The Real Lolita

by Sarah Weinman

  But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight. The Church, as we now know from decades’ worth of scandal, hid generations of abused victims, and moved pedophile priests from parish to parish because covering up their crimes protected the Church’s carefully crafted image. Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish. A place where no one would ask Sally Horner if something terrible was happening to her.

  Eleven

  Walks of Death

  Back in Camden, Sally Horner’s plight had been consigned to the same purgatory that befalls every long-term missing child investigation. The city hadn’t moved on, but her fate was no longer the highest priority. Camden residents wanted to embrace progress, to bask in fortunes they believed would last forever. There was little warning of the outsized event that would bewilder them and foreshadow the precipitous decline in the city’s near-future.

  In the fall of 1949, Camden believed in its own prosperity. It had weathered the Great Depression and near-bankruptcy in 1936, the result of financial mismanagement by the local government. Private industry still thrived. The New York Shipbuilding Corporation still had contracts from the navy and the Maritime Administration. Smaller shipbuilding companies, like John Mathis & Company, had doubled their workforce during the Second World War and seemed primed to expand. Manufacturing jobs in the region were a year away from an all-time peak of 43,267. Campbell’s Soup still employed thousands of workers at its local headquarters.

  No company represented Camden’s sense that the future was theirs for the taking more than RCA Victor, the phonograph company. In June 1949, it had introduced the “45,” a smaller, faster alternative to Columbia’s “LP” record format. RCA Victor also began producing technology for television, making equipment required by broadcast studios as well as for television sets regular home-buyers could acquire.

  A great many forces underlay Camden’s eventual negative transformation. But Sally Horner’s abduction wasn’t the spark. Rather, the morning of September 6, 1949, seems to me like the inflection point between progress and backlash, hope and despair, promise and decline. The scope of the crime seemed an unfathomable one-off, but its grotesque repetition in the decades to come demonstrates how a singular evil can become all too mundane.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK that morning, a mother woke up her son for breakfast. He’d been out late the night before, sitting and stewing in a movie theater on Market Street in Philadelphia, waiting for a date who never showed. The son’s homosexuality wasn’t quite a secret, but nor could he flaunt it when sex between men was still very much against the law.

  That his date, a man with whom he’d been in the midst of a weeks-long affair, stood him up was indignity enough. Then he’d returned to his home in Cramer Hill to find the fence he built to separate his house from his neighbors’ home had been torn down.

  The man drank a glass of milk and ate the fried eggs his mother, Freda, prepared. Then he went into the basement, whose walls were covered in memorabilia from the war he’d fought in, and where he had written down meticulous notes on each enemy soldier he’d killed. He regarded his nine-millimeter pistol, a Luger Po8, for which he had two full clips and thirty-three loose cartridges, and thought about the list of people—neighbors, shopkeepers, even his mother—he wanted to wipe off the face of the earth.

  He grabbed a wrench and went back to the kitchen. He raised it, threatening Freda. “What do you want to do that for, Howard?” she cried. When he didn’t answer, she repeated the question as she backed away from him, then ran out of the house to a neighbor’s. He retrieved his Luger and ammunition from the basement, as well as a six-inch knife and a five-inch pen-like weapon tricked up to hold six shells. Then he cut through the backyard and shot at the first person he saw: a bread deliveryman sitting in his truck.

  Howard Unruh missed his first target, but he wouldn’t miss many more. Twenty minutes. Thirteen dead. And a neighborhood, a city, and a nation forever marked by his “Walk of Death.”

  FOR MARSHALL THOMPSON, Unruh’s murderous spree hit too close for comfort. He and his family lived around the corner from Unruh and his mother, at 943 North Thirty-Second Street. Most of those who died or were injured on the morning of September 6 were Unruh’s neighbors on River Road, which was the main thoroughfare of East Camden.

