Earlier generations had Aurora's too:
At 9:30 a.m. on Sept. 6, 1949, a reclusive World War II combat veteran named Howard Barton Unruh ate a breakfast of Post Toasties and fried eggs, left his mother’s apartment wearing slacks and a bow tie, picked up his 9 mm Luger, and walked from shop to shop on River Road in East Camden, N.J., where he started shooting people.
Some victims were on a list Unruh had been preparing for months. Others were bystanders he’d never met, including three small boys under the ages of 10 -- one of whom was shot point-blank while sitting in a barber shop getting a haircut. By the time Unruh was apprehended, he’d murdered 13 people.
Like James Eagan Holmes outside a bloodied movie theater Thursday night in Aurora, Colo., Howard Unruh surrendered without a fight. But why did he do it in the first place? That’s what everyone wants to know after such rampages. We also want to know what, as a society, we’re supposed to do about it.
.......... this particular kind of horror is not new. We tend to think of mass murderers who embark on a senseless rampage shooting people at random as a recent phenomenon, but they aren’t. The litany of place names we recall easily rolls off the tongue: Luby’s Restaurant in Killeen, Tex., Columbine High School, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, Tucson, and now the Century 16 multiplex in the Aurora Mall in suburban Denver.
But earlier generations of Americans had their Auroras, too.
-- On Aug. 13, 1903, a 30-year-old veteran of the Spanish-American War named Gilbert Twigg opened fire with a .12-gauge shotgun on a crowd at an outdoor concern in the county of his birth. Twigg killed nine people in Winfield, Kan., and wounded many more before turning a revolver on himself. This bloodbath earned only five paragraphs in the New York Times.
-- In 1948, 10 months before Howard Unruh lost it, an ex-con named Melvin Collins got in a squabble with bookmaker in front of a Chester, Pa. boardinghouse, shot the man dead and then barricaded himself in his second-floor room, shooting people at random with hollow-point bullets fired from a .22 rifle. He wounded four people, and killed eight, including himself.
-- On Aug. 1, 1966, only two weeks after Richard Speck raped, tortured and murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, University of Texas student Charles Joseph Whitman killed his wife and mother, then carted a footlocker full of weapons and ammo to the university tower in Austin and began shooting. By the time the former Eagle Scout and U.S. Marine was killed by policemen, 15 other people were dead and another 30 wounded.
Eighteen summers later, the nation’s attention was on California as San Francisco Democrats were nominating a presidential candidate and Los Angeles was putting the final touches on the 1984 summer Olympic Games. But even further south, in the San Diego County border town of San Ysidro, unemployed security guard James Oliver Huberty took an Uzi, a shotgun, and a pistol into a McDonald’s and methodically began killing everyone he could.
When a police sniper stopped him 77 minutes later, 21 people were dead and 19 were wounded. Eleven of the dead were children or teenagers.
“What’s the matter with you,” one of the angry arresting officers shouted at 28-year-old Howard Unruh. “You a psycho?”
Unruh replied that he had “a good mind,” but he was as hard-pressed to explain what he’d done as anyone else was. Unruh had stopped shooting only when he ran out of ammunition, and was back at his apartment, apparently to get more, when the cops closed in. Moments earlier, he fielded a telephone call from local newspaperman named Philip Buxton, who’d dialed the apartment on a hunch.
“Why are you killing people?” Buxton asked.
“I don’t know,” Unruh replied. “I can’t answer that yet.”
Charles Whitman seems to have been perplexed by his own deteriorating mental condition. After killing his mother, he went home and stabbed his wife, Kathy, to death in her sleep. “I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could hope to have, ” he said in a type-written note. “I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.”
He also asked in his suicide note that his brain be studied after his death: He suspected something had changed in the physical makeup inside his skull. “I don’t really understand myself these days,” he wrote. “I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”
The authorities wanted answers, too. Whitman, who was only 25 years old, had been an Eagle Scout and was highly intelligent before he snapped. What the medical examiner found was a tumor in an area of the brain that regulates both fear and aggression.
And on the morning of July 18, 1984, James Huberty approached his wife, Etna, in camouflage clothing, and as she lay down for an afternoon nap said he wanted to kiss her goodbye.
“Where are you going?” she asked
“I’m going hunting humans,” he replied. She merely laid back on the couch and watched him walk out the door for his destiny with mass murder. Later, in her own defense, she would in turn point the finger at local government: Her husband had called a mental health facility the day before, she noted, and did not receive a return call.
Other family members of these killers blame war. When Huberty burst into the McDonald’s, he shouted out that he’d “killed thousands” in Vietnam. In truth, the 41-year-old unemployed security guard had never served in the military. But Gilbert Twigg, Howard Unruh, and Charles Whitman did.
Turn-of-the-century Kansans wondered if anything that happened to Twigg in the Philippines or Cuba during the Spanish-American War had altered his psyche.
Unruh has served in combat, too, and plenty of it, in World War II. He was a decorated machine gunner in a tank turret who’d seen ferocious action at the Battle of the Bulge. “Since he came home from the service,” his brother James Unruh ruminated later, “he didn’t seem to be the same.”
Were there other factors? Almost certainly, but in these cases the diagnoses often simply sound like an after-the-fact recitation of the symptoms. Prison psychiatrists wrote of “repressed rage” and a “smoldering anger” in Unruh. Some of this rage was directed at himself, apparently, over a homosexual encounter in a Philadelphia movie theater. Some of it was directed at his neighbors over slights real and imagined -- including his notion that they considered him a “mama’s boy” because he still lived with his mother.
Unruh was a regular churchgoer who read the Bible obsessively and underlined passages dealing with apocalyptic prophesies. He was also a gun enthusiast with another “bible,” titled “The Shooter’s Bible.”
Like so many rampage killers, he had trouble relating normally to people in everyday life. “He was a quiet one, that guy,” one local man told his neighbors. “He was all the time figuring to do this thing. You gotta watch them quiet ones.”
In any event, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and spared the death penalty. But one thread of his case runs through so many of these rampage killers’ stories, including -- according to early news accounts -- James Eagan Holmes’s: He had trouble finding, or keeping, a job. Was that emblematic of a deteriorating mental condition that made it hard for them to function in a social setting -- or was it the match that ignited the tinder of their fragile psyches?
Gilbert Twigg lost a railroad job that was paying him $100; in his delusional state, he blamed unknown persecutors for drugging him so he couldn’t perform. Howard Unruh told police he was teased by neighbors for being unemployed and sponging off his mother.
Patrick Edward Purdy couldn’t hold a job, and held Vietnamese immigrants responsible. Most of the children he killed and wounded in his 1989 attack on Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., were Southeast Asian.
“Society had their chance,” laid-off security guard Huberty told his wife before heading into the San Ysidro McDonald’s. Speaking of which, the job market in Southern California is so hard to crack right now that Holmes could only get a part-time job in a local McDonald’s despite graduating near the top of his class at the University of California, Riverside.
“I felt bad for him because he studied so hard,” recalled a 17-year-old neighbor. “My brother said he looked kind of down; he seemed depressed.”
Consistent with its long-term editorial stance, the New York Times (as well as New York’s mayor) instantly homed in on gun control as the lesson out of Aurora. But there are others.
In 2000, the Times itself examined in detail some 100 cases of rampage murder in this country. And it reported a fascinating finding: “By far the most common precipitator,” it wrote, “was the loss of a job.”
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