Howard Barton Unruh: 21st January 1921 – 19th October 2009.
Died at the age of eighty eight after a prolonged illness in the nursing facility of Trenton State hospital where he had been, on a diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia, since shooting his way into the record books back in September 1949. Said to be ‘no longer lucid’, his last visitor, a fellow world war two veteran, died in 2001. His family are all gone, as are most of those who were around on that late summer day in Camden, New Jersey when the deeply troubled Howard finally snapped and killed thirteen people on a twelve minute walk down main street.
The man whose surname meant ‘unrest’ is at rest now.
RIP, Howard.
AND SO IT’S OVER
IS THIS WHAT HAPPENS?
Everyone’s favourite dead GP serial killer, Dr. Harold Shipman is back in the news almost four years and six months after pulling the lever on himself in his gaol cell.
The facts of the matter; he wrote regularly from prison to a couple who were ex-patients as well as friends, and when they died their son was clearing out their house when he found the letters. Now, he is putting them up for auction.
Seriously. He wants people to pay to get ahold of the letters of Dr. Shipman.
I suppose the purchaser could bind them up and put them into book form. Or wants to examine them to see into the mind of this killer? But then suppose the person who wants to publish or examine them can’t afford to bid any higher? (It is an auction after all). But then who apart from a publisher or someone who studies the psychology of such events and types would want them?
And what kind of mentality would put them up for sale?
The locals, across Hyde, Shipman’s hunting ground, are disgusted and offended, especially the families of the murdered. I’m not, although I was pals with more than one victim, I’m just absolutely shocked that anyone would want to get involved in such doings.
Of course, the real question to be asked, is who in the name of reason would want to privately own a set of letters written by a dead serial killer? What on earth would you do with them? Boast to your friends? Can you imagine a party or social gathering of some kind. And people are discussing their possessions;
“I’ve got one of those flat screen forty-two inch televisions.”
“I’ve got a four poster bed that was once slept in by George IV.”
“I’ve got a coffee table made from ebony flown in and carved specially.”
“I’ve got the letters of a dead serial killer.”
Beyond my ken. . .
THE RETURN HOME ETC+
On the 20th of August, a certain chap named Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi left Scotland to return home to Libya to die. He had prostrate cancer and according to doctors only a few months left. This single has caused an international uproar, and the ire of the US has been firmly aimed at Scotland, with calls for a boycott on Scottish goods, even from the Scots themselves.
Back now, in time, to December 1988. Pan Am Flight 103, ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’, was cruising over southern Scotland when a bomb on board ignited, killing everyone on board, the majority of who were US citizens on their way home for Christmas. The ruined plane came apart and parts crashed onto the small town of Lockerbie where eleven people were killed. The death total was finalised at 270, the majority, 189 of which were American citizens. The explosion was so violent and so total that the crew of ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’ didn’t even have time to send a distress signal.
Forward again, to May 2000, when, after much wangling ad diplomatic actions, two men were finally extradited from Libya to the Netherlands stand trial under Scottish law for what was to be known as the Lockerbie bombing. One was Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, who was found not guilty. The other was Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. He was found guilty in the May of 2001 and sentenced to life in prison for the murders. There was how it rested until this year, August, the Scottish Justice Secretary, a one Kenny MacAskill, decided to release the dying Megrahi on compassionate grounds, allow him to die at home. Megrahi was met by cheering crowds off the plane, some waving Scottish flags, and treated to an audience with Muammar al-Gaddafi, Revolutionary leader of Libya. A bit like meeting the Queen, the US President and the Prime Minister all rolled into one. He was treated, in other words, like a celebrity hero.
Now, in case you haven’t guessed, we come to the point as to why Scotland is facing a boycott. A murderer, a mass murderer, has been freed and allowed to go home and treated like a hero, and Scotland is responsible. Now, Megrahi has not been pardoned, so he is still the guilty one, the only one ever deemed responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.
