Sixty years ago today, a Camden gunman killed 13

Charles Cohen slipped into a closet after hearing his mother yell, "Hide, Charles! Hide!"

Sixty years later, he remembered vividly what he had heard next: gunfire.

Howard Unruh, a deranged World War II veteran, was spraying bullets around the Cohens' apartment in the Cramer Hill section of Camden. He was on an infamous 20-minute rampage that killed 13 people and wounded three others.

In the media, it became known as the walk of death.

As 12-year-old Charles huddled in a closet, Unruh killed the boy's father, Maurice, 40, then his mother, 39-year-old Rose. Unruh then killed the boy's grandmother Minnie Cohen, 67, as she desperately tried to call police.

Last week, Cohen said a prayer and lit a candle in a synagogue to observe Yahrzeit, the Hebrew anniversary of the deaths, which occurred Sept. 6, 1949.

"You get through it, but you never get over it," Cohen said. "I think about my parents every day."

He was disappointed to hear from a reporter that Unruh, although in poor health, was still alive. Cohen was waiting for the call that the man who killed his parents had died.

He never got that call.

On Friday, Cohen died at 72, three days after giving his final interview about that terrible day 60 years ago.

Unruh has outlived a lot of people who could offer memories of the shootings and their aftermath. The judge is gone. The medical examiner, the psychiatrist, and nearly all the investigators are gone, too.

One of those still around Camden is Ron Dale, a retired ironworker and Navy veteran who was 8 and waiting to get his hair cut on that September morning.

The line for the barber in the 3200 block of River Road was long as youngsters got ready for the first day of school. The shoemaker in the next shop had comics, so Dale waited there.

That was when Unruh arrived, gun in hand, and shot the shoemaker, John Pilarchik, 27, a World War II veteran from Pennsauken.

"I heard this bam! He turned around and looked at me," Dale said last week. "He left and went to the barber's."

J. Clark Hoover, 45, was cutting the hair of 6-year-old Orris M. Smith as the boy sat on a hobbyhorse. The two were shot dead in front of the boy's mother.

Dale ran home, pale with fear, his mother later told him. She closed and locked the windows, pulled the blinds, and locked the door, which the family rarely had done before the slayings but regularly did afterward.

Pandemonium ensued. Police flooded the neighborhood. As they searched for the gunman, they used loudspeakers to warn residents to stay inside. Mothers grabbed their babies and ran. Others slid beneath their beds.

Dale was among those who scattered for safety. At Engel's, the nearby saloon, the owner later told Dale that he had grabbed his gun and waited for Unruh as customers took cover behind the jukebox and bar.

But Unruh targeted mostly neighbors and business owners on the other side of River Road, or killed those who got in his way or just caught his eye.

The chronology of the shootings is unclear. At some point, Unruh spotted movement in the first-floor window of a rowhouse next to the shoemaker's. He fired and killed 2-year-old Tommy Hamilton, who was playing with the curtain next to his playpen.

Unruh lived in a second-story apartment at River Road and 32d Street, above the pharmacy where Maurice Cohen worked. Unruh wanted the Cohens dead because of a squabble about Unruh's leaving a gate open.

He also killed a mother, her son, and a grandmother stopped in traffic; a tailor's wife of one month; a TV repairman stopped in traffic; and an insurance agent who failed to get out of his way as he stood at the door of the pharmacy.

Dale thinks Unruh also was looking for neighborhood teens.

"The older kids in the neighborhood used to harass him. They thought he was gay and used to make fun of him," Dale said, describing Unruh as a loner.

James Klein, Unruh's public defender for 33 years, was 7 at the time.

"I remember playing outside and my mother saying, 'Come inside. There's a madman on the loose.' "

In a recent interview, one historian said the event foreshadowed the decline of Camden, an industrial city that had experienced little more than petty crimes. It pierced a trusting community where neighbors took care of one another, he said.

"It's something you never really forget. . . . You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property," said Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society. "He didn't just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence."

Schopp, who took an interest in the case as a historian, said his father had been on the No. 9 bus from Philadelphia, heading home to Palmyra, when it passed through Camden during the rampage. Police stopped traffic on River Road.

"He was very much aware that something horrific had happened," Schopp said. "By the time his bus had reached the carnage, they were putting sheets over the bodies."

If he'd had more ammunition, Unruh told police, he would have kept shooting. In the end, he surrendered when police descended on his apartment and opened fire on the building.

Years later, as Unruh's attorney, Klein would become one of the few people to visit him regularly in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, where doctors diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and he remained in a ward for the criminally insane.

Klein said Unruh had never been right after he returned from World War II combat, having served in Italy and France, keeping a diary of the Germans he killed. After the war ended and he returned from the service, Unruh tried college but could not make it, Klein said.

Unruh collected weapons and created a shooting range in the basement of his building. He often walked the neighborhood in Army boots, carrying a Bible. Police later learned that Unruh had kept a list of those he wanted dead.

Over the years, Unruh never was found competent to stand trial; the legal system has treated him as someone found guilty by reason of insanity. He unsuccessfully sought parole and transfers to less restrictive facilities, with the relatives of his victims fighting each possible move.

Cohen was among those who attended court proceedings and kept track of Unruh. In the 1980s, he became a strong advocate for victims' rights and hoped for changes in the criminal-justice system to prevent such slayings, his family said. It seemed, however, that the number of mass murders increased; each time, Cohen relived his own horror, they said.

He and his wife of 52 years, Marian, had three grown daughters and seven grandchildren, some of whom never were told of the tragedy. Two years ago, he and his wife left Cherry Hill and moved out of the area. His wife said services for her husband would be private.

There are no more hearings - or, as Marian Cohen called them, "dog and pony shows" - where Unruh is taken to court. Every year, a judge signs a new order to keep him confined.

On River Road, most of the buildings still stand, occupied by new businesses. Engel's Saloon is now the Rumbarenque Night Club, closed this year after a 25-year-old man was fatally shot outside.

Martin's barbershop stands where the shoemaker was killed, and weeds grow in a lot where the old barbershop was torn down.

The apartments where the Cohens and Unruh lived are vacant. A newer stucco facade hides the bullet holes that had, for decades, scarred the building.

The pharmacy is a shoe store, where Maritza Guzman, the owner of Gomez Shoes, learned of the rampage a week after she moved her business there two years ago.

Guzman said she was sorry for the tragedy, "but life has to continue."

Today, Unruh is the oldest person incarcerated in the state. When not hospitalized for medical reasons, he is confined at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.

Klein questions whether the mass murderer will survive to see his 89th birthday in January.

"He's really declined a lot," said Klein.