Howard Barton Unruh dies; vet killed 13 people in 1949 rampage
Howard Barton Unruh, who killed 13 people as he walked the streets of Camden, N.J., in a psychotic 1949 shooting rampage that was the nation’s worst mass murder at the time, died Monday. He was 88.
Camden County Prosecutor Warren W. Faulk said Unruh died in a Trenton nursing facility after a long illness.
Unruh had been confined in a state psychiatric hospital since the killings, which became known as the “Walk of Death.” Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he confessed to the killings and was judged mentally competent but never tried for the Sept. 6, 1949, massacre.
Unruh, then a 28-year-old honorably discharged World War II combat veteran and pharmacy student, planned the killings for more than a year. He kept a meticulous journal on his intended victims.
He killed five men, five women and three children. Some Unruh knew and intentionally targeted; others were simply strangers he encountered on the street that morning.
“Only occasionally excessive brightness of his dark eyes indicated that he was anything other than normal,” New York Times reporter Meyer Berger wrote of Unruh’s interrogation, in a 4,000-word account of the shootings for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for deadline writing.
He faced 13 counts of “willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought” and three counts of “atrocious assault and battery.” He was eventually pronounced insane and put in a unit for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.
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