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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Counting the victims of a mass murderer

Howard Unruh is held by police after his shooting rampage, killing 12 people in 1949.

The death of mass murderer Howard Unruh renews a sense of loss for his victims’ families and for a once-bustling city that has eroded since his horrific crime 60 years ago.

Unruh, 88, died Monday at a nursing facility in Trenton. He had been held at a state psychiatric hospital since his long-ago rampage.
 
On the morning of Sept. 6, 1949, the World War II veteran walked out of his home in the Cramer Hill section of Camden with a pistol. In less than 20 minutes, he shot and killed 13 people, including three children, and wounded three others.
 
Police captured Unruh by flushing him out of his home with tear gas. He became known as America’s first modern mass murderer.
 
Unruh said his shooting spree began as a dispute with a neighbor over a fence gate. But there could be no sane explanation for Unruh’s crime. His brother believed the war changed him. Unruh was deemed mentally ill and was never tried for the murders.
 
One crime does not define a city, but Camden has struggled mightily since Unruh’s infamous act. It’s as if the crime marked the start of a long decline.
 
The city’s population peaked in 1950 at 124,000, when Cramer Hill was a blue-collar neighborhood thriving with small businesses. Since then, urban decay, job losses, crime, and other factors eroded the city’s population to 79,000.
 
Redevelopment on the waterfront in recent years has finally given Camden some new life. But recovery has been slow and uncertain, as in other urban centers.
 
During his years in captivity, Unruh declined interviews. As the 50th anniversary of the crime approached in 1999, he wrote to a friend in Cherry Hill, “I have nothing to write about myself or my situation concerning the reporters.”
 
When Unruh sought more lenient hospital privileges in 1991, he wrote: “My lawyer’s independent psychiatrist just interviewed me and I don’t think I did very well. He pried a lot on the trouble I got into and related things. It painted a poor picture of me.”
 
The senselessness of his crime lingers, despite six decades having passed. A 2-year-old boy was shot as he looked out the window. Another boy was shot while seated in a hobby horse chair at a barber’s shop.
 
One survivor who had waited years for word of Unruh’s death was Charles Cohen, who was 12 when Unruh killed his mother, father, and grandmother. But Cohen died last month at age 72.
 
Relatives of several of Unruh’s victims in South Jersey still live with the memory of their loss. It is hoped that the final chapter of this tragedy will lessen their enduring sorrow.
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