Wendel knew that someone was pulling strings behind the scenes. When he did offer a confession after nearly a week, using tricks such as false personal information, this mastermind caught him. So, it was someone he knew, and knew pretty well. After several attempts, he finally delivered an acceptable version (although it failed to match important items at the crime scene). But then Parker tried to get Wendel’s family to offer false corroborations. No one cooperated.
Parker bet his reputation on the notion that he could read a man, and that someone like Wendel would grab the spotlight and admit to this nefarious crime. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Parker invited the prosecutor and his team to the Mercer County jail where Wendel was being held.
Hauptmann’s execution was delayed so Wilentz could question Wendel. It was clear at once that the supposed confession had been coerced. After Wendel described his ordeal and recanted, Wilentz dismissed it. The Hauptmann execution was back on track.
By this time, Hauptmann’s wife, Anna, had traveled to Chicago to talk with Leonarde Keeler about his polygraph device. He demonstrated its reliability on her. Reading off a list of numbers, Keeler correctly judged her age from the machine’s recording of her physiological response. Impressed, she returned to tell the governor that Keeler would provide his services at no charge and in secret. However, Keeler leaked. He wanted people to know that he’d been invited into this notorious case. Thus, he undermined his chance to make a contribution.
Time had run out and on April 3, 1936, Hauptmann was executed.
But Parker had trouble on his hands. He’d insisted that Wendel’s recantation of his confession was a sign of his instability – the same mental state that had inspired him to kidnap Baby Lindbergh. But then Wendel’s family implicated Parker in the sordid affair. Now the case was truly explosive. Then the accomplices implicated Parker and the place where Wendel had been tortured was located. Things were dire for the great detective. There were numerous political twists and turns in New Jersey’s “justice” system before Parker finally went to trial for kidnapping. His son was with him. The three accomplices had pled guilty.
The defense was that Parker was fully justified in believing that Wendel was guilty of the Lindbergh kidnapping, because Wendel had repeatedly bragged that he could return the baby alive. Arresting him had been justified. Parker and his son denied any role in the kidnapping and torture. Parker, now a frail man, testified in his own defense. It was a chance for him to explain how he had investigated the Lindbergh kidnapping and believed that Hauptmann was innocent. It soon became clear that throughout his career, he was often lucky rather than shrewd. He made large leaps from little evidence and operated on confirmation bias: Once he had a theory, he made the facts fit.
Parker chewed gum and his son bit his nails as the jury came back into the room the same day they’d gone out. They found both guilty, but they recommended leniency. The judge was unmoved. He made a speech to the effect that he thought that Parker had believed he was above the law. In fact, he had made a “mockery of the process of justice in New Jersey.”
Ellis Parker, his son, and his associates were sentenced to prison for kidnapping. Parker got six years and his son received three. Paul Wendel briefly became a celebrity. Sadly, Parker died in prison. Among the mourners at his funeral was Anna Hauptmann.
Camden Rage Killer
HOWARD UNRUH LIVED WITH HIS MOTHER in her Cramer Hill apartment in Camden. The twenty-eight-year-old WWII vet wasn’t inclined to find work, but he was inclined to obsess over people he believed had wronged him. He made a List of Grudges and prepared his personal arsenal. Then a random straw broke the camel’s back.
Recently he’d built a gate because his neighbors had asked him to stop using theirs. They were on his list. Angry, he’d gone across the Delaware River into downtown Philadelphia to see a movie. He stayed for two. Then he watched them both again. Finally around 3:00 A.M. Unruh went home. As he came to his yard at 3202 River Road, he stopped and stared.
Someone had stolen the gate he’d just made.
He had an idea of who it was. Someone on his List. Maybe several people had conspired together. He hated his neighbors. They talked about him. He’d make them pay. He’d been thinking about this for a while now, and he knew just what to do.