But once the steam of indignation has been wiped off the window of truth, and you can see through, it’s just possible that Megrahi was set up. The only evidence came from clothes wrapped around the remains of the suitcase bomb, which were said to have been sold to Megrahi by a one Tony Gauci in Malta. That was it. No other evidence linked our Libyan sick man to the bombing. It’s possible that Gaddafi excepted the verdict because he no longer wanted to be the head of a country that was a byword for terrorism. It’s possible that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was sacrificed by those who wanted to see closure. Not on purpose. There were clothes with the bomb, and our Maltese shop keeper Tony Gauci claimed to have sold them to Megrahi, but isn’t it just possible that the whole thing was rushed through as quickly as possible. Before you shout ‘give over! Are you a terrorist lover?!’ Think on this;
The only reason why Lamin Khalifah Fhimah was found not guilty was because he had an alibi that put him somewhere else other than Malta at that time.
Use reason; the man is still guilty in the eyes of the law, and he’s only got three months to live. I know it must be hell to see someone whom you believe is responsible for the brutal, bloody death of someone you love more than your own heart let go, but a lot of the Scottish victims families, who are suffering just as much as those of the other nations, weren’t happy with his conviction. They’d rather see no closure and an innocent man go free than rub their hands with glee at the thought of someone, who just might not have done it, be locked up. And if he was sacrificed on the altar of international politics, (a story is going around that Libya and Scotland did a deal; let the chap come home and you can have our oil. How true it is I’ve no idea) he’s still going to die. That’s why he was sent home, on compassionate grounds, to die. It’s not as if he’s going to spend the next thirty years or so admired and feted by the Libyans, doing the rounds of chat shows, getting money, perhaps writing a best-selling book. He’ll be dead before Christmas.
And he’s still officially guilty.
And the rest of Scotland aren’t to blame.
Meanwhile, in the Midlands in the UK, a small girl child has been found strangled in the cab of a wagon, while her Mum’s boyfriend who had taken her out as a treat on delivery trips, has been found hanging from a cord within walking distance.
THE LIBERAL IDEA OF FAIRNESS
Iran has broken the record for the most people executed at one time in the past thirty years.
On the thirtieth of July, twenty-four drugs traffickers were hanged, with the hanging arranged so the hanged would die slowly and painfully, choking on the end of the rope.
I’m sure fair-minded liberals everywhere are ready to protest outside Iranian embassies around the world, call for a boycott of Iranian products, newspapers make it headline news, and politicians are standing up to protest at this gross human rights abuse.
They’re not?
Oh no, of course not. Because it isn’t Israel who is executing people. That’s how the liberal mind works, you see. Any other nation on earth can openly commit the grossest human rights abuses possible, from stoning teenage girls to death for being raped, to throwing white people off their farms, to shooting people for exercising their right to peacefully protest all the way to executions where the executed are tried without defence lawyers present and sometimes tortured as part of the prosecution’s plan to get a conviction. But if an Israeli is caught picking his nose in front of a Palestinian child the liberal world is alight with cries of horror at such blatant abuse.
There is nothing liberal about such liberals. Until they admit that Iran is a criminal state, along with Zimbabwe, and most of Africa and the Arabs nations, then they have no right to howl human rights abuse whenever an Israeli isn’t happy about a Palestinian taking over their home.
The US and the UK are also the whipping boys of the liberal intelligentsia.
‘THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON’ – A CRITIQUE
Take one light-hearted, happy-souled, dreamer who wanted to give peace a chance and introduce him to an angry, confused disturbed young man man fifteen years his junior. Add an obsession to the death and a .38 gun. You get ‘The Killing of John Lennon’, told in Mark David Chapman’s own words, from when he first flies to New York ‘because I want to travel’ to his reading from ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ in a court where he stands guilty of murder.
