![]() ![]() The FBI defines a “mass murder” as four or more victims in a single incident (usually in one spot). ![]() There have been killers since Cain murdered Abel, and Unruh certainly wasn’t the first American to take the lives of multiple victims. A somewhat forgotten man outside of criminology circles and local old-timers, Unruh was an early chapter in the tragically-all-too-familiar American story of an angry man with a gun, inflicting carnage. In a few hours, on the morning of Tuesday, September 6, Unruh would embark upon his “Walk of Death,” murdering 13 people and wounding three others in a 20-minute rampage before being hauled off by police after a dangerous firefight. Unable to sleep, he made yet another mental list of his intended targets, a group of local shopkeepers one would find in a 1950s children’s book: the druggist, shoemaker, tailor and restaurant owner. He went into his apartment, uncased his German Luger P08, a 9mm pistol he’d purchased at a sporting goods store in Philadelphia for $37.50, and secured it with two clips and 33 loose cartridges. Unruh thought the world was out to get him, so he decided to enact revenge on his little corner of it. For a couple of years, Unruh had been contemplating killing several of his Cramer Hill neighbors over petty squabbles, perceived slights and name-calling, all which fed into his psychosis. At 3 a.m., he arrived home in New Jersey to find that the newly constructed fence at the rear end of his backyard-one he’d erected to quell an ongoing feud with the Cohens who lived next door and owned the drugstore below the apartment he shared with his mother-had been tampered with. Unruh sat in the dark until 2:20 a.m., bitterly stewing through multiple on-screen loops of the movies. Unfortunately for Unruh, 28 years old at the time, traffic held him up and by the time he reached theater, a well-known gay pick up spot on Market St., his date was gone. Unruh, however, wasn’t interested in the pictures. He was supposed to meet a man with whom he’d been having a weeks-long affair. ![]() On the bill that night was a double feature, the double-crossing gangster movie I Cheated the Law and The Lady Gambles, in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a poker-and-dice-game addict. He left his Camden, New Jersey, apartment and headed to the Family Theatre in downtown Philadelphia. On Labor Day, 1949, Howard Unruh decided to go to the movies. ![]()
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