bonestructure posted:

Many words

Tired Moritz posted:

Talking about books, what's the best books if I want to read up on hosed up crimes or serial murderers?

quote:

From 1890 to 2010, the rate of botched lethal injections in the United States was 7.1%, higher than any other form of execution, with firing squads at 0%, the electric chair at 1.9%, hanging at 3.1%, and the gas chamber at 5.4%.[11]

In 2011, Hospira announced that it would stop manufacturing sodium thiopental, due to use by American prisons for executions. "Virtually all" death rows in the US were left without a steady supply of the drug, which is used to numb the pain of potassium chloride stopping the heart. Some states bartered supplies of execution drugs, while other states were accused of illegally buying drugs from India and other sources. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized supplies of sodium thiopental from several states in spring and summer 2011, questioning how they were imported.[12] Other manufacturers have also refused to provide pharmaceutical drugs for the purpose of execution, and a European export ban added to problems obtaining the necessary drugs.[13][14]

Due to the supply issues, Oklahoma used an untested mixture of midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride for Lockett's execution.[2] While Florida had previously used the same three drugs in a 2013 execution,[15] they used 500 mg of midazolam rather than the 100 mg used by Oklahoma.[16] Secrecy laws in Oklahoma prevent the public knowing more than which three drugs were used. The state refused to state why that drug combination was chosen, what the drugs were like and how they were obtained. Reportedly, the drugs were bought with petty cash making the transaction harder to track and to challenge legally.[17]

In a recent Florida case experts testified that midazolam would not cause unconsciousness. Instead of sedating some patients midazolam can make them violent. Dennis McGuire took 25 minutes to die; he gasped and snorted. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that if the first drug does not make the inmate unconscious there is an unacceptable risk of suffocation and pain from the two following drugs. Potassium chloride causes severe pain if used without an anesthetic. Pharmacology professor, Craig Stevens of Oklahoma State University asked why anesthesiology or pharmacology experts were not consulted. "Midazolam has no analgesic properties. It's a whole different drug class than sodium thiopental or barbiturates," Stevens said. Stevens described dying from the other two drugs without anesthetic as "horrific".[18] The drug combination used is considered too painful to euthanise animals. "Veterinarians in at least one state are barred from using a three-drug formula used on several inmates, including Clayton Lockett."[19]

bonestructure posted:

Rest in peace, Kris and Lisanne.

Chicken Butt posted:

There's also a drastically contrasting sense of scale between Europe and the Americas. California alone is larger than the entire country of Germany. Panama is twice the size of the Netherlands, but has less than a fifth of its population. And so on.

Walton Simons posted:

I still don't think I get the idea of these military bases in the desert where nobody is there. I get that they're protected by their remoteness but they're certainly not impossible to get there if you're determined and prepared. So what's there, what are they for and why even bother marking them on a map if they're not worth guarding?

Karma Monkey posted:

Really? Starve to death rather than fix your own drat dinner? His wife must have been so happy to get out of the hospital and find out she was free from that jackass.

Walton Simons posted:

I still don't think I get the idea of these military bases in the desert where nobody is there. I get that they're protected by their remoteness but they're certainly not impossible to get there if you're determined and prepared. So what's there, what are they for and why even bother marking them on a map if they're not worth guarding?

quote:

NAWS China Lake provides and maintains land, facilities and other assets that support the Navy’s research, development, acquisition, testing and evaluation (RDAT&E) of cutting-edge weapons systems for the warfighter.

Darkhold posted:

I had a co-worker whose father-in-law refused to cook his own meals/food shop because that was 'women's work' after his wife died if his two daughters couldn't come around to fix his meals for him he'd literally choose to starve. He was just out of his second visit to the hospital for malnourishment when I quit.

I can only assume you must have some level of dementia to choose to die rather than feed yourself.

Wikipedia says posted:

Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned; he would eat only food that his wife, Adele, prepared for him. Late in 1977, she was hospitalized for six months and could no longer prepare her husband's food. In her absence, he refused to eat, eventually starving to death.[20] He weighed 65 pounds (approximately 30 kg) when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.[21] Adele's death followed in 1981.

MikeCrotch posted:

Kurt Godel

pookel posted:

Some interesting material here, some creepy, some funny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths

JacquelineDempsey posted:

It doesn't matter what your stance is on capital punishment (and please, for the love of this thread, let's not derail it on that subject), the fact that some states are making their own secret, untested cocktails of lethal injections in the name of "humane" executions is pretty fuckin' creepy. Give me the Razor of France over that, any day.

