Amid the chaos of the siege, a little boy’s voice sounded out.
“Help us!” he cried from a second-floor window in the building next to Unruh’s apartment. “He’s killing everybody!”
Even as cops prepared to smoke out the killer barely twenty feet away, the child crawled out onto a first-floor roof.
It was Charles Cohen.
He’d emerged from his closet to find his mother’s bloody body on the floor, and his father’s corpse lay in the street just below him. A cop rushed up to the Cohens’ living quarters to pull Charles to safety, as Unruh hid in the apartment next door.
The cop scooped Charles up and took him to a waiting police car.
“You watch,” he said. “I’m going to be a hero, kid.”
From that moment, Charles Cohen never spoke about the tragedy on Cramer Hill again that morning. He wanted to forget. He wanted the world to forget.
But there came two moments when he could remain silent no longer.
The first time was when he told his new bride, on their wedding night, the dark secret he carried.
And the next time was when the world—which hadn’t forgotten, but hadn’t exactly remembered, either—appeared ready to forgive Howard Unruh.
COMING UNDONE
Even before all the bodies had been counted and collected, Howard Barton Unruh sat expressionless in a Camden detective’s office.
Less than ninety minutes before, he was murdering his neighbors in a brief but methodical “walk of death,” as the newspapers and radio broadcasts would soon call it. Now, here sat a tall, lean, detached young man in a white shirt and bow tie, his hands in his lap as if he were in church. He was cooperative and polite to the officers, even thanked them for doing their job. His pale face betrayed neither worry nor remorse. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, he looked almost too fragile to be a mass murderer.
But he was a murderer, and he confessed it readily.
“I deserve everything I get,” he told them, “so I will tell you everything I did and tell you the truth.”
For more than two hours, detectives pieced together the puzzle of Howard Unruh, a man who’d never gotten a jaywalking ticket, much less shown homicidal tendencies.
Under questioning by District Attorney Mitchell Cohen (no relation to the druggist), Unruh described in scrupulous detail how he hated his neighbors, how they’d plotted against him, and how he’d been planning to kill them all for more than two years. He meticulously recounted how he gathered his ammunition, laid out his gun, left a note to be awakened at 8 o’clock sharp, ate his cereal and eggs, and then killed as many people as he could.
He unemotionally described the murders, one after the other. He narrated each death as if it were no more hideous than finding a dead sparrow on the sidewalk. He’d spilled more blood than any single killer in living memory, but to hear him tell the story, it was no more dramatic than a morning walk in the park.
None of it made any sense.
Howard Barton Unruh was born January 20, 1921, in Haddonfield, a Camden suburb. A younger brother was born four years later.
But their parents separated when Howard was ten. The boys went with their mother to Camden, where she worked for a soap factory, while their father lived and worked on a dredge in the Delaware River.
Howard grew up solitary, preferring always to be alone. He played with his train sets, read voraciously, and collected stamps. He never brought friends home, and he seldom made trouble.
Unruh’s pale face betrayed neither worry
nor remorse. Behind his wire-rimmed
glasses, he looked almost too fragile
to be a mass murderer.
In school, Unruh appeared to be studious, but he was an average student. He never had a girlfriend, never went to a dance, and avoided most social activities. Except church. He took to carrying a Bible with him everywhere, faithfully attending Sunday services and Monday Bible classes at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.
After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1939, he worked as a pressroom helper at a publishing company, then briefly as a sheet-metal worker at the Philadelphia Navy Yard until he enlisted in the Army in 1942.
Unruh was stationed stateside until his self-propelled field artillery unit landed in Naples, Italy, in 1944. He served as a tank gunner in battles across Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, and Germany, winning two battle stars and sharpshooter ribbons, and taking meticulous notes about the Germans he killed along the way.
Every day, he wrote to his mother. Sometimes, his letters posed deep theological questions that troubled him; other times, they discussed military matters as if his mother had technical expertise.
