Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (5 page)

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.

But like some horror-show monster, Unruh wouldn’t die until he had loosed all of Charles’s pent-up emotions one last time.

LETTING LOOSE THE DARKNESS

A month after the shootings on Cramer Hill, without a single competency hearing, Howard Unruh was committed to the New Jersey State Hospital’s Vroom Building, a special hellhole for the criminally insane. Its concrete walls were surrounded by razor wire, its every window blocked by steel bars. The clangor of bars and insanity bouncing off the cold walls was deafening. Even on the brightest days, Vroom was gloomy.

Unruh, or Patient No. 47,077, was locked in cell eleven. Paint flaked from the Spartan cubicle’s walls, which defined Unruh’s new world: a steel cot with a thin, soiled mattress, a toilet, a sink, and a footlocker for whatever possessions Unruh might prize enough to keep in an asylum.

His mother visited faithfully every three weeks, but Unruh grew steadily more insane. He believed the television was spying on his thoughts. For decades, his days were spent mostly listening to the voices in his head, walking in endless circles in a small, fenced-in grassy area outside, and discussing the Oedipus complex, the unwelcome thoughts in his brain, and all the other inmates who were talking about him behind his back and plotting to hurt him. Dutifully, Unruh voted in every election, although his ballots were routinely thrown out until 2009, when New Jersey banned its insane citizens from voting.

At first, he read many books, especially those about science and astronomy, but he began to suspect that all books were contaminated, so he refused to touch them.

In 1954, twenty-three insane criminals rioted for two hours in the Vroom Building’s dining hall, taking a guard prisoner and setting fire to the furniture. Howard Unruh simply sat and watched.

With the advent of antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine, Unruh’s delusions and hallucinations were tamed. Unruh grew exceedingly competent by legal standards. In articulate, handwritten letters in 1965, he asked a judge to dismiss the thirteen murder indictments against him—still standing after fourteen years—and transfer him to a safer, more comfortable Veterans Administration hospital. The request was denied.

Then in 1979, the fifty-eight-year-old Unruh asked to be transferred to a minimum-security state psychiatric hospital, closer to his sickly, eighty-two-year-old mother, but citizens in that town rose up in protest. Unruh was, after all, still a confessed mass murderer.

A sympathetic public defender, James Klein, came to Unruh’s rescue. The mad killer’s only chance to escape the dark, medieval Vroom Building was to have all the murder indictments dismissed, effectively making him (in the law’s eyes) just another mental patient entitled to a life outside what was, in effect, a maximum-security prison.

“I think if we don’t transfer him he’ll die shortly,” the New Jersey State Hospital’s administrator said behind closed doors in 1979. “If we don’t transfer him before his mother expires then he will go downhill very rapidly. I think the environment, coupled with the fact that there’s a great distance between him and his mother, exacerbates this slow physical deterioration.”

So, in 1980, a state judge ruled that Unruh’s constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated and threw out the murder indictments. The Camden County prosecutor’s office immediately appealed, setting up a hearing that would determine whether Unruh was well enough to live in a less restrictive, more humane environment.

With the rap of a gavel, Charles Cohen’s carefully buried secrets were about to be exhumed, thirty-one years after he had laid them to rest.

Charles could not stand by silently and let his parents’ killer win a moment’s comfort without a fight. It frightened him that the murder charges had been dropped, opening the door to increasing freedom for a madman …maybe even to eventually letting him go free.

It was a waking nightmare, and every horrific memory came flooding back. A lifetime of grief unreeled in living color.

His only hope was to speak out, to let loose the darkness inside him—not to hide in a closet but to fight with every fiber of his being. Thirty-two silent years had passed, but now he was going to speak in a desperate attempt to keep the killer Howard Unruh where he belonged until he died: behind bars.

Before Unruh’s hearing, Charles sat his children down and told them the whole harrowing story. Then he picked up the phone and called a reporter.

CATHARSIS

In the courtroom, Charles saw Unruh for the first time since they’d crossed paths in the Camden police station on September 6, 1949, less than an hour after Charles’s parents and grandmother were slaughtered.

Now Unruh was a stooped, shambling old man. His belly hung low and his hair had gone white, but his dark eyes were still empty. He was sixty-one, but looked much older. He sat, pasty-faced and sedated, at his lawyer’s table, more pathetic than sinister.

Charles trembled. He was a tinderbox of rage, hate, and fear, awaiting only the spark that would set the flame that would consume him. From where he sat, it appeared the world now pitied the monster and had forgotten his victims. He felt every possible feeling of hate a human can have for another human. He didn’t just want to hurt Unruh; he wanted him to suffer.

The hearing began with psychiatrists who had studied Unruh. They painted a portrait of a submissive, compliant patient who was heavily medicated and not a significant threat to himself or fellow inmates. A 1980 psychiatric report noted he was “suffering from a malignant, progressively deteriorating schizophrenic illness …over the years, his mental condition has deteriorated greatly. His physical condition has also deteriorated, and he has aged far beyond what would be expected merely by the number of years that have passed.”