Tired Moritz posted:

Talking about books, what's the best books if I want to read up on hosed up crimes or serial murderers?

pookel posted:

I'm wondering now, is it an American thing to think of military bases as places to house lots of troops while they train and equipment gets tested? It never really occurred to me to think of them as primarily strategic installations that you put near places that need to be defended. But then, we usually fight wars far from home - there's not much need to set up bases for local defense.

pookel posted:

I'm wondering now, is it an American thing to think of military bases as places to house lots of troops while they train and equipment gets tested? It never really occurred to me to think of them as primarily strategic installations that you put near places that need to be defended. But then, we usually fight wars far from home - there's not much need to set up bases for local defense.

pookel posted:

I'm wondering now, is it an American thing to think of military bases as places to house lots of troops while they train and equipment gets tested? It never really occurred to me to think of them as primarily strategic installations that you put near places that need to be defended. But then, we usually fight wars far from home - there's not much need to set up bases for local defense.

MikeCrotch posted:

I get the impression that US military bases are a lot more remote than they are in Europe. I can only speak to living in the UK, but its not uncommon for barracks to be smack bang in the middle of suburbs. Even with bases which don't have obvious purposes, you can usually see buildings from the fence line. I can't remember ever seeing something marked for military use that didn't clearly have occupied buildings within walking distance.

quote:

(Vladimir) Komarov was selected to command the Soyuz 1, in 1967, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. Both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly, but everyone in space program was terrified of Brezhnev’s reaction to the mission being delayed or scrubbed. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Vladimir Komarov was among Gagarin’s best friends.

quote:

As the launch date drew near, everyone was more and more pessimistic. There were serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The pre-tests flights had been disconcerting, the technicians who had inspected the Soyuz 1 had found 203 structural problems. An atmosphere of foreboding prevailed at the cosmodrome. As Vladimir Komarov climbed into the transfer van to take dhe Ride Down to the pad, he had an air of fatalistic resignation about him. His fellow cosmonauts joshed him, trying to cheer him and get a smile. They started singing, encouraging him to join in. By the time they reached the pad some minutes later, he was singing with them too and the mood of pessimism had lifted somewhat. Gagarin showed up to the launch in full gear and tried to convince the crew to let him pilot the craft instead, but the crew (including Komarov) refused to let him, and Komarov flew the ship, almost certainly knowing that he was likely to die. Eight minutes later Vladimir Komarov was in orbit operating one of the most sophisticated spacecraft ever launched.

quote:

As Komarov was headed to his doom, US listening posts in Turkey heard him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship”. He told ground control officials he knew he was about to die. The Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov’s wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying. When the capsule began its fatal descent the American intelligence “picked up [Komarov’s] cries of rage as he plunged to his death”. Some translators heard him say, “Heat is rising in the capsule”. He also used the word “killed” — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him.

pookel posted:

Back on topic: I was poking around this historical photos site that was posted above (but now I've forgotten what for) and found this bit of history both heartbreaking and creepy. Note: charred, unrecognizable human remains in a photo at the top. Lots of graphic historical photos in side links. Possibly or if you are sensitive to photos of death and violence.

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/remains-astronaut-vladimir-komarov-man-fell-space-1967/

RIP, Vladimir Komarov.

pookel posted:

Some interesting material here, some creepy, some funny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths

quote:

2013: João Maria de Souza, 45, of Caratinga, Brazil, was killed by a cow that fell through the roof of his house onto his bed while he was asleep.

pookel posted:

Back on topic: I was poking around this historical photos site that was posted above (but now I've forgotten what for) and found this bit of history both heartbreaking and creepy. Note: charred, unrecognizable human remains in a photo at the top. Lots of graphic historical photos in side links. Possibly or if you are sensitive to photos of death and violence.

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/remains-astronaut-vladimir-komarov-man-fell-space-1967/

RIP, Vladimir Komarov.

quote:

But why they gave him an open casket service? Komarov demanded it personally because he wanted to send a message to the government officials who had caused his death. He knew the capsule was unsafe and that he would very likely die, he knew he would not be returning alive so he made the demand before launching. His final “revenge” was forcing his superiors to look at what they had done.

An Angry Bug posted:

pookel posted:

RIP, Vladimir Komarov.

3 posted:

Soyuz 1 was a complete disaster where almost everything on the spacecraft was broken; it's a testament to how good of a pilot Komarov was that he was able to manually guide the craft in for reentry while wrestling with a basically nonfunctional capsule. If it wasn't for the fact that "almost everything" also unfortunately included the main parachute, he might've even guided it into a survivable landing.

Ironically, thanks to this clusterfuck, the Soyuz program was heavily retooled and is now longest-lived manned spacecraft program in history and one of the most statistically reliable, having outlived Apollo and STS and is still being used to taxi folks to the ISS.

Walton Simons posted:

I still don't think I get the idea of these military bases in the desert where nobody is there. I get that they're protected by their remoteness but they're certainly not impossible to get there if you're determined and prepared. So what's there, what are they for and why even bother marking them on a map if they're not worth guarding?

Madkal posted:

That is some Final Destination type death right there.