Forget the blockbuster idea. If you want to label it, it’s indie, art house fayre. It took three years for the money to be raised to make it. Very few special effects, filmed on location. Lots of close ups of hands and feet and faces, along with shots shown over and over again.
It is not an easy film to watch, it was as if the happenings on screen had reached out and wrapped me up so much so a day after seeing it it am still stunned and my brain is full of it. The killing itself, along with other notable scenes, of close ups of Chapman behaving in a disturbed, disturbing way, leafing through a magazine full of pictures of Lennon, flipping through ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, holding it to his face, sitting rocking violently on his bed, dancing around to the Beatles music while his mostly unaffected wife Gloria stands in an adjoining room with her hands flat to her ears, writing ‘John Lennon’ in the signing book at work, holding a heavy gun and pretending to shoot people outside the window of the Hawaii gun shop, fantasising about shooting two gay men in the next room at the YMCA in New York, his obsessive behaviour after getting his copy of ‘Double Fantasy’ what turned out to by John and Yoko’s last album signed by John, and all to a calmly spoken track of Chapman’s own thoughts.
The killing of John Lennon itself; the DVD itself has a fifteen certificate because it ‘contains strong violence and language’. I have watched many scenes in films that contain violence and language, but the killing was truly horrendous; so bad I found myself speaking out loud, over the roars from the gun and Lennon’s body being bloodily torn apart, ‘good god, that’s enough now!’
After being arrested, he had a bullet proof vest wrapped around him to be hustled through the waiting press; as the police captain in charge said, ‘This man just killed John Lennon. There ain’t gonna to be an Oswald on my watch’. A moment of peace in a toilet, and the captain asked Chapman why he did it. He answered that he liked John Lennon. Helplessly, the captain added, ’so did I’. In fact, whenever he was asked why he did it he almost literally always gives a different answer. I believe he did it for the fame, he was sick of having a wife and a job and living in one of the most beautiful places on earth,living an ordinary life; he needed to be noticed.
Today, Chapman is in Attica state prison, in solitary confinement for his own safety, in a room six yards by ten yards. He has been turned down for parole four times so far. But don’t pity him. He has never once expressed an apology for what he has done. He’s only fifty-four now. If released, it’s just possible he might get an obsession with another great person to notch up his fame level again. Chapman might be locked away, he probably would never be released, but he’s alive. John would have been sixty-nine, a venerable, well respected old gentleman of rock, rich in memories, like Paul McCartney perhaps even still making music.
All that wiped out because a sad, pathetic little oddball nonentity wanted to be noticed.
AND ANOTHER ONE TO REMEMBER
When most people think ’serial killer’ they think of Theodore Robert Bundy* (Ted Bundy).
His MO was to fake injury, wander around college campuses usually late at night and wearing a cast on either an arm or a leg and go around picking out likely females and asking them for assistance. Those who went with him were knocked out and strangled and then raped. In that order. He also killed Janice Ott and Denise Nashlund in one day, swooping them up from the crowded holiday spot Lake Sammamish State Park, in Washington State. The story he took Janice first to an isolated spot, and then went back for another who happened to be Denise and killed Denise while Janice was watching, and then killed Janice. He started his career by breaking into the bedrooms of girls who took his fancy, following them home and clubbing them to death. His last two murders were killed in their beds when he went into a frenzied rampage around the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, carrying a two by four going into the rooms where the girls slept and walloping them around the head. He was arrested twice and escaped twice and the final time he ended up in Florida and reverted to type.
He ended up lost, completely out of touch with any human feelings, just desperate to kill, driven by feelings he no longer had any control over. He was in this state when by the road he sighted a female form, and went for her. This was Kimberley Leach, who was just twelve. He was caught, arrested, and tried and found guilty and sentenced to death then put on death row in Florida to await his fate through years of legal wrangling.
To try and save his own life, a natural reaction whatever you think about him, he confessed to several other murders while on death row, mostly of coeds across the North West of the US. He was eventually pinned down to having committed thirty sex murders, although some accounts reckon it could have been up to a hundred.
