DEADLY INTENTIONS

Howard Unruh being arrested

 I was 16 on August 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of a tower on the University of Texas campus in Austin Texas and began shooting people. Before he was stopped he killed 11 people and wounded 31. Ultimately 5 more people would die of their injuries, the last one dying 35 years after the shooting. Since Charles Whitman there have been numerous mass shootings. Now they seem to happen almost every week. They all seem to have the same characteristics in common. The people doing these things exhibit behavior that should be red flags to the people around them but many people don't focus on that behavior until it is too late. I will always remember my first reaction to the movie The Sixth Sense. That movie terrified me the first time I saw it because I never saw the climax to the movie coming. I have seen this movie several times since and it doesn't have the same impact on me now. There are clues throughout the movie that I never picked up on the first time that I saw it. The clues pointed to the fact that Bruce Willis was a ghost but I didn't pick up on them the first time. Some people do pick up on the clues. My sister told me that The Sixth Sense didn't have the same impact on her that it had on me because she realized early on that Bruce Willis was dead. Life is kind of like the Sixth Sense. Some people try to sound the warnings about mass killers but their warnings fall on deaf ears. Or the legal system fails to protect society from these people. Clues of their dysfunctional behavior are everywhere. We just don't pick up on them. This is why I don't believe in Red Flag laws. They are not effective and will most likely be used against the wrong people. In my view, like all gun laws, they do not address the real problems. Take the case of the mass shooter Amy Bishop who killed and wounded her colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. When she was young she had murdered her brother with a shotgun in the 1980's because she was jealous of him. A corrupt city official allowed the murder to be ruled an accident even though a multitude of evidence pointed to murder. Years later she mailed a package bomb to her supervisor that fortunately didn't explode. Even though authorities were able to trace the bomb to her she was not prosecuted because of so-called lack of evidence. On another occasion she assaulted a woman in a restaurant because the woman wouldn't give her the child's high chair for her own child to use. The restaurant only had a certain amount of high chairs and they had given the last chair to the woman that Amy assaulted. Again, she avoided accountability for her actions. Amy killed and wounded her colleagues at the University of Alabama because they had been trying to remove her tenure as a professor due to bizarre behavior. We don't need Red Flag Laws. As a society we just need to take the proper legal action when these people violate the law and hold them accountable for what they do.

Amy Bishop

 Howard Unruh was born on January 21, 1921. in Camden New Jersey. He had a younger brother named James and his parents separated when he was young. Unruh graduated from Woodrow Wilson high school in 1939. His yearbook indicated that he was shy and his ambition was to be a government employee. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the U.S. Army on October 27, 1942 and fought the war in Europe in a tank unit from October 1944 until July 1945. He was remembered as a first class soldier who never drank, swore or chased women. A red flag, however; was that he kept meticulous notes on each German soldier that he killed, the date that he killed them, including details of their death and describing in gory detail what their corpses looked like. His commander noted that he had an unusual interest in guns. He won several medals and after being honorably discharged he returned to New Jersey to live with his mother and brother. His brother said that Howard was a changed man after returning from the war. Unruh attended a pharmaceutical school in Philadelphia but soon dropped out. After returning to Camden he moved in with his mother and became a deadbeat living off the small income of his mother. He spent his days studying the Bible. Unruh also began collecting pistols and knives. He also built a gun range in their basement where he honed his shooting skills. Unruh began to keep track of every time he thought someone had slighted him and was always thinking of ways that he could even the score. Maurice and Rose Cohen lived next door and Unruh's mothers apartment was over their drugstore. The Cohen's believed that Unruh was a religious nut and his interest in guns unnerved them. Their negative comments stirred his anger even more. He also claimed that the Cohen's routinely shortchanged him and a shoemaker nearby was suspected of leaving his trash in Unruh's yard. Unruh was a homosexual and one day he was late for a date with a man that he was supposed to meet at a movie theater. He had been delayed by traffic and when he finally arrived his date had already left. Added to his frustration when he got home he noticed that a fence he had erected separating his yard from the Cohen's yard had been removed. In his troubled mind this was the straw that broke the camels back.