On September 6, 1949, Unruh dressed in a brown suit, white shirt, and striped bowtie. He face was so serious on this morning that it frightened his mother, who left the house. Around 9:20 AM, he picked up his 9-mm German Luger, left over from his service in World War II, and headed for his first victim. He was going to kill a lot of people that day. He also carried a six-inch knife and a tear-gas pen with six shells.
He knew how to be stealthy. He’d learned this overseas. He stepped onto the road at the corner of Harrison and 32nd Street. Two kids were playing near a bakery truck. Unruh walked up, pointed his Luger at the driver, and pulled the trigger. The gun went off, but it missed. The driver ducked away. Unruh didn’t pursue. This man was not on the List.
Not far away, at the local shoe repair shop, Unruh took at shot at John Pilarchik, 27. The man went down. Unruh was satisfied. This man had been on the List. Now he was dead. Payback! Next was Clark Hoover in the barbershop. Unruh entered and opened fire. A child getting a haircut there became collateral damage.
Unruh also shot at a kid looking out an overhead window, but missed. He attempted to enter a tavern, but someone inside had locked the door, so he shot at it. Taking a moment to reload, he realized that he should kill his true enemies, the Cohens, those neighbors who had actively persecuted him over the past two years. They were at the top of his List of Grudges.
Their drugstore was steps away. As he entered, an insurance agent named James Hutton was leaving. Unruh warned him to get out of the way, and he didn’t move quickly enough, so Hutton died on the steps.
Now in the pharmacy, Unruh spotted Maurice Cohen and his wife, Rose. They were running away, up the stairs to their apartment. They must have heard the shots and screams outside. He followed. He shot Rosie first as she hid inside a closet and then killed her 63-year-old mother-in-law, who was on the phone. Unruh saw Maurice jump out a window onto a roof, so he followed and wounded him. Cohen landed on the sidewalk below. Unruh jumped down and finished him off. Then he reloaded.
Nearby, Mrs. Harrie and her 16-year-old son, Armond, were hanging clothing onto a clothesline. Unruh entered their house, but left without killing anyone. He now had hit nine people, killing seven.
Outside, he saw Alvin Day slow his car near the body of James Hutton, so Unruh shot and killed him. From there, he walked to a car stopped at a light and shot through the windshield, killing the female driver and her mother, and wounding a twelve-year-old boy in the back seat with a bullet through his neck. In the car behind them, he shot and wounded Charlie Peterson.
None of these victims had been on the List, but the tailor was. Unruh made for the shop. He shot the man’s wife while she was on her knees begging for her life. Unruh left just as two-year-old Tommy Hamilton looked out his front window. He died that day, too.
Unruh had run out of bullets. He heard sirens wailing. He shrugged and went back home. In his wake, five men, five women and two small children were dead and four others were badly wounded. One would later die, bringing the toll to thirteen dead in twelve minutes. Had he hit and killed everyone at whom he took a shot, the number would have been twice that many.
Unruh barricaded the door in his mother’s apartment. Everyone knew Unruh, so it was easy for arriving officers to pinpoint his location. They surrounded his building, but no one among them had experience with this kind of incident. Who would just go out and start shooting everyone in the street? They didn’t know how to handle him.
Over fifty officers surrounded the two-story building. Unruh shot at them from a window. Officers shot back, hoping that no one was in there with him. Several marksmen mounted onto the roof of a shed.
Around this time, Freda Unruh, the shooter’s mother, was
on her way home. She saw the police barricade and heard people shouting. Then she heard the barrage of gunfire. She knew it was about her son. He’d seemed so angry that morning and he had so many weapons. She turned around and went to her sister’s home five blocks away.
Philip W. Buxton, an assistant city editor of the Camden Evening Courier, looked up Unruh’s phone number, Camden 4-2490W. He placed a call. To his surprise, a man answered, and the following dialogue was reported in several area newspapers:
“Is this Howard Unruh?” Buxton asked.
“Yes, this is Howard. What’s the last name of the party you want?”