CAMDEN COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY MITCHELL COHEN, RIGHT, INTERROGATED CONFESSED GUNMAN HOWARD UNRUH FOR TWO HOURS AFTER THE SHOOTING UNTIL HE REALIZED UNRUH HAD BEEN SLIGHTLY WOUNDED IN THE BUTTOCKS. AFTER UNRUH WAS TREATED AT A LOCAL HOSPITAL, COHEN CONTINUED HIS QUESTIONING AT UNRUH’S BEDSIDE.
Associated Press
In November 1945, he was honorably discharged and came home to his mother’s flat in Camden. His family noticed a distinct difference in him, as if he had retreated into a shell. He rarely spoke about the war. He threw out his stamp collection and started to collect guns. He built a target range in his basement, stacking newspapers against the far wall to absorb the bullets he often reloaded himself. Neighbors often heard the pop-pop-pop of his cellar gunfire, but they thought young Unruh must have been hammering on a carpentry project.
His church fixed him up with a young woman and subtly encouraged them to marry. But after a while, Unruh broke it off, promising the girl it would be “a mistake” to marry him.
One day in 1947, Unruh spotted a German Luger in a shop window. When he inquired, the clerk told him he needed a permit from the Camden police before he could buy it. Dutifully, he got the permit a few days later and paid $37.50 for the gun—the same gun he used to kill his neighbors two years later.
Unruh took a few odd jobs after the war, but he never worked for very long. Hoping to study pharmacy at Temple University, Unruh used the GI Bill to pay for some college prep classes and even enrolled at Temple, where his nemesis and later victim Maurice Cohen had graduated, but he quit after three months. He sold some of his train sets for pocket money and never worked again.
Nothing about Howard Unruh’s first twenty-eight years screamed bloody murder. Sure, he was a little eccentric. Maybe a loner. Maybe a loony. But a cold-blooded killer? What made Howard Unruh come undone?
JUSTIFYING MURDER
While Unruh was being interrogated, detectives scoured his mother’s apartment for clues to his state of mind. They found more than they could have imagined.
They found his basement shooting gallery and bullet-making equipment easily enough. They also found his cache of war souvenirs, from bayonets and pistols to ashtrays made from artillery shells. They found the machete he planned to use to cut off the Cohens’ heads.
There were many books—some about gun collecting, others about sexual science.
In his bedroom, detectives discovered the notebook containing sketchy details of his dalliances. Some of the men were listed only by first names, some simply as “a man.” Some names were followed by the words “a car.” Beside each name was a date, and sometimes there were several names on the same date. He’d make such notations every night for weeks at a time.
And beside Unruh’s bed, they found his Bible, lying open to chapter twenty-four of St. Matthew, the chapter in which Christ predicts the destruction of the temple and all the catastrophes to come. “The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of,” it said. “And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The interrogation of Howard Unruh might have continued longer if DA Cohen hadn’t seen blood puddling under Unruh’s chair. When they examined him, they found he’d been shot in the buttocks w
ith a small-caliber bullet. He was rushed to the hospital, the same hospital where his victims had been taken, but doctors determined that removing the small bullet would do more damage than the bullet itself had done. For the rest of his life, he carried the slug in his butt.
Within sixteen hours of his arrest, Unruh was taken to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton to be further evaluated. Through weeks of interviews, psychiatrists noted that Unruh “rarely spoke spontaneously” and was “at all times entirely free from anxiety or guilt.” He spoke in a monotone “with a marked degree of emotional flattening.” He never showed any emotion, even when the most delicate subjects were discussed—until asked about his attack on his mother, when he appeared to be guilty and fearful.
Some findings were surprising, if not lurid. Unruh had an unnaturally close relationship with his mother, though there was no evidence that it was sexual. He’d made sexual advances toward his brother as a youngster, but they were rebuffed. He started having sex with men during the service and continued after the war, and he struggled mightily with guilt over his behavior.
More to the point of his killings, there was little evidence that the insults Unruh imagined had ever really happened or, if they did, were as meaningful as he made them out to be. Maybe his neighbors were talking about him, but psychiatrists believed many of the insults Unruh “heard” were in his imagination. Either way, he was unable to laugh off a practical joke or a friendly jab and walk away; his paranoia simply wouldn’t let him.