There are different opinions as to his years as an active, uncaught, killer. It has been stated his first victim was Ann Marie Burr,a nine year old neighbour in Tacoma, Washington state, who idolised the then fifteen year old Ted and followed him about, and who vanished early one morning, never to be seen again, in 1961. Although when confronted on death row, having nothing to lose by admitting it, he denied having anything to do with her disappearance. Killings from 1969 and 1973 were later found out to have been misattributed to him. However, most who have made examinations of the matter agree that the time frame of his killings stretched from January 1974, when he clubbed and removed the body of Linda Anne Healy from her own bedroom, to February 1978 when he stole Kimberly Leach from a street corner.
Although he will forever be known as ‘Bundy’ he was actually a Cowell. Born on the 24th November 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell, an unwed Mother, who later met and married a Johnny Bundy, who legally adopted Ted and gave him his own surname. He resented this whole set-up with a passion. Not only did he hate being ‘a bastard’ he also was supposed to have refused any overtures of familiarity from his step-Dad insisting that he was a Cowell and not a Bundy.
Anyhow, twenty years ago on this date Ted was put down in the electric chair of Florida State Prison, for the murders, in their beds, of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, and his death penalty was confirmed when he was tried and sentenced for the abduction and murder of Kimberley Leach.
*Gratuitous fun fact! If you ever get into a pub quiz where one of the questions is ‘who was the first serial killer?’ the answer is ‘Ted Bundy’. There were others before him. One of the first was Britain’s own Mary Cotton. But the label ’serial killer’ was first applied by psychologist and FBI profilers to Ted. Before that, they were known as ‘multiple’ or ‘mass’ murderers.
THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL
Howard Barton Unruh is eighty-eight today.
Before him, there was no such thing as the mass murderer.
I know I say some daft things concerning these killers, and today this kind of thing is almost a weekly event, especially in the US, but just imagine if you were back in 1949, a copper or psychiatrist or reporter or someone and you discovered you were about to meet someone who had shot up their neighbourhood and left more than a dozen dead. You’d never come across such thing previously. You wouldn’t even have the template to cut such things from. Just imagine the shock and horror and wonder you might feel, and the single question would be hovering in your mind;
“Why?”
He was asked, apparently. Some say it was a policeman trying to make sense of what he did, when he was in the police car just after arrest. Others say it was some civilian worker or reporter when he was in the police station or hospital treated for a gunshot wound he’d received.
Whoever it was, someone asked him;
“Are you some kind of psycho?”
And his response, I imagine in a clipped, slightly resentful tone, looking ahead while he spoke;
“I’m not. I have a good mind.” He was then supposed to have offered, “I’d have killed thousands if I’d bullets enough.”
And because he wasn’t a victim except in his mind, here are the names of those who made history along with him, dying under the gun of a man who was a stranger to human beings, and saw them as nothing but enemies to be killed;
John Joseph Pilarchik, 27
Orris Martin Smith, 6
Clark Hoover, 33
James Hutton, 45
Rose Cohen, 38
Minnie Cohen, 63
Maurice J. Cohen, 39
Alvin Day, 24
Thomas Hamilton, 2
Helga Kautzach Zegrino, 28
Helen Wilson, 37
Emma Matlack, 68
John Wilson, 9
SHOOT THE LITTLE BASTARDS RIGHT IN THE HEAD
Just watch this.* It is a short advert commissioned by Barnardo’s the children’s charity (because there’s only one) and it’s supposed to be a scenario where the ‘demonisation’ of ‘children’ is taken as far as it can be taken.
Bloody nasty stuff and it might just give a few people ideas.
Ah well, it makes a change from babies being the victims and kids killing one another.
By the way, I don’t believe children are animals, vermin or parasites. None of the aforementioned species would behave in such a nasty, cruel, anti-social way, purposefully going out to be annoying towards members of their own species.
