Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (6 page)

The same report also noted Unruh’s unsettling response when he was asked if he could ever commit such a crime again.

“I hope not” is all he said.

When Unruh himself was called to testify, as he stood up, his ill-fitting, state-issued pants dropped to his knees, revealing his long, old-fashioned boxer shorts. The gallery was momentarily sorry for the oblivious old man, who simply pulled his trousers up and proceeded to the witness stand.

Speaking in a quiet, raspy voice, Unruh slowly and tersely answered questions from his lawyer, James Klein, just as he’d answered the prosecutor’s questions thirty-two years before.

“Do you believe you are suffering from a mental illness?” Klein asked.

“I was.”

“How about today?”

“I don’t think so.”

Charles watched Unruh’s face intently. It was vacant of any emotion.

“What are your goals ultimately? What would you like to see happen to yourself?” the lawyer asked.

“I would like to be transferred to a civil ward at Ancora [another state hospital], then receive treatment to prepare me for the street,” Unruh replied.

“You think you need some preparation before you go to the street?”

“I don’t, but the doctors do.”

The prospect of Howard Unruh roaming the streets again chilled Charles, who sat with Marian in the back of the courtroom, his every muscle tensed. Unruh wanted to be closer to his ailing mother, whose companionship he’d enjoyed for more than sixty years. Charles seethed. When he wanted to visit his mother, he had to go to a cemetery.

After fifteen minutes, Klein rested, and the prosecution had no questions. But the judge asked the question everyone wanted to hear.

“Mr. Unruh, do you have the feeling that you want to hurt anybody?”

“Not anymore.”

“How long ago was it that you stopped having those feelings, if you did have them?”

“Ever since I was sent to the Vroom Building.”

Ten minutes later, the judge ruled. Howard Unruh, he said, remained a threat to himself and the public, and more freedom was likely only to mean more risk to innocent people.

Charles Cohen had gotten his way this round, but the fight was far from over.

For the rest of his natural life, Howard Unruh was entitled to a similar hearing once a year. Every year, a judge would determine whether the killer was entitled to a more comfortable life.

“I was only twelve years old,”
Charles Cohen told one reporter.
“I was a kid. I listened to my mother.
She yelled ‘Hide, Charles, hide!’
That’s what I did. I hid in the closet.”

So Charles Cohen became a zealot. His story came pouring out in great torrents. He spoke to every newspaper, TV, and radio reporter who would listen. He began to speak into a portable tape recorder, as he planned to write a book about the massacre and its aftermath. He wanted everyone to see how this one man, Unruh, had outlived all the families he destroyed in his berserk, twelve-minute rampage. Charles wanted the world to understand what he’d lost. He wanted other survivors to be able to get past it, even if he hadn’t. He wanted Unruh to never enjoy a moment of freedom beyond the dark, noisy walls of the Vroom Building.

But most of all, he wanted his parents to be proud of him. If he said nothing, the dead could never forgive him. He must live with purpose so there would be a purpose in their deaths.

The only place he never spoke was the courtroom. Throughout Unruh’s many hearings, no judge, jury, or lawyer ever asked Charles to speak for the dead.

“I was only twelve years old,” he told one reporter. “I was a kid. I listened to my mother. She yelled ‘Hide, Charles, hide!’ That’s what I did. I hid in the closet.

“Thing is, I’m still in there.”

He talked about the suitcase full of ghosts he kept in the attic, too.

He told another reporter about his fantasy of a phone call delivering the news that Howard Unruh was dead. He’d give his statement of condolences to the surviving families of Unruh’s victims, piss on his grave, then bury the suitcase once and for all. His ghosts would be exorcised.

Unruh remained 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. And every year, Charles Cohen sat through another hearing, ready to speak for the dead.

And every time some other lunatic cut loose with a gun—Nebraska, Austin, New Orleans, San Ysidro, Killeen, Atlanta, Littleton, Red Lake, Montreal, Virginia Tech, Binghamton, and all the places whose names and streets would be forever stained by mass murderers—the ghosts of Cramer Hill came back to life for Charles. He knew there’d be people who would live with the horror for the rest of their lives and never know what to do.

Headlines called him “the father of mass murder,” but Unruh had not been the first American mass murderer, or even the most prolific. But he stood out, albeit for mysterious reasons.

His body count was nowhere near records set in earlier mass murders, such as the all-but-forgotten 1927 school bombing in Bath, Michigan, in which forty-five people—mostly children—died. But the most shocking American mass murders have never been purely about the number of deaths.

Unruh’s crime has echoed for decades because nobody could possibly have predicted his explosion, which happened in a place that seemed all too familiar to most people—in this case, an ordinary neighborhood. For the rest of the twentieth century and beyond, the shocking combination of unexpected horror in a “safe” place would happen again and again in restaurants, schools, public parks, and small businesses.

But Unruh also fascinated America, in part, because he lived. There was no suicide, no fatal shootout with cops, no electric chair, not even emotional death by remorse. He was different because he survived.

Charles Cohen survived, too. He sometimes walked past the old drugstore, but he never went inside. He visited his parents’ graves on the Hebrew date of their deaths, always leaving a stone as a sign that he’d come.