Howard Unruh as a soldier

On the morning of September 6, 1949 his mother fixed breakfast of fried eggs and milk for him. Afterward he threatened his mother with a wrench that scared her so bad she ran to a neighbors house to hide. After eating he armed himself with a tear gas pen, a six inch knife and a German Luger that he had brought back from the war. He loaded 30 bullets into two magazines. His intended targets were the Cohen's, a barber named Clark Hoover, the tailor, and the shoemaker John Pilarchik. These were the main people in the neighborhood that he held a grudge with. Dressed in a Brown suit Unruh left his apartment and walked into the shoemaker shop of John Pilarchik shooting him twice while a young child crouched in terror behind a counter. He then walked into the barber shop next door where barber Clark Hoover was cutting the hair of a six year old boy named Horace Smith who was sitting on a hobby horse. Unruh shot both of them dead while the little boys mother screamed in horror. Upon exiting the store he shot at a little boy standing in a window missing him and into a bar which luckily did not hit anyone. He then headed toward the Cohen's drugstore, his main target. As he approached the entrance 45 year old James Hutton was exiting the store. Unruh asked Hutton to excuse him but he didn't move out of the way fast enough so Unruh shot him dead. Hearing the gunshots the Cohens tried to flee into their upstairs apartment. Thirty eight year old Rose Cohen pushed her 12 year old son Charles into a closet and she hid in an adjacent closet. Unruh was able to gain access to the bedroom where they were hiding and shot 3 times through the closet door where Rose was hiding. He then opened the closet and shot her in the face killing her. Unruh then found her 63 year old mother-in-law Minnie and killed her. Maurice had climbed out on the roof trying to escape but was shot in the back. Maurice tumble off the roof and fell dead to the pavement below. 

Barber shop murder scene

 He then walked out of the drugstore into the middle of the road causing a passing car to slow down. He walked over to the drivers side window and killed a 24 year old television repairman and war veteran Alvin Day. Unruh then walked to the tailor shop hoping to kill Thomas Zagrino but instead found his wife 28 year old Helga hiding behind a counter. She was begging for her life when he shot and killed her. He then walked over to a grocery store but finding it locked shot through the door. Unruh then walked over to a car stopped at an intersection. He killed 37 year old Helen Wilson and her 68 year old mother. Unruh then shot Helen's 9 year old son John sitting in the backseat in the neck. The boy would die later in the hospital. Seeing something move in an apartment window he shot 2 year old Thomas Hamilton killing him instantly. His babysitter collapsed and later went into shock. Unruh shot at another car but the occupant managed to escape. By this time he was nearly out of ammunition and hearing sirens in the distance decided to head back to his apartment. He broke into the apartment of 36 year old Madaline Harry and her 16 year old son severely injuring both of them. Unruh then walked into his apartment and sat down waiting for the police to arrive. Police surrounded his apartment and a gunfight began. In 1949 this was all new to police and they had no strategy in place to deal with an active shooter. A reporter named Phillip Buxton found his phone number and called Unruh. When he answered Buxton asked if it was Howard speaking. He said "yes, what is the last name of the party that you want?"  Buxton  said "Unruh". Again Howard asked " what is the last name of the party that you want? " The reporter said "Unruh". Buxton said "I am a friend and I want to know what they are doing to you". Unruh responded "their not doing a damn thing to me but I'm doing plenty to them". Buxton asked "how many have you killed?" " I don't know yet, I haven't counted them. Looks like a pretty good score". Buxton asked " why are you killing people?" Unruh answered, " I don't know, I can't answer that yet I'm too busy." Buxton heard Unruh move away from the phone and the sound of gunfire grew louder. Unruh said " I'll have to talk to you later, a couple of friends are coming to get me" and he hung up. 

 Police continued to fire at Unruh's apartment with machine guns, rifles and pistols. They finally fired tear gas into the building which caused him to surrender. Two officers stood at the bottom of the stairs demanding that Unruh come out with his hands raised in the air. He told them "I give up, don't shoot" and fell down the stairs. After being cuffed one officer asked if he was a psychopath. He responded "I am no psycho. I have a good mind." In twenty minutes time he had killed 13 people and severely injured 4. This killing spree became known as the "Walk of Death". After his interrogation blood was found on his seat. He had either been wounded by a bar owner or by police in the shootout. After being treated for his wound he was transferred to the Trenton psychiatric hospital where he was placed in a ward for the criminally insane. He was interviewed extensively by doctors and their notes weren't released until 2012. Unruh said that he was sorry for killing the kids but doctors concluded that he showed no remorse for his crimes. He said that murder is a sin and he should get the electric chair. Unruh would never get the chair or prison time. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and on October 20, 1949 a judge signed an order committing him to Trenton hospital for the criminally insane. His mother visited him regularly until her death in 1985. In 1993 Unruh was transferred to the geriatric part of the hospital which had fewer restrictions. Unruh died there on October 19, 2009 at the age of 88. In a last interview held by a psychologist Unruh told him that he could have killed a thousand if he had had the bullets. Contemporary experts believe that Unruh's diagnosis was a farce and if he had done the same crime today he would have spent his life in prison or he would have been executed. In an ironic twist of fate during the Parkland high school shooting of 2018 student Carly Novell was saved by hiding in a closest. Her grandfather was Charles Cohen whose life was also saved by hiding in a closet.