Howard Unruh with Prosecutor Cohen

Camden County Historical Society

Prosecutor Mitchell H. Cohen, pictured above alongside Howard Unruh shortly after his arrest, brought charges for thirteen counts of “willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought” and three counts of “atrocious assault and battery.” However, Unruh was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and deemed incompetent to stand trial. He was confined to the maximum-security Vroom Building at the Trenton State Hospital for the next sixty years until his death at 88 on October 19, 2009.

The enormity of Unruh’s crimes and the staggering death toll they brought, shocked Camden and the nation. Dubbed the “Walk of Death” by the press at the time, the shooting attracted widespread news coverage and notoriety.

The "spree killing," which is a killing of three or more unrelated individuals without a cooling-off period, has been widely attributed as the United States' first mass shooting. However, earlier incidents, such as a 1903 shooting in Winfield, Kansas, in which nine were killed and 12 injured, and various historical racially motivated acts of violence against Native Americans and enslaved Africans also meet the standards of a mass shooting. Unruh's shooting has been commonly attributed as the first because it was the first to attract widespread news coverage. National media outlets such as CNN and the New York Times have listed the 1949 incident in Camden as the first mass shooting in the United States.

Howard Unruh dressed in his US Army uniform

Camden County Historical Society

Howard Unruh, depicted in this photograph, enlisted in the United States Army on October 27, 1942, and served as a Private First Class in Battery C, 342d Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Upon first deploying to Naples, Italy, Unruh’s unit saw combat in France, Germany, Austria, and Belgium, where he earned the European Theater of Operations Medal, the Victory Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal. He was honorably discharged on November 30, 1945, whereupon he returned home to Camden and worked briefly at a printing press in Philadelphia.

Unruh’s former commanding officer reported to the Philadelphia Inquirer shortly after the killings that he was “a little peculiar” and spent most of his down time writing letters or reading books, but added that, “As far as real combat action goes, he got his share.” A journal kept by Unruh during his military service, entitled “Combat Amendments and Army Memories,” immortalized his experiences during World War II and featured graphic descriptions of the bodies of dead German soldiers.

Howard Unruh’s yearbook entry

Camden County Historical Society

Howard Unruh graduated from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Camden, New Jersey in January 1939. The entry in the class yearbook, where this photograph appeared, reads: “‘How’ is a very quiet fellow. Despite his apparently shy demeanor, ‘How’ has made a great many friends with his fellow members of the Practical Arts Course. ‘How’s’ main ambition is to be a government employee and if his previous work is any indication, the position is as good as filled. The utmost of success to you in all your aspirations, ‘How.’” On a later page of the yearbook, Unruh listed his favoite song as “Get Out and Get Under the Moon,” an upbeat tune recorded by singer Helen Kane in 1928.

Frieda Unruh

Camden County Historical Society

At the time of the killings, Howard Unruh was unemployed and supported by his mother, Frieda, who worked as a packer at the Evanston Soap Company in Camden. Estranged from her husband, the two lived together in an apartment above a vacant store at 3202 River Road, which Frieda (shown here in an undated photograph) rented from Maurice and Rose Cohen, who owned the neighboring pharmacy. On the morning of September 6, while ironing clothes, Frieda found herself cornered by Unruh as he silently brandished a monkey wrench over her in a threatening manner. Unruh later told prosecutors and psychiatrists that he had considered murdering his mother in that moment but could not bring himself to do so. Terrified, Frieda fled up the street to the home a friend, where she allegedly fainted upon hearing the first shots ring out across the neighborhood.

During a psychiatric evaluation conducted at Trenton State Hospital on May 7, 1982, Unruh related that he had “been reading a great deal about his relationship to his mother in the works of [psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund] Freud,” describing it as an Oedipus complex. “That’s the bad way to be in love with my mother,” Unruh is quoted in the report, “that means I want to have sex with my mother.”

Shortly after the killings, Frieda relocated to Whiting, New Jersey, and visited Unruh regularly during his confinement at Trenton State. She passed away in June 1985 at the age of 87. Upon his death in 2009, Unruh was buried beside her in an unmarked cemetery plot.