  Thompson might have gotten his hair cut at Clark Hoover’s barbershop a few feet down River Road. That awful morning, the barber took a fatal shot, as did six-year-old Orris Smith, perched on a hobbyhorse inside the shop. If Thompson needed his shoes repaired and shined, he likely got it done at the repair shop next door, where Unruh killed the cobbler, John Pilarchik. Down the street was the tailor shop, owned by Thomas Zegrino. He was out when Unruh arrived, but Zegrino’s new wife, Helen, was not, and she paid the price.

  Unruh then shot Alvin Day, the television repairman. James Hutton, the insurance agent, made the dreadful mistake of running out of the drugstore to see what the commotion was all about, and also died. So, too, did a mother and daughter, Emma Matlack, sixty-six, and Helen Matlack Wilson, who’d driven in from Pennsauken for the day and failed to comprehend the massacre unfolding. Unruh shot them dead, and Helen’s twelve-year-old son, John, took a bullet in the neck. He died the next day in the hospital.

  Others were injured. Like Madeline Harrie, caught in the arm by a bullet after Unruh’s first two missed, and her son, Armand, who tried vainly to tackle Unruh when he invaded their home.

  Unruh moved on to his worst grudge late in the rampage, hunting down his next-door neighbor, Maurice Cohen, owner of the drugstore, to make him pay for the business with the fence as well as other perceived grievances. Not spotting him in the store, Unruh went upstairs to the family apartment. As Maurice climbed onto the roof, his wife, Rose, shoved their son, twelve-year-old Charles, into a closet, and then hid in a separate one. Unruh searched the apartment and then went out on the roof, where he caught a glimpse of Maurice running away. Unruh fired into the druggist’s back. The shot jerked Maurice off the roof and he was dead before hitting the street.

  Unruh went back inside and fired his Luger several times into the closet where Rose was hiding. She died instantly. Maurice’s mother, Minnie, was in the bedroom, in a frantic state as she tried to get police on the phone, when Unruh caught up to her. He shot her in the head and body. She fell back on the bed and died there.

  Charles stayed hidden until it was utterly quiet. When officers finally found him, he would not be comforted—he’d heard everything. Charles leaned halfway out his apartment window and screamed, “He’s going to kill me. He’s killing everybody.”

  Howard Unruh had walked down the stairs and made his way to the Harries’ place. There he discovered he was out of ammunition. Hearing the police sirens, he doubled back to his mother’s house to await his fate.

  IN A LARGER CITY, where officers didn’t walk the beats where they lived, Marshall Thompson might not have taken part in police efforts to apprehend Howard Unruh. But it’s unlikely Thompson could have begged off even if he wished. One of Thompson’s colleagues on the Camden detective squad, John Ferry, also lived in Unruh’s Cramer Hill neighborhood. The summer before, Ferry had tried to help Unruh find a job as a favor to the man’s uncle, a deputy fire chief.

  Ferry had just finished up a midnight-to-eight shift. He was on his way home when he saw his insurance man dead in the street, as well as other victims. “When the other cops started arriving I went home and came back with my shotgun,” Ferry recalled in 1974, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre. With the body count rising and ambulances blaring to and from Cooper Hospital, Thompson was one of more than four dozen cops who descended upon Cramer Hill that morning.

  Howard Unruh had barricaded himself in his home. It was up to a group of policemen led by Detective Russ Maurer to figure out how to coax him out. Maurer sidled up to the front of the house. A throng of cops, including
Thompson, covered Maurer, poised to throw tear gas through the window if Unruh acted rashly. As Courier-Post columnist Charley Humes observed, “Russ [Maurer] could have paid with his life, because the killer seldom missed. That was a brave act.”

  John Ferry was crouched with several other policemen in Unruh’s backyard, awaiting any sign of the man. When Unruh appeared in the window, Ferry turned to James Mulligan, his supervisor on the detective unit, and asked, “Jim, should I take his head off?”

  “No,” replied Mulligan. “There has been plenty of killing.”

  Unruh later told police he “could have killed Johnny Ferry . . . any time I wanted.” Ferry’s past attempt to find Unruh a job may well have saved his life, and perhaps the others. Unruh made his decision. “Okay. I give up, I’m coming down,” he shouted to the cops down below.