*Actually the kitchen layout and state of untidiness is very much like mine. Never had three adult men in it though.
GREATNESS, IN ITSELF
You know, us human beings have achieved some things. We started off as mammals in the Savannah and due to the slow, mindless workings of natural selection, we have arrived, seven million years later, at the pinnacle of life. We can, and have, overcome the workings of nature. People who nature once allowed to die have full lives. Those not meant to breed can now reproduce. Disease, disability, we have tamed and nearly beaten it. I really do believe we have overcome nature, and the ways of basic interrelatedness with the world around us. We no longer have anything to fear from natural selection, everything it throws at us we can overcome, given time. We really have got to the peak. We should congratulate ourselves. We are now at a point of such detached sophistication from the effects of evolution that a Mother can allow her own offspring, a male child, who she grew inside her, perhaps the closest genetic relationship possible, to be killed, through weeks of slow torture, at the hands of two men to whom she has no genetic relationship at all.
A PROMISE (AS YET) UNKEPT
A bit back, I said that one day I would write a mini-bio on the only killer in the history of crime I have any time for, namely John Haigh*. Well, the only thing holding me back is the fact that I might not be able to fit the whole thing in one posting, and if I run out of room, then the next post will be above it, and anyone reading it will end up finding out what happened to him before they knew what he did.
As soon as I can assure myself that I can write a huge, massive post without having to break it up, well, then, soon, you will be rewarded by the All The Best! guide to the life, times and crimes of Christian killer John George Haigh, aka the Acid Bath Murderer or the Crawley Vampire.
I might even break my personal blog tradition of plenty of words but few pictures and illustrate the guide.
*Apart from maybe Graham Young.
I’D HAVE KILLED THOUSANDS. . .
Forty-nine years ago on this date in Camden, New Jersey, Howard Unruh, a quiet veteran of World War Two came home from a late night picture show and discovered someone had stolen the gate to the back yard of his home he shared with his Mother, Freda (Rita in some accounts).
The following morning, he washed, dressed in his best clothes and bow tie, picked his Luger pistol and set off on a twelve-minute stroll around his neighbour.
When he got back home, the sounds of sirens were coming closer and thirteen human beings had been shot dead by the man whose actions had successfully carved himself a niche in the wall of the history of crime as the first lone mass murderer. After many weeks of trying to fathom out why he had got to this point, the doctors handling his case made their diagnoses; ‘Dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid colouring’. Today the label would be paranoid schizophrenia*. He was then was found a bed in Trent State Hospital for the criminally insane.
He’s still there today. He’s eighty-seven now and all attempts to downgrade his category of risk have failed, as he’s still considered a danger. He hasn’t spoke since his Mother’s death.
One of his quotes, on being challenged by the policeman who took him in;
“I’d have killed thousands if I’d had bullets enough”.
And if you translate the German Unruh into English you get ‘unrest’.
*I bet not many people can spell ’schizophrenia’ without looking it up. I can.
MORE FROM MARS+AN UNDENIABLE TRUTH
Two noteworthy events I’ve just uncovered (?)
One, the ice on Mars was made up of frozen water. That’s H2O. Which just means there could have been life harboured on the red planet at one time in the past. Which blows all the theists notions completely away. After all, their god made life on this planet, and no other, and, if there is life, or has ever been life, on other planets, what makes ours so special for the oh-so-involved Biblegod to do the creation bop in other places? If he did, then why all the choosing one species on one planet on the back end of one universe of the galaxy. If life on other planets is produced, then it proves that we aren’t so special after all.
Maybe it’ll wake one or two waverers up to the truth of the matter, that Bible or Koran god is of men, made up stories by males who want to play god so invented a deity and placed their own personalities on him.
Science is pushing the age-old tales of the gods of active religion more and more into one corner and eventually over into the graveyard of dead, and forgotten gods.
