Victim remembers massacre 50 years ago

Posted: Monday, September 06, 1999

CAMDEN, N.J. - The sounds of that September morning still haunt Charles Cohen.


The terrified 12-year-old dove into a closet as Unruh stalked the streets and shops of his East Camden neighborhood - and then the Cohens' apartment - in a 12-minute shooting spree that came to be called the "Walk of Death."


At the time, the Sept. 6, 1949 rampage was considered the nation's worst mass murder. Today, Unruh remains one of the century's most notorious killers.



He has spent the past 50 years in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, a state hospital for the criminally insane.


"I committed a horrible crime," Unruh said during a hearing several years ago. Usually he doesn't speak at all.


"He realizes what he did was 100 percent wrong. He's sorry he did it," said Harry Rosell, 75, of Cherry Hill.


"Unfortunately, the victims' names are long forgotten, and Unruh's lives in infamy," said Cohen, now 62 and a retired linen salesman. "My memories don't dim. Do you know how many times in 50 years I've relived that story?"

Unruh, then a 28-year-old World War II veteran and pharmacy student, planned the killings for more than a year. A recluse, he was convinced his neighbors were ridiculing him and plotting against him.

"They have been making derogatory remarks about my character," Unruh told authorities after the attack. What set him off was discovering someone stole his fence gate.



As neighbors screamed and scrambled for cover, Unruh went to the shoe repair shop and shot the cobbler. Next door, at the barber shop, he killed a 6-year-old boy on a hobbyhorse chair and then the barber. Next was the tailor, but he had left to run an errand, so Unruh shot his bride of six weeks.



Charles Cohen, in his family's apartment above their drug store, thought he heard a car backfire. When he looked out the window, Unruh had just shot an insurance salesman.


Rose Cohen had angered Unruh for complaining that his radio was too loud. Charles annoyed him by playing his trumpet.

As Charles hid in one closet, and his mother cowered in another, his grandmother, Minnie Cohen, 67, tried frantically to call police.

When the shooting ended, Charles emerged to find his 38-year-old mother dead in the closet where she hid, his 41-year-old father shot in the back and dead on the street below, and his grandmother fatally shot in the head and chest.





Unruh was never prosecuted because he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial on 13 counts of murder and three counts of atrocious assault. The indictments were dismissed in 1980 after a judge ruled he was denied a speedy trial.

Cohen, meanwhile, opposed all attempts to ease security restrictions on Unruh as he grows old.

"I don't want anyone to see him as a poor, old man," Cohen said. "He's a mass killer that has outlived most of the families that he destroyed. I'm just waiting for the call that he's dead, and I'll spit on his grave, and that will be it."