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

would be committed to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton where “he and the community will be protected from injury or danger should there be a recurrence of his homicidal impulses.”
    For some, that wasn’t enough. A judge ordered Howard’s estranged father, Samuel, to pay the state of New Jersey $15 a month for his son’s care at the asylum.
    And just in case Howard Unruh should ever be “cured,” the indictments against him would stand for decades.
A SUITCASE OF MEMORIES
    While the world fascinated itself with the enigmatic and diseased mind of Howard Unruh, it overlooked young Charles Cohen.
    Death had rubbed a callus on the heart of postwar America. A million Americans were killed or wounded in the war. Everyone else was simply lucky.
    Thus it was with Charles. He’d lost his entire family to a madman’s fury, but because he suffered no physical wounds, he was “lucky.” So the wise men of science gathered ’round the maniac and sent the lucky little boy home.
    Suddenly an orphan, he was briefly taken by the police to the station, where he was told to wait for a relative to claim him. While Charles sat there in shock, cops brought Unruh in for booking, and their eyes met for an incalculable moment. Then the killer was gone.
    At that moment, Charles had not considered the awful truth. He’d seen his mother lying in a pool of blood, but believed his father and grandmother were still alive. It was an aunt who finally told him bluntly, “They’re all dead.”
    The pain was sudden and incalculable. Charles had loved his parents deeply, and they had loved him. They took him everywhere. With them, he felt like a little man, trusted to run errands into Philadelphia even before he was ten. They placed their faith in him, and he felt it.
    But the morning after his parents and grandmother were slain, Charles awoke in a strange bed in a strange new world. He’d left with only an old brownsuitcase of clothes and a few other possessions. He pushed the sudden loneliness, bewilderment, and, in time, the anger deeper, where nobody would see. He didn’t want to disappoint all the people who marveled at his luck.
    The three caskets of Maurice, Rose, and Minnie Cohen were buried side by side at Philadelphia’s Roosevelt Memorial Park a few days after the killings. Charles was there to watch them be lowered into the ground. He didn’t remember too much about that day, but he promised himself that when he stopped crying, he would live the life they expected for him. He would grow up the best he could, marry, work hard, and have children of his own.

    AFTER HIS PARENTS AND GRANDMOTHER WERE SLAUGHTERED BY HOWARD UNRUH ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1949, CHARLES COHEN (SHOWN HERE IN 1999) DROVE HIS PAIN AND HORROR DEEP INSIDE. BUT IN 1981, WHEN UNRUH SOUGHT MORE FREEDOM AT HIS NEW JERSEY MENTAL HOSPITAL, CHARLES BECAME AN OUTSPOKEN VOICE FOR UNRUH’S VICTIMS.
Associated Press
    Having relatives to care for him, Charles lived with several aunts and uncles after the shootings. But they were building their own families, and he always felt like an outsider, always extra. Their homes weren’t his home, and he began to feel as though they weren’t even his family. He was a child of the dead.
    In the blue-collar world of the fifties, only crazies sought mental help. Therapy was electroshock and lobotomies. A sudden death in the family, even three, certainly didn’t prompt anyone to suggest counseling, especially for a Jewish orphan kid who was, after all, lucky to be alive. Sad wasn’t the same as crazy.
    In the luckiest stroke of all, Charles and his older brother—in the military at the time of the tragedy—shared the money from the sale of their parents’ drugstore, enabling Charles to pay the rent that some of his relatives took from him and, when the time came, to pay for his own bar mitzvah, too.
    Some of the money paid his tuition at a private