Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 377: Howard Unruh

Episode Date: August 10, 2019

On today's episode, we cover Howard Unruh, the first widely-known mass shooter in American history, from his time as a soldier in World War II to his infamous Walk of Death in Camden, NJ that resulted in the deaths of thirteen people in 1949.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? You know what? I think it's only fitting that we record today's episode on the first time that Tool has released a single in 13 years. Because I really think that Howard Unra would be a massive fan of fear inoculum. Really? A new dirge-like single from Tool. He might be a Maynard guy. Tool rocks, dude. Tool rocks. Are you still in Tool Camp?

I'm a Tool Camp guy because you know what it did? It gave bass players a reason to feel cocky. Because all bass have a lot of reason to feel cocky. I'm just saying Tool. I know that, but Tool is a bass player band. Bass players? They always got a big dick and can't read. That's true. Honestly, I actually agree with Henry on that one. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to the last podcast. On the left, I am Ben joined by Marcus. Hi.

And of course, we have Henry Zabrowski on the beautiful west coast. You know what? I love the way to start a week. One of my favorite ways to start a week is to spend several hours looking at old days. Looking at old, tiny, crime scene photos of a mass shooter and all the bodies and the fun outfits from the 50s. They were fun. All splattered with blood to the point where I am having active shooter nightmares that are outside of just what's happening in the news. That's wonderful. I guess it's important to be prepared, I suppose. It's very sad. It's a good time for protective outerwear companies. Oh, this is a golden age for Kevlar. And hopefully they can make a skirt with pockets.

Yes. So today we're talking about a man. His name is Howard Oonra. Now, in full disclosure, we decided to tackle the subject of America's first widely known mass shooter about two weeks ago. Because we needed a one-shot episode to give us enough time to get together the research for the big series that's starting next week. And when we decided to do it, I actually jokingly texted Henry, just something along the lines, like, ah, we'll be fine doing it just so long as there's not a mass shooting between now and then. Right. And man, we just laughed. And I remember, because Marcus doesn't make a lot of good zingers. When he sent that, I was like, oh, Marcus, you are just damning us all to more chaos.

Any young men of mass tragedy jokes. Next day, Gilroy Garlic Festival. Jesus. Three people were killed. But, you know, we decided to go ahead with the episode because we honestly, cynically thought, ah, people are probably going to forget about Gilroy by the time the episode's released. They did. It's brutal. Unless you were there or you knew someone who was there, let's be honest, you probably would have forgotten about Gilroy if you haven't already forgotten about Gilroy.

Here comes the most L.A. sentence I'm going to say is that that day of my, I went to a yoga class and the yoga teacher was on her way to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Geez. Yeah. She's fine. But is yoga and garlic a good mix? Oh, there's a lot of smells in you. There's a lot of mixtures of food. What is food? What is body? I'm not sure. Is the garlic steam class? No, this is great. I love feeling like a piece of spaghetti in an Italian stew.

Well, regardless, we moved forward. But then the El Paso murders happened last Saturday with the Dayton murders coming later that night. And there were still others in the last couple of weeks that were barely blips in the news. You had the disgruntled employee who killed two in a Walmart in Mississippi. You had the mass shooting here in Brooklyn, out in Brownsville. Yeah. Eleven people were wounded and one was killed. You didn't even make the local papers. Barely made the local news. It was not on the front page of the Daily News like I was looking it up earlier today.

You know what it is? New York One. That's the most good hack. Oh, hey, the best news source in the country. Honestly, New York One. I miss it. Yes, New York One is great local New York news. It's great local news, but shit, it's not even in the post. I remember when I used to work in the financial district, I used to turn on New York One just to see if there was terrorist activity in Manhattan, so I wouldn't have to go to work. You know, we're recording this on Wednesday before we go out for a tour this weekend, so, you know, there's a fucking chance there might be another mass shooting between now and the time we release on Friday night.

Yeah. In other words, if we were to wait until there were no mass shootings to cover a mass shooter, we would never cover any mass shooters. But then the question is, Marcus, why are we covering mass shooters besides the fact that we run a podcast where we cover every single thing that is dark and fucking horrible? Because these dickheads are just as worthy of our scorn and derision as the serial killers we cover week after week. Absolutely. And this story is fascinating, no matter what the context. So we're going to move ahead with where all this shit started, Camden, New Jersey. Oh, can you smell the street fish?

Yes. Oh, it's like the mailboxes of farting. Beautiful Camden, New Jersey, where every angel's got a stogie in her mouth. Oh, right. Camden's a wonderful place. They have beautiful streets, a lot of grass, and they have homes there. A lot of people think that the era of the mass shooter began with Charles Whitman picking off college students from the Bell Tower at the University of Texas in 1966. But almost 20 years before that, there was Howard Unra.

It's like Charles Whitman, Charles Whitman's Led Zeppelin, right? But Howard Unra is the troggs. Oh, no kidding. Over the course of 13 minutes on September 6, 1949, Howard Unra took what came to be known as the Walk of Death through his Camden, New Jersey neighborhood, murdering 13 people and wounding three. At the time, Unra was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, mostly because people back then, they figured there was no way somebody would do this if they weren't, quote, unquote, crazy, and schizophrenia back then was just kind of a catch-all diagnosis for abnormal and disturbing behavior. Okay.

But who knew that his behavior was sort of like a seed that would be pushed deep into the soil of America and be one of our common methods of everyday crime, essentially just some weird, whatever it is, the dark soul of this country that is expressing itself in these explosions of violence. Yeah, absolutely. Howard Unra was one of the very early examples of that. But Howard Unra was not a schizophrenic. Admittedly though, I mean, Unra did have his pressures. I mean, he may have suffered from post-World War II PTSD. He was a veteran, and he was gay living in a time when homosexuality was not only unaccepted, but fully illegal.

It was fucking illegal to be gay. I forgot about all this shit. It's bad. To be fair, I'm not sure how well it's doing in Camden, New Jersey right now, either. Oh, those cigar-smoking angels are getting blown out every other day. It's Jersey, baby. All right. But perhaps the biggest pressure of all on Howard Unra is that he, like the vast majority of mass shooters,

was an unapologetic, unlikable, incurable asshole comparable to awkward dickheads like James Holmes and Sung Cho. That's his biggest flaw. Right. He was a fucking asshole, and he looked like a nerd Frankenstein. He really did. He was all forehead. He looked like Lurch of Lurch got wedgies from bigger lurches. Whoa!

Today we call Howard Unra a psychopath. You know, when Howard was asked why he did what he did, he only expressed remorse that he didn't kill more, saying he'd have killed thousands if he had enough bullets. Oh, what a weird man. Scary, Mr. Unra. Right. So you mentioned Cho and Holmes, of course. Yeah.

That's the Batman movie theater shooter and the Virginia Tech shooter, right? Or in Virginia Tech, yeah. Were they influenced? Did this man influence anybody? No, he was forgotten. Okay, totally forgotten. Outside of true crime circles and academics, Howard Unra just kind of went away after 1949. Okay.

Because, you know, there wasn't anything else like it until 1966. And honestly, people wanted to forget about Howard Unra. Right. It was at the time it was one of the most terrifying things to ever happen in America. So they weren't doing like Camden, New Jersey, like, it's the Death March tour. Come on now. No, no, no. They didn't set up like fake targets and stuff like they would do now.

They didn't have as much of a rockabelly movement. Okay. In Camden at the time. Well, the thing is about Unra though is that as far as the media coverage goes, a guy named Meyer Burger actually won a Pulitzer, won the Pulitzer Prize that year for his writing on the Camden Massacre. It's beautiful. It is.

It's a beautiful article. It's, go and read it. It's Meyer Burger. I can't remember what, like there's a, on the Pulitzer site it's called Mass Shooting Tight Deadline. He wrote it within six hours of doing, of going and doing the interviews. He's taught in journalism schools now. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of true crime writing I've ever read.

It's up there with Capote. Okay. Now, and as far as like sources go, we didn't actually mean to do Harold Schecter sourced episodes in a row, but we discovered after getting an Unra that Schecter had written a fantastic chapter in a book called Rampage that was about the Camden Massacre. So that along with a wonderful in depth piece in Smithsonian Magazine by Patrick Sauer provided a lot of the information you're about to hear. So inside the minds of mass murderers, why they killed by Catherine Ramslin, which has

some, she does jump to a lot of conclusions and her own version of a jump to conclusions man. Of course. About spree killers. But her information is pretty solid. Yeah. It's a pretty good little read. Oh yeah.

Ramslin's a hell of a researcher. Great. So without further ado, let's get into the story of America's first widely known mass shooter, Howard Unra. Now, as far as Howard's upbringing goes, it wasn't marked with the sort of tragic events you might expect. The most abnormal aspect of his childhood was that he didn't walk or talk until he was 16 months old and he had, quote, a prolonged period of toilet training.

Mommy, I don't think you understand. I just like to sit. Yes. Honestly, that's not bad. I didn't talk until I was two years old. I grunted, I rolled over, my brothers brought me everything. It didn't make me lazy in any way. Weird.

