Well, forgive me if I seem a bit mystified by this article. What's your opinion?
Police in Oakland, California are investigating how Eunice Workman died and why it took so long to discover her remains. The 76 year-old woman was reported missing by her family nearly seven years ago and the case has remained unsolved. In an odd twist, her daughters found her body when they were cleaning out the woman’s two story home on Wednesday evening, March 25, 2009.
Workman’s family members reportedly discovered her body amid some rubble in an upstairs bedroom, while getting the home cleaned up to sell. The human remains were described as a fully clothed skeleton. An autopsy has been scheduled by the Alameda County coroner in order to determine the cause of death.
There is speculation that debris may have fallen on Eunice and trapped her. The residence, on the 700 block of 47th Street, is described as filled from floor to ceiling with hoarded belongings, and has remained virtually untouched for seven years.
Police and the Health Department received numerous calls from neighbors reporting the condition of the property as well as a strong order shortly after the woman went missing. Those calls were noted in an Oakland law enforcement database, as were reports that squatters had moved in, though apparently no action was taken by police to investigate any of the complaints.
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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Murders of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena
What happened...
Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena were 14 and 16 years old, respectively. They were friends who attended the same high school in Houston, Texas, Waltrip High School. On June 24, 1993, the girls spent the day together....and then died together.
They were last seen by friends about 11:15 at night, when they left a friend's apartment to head home, to beat summer curfew at 11:30. They knew they would be late if they took the normal path home, down W. 34th Street to T.C. Jester, both busy streets. They also knew they would have to pass a sexually-oriented business on that route and so decided to take a well-known shortcut down a railroad track and through a city park to Elizabeth's neighborhood.
The next morning, the girls parents began to frantically look for them, paging them on their pagers, calling their friends to see if they knew where they were, to no avail. The families filed missing persons reports with the Houston Police Department and continued to look for the girls on their own. The Ertmans and Penas gathered friends and neighbors to help them pass out a huge stack of fliers with the girls' pictures all over the Houston area, even giving them to newspaper vendors on the roadside.
Four days after the girls disappeared, a person identifying himself as 'Gonzalez' called the Crimestoppers Tips number. He told the call taker that the missing girls' bodies could be found near T.C. Jester Park at White Oak bayou. The police were sent to the scene and searched the park without finding anything. The police helicopter was flying over the park and this apparently prompted Mr. 'Gonzalez' to make a 911 call, directing the search to move to the other side of the bayou. When the police followed this suggestion, they found the badly decaying bodies of Jenny and Elizabeth.
Jennifer Ertman's dad, Randy Ertman, was about to give an interview regarding the missing girls to a local television reporter when the call came over a cameraman's police scanner that two bodies had been found. Randy commandeered the news van and went to the scene that was now bustling with police activity. Randy Ertman appeared on the local news that evening, screaming at the police officers who were struggling to hold him back, "Does she have blond hair? Does she have blond hair?!!?" Fortunately, they did manage to keep Randy from entering the woods and seeing his daughter's brutalized body and that of her friend Elizabeth, but they were unable to escape that fate themselves. I saw hardened, lifelong cops get tears in their eyes when talking about the scene more than a year later. The bodies were very badly decomposed, even for four days in Houston's brutal summer heat and humidity, particularly in the head, neck and genital areas. The medical examiner later testified that this is how she could be sure as to the horrible brutality of the rapes, beatings and murders.
The break in solving the case came from, of course, the 911 call. It was traced to the home of the brother of one of the men later sentenced to death for these murders. When the police questioned 'Gonzalez', he said that he had made the original call at his 16 year-old wife's urging. She felt sorry for the families and wanted them to be able to put their daughters' bodies to rest. 'Gonzalez' said that his brother was one of the six people involved in killing the girls, and gave police the names of all but one, the new recruit, whom he did not know.
His knowledge of the crimes came from the killers themselves, most of whom came to his home after the murders, bragging and swapping the jewelry they had stolen from the girls.
While Jenny and Elizabeth were living the last few hours of their lives, Peter Cantu, Efrain Perez, Derrick Sean O'Brien, Joe Medellin and Joe's 14 year old brother were initiating a new member, Raul Villareal, into their gang, known as the Black and Whites. Raul was an acquaintance of Efrain and was not known to the other gang members. They had spent the evening drinking beer and then "jumping in" Raul. This means that the new member was required to fight every member of the gang until he passed out and then he would be accepted as a member. Testimony showed that Raul lasted through three of the members before briefly losing consciousness.
The gang continued drinking and 'shooting the breeze' for some time and then decided to leave. Two brothers who had been with them but testified that they were not in the gang left first and passed Jenny and Elizabeth, who were unknowingly walking towards their deaths. When Peter Cantu saw Jenny and Elizabeth, he thought it was a man and a woman and told the other gang members that he wanted to jump him and beat him up. He was frustrated that he had been the one who was unable to fight Raul.
The gang members ran and grabbed Elizabeth and pulled her down the incline, off of the tracks. Testimony showed that Jenny had gotten free and could have run away but returned to Elizabeth when she cried out for Jenny to help her.
For the next hour or so, these beautiful, innocent young girls were subjected to the most brutal gang rapes that most of the investigating officers had ever encountered. The confessions of the gang members that were used at trial indicated that there was never less than 2 men on each of the girls at any one time and that the girls were repeatedly raped orally, anally and vaginally for the entire hour. One of the gang members later said during the brag session that by the time he got to one of the girls, "she was loose and sloppy." One of the boys boasted of having 'virgin blood' on him.
The 14-year-old juvenile later testified that he had gone back and forth between his brother and Peter Cantu since they were the only ones there that he really knew and kept urging them to leave. He said he was told repeatedly by Peter Cantu to "get some". He raped Jennifer and was later sentenced to 40 years for aggravated sexual assault, which was the maximum sentence for a juvenile.
When the rapes finally ended, the horror was not over. The gang members took Jenny and Elizabeth from the clearing into a wooded area, leaving the juvenile behind, saying he was "too little to watch". Jenny was strangled with the belt of Sean O'Brien, with two murderers pulling, one on each side, until the belt broke. Part of the belt was left at the murder scene, the rest was found in O'Brien's home. After the belt broke, the killers used her own shoelaces to finish their job. Medellin later complained that "the bitch wouldn't die" and that it would have been "easier with a gun". Elizabeth was also strangled with her shoelaces, after crying and begging the gang members not to kill them; bargaining, offering to give them her phone number so they could get together again.
The medical examiner testified that Elizabeth's two front teeth were knocked out of her brutalized mouth before she died and that two of Jennifer's ribs were broken after she had died. Testimony showed that the girls' bodies were kicked and their necks were stomped on after the strangulations in order to "make sure that they were really dead."
The juvenile pled guilty to his charge and his sentence will be reviewed when he turns 18, at which time he could be released. The other five were tried for capital murder in Harris County, Texas, convicted and sentenced to death. I attended all five trials with the Ertmans and know too well the awful things that they and the Penas had to hear and see in the course of seeing Justice served for their girls.
Two VERY important things in the criminal justice system have changed as a result of these murders. After the trial of Peter Cantu, Judge Bill Harmon allowed the family members to address the convicted. This had not previously been done in Texas courts and now is done as a matter of routine.
The other change came from the Texas Department of Corrections which instituted a new policy allowing victims' families the choice and right to view the execution of their perpetrators.