  “Where’s that gun?” a sergeant yelled.

  “It’s on my desk, up here in the room,” Unruh said, then repeated: “I’m coming down.”

  Unruh opened the back door and came out with his hands up. More than two dozen officers trained their guns upon him. One yelled, “What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”

  “I’m no psycho,” said Unruh. “I’ve got a good mind.”

  MITCHELL COHEN, THE Camden County prosecutor, had just returned from a summer vacation at the Jersey Shore. He expected his office would be its usual bustling self the morning after Labor Day, and that he would be faced with a fresh round of indictable crimes, from gambling rackets, to robberies, to teens illegally buying beer.

  Mitchell Cohen questions Howard Unruh in a hospital bed, September 7, 1949.

  The office was the opposite of bustling. None of the detectives were around, and the quiet cast a strange pall over the place. Then the phone rang. Larry Doran, chief of detectives, was on the line. He told Cohen that a local man had gone “berserk on River Road and was shooting people,” which was why every police officer was out of the office. He also told Cohen that Unruh was alive and in custody after his twenty-minute rampage.

  Cohen walked over to the police station to interview the mass shooter and found him cooperative. “It was a horrible, revolting narrative,” Cohen recalled in a 1974 interview. “He really gave it cold, cut-and-dry. There was no attempt to conceal or be furtive. He didn’t seem to experience the normal relief of getting it off his chest. There was no remorse, no tears. There was a lack of all emotion.”

  Over the two or so hours he spoke with Cohen, Unruh was concealing something. When Cohen realized what it was, he was stunned. “What really convinced me that [Unruh] was terribly insane was when he got up after two hours and his chair was covered with blood. . . . He had been shot and wasn’t even aware of it.” Unruh was sent to a nearby hospital to recuperate, and Cohen interrogated him further upon his recovery from the bullet wound.

  One month after the massacre, Cohen released the psychiatric reports he’d ordered on Unruh to the public. Unruh had been ruled clinically insane, and therefore not competent to stand trial. And so the deaths of thirteen people and the injuries of many more were never properly accounted for in court. Unruh didn’t go free. He would spend the rest of his life in mental institutions in and around Trenton. But for those who survived the massacre, who attended hearing after hearing to ensure Unruh was never released, it did not seem like proper justice. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-eight, just one month after Charles Cohen, the last survivor of the massacre, died.

  Unruh’s “Walk of Death” also seemed to foreshadow Camden’s deeper decline. “It’s something you never really forget. . . . You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property,” Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society, said in an interview to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the mass shooting. “He didn’t just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence.” The trauma of a mass shooting, and a collective desire to forget, seems like the true beginning of Camden’s downward slope.

  Twelve

  Across America by Oldsmobile

  Vladimir Nabokov finished the 1948–1949 academic year at Cornell University in a state of irritation. He hadn’t found much time to write. He fumed over cuts and changes made without his permission by the New York Times Book Review to his review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, which he had submitted in March. His finances were depleted: Nabokov hadn’t budgeted for unexpected housing costs and the added expense of Social Security (what he termed “old-age insurance”) taken out of his monthly salary. And he was exhausted from teaching a full load of English and Russian literature undergraduate classes, exacerbated by the extra work he’d inflicted upon himself by translating a pivotal Russian poetic masterpiece, “The Song of Igor’s Campaign,” for one of those classes.

  Nabokov had, at least, completed another two chapters of his memoir, Conclusive Evidence, both of which were published later that year in the New Yorker. He did love teaching, and Cornell proved to be more amenable to his idiosyncrasies than Wellesley. But he couldn’t resist complaining: “I have always more to do than I can fit into the most elastic time, even with the most careful packing,” he wrote his friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky in the spring of 1949. “At the moment I am surrounded by the scaffoldings of several large structures on which I have to work by fits and starts and very slowly.”