Tired Moritz posted:

Talking about books, what's the best books if I want to read up on hosed up crimes or serial murderers?

quote:

Murder, let's face it, is as American as cherry pie.

That's the unavoidable conclusion one reaches after reading the Library of America's huge, bloody, fascinating, often depressing yet sometimes grimly funny anthology of 350 years of true-crime writing.



Admirably edited by Harold Schechter, the book opens with "The Hanging of John Billington," Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford's 1651 account of the first recorded American murder, and ends with "Nightmare on Elm Drive," Dominick Dunne's 2001 report on the conviction of the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, for murdering their parents. The anthology's 50 nonfiction pieces, most originally published in newspapers and magazines, include some by authors as celebrated as Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Thurber, Theodore Dreiser and Truman Capote. Many of the crimes are obscure, while others are notorious, such as those involving Leopold and Loeb, Richard Speck and Charles Manson.

We encounter the Ghastly Find (often a body, or pieces of one, floating in a river); the Wayside Tavern, "where the solitary traveler comes but never departs"; and a multitude of women seeking to rid themselves of husbands by means of arsenic or various blunt instruments, some getting away with it, others not. We are reminded of just how incompetent most murderers are. Damon Runyon called Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray the Dumbbell Murderers when they were tried in 1927 for killing Snyder's husband, and the same could be said of a dozen others in this book, including Leopold and Loeb and the Menendez brothers, who fancied themselves superior creatures who could bring off the perfect crime.

Often, the stories from the 18th and 19th centuries are the most gripping, because we are unlikely to have encountered them before. Two early chapters describe separate murders in 1781 and 1782, wherein a farmer and a shopkeeper took up the ax and murdered their families, one because God told him to, the other because of business reversals. Mark Twain explains that the many shootings in America's Wild West came about because "a person is not respected until he has 'killed his man.' " An anonymous piece called "Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend," tells of a lad in South Boston who in the 1870s tortured and killed younger children, and at age 14 was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, and he died in prison 60 years later.

The Cuban patriot José Martí reports on the trial of Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled office-seeker who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 and claimed in court that God had told him to. Why? "To unite the factions within the Republican party," the killer explained. His insanity defense was rejected, and he was executed.

The reporter and future novelist Susan Glaspell tells how in 1900 an Iowa farmer's abused wife, Margaret Hossack, apparently used an ax to crush the skull of her sleeping husband but after two trials emerged a free woman. Not so fortunate was Cordelia Botkin of San Francisco, who when rejected by her married lover in 1898 sent his wife a box of poisoned chocolates, which killed both the wife and another woman. Botkin, too, was a dumbbell and wound up in San Quentin.

One does not typically look to true-crime reporting for outstanding writing -- just the facts will suffice -- but there is plenty of class in this volume. The New Yorker's Annals of Crime series has employed the talents of Alexander Woollcott, James Thurber, A.J. Liebling and Calvin Trillin; their articles collected here include Liebling's classic "Case of the Scattered Dutchman," which concerns body parts found floating in the East River.

Three dramatically different selections struck me as exceptionally well crafted.

"The Eternal Blonde," Damon Runyon's day-by-day account of the 1927 trial of Snyder and Gray for the murder of her husband, Albert Snyder, "under circumstances that for sheer stupidity and brutality have seldom been equalled in the history of crime," is often hilarious. Example: "[Snyder] is not bad looking. I have seen much worse. She is thirty-three and looks just about that, though you cannot tell much about blondes." Gray is dismissed as "the little corset salesman." After the lovers bashed in the sleeping husband's skull with a five-pound sash weight, Gray tied up Snyder, who later told the police that two foreigners had broken in and killed her husband. That story held up for about 30 seconds, whereupon the lovers turned on one another, a legal strategy that, as Runyon gleefully relates, did not save them from the electric chair.

At a little after 9, on the morning of Sept. 6, 1949, in Camden, N.J., a World War II veteran named Howard Unruh, armed with a Luger pistol, left his home and proceeded to kill or wound 16 neighbors and passersby in their shops, homes and cars. He later explained that his neighbors were making "derogatory remarks" about him. New York Times reporter Meyer Berger soon arrived on the scene and spent six hours retracing Unruh's steps and interviewing some 50 witnesses. He then returned to the Times office and wrote a 4,000-word story that was published the next day under the headline "Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street." It was a dazzling example of deadline reporting and won Berger the Pulitzer Prize. Among the many bits of memorable dialogue he recorded was this exchange between an indignant Unruh and one of the policemen who arrested him: "You a psycho?" "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind."