But now I've made up for not speaking, but that's not, that's not that abnormal. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not that weird. It's not that weird. No. I couldn't tie my shoes until I was eight and they thought that they put me in remedial classes for a hot sec and thinking, again, that I was mentally handicapped. But actually, I was so not mentally handicapped that I had problems with my fingers reaching

my shoelaces. Oh, really? Really, the only thing in Howard Unra's childhood that was in any way abnormal was only abnormal for the time. When Howard was about nine years old, his parents got a divorce, which in the thirties just didn't happen. His parents were Sam and Frida Unra, and his father worked for the American Dredging Company, and all that dredging kept Sam out of the house, which contributed to the disintegration

of his marriage to Frida. Also, he worked at a company where the job was just, I guess, lifting things out of sludge. I don't know. I don't know what dredging is. It's a drag in the bottom of the river for treasures or bodies. So it's not romantic? He doesn't come back with a bunch of toilet seat rims?

I'm like, hey, honey, look, I got another Christmas wreath. We put a couple of bows on this shit Jesus is going to love it. I think that sounds very romantic. You can find a lot of things in the bottom of a lake. So after Sam Unra left, Howard's mother got a job as a packer at the Evanston Soap Company and supported Howard and Howard's younger brother James. And we'll say, pre-automation jobs are funny to me. Yeah, Packard is so confident.

A dredger and a packer. Oh, we're a packer. I'm a dredger. We have a family now. You used to have to work in this country. I know. No, we don't know a lot about Howard's younger years. But according to his high school yearbook, his only extracurricular was the Science Club.

His nickname... There's nothing wrong with that so far. No, there's nothing wrong with that. That's not what you said so far. No, we have a lot of people who are in the Science Club. I would have been in the Science Club if my school could have afforded a Science Club. Oh, that's a whole lot of fun. I was a part of the AV Squad and I also started the Risk Club.

Really? Would have loved to have all those things. See? How many people joined you in said Risk Club? There was five stalwart members. Each one braver than the next. Each one more bespectacled next to the next. There was a man that we called Ten Eyes because he had five sets of glasses on.

He must have been very good at Risk. Well, furthermore, in Howard's yearbook, they listed his nickname. His nickname was Howe. Sure. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. Howard Howe.

Be kind of like if my nickname was Mark. Yeah. It's better than calling him Ard. Yeah, he would start calling Howard's Ard. And Howard Oonra's life ambition at the age of 18 was to be a generic government employee. Again, great benefits. He was just making practical decisions as a 15-year-old. Honestly, so far so not abnormal.

Yeah. And as far as his grades went, he was also unremarkable. He earned mostly Bs in the area of cooperation, courtesy, and dependability. So far, this man is making me feel really bad about my own adolescence because my mom used to say Cs get degrees when in reality C pluses get degrees, but that was my report card. And he, well, he did get some Cs. He got Cs in the areas of mental alertness and personal impression.

What is the class of mental alertness? They just clap in your fucking ears? Why in the 1930s are they judging little children like they are dogs at a dog shop? He might have been like, good gate. Let me check the gums. Excellent gums. Fine set of genitalia. Both balls are there, perfectly drooped.

Dude, last time I watched Westminster, there was a judge that was actively molesting the dogs. He was into the butt, way too into it. I felt really strange when I remember there was that guy, because it was that corgi. The corgi was a big one in the midsize one. I remember, I thought it was strange when the judge got underneath the corgi, like sort of like, he looked like Elliot Spitzer. He had his pants off socks on, and he just was teabagging this dog.

And everyone was like, interesting, oh, he's really getting in there. And the dog only came second place. Really? Second's not bad at Westminster. Not at all. Well really, the only things that Howard Unra really cared about were model trains, stamp collecting, and church. Okay.

I mean, he was a nerd. Yes. He was a full on nerd, and he looked the part. There is no, like, you see that picture of Howard Unra, and it's exactly what, like, you take that face, and you extrapolate it to eight-chan now, and it's the same guy. Right. I mean, to be fair, what were the other options? Didn't you, I mean, stamp collection was big.

I mean, I don't know if it was big. Model trains were big. I don't know if they were big among, like, big. It's just a thing that loners do. What else did the only other options was to dredge or pack? Play stickball. Ah. You know, play stickball, play marbles with the boys, go to the jukebox, go to the malt

shop. Okay. That's true. Well, Howard, I mean, when he was younger, his faith was very important. He was a devout evangelical Lutheran, but his faith did later just disappear completely. After high school, Howard didn't get that dream government job. Instead, he spent the years from 1939 and 1942 working generic but respectable manual labor jobs like printers, helper, stamping, press operator, and sheet metal worker.

Okay. All jobs that don't exist in America anymore. Of course not. Guys like Unra live opposite of comfortably, not comfortably, in a gray area of mediocrity, where they kind of live in this spot, neither getting enough negative attention to get somebody to pay attention to them, or getting enough positive attention, because so what they do is start to kind of develop this own little world. He basically put himself in this place, which is not, it is manual labor, some more skilled

than others, but he didn't have to apply anything to himself. Meanwhile, deep on the inside, he is starting to maybe formulate ideas that he might be a superior person being forced in an inferior place. Interesting. Yeah. Generic might be the worst life, gray, sounds very, it seems like Christian Bale in The Machinist. Yeah.

Unless you're fucking totally cool with it. Yeah. There are people that just like, you got your job, you make your money, like, but then people invest importance in other things, that all of his other interests were kind of these passing, just kind of busy work, except for church. Church at the time became both a way for him to lord it over other people. He would bring his church teachings to school and lecture people. That's what kind of people knew about him, was that he was a nut even then about Jesus

Christ. Okay. Yeah. I mean, he was one of those guys, he started to believe he was superior, and that all the work around him was inferior, but he also did nothing to actually pull himself out of that and to do anything better with his life. That is a recipe for disaster. But in 1942, Howard Unra would make a decision that either fucked him up forever or woke

up something that was waiting to be activated. That was the year that Unra enlisted in the army and was sent to the European theater of World War II. Right into the shit. Right in the middle. Right in the middle. Right in the middle. Right in the middle.

Me and my fucking, me and my pop-op. My pop-op was there, man, in Italy, dude. In Italy? Was fighting for Mussolini? No. Wait, what is, hold on a second. He was a weak man, he was a weak man who loved pasta. You're a grandfather, because you have made fun of me.

No, you worked for the U.S. Army. Did he? No, he was in the U.S. Army. Oh, okay. He was killing Italians. He was killing the Italians. Okay, well, I just really kind of wanted him to be pro Mussolini so I could lured that over to you the way that you lured my family's history over me on a regular basis.

No, my, we were, he was a part of the good boys. He caught him in the ground, he lost all his teeth, and saw Mussolini's dead body hanging in the square. Yeah, the spaghetti boys. Well, Oda, yeah, I mean, he got drafted into the Army. He went just like everybody else did. But one dude who served with Howard, named Charles Alred, said that, yeah, Charles is an interesting name, but he said that Howard conducted himself in an intelligent, quiet,

courteous, and obedient manner, rating Howard's service in the 342nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion under General George Patton as excellent. Ooh, I just feel like Charles was born after his baby feet pushed out a bunch of red-man chewing tobacco from his mother's womb. Just a bunch of Charles came out. I'll say, I'll tell you one thing about Oonra, okay, he's a straight shooter, he's a straight shooter, he's a straight shooter, and also with a gun, he's a straight shooter. Nowadays, my opinion is changed, but back in the day, Oonra could also, he could eat

the most out of her steak I'd see a prior would ever do. Fly from North Wraith, fly from North Wraith. No one story you'll hear again and again in war, particularly from World War II, is the story about the soldier purposely shooting over the heads of enemies, because, contrary to popular belief, humans, for the most part, are not born killers, especially when the enemy looks like them as they did in the European Theater of War. That's why they have to train, like, what makes the grass grow, blood, blood, blood. That's why they do that sort of training, because they have to remove the stops that

most humans have that keep us from killing each other, because humans have evolved to be social creatures. Yes, I remember that Toni Morrison poem, what makes the grass grow, blood, blood, blood. It's really interesting how you have to break somebody down to a robot, and then you're going to find out there are some people that are better at it than others, and then what does that mean when they come back from the war? It would seem to me, so far, the character breakdown that you've given, he would be a perfect soldier.

He absolutely was. Howard Unra was not one of those men that needed to be broken down. Other soldiers called him unrattled and efficient with a rifle, and Unra participated in, he was in the Battle of the Bulge, I mean, he was fighting back against Hitler one last time. Yeah, so are Henry and I, the Battle of the Bulge. That's different, this is my, I'm starting to call it Battle of the Swole, I am just getting swollen.