“Unruh,” the editor told him.
“Who are you?” Unruh demanded to know. “What do you want?”
“What are they doing to you?”
“They haven’t done anything to me yet,” said Unruh, “but I’m doing plenty to them.”
“How many have you killed?”
“I don’t know yet—I haven’t counted them. But it looks like a pretty good score.”
The editor inquired as to his reason for shooting people.
“I don’t know. I can’t answer that yet. I’m too busy. I’ll have to talk to you later. A couple of friends are coming to get me.”
Officers lobbed a canister of tear gas through the broken bedroom window. It was a dud, and it caused Unruh to take cover. They tossed in a second canister and the place slowly filled with stinging gas. It took another five minutes, but finally Unruh moved aside the white curtain upstairs and said, “Okay, I give up. I’m coming down.”
He came out the door, unarmed, and surrendered.
“What’s the matter with you?” one officer asked Unruh. “Are you a psycho?”
“I’m no psycho,” Unruh responded. “I have a good mind.”
At City Hall, detectives put Unruh into a room for questioning. He remained calm. To the Camden County Prosecutor, Mitchell Cohen, Unruh admitted that before going to sleep the previous night he’d made up his mind to kill his neighbors. They’d deserved it for how they’d treated him. He explained about the gate and then described his method: “I shot them in the chest first, and then I aimed for the head.”
A check of Unruh’s records indicated no report of mental illness. He had an exemplary record from his military service and he did not drink.
Drs. H. E. Yaskin and James Ryan performed psychiatric assessments. Yet his background was unrevealing. Unruh had an average childhood. He’d attended church regularly and had been well behaved. They did learn that whenever he’d killed a German during the war, he’d recorded the details – especially if he’d seen the corpse. He won medals and was honorably discharged in 1945. On the wall of his bedroom in his mother’s apartment, he’d hung crossed pistols, machetes, German bayonets, and photographs of armored artillery in action.
“I had been thinking about killing them for some time,” Unruh commented about his neighbors. “I’d have killed a thousand if I’d had bullets enough.”
When he was able to leave Cooper Hospital, Unruh was sent to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane (Trenton Psychiatric Hospital), to be installed into a private cell in the maximum-security Vroom Building.
Dr. Edward Strecker, of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant for the military, told reporters that war does not cause more insanity cases. Unruh had been sick for a while and the war had merely provided the opportunity for him to learn how to shoot.
A commission found that Unruh had “Dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring.” In other words, Unruh was considered a paranoid schizophrenic, caught in a world of his own delusions. He would be committed to a psychiatric institution. He was sentenced for the remainder of his life to the Vroom building, the unit for the criminally insane.
Relatives of the victims were understandably outraged. Some wanted him to be executed. However, he was never restored to competency and he remained at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until the day he died in 2009.
The Sculptor and the Murderer
I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO INTERVIEW forensic sculptor Frank Bender about his work, which included a sculpture he’d made in a famous New Jersey case. Frank has since died, which was a serious loss to the law enforcement community. When I first met him, I visited him in his Philadelphia studio, which was housed in a converted meat shop. Eighty-eight feet long, it was filled with Bender's paintings and sculptures. A small cellar served as his workshop.
He got his start after a visit to the morgue in 1976. He was taking a fine arts class and he wanted to learn more about human musculature. A friend took him over to the medical examiner's office and the morgue. There, he pointed out the body of a woman known only by a number, 5233. She'd been shot three times in the head at close range and dumped near the airport. Bender thought he could show the way she’d looked during life. The pathologist encouraged him to do so. Bender did a sculpture. When he had the results he wanted, he photographed the bust and the pathologist published this in the newspaper. They were able to identify the 62-year-old woman, which then led to the arrest and conviction of her killer.
“How do you do it?” I asked.
"It's a gift," he responded. "I pay attention to details and then get the picture in my head."