I had an ever-swaying opinion on the death penalty before this happened to people I know, before I watched the justice system at work firsthand. I have now come to believe that there are some crimes so heinous, so unconscionable that there can be no other appropriate punishment than the death penalty.
Charlene Hall
Update - 1996
Vinnie Medellin was sentenced at age 14 to forty years in the Texas Department of Corrections for the crime of aggravated sexual assault upon Jennifer Ertman, to which he pled guilty. As a juvenile, he was remanded to the custody of the Texas Youth Commission where he would remain until age eighteen. He testified at all of the other trials except for that of his brother, Jose Medellin. He refused to answer any questions at his brother's trial and was held in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in county jail, to be served at the end of his current sentence.
On September 26, 1996, after three years in the custody of the TYC, a hearing was held to determine the future of the juvenile. Three outcomes were possible; he could have been released on parole, a possibility which was never even discussed; he could have been returned to TYC custody until he reached the age of 21 at which time another hearing would have been held; or he could have been sent to TDC to serve the remainder of his sentence as an adult.
The recommendation of TYC was that he continue treatment at TYC until age 21. He was said to be an excellent inmate and did not have behavior problems and participated in all required therapies. On the other hand, his counselors reported that he still seemed to show no remorse for his part in the crimes and also did not take responsibility for his part.
The courtroom was filled with supporters of the girls' families, most of whom did not know them before the murders and who have become friends through Justice For All or Parents of Murdered Children. There was testimony about the details of the crime from a detective who was present at the murder scene and participated in the investigation and arrests. A therapist from TYC testified as to Vinnie's stay at TYC and the reports of various counselors and therapists. Vinnie's father testified as to his good behavior before this incident.
Randy Ertman took the witness stand to tell the court about his daughter, Jennifer. When asked what Jenny's hobbies were, he elicited bittersweet smiles in the courtroom when he responded, "Shopping!" Randy told the judge that he was living through the worst possible thing that could happen to a family and implored the judge to send Vinnie to TDC and to not make the families repeat this process in three years.
Vinnie took the stand and was asked about his past behavior, his grades at school and how he happened to be with his brother on this night. He read a letter that he had written, telling the parents of the victims that he was sorry for their losses and warning other teenagers away from gangs, saying that he had gone with this gang for one hour and had ruined his life forever.
Judge Pat Shelton did not take a recess to ponder his decision. He said that he agreed with Mr. Ertman, that this is the nightmare of nightmares for a parent. He said that he also agreed with Vinnie Medellin that gangs were destructive but that "you have to mean what you say when you are walking out the front door of your house, not just when you are walking in the door of the courtroom."
He also said "I'm not sure that your future parole officer has even been BORN yet and I'm not sure that you deserve for him to have even been born yet." He rejected the report from the TYC as "psycho-babble" and transferred custody of Venancio Medellin to the Texas Department of Corrections.
Charlene Hall
Update
I just wanted to let visitors know what is going on with the killers' appeals.
Two of the murderers had an execution date set for June 2004, on and the day after the 11th anniversary of the murders. The two were Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal. They both received a stay because of an appeal that was to be heard before the US Supreme Court regarding a case from Missouri that challenged the execution of any murderer who was under the age of 18 at the time of the crime. Both of these killers were not yet 18 when they brutally attacked and killed the girls. Villarreal turned 18 in three months, and Perez turned 18 five months after the murders.
The arguments in this case were heard in the fall of 2004 and the decision was handed down a few months later; no more death penalties for "juvenile" murderers. This will result in these two killers, plus dozens more across the country, being removed from death row and given life sentences instead. In this case, it is life without the possibility of parole for 35 years because that was the alternative to a death sentence in a capital case at the time of the murders. They will certainly never be released from prison, but they should have been executed.
The only consolation is that they will no longer have the protection they now have on death row - they will be in the general population of the prison system and most regular prisoners do not like people who rape and murder children. They might have gotten a reprieve but it may be much worse in the end, a true case of be careful what you wish for...
Additionally, a third killer out of the five who were put on death row for this crime had an appeal pending before the US Supreme Court. In this instance, Joe Medellin claims that he should get a new trial because he is a Mexican national and should have been allowed to contact the Mexican consulate for legal assistance. However, he had lived in the US since he was six years old and had gone to elementary, middle and high school here. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in spring of 2005. In the meantime, US President George Bush instructed, via a "determination," that Texas courts comply with the 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and hold a hearing for Medellin. Texas refused to comply, saying that the federal government and the international ruling have no bearing on state criminal justice statutes. The US Supreme Court agreed to hear Medellin's case again, and sided with Texas against the President, saying that President Bush did not have the authority to order such a review. Medellin has an execution date of August 5, 2008.
Sean O'Brien was executed on July 11, 2006. His final statement was, "I'm sorry. I have always been sorry. It's the worst mistake that I ever made in my whole life. Not because I am here but because of what I did and I hurt a lot of people, you and my family."
The New Orleans Sniper
Mark James Robert Essex was born in Emporia, Kansas. Essex then joined the United States Navy as a dental technician, where he claimed he was subjected to two years of ceaseless racial abuse.[1] He was given a general discharge for unsuitability on 10 February 1971, for "character and behavior disorders." After his discharge, he became involved with black radicals in San Francisco, California and later joined the New York Black Panthers.
[edit]
New Year's Eve, 1972
At the age of 23 and living in New Orleans, Essex began targeting police officers. On New Year's Eve 1972 Essex parked his car and went down Perdido Street, a block from the New Orleans Police Department. He hid in a parking lot across from the busy central lockup and used a Ruger .44 Magnum carbine to kill Cadet Alfred Harrell, 19. Lt. Horace Perez was also wounded in the attack. Interestingly, Harrell was black, although Essex said he was going to kill "just honkies" before beginning his murderous attacks. Essex evaded being taken into custody, and later returned, killing Officer Edwin Hosli Sr.
In 1973 this building was the New Orleans "Howard Johnson's" where Essex took part in a gun-battle with police
[edit]
7 January 1973
It was 10:15am, 7 January 1973, when Essex shot grocer Joe Perniciaro with his .44 Magnum carbine. Essex was making his way to the Downtown Howard Johnson's Hotel. Gaining entry from a fire stairwell on the 18th floor, Essex told three startled black hotel employees not to worry, as he was only there to kill white people. In the hallway in front of room 1829 Essex found a 27-year-old vacationing Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife Betty. After a struggle with Steagall, Essex shot him in the chest. He then shot the wife of the doctor in the back of the head. In the room, he soaked telephone books with lighter fluid and set them ablaze under the curtains. Essex dropped a Pan-African flag onto the floor beside the bodies of the couple as he left. Down on the 11th floor, Essex shot his way into rooms and set more fires. On the 11th floor, he shot and killed Frank Schneider, the hotel assistant manager, and shot Walter Collins, the hotel general manager. Collins died in the hospital three weeks later as a result of the gunshot wounds.
The police and fire department quickly arrived. Two officers tried to use a fire truck's ladder to enter the building, but were shot at by Essex. Attempting to rescue trapped officers, Deputy Chief Sirgo was fatally shot in the spine by Essex. Lt. Lewis Townsend, a Tulane medical student, walked into the open field to carry the wounded officer to safety, then returned to class.