You are, you are. Well, Unra served in the Battle of the Bulge with distinction, but while the rest of the soldiers were spending every free moment they could trying to get laid, Unra spent all his free time with his Bible, and there was a very good reason why Unra was doing this. Well, the time they just thought he was, they just thought, I mean, they called him a nerd, and they separated him from the other officers, because they would go and age fuck all night and be like, Unra, what are you doing buddy? We just got done blowing up Nazis all day, aren't you horny, but then he's just there

working on his Bible, just like, I wish I could, but according to here, elephants were made before orangutans. Did you know that? It was done by God. As I briefly mentioned earlier, Howard Unra was gay in a time when homosexuality was not only considered highly immoral, but was actually punishable in America by a lengthy prison sentence. Really, Howard's Bible study didn't set him that far apart from other soldiers, because

there were plenty of religious guys in the service back then. Right. What really set Unra apart was how he approached the act of killing. While most of the soldiers who did actively kill did so with a sense of duty and eventual guilt that they just pushed down as hard as they could when they got home, Howard Unra was privately relishing every single kill. See until the day he was arrested, Unra obsessively recorded his day-to-day life in a series of diaries.

And one day, during the war, one of Howard's squadmates who later joined the NYPD took a look at one of Howard's battlefield diaries. This soldier found that Unra had carefully noted the time, date, and location of every kill and when Howard was able to see the body up close and study its condition, Howard even described how each dead Nazi looked after death in great detail. June 1st. It was at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. It was by a stump that had a frog on it and when I looked deep into his eyes I saw a tiny

kooky little smile. Weird. If anything, Unra could be compared to someone like Timothy McVeigh who joined the service just to see what it was like to kill someone and Howard discovered that he liked it. And even so, both Howard's brother James and Howard's father said that when Howard returned from the war, he was never the same. I think a little similar to what we've seen other killers that have served time in the war, various wars, and who actually saw combat.

There's very few of them that actually saw combat. A lot of them joined the army, they got training, but a part of what the training sort of does, it does create a sense of there's a hierarchy and a structure. You go and to you, especially to somebody who views the world, like he has an emotional filter, right, where everything kind of is as shallow to him as possible, like he can't seem to break through, he has no empathy for other human beings. Army and all this kind of shit gives you a structure to your life, it gives you a thing to shoot for, it gives you like a you get up, these are the things that show that you've

made progress, like in our world of weird, amulgous social networks and our lives, leading a successful life is very, you know, it's challenging and it takes a lot of you have to learn how to cooperate with people and they have to learn all the shit, where there, you just become a cognitive machine. And then when you're kicked out of the structure, someone like Unra, who every day you had things to do, said things that you were supposed to accomplish, and then all of a sudden you just got to figure it out on your own, he never had those skills. He went from school to the army, where he just fucking went from one set of handlers

to another, and then he's back out being like, all right, good luck. Have fun. Do you want to be a barber? You want to be a scientist? It's interesting though, because now, I mean, it also seems as if he could be praised when he gets back for all of his work, we're looking over the diaries, but I'm thinking there was a movie made about a sniper, the American sniper, and he had every single kill registered and it was used as a point of pride.

Well, it wasn't, I don't even know if it was a point of pride for Howard Unra, like it was more just, it was more, not even, or not even really an obsession, he just liked it. It was just something that he enjoyed, like this is, I did this, this is something like and he liked to relive it, because it's, you know, kind of almost like a serial killer with a trophy, you know, it's a way to like relive those kills, like to note the time, date, place, and the location of the body, that immediately takes you back to that moment. Right.

He also got positive validation for it. He got positive, but every single time he killed a German, everybody was super, super happy. Right. And then it was like a thing where he was making people happy, even though personally, he could not connect. Yeah. When he got back from the war, he wandered from job to job, never lasted more than a

few months in any job. I mean, the closest he got to ambition was when he enrolled in pharmacy school at Temple University, but even that only lasted about three months before Howard dropped out for quote unquote, health reasons. Yeah, I have this thing, the doctor's diagnosed me with, I have dick fever, so I can't really make it to school because I am just, wow, I need to get some of that dick. Oh, Christ. All right.

Speaking of which, I mean, he did attempt a relationship with a woman from his Bible study group as, you know, Bible study groups have long been a dependable dating pool for closeted men and women because it allows for appearances while giving a convenient excuse to avoid sex. My church, good news fellowship church, it's still around in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. They put together, they would marry large lesbians, butchier lesbians with really petite gay men and they thought that's what I swear to God. Oh, that's fucking, oh, that's horrible.

There was a dude, Tim G. It's love science. That's all it is. So there was this, there was a marriage with this guy, Tim G, and he married this female truck driver who was like Maude for Pee-Ree Herman and I have no idea what happened with them. Pure love, nothing but fucking rock and sex, passionate kisses, great trips in Disney World, so much merch bought in Disney World.

So much merch. Between the two of them. Evangelical Christians trying to figure out how to cure homosexuality is the single craziest thing that's ever happened. It's crazy. And I hope both of those people got the fuck out of that prison. I hope so. You know what, we decided to go, and we got to hear this not gay hat.

Put it on there, and as soon as you put it on, you're not gay anymore, so it's that easy. Well, you know, because of this, you know, Howard's relationship with his girlfriend, it never got past hand-holding. He would refuse to even kiss her on the cheek. He let her on for two years and then finally told her that he was quote-unquote schizo and he was never going to marry her or anyone else. Okay. At least he was strangely honest.

Strangely. So after Temple, Oonra ended up back at his mother's house where he would live as an unemployed loser playing with model trains and collecting stamps, letting his anger fester for two years. And I say loser because that's exactly what Howard Oonra was. He was. This was post-World War II America. This was the healthiest economy this country ever had, especially if you were a veteran. He could have gotten a job at any time.

My grandfather became the head of travel for Pepsi. Like, these are these things where at the time you left World War II and you came to America as a hero, this is when it actually would have benefited you and you weren't a pariah of society and you weren't destroyed, some of them were destroyed by shell shock. But you know, they learned to smile and the learner put pace in their hair and they learned to pump several loveless children into a wife that they wrote letters to for several years. Look at that, isn't that nice? I mean, so he played with model trains, played with stamps, he stewed, he was angry, he's

just Neil Young. But you've got to have a hit record career first and you can lose your life to model trains. But the war was the hit record. But also, you have to be such a dictator to be into model trains. It is like me with Civilization 5 where you just are like, I decided the trains go where if they stop. I decided the trains get to where they're going.

I also decided if I don't just blow up this whole fucking tape if I want to. Yes, your obsession with Civilization 5 is very Machiavellian. Machiavellian, yeah. Machiavellian. I gotta get it out. I know. You should try No Man's Sky. It's a space exploration game.

Oh, is that the one with all of this, that's all with all the planets where you go to different places and you find resources? Yeah, they updated it about a year ago. It's much better now. I love it. I play it all the time now. Because you're not enough killing. Oh no, there's tons of killing.

All right, this is no wizard in the bruiser. You just kill animals and plants. Oh, that's not killing. Robots. You kill robots too? That's fine. Okay. Well, I mean, talking about Howard Unra after World War II, we're definitely not mitigating

the PTSD that a lot of veterans go through. That's very real and does prevent people from living a quote unquote normal life. Absolutely. But this is back when it was called shell shock and it only happened to tough guys. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. But Howard Unra had PTSD, despite what his family said, Howard Unra was just an asshole and he lived his life accordingly.

During the two years leading up to the massacre, Howard Unra's life, it's like a nerd version of Taxi Driver. It's fucking bizarre. It really is. It is a brill cream version of just walking around New York City in taxes because he lived a fucking lone ass life. He dressed up in the same brown suit every day. He had a series of ties.

Some were his favorite, some were his not. He had these combat boots that he'd wear 24-7 and his thing was that he'd walk right upright, super straight back, shoulders back, like a soldier and the way they'd describe it is that he would march through the neighborhood, like march and shit, like waiting for somebody to disrespect him. Yeah. Right. He lived in a room, like his room, it was just filled with war trophies.

All this shit that he'd smuggled back from World War II. He had bayonets, like crossed on the walls. He had Nazi Lugers that he brought back. He had ashtrays that were made from Nazi shells. It's kind of crazy how often they brought boys brought back stuff from World War II. I love that whole thing that they were talking about in the Harold Schecter chapter, where they had to create a panel of people saying, okay, we know you love your Nazi landmines and your Nazi guns and you brought them back from World War II.

You kill those guys right, just like, sure, yeah, you can keep them. But bring them to us so we can make sure that they're inoperable. Yeah. And then after Howard Unra, it was a rush of 70,000 people that came out of nowhere to show, hey, all right, here are all these Nazi landmines I have in my fucking mouth. Right. They just brought back pistols, active landmines, active grenades. They just put them in their bag and brought them home.

Well, it's a different time. The TSA was a little bit more relaxed or non-existent, one could argue. And when Howard wasn't in his room playing with his trains or cataloging his stamps, he was in his mother's cramped, low-ceiling basement, target practicing. Now, Howard was already deadly with a gun by the time he got back from the war. But down in the basement, Howard became truly skilled. He would practice for hours using a Luger semi-automatic pistol he bought from a Philadelphia pawn shop for $37.50.

How was he practicing in his mom's basement? Was he shooting real bullets? Yeah. This is back in the day. In his mother's basement? Yeah. In the middle of a residential and commercial neighborhood. This is back in the day when people didn't complain.