As well. . .
A chap called Barry George, who apparently has an IQ of seventy-five (his barrister compared it to a light bulb on, but only a forty watt one), was, back in 2001, arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder of TV personality Jill Dando, who was shot on her doorstep in 1999. After lots of questions remaining unanswered, like how could a man whose IQ is in the bottom five per cent could have the intelligence and ability to stalk and shoot Ms Dando, eight long years later Mr George was removed from his cell and put back on trial.
And found not guilty.
How was he found guilty first time round? Well, the police have managed to gather evidence that leans to it almost being impossible that he was responsible.
I wonder how many others are sitting in cells knowing they are not guilty, and no one listening to them? Especially those who are in there for child murder and other unpopular crimes?
A small digression; When I was a believer, a group of us were taken around various prisons and hospitals and I happened to meet Stephan Kiszko. He was a huge, gormless man who, thanks to a combination of lying witnesses, an inept defence and mis-determined police work, was, back in the mid seventies, sold down the river for a murder he did not commit, that of eleven year old Lesley Molseed.* He was treated as a child murderer in prison is always treated, and that doesn’t mean with understanding and kindness. I remember his massiveness and his gentle Yorkshire accent and perpetual, bewildered, smile and how he’d just recently been cleared of the murder, and was in hospital to help his recovery from his ordeal.
On being allowed home, this shambling man reduced thanks to his ordeal to a wreck of a human being finally died of a heart attack in December 1993. His beloved Mother, the only human being he felt he could trust, died four months later. A sad ending to a long ordeal.
And he can’t be the only one. There must be others, like Mr George, in a cell, fastened away, knowing yet unable to articulate the truth; I didn’t do it.
Even in the venerable case of Tim Evans, wrongly hanged for the crime of killing his wife and daughter, and fifty-eight years later is still suffering the posthumous blame of the death of his daughter, because the strangler of 10 Rillington Place Reg Christie admitted to doing the grown up Beryl in, but not the toddler Geraldine.
In a previous blog, which no longer exists, I once, in a burst of indignation, advocated a reasoned debate about the return of capital punishment. Having thought about it, coolly, I retract any defence of the use of the death penalty in any case. Barry George and Stephan Kiszko would both have been dead had there been hanging. As well as those in their cells wondering how the hell they are going to convince the massive, irreversible juggernaut of the law that they are innocent.
*Ronald Castree is now doing time for little Lesley’s murder. He owned a comic shop in an indoor market where I used to purchase American comics when I was about Lesley’s age, but I can’t recall him.
EDMUND EMILE KEMPER III
I know I should be doing better things with my time, but sod it.
Here’s an interview with Edmund Kemper, everyone’s favourite genius giant serial killer, Mother killer and necrophiliac. It’s from YouTube from ‘The Killing of America’ video, which by the way is unavailable over here, I know because I’ve tried to get it.
His question, when wearing his killing glasses, ‘Would you get into a car with this man?’ When this massive waste of space was active in the early seventies when the wash over of love and peace and trust from the loving hippie sixties still dictated that you should not suspects others, which meant young women hitch-hiking alone, getting into men’s cars without anticipation of anything going terribly wrong. So yes, getting into a car with a man did happen, and in six cases it just happened to be ‘this man’.
The most shocking thing about it is how reasonable he sounds. The idea is that true psychopaths are not raving slavering knife wielding killers a la Jason or Freddie or even Norman Bates as Mother, but likeable, charming trustworthy types. Of course, it’s all superficial, all front, but by the time the intended victim realises this, it’s too late. But how Mr Kemper discusses taking to severed heads and blowing people’s brains out and murdering his Mother like talking about going for a walk or eating his dinner, mixed in with his experiences on dating women, all with a sort of awkward open friendliness, makes you do a double-take and you have to recall that this man murdered ten human beings in his attempt to make sense of a world that was alien to him.
