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

military academy where nobody knew just how lucky Charles was. For the first time since the shootings, he felt as if he had a family. He was happy there until his classmates began to whisper about who Charles really was, so he left.
    The suitcase that once contained the remnants of his life was now filling with odd clippings, photographs, and mementos of that day. Initially,
Life
magazine and others had come around to do stories, but as time passed, Howard Unruh was forgotten, except as a macabre measuring-stick. “Stark-weather Three Short of Worst Killing Spree” said one 1958 headline. “Mass Murder of Chicago Nurses Recalls Unruh” said another in 1966. And finally in that same deadly summer “Texas Tower Sniper Kills Fourteen in Worst Shooting Ever.”
    Days went into days, and Charles kept pushing the memories deeper inside himself. A word, a sound, even the slant of the light could trigger a flashback in which he relived the whole sickening episode. He smiled when people told him how well he was doing, but inside, he knew he was barely holding it together. In time, those people just believed he had overcome his loss. Lucky for him, they didn’t know.
    Days went into days, and Charles kept pushing the
memories deeper inside himself. A word, a sound,
even the slant of the light could trigger a flashback in
which he relived the whole sickening episode.
    He hadn’t conquered his pain. It still lived inside Charles like some black creature he kept locked up in the darkest recesses of his mind. Outwardly, he grew to be jovial, even silly at times. He had a knack for making people laugh. But despite the superficial light, black things writhed in him, seldom on display but always a shadow behind his dark eyes.

    EVERY YEAR SINCE 1981, THE STATUS OF INSANE MASS MURDERER HOWARD UNRUH (SHOWN HERE IN 1998) AT THE TRENTON STATE HOSPITAL WAS REVIEWED BY THE COURTS, WHICH KEPT HIM INSTITUTIONALIZED UNDER MAXIMUM SECURITY ALMOST UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE SIXTY YEARS AFTER HIS 1949 CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, SHOOTING SPREE.
Associated Press
    Almost from the start, Charles had yearned to rebuild his lost family.
    In 1958, he married Marian Schwartz, a young woman who had admired Charles from afar since she was a teenager. On their wedding night, he sat on the edge of their hotel bed and told her the whole story of that heartbreaking September day and everything after. He told her he only wanted to live a normal life, but he couldn’t be at peace until Howard Unruh was dead.
    It never came up again.
    He became a linen salesman, and he was good at it. His customers liked him; he made them laugh.
    Charles and Marian had three daughters. Growing up, the girls never knew what horrors their father had survived or still haunted him. He neverspoke of Howard Unruh or the day everyone died, fearing he might pass some of the toxic darkness to them.
    But they sensed something. They knew their father never gave cut flowers because they always died. He forbade them from having pets because they, too, died. He worried about them incessantly, even more than other girls’ fathers. When they asked about their grandparents, they were told they died in an accident. One night, one of his young daughters wept as she watched Jackie Gleason’s film portrayal of Gigot, the gentle but mute janitor obsessed with strangers’ funerals. She saw her father in him, but she didn’t know why.
    Charles Cohen finally had the family he so desperately wanted. He lived in his own house, not someone else’s. His children were happy. The hidden wounds inflicted by Howard Unruh had remained secret.
    But like some horror-show monster, Unruh wouldn’t die until he had loosed all of Charles’s pent-up emotions one last time.
LETTING LOOSE THE DARKNESS
    A month after the shootings on Cramer Hill, without a single competency hearing, Howard Unruh was committed to the New Jersey State Hospital’s Vroom Building, a special