The horror in the Orlando night club brought to mind when I was 11 years old in the leafy Camden suburb of Collingswood, New Jersey. It was September 6, 1949, and in the Cramer Hill section of Camden a World War Two vet, Howard Unruh, 28, left his house at 9:20 in the morning for what became known as “The Walk of Death,” a stroll of 12 minutes during which he killed 13 people – three of them children – with a souvenir Luger.
That made Unruh the first American mass killer. He wouldn’t be the last certainly, as this brand of insanity seems to have become as American as apple pie and the access to the weapons to carry out mass murder an irredeemable right worth, ironically, dying for to those who champion it. The American Eagle now clutches an assault weapon in its talons.
To an 11-year-old, Unruh’s rampage was at first an abstraction as I listened to reports on the radio because we didn’t have a television yet. My father sold what were called mills supplies – cables, belts, heavy lubrication oils – and Unruh’s murders became closer to home when he pulled into the driveway at noon and came in the house, severely shaken.
It turns out that his first sales call that morning was to have been in Unruh’s East Camden neighborhood at about the time the shootings occurred. As fate would have it, his sales manager changed the appointment just before my father left the office. He stayed home the rest of the day. He always said it was like missing a plane that crashed.
My father had grown up in Camden and knew a lot of the cops that were involved in the shootout with Unruh after he barricaded himself in his mother’s house, she having fled after Howard threatened her with a wrench before leaving on his spree.
My father was something of a raconteur and one of his stock stories was about Stoney McGlinn, a Camden detective who was one of the 60 police who traded shots with Unruh before he surrendered. As my father told it, Stoney was as crazy as Unruh, sticking his head around a window sill to taunt Unruh to draw his fire so that the cops could get a decent shot at him.
Unruh was deemed too mentally unstable to stand trial and was committed to what is now Trenton Psychiatric Hospital where he died in 2009 at the age of 88.
Besides my father’s close call, I had other connections, some close, some distant, to the first American mass murderer. Unruh had gone to Cramer Junior High School in East Camden. I was a substitute teacher there the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
One of the people killed by Unruh on that blasted morning was a barber, Clark Hoover, 33, who was cutting the hair of six-year-old Orris Martin Smith, who was sitting on one of those little horses they had in barber shops for kids back then. Unruh shot them through the barber shop window, allowing for the deflection. He had a shooting range where he practiced in his mother’s basement. He got very good with that Luger. Unruh knew from death. He had been a tanker at the Battle of the Bulge.
My connection with Hoover the barber was that his son, Ron, later became the star quarterback in my hometown of Collingswood.
My most personal connection to Howard Unruh was through my sister. Ellen, who is a retired detective with the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office. At one point, many years ago, Unruh’s mother. Freda, petitioned the courts for her son to be moved from Trenton Psychiatric Hospital to a facility closer to Camden to make her visits easier because she didn’t drive.
My sister and another detective were dispatched to bring Unruh for the hearing in a Camden courtroom. They transported him, fully shackled, in a plain county sedan. There was no barrier between the front and back seats, but my sister remembers that he was too medicated to be much of a threat. Cops are masters of black humor, and my sister says that during the one-hour ride, she and the other detective told Unruh that they were going to sell Unruh beanies with little propellers on top. Doped up as he was, she said he laughed a little at the idea. When his mother was mentioned, though, my sister said he would tighten his lips in silence. He had said many times he would kill his mother given the chance.
Unruh once told a psychiatrist that he would have killed a thousand people if he had enough bullets. The judge at the hearing said he would always be dangerous and sent him back to Trenton.
Fifty dead in Orlando. Unruh would be happy.