Yeah, I guess. They did not care. But think about this. I know I also love the, because these are, you always find this fascinating, when people actually physicalize their weird mental states, where he had his trophy room, where his mom was forced to live with him. Like, she, I mean, you know, she was fucking supporting him. But she was in like, her area becomes smaller and smaller in this one bedroom apartment

as one half the apartment became covered in Nazi regalia. Right. But he would retreat to the basement, his private world, where he'd just shoot guns all night. Yeah. And you are, you are your mommy, you're Mrs. Kissell, right? Your mother above you going like, hey, mommy, I'm gonna go downstairs and I'm gonna do my practicing.

And you go like, okay, Benjamin, whatever you gotta do, Benjamin, go down there. And she's just throwing Bud Lightcans in a dark room. Right. They're not sticking. Why don't they stick to that? Oh, they're not darts. At some point though, don't you just become a Nazi? Well, no.

It seems like he had Nazi paraphernalia everywhere. He's practiced it in the basement. There were trophies. I know. It was about, it was about him seeing the fruits of his labor. Right. Like, where they were trophies of his kills. Yes.

There were trophies of murder. You know, trophies, yeah. I mean, it wasn't that he was into Nazi ideology. Right. He just liked to look at them and think about that Nazi that he killed. I actually, they, I agree with Kissell a little bit. I think that there is a time period. I think that when you do start collecting these things, yes, they start as trophies

of your, your subjects, right, to the people that you killed because you brought them back, right. And I think, especially with what then happened with Howard Unruh, is that you do begin to sort of look up to the, the fascist state of mind, which is my way or the highway, which is what Catherine Ramson talks about, which is the concept, which I really agree with, which is the concept of rigidity of personality, where it's like it is legitimately, the view are going to try to create these people, especially mass shooters, cannot handle anybody trying to challenge their worldview in any way, shape, or form.

Right. And that's why they come back in a hysterical way. Yeah. I mean, pretty much like how it was with Howard, I mean, he was, he had, he was completely unable to accept frustration in any way whatsoever. He had a very strict and specific set of rules that he thought the world should follow, or at least rules people should follow when they were interacting with him. And if anyone broke those rules or transgressed against Howard in any way whatsoever, how

Howard would make a mental note. And later on, that person would be added to a list. This is not, this is like Steve Buscemi and Billy Madison, man, this is not good. If you want to get more of your way done, like if you're really frustrated people, a good way is that if anybody tells you, you know, even if the DMV, right, you go like, they're like, sir, you're going to have to come back and we need another form. We need another like, you know, birth certificate. And you just go, hmm, what's your name?

I've got a little book out in the back of your pants and it's called, like, last name? Interesting. See you soon. It's like, you just write, you just write it down and then you cryptically walk out. Very scary. See, Howard didn't stop his diary keeping after he left the service. Instead of cataloging kills, Unra started keeping a tally of every instance in which he thought someone in his Camden, New Jersey neighborhood had wronged him.

People who made Howard, in his word, soar. If you do not want to be screamed at, get out of Camden, New Jersey and this man is in the single worst place ever to not have any kind of ability to deal with someone criticizing or just calling him a hard F word every now and again. You're going to have a hard time in the entire Tri-State Aries. The barber, Clark Hoover, had been doing some construction work in a vacant lot adjoining Howard's home which it caused Howard's precious basement to flood, so Hoover made the list. That's scribble noises, he's just staring looking at his wet bullet casings.

Then you had the shoemaker, John Pillarchick, who had a habit of using Howard's backyard as a garbage dump. He's on the list. You also had Dominique Latella, who owned a local restaurant and referred to Howard as a gun-toting, quote unquote, gangster. This is not my gun, this is my pet. I'll tell you what, you dirty Italian, I killed so many of you on the other side, oh, you flip-flop and spaghetti-lovin' Italians.

Whoa. You don't think I won't put a hole in your rigged-tony? I'm sorry. Go to sleep, go to sleep, my precious little pet, I name her Gertha, from Germany. Gertha the gun, but what's wrong with being called a gangster? He didn't like it because it was derogatory. Gangster was a derogatory term. This is back time too, it's like if you wanted to get, calling somebody a gangster or a pimp

in the 1950s was a way to get punched in the face. Okay. There was even a teenager named Carl Sorgh, who had sold Christmas trees in the vacant store under Howard's apartment, and Sorgh had run an extension cord into Howard's basement to light the trees. He'd stolen electricity. I will say these grievances are adorable suburban gripes. Yeah.

The problem is that you are George Costanza, until you're a Howard Unruh. I understand it up to a point, I understand the little frustrations building, you see each one. It's been like, oh, you're taking my lumens? You're taking my photons? There was nobody in Howard's neighborhood who pissed him off as much as his neighbors, the Coens. Maurice, the patriarch, owned and ran the local drug store, and he lived next door

to Howard. Uh, Maurice, it was him, it was his wife, it was his young son, and his mother. And in this case, it was definitely Unruh who was at fault. See, Unruh liked to listen to the radio on high volume all night long. Clang, clang, clang with the trolley, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. This is your neighbor, there, the pharmacy and Unruh's family house were attached by the wall. But Howard.

Marching in his own gun range, and he's upset that someone would be like, hey, excuse me sir, could you just keep it down? Just a little bit. It sounds like there's a military parade, like in your house. It does sound like that. Yeah, but well, Unruh justified it because for Christmas one year, the Coens got Charles Coen, the youngest son, they got him a bugle for Christmas, and, you know, but they let him play it, and Unruh hated it, so he thought he was fully justified in playing his music

as loud as he wanted whenever he wanted, but the Coens were the assholes here, obviously. I have no idea, suburban politics are endlessly amazing. Jersey has not changed, and I will say there is nothing worse than a child learning to play an instrument. Oh yes. That's the worst sound on the face of the planet. But the biggest sticking point between Unruh and Coens was the most suburban thing of all, their shared backyard.

See, the Coens had given permission to Unruh and his mother to use the back gate, but Howard, he kept leaving the fucking door open, which meant stray dogs, they're coming in, they're messing up the garbage, Coen's gotta clean it up, this is a fucking episode of Everybody Loves Rainies. But, eventually, I'd be kind of scared of Unruh, he's coming home every night, later and later, he's huge, he's over six feet tall, he's a scary looking dude, now that at one point he's just nerdy, but then he becomes scary, he's got tiny little beady eyes, fucking huge ass, eraser head like head, and he's just like, you know he's leaving

that fucking gate open on purpose, you know now it's become like every single time, this is war. Yeah, suburban war. Yeah, and the gate problem became such a controversy that Coen's mother actually had a guy come out and build a second gate, just for Howard to use. How much of a little bitch you have to be, that your own mother has to call up and get another gatemaid, and you know it's going like, hmm, like watch him building up, I think our gate is smaller than the Coen's gate.

Well, I mean really the people in the neighborhood weren't noticing that Howard Unruh was going downhill, I mean for all, they thought that this guy is harmless, he wouldn't hurt a fly, but Unruh's mother, she was living with him, she was in that house with him every day, and she noticed that he was going downhill, and that's why she got the gate put in. Right. And she's the little Dutch boy putting her fingers in the dyke, trying to keep the dam from bursting. Right, yeah I've seen that fucking video my friend.

And Howard's little notebook, next to every person's name on his little grudge list, Howard had written notations like RET, WTS, and DNDR, those stood for retaliate when time is suitable and do not delay retaliation. It is frightening to think about that, the fact that he has this little thing, the concept of retaliation, each one of these, which shows that, I mean he has an antisocial personality easily, where he does believe that all of these things are pointed attacks on his society, because he also believes that society did him wrong, right, that he is not a success as he should be.

He came back from the war, he did his fucking job as an American, he served the country, he came back, and no one came and just left prizes at his feet, where he didn't understand everybody else was super fucking industrious, and was like jumping into work. He just was a listless dude that was kind of expecting something else, and then all of a sudden you just start your little list, I mean I have a list, but mine just says stuff like, you know, DTS, which is a donut towards service, which I know that each time somebody does something good for me, I owe them one of the new Krispy Kreme Reese's Peanut Butter donuts, which actually look fantastic.

Interesting, I don't like the corporate mixing there, I really don't like it, I don't like the Reese's in there, they got Reese's in the peanut butter cups there, I don't need it, I don't need it, I'll have a Reese's if I want a Reese's, thank you. But ironically enough, I think you would have done great in Nazi Germany as a Nazi. I don't think so though, because the Nazis were for people who like rules, Howard Unruh was all about his rules, and every once in a while the Nazi's rules are not gonna vibe with his rules, and because all that matters is him. But if he went on a shooting spree in Nazi Germany, technically he's a hero.

Technically. Yeah, it's very weird. Weird, in a way. Right? He's an interesting character. But it wasn't just simple everyday neighborhood conflicts that bothered Howard. He also believed that everyone in the neighborhood knew he was gay and were calling them names, and he believed that the neighborhood saw him as a parasitic mama's boy.

