Howard Unruh

[Ginger]

Smithsonian has a really great article about Howard Unruh, the Camden maniac: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...956927/?no-ist

[Mayerling]

Smithsonian has a really great article about Howard Unruh, the Camden maniac: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...956927/?no-ist

Thanks for the citation. I read the article, and it was quite good. Before this I was acquainted with the newspaper report that won a Pulitzer Prize. This gave far more detail.

However the author did not feel Unruh was a maniac. He concluded that he knew the actions he did were quite illegal and that there would be legal consequences. Further he really did not show a bit of remorse.

Unruh said at one point he should be executed. Unfortunately nobody took him up on that idea.

[sdreid]

This was the first "mass" shooting that got major attention here in the U.S., I think. There had previously been some, including a school shooting, in Germany back around the time of WWI.

[Ginger]

However the author did not feel Unruh was a maniac. He concluded that he knew the actions he did were quite illegal and that there would be legal consequences.

Mea culpa. I heard him described that way once, and just like the melodramatic sound of it.

[Pcdunn]

Very interesting article on a case I had never heard about. Thank you for the link.

Did you hear of the recent incident over the weekend in an Ohio library? A teenager with two knives burst into a chess class for elementary-school aged kids, but their instructor, a veteran in his seventies blocked the attacker, signaled for the children to run, and wrestled the teen down, despite getting severely slashed in one hand and arm. No children were injured.
Thank goodness the attacker didn't have a gun or two.

[Mayerling]

Mea culpa. I heard him described that way once, and just like the melodramatic sound of it.

It's okay Ginger. The authorities in New Jersey apparently liked the sound of that word too! Otherwise we'd be reading of the 1950 electrocution of Howard Unruh.

Plenty of forgotten serial or mass killers who have been forgotten. One that was once plenty written about as a mass killer was an Englishman named William Godfrey Youngman (executed in 1860) who killed his fiancé, mother, and brothers in their flat in London. Supposedly he was planning the killing of the fiancé for some insurance he took out, and used the other murders as a cover-up (which did not work, obviously). There was supposed to be insanity in his family. However, one person who wrote on it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he had doubts about Youngman's actual guilt - he was illustrating how difficult it can be to correctly read circumstantial evidence, though Sir Arthur here does not convince me.

Jeff