And although his family disagreed, several psychiatrists found no link between Unruh’s war experiences and his ultimate unraveling. Unruh wasn’t psychologically right before the war, they said, and while combat certainly didn’t help, his slow decay was set in motion long before he ever fired a shot in anger.
A month after the shootings, the hospital’s staff declared Unruh to be suffering from a case of paranoid and catatonic schizophrenia that was slowly getting worse. In short, Howard Barton Unruh was insane, even if he understood his actions were wrong, and he would only get worse as time passed.
“He knew what he was doing,” the psychiatrists concluded, “but seemed to be operating from an automatic compulsion to continue shooting and killing until his ammunition was exhausted….
“His narcissism is such that at all times he has felt justified in the killings of the particular people whose murders he plotted from the beginning. [He] has always acknowledged that it was wrongful and has usually stated that he should die in the electric chair. He has shown himself totally unable to identify emotionally with the victims of his crime or to sense in any way the reactions directed against him by the survivors.”
Howard Unruh would never stand trial on thirteen counts of murder. He would never face the electric chair. He wouldn’t even face his accusers in a court of law.
Instead, DA Cohen announced that Unruh would be committed to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton where “he and the community will be protected from injury or danger should there be a recurrence of his homicidal impulses.”
For some, that wasn’t enough. A judge ordered Howard’s estranged father, Samuel, to pay the state of New Jersey $15 a month for his son’s care at the asylum.
And just in case Howard Unruh should ever be “cured,” the indictments against him would stand for decades.
A SUITCASE OF MEMORIES
While the world fascinated itself with the enigmatic and diseased mind of Howard Unruh, it overlooked young Charles Cohen.
Death had rubbed a callus on the heart of postwar America. A million Americans were killed or wounded in the war. Everyone else was simply lucky.
Thus it was with Charles. He’d lost his entire family to a madman’s fury, but because he suffered no physical wounds, he was “lucky.” So the wise men of science gathered ’round the maniac and sent the lucky little boy home.
Suddenly an orphan, he was briefly taken by the police to the station, where he was told to wait for a relative to claim him. While Charles sat there in shock, cops brought Unruh in for booking, and their eyes met for an incalculable moment. Then the killer was gone.
At that moment, Charles had not considered the awful truth. He’d seen his mother lying in a pool of blood, but believed his father and grandmother were still alive. It was an aunt who finally told him bluntly, “They’re all dead.”
The pain was sudden and incalculable. Charles had loved his parents deeply, and they had loved him. They took him everywhere. With them, he felt like a little man, trusted to run errands into Philadelphia even before he was ten. They placed their faith in him, and he felt it.
But the morning after his parents and grandmother were slain, Charles awoke in a strange bed in a strange new world. He’d left with only an old brown suitcase of clothes and a few other possessions. He pushed the sudden loneliness, bewilderment, and, in time, the anger deeper, where nobody would see. He didn’t want to disappoint all the people who marveled at his luck.
The three caskets of Maurice, Rose, and Minnie Cohen were buried side by side at Philadelphia’s Roosevelt Memorial Park a few days after the killings. Charles was there to watch them be lowered into the ground. He didn’t remember too much about that day, but he promised himself that when he stopped crying, he would live the life they expected for him. He would grow up the best he could, marry, work hard, and have children of his own.
AFTER HIS PARENTS AND GRANDMOTHER WERE SLAUGHTERED BY HOWARD UNRUH ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1949, CHARLES COHEN (SHOWN HERE IN 1999) DROVE HIS PAIN AND HORROR DEEP INSIDE. BUT IN 1981, WHEN UNRUH SOUGHT MORE FREEDOM AT HIS NEW JERSEY MENTAL HOSPITAL, CHARLES BECAME AN OUTSPOKEN VOICE FOR UNRUH’S VICTIMS.