And in reality, Mr. Cohen did derisively tell customers that Howard allowed his mothers to support him. And the local tailor, Thomas Sagrino, was spreading rumors that he saw Howard getting blown by a dude in a back alley. You have no idea what I was doing in that alley, it was my best friend Roger. He had a bee stuck in his pants, and I was trying to catch that bee with my bee-proof mouth. I'm a straight shooting man.

I'm a straight shooting man, and I'm as straight as the letter Q. I love the ladies. Seems like you had a hard time saying that, but... I love a dead lady. I love an alive man. That rumor probably wasn't true, because Howard actually went to great lengths to hide his sexuality. Multiple times, every single week, Howard would drive to Philadelphia for random hookups in various spots around town.

He put a lot of work into it. Living this lifestyle was very difficult in the 1940s. And every single time that Howard had a sexual encounter, he logged the sexual encounter right alongside his grudges. And when those sexual logs were discovered, the newspapers at the time described them as, quote, social contacts with other men. They were, yeah. They couldn't say that they were doing an envelope party.

They were trying to see how many tubes can fit in a sock. They weren't saying all those specific games, right? He was doing a very, you know, and it's very difficult for them to say, what do you talk, what do you think about the lists? Like it does, at some point, I think what it does is dehumanize the entire experience. I think that when he starts making these lists, it's the same scorecard as the Germans. It's actually the same shit where he is still viewing them as Marx, like just tallies. Yeah.

And not anything like a human connection. Yeah, it's antisocial, it's sociopathic, it's psychopathic. I mean, it's seeing other people as ways to facilitate his own pleasures. You know, that's just the little tally marks with every dude, like they're just there to serve Howard Unra's sexual pleasures. And those people that he's making the list for, the grudge list, like they're there to serve Howard's anger. He's one of those tall dudes too, so he probably has a fucking, he's probably got a big one.

You have a very strange idea of tall men. Well, Howard, he hooked up so much, he actually kept a room in a Philadelphia lodging house for 30 bucks a month, just for fucking dudes, and he even, and he contracted the clap on one occasion. He had fun. If you are like that, like that's a, that's money put into the lifestyle, where it's almost been like, it's really a shame. But like in Jeffrey Dahmer's case, you can't say that the late homophobia of the time was

really to blame. It's also a part of it is the, the, it's, it's just strange. It helped him sink one part of his compartmentalized personality into an area that was totally covered with shadows, that nobody could have any sort of entrance to because just being him was illegal. So on some level, it kind of helps other things sink into the dark parts of your personality as well. Very sad he had to be underground like that.

But then again, there were a lot of gay fighters, freedom fighters who were very active and open, difficult times, but he could have also just gone and been a, been a fighter for gay rights. He could have just gone, what, 30 minutes to New York City? Sure. I think they had some gay people in New York City judging by the theater. I mean, I understand it was tough, you know, and it's, you know, the, the persecution, like he did have a persecution complex going on, but the persecution against gay people at

the time was extremely real. It was very, it was very, very real. But he did not, he used that as a way to fuel his anger. He used that as a way to justify his own terrible and shitty behavior. And it was after one of these hookups had failed that Howard Unra finally snapped. On September 5th, 1949, Unra had a date waiting at a cruising spot on Market Street in Philadelphia called the Family Theater. But Howard got held up by traffic going into Philly.

So by the time he showed up, his date had already given up and left. So Howard sat through three showings of the double feature, just sitting there seething. That night, the theater was playing, I Cheated the Law, which is pretty much looks like a forgettable courtroom drama, and The Lady Gambles, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Guess what it's about, Kissel? Guess what it's about? Guess what it's about. Does, um, ah, she gamble?

It's about a lady who gambles. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Honestly, I love it. I'll blow on the dice. I'll be, I'll be the, I'll be the lucky charm for a lady who gambles. You need, you need a little look when you're playing your, or what? Here you go, dull face.

Go buy yourself a Bud Light Lime. It's just like, puts $50 chip in your waistband. I mean, the movies don't really have anything to do with it. I mean, he just sat there just staring off into the middle distance. And he sat there through three showings. Yeah. I mean, he sat there from probably 9 p.m. and then finally at 2 20 a.m. after the whole thing was over and done with, he left.

He just sat there with these people. No. He just would have been kicked. He just, it just would have kicked the can down the road a few more days. Okay. One magical blowy sometimes can turn your fucking life around. It can. It can.

I mean, it's just, it's just like I was saying earlier. Like it's just using people for whatever pleasures that he wants. Yes. It's just a matter of time. Yeah. It's just a matter of time. So the double feature was over at about 2 20 a.m. how he got in his car and drove back to Camden.

And when he arrived, he found that the fence that his mother had commissioned for his use and his use only was gone. Man, I'm getting mad for it. Honestly though, dude, that is a bold move. Was that Cohen that did it? No, it was just a bunch of kids. This is anyone who has ever been annoyed by children can understand the rage that he must have felt.

Now granted, of course, obviously he took it far, way too far, but I would be, I would be kicking it. I would be kicking up dust. Kicking a tire or two. I would be kicking a tire. I mean, we were horrible kids. My favorite stunt we ever did, I think I've told the one where we just moved everyone's mailbox one house down.

That's fun. That was the greatest stunt of all time, but I know, but it must have really angered some people. There was one Howard Unra in that fucking on that street and that was the final straw. This is what you really need to think about. What kind of pranks you're pulling and what kind of fun things you're having with your weird little neighbors. I'm not blaming the victims here, but remember, if he looks like, if he's got a spider web

of veins that are slowly growing from around his eyes to the middle of his forehead and he seems to be getting more and more agitated, maybe lay off. Maybe bring him some ice cream. I don't know. Do something fun for him. He'll just be upset. He'll be like, butter rum. Butter rum.

What do you think I am? Some kind of queer? No, it's just butter. I love butter rum ice cream. I know what you're saying. I know what message you're sending. I'm straight. Even though it did turn out to be just a bunch of kids, but Howard decided that it had to

have been the Cohen's. And this, like Henry said, this was the last straw. Unra went inside, laid in bed, just stared up at the ceiling, fantasizing about how everyone on his list was finally going to pay. He just had to decide how he was going to do it. One option Howard had on the table was mass decapitation. Months before, Howard had ordered a machete from LL Bean. LL Bean.

Did it change the net company? Because now you just get duffel bags. You get some duck boots from them. They're kind of nice. But I really want them to bring the machete back. And Howard just spent nights just sharpening the blade until it was razor sharp. And he just sat there and fantasized about cutting off the heads of each and every member of specifically the Cohen family.

How honey, are you done sharpening your machete? Do you want to have some split beef? I made split beef, but the family? Hold on a second mom, I'm almost done. This machete can almost split a fly in half. Oh Howard, I knew you worked well and you worked good and you're a good boy. Very scary. Very scary.

But eventually Howard decided that the machete just wasn't efficient and instead decided that the best way to get everyone was to use his semi-automatic Luger pistol made deadlier by years of target practice. So Howard loaded two clips and dozed off for a couple of hours until the shops were once again opened the next morning because Howard knew that that would maximize the body count. Fly from your grave. Fly from your grave. As far as mass shootings in America go, Howard Oonra was not the first.

Not even a year before Oonra's walk of death, a man named Melvin Collins had shot and killed eight people from the second story window of a boarding house. But there are two reasons why nobody knows the name Melvin Collins. The first was that Melvin's murders got no attention even at the time because Melvin and his victims were all black and the news media just didn't give a fuck. I mean even today when you google the name Melvin Collins, the mass murderer is actually the fifth result and even then it's just a short entry on Murderpedia reposting a 300 word piece that barely qualifies as an article from the November 1948 issue of Time Magazine.

But the second reason why Melvin isn't known is because besides just race, Melvin's background was totally different from Howard's. See Melvin had a demonstrably violent criminal record which included two stretches in prison for gun related crimes and an attempted murder charge after Melvin tried to stab his own brother to death. I will say these guys are definitely doing a good job of reforming the nerdy names Howard and Melvin. Yeah man.

Extremely scary, extremely scary names. I'm deeply scared of a Melvin because if you are bored, because the deck is stacked against you in this life, especially in 2019 and if you are a Melvin. Yeah. Well in other words while it was shocking and tragic, Melvin Collins could be written off as a simple criminal, whether that's fair or not. But Howard Unra had no record of violence. He served with distinction in the war and he was known in the neighborhood as prickly

but harmless. You couldn't ignore. I'm deeply scared of a Melvin. I guess so. Because if you are bored, because the deck is stacked against you in this life, especially in 2019 and if you are a Melvin. Yeah. So in other words while it was shocking and tragic, Melvin Collins could be written off

as a simple criminal, whether that's fair or not. But Howard Unra had no record of violence. He served with distinction in the war and he was known in the neighborhood as prickly but harmless. You couldn't ignore the story of Howard Unra because Howard Unra was something totally new. He was the first example of the so-called lone wolf who suddenly snapped and murdered a bunch of people for no reason whatsoever.

