Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived Read Online Free PDF Page A

the words “a car.” Beside each name was a date, and sometimes there were several names on the same date. He’d make such notations every night for weeks at a time.
    And beside Unruh’s bed, they found his Bible, lying open to chapter twenty-four of St. Matthew, the chapter in which Christ predicts the destruction of the temple and all the catastrophes to come. “The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of,” it said. “And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
    The interrogation of Howard Unruh might have continued longer if DA Cohen hadn’t seen blood puddling under Unruh’s chair. When they examined him, they found he’d been shot in the buttocks with a small-caliber bullet. He was rushed to the hospital, the same hospital where his victims had been taken, but doctors determined that removing the small bullet would do more damage than the bullet itself had done. For the rest of his life, he carried the slug in his butt.
    Within sixteen hours of his arrest, Unruh was taken to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton to be further evaluated. Through weeks of interviews, psychiatrists noted that Unruh “rarely spoke spontaneously” and was “at all times entirely free from anxiety or guilt.” He spoke in a monotone “with a marked degree of emotional flattening.” He never showed any emotion, even when the most delicate subjects were discussed—until asked about his attack on his mother, when he appeared to be guilty and fearful.
    Some findings were surprising, if not lurid. Unruh had an unnaturally close relationship with his mother, though there was no evidence that it was sexual. He’d made sexual advances toward his brother as a youngster, but they were rebuffed. He started having sex with men during the service and continued after the war, and he struggled mightily with guilt over his behavior.
    More to the point of his killings, there was little evidence that the insults Unruh imagined had ever really happened or, if they did, were as meaningful as he made them out to be. Maybe his neighbors
were
talking about him, but psychiatrists believed many of the insults Unruh “heard” were in his imagination. Either way, he was unable to laugh off a practical joke or a friendly jab and walk away; his paranoia simply wouldn’t let him.
    And although his family disagreed, several psychiatrists found no link between Unruh’s war experiences and his ultimate unraveling. Unruh wasn’t psychologically right before the war, they said, and while combat certainly didn’t help, his slow decay was set in motion long before he ever fired a shot in anger.
    A month after the shootings, the hospital’s staff declared Unruh to be suffering from a case of paranoid and catatonic schizophrenia that was slowly getting worse. In short, Howard Barton Unruh was insane, even if he understood his actions were wrong, and he would only get worse as time passed.
    â€œHe knew what he was doing,” the psychiatrists concluded, “but seemed to be operating from an automatic compulsion to continue shooting and killing until his ammunition was exhausted….
    â€œHis narcissism is such that at all times he has felt justified in the killings of the particular people whose murders he plotted from the beginning. [He] has always acknowledged that it was wrongful and has usually stated that he should die in the electric chair. He has shown himself totally unable to identify emotionally with the victims of his crime or to sense in any way the reactions directed against him by the survivors.”
    Howard Unruh would never stand trial on thirteen counts of murder. He would never face the electric chair. He wouldn’t even face his accusers in a court of law.
    Instead, DA Cohen announced that Unruh