Possibly the most remarkable piece of writing in this anthology is the African American novelist and journalist Zora Neale Hurston's account of the 1952 trial in Suwannee County, Fla., of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who had shot and killed her white lover, Clifford Adams Jr., a doctor and state senator. The trial, Hurston wrote, "amounted to a mass delusion by unanimous agreement." The well-to-do McCollum had given birth to one child by Adams and was pregnant with another when she shot him. She was allowed to say in court that Adams was the father of her child, but the prosecution called that "preposterous" and the judge refused to let her offer any details or mitigating circumstances. She was a black woman who had killed a white man, and there was nothing more to be said. The official story was that she shot him in a dispute over an unpaid $6 medical bill. Covering the trial for an African American newspaper and watching from the balcony reserved for blacks, Hurston found this charade astonishing, and she gives a powerful account of both the trial and the way local blacks, fearful of white authority in a Klan stronghold, were unanimous in condemning McCollum. It's a painfully candid piece of writing in which one reporter sees with perfect clarity the reality that everyone else denies.

Editor Schechter refers to a previous crime anthologist as having "served up true-crime tidbits for the delectation of a sensation-craving public." There are many delicious tidbits here, but I think no one would accuse Schechter of base motives. His seriousness is reflected in the Hurston selection, in Elizabeth Hardwick's eloquent protest against the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman and in many other pieces. The anthology is almost obscenely entertaining, if one has a strong stomach and a certain mind-set, but it is also a searching look at the dark underside of American reality, at an aspect of the human condition that both horrifies and fascinates us.

quote:

Benjamin Franklin -The Pennsylvania Gazette, October 24, 1734

Saturday last, at a Court of Oyer and Terminer held here, came on the Tryal of a Man and his Wife, who were indicted for the Murder of a Daughter which he had by a former Wife, (a Girl of about 14 Years of Age) by turning her out of Doors, and thereby exposing her to such Hardships, as afterwards produced grievous Sickness and Lameness; during which, instead of supplying her with Necessaries and due Attendance, they treated her with the utmost Cruelty and Barbarity, suffering her to lie and rot in her Nastiness, and when she cried for Bread giving her into her Mouth with a Iron Ladle, her own Excrements to eat, with a great Number of other Circumstances of the like Nature, so that she languished and at length died.

The Evidence against them was numerous, and in many Particulars positive; but the Opinion of the Physician who had visited the Child, that whatever Usage might be given her, the Distemper she laboured under was such, as would of itself in all Probability have ended her Life about the Time she died, it is thought weighed so much with the Jury, that they brought in their Verdict only Man-slaughter. A Verdict which the Judge, (in a short but pathetic Speech to the Prisoners before the Sentence) told them was extreamly favourable; and that, as the Relation of their hitherto unheard-of Barbarity had in the highest Manner shocked all that were present; so, if they were not perfectly stupified, the inward Reflection upon their own enormous Crimes, must be more terrible and shocking to them, than the Punishment they were to undergo: For that they had not only acted contrary to the particular Laws of all Nations, but had even broken the Universal Law of Nature; since there are no Creatures known, how savage, wild, and fierce soever, that have not implanted in them a natural Love and Care of their tender Offspring, and that will not even hazard Life in its Protection and Defence. — But this is not the only Instance the present Age has afforded, of the incomprehensible Insensibility Dram-drinking is capable of producing. — They were sentenced to be burnt in the Hand, which was accordingly executed in Court, upon them both, but first upon the Man, who offer’d to receive another Burning if so be his Wife might be excused; but was told the Law would not allow it.

quote:

CAMDEN, N.J., Sept.6—

Howard B. Unruh, 28 years old, a mild, soft-spoken veteran of many armored artillery battles in Italy, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, killed twelve persons with a war souvenir Luger pistol in his home block in East Camden this morning. He wounded four others.

Unruh, a slender, hollow-cheeked six-footer paradoxically devoted to scripture reading and to constant practice with firearms, had no previous history of mental illness but specialists indicated tonight that there was no doubt that he was a psychiatric case, and that he had secretly nursed a persecution complex for two years or more.

The veteran was shot in the left thigh by a local tavern keeper but he kept that fact secret, too, while policemen and Mitchell Cohen, Camden County prosecutor, questioned him at police headquarters for more than two hours immediately after tear gas bombs had forced him out of his bedroom to surrender.

Blood Betrays His Wound

The blood stain he left on the seat he occupied during the questioning betrayed his wound. When it was discovered he was taken to Cooper Hospital in Camden, a prisoner charged with murder.

He was as calm under questioning as he was during the twenty minutes that he was shooting men, women and children. Only occasionally excessive brightness of his dark eyes indicated that he was anything other than normal.

He told the prosecutor that he had been building up resentment against neighbors and neighborhood shopkeepers for a long time. “They have been making derogatory remarks about my character,” he said. His resentment seemed most strongly concentrated against Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Cohen who lived next door to him. They are among the dead.