I came to regard Bender as something of a wizard. He could take half of a skull and get a likeness of the victim so close that an identification was fairly quick. He also drew age progressions of fugitives, which is how he came to be involved in the John List case.
There was no real mystery about who the killer of the List family was. What no one knew was where he’d gone. They didn’t even know if he was still alive. Some eighteen years had passed without turning up any leads to his whereabouts. This is what happened:
In November 1971, John Emil List drove away from Breeze Knoll, his three-story, 19-room Victorian mansion in the wealthy area of Westfield. He’d left church music playing, lights on in every room, and dead bodies in the ballroom and attic. Expecting to be apprehended, he drove to the closest airport, abandoned his car, and boarded a plane.
But no one came after him. The 46-year-old fugitive headed to Colorado, lying low and working a menial job until it became clear that he was not going to be arrested for what he’d left behind.
It took a month before the drama teacher of one of the List children, sixteen-year-old Patricia, alerted authorities to something amiss. List had told teachers that he was taking his children out of school for a while, but this teacher remembered List’s daughter saying that if something ever happened to them, it was her father who did it. Apparently, she had expected her father to kill them all.
List was a religious man with an extreme need to keep things under control. He kept everything in its place and he even mowed his lawn in a suit and tie. He’d applied for a firearms registration, for “home protection.” However, he’d had something altogether different in mind. Enamored of the notion of a “perfect murder,” he decided to try to accomplish it.
THE OFFICERS LOOKED THROUGH windows and found one unlatched. Lights were burned out in several rooms, but some were still on. The church music was loud and the heat was off.
They made their way through the empty dining room and into the pantry, where they noticed dark stains on the walls. In the kitchen, the checkerboard floor also bore dark streaks, as if someone had been dragged along it. The officers noticed that a terrible smell was getting stronger as they moved down the hallway. It appeared as if someone had tried to clean up blood – a lot of it. They followed the drag stains toward the dark ballroom.
In one area near the fireplace in this enormous room, there appeared to be mounds of clothing stacked up. It stank badly in here. As their eyes adjusted, the searchers realized they were looking at four corpses placed side by side on sleeping bags. The drama coach who’d come with them identified Helen List and her three children. Upstairs in an attic room, they found List’s 85-year-old mother, shot in the forehead.
/> The police realized that List had a very long head start. He’d left several long notes to explain his murders, which was basically to “free” his family’s souls. Two months earlier, the police had picked up his daughter for walking the streets after midnight and smoking. His wife no longer went to church. They’d been wandering from the righteous path, so it had been his duty to keep them clean.
In fact, however, List had been fired from his job as an accountant, he was deep in debt, and he’d been stealing from his mother’s funds. Murder had been his only way out. He hadn’t killed them for their own good; he’d killed them for his own good. (He would later say that he did not commit suicide because then he would not get into heaven.)
As years passed with no sign of List, detectives attempted to keep the file current. During the mid-1980s, they updated List's photo to show what he would look like sixteen years later and published it in nationwide tabloids.
In 1988, Fox Broadcasting began to air America’s Most Wanted, a television show about fugitives from serious crimes that enlisted the aid of its viewers to help identify potential suspects. The show dramatized the crime and then provided what information they could. As the show gained in popularity, each weekly segment averaged 6,000 calls. Many tips led to arrests Detective Marranca decided to get the List case on the air.
However, the producers thought the case was too old. They turned it down. Then the executive producer, Michael Linder, was scheduled to speak at a law enforcement conference, so Marranca went, taking the List files with him. He approached Linder, who found it fascinating and ordered a segment.
But there was a problem: No one had a recent photo of List, an important factor in other arrests. The one they had was 19 years old. Linder approached Frank Bender. He agreed to do a bust for the show. Even as he started to work, Bender knew that updating the appearance of a man by 18 years would require some research about his personality. He'd need a detailed psychological profile to help him estimate how the man might have altered his appearance.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 3
