Howard Unruh, 88, Dies; Killed 13 of His Neighbors in Camden in 1949
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN NY Times
Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America’s most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years’ confinement. He was 88.
His death was announced by Warren W. Faulk, the Camden County prosecutor. James Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said Mr. Unruh had been in state custody since his arrest.
Mr. Unruh was found to have paranoid schizophrenia and never stood trial. He was confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit.
When Mr. Unruh gunned down his neighbors, the shootings were particularly shocking because no one could remember anything like that. And few of his neighbors, in the working-class Cramer Hill section of East Camden, had paid him much notice. An Army veteran who had seen extensive combat in Europe with the artillery in World War II, he lived in a three-room apartment in the 3200 block of River Road with his mother, Freda.
He had often accompanied her to St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and was known to read his Bible frequently. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, he entered Temple University’s pharmacy school in the fall of 1948 but soon dropped out. At age 28, he was unemployed and supported by his mother, who was estranged from her husband and worked as a packer for a soap company in Camden.
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend’s home.
At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker’s shop on his block. He pulled out a 9 millimeter German Luger pistol he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.
“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.”
Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.
Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.
The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”
Then Mr. Unruh approached a tavern, but the owner, Frank Engel, having heard the shots, locked the door and fled with his patrons to the rear as Mr. Unruh shot into the bar.
Next, Mr. Unruh fired into an apartment window and shot Thomas Hamilton, a 2-year-old, in the head. After shooting into a restaurant, he fired through the window of a passing automobile and hit Alvin Day, 24, a television repairman.
Mr. Engel, who owned a pistol, shot Mr. Unruh in the hip from an upper-floor window of the tavern building, but Mr. Unruh seemed not to notice the wound.
Having reloaded his pistol, he went to a drugstore owned by Maurice Cohen, 40, whose family had argued with Mr. Unruh over his using the Cohens’s gate to take a shortcut from his home to the street. As Mr. Unruh entered, James Hutton, 45, an insurance agent, was emerging. Mr. Unruh shot him in the head.
Mr. Cohen fled to the roof of his apartment above the drugstore as his wife, Rose, 38, hid in a closet and pushed their son Charles, 12, into another closet. Mr. Unruh shot Mr. Cohen in the back, sending him plunging to the street. He also shot Ms. Cohen, firing through the closet door, and Minnie Cohen, 63, the druggist’s mother, as she was trying to call the police from a bedroom. Charles Cohen was unharmed.
Over the next few minutes, Mr. Unruh shot Helen Matlack Wilson, 37; her son, John, 9; and her mother, Emma Matlack, 68, who were in a car stopped at a red light. He also wounded Charles Peterson, 18, who had approached Mr. Hutton’s body outside the drug store, unaware that the gunman was still on the scene.
On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harrie, 36, and her son Armand, 16.
“Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way,” Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times in a 4,000-word account, based on more than 50 interviews, that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline pressure. (He gave the $1,000 prize money to Mr. Unruh’s mother.)
“Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse with fear,” Mr. Berger wrote. “No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block.”
Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment. Some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machine guns, shotguns and pistols.
During an interlude, the assistant city editor of The Camden Courier-Post, Philip Buxton, phoned the house. Mr. Unruh answered his call.
Mr. Buxton asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed.
“I don’t know, I haven’t counted,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good score.”
“Why are you killing people?” Mr. Buxton asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Unruh replied.
After the police fired tear gas, Mr. Unruh came outside, his hands held high, his bow tie still in place.
A search of his room turned up 700 cartridges, a book called “The Shooter’s Bible” (he had used the building’s basement for target practice) and a New Testament Bible.
In his confession, Mr. Unruh said that the night before the killings, he made a list of people to be targeted: the shoemaker, the tailor, the barber, the druggist. He had nevertheless shot down strangers as well.
A psychiatric report found that Mr. Unruh had felt his neighbors were persecuting and belittling him, “that they were thinking of him as a homosexual.”
The report described him as “a master of suppressed rage” who harbored a “smoldering anger.”
Mr. Unruh’s brother, James, said later that “since he came home from the service, he didn’t seem to be the same.”
“He was nervous,” James Unruh said.
His father, Samuel, said Mr. Unruh had “built a shell around himself we could never penetrate.”
Moments after Mr. Unruh surrendered, a policeman said to him: “What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”
“I’m no psycho,” Howard Unruh replied. “I have a good mind.”
Mr. Unruh’s years in confinement were largely without incident. In 1995, James H. Klein, the public defender who had represented him for two decades, said Mr. Unruh spent most of his time sleeping and watching television. For a while, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Unruh had collected stamps.