Mr. Cohen was a druggist with a shop at 3202 River Road in East Camden. He and his wife had had frequent sharp exchanges over the Unruhs’ use of a gate that separates their back yard from the Cohens’. Mrs. Cohen had also complained of young Unruh’s keeping his bedroom radio tuned high into the late night hours. None of the other victims had ever had trouble with him. Unruh, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School here, had started a GI course in pharmacy at Temple University in Philadelphia some time after he was honorably discharged from the service in 1945, but had stayed with it only three months. In recent months he had been unemployed, and apparently was not even looking for work.

Mother Separated From Husband

His mother, Mrs. Rita Unruh, 50, is separated from her husband. She works as a packer in the Evanson Soap Company in Camden and hers was virtually the only family income. James Unrah, 25 years old, her younger son, is married and lives in Haddon Heights, N.J. He works for the Curtis Publishing Company.

On Monday night, Howard Unruh left the house alone. He spent the night at the Family Theater on Market Street in Philadelphia to sit through several showings of the double feature motion picture there--“I Cheated the Law” and “The Lady Gambles.” It was pass three o’clock this morning when he got home.

Prosecutor Cohen said that Unruh told him later that before he fell asleep this morning he had made up his mind to shoot the persons who had “talked about me,” that he had even figured out that 9:30 A.M. would be the time to begin because most of the stores in his block would be open at that hour.

His mother, leaving her ironing when he got up, prepared his breakfast in their drab little three-room apartment in the shabby gray two-story stucco house at the corner of River Road and Thirty Second Street. After breakfast, he loaded one clip of bullets into his Lugar, slipped another clip into his pocket, and carried sixteen loose cartridges in addition. He also carried a tear-gas pen with six shells and a sharp six-inch knife.

He took one last look around his bedroom before he left the house. On the peeling walls he had crossed pistols, crossed German bayonets, pictures of armored artillery in action. Scattered about the chamber were machetes, a Roy Rogers pistol, ash trays made of German shells, clips of 30-30 cartridges for rifle use and a host of varied war souvenirs.

Mrs. Unruh had left the house some minutes before, to call on Mrs. Caroline Pinner, a friend in the next block. Msrs. Unruh had sensed, apparently, that her son’s smoldering resentments were coming to a head. She had pleaded with Elias Pinner, her friend’s husband, to cut a little gate in the Unruhs’ backyard so that Howard need not use the Cohen gate again. Mr. Pinner finished the gate early Monday evening after Howard had gone to Philadelphia.

At the Pinners’ house at 9 o’clock this morning, Mrs. Unruh had murmured something about Howard’s eyes: how strange they looked and how worried she was about him.

A few minutes later River Road echoed and re-echoed to pistol fire. Howard Unruh was on the rampage. His mother, who had left the Pinners’ little white house only a few seconds before, turned back. She hurried through the door.

She cried, “Oh, Howard, oh, Howard, they’re to blame for this.” She rushed past Mrs. Pinner, a kindly gray-haired woman of 70. She said, “I’ve got to use the phone; may I use the phone?”

But before she had crossed the living room to reach for it she fell on the faded carpet in a dead faint. The Pinners lifted her onto a couch in the next room. Mrs. Pinner applied aromatic spirits to revive her.

Panic Grips Entire Block

While his mother writhed on the sofa in her house dress, and worn old sweater, coming back to consciousness, Howard Unruh was walking from shop to shop in the “3200 block” with deadly calm, spurting Luger in hand. Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way. Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, man hoarse with fear. No one could quite understand for a time. what had been loosed in the block.

Unruh first walked into John Pilarchik’s shoe repair shop near the north end of his own side of the street. The cobbler, a 27-year-old man who lives in Pennsauken Township, looked up open-mouthed as Unruh came to within a yard of him. The cobbler started up from his bench but went down with a bullet in his stomach. A little boy who was in the shop hid behind the counter and crouched there in terror. Unruh walked out into the sunlit street.

“I shot them in the chest first,” he told the prosecutor later, in meticulous detail, “and then I aimed for the head.” His aim was devastating--and with reason. He had won markmanship and sharpshooters’ ratings in the service, and he practiced with his Lugar all the time on a target set up in the cellar of his home.

Unruh told the prosecutor afterward that he had Cohen the druggist, the neighborhood barber, the neighborhood cobbler and the neighborhood tailor on his mental list of persons who had “talked about him.” He went methodically about wiping them out. Oddly enough, he did not start with the druggist, against whom he seemed to have the sharpest feelings, but left him almost for the last.

Newlywed Wife Shot Dead

From the cobbler’s he went into the little tailor shop at 3214 River Road. The tailor was out. Helga Zegrino, 28 years old, the tailor’s wife was there alone. The couple, incidentally, had been married only one month. She screamed when Unruh walked in with his Luger in his hand. Some people across the street heard her. Then the gun blasted again and Mrs. Zegrino pitched over, dead. Unruh walked into the sunlight again.