Seeing the story on TV, Lt. General Chuck Pitman of the United States Marine Corps offered the use of a CH-46 military helicopter to assist the police officers. The helicopter was loaded with armed men and sent up. By this time, Essex had retreated up to the roof of the building where he and the helicopter exchanged many rounds over many hours. As nightfall came, Essex managed to hole himself up in a concrete cubicle that would protect him in the northwest side of the roof. As he stepped out in the open to fire again on the helicopter, and after hitting the helicopter's transmission, Essex was barraged with fatal gunfire from police sharpshooters on the roofs of adjacent buildings. An autopsy later revealed more than 200 gunshot wounds.
Before the attack, the television station WWL received a handwritten note from Essex. It read:
'Africa greets you. On December 31, 1972, aprx. 11 p.m., the downtown New Orleans Police Department will be attacked. Reason — many, but the death of two innocent brothers will be avenged. And many others.
P.S. Tell pig Giarrusso the felony action squad ain't shit.
Mata'
[edit]
New Year's Eve, 1972
At the age of 23 and living in New Orleans, Essex began targeting police officers. On New Year's Eve 1972 Essex parked his car and went down Perdido Street, a block from the New Orleans Police Department. He hid in a parking lot across from the busy central lockup and used a Ruger .44 Magnum carbine to kill Cadet Alfred Harrell, 19. Lt. Horace Perez was also wounded in the attack. Interestingly, Harrell was black, although Essex said he was going to kill "just honkies" before beginning his murderous attacks. Essex evaded being taken into custody, and later returned, killing Officer Edwin Hosli Sr.
In 1973 this building was the New Orleans "Howard Johnson's" where Essex took part in a gun-battle with police
[edit]
7 January 1973
It was 10:15am, 7 January 1973, when Essex shot grocer Joe Perniciaro with his .44 Magnum carbine. Essex was making his way to the Downtown Howard Johnson's Hotel. Gaining entry from a fire stairwell on the 18th floor, Essex told three startled black hotel employees not to worry, as he was only there to kill white people. In the hallway in front of room 1829 Essex found a 27-year-old vacationing Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife Betty. After a struggle with Steagall, Essex shot him in the chest. He then shot the wife of the doctor in the back of the head. In the room, he soaked telephone books with lighter fluid and set them ablaze under the curtains. Essex dropped a Pan-African flag onto the floor beside the bodies of the couple as he left. Down on the 11th floor, Essex shot his way into rooms and set more fires. On the 11th floor, he shot and killed Frank Schneider, the hotel assistant manager, and shot Walter Collins, the hotel general manager. Collins died in the hospital three weeks later as a result of the gunshot wounds.
The police and fire department quickly arrived. Two officers tried to use a fire truck's ladder to enter the building, but were shot at by Essex. Attempting to rescue trapped officers, Deputy Chief Sirgo was fatally shot in the spine by Essex. Lt. Lewis Townsend, a Tulane medical student, walked into the open field to carry the wounded officer to safety, then returned to class.
Seeing the story on TV, Lt. General Chuck Pitman of the United States Marine Corps offered the use of a CH-46 military helicopter to assist the police officers. The helicopter was loaded with armed men and sent up. By this time, Essex had retreated up to the roof of the building where he and the helicopter exchanged many rounds over many hours. As nightfall came, Essex managed to hole himself up in a concrete cubicle that would protect him in the northwest side of the roof. As he stepped out in the open to fire again on the helicopter, and after hitting the helicopter's transmission, Essex was barraged with fatal gunfire from police sharpshooters on the roofs of adjacent buildings. An autopsy later revealed more than 200 gunshot wounds.
Before the attack, the television station WWL received a handwritten note from Essex. It read:
'Africa greets you. On December 31, 1972, aprx. 11 p.m., the downtown New Orleans Police Department will be attacked. Reason — many, but the death of two innocent brothers will be avenged. And many others.
P.S. Tell pig Giarrusso the felony action squad ain't shit.
Mata'
Rampage in Camden
Original post from TruTV Crime Library:
Rampage in Camden
It seemed a petty grievance, but it was also a turning point. As soon as he saw the missing gate, just installed that day, he knew that his life would change. He had to take action now, no matter what the cost. He'd been plotting revenge for at least two years and now it was time to act on his "preconceived plan."
Dressing up in a brown tropical-worsted suit, white shirt, and striped bow tie, the slender six-foot recluse picked up his 9-mm. German Luger and went outside. It was Tuesday, September 6, around 9:20 a.m. His mother had just left, so she was out of the way. He could have taken any number of guns from his collection, but he favored the Luger. Just in case, he also grabbed a six-inch knife and a tear gas pen with six shells.
Vaulting over a fence, he cut through some back streets and then stepped out into the road. A map drawn for the Philadelphia Inquirer that evening, which identified the shooter as "the crazed man" and "the maniac," marks where this otherwise quiet World War II veteran went. (The exact sequence of the events that day differs from one newspaper to the next, but they all end up with the same result.)
The lean and quiet man was about to make history. He would become America's first single-episode mass murderer.
In 1949, the Cramer Hill area of Camden, N.J. was generally quiet. But that day, for a mere twelve minutes, the shooter had made himself heard. For too long, he believed, people had been talking about him behind his back. It was time for revenge. No one was going to treat him like this! He put his lessons from the war to good use: he approached the target area from a route that no one would expect.
At the corner of Harrison and 32nd St. sat a bread delivery truck. Two kids played nearby. The driver appeared to be sorting through some papers. He would be the first. Shoving the Luger through the door, the shooter pulled the trigger. But the bread man was quick.
"He missed me by inches," the unidentified driver later told reporter Roxy Di Marco. "I was seated in my bread truck going over my records and he walked up and shoved a pistol through the door at me. I thought it was a holdup. I tumbled into the back of my truck among the breadboxes. He fired one shot and, thank God, it missed me."
The bread man saw the two children in the road, so he grabbed them and hid them in the truck. He then drove down the road to warn others, but it was too late.
The shooter walked along 32nd St. back toward the building where he lived on the second floor. He planned on making some stops before reaching home. He had enemies and he knew where they were. Entering a shoe repair shop, he aimed the gun at John Pilarchik, 27, the man inside bent over a child's shoe. The shooter walked within a yard of him and fired twice. A little boy ran for cover behind the counter, but the shooter ignored him. He now had his first kill of the day, with one bullet in the man's stomach and another in his head. Unlike the bread man, the shoemaker had been on his list. The barber was next.
People who heard the shots later admitted they had dismissed them as cars backfiring or someone shooting at the rats that ran along the Delaware Riverfront. No one could quite understand why people were screaming.
Next door to the shoe shop was Clark Hoover's barbershop. When the shooter entered, Hoover, 33, was cutting the blond hair of a six-year-old boy sitting on a white carousel horse. His mother, Catherine Smith, sat nearby, watching. The shooter took aim and said, "I've got something for you, Clarkie." The barber tried to shield the boy, but he was too slow. The first bullet hit the boy in the head from a short distance and the second one killed Hoover. Both dropped to the floor. The shooter left the woman alone to cry out for help. Two other children who had been in the shop went screaming into the street, but the shooter was oblivious, even when the shrieking mother carried out her dead child, begging for someone to help.
Passing a group of kids who raced for cover, the shooter shot at a boy watching him from a window, but missed. It didn't matter. They were incidental targets. He headed toward the tavern, but the door was locked so he shot two bullets in it. Inside, customers cowered behind the bar. The tavern owner, Frank Engel, rushed up the steps to retrieve his .38 caliber pistol.
Next, the shooter tried to get into a locked restaurant -- without success. He reloaded and then turned his attention to his most hated targets, the Cohens.