No reason? No reason? It doesn't seem like there's that much of a reason, sir. You seen my gate? Yeah, but it's just a gate, Howard. I'm not gay. I did not say you were gay. It's just a gate, I said.

I'm not gay and I'll show you how not gay I am. I'm gonna blow you so hard that your own father's gonna come in his pants. Well today we call what Howard Unra did, we call it mass murder. But back then, 1949, some people actually tried to coin the term super murder by attaching it to horror movies, fast cars, atom bombs, and of all things, fucking Superman. There is a way to extrapolate this entire theory which is they sort of hint at it because they were saying that the atomic bombs and all this of the atomic age was gonna make new supervillains and that sort of like the movie Unbreakable, that basically people would

show up and create mass violence in order to see if Superman will appear to stop them. No! Just like Mr. Glass. Geez! Well, it's also tied into, you know, with the whole pop culture thing, blaming pop culture. It always was like... Oh, it's amazing. They've been doing it since, I think it was 1953, Frederick Wartham, The Seduction of

the Innocent. Absolutely. He went up in front of fucking Congress to talk about how tales from the crypt was turning the nation's youth into a bunch of juvenile delinquents that were going to murder us all in our sleep. They've been trying to blame pop culture for violence since the fucking fifties and it's fucking dumb. But because Unra was no more inspired to kill by the mummy's curse than Eric Harris and

Dylan Klebold were inspired by Doom and Marilyn Manson. Right, absolutely. And they do that to... That was the most infuriating thing about the coverage of El Paso and Dayton. The video game conversation drove me insane. I can't believe it's still there. He's a terrorist and Unra is the thing that we're saying right here, Unra is not a terrorist. Which is also the difference too.

This is the type of example of a crime that we're showing that's also uniquely American. Our now, our version of domestic terrorism is actually plentiful throughout the entire world that we are just experiencing it all the time now. Unra though was a little firecracker that just fucking turned out to be an atomic bomb in the middle of New Jersey. I think we could probably retrofit the term domestic terrorist and place it over Unra though. I don't think we could.

Because that's the thing. He had no point. He had no point whatsoever. He wasn't trying to make a point. He had no political ideology behind him. It was all just the fence. Yes. Yeah.

He just... But it wasn't just the fence, Kessel. It was about what the fence represented. It was that he was a veteran that was disrespected and he was straight. No matter how much sex he had in the backs of Plymouths or in movie theaters. Yeah. I mean the guy in El Paso, he is a terrorist. He is a domestic terrorist because he is using violence to try to scare people into believing

his political ideology. Unra was just trying to make the people who broke his precious little rules pay. That's all he wanted to do. He wasn't trying to change anyone's mind. He had no political ideology behind what he was doing. He was just an asshole. And make people pay is exactly what he did on September 6th, 1949. That morning, Unra woke up at 8 a.m. and walked down to a breakfast of fried eggs and milk

that his mother had prepared. I love a good old fashioned number two, which is any food that makes me immediately dooth liquid diarrhea. Yeah, that's exactly what it sounds like. After breakfast, Unra went down to the basement and fetched a wrench that he'd cut near the stairs just in case the sorg kid ever came back. Unra then walked back to the kitchen and brandished the wrench towards his mother because his original plan was to kill his mother first to save her the shame of having a son who

was capable of doing what Howard was about to do. But Howard found he couldn't do it. Instead, he just hung the wrench over his mother's head as she asked him, what do you want to do that for, Howard, over and over and over again? Can you imagine your huge son coming in the room? He just lifted the wrench over his head and stared at her. We were like, what do you want to do that for, Howard? What do you want to do that for?

And he's just trembling and staring and trembling and staring. And then he's like, I guess I'm just going to leave. I'm just going to go exit stage, right? And she just like fucking scurried out of the house. And she's staring with that fucking wrench extended in his hands. Poor woman. Poor woman. She ran to a neighbor's house like she had no idea what the fuck to do.

Yeah. And after his mother left, Howard collected his weapons. Taking his Luger, two clips, 16 shells extra, a six inch knife and a tear gas pen, Howard walked out the backyard of his apartment dressed in a brown suit, white shirt and a striped bow tie. The first person Howard came upon was a bread delivery man that Howard had never seen nor met. But regardless, Howard raised his gun and fired.

Luckily for the driver though, Howard missed that first shot. Since the driver wasn't on the list, Howard deemed him unimportant and moved to a small grouping of shops where the real objects of his rage all lived and worked. It was literally all within one block. All of this happens within one section. The first victim was John Pillarchick, the shoemaker. Howard opened the door to Pillarchick's store, raised his pistol and shot Pillarchick in the stomach without a word of explanation before killing the shoemaker with a shot to the head.

After the shoe store, Ooner walked to Clark Hoover's barbershop. There, Clark was cutting the hair of a six year old boy who was attending his first day of the first grade the very next day. Just for the first time that day, Ooner spoke, telling Clark that he had something for him. When Clark saw the gun, he tried shielding the boy, but he wasn't fast enough. Ooner's first shot in the barbershop hit the boy directly in the head, killing him instantly. Ooner then opened fire on the barber, shooting him in the chest and the head. With the barber and the shoemaker taken care of, Ooner started making his way towards his

ultimate target, the Cohen's Drug Store. But before he could enter, an insurance agent named James Hutton blocked his path. Who he had actually had, he was his client, he just bought an insurance claim from him. Yeah, and Hutton had no idea what was going on, he just said, hello. Howard responded with a curt, excuse me, but at that moment Hutton saw the gun in Howard's hand and he froze. And when Hutton froze, Ooner lost his patience because someone had broken a rule. So he raised the gun and shot Hutton twice, again in the torso and the head, killing him

as well. And Maurice Cohen, watching from behind the counter, saw the whole damn thing unfold in the doorway of his store. So Cohen ran up the stairs to warn his family on the second floor, but Howard calmly followed behind, dropping an empty clip and reloading another. By the time Howard got to the top of the stairs, Rose Cohen was hiding in one closet while their son hid in another. Maurice Cohen had opened a window and was trying to hide on the roof, but in trying

to save his family, Maurice had chosen the most obvious hiding spot. Ooner could clearly see him through the window, so Ooner aimed and shot Cohen in the back. And by the time Cohen hit the pavement, he was dead. Ooner then heard Rose Cohen from the closet, so he fired three shots through the door, then opened it and shot Rose once more in the head. Then hearing someone in the next room, Howard walked in to find Cohen's mother, Minnie, trying to call the police. Before she could get through, though, Ooner shot her in the face, killing her as well.

Only the Cohen's son, Charles, would survive, because after the murder of Minnie, Ooner lost interest in the Cohen home and walked back outside to make his way to Thomas Zagrino, the tailor. While Howard was crossing the street, a TV repairman driving by named Alvenday slowed down when he noticed James Hutton's body on the sidewalk. Taking the opportunity, Ooner calmly shot Alvenday in the head, killing him as well. It was at this point that the neighborhood finally noticed that something truly terrible was happening.

At that point, they just thought it was a car backfiring, maybe some firecracker, something like that. So Frank Engel and his bartender poked their heads out of their saloon, which attracted a wild hell of bullets from Ooner, but Ooner missed every single shot. But after Engel and his bartender took refuge back inside, Ooner looked up to the second story window of the apartment next to the bar and saw a two-year-old boy looking out, attracted by the noise. And again, with no emotion, Ooner fired and killed the toddler.

And when Ooner finally got to the tailor shop, Thomas Zagrino wasn't there. Instead, it was his new wife, Helga, 28 years old. Ooner ended her life with two more shots, as people outside tried taking cover. And a lot of those took refuge in Earl Horner's grocery store. And after killing the tailor's wife, Ooner decided that Earl Horner was next, even though Horner had never made Ooner's list. Earl Horner was always very nice to Ooner, but then he had a new grocer clerk that actually was super rude to Ooner one time, so the clerk was on the list, but not the owner of the

grocery store. Well, luckily, Horner thought to lock up the shop, and three shots from Ooner's luger weren't enough to bust through the door. And when Ooner didn't immediately make it through, his natural frustration just kept him moving. Ooner turned his attention back to the street where a car was stopped at a red light. Inside was Helen Wilson, her mother Emma, and her nine-year-old son John. Howard killed all three of them with one shot each.