All this was only a matter of seconds and still only a few persons had begun to understand what was afoot. Down the street at 3210 River Road is Clark Hoover’s little country barber shop. In the center was a white-painted carousel-type horse for children customers. Orris Smith, a blonde boy only 6 years old, was in it, with a bib around his neck, submitting to a shearing. His mother, Mrs. Catherine Smith, 42, sat on a chair against the wall and watched.

She looked up. Clark Hoover turned from his work, to see the six-footer, gaunt and tense, but silent, standing in the driveway with of the Luger. Unruh’s brown tropical worsted suit was barred with morning shadow. The sun lay bright in his crew-cut brown hair. He wore no hat. Mrs. Smith could not understand what was about to happen.

Unruh walked to “Brux”-- that is Mrs. Smith’s nickname for her little boy -- and put the Luger to the child’s chest. The shot echoed and reverberated in the little 12 by 12 shop. The little boy’s head pitched toward the wound, his hair, half-cut, stained with red. Unruh said never a word. He put the Luger close to the shaking barber’s hand. Before the horrified mother, Unruh leaned over and fired another shot into Hoover.

The veteran made no attempt to kill Mrs. Smith. He did not seem to hear her screams. He turned his back and stalked out, unhurried. A few doors north, Dominick Latela, who runs a little restaurant, had come to his shop window to learn what the shooting was about. He saw Unruh cross the street toward Frank Engel’s Tavern. Then he saw Mrs. Smith stagger out with her pitiful burden. Her son’s head rolled over the crook of her right arm.

Mrs. Smith screamed, “My boy is dead. I know he’s dead.” She stared about her, looking in vain for aid. No one but Howard Unruh was in sight, and he was concentrating on the tavern. Latela dashed out, but first he shouted to his wife, Dora, who was in the restaurant with their daughter Eleanor, 6 years old. He hollered, “I’m going out. Lock the door behind me.” He ran for his car, and drove it down toward Mrs. Smith as she stood on the payment with her son.

Latela took the child from her arms and placed him on the car’s front seat. He pushed the mother into the rear seat, slammed the doors and headed for Cooper Hospital. Howard Unruh had not turned. Engle, the tavern keeper, had locked his own door. His customers, the bartender and a porter made a concerted rush for the rear of the saloon. The bullets tore through the tavern door panelling. Engel rushed upstairs and got out his .38 caliber pistol, then rushed to the street window of his apartment.

Unruh was back in the center of the street. He fired a shot at an apartment window at 3208 River Road. Tommy Hamilton, 2 years old, fell back with a bullet in his head. Unruh went north again to Latela’s place. He fired a shot at the door, and kicked in the lower glass panel. Mrs. Latela crouched behind the counter with her daughter. She heard the bullets, but neither she nor her child was touched. Unruh walked back toward Thirty-second Street, reloading the Luger.

Now, the little street--a small block with only five buildings on one side, three one-story stores on the other--was shrill with women’s and children’s panicky outcries. A group of six or seven little boys or girls fled pass Unruh. They screamed, “Crazy man!” and unintellible sentences. Unruh did not seem to hear, or see, them.

Autoist Goes to His Death

Alvin Day, a television repair man, who lives in the near-by Mantua, had heard the shooting, but driving into the street he was not aware of what had happened. Unruh walked up to the car window as Day rolled by, and fired once through the window, with deadly aim. The repair man fell against the steering wheel. The front wheels hit the opposite curb and stalled. Day was dead.

Frank Engel had thrown open his second-four apartment window. He saw Unruh pause for a moment in a narrow alley between the cobbler’s shop and a little two-story house. He aimed and fired. Unruh stopped for just a second. The bullet had hit, but he did not seem to mind, after the initial brief shock. He headed toward the corner drugstore, and Engle did not fire again.

“I wish I had,” he said, later. “I could have killed him then. I could have put a half-dozen shots into him. I don’t know why I didn’t do it.”

Cohen, the druggist, a heavy man of 40, had run into the street shouting, “What’s going on here? What’s going on here?” but at sight of Unruh hurried back into his shop. James J. Huttton, 45, an insurance agent from Westmont, N.J., started out of the drug shop to see what the shooting was about. Like so many others he had figured at first that it was some car backfiring. He came face to face with Unruh.

Unruh said quietly, “Excuse me, sir,” and started to push past him. Later, Unruh told the police: “That man didn’t act fast enough. He didn’t get out of my way.” He fired into Hutton’s head and body. The insurance man pitched onto the sidewalk and lay still.

Cohen had run to his upstairs apartment and had tried to warn Minnie Cohen, 63, his mother, and Rose, his wife, 38, to hide. His son, Charles, 14, was in the apartment, too.

Mrs .Cohen shoved the boy into a clothes closet, and leaped into another closet herself. She pulled the door to. The druggist, meanwhile had leaped from the window onto a porch roof. Unruh, a gaunt figure at the window behind him, fired into the druggist’s back. The druggist, still running, bounded off the roof and lay dead in Thirty-second Street.