Their drugstore was on the corner. The Cohens were his immediate neighbors, and they complained that he had used their gate to get to the door of his apartment. They were among those who had slandered him during the past two years.
As he was about to enter the drugstore, a man he knew well, an insurance agent named James Hutton, came out the door. He greeted the shooter, who politely said, "Excuse me, sir." Hutton did not move, so he received his own fatal bullet. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shooter went into the pharmacy and saw Maurice Cohen and his wife Rose run up the steps to their apartment. Something had alerted them, but that would not save them. The shooter followed, watching Rose try to hide in a bedroom closet and firing three times through the door. He then opened it and shot her in the head. Then he walked through the apartment until he found Maurice's elderly mother, 63, on the telephone. She was calling the police. He killed her with two shots where she stood, but had no time to watch her slump to the bed, because Maurice had jumped out a window onto a porch roof.
The shooter leaned out and hit him with a bullet, wounding him badly enough to send him off the roof to the sidewalk below. He had no time to recover because the shooter had jumped down the steps and come out to the street, where he discharged another shot. Maurice died on the street, but he had succeeded at saving one person, his 12-year-old son, hidden in a closet upstairs. The shooter reloaded.
Nearby, Mrs. Harrie and her 16-year-old son, Armond, were hanging clothing onto a clothesline. Mrs. Harrie went inside and the shooter entered her house. Her son ran in and said that the man shot at them five times, wounding them both in an arm. Then he tried smacking Armond with the butt of the empty pistol, but before anyone could stop him, he left. He now had shot nine people, killing seven.
Circling back, he walked down 32nd St. along the side of the pharmacy and encountered a motorist, Alvin Day, who had slowed down near the body of James Hutton, the dead insurance agent. That was his mistake. The shooter leaned into his car and killed him, leaving the car to stall and roll into the curb.
Then the shooter went over to another car that was stopped at a light across the street. He 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. Next was a car behind this one (according to the map, but not included in other accounts) where he shot a young male, Charlie Peterson, wounding him. He shot into several other cars, too. Peterson staggered from his car and entered the tavern so someone could get him to a hospital. The man on the rampage was then busy firing at a chain grocery store.
Frank Engel leaned out a window and shot at the retreating figure with his own pistol. He thought he had hit the maniac in the thigh, because he paused, but it had not slowed him down. Engle could have fired again and killed him, but he refrained. Later he would say, "I could have put a half dozen shots into him. I don't know why I didn't do it. I wish I had."
Diagram of the crime scene.
Apparently, the shooter wasn't yet finished. He went into the tailor's shop. Zegrino, too, was on his list. By that time, a man who had been in line behind cars into which the maniac had fired had driven to the nearest fire station on 27th Street, six blocks away, to raise an alarm. But there would be two more fatalities.
The tailor's wife, Helga, who had been married to him for only three weeks, got on her knees and begged, "Oh, my God, don't!" Then she screamed so loudly that people in buildings across the street could hear her. Without mercy, the shooter pointed his gun and shot her. Then he left and went strolling down the street.
Tommy Hamilton, aged two, happened to look out his front window, so the shooter aimed and fired right through the glass, taking his last victim. (One Philadelphia Inquirer account has him going into the Hamilton apartment, herding the family into the kitchen, and then killing Tommy. In the New York Times, Meyer Berger has him killing Tommy from outside, but entering the apartment of the Harrie family and shooting at them. Other sources have Mrs. Harrie and her son outside, but the Harrie boy claimed later to reporters that they were both inside when shot. The killer says he shot someone through a window from outside. The likely tale is that he shot the Harries inside but the Hamilton boy from outside.)
He attempted once more to get into a restaurant that stood at the end of River Road near Bergen St. but failed, so as sirens began to wail from a distance, he went around to the back and finally came home to his apartment. He'd been out for less than 15 minutes, but was running low on ammunition. "I ran out of bullets," he later said, "so I went home."
In his wake, twelve people were dead—five men, five women and two small children--and four were badly wounded—a man, a woman, and two teenagers. One of these would later die, bringing the toll to thirteen. Had he hit everyone at whom he took a shot, as Time-Life's Mass Murderers says, the number of deaths would have been twenty-six.
The police were scrambling to go after this man, having run into or been called to the massacre, but the shooter reached his apartment first. He barricaded the door and reloaded. One officer found a boy running in the street, who turned out to be Charles Cohen, the boy who had been spared by being shoved into the closet in his home. He had nearly suffocated, he said, and had finally kicked open the door to get out. He remembered watching his grandmother fall just as the door closed, and he had heard screams and shooting. He was taken to the home of a relative.
People had now identified the rampaging shooter to the first arriving officers as Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old recluse and "religious nut." All available police reserves were dispatched. None had ever dealt with such an incident before. Ironically, Unruh's name in German meant "unrest."
A cordon of between 50 and 60 police officers surrounded the two-story gray stucco building that housed Unruh's apartment at 3202 River Road, behind and next to the Cohens' pharmacy and residence. Unruh was barricaded inside, and he shot at them from a window. From the number of victims, the police believed they were dealing with more than one killer. They armed themselves with rifles and machine guns. For a time, the road was a state of confusion, with people in the milling crowd getting in the line of fire.
The police shot into the apartment in what reporters called a "rain of gunfire" intended to drive the shooter out or to kill him. Pedestrians formed a ring around the area and within half an hour, more than 1,000 people were watching. Several marksmen on the roof of a nearby shed tried to get a clear shot into the room from which the suspect himself was shooting. One officer shouted that he had hit the man.
Meanwhile, the bodies of the dead and the wounded were removed to Cooper Hospital, and some officers were collecting stories from eyewitnesses. One woman suffering from shock and a man who had injured his leg trying to escape were also rushed to the hospital.
Freda Unruh, the shooter's mother, had returned home around this time, just after 10 A.M. When she saw the police barricade and heard spectators talking excitedly about what had occurred, she knew it was about her son, and she wandered off in a daze. She finally made her way (or was taken) to the home of her sister, five blocks away, who found a doctor to treat her and who kept the breaking details of the story from her. It was the sister's opinion that this had all been caused by "terrible experiences" that Howard had suffered during his three-years in the war.
Reporters were aware of the events, and Philip W. Buxton, an assistant city editor of the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's phone number, Camden 4-2490W, and called the home. To his surprise, Unruh answered with a calm voice.
"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?"
Buxton could hear the sound of bullets coming through the window, breaking glass. He identified himself as a friend and then asked, "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 then wanted to know why he was killing 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." He slammed down the phone.
Who those friends might be was never clarified.
To get him to leave the apartment, the detectives on the roof got close enough to lob a canister of tear gas through the broken bedroom window. It proved to be a dud, which alerted Unruh to their strategy, so he went into another room. As he returned, 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, looked out and said, "Okay, I give up. I'm coming down."
"Where's the gun?" a sergeant yelled up at him.
"It's on my desk, up here in the room. I'm coming down."
He came out the door, unarmed, with three dozen guns trained on him, and surrendered without a word to motorcycle officer Charles Hance. Forty-five minutes after he had taken his first shot, Unruh was ushered through the angry crowd, who swore at him and called for a lynching, and into a police car and driven away.
One observer murmured, "You gotta watch them quiet ones."
Three coroners came to oversee the autopsies. The wounded were tended, but the 12-year-old boy who had been sitting in the backseat of a car was in critical condition. The bullet had gone through his neck to the base of his brain. The prognosis was poor.
The police did not comprehend the killer's motives. They had never dealt with such an incident before. "What's the matter with you?" one officer asked Unruh. "Are you a psycho?"