Then bereft of businesses and pedestrians to terrorize, Ooner wandered into the home of Madeleine Harry, who is sitting in her kitchen with her two teenage sons, Armand and Leroy. Now overcome by adrenaline, Ooner fired three shots, but only hit Madeleine in the arm. And Armand tried rushing Howard, but instinct kicked in, and Howard took the boy down with a quick knock to the head with his pistol. Then as if to punish the boy for his insolence, Howard shot him once in each arm. Howard then aimed the gun directly at Armand's chest and pulled the trigger, but by some

stroke of fate, the hammer fell on an empty chamber. This is how scary is this shit? How scary is this shit? You're sitting at a dinner with your family, and the door just opens, and nerd Frankenstein standing there with the loaded gun and he is just, because also at this point, he's now unhinged. And they were before, like now he's unhinged, which is fucked up to say. Before he was moving like fucking T-1000, just like emotionally walking and let's just

do an ending, like he didn't stop, because it was a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then all of a sudden he just walks in your house. Very scary. Yeah, but at that point, Howard Ooner was out of bullets. He'd gone through both of his clips and he'd gone through all the fucking ammunition that he brought with him. So he went back outside, but at that moment, he felt a sharp, stinging pain in his buttocks. It was, he also, the way he said it too, was just like for his gum, something just jumped

up and bit me. He had got a shot right in the butt. Turned out, Frank Engel, the saloon keeper, had grabbed his 38 special and had fired on Ooner from his second story window, but that was the only shot that Engel fired. He later said he could have ended it all right there, but he didn't. He said he just couldn't pull the trigger anymore and he had no idea why. Most likely, it's because Engel, like the vast majority of people, he wasn't a killer. Right.

No. Doesn't matter who the fuck it is in front of you, most people just aren't killers. I mean, and to his credit, usually if you shoot someone in the butt, that person stops. When he got shot in the butt, he just turned around and looked at him. And the guy, it's difficult, but I completely agree with it. I think that's what people don't understand. I think the concept of good guy with a gun beating a bad guy with a gun is like, I don't think you understand most good people.

It's very difficult for them to shoot somebody. Even if they have a gunner also in putting other people's lives in danger, taking somebody's life changes everything you know about yourself. If you have human empathy, it's difficult. You have to get over it to serve in the armed services. That's why it's such a difficult job. I mean, it's hard for most people to just punch someone in the face. Much less point a gun at them and end their life right there.

It doesn't matter who the fuck it is, it doesn't matter how big of an asshole they are or what they've done. Most people just don't have it in them. And that's a good thing. Absolutely. Thank God. It's a great thing. I mean, it's an evolutionary thing, but it's a good thing.

We just have that. We have that failsafe. Most people do. So wounded and out of bullets, just 13 minutes after the walk of death began. This whole thing took 13 minutes. Howard Oonra went home before the cops had even showed up. And admittedly, 13 minutes does seem like a long time for the cops to arrive in this type of situation.

But you got to remember, this was 1949. It isn't like it is today where we've got five or six mass shootings every single week. This type of thing just didn't happen. So there was no police protocol for this situation in any way. The way they talk about it was that the DA got this message to be like, you know that there's a maniac on the fucking loose? And then when that thing happened, it's kind of subtle because it happened so fucking fast. It happened so fast that no one really even got a chance to even think about what was

happening. Everybody was fight or flight. And so finally, someone called the cops. But it was like, by the time it got to the DA, he was already arrested. Yeah. I mean, to compare it to today, just to compare it to say Dayton, this Howard Oonra, that was 13 minutes, 13 dead, and about 15 minutes until the cops show up, Dayton, one minute, nine dead, and about one minute for the cops to show up.

Because he's a pussy with an assault rifle. This dude was a fucking Oonra. Actually, I mean, unfortunately, he did this bullet by bullet. He was trained by the US Army to do what he did. Highly trained. And he trained himself to do this as well. So by the time Howard had gotten back to his home and barricaded himself in his room, damn near every cop in Camden had surrounded his house.

I read two different accounts of what he did. One I heard that he definitely barricaded, but then another one I heard, which actually also sounds eerily real, is that he just crawled in a bed, that he went in, that he went into his room and he pulled the covers up to his chin and just laid there and tried to go to sleep. And of course, Henry, when you said that Oonra also trained for this, he trained by playing video games, right? He had his new PS4, he was playing D2.

Like that's what did it. I mean, obviously, that's what caused all of this in 1949. VirtuaCop. Yeah. Old games. Of course. So, I mean, no matter what Howard did when he came home, you know, the cops, 50 cops showed up, you know, and they gave him a chance to surrender, but Howard decided to be cute

and fire a couple of shots out the window. And in response, 50 officers armed with shotguns, pistols, and submachine guns opened fire. And you can still go, like this, the building where Howard Oonra lived, it still stands to this day. And you can still go and see bullet holes in the stucco. Now it's the front, the bottom business is Gomez's shoes. Oh. Yeah.

But the apartment where Howard Oonra lived, still vacant to this day. No one after Oonra left, no one ever moved in ever again. I read a story about the guys that run Gomez's shoes, and they asked, like, why no one lives up there, and the boy, the son of the owner, I remember him, for some reason I remember the sentence, he just went, fantasmas, which means ghosts. And it's the reason why they don't live up there, it's because it's fucking haunted to shit. Oh my gosh.

Oh, Jesus Christ. But after the bullets, you know, none of those bullets actually hit Howard Oonra. And after the shots died down, Howard's telephone rang. See, word had gotten around pretty damn fast that the name of the killer was Howard Oonra. So the assistant editor at the Camden Evening Courier, Phillip Buxton, just looked up Howard's name in the phone book and gave him a call. Said, fuck it, why not? Let's see if he answers.

Yeah, let's do a test. Yeah, why not? I suppose so. And here's how that call went, according to Buxton. Hello. Is this Howard? Yes, this is Howard. What's the last name of the party you want?

Oonra. Who are you and what do you want? I'm a friend, and I want to know what they're doing to you. Well, they haven't done anything to me yet, but I'm doing plenty to them. How many have you killed? I don't know yet. I haven't counted them, but it looks like a pretty good score. Why are you killing people?

I don't know. I can't answer that yet. I'm too busy. I'll have to talk to you later. A couple of friends are coming to get me. With that, Howard Oonra hung up the phone. Geez, all right, so he's very casual, very cold. Yeah, I'm too busy.

Well, I mean, I'm too busy. He was very busy. He was. When you're getting shot at by 50 police, I would chalk that up to being, like, preoccupied with something to do. And moments later, an officer standing on the roof where Mr. Cohen had been shot tossed a tear gas canister through the window, but it didn't go off. The second one, though, did.

And unlike most of the killers that came after him, Howard Oonra decided to give himself up rather than commit suicide by gun or by cop, and he came out with his hands raised above his head. Just cut to Oonra, just cut to Oonra being like, thank you for the tear gas. It's the first time I've ever cried. I actually, I wonder why he didn't commit suicide. This is the most common way these crimes end is suicide. It's very, he didn't have a plan.

He obviously had no clue that life would continue going after he enacted his revenge. And as one of the officers led Howard to a squad car, he asked Howard if he was a psycho. And somehow, Howard took this as a huge affront and replied, oh, I can't, no. He replied, quote, I'm not a psycho. I've got a good mind. You answered that like you're a psycho, Mr. Oonra, do you? I'm not gay, that's for certain. Oh, I did not even say you were gay.

I said, I'll suck your dick, though, to show you how gay I'm not, how much I'll gag on it. I'll gag on it and gag on it until you calm in my throat, I'm not gay. Are you, are you gay? Oh, I'm, I'm getting my notebook. So after his arrest, Howard was immediately taken to a Camden detective's office and interrogated and Howard confessed to everything, retold the whole story in a calm, collected, unemotional tone.

And they could not handle that. They couldn't. They could not handle it. And the way he rattled it out, it was 66 pages of talking, where he just monologues every single action and every single step he took, he talked about every single time he reloaded, he talked about aiming, he talked about all the shit, and they just stared at him because they've never dealt with anybody that's just like the way BTK did in his trial, the way he just bit, bit, bit, bit, bit through each one of his crimes, very categorically.

And you know, some of the cops are trying to rationalize this by being like, where's the marijuana cigarette? I know that you must have been hung on marijuana cigarettes. Where are they? You've been hanging out with jazz cats and jazz dogs. Must be, must be. Well it was only after Howard was done with his story that someone noticed that Howard had been bleeding from his buttocks wound the entire time.

You got, remember, he got shot in the ass and he hadn't shown the least bit of discomfort or care. And it was around this time that people started calling Howard crazy. One opinion joined another and within 24 hours of his arrest, Howard Oonra was transferred to the Vroom Building for the Criminally Insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. The day that Howard Oonra was arrested, that was the only day he ever spent in a jail cell. Wow. After being examined by a team of psychiatrists for weeks, Oonra was diagnosed with, quote,

dementia precox mixed type with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring. And that is also called, ah, he's a white guy, how do we, I mean prison for a white guy. He's kind of a jerk but if he comes in here a second time, we'll let him go. In other words, they diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic because they'd already decided he was crazy and they needed to make it sound good. Oonra had no, not a single symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. He had no commanding thoughts, no commanding voices or anything like that.

He did it because he fucking wanted to. Yeah, he was fucking asshole. Yeah. He was declared too mentally ill to stand trial. Now, it could be said that Oonra's statements during those examinations were colored by the psychiatrist's use of sodium pentothal, aka truth serum. This drug was used in conjunction with a psychiatric technique known as narcosynthesis, which was originally used to treat PTSD, but was used on Oonra to, quote, unquote, recover memories.