Associated Press
Having relatives to care for him, Charles lived with several aunts and uncles after the shootings. But they were building their own families, and he always felt like an outsider, always extra. Their homes weren’t his home, and he began to feel as though they weren’t even his family. He was a child of the dead.
In the blue-collar world of the fifties, only crazies sought mental help. Therapy was electroshock and lobotomies. A sudden death in the family, even three, certainly didn’t prompt anyone to suggest counseling, especially for a Jewish orphan kid who was, after all, lucky to be alive. Sad wasn’t the same as crazy.
In the luckiest stroke of all, Charles and his older brother—in the military at the time of the tragedy—shared the money from the sale of their parents’ drugstore, enabling Charles to pay the rent that some of his relatives took from him and, when the time came, to pay for his own bar mitzvah, too.
Some of the money paid his tuition at a private military academy where nobody knew just how lucky Charles was. For the first time since the shootings, he felt as if he had a family. He was happy there until his classmates began to whisper about who Charles really was, so he left.
The suitcase that once contained the remnants of his life was now filling with odd clippings, photographs, and mementos of that day. Initially, Life magazine and others had come around to do stories, but as time passed, Howard Unruh was forgotten, except as a macabre measuring-stick. “Stark-weather Three Short of Worst Killing Spree” said one 1958 headline. “Mass Murder of Chicago Nurses Recalls Unruh” said another in 1966. And finally in that same deadly summer “Texas Tower Sniper Kills Fourteen in Worst Shooting Ever.”
Days went into days, and Charles kept pushing the memories deeper inside himself. A word, a sound, even the slant of the light could trigger a flashback in which he relived the whole sickening episode. He smiled when people told him how well he was doing, but inside, he knew he was barely holding it together. In time, those people just believed he had overcome his loss. Lucky for him, they didn’t know.
Days went into days, and Charles kept pushing the
memories deeper inside himself. A word, a sound,
even the slant of the light could trigger a flashback in
which he relived the whole sickening episode.
He hadn’t conquered his
pain. It still lived inside Charles like some black creature he kept locked up in the darkest recesses of his mind. Outwardly, he grew to be jovial, even silly at times. He had a knack for making people laugh. But despite the superficial light, black things writhed in him, seldom on display but always a shadow behind his dark eyes.
EVERY YEAR SINCE 1981, THE STATUS OF INSANE MASS MURDERER HOWARD UNRUH (SHOWN HERE IN 1998) AT THE TRENTON STATE HOSPITAL WAS REVIEWED BY THE COURTS, WHICH KEPT HIM INSTITUTIONALIZED UNDER MAXIMUM SECURITY ALMOST UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE SIXTY YEARS AFTER HIS 1949 CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, SHOOTING SPREE.
Associated Press
Almost from the start, Charles had yearned to rebuild his lost family.
In 1958, he married Marian Schwartz, a young woman who had admired Charles from afar since she was a teenager. On their wedding night, he sat on the edge of their hotel bed and told her the whole story of that heartbreaking September day and everything after. He told her he only wanted to live a normal life, but he couldn’t be at peace until Howard Unruh was dead.
It never came up again.
He became a linen salesman, and he was good at it. His customers liked him; he made them laugh.
Charles and Marian had three daughters. Growing up, the girls never knew what horrors their father had survived or still haunted him. He never spoke of Howard Unruh or the day everyone died, fearing he might pass some of the toxic darkness to them.
But they sensed something. They knew their father never gave cut flowers because they always died. He forbade them from having pets because they, too, died. He worried about them incessantly, even more than other girls’ fathers. When they asked about their grandparents, they were told they died in an accident. One night, one of his young daughters wept as she watched Jackie Gleason’s film portrayal of Gigot, the gentle but mute janitor obsessed with strangers’ funerals. She saw her father in him, but she didn’t know why.
Charles Cohen finally had the family he so desperately wanted. He lived in his own house, not someone else’s. His children were happy. The hidden wounds inflicted by Howard Unruh had remained secret.
Delivered from Evil Page 3