"I'm no psycho," Unruh insisted. "I have a good mind."
Whether or not he was right remained to be seen.
At City Hall, a gaunt Unruh was taken into a private room and questioned for hours by detectives and those who would be involved in prosecuting him. At all times, he seemed calm, as Berger reported for The New York Times. "Only occasionally excessive brightness of his dark eyes indicated that he was anything other than normal."
To Camden County Prosecutor Mitchell Cohen he admitted that before going to sleep the previous night he had made up his mind to go on this rampage. He was willing to offer a shot-by-shot account. "I shot them in the chest first," he explained, "and then I aimed for the head." Although some people were pre-planned targets, a few just got in the way. About the insurance agent on the pharmacy doorstep, Unruh simply explained, "That man didn't act fast enough. He didn't get out of my way."
He'd gone out that morning, he admitted, with one bullet in the chamber, 16 loose bullets and two clips of eight, because his neighbors "had been making derogatory remarks about my character."
A check of his records indicated no report of mental illness before, during, or after his Army service. In fact, he had an exemplary record as a soldier and those who knew him reported that he was not a drinker. No one knew much then about post-traumatic stress disorder, or even combat fatigue (which they called war neurosis). Few people knew much about paranoid character disorders or schizophrenia.
Eighteen civilian witnesses were interviewed and most claimed that Unruh had entered the barbershop first, but Unruh insisted it was the shoemaker, with the barbershop second, so his report became the official one.
Between what neighbors said and what Unruh told his questioners (this was in the days before people were told they had the right to remain silent), a narrative about was pieced together.
It was learned that on September 5, the evening before, Unruh was in Philadelphia at the 24-hour Family Theater, where he watched a double feature. One movie was "I Cheated the Law," about how a lawyer seeking justice tricks a gangster into confessing to murder. The other was "The Lady Gambles," starring Barbara Stanwyck, about a woman with a gambling addiction who destroys nearly everything in her life. Unruh sat through both three times, thinking that Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors. He left the theater for home at about 3:00 a.m.
At that time, he discovered that someone had stolen his outside gate. He and his mother's friend had just installed it that day, because the only other way to get access to the apartment door was through the gate owned by Rose and Maurice Cohen. They owned the pharmacy downstairs in the same building and had their residence next door on the same floor as the Unruh's. Prior to cutting a gateway into the fence, he'd had to walk through a weedy lot to get out to the street, or use their gate. Rose sometimes complained that Howard left the gate standing open, and she and her husband both disliked the loud music that Howard played on the radio late at night. Their squabbles had led to a threat to revoke his gate privileges.
"When I came home last night and found my gate had been taken," Unruh said, "I decided to shoot all of them so I would get the right one."
He went to bed angry and got up around 8:00 a.m. to eat a breakfast of fried eggs that his mother had prepared. She asked him what was wrong but he told her nothing about his plan. He went into the basement to retrieve some items and came back, going into the living room. He seemed to go into a trance, according to the statement Mrs. Unruh gave later, and when she probed to find out what was wrong, he spun around and menaced her with a wrench.
She left the house and went to the home of friends, the Pinnars, to tell them she was afraid that tensions were coming to a head and that her son no longer loved her. (By some accounts, she had narrowly escaped death by leaving when she did.) It was Mr. Pinnar who had helped build the gate the day before. David Everitt claims that Mrs. Unruh had told them she was most afraid of her son's eyes. "Freda Unruh would later tell reporters, he stared at her as if he had no idea who she was."
After she left, Unruh returned to his preparation. He figured that 9:30 was the time to begin, because most of the stores would be open at that time. He could shoot everyone who had been talking about him. He had a German 9-mm. Luger that he had bought for $37.50 at M&H Sporting Goods in Philadelphia, and he had thirty-three rounds of ammunition. It was enough to do what he had in mind.
At just after nine o'clock, he had walked out into the neighborhood, fully armed.
Two people believed they had hit Unruh with a bullet -- the tavern owner and a police officer, but only when Unruh got off his chair after hours of questioning did anyone notice the bloodstain. He had been wounded in his right side but he was uncomplaining throughout the interrogation. He was sent to Cooper Hospital, the same place where the victims were being treated or placed in the morgue.
There he underwent surgery for his own wound, but surgeons were unable to remove the bullet. That meant they could not determine who had actually shot him. (While the newspapers offer no answer in later reports, most accounts attribute the hit to Frank Engel.)
Two psychiatrists, Drs. H. E. Yaskin and James Ryan, were assigned to ask Unruh questions while he was still hospitalized at Cooper. What they learned would be compared with assessments by other professionals later, because it seemed clear that, regardless of his past record, he was destined for psychiatric treatment. They (along with reporters looking for Unruh's acquaintances) learned more about his background.
Unruh was living with his mother, Freda, in a small apartment on River Road. He had a married younger brother living in Hadden Heights and his father, Samuel Unruh, was alive but estranged from the family. (Samuel had come to City Hall when he'd heard about the shootings.)
Unruh had had an ordinary childhood and seemed to have been a well-behaved boy, although reportedly he was quiet and moody. He attended the Lutheran church every Sunday and studied the Bible. When he was of age, he enlisted in the army in 1942 to fight for America during World War II, but most people did not realize that this was not just a patriotic duty for him. It was also an experience of death that he painstakingly documented.
He took excessive care of his rifle and was a brave soldier as a tank gunner in Italy, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and France, taking part in the relief of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Whenever he killed a German, he wrote down the day, hour, and place. If he actually glimpsed the remains, he described the corpse in some detail, to the point where a fellow soldier who read the tight-lipped, Bible-reading soldier's diary was quite shocked. Unruh was honorably discharged in 1945. Like many soldiers, he returned home with medals and a collection of firearms.
He decorated his bedroom in the three-room apartment with military pieces. Berger writes that on the walls he had crossed pistols, machetes, crossed German bayonets, and photographs of armored artillery in action. Even his ashtrays were made from German shells.
Unlike other soldiers, he did not try to find a girlfriend and settle down, although for a few weeks prior to his enlistment he had dated a young woman who went to his church but he had ended this relationship by letter from overseas. After coming home, he mostly remained inside his mother's apartment, rarely going out and becoming increasingly more reclusive. She supported them both with her income as a packer for a soap company, although Howard had made and sold several model trains. For three months, he took pharmacy courses at Temple University in Philadelphia, across the river. He also went to church and attended Bible classes.
"I always thought of Howard as a soft-spoken young man," said the pastor of his Lutheran church. "He came to services regularly before the war. After the war, he came mornings and evenings regularly for about a year. About three months ago, he stopped entirely." The pastor's wife called Unruh "the mildest type of man you could meet."
Mrs. Pinnar, who had corresponded with Howard when he was overseas, said when he came back he was different. "He always appeared to be very nervous. He walked very straight on the street, his head rigid, never glancing to the right or left." She thought he was suffering from "war neurosis."
Unruh's brother, James, 25, said that Howard was a "born-again Christian" who had undergone a deep religious experience and had tried to live by the ways of Christ. Yet he'd become "nervous" over the past couple of months, according to statements James made to the New York Times. "He just seemed changed."
Another church member who visited him a month after he stopped going to church said that he exhibited strange behavior, believing that people were making things hard for him. This is precisely what Unruh's mother had been frightened about.
Unruh's primary recreation was collecting guns and target shooting in the basement. Eventually he stopped going out. Without a job, he just sat around the house, often thinking about his neighbors.