  Lolita, which he still thought of as The Kingdom by the Sea, was less a work in progress than a seed in Nabokov’s mind, one that wasn’t quite ready to germinate. Perhaps he would make a beautiful work on his summer trip—another cross-country jaunt with Véra and Dmitri. They said goodbye to the Plymouth that had carried them all the way to Palo Alto, California, in 1941, and hello to a used black 1946 Oldsmobile. Dorothy Leuthold, who had shared the driving with Véra eight years earlier, wasn’t available, and neither were two other friends, Andree Bruel and Vladimir Zenzinov. But one of Nabokov’s Russian literature students, Richard Buxbaum, volunteered, and the Nabokovs picked him up at Canandaigua on June 22.

  Their first destination was Salt Lake City, where Nabokov was to take part in a ten-day writers’ conference at the University of Utah starting on July 5. But their westward journey almost ended a few miles from Canandaigua, when Véra changed lanes on the highway and narrowly missed plowing into an oncoming truck. Pulling over, she turned to Buxbaum and said: “Perhaps you’d better drive.”

  With Buxbaum now behind the wheel, the group traveled south of the Great Lakes and across Iowa and Nebraska. The Nabokovs spoke Russian and encouraged Buxbaum to do the same, chiding him when he lapsed into English. Vladimir was never without his notebook, ready to record all observations, however minuscule, of quotidian American life on the road, be it overheard conversation at a restaurant or vivid impressions of the landscape. They arrived in Salt Lake City on July 3, two days before the conference’s start, and were lodged at a sorority house, Alpha Delta Phi, where the Nabokovs had a room with a private bath—a pivotal part of his participation agreement.

  The conference introduced Nabokov to writers he might not have otherwise met, including John Crowe Ransom, the poet and critic who founded and edited the Kenyon Review; and Ted Geisel, a few years away from children’s book superstardom as Dr. Seuss, whom Nabokov recalled as “a charming man, one of the most gifted people on this list.” He also got reacquainted with Wallace Stegner, whom he’d first met at Stanford. Nabokov and Stegner spent the conference debating each other in the novel workshops and in the off-hours playing doubles on the tennis courts, with their sons as partners.

  Nabokov did not have much time to idle, though. He taught three workshops on the novel, one on the short story, and another on biography. He took part in a reading with several poets, and repurposed an old lecture on Russian literature under a new title, “The Government, the Critic, and the Reader.” When the conference ended on July 16, he, Véra, Dmitri, and Richard Buxbaum headed north to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

  Nabokov, once more, was game to hunt more butterflies. But Véra was worried. Th
e Teton Range, she had heard, was a haven for grizzly bears. How would Vladimir protect himself against them carrying a mere butterfly net? Nabokov wrote to the lepidopterist Alexander Klots for advice; Klots assured him that Grand Teton was “just another damned touristed-out National Park.” Any danger would come from clueless visitors, not ravenous bears.

  Nabokov re-creating the process of writing Lolita on note cards.

  From there the quartet headed to Jackson Hole, where Nabokov wanted to look for a particularly elusive subspecies of butterfly, Lycaeides argyrognomon longinus. On the way the Oldsmobile blew a tire. As Dmitri and Richard started changing it, Nabokov said, “I’m no use to you,” and spent the next hour catching butterflies. They arrived the following day, around July 19. For the next month and a half, the Nabokovs’ home base was the Teton Pass Ranch, at the foot of the mountain range. Nabokov’s hunt for his coveted butterfly subspecies proved successful.

  The six-week stay was not without rough moments, though. Dmitri and Richard Buxbaum decided to try climbing Disappointment Peak, next to the Grand Tetons’ East Ridge. The climb to the top, seven thousand feet above base level, was straightforward at first. Then Dmitri, with the overconfidence befitting a fifteen-year-old boy, decided they should switch to a more difficult path, one that required extra equipment they lacked. Realizing they would get stuck up there if they carried on, they turned around, but hours passed—and the sun nearly set—by the time they made it back to Vladimir and Véra, who were understandably frantic.