Rampage

Rampage by Harold Schechter

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On the morning of September, 6, 1949, twenty-eight year old Howard Unruh took a walk through his Camden, New Jersey neighborhood with his war trophy, a German Luger. In approximately ten minutes, he had murdered 13 people.

He became the first mass-shooter in American history.

Unruh was known as a quiet, cooperative man who lived with his mother. He studied the bible, collected stamps and had a train set. He had served with distinction in combat in battles in Europe. However, it seems that he became convinced that his neighbors were harassing him and gossipping about him. He was, also, a closeted homosexual who kept a diary of his sexual activities and believed that at least one of his neighbors had started a rumor about seeing him “go down” on another man.

Schechter's book is again a masterpiece of history. We learn about this “crime of the century,” now forgotten. We learn something about Camden in the 1930s - a time when my mother was growing up in Camden. We learn something about the push to confiscate war trophies after his shooting.

Unruh's crime is inexplicable because he was obviously delusional. On that point, Unruh confessed to the murder of men, women and children, but escaped the death penalty because the prosecutor insisted on having him examined by psychologists who readily found him incompetent. Naturally, this outraged the family of victims, who swore vengeance if he were released. Unruh eventually died of old age in 2009.

This is a short, well-written book. I listened to it as an audiobook in the space of an hour.

I also listened to it the night after my Communio group had reviewed St. Thomas Aquinas's discussion of anger in the Summa Theologica. In Question 158, article 5, Aquinas discusses the three species of anger, to wit, “choleric” where persons are too quick to anger, “sullen,” where people dwell on their anger, and “ill-tempered” or “stern” where “people, who do not put aside their anger until they have inflicted punishment.” Unruh seems to fit that last which involves a situation where anger has become habitual.

And what about the anger of victims' relatives? Aquinas would say that if they were not angry, their inhuman indifference would be a sin:

On the contrary, Chrysostom [*Hom. xi in Matth. in the Opus Imperfectum, falsely ascribed to St. John Chrysostom] says: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”

(Summa Theologica, II-II, q 158, a. 8.)

The relatives should have been angry. They properly wanted an accounting - revenge - for the death of their loved ones, including the two small children murdered by Unruh with indifference. It was an abomination of justice at that time that the hubris of the psychology profession claimed that it could “cure” people like Unruh, when it could do no such thing. Ultimately, the more expansive definition of insanity would be cut back in later years to include only those who actually could not understand right from wrong.