Because they were trying to see why he'd done this, like there must be something in his past, something must have happened to him, that one little seed that made him do all this shit. He just kept on repeating the fence, the fence, the fence has been stolen. This is a gate issue? It was during one of these sessions that Oonra told a doctor that he'd been to bed with his mother, that he'd fondled his mother's breasts, and that, quote, the privates touched. Hey man, when you're sleeping with mommy every day, all right, and she, and you, I

don't know, I don't know, man, I don't know if he fondled her breasts. I don't know if he, sure, I don't think he did though. He probably did. He probably had a dream that he fondled his mother's breasts. I also think he was just that in the closet where he's like, nah, I can't tell him I'm gay. I fuck my mom. I fuck my mother, though.

I tell you what, I certainly don't suck dick, but if you show a picture of my mother's asshole, the first thing I'm gonna do is come my pants, am I ruining today? Am I making everybody sad, because everybody's frowning? Oh my God. Today Oonra would have without a doubt been found sane, and under current New Jersey law, Oonra would have spent the rest of his life in prison, but back then, all of this was so bizarre, so out of the ordinary, that it was decided that Oonra had to be mentally ill, partly because people couldn't understand it, and partly because, I mean, really just

like today, the thought of a sane person doing something like this, scared the fuck out of people. Yes. So, Howard's father was ordered to pay $15 a month for expenses, and Oonra wild away the next 60 years at Trenton Psychiatric, where he busied himself with stamp collecting and mopping the floors with a steady mutter. If only, I can't wait to live my life, just sweeping and muttering. Yeah.

One day. That's my retirement plan. So he only, he basically did everything he would have done if he was not in a psychiatric ward? Yeah. Yeah. And his dad was paying his rent. Cool.

Wow. And eventually, Oonra was transferred to the geriatric unit of the hospital, the Raycroft Center, and it was there that Howard Oonra died on October 19th, 2009, at the age of 88. Howard Oonra died 10 years ago. Oh my God, that's crazy. And he looks crazy too, as he got older, he got fucking silver lurch. All right.

Oh, the silver lurch, toss up, stupid question, but we run a show that's about the mirror. Ed Gean or Howard, who liked the psychiatric ward better? Ed Gean. Ed loved it. Ed Gean, Ed Gean really was at home in the psychiatric ward. Oonra was trying to get out for many, many years, so he didn't like the structure of it. No, it's not even about the structure is that at some point, he became so convinced

still that what he did was not a crime, and not what he did, that he kind of was past it. And it seemed to be his prevailing attitude was, I don't understand why everybody's still like wrapped up in this shit, just like, let me go, let's get past this one day is yesterday, today is the present, which is why it's a gift, like he was like trying to spin it that way. He was literally just like, so guys, I'm over it. Have we thought about you being over it?

Have we thought about you getting over it? Jesus, but the other thing was is that someone reminded Howard Oonra that like, hey, the moment you get declared sane, you're going on trial for murdering all these people. Right. And he went right back to immediately like, oh, really? Sweepin' them up. Sweepin' them up. Wow.

Now at the time, Howard Oonra's kill count of 13 was above and beyond the largest mass murder committed with a firearm by a single person in United States history. Now though, Camden Massacre barely makes the top 20. Las Vegas, Pulse, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs, Luby, San Cedillo, El Paso, Parkland, the University of Texas, San Bernardino, the Everman Post Office, Fort Hood, Binghamton, and Columbine all surpassed Howard Oonra. And as a small coda of horror and cruelty in the universe, Charles Cohen, Maurice Cohen's son, eventually had a granddaughter named Carly Nevelle, and Carly Nevelle had to live

through the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 70 years after her grandfather survived Camden. It's so sad. I'm just gonna fucking chill up my spine. And so we kind of hoped, was that looking back at one of the first examples of something like this, that maybe that there's something in the center of this, which can help us learn in the future, and the answer is, I don't know. And I'll join that chorus of, I don't know, and I hope we have a listener that's smarter

than us. Somebody tell us how to fix this. That is the story of Howard Oonra. I mean, honestly, this is just about, you gotta watch out for each other. That's the best thing you can do. You know what, it's true, because we were talking about the shithead from El Paso, Natalie and I, and a part of it, it's about how do you, how do you reach out to these little pieces of shit?

And how do you make sure that they have some sort of clear channel of communication? When that guy's rapelist was found early on in his life, where they had an opportunity to essentially like, they should have threw him in a mental hospital fucking immediate, like there are no beds anymore for people like this. They have no way to figure out how to challenge these really, really intense problems that some of our youth have, because like these dudes are just lost on the internet. They're just lost. It's very difficult.

And obviously now we talk about this on Abel against Toppat. Some solutions, red flag laws, for example, this would be a prime candidate for his neighbors to just be like, Howard shoots in the basement at night. He doesn't seem stable. He's extremely irrational. Maybe we should just go see if he has a lot of loaded guns and maybe he doesn't need those. Well the Cohen's actually, the night before, this is a horrible thing, but the night before the massacre, like it was, the thought of someone doing like something like this was

so out of their purview, so out of their context, they joked the night before. Like they joked the night before like, that dude's probably going to kill us someday. They're like, ah, it's dumb. What haven't we seen so far? We haven't seen something that will most likely occur, which is going to be a drone mass shooting. That will happen. It'll be done by a dude in his basement, and we won't even know where it is for a long time.

And they're going to, I mean, there's, ugh, it is. No, now we're just at this crux where we are now so paralyzed with the fear of the scenario that nobody is trying to figure out. There's nobody who's got the balls to really stand up and like do a clampdown. I do appreciate our sense of freedom in America, and I know why they don't want to, like, I vaguely understand the concept of not wanting these gun laws. I don't know. I mean, I am obviously out of my depth politically trying to discuss these fucking issues.

But there's, it's got to be something done. And a part of it is that the, how do you divide the line between nanny state and like, sometimes the government can really help you by fucking scooping you up and putting you in a room for a little bit, and they can like, honestly, like maybe you need to be arrested for a little bit so that someone can come and listen to your thoughts and then find out a way that prisoners can actually be rehabilitated. These people are like, it's searching for solutions instead of searching for problems. I imagine it would also really be helpful if they can't get their hands on assault rifles.

That would be helpful. Especially these little fucking torps with no fucking training. They don't even have training. They're learning how to use these guns from the fucking internet. Yeah. And of course, and of course, those video games, but no, it's the video games. It really is about community activism, community boards, know your community because community outreach.

It is. Cause it's just, I think as we've talked about before, in my personal opinion, in my lifetime, I don't think we're going to see much gun movement. Obviously right now we have less gun laws than ever. Semi assault rifle ban was allowed to expire after Columbine. I think we had a chance in this country. We did. And then once Gore lost, I think, and pork and parkland.

Oh yeah. I mean, after fucking, uh, one Sandy Hook happened and we allowed all of these kids to get murdered and then we didn't make any sort of change towards, I mean, this is obviously, we're heading to very heavy workers here. Yes. Um, uh, and I am personally out of my depth when it comes to talking about gun laws, but you know, maybe something can be done. Yeah.

Well, anyway, that, that's a conversation that we would continue to have abling and stop at side stories. We address it, but this was just absolutely fascinating to hear a story that is so timeless in American history. It's very, it's a tale as old as American history and, uh, that was really informative. Yeah. The only difference between now and then is that now that story would happen in an Amazon warehouse because there's no longer a shoemaker, a barber and a, uh, Taylor.

And if they're really, if they're really good at it, they can get on the cover of the Rolling Stone. So all right, everyone, that is Howard Unra, the first mass shooter, uh, in American history. I suppose the second after Melvin, but the first is widely known. The first one. The first lone wolf. Um, all right. Well now it's time to tell you where we're going to be this weekend because it's on stage

completely vulnerable, just standing up there with no body armor on and check us out. Yeah. We're already in Midwest right now and loving it, loving our people, loving it, loving it, loving it, loving it. We love our people. We're about to see our other people. You got to buy them tickets to Atlantic City. You got to buy them tickets to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

And you got to buy them tickets to Port Chester, which I've heard again is the most beautiful city in the Northeast. Really? Yep. August 16th, Atlantic City, August 17th, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, August 18th, Port Chester, New York. Just come on out. Yeah.

It's, it's, it's hit or refer to it on side stories. That is our Gallagher 2 tour, AC, Port Chester, and Bethlehem. I can't wait, but seriously, come on out. We cannot wait to see you in those areas. And then of course you're doing Dublin, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Birmingham, London, London, Stockholm, Emberlin, and September, yeah, 4th and 18th. Cannot wait. Go to last podcast on the left.com.

There are links to every single ticket that you want to buy. Yes. Absolutely. And August 11th, I'm doing a premiere at, in Milwaukee. It's a smaller theater there by the Pap's Theater of Hail Yourself America. So if you haven't got tickets, get tickets to that. Make it a full last podcast weekend and we'll go have some bursts afterwards and eat some meats and cheeses and have a good Milwaukee time.

Yeah, man. Fuel that gout, Kissel. This is the time. This is the golden age of gout. Henry, you didn't gout. Get out. Get out. All right, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail again. Magusta lesions. Hail me. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them.

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