He kept a list of grudges against them, imagining how he would get his revenge. He felt that people in the neighborhood were slandering him, talking behind his back. Next to each offender's name he had recorded that particular person's misdeeds. Then he had placed the word "retal," short for retaliation. "I had been thinking about killing them for some time," Unruh commented. "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had bullets enough."
Despite Unruh's claim that he had pondered all of this while at the movies, many people believed that the damage he saw to the gate when he came home from the theater was the final straw. Freda Unruh had sensed that morning that something terrible was going to happen. As she left the Pinnar's home that morning, according to them, she heard gunfire at a distance and went back in, crying, "Oh Howard, Howard, they're to blame for this." She asked for a phone to call the police, but before she reached it, she fainted. (Some accounts say a doctor revived her and took her to her sister's. Others say that the Pinnars revived her and she went back out.)
In sum, Howard Unruh appeared to be a quiet man who developed suspicions but kept them to himself, letting them simmer and grow into paranoid delusions. Now his fate was in the hands of a team of mental health professionals.
When he was able to leave Cooper Hospital, Unruh was sent to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane (now Trenton Psychiatric Hospital), to be installed into a bed in a private cell in the maximum-security Vroom Building.
Only twelve hours earlier, 10-year-old John Wilson, who had been with his mother and grandmother in a car when all of them were shot, had died from his injury. This put the death count at thirteen. Prosecutor Cohen emphasized that the killer had not been declared insane, but that he would be receiving tests to determine his state of mind. It was not an involuntary admission by the court, but a voluntary agreement that four psychiatrists had recommended and Unruh had accepted. He'd asked to be "subjected to further study and observation."
Since he would need bed rest for at least two weeks anyway, the prosecutor had no reservations about leaving him in the hands of psychiatrists. "It will benefit all concerned," he said. "We will get the full and complete results of all possible study." He filed the charges for 13 "willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought" and three counts of "atrocious assault and battery."
On Friday morning, September 9, Freda Unruh learned from her estranged husband the full facts of her son's fate. "Howard, poor Howard," she cried. "He didn't know what he was doing." She fainted before she had heard all the details. Then she worried that the hospital would not have enough handkerchiefs for Howard's hay fever.
Soon there were rumors that two of the four psychiatrists had determined that Unruh was sane. "He appears cognizant of his surroundings," said Dr. Dean Cavalli, a Camden area physician, "and knows between right and wrong." But he added that he himself was not a psychiatrist. Nothing further was forthcoming. They expected the tests to last more then a month.
At the hospital, Dr. Robert S. Garber, assistant superintendent, and Dr. James Spradley began their assessments, attended by the prosecutor and several detectives. News photographers were permitted to enter the isolation cell for pictures. Unruh submitted without expression, although he turned his head when they asked him to.
Reportedly, Unruh was surprised by the treatment he was receiving. "It is certainly a lot better than I deserve," he commented. He expressed some remorse over dropping out of pharmacy courses, because he could have devoted his life to saving lives. No one records him feeling badly about the victims.
During the testing, the relative of the boy who recently had died showed up in the doorway of Unruh's cell.
"I'm going to get him!" the man yelled, trying to rush inside, but the police guards restrained him and took him out.
Dr. Edward Strecker, of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant for the armed services, told reporters that "war does not cause an increase in the number of actual cases of insanity." (Ironically, on the same page is an incident of another veteran creating havoc in a restaurant by hitting people with a chair and being shot dead by the police. He'd been angry that someone suggested he get psychiatric help.) Strecker believed that Unruh's illness must have built up over the years. The type of killing that he had done could not be traced to military service. The war had simply provided the opportunity to learn the weapons. Although he had not examined Unruh himself, he thought the man had gone "gun crazy" once he started shooting.
Another psychiatrist, unidentified, thought that Unruh's overtly religious character might have given him a savior complex, and when he saw that he had failed to save the world, he reacted.
While they awaited the official results, reporters looked around for earlier signs of Unruh's mental instability. The Woodrow Wilson High School yearbook from 1939 indicated that he was shy and that his ambition was to become a government employee. They called him "How." A check of his records revealed Bs and Cs for things like "health," "courtesy," and "personal impression." There was no evaluation of his intelligence, but his mental alertness was average.
After two months of personality and physiological tests, the assessment was concluded and the final diagnosis was "Dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring." Unruh was a paranoid schizophrenic, caught in a world of his own delusions and separated from reality. His mental illness had come upon him slowly and was not caused by combat.
Pronounced insane, he was immune from criminal prosecution but was sentenced for the remainder of his life to the Vroom building, the unit for the criminally insane.
In Who Killed Precious?, a book about the FBI's approach to mass murderers and serial killers, H. Paul Jeffers says that before Howard Unruh's rampage, mass murders in America were rare. "After Unruh, there's hardly been a year stained by it." On "Mass Murders," an American Justice documentary, it was claimed that mass murders have been on the rise over the past three decades and that around the country there are an average of two a month. Two hundred people each year become victims, and seven of the ten worst cases in our history have occurred since 1980. Many experts see this as a sign of the breakdown of social controls.
A mass murderer, according to the FBI Crime Classification Manual, is someone who kills four or more people in close succession in a single locale, or in closely related locales. This differs from a spree killer, who may have similar motives and ambitions, but who tends to travel over a series of loosely related or unrelated locations. Mass murderers come in two basic varieties: family killers such as John List, who slaughtered his mother, wife, and three children, or classic mass murderers, like Charles Whitman or Richard Speck.
Mass murderers are male, white, usually over 30, and generally own at least one gun. Criminologist James Fox says the availability of guns has influenced the increase in mass murders because guns distance people from their crimes—a desire common to mass murderers. They want it to be easy and fast.
Mass Murderers are typically quite ordinary. They're reclusive, have few if any friends, and have no criminal record. However, they do not let go of past grievances and they tend to build and fester, with minor incidents being perceived as major offenses, and impersonal ones as personal. Some stress, such as a broken relationship, a loss, or unemployment, may be the trigger that sets everything in motion. They blame others for their failures and their motive is generally to strike back, to punish, and to exact as much damage as they can manage. The higher the death toll, the better they have succeeded. People who have been dismissing or ignoring them are not going to forget them now. Their choice of targets is typically irrational, and often does not even include the one against whom they wanted vengeance. Some, like Unruh, have shown signs of psychosis, but most have been judged sane at the time of the incident.
The time period for mass murder can be minutes, hours or days, and such people typically have a mental disorder, are frustrated, and their problems have increased to the point of having to act out aggressively. Charles Whitman and James Huberty are held up as the typical example. In 1966, Whitman took an arsenal up the tower at the University of Texas in Austin to take shots at unsuspecting people from above until he was killed. In an hour and a half, he killed sixteen and wounded thirty. He had also killed his wife and mother that day. Huberty, crushed by unemployment, went "hunting for humans" at a McDonald's fast food restaurant in San Ysidro, California in 1984, killing 21 and wounding 19.
While the FBI manual says that because Unruh moved to different locations, his act was not classified as a mass murder, but other criminologists disagree. His spate of killings was one of the shortest on record, it was a contained neighborhood, and he did not travel in the way that spree killers like Andrew Cunanan or Charles Starkweather did. The manual calls Unruh a spree killer, but there is clearly disagreement on this classification. Since the Crime Classification Manual has not been universally adopted the way the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been in psychiatry, exactly how to classify Unruh seems unclear.