Unruh fired into the closet, where Mrs. Cohen was hidden. She fell dead behind the closed door, and he did not bother to open it. Mrs. Minnie Cohen tried to get to the telephone in an adjoining bedroom to call the police. Unruh fired shots into her head and body and she sprawled dead on the bed. Unruh walked down the stairs with his Luger reloaded and came out into the street again.

A coupe had stopped at River Road, obeying a red light. The passengers obviously had no idea of what was loose in East Camden and no one had a chance to tell them. Unruh walked up to the car, and though it was filled with total strangers, fired deliberately at them, one by one, through the windshield. He killed the two women passengers, Mrs. Helen Matlack Wilson, 43, of Pennsauken, who was driving, and her mother, Mrs. Emma Matlack, 66. Mrs. Wilson’s son John, 12, was badly wounded. A bullet pierced his neck, just below in the jawbone.

Earl Horner, clerk in the American Stores Company, a grocery opposite the drugstore, had locked his front door after several passing men, women and children had tumbled breathlessly into the shop panting “crazy man***killing people.***” Unruh came up to the door and fired two shots through the wood panelling. Horner, his customers, the refugees from the veteran’s merciless gunfire, crouched, trembling, behind the counter. None there was hurt.

“He tried the door before he shot in here,” Horner related afterward. “He just stood there, stony-faced and grim, and rattled the knob, before he started to fire. Then he turned away.”

Charlie Petersen, 18, son of a Camden fireman, came driving down the street with two friends when Unruh turned from the grocery. The three boys got out to stare at Hutton’s body lying unattended on the sidewalk. They did not know who had shot the insurance man, or why and, like the women in the car, had no warning that Howard Unruh was on the loose. The veteran brought his Luger to sight and fired several times. Young Petersen fell with bullets in his legs. His friends tore pell-mell down the street to safety.

Mrs. Helen Harris of 1250 North Twenty-eighth Street with her daughter, Helen, a 6-year-old blonde child, and a Mrs. Horowitz with her daughter, Linda, five, turned into Thirty-second Street. They had heard the shooting from a distance but thought is was auto backfire.

Unruh passed them in Thirty-second Street and walked up the sagging four steps of a little yellow dwelling back of his own house. Mrs. Madeline Harrie, a woman in her late thirties, and two sons, Armand, 16, and Leroy, 15, were in the house. A third son, Wilson, 14, was barricaded in the grocery with other customers.

Unruh threw open the front door and, gun in hand, walked into the dark little parlor. He fired two shots at Mrs. Harrie. They went wild and entered the wall. A third shot caught her in the left arm. She screamed. Armand leaped at Unruh, to tackle him. The veteran used the Luger butt to drop the boy, then fired two shots into his arms. Upstairs Leroy heard the shooting and the screams. He hid under a bed.

By this time, answering a flood of hysterical telephone calls from various parts of East Camden, police radio cars swarmed into River Road with sirens wide open. Emergency crews brought machine guns, shotguns and tear gas bombs.

Sergeant Earl Wright, one of the first to leap to the sidewalk, saw Charles Cohen, the druggist’s son. The boy was half out the second-floor apartment window, just above where his father lay dead. He was screaming “He’s going to kill me. He’s killing every body.” The boy was hysterical.

Wright bounded up the stairs to the druggist’s apartment. He saw the dead woman on the bed, and tried to soothe the druggist son. He brought him downstairs and turned him over to other policemen, then joined the men who had surrounded the two-story stucco house where Unruh lived. Unruh, meanwhile, had fired about 30 shots. He was out of ammunition: Leaving the Harrie house, he had also heard the police sirens. He had run through the back gate to his own rear bedroom.

Guns Trained on Window

Edward Joslin, a motorcycle policeman, scrambled to the porch roof under Unruh’s window. He tossed a tear-gas grenade through a pane of glass. Other policemen, hoarsely calling on Unruh to surrender, took positions with their machine guns and shotguns. They trained them on Unruh’s window.

Meanwhile a curious interlude had taken place. Philip W. Buxton, an assistant city editor on the Camden Evening Courier had looked Unruh’s name up in the telephone book. He called the number, Camden 4-2490W. It was just after 10 A.M. and Unruh had just returned to his room. To Mr. Buxton’s astonishment Unruh answered. He said hello in a calm, clear voice.

“This Howard?” Mr. Buxton asked.
“Yes, this is Howard. What’s the last name of the party you want?”
“Unruh.”
The veteran asked what Mr. Buxton wanted.
“I’m a friend,” the newspaper man said. “I want to know what they’re doing to you down there.”
Unruh thought a moment. He said, “They haven’t done anything to me---yet. I’m doing plenty to them.” His voice was still steady without a trace of hysteria.
Mr. Buxton asked how many persons Unruh had killed.
The veteran answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t counted. Looks like a pretty good score.” “Why are you killing people?”
“I don’t know,” came the frank answer. “I can’t answer that yet. I’ll have to talk to you later. I’m too busy now.”
The telephone banged down.

