CRIME: The Quiet One

Howard B. Unruh saw a good bit of combat as a tank gunner in Italy and France. But unlike most front-line soldiers he never smoked, swore or chased girls. He drank a little kümmel, but only as an experiment. He was a slender, shy, high-domed youth with dark hair, pallid skin, thick lips and sunken cheeks.

When he got back to his mother’s second-story flat on River Road in Camden, N.J. after the war, he set up a basement target range, collected pistols, knives and bullets, and spent hours poring over the Scriptures. He was not popular, seemed unable to stick to a job. The neighbors in the little business block around his mother’s flat decided he was a “religious nut.”

The 28-year-old ex-G.I. said little. But he brooded over the “derogatory remarks,” of the neighbors. One morning last week he slipped a loaded clip into his Luger pistol, filled his pockets with ammunition, and went out to the sunlit street.

One, Two, Three. He opened the door of a shoe-repair shop, silently entered, and killed Cobbler John Pilarchik with two thunderous shots. The street was still quiet as he got out to the sidewalk again.

Nobody paid any attention as he sauntered, pistol in hand, into Clark Hoover’s barbershop. Inside, a six-year-old boy with a white apron around his neck was sitting astride a raised hobbyhorse. The barber stood beside him clipping busily. Wordlessly, Howard Unruh aimed his pistol. He shot the boy on the hobbyhorse through the chest and head, then fired again and killed the barber.

As he walked back out, screams and yells began to break the morning quiet. Howard Unruh did not seem to hear the noise at all. He walked slowly on to Maurice Cohen’s drugstore.

“Excuse Me, Sir.” The doors burst open and a 46-year-old insurance agent named James Hutton hurried out. Unruh spoke for the first time. “Excuse me, sir,” he said quietly, and tried to brush past. The insurance man stood motionless. Without another word, Unruh shot him, first in the head, then in the body. He walked into the store and mounted the stairs to Cohen’s apartment, where the druggist’s family was frantically hunting hiding places.

Cohen’s wife ran into a closet. Unruh fired twice through the door, then pulled it open and shot her through the head. He cornered the druggist’s 63-year-old mother in another room, and killed her. He trapped Cohen outside on a roof and shot him; the druggist fell to the pavement and the killer aimed, fired, hit him again.

After that, for nightmarish minutes, he stalked the street like a murderous mechanical man. He shot at passing motorists, killed three people, wounded two more. He saw a two-year-old boy in a window, aimed, fired, killed him.

He moved on to a tailor shop, opened the door, and murdered the tailor’s screaming wife. He pushed into a neighboring house, found a fear-stricken woman and her 16-year-old son, shot both of them with his last bullets. Then he went back to his upstairs bedroom, leaving twelve dead, one dying and three wounded in a scant twelve minutes that had no counterpart in U.S. crime history.

“A Pretty Good Score.” By this time, Camden was noisy with the sound of sirens and the screech of skidding police cars. More than 50 policemen surrounded the Unruh home and began firing with pistols, rifles, submachine guns.

But when the telephone rang in the midst of the uproar, he calmly picked up the receiver. The man on the other end of the wire, a fast thinking Camden newspaperman named Philip Buxton, said: “I’m a friend . . . how many have you killed?”

“I don’t know yet . . .” said Unruh, in a matter-of-fact voice, “but it looks like a pretty good score.” Why are you killing people? “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t answer that yet—I’m too busy. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

“You a Psycho?” Outside a policeman lobbed a tear-gas bomb through a window. The choking fumes drove Unruh downstairs. In a few minutes he opened the back door and came out, hands high, apparently completely unconcerned. A cop scrambled forward, handcuffed him. As he was hurried off, to be questioned by police and psychiatrists, a harried and sweating cop snapped:

“What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”

“I’m no psycho,” said Howard Unruh with injured dignity.”I have a good mind.”