Maurice and Rose Cohen

Camden County Historical Society

Maurice and Rose Cohen (shown in this undated photograph) owned the River Road Pharmacy at the corner of River Road and North Thirty-Second Street, which served as an unofficial gathering place for the close-knit residents of Cramer Hill. The husband and wife lived in an apartment above the shop with their 13-year-old son, Charles, and Mr. Cohen’s mother, Minnie; additionally, the Cohens owned the adjoining (then-vacant) storefront and rented its second-floor apartment to Howard and Frieda Unruh.

Of the many paranoid delusions Howard Unruh harbored toward his neighbors, his grudge against the Cohens was by far the most serious. In his confession statement to prosecutors, Unruh nonchalantly mentioned that he had previously purchased a machete because he “had a mind to decapitate Mr. and Mrs. Cohen.” Upon further prodding, he explained that “I had it in the back of my mind that they were butting into my business.” Rose Cohen, Unruh thought, had once said that she could tell there was something wrong with him by the look of his eyes. While Unruh used a pay phone in the pharmacy one day, he stated, Maurice Cohen drew the attention of other customers to him and mocked, “There’s a fellow who is letting his mother support him.” Six pages of extensive notes listing his grievances against other neighbors were found in a journal Unruh kept from the spring of 1949 up until several weeks before the killings. Among them were such perceived wrongs as Charles Cohen loudly playing with a bugle, Rose Cohen slamming a screen door late at night, and that once Maurice Cohen had short-changed him. Abbreviated in the margins for some of these incidents, Unruh wrote the notation “Retal”—short for “retaliate.”

According to his mother, Howard Unruh often left their apartment and traversed the Cohens’ adjacent yard as a shortcut to reach Thirty-Second Street and River Road. Rose Cohen, annoyed by the traffic past her kitchen window and how Unruh would noisily slam the gate, had recently asked him to not use their yard. To resolve the matter, on Monday, September 5 (the day before the killings), Unruh, his estranged father, and a family friend constructed a new gate that connected the Unruhs’ yard to a neighboring driveway on Thirty-Second Street. After completing the project, Unruh left to see a movie in Philadelphia, and upon returning home at 3 a.m., found that this new gate had been ripped out—he assumed, by the Cohens. This incident, he told prosecutors, triggered him to finally “retaliate” for these long-held grievances the following morning.

Maurice, Rose, and Minnie Cohen were all murdered by Unruh in their apartment, but Charles Cohen survived the deadly rampage by hiding in a closet. He later became an outspoken voice on the scourge of gun violence and mental health and fiercely opposed a proposal in the 1980s to transfer Unruh from Trenton State to the minimum-security Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Winslow Township, New Jersey. Cohen died at the age of 72 on September 4, 2009, almost sixty years to the day of the killings, and mere weeks before Howard Unruh died on October 19.

Charles Cohen’s granddaughter, Carly Novell, was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and survived the mass shooting on February 14, 2018, that killed 17 and injured 17 others by also hiding in a closet.

Family Theater on Market Street

PhillyHistory.org

In the late 1940s, the all-night Family Theater at 1311 Market Street in Philadelphia (pictured here in 1960) was one of several movie houses in Center City where Howard Unruh and other gay men met discreetly away from the watchful eye of the police. Unruh told psychiatrists that he frequently engaged in sexual activities with other men in the room he rented at a boarding house on Clinton Street. Having been brought up a devout Christian, and still considering himself such until a few weeks before the killings, Unruh struggled deeply with his sexuality. During a psychiatric evaluation in 1982, Unruh recalled, “Once, after I left a fellow [with whom he was having a homosexual affair] in his apartment and went into the subway, I felt that the Devil had me—he possessed me.”

During an earlier “narcosynthesis” session at Trenton State Hospital, Unruh divulged to a team of psychiatrists that he secretly carried on a relationship with a man named Van for a time during the summer of 1949, and that they “got along very well together.” On Labor Day, September 5, the day before the killings, Unruh finished building the new gate in his apartment’s yard with his father and then left for Philadelphia to make a date with Van that night at the Family Theater on Market Street. He said that traffic delayed him leaving Camden and when he finally arrived, Van was not there. Unruh waited for hours, but Van never showed, and he sat alone in the theater watching two films, I Cheated the Law and The Lady Gambles, several times until finally leaving around 2:30 in the morning. When Unruh returned home to Camden, he found the newly built gate ripped out of the fence.

Speaking of Van only once, the psychiatrists noted in their report that, “This is the one point in the whole narco when [Unruh] showed any emotion. He appeared to be a little tearful and depressed at this time.”