Other examples of killers like him include:
Martin Bryant On April 28, 1996, Bryant, 28, killed the two owners of Seaside Cottages in Australia, then took two semi-automatic rifles to a tourist area in Port Arthur, where in 15 seconds he shot and killed 20 people, wounding fifteen. He then walked around shooting more, got into his car to drive a few hundred yards, killed more people, stole a car, killed more people, took a hostage, and went back to the cottages, where he killed several people driving by and then killed the hostage. The police held him under siege overnight and he ran out when the building went up in flames. His total in less than a day had been 35 dead, 18 wounded. While he is considered a mass murderer, he did move around quite a bit and he killed people in a lot of different areas, but not in the manner in which classic spree killers do, who generally stretch things out over days or weeks.
Michael Ryan - In August 1987, Ryan, 27, a gun-loving, hypersensitive young man prone to exaggerated fantasies, took an AK-47 assault rifle and several other weapons on a shooting spree in Hungerford, England, killing 15 and wounding as many before retreating to his former school and turning the gun on himself. He began in the woods, killing a woman who ran from him, then drove home to shoot the family dogs and grab ammunition. When his car failed to start, he set fire to his house and began a two-mile walk through the streets of Hungerford, shooting both acquaintances and strangers. When his mother found him and confronted him, he killed her, too. She was his eighth victim, felled by four bullets. Police set up blockades and inadvertently sent motorists directly into the killer's path, where their cars were sprayed with bullets and many were killed. Ryan even entered one home and shot an elderly man to death. Finally he went into the John O'Gaunt School. Surrounded by police, he demanded to know about his mother and his dog. Before he shot himself in the head, among his last statements was, "I wish I had stayed in bed."
Marc Lépine Enraged against feminists and believing that some woman got a position intended for him, militaristic Lepine armed himself on December 6, 1989 and committed the worst mass murder in Canadian history. Most of the victims were women and all of them were strangers. Lepine went to the Engineering school at the University of Montreal, separating the women from the men in one classroom before he started shooting. Six died and three were wounded. Then he left the classroom and roamed the building, now treading the line that divides mass from spree killers. Like Unruh, he just kept walking and shooting when he found people. Then he went into another classroom, killed more students and then plunged a knife into a woman struggling to survive a shot. As a final gesture, he turned a pistol on himself. Fourteen women had died; fifteen men and women had been wounded, and in the months to come, some people who had survived would kill themselves.
Given these examples of killers who move around in a fairly tight area, either we need to pinpoint a better distinction between mass and spree killers or develop a new category into which to place those who appear to be not quite in either camp. Most criminologists call Unruh a mass murderer, and his rampage does bear all the marks of a disgruntled, militaristic loner who decided to just act out.
"The more random the killings," says sociologist Jack Levin, "and the more it occurs in public places among absolute strangers, the more likely it is that the killer is psychotic, or insane."
That was not the case with Howard Unruh. He knew most of the people he had killed, he'd placed them on a list, it was his neighborhood, and the spate of killings was the result of what he called a preconceived plan. He even believed he was not crazy. When he heard sirens, he rushed home. Thus he knew that what he had done was illegal or wrong. He was aware and he had made a plan. That frame of mind generally does not pass in today's courts as insane.
Dr. Richard Noll, professor of psychology at DeSales University and author of The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and the Psychotic Disorders, now in its second edition, offers a perspective on the manner in which Unruh may have been diagnosed in 1949.
"It sounds more like schizoid personality disorder or paranoid personality disorder, in modern DSM-IV parlance. When someone was violent back then, they always invoked the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. If someone was distraught (from emotional trauma, for example), that might be called 'pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia.'
"Paranoid schizophrenia is traditionally one of the most misused diagnostic labels in both clinical and forensic contexts. Schizophrenia is an insidious, chronic brain disease that takes many forms, the paranoid subtype being one of them. The age of onset for this subtype tends to be slightly older than for other subtypes, has a better prognosis, and is most likely to be helped by treatment. The hallmark of the paranoid subtype is delusions, usually of a persecutory or grandiose nature. For the individual in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital since 1949 who killed 13 people because he believed his neighbors were slandering him, you would have to place that explosive event in the context of prior mental status and subsequent clinical observations. Anyone -- especially a male under great stress due to a divorce, job loss, death of a loved one, etc. -- could become paranoid and violent under conditions of extreme and prolonged stress.
"In a clinical contest, it is really quite difficult to distinguish between paranoid schizophrenia, an agitated manic episode of bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, a brief psychotic reaction, or someone with a paranoid personality disorder (a character disorder, not a psychotic disorder), who simply 'loses it.' Without a detailed clinical history, it is hard to assess whether the diagnosis was a correct one. However, it is true that the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia have tightened up considerably since the 1940s when this incident took place, and back then the term paranoid schizophrenia was liberally dispensed in a forensic context as almost a euphemism for 'raving madman.' Anytime violence entered the case history, the 'paranoid schizophrenia' diagnostic label was almost automatically applied, even if someone was bipolar and violent, or under stress and violent."
In other words, had he gone on his rampage today, his paranoia would have been acknowledged but unless psychosis actually affected his ability to appreciate that what he was doing was wrong or made him unable to comply with what he knew, then he would have been declared legally sane.
Howard Unruh remained at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as of this writing, is still there, according to Ramsey, mopping floors. Now in his 80s, he reportedly has spoken to no one since his mother died some years ago. He has ground privileges now and just keeps to himself.
Bibliography
"Besieged Slayer Talks with Reporter on Phone," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Berger, Meyer. "Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street, The New York Times, Sept 6, 1949.
"Boy Escapes Unruh's Shots, Almost Suffocates in Closet," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 7, 1949.
Di Marco, Roxy, "Slayer Missed his First Target," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Douglas, John, Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess, and Robert K. Ressler. Crime Classification Manual. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Everitt, David. Human Monsters: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Most Vicious Murderers. New York: Contemporary Books, 1993.
"I ran Out of Bullets, Went Home," Killer Says," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Jeffers, H. Paul. Who Stole Precious? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
"Killer 'Changed' by War Service," New York Times, Sept. 7, 1949.
Lane, Brian. Chronicle of Twentieth Century Murder, Vol. II. New York: Berkley, 1995.
Mass Murderers. Time-Life Books, Alexandria, VA , 1992.
"Mad Camden Killer Spirited To State Asylum at Trenton," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 8, 1949.
"Madman Traces His Murder Path," Philadelphia Inquirer. Sept 7, 1949.
"Mass Murder: An American Tragedy," American Justice, A&E Network, 1994.
"Mother Wanders off In Daze as She Sees Siege of Home," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept, 7, 1949.
"Nation's First Mass Murder was the Top Story of Sept 6, 1949," Courier-Post, April 29, 2003.
Noll, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and the Psychotic Disorders, Second Edition, New York: Facts on File, 2000.
"Police Coordinate Stories of Killings," Philadelphia Inquirer. Sept 6, 1949.
Ramsey, Ed. "The Silent Life of the Incurable Howard Unruh." The Trenton Times, May 4, 2003.
Scott, Gini Graham. Homicide: One Hundred Years of Murder in America. Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1998.
Smith, Wilfred. "Mad Camden Veteran Shoots Twelve Dead, Wounds Four in Mass Murder Orgy," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Tomlinson, Gerald. Murdered in Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
"Unruh's Church Shocked by News," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
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With special thanks to John Timpane, opinion page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Rampage in Camden
It seemed a petty grievance, but it was also a turning point. As soon as he saw the missing gate, just installed that day, he knew that his life would change. He had to take action now, no matter what the cost. He'd been plotting revenge for at least two years and now it was time to act on his "preconceived plan."