He continued to pursue a book about his experience, making notes and amassing a stack of audiotapes on which he would secretly record his
memories and reflections. He often stopped the tape when the ghosts overwhelmed him, such as describing visiting his parents’ graves before seeing Unruh in court.

“This is my catharsis; this is my coming out and discussing what, why, and how,” he said plaintively on one of the tapes.

“I want to be able to tell people that no matter how shitty things get in life and how depressed you may feel and how bad things may seem to you, sometimes it is better to talk about it and get it out. Either talk to the right person or find your time to talk to the world….”

“I want to be able to tell people that no matter
how shitty things get in life and how depressed
you may feel and how bad things may seem to
you, sometimes it is better to talk about it and
get it out. Either talk to the right person or find
your time to talk to the world….”

Where Charles had once kept secrets out of fear that his pain might poison his children, he now hoped his old secrets could bind them into the family he had always dreamed of rebuilding.

“The reason I am doing this is to keep Howard Unruh in a maximum security situation for the rest of his life. But perhaps that’s not really the reason. Maybe I now have to talk about it. I have to lay it all out. I have to look at it myself. Perhaps I can live whatever life I have left—and I hope I have a long life with my family—and we can enjoy whatever time it is even with a better quality than we have at this point because I am sure that my holding back [has] kept a lot of feelings inward that perhaps could have made it easier on everyone else.”

Sadly, Charles Cohen died unexpectedly on Friday, September 4, 2009, after a massive stroke at his summer home in Ventnor City, New Jersey. He was seventy-two. Jewish funeral customs require that the dead be buried as soon as the day after death, except on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. Thus, some say it was God’s intent, others mere coincidence, that Charles was buried on Sunday, September 6, 2009—the sixtieth anniversary of Howard Unruh’s deadly rampage.

Howard Unruh outlived Charles by only six weeks. Unruh died of old age in a state nursing home on October 19, 2009, after spending the last sixty years of his life in an insane asylum. He was eighty-eight. His lawyer said he remained
lucid up to his last few days, but he never talked about the Cramer Hill massacre except to say that he was sorry children had died.

The killer was secretly buried in an unmarked grave beside his mother in Whiting, New Jersey, after a private funeral attended by only two relatives and a pastor. A few days later, a cemetery worker planted a small American flag in the fresh dirt, just as he did for all departed soldiers.

Charles Cohen’s suitcase, the repository of a life diverted by a madman, was never buried. It is safe in his daughters’ hands.

ATLANTA WAS BURNING
.
A suffocating heat wave had engulfed the city and simmered near 100°F (38°C) for days. The dead air, curdled humidity, and sunlight caroming like a white-hot blade off the modern high-rises made a killer hot spell even hotter.

People were dying elsewhere, but in Atlanta’s elegant, air-conditioned Buckhead district, there was at least some comfort in the electric coolness of the upscale shops, chic clubs, and posh offices, separated from the deadly dangers outside by a barrier of reflective glass and steel.

But walls and windows couldn’t protect All-Tech Investment Group from storms in the stock market, and today was a bearish day. The NASDAQ was tanking; losses were mounting. The heat was rising on Wall Street, too.

So Brent Doonan, the twenty-three-year-old co-owner of All-Tech, wasn’t surprised to see his friend, a day trader named Mark Barton, push through the trading floor’s glass doors a little before 3 p.m. He was dressed in a comfortable red polo shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes and was sweating. He was carrying a small duffel bag. Maybe he was here to pay a $30,000 shortfall in his account, Brent hoped. In any event, he was glad to see his buoyant, laid-back friend who drifted through life unfazed by the fact that on any given day he might win or lose ten thousand bucks gambling on the stock market.

BRENT DOONAN WASN’T SURPRISED TO SEE HIS FRIEND AND CUSTOMER MARK BARTON OUTSIDE THE CONFERENCE ROOM (AT RIGHT) ON JULY 29, 1999. “YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS,” HE TOLD DOONAN.
Courtesy of Brent Doonan

Barton motioned to Brent, who was making a sales pitch to a potential new day trader behind the glass walls of All-Tech’s conference room. Brent waved back but couldn’t walk away from a potential new customer.

Barton paced outside the room for a few minutes, making small talk with other traders, even offering them sodas from a nearby refrigerator. But he couldn’t wait. He impatiently rapped his knuckles on the window. Brent apologized to his trainee and motioned the excited Barton in.

“Hey, Brent, I need to talk to you. It’s important,” Barton said with a peculiar little smile. “Can I have a minute?”

Brent looked at his watch.

“Yes, Mark,” he said. “In just a minute.”

Barton smiled big and left.

While Brent looked for a stopping point with his new client, Barton chatted up some of his old buddies on the trading floor. Somebody noticed spatters of red on his hands, forearms, and collar, and they reckoned he must have been painting. Someone else wondered why Barton casually closed the office blinds before he went back to the conference room and interrupted Brent.

“Brent, come here quick,” he said, an odd look on his face. “Really, you’re gonna love this!”