Unruh was busy. The tear gas was taking effect and police bullets were thudding at the walls around him. During a lull in the firing the police saw the white curtains move and the gaunt killer came into plain view.

“Okay,” he shouted. “I give up, I’m coming down.”
“Where’s that gun?” a sergeant yelled.
“It’s on my desk, up here in the room,” Unruh called down quietly. “I’m coming down.”

Thirty guns were trained on the shabby little back door. A few seconds later the door opened and Unruh stepped into the light, his hands up. Sergeant Wright came across the morning-glory and aster beds in the yard and snapped handcuffs on Unruh’s wrists.

“What’s the matter with you,” a policeman demanded hotly. “You a psycho?”
Unruh stared into the policeman’s eyes---a level, steady stare. He said, “I’m no psycho. I have a good mind.”

Word of the capture brought the whole East Camden populace pouring into the streets. Men and women screamed at Unruh, and cursed him in shrill accents and in hoarse anger. Someone cried “lynch him” but there was no movement. Sergeant Wright’s men walked Unruh to a police car and started for headquarters.

Shouting and pushing men and women started after the car, but dropped back after a few paces. They stood in excited little groups discussing the shootings, and the character of Howard Unruh. Little by little the original anger, born of fear, that had moved the crowd, began to die.

Men conceded that he probably was not in his right mind. Those who knew Unruh kept repeating how close-mouthed he was, and how soft spoken. How he took his mother to church, and how he marked scripture passages, especially the prophecies.

“He was a quiet one, that guy,” a man told a crowd in front of the tavern. “He was all the time figuring to do this thing. You gotta watch them quiet ones.”

But all day River Road and the side streets talked of nothing else. The shock was great. Men and women kept saying: “We can’t understand it. Just don’t get it.”

Nckdictator posted:

True Crime: An American Anthology published by Library of America does a admirable job at not being sleazy.


https://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=289

http://www.amazon.com/True-Crime-Anthology-Harold-Schechter/dp/1598530313

Irisi posted:

My god, that second piece is an astonishing piece of writing. Especially considering it was written by one man to a deadline, in a time and place where it must have been hellishly difficult to get any sense out of a very frightened neighbourhood.

It's so clear and precise and lacking in extreme sensationalism, in some places it almost reads like a well-honed précis for a book or film script. Puts to shame the reporting modern journalists do on mass shootings, no wonder it won an award.

Irisi posted:

My god, that second piece is an astonishing piece of writing. Especially considering it was written by one man to a deadline, in a time and place where it must have been hellishly difficult to get any sense out of a very frightened neighbourhood.

It's so clear and precise and lacking in extreme sensationalism, in some places it almost reads like a well-honed précis for a book or film script. Puts to shame the reporting modern journalists do on mass shootings, no wonder it won an award.

quote:

WHEN WE COULD SEE THE COFFINS
by Meyer Berger in The New York Times, October 27, 1947


The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly. One coffin, borne from the ship in a caisson, moved through the city's streets to muffled drumbeats and slow cadenced marches, and 400,000 New Yorkers along the route and at a memorial service in Central Park paid it the tribute of reverent silence and unhidden tears.

At the service on the Sheep Meadow, chaplains of three faiths prayed for the soldier dead. Their words, and the choking sadness of taps, suspended in quivering, unseasonal heat, evoked women's sobs and caught at men's throats.

The transport Joseph V. Connolly broke through the haze outside the narrows at 9 a.m., a shadowy hulk all gray and tan, with a funeral wreath at her forepeak. Nothing moved on her decks.

The Connolly's escort wheeled into line: the destroyers Bristol and Beaty, the gleaming white Coast Guard cutter Spencer; five of the city's fireboats and other small craft. The ship's ensign, half-masted, stirred in the wind, and at 9:15 A.M. foam flowed from the Connolly's prow and the craft moved toward the harbor.

The pace was slow, a bare ten knots. Buoys tolled and lapsed into quiet. There was a stir on the Bristol's fantail, and Corporal Carroll Ripley, a marine, raised his trumpet and Church Call, muted and tender, hung over the waters. Rear Admiral John J. Brady, retired, opened a prayer: "O, God -" but a wind tore the invocation to tatters.

KozmoNaut posted:

I just can't over how goddamn AMERICAN everything put out by Scientology is.

KozmoNaut posted:

I just can't over how goddamn AMERICAN everything put out by Scientology is.

As a nation, you guys really do love your fancy graphics, dynamic go-getter type soundtracks and pumped up narrators.

KozmoNaut posted:

I just can't over how goddamn AMERICAN everything put out by Scientology is.

As a nation, you guys really do love your fancy graphics, dynamic go-getter type soundtracks and pumped up narrators.