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN NY Times
Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America’s most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years’ confinement. He was 88.
His death was announced by Warren W. Faulk, the Camden County prosecutor. James Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said Mr. Unruh had been in state custody since his arrest.
Mr. Unruh was found to have paranoid schizophrenia and never stood trial. He was confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit.
When Mr. Unruh gunned down his neighbors, the shootings were particularly shocking because no one could remember anything like that. And few of his neighbors, in the working-class Cramer Hill section of East Camden, had paid him much notice. An Army veteran who had seen extensive combat in Europe with the artillery in World War II, he lived in a three-room apartment in the 3200 block of River Road with his mother, Freda.
He had often accompanied her to St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and was known to read his Bible frequently. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, he entered Temple University’s pharmacy school in the fall of 1948 but soon dropped out. At age 28, he was unemployed and supported by his mother, who was estranged from her husband and worked as a packer for a soap company in Camden.
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend’s home.
At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker’s shop on his block. He pulled out a 9 millimeter German Luger pistol he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.
“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.”
Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.
Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.
The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”
Then Mr. Unruh approached a tavern, but the owner, Frank Engel, having heard the shots, locked the door and fled with his patrons to the rear as Mr. Unruh shot into the bar.
Next, Mr. Unruh fired into an apartment window and shot Thomas Hamilton, a 2-year-old, in the head. After shooting into a restaurant, he fired through the window of a passing automobile and hit Alvin Day, 24, a television repairman.
Mr. Engel, who owned a pistol, shot Mr. Unruh in the hip from an upper-floor window of the tavern building, but Mr. Unruh seemed not to notice the wound.
Having reloaded his pistol, he went to a drugstore owned by Maurice Cohen, 40, whose family had argued with Mr. Unruh over his using the Cohens’s gate to take a shortcut from his home to the street. As Mr. Unruh entered, James Hutton, 45, an insurance agent, was emerging. Mr. Unruh shot him in the head.
Mr. Cohen fled to the roof of his apartment above the drugstore as his wife, Rose, 38, hid in a closet and pushed their son Charles, 12, into another closet. Mr. Unruh shot Mr. Cohen in the back, sending him plunging to the street. He also shot Ms. Cohen, firing through the closet door, and Minnie Cohen, 63, the druggist’s mother, as she was trying to call the police from a bedroom. Charles Cohen was unharmed.
Over the next few minutes, Mr. Unruh shot Helen Matlack Wilson, 37; her son, John, 9; and her mother, Emma Matlack, 68, who were in a car stopped at a red light. He also wounded Charles Peterson, 18, who had approached Mr. Hutton’s body outside the drug store, unaware that the gunman was still on the scene.
On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harrie, 36, and her son Armand, 16.
“Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way,” Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times in a 4,000-word account, based on more than 50 interviews, that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline pressure. (He gave the $1,000 prize money to Mr. Unruh’s mother.)
“Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse with fear,” Mr. Berger wrote. “No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block.”
Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment. Some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machine guns, shotguns and pistols.
During an interlude, the assistant city editor of The Camden Courier-Post, Philip Buxton, phoned the house. Mr. Unruh answered his call.
Mr. Buxton asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed.
“I don’t know, I haven’t counted,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good score.”
“Why are you killing people?” Mr. Buxton asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Unruh replied.
After the police fired tear gas, Mr. Unruh came outside, his hands held high, his bow tie still in place.
A search of his room turned up 700 cartridges, a book called “The Shooter’s Bible” (he had used the building’s basement for target practice) and a New Testament Bible.
In his confession, Mr. Unruh said that the night before the killings, he made a list of people to be targeted: the shoemaker, the tailor, the barber, the druggist. He had nevertheless shot down strangers as well.
A psychiatric report found that Mr. Unruh had felt his neighbors were persecuting and belittling him, “that they were thinking of him as a homosexual.”
The report described him as “a master of suppressed rage” who harbored a “smoldering anger.”
Mr. Unruh’s brother, James, said later that “since he came home from the service, he didn’t seem to be the same.”
“He was nervous,” James Unruh said.
His father, Samuel, said Mr. Unruh had “built a shell around himself we could never penetrate.”
Moments after Mr. Unruh surrendered, a policeman said to him: “What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”
“I’m no psycho,” Howard Unruh replied. “I have a good mind.”
Mr. Unruh’s years in confinement were largely without incident. In 1995, James H. Klein, the public defender who had represented him for two decades, said Mr. Unruh spent most of his time sleeping and watching television. For a while, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Unruh had collected stamps.
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