Dressing up in a brown tropical-worsted suit, white shirt, and striped bow tie, the slender six-foot recluse picked up his 9-mm. German Luger and went outside. It was Tuesday, September 6, around 9:20 a.m. His mother had just left, so she was out of the way. He could have taken any number of guns from his collection, but he favored the Luger. Just in case, he also grabbed a six-inch knife and a tear gas pen with six shells.
Vaulting over a fence, he cut through some back streets and then stepped out into the road. A map drawn for the Philadelphia Inquirer that evening, which identified the shooter as "the crazed man" and "the maniac," marks where this otherwise quiet World War II veteran went. (The exact sequence of the events that day differs from one newspaper to the next, but they all end up with the same result.)
The lean and quiet man was about to make history. He would become America's first single-episode mass murderer.
In 1949, the Cramer Hill area of Camden, N.J. was generally quiet. But that day, for a mere twelve minutes, the shooter had made himself heard. For too long, he believed, people had been talking about him behind his back. It was time for revenge. No one was going to treat him like this! He put his lessons from the war to good use: he approached the target area from a route that no one would expect.
At the corner of Harrison and 32nd St. sat a bread delivery truck. Two kids played nearby. The driver appeared to be sorting through some papers. He would be the first. Shoving the Luger through the door, the shooter pulled the trigger. But the bread man was quick.
"He missed me by inches," the unidentified driver later told reporter Roxy Di Marco. "I was seated in my bread truck going over my records and he walked up and shoved a pistol through the door at me. I thought it was a holdup. I tumbled into the back of my truck among the breadboxes. He fired one shot and, thank God, it missed me."
The bread man saw the two children in the road, so he grabbed them and hid them in the truck. He then drove down the road to warn others, but it was too late.
The shooter walked along 32nd St. back toward the building where he lived on the second floor. He planned on making some stops before reaching home. He had enemies and he knew where they were. Entering a shoe repair shop, he aimed the gun at John Pilarchik, 27, the man inside bent over a child's shoe. The shooter walked within a yard of him and fired twice. A little boy ran for cover behind the counter, but the shooter ignored him. He now had his first kill of the day, with one bullet in the man's stomach and another in his head. Unlike the bread man, the shoemaker had been on his list. The barber was next.
People who heard the shots later admitted they had dismissed them as cars backfiring or someone shooting at the rats that ran along the Delaware Riverfront. No one could quite understand why people were screaming.
Next door to the shoe shop was Clark Hoover's barbershop. When the shooter entered, Hoover, 33, was cutting the blond hair of a six-year-old boy sitting on a white carousel horse. His mother, Catherine Smith, sat nearby, watching. The shooter took aim and said, "I've got something for you, Clarkie." The barber tried to shield the boy, but he was too slow. The first bullet hit the boy in the head from a short distance and the second one killed Hoover. Both dropped to the floor. The shooter left the woman alone to cry out for help. Two other children who had been in the shop went screaming into the street, but the shooter was oblivious, even when the shrieking mother carried out her dead child, begging for someone to help.
Passing a group of kids who raced for cover, the shooter shot at a boy watching him from a window, but missed. It didn't matter. They were incidental targets. He headed toward the tavern, but the door was locked so he shot two bullets in it. Inside, customers cowered behind the bar. The tavern owner, Frank Engel, rushed up the steps to retrieve his .38 caliber pistol.
Next, the shooter tried to get into a locked restaurant -- without success. He reloaded and then turned his attention to his most hated targets, the Cohens.
Their drugstore was on the corner. The Cohens were his immediate neighbors, and they complained that he had used their gate to get to the door of his apartment. They were among those who had slandered him during the past two years.
As he was about to enter the drugstore, a man he knew well, an insurance agent named James Hutton, came out the door. He greeted the shooter, who politely said, "Excuse me, sir." Hutton did not move, so he received his own fatal bullet. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shooter went into the pharmacy and saw Maurice Cohen and his wife Rose run up the steps to their apartment. Something had alerted them, but that would not save them. The shooter followed, watching Rose try to hide in a bedroom closet and firing three times through the door. He then opened it and shot her in the head. Then he walked through the apartment until he found Maurice's elderly mother, 63, on the telephone. She was calling the police. He killed her with two shots where she stood, but had no time to watch her slump to the bed, because Maurice had jumped out a window onto a porch roof.
The shooter leaned out and hit him with a bullet, wounding him badly enough to send him off the roof to the sidewalk below. He had no time to recover because the shooter had jumped down the steps and come out to the street, where he discharged another shot. Maurice died on the street, but he had succeeded at saving one person, his 12-year-old son, hidden in a closet upstairs. The shooter reloaded.
Nearby, Mrs. Harrie and her 16-year-old son, Armond, were hanging clothing onto a clothesline. Mrs. Harrie went inside and the shooter entered her house. Her son ran in and said that the man shot at them five times, wounding them both in an arm. Then he tried smacking Armond with the butt of the empty pistol, but before anyone could stop him, he left. He now had shot nine people, killing seven.
Circling back, he walked down 32nd St. along the side of the pharmacy and encountered a motorist, Alvin Day, who had slowed down near the body of James Hutton, the dead insurance agent. That was his mistake. The shooter leaned into his car and killed him, leaving the car to stall and roll into the curb.
Then the shooter went over to another car that was stopped at a light across the street. He 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. Next was a car behind this one (according to the map, but not included in other accounts) where he shot a young male, Charlie Peterson, wounding him. He shot into several other cars, too. Peterson staggered from his car and entered the tavern so someone could get him to a hospital. The man on the rampage was then busy firing at a chain grocery store.
Frank Engel leaned out a window and shot at the retreating figure with his own pistol. He thought he had hit the maniac in the thigh, because he paused, but it had not slowed him down. Engle could have fired again and killed him, but he refrained. Later he would say, "I could have put a half dozen shots into him. I don't know why I didn't do it. I wish I had."
Diagram of the crime scene.
Apparently, the shooter wasn't yet finished. He went into the tailor's shop. Zegrino, too, was on his list. By that time, a man who had been in line behind cars into which the maniac had fired had driven to the nearest fire station on 27th Street, six blocks away, to raise an alarm. But there would be two more fatalities.
The tailor's wife, Helga, who had been married to him for only three weeks, got on her knees and begged, "Oh, my God, don't!" Then she screamed so loudly that people in buildings across the street could hear her. Without mercy, the shooter pointed his gun and shot her. Then he left and went strolling down the street.
Tommy Hamilton, aged two, happened to look out his front window, so the shooter aimed and fired right through the glass, taking his last victim. (One Philadelphia Inquirer account has him going into the Hamilton apartment, herding the family into the kitchen, and then killing Tommy. In the New York Times, Meyer Berger has him killing Tommy from outside, but entering the apartment of the Harrie family and shooting at them. Other sources have Mrs. Harrie and her son outside, but the Harrie boy claimed later to reporters that they were both inside when shot. The killer says he shot someone through a window from outside. The likely tale is that he shot the Harries inside but the Hamilton boy from outside.)
He attempted once more to get into a restaurant that stood at the end of River Road near Bergen St. but failed, so as sirens began to wail from a distance, he went around to the back and finally came home to his apartment. He'd been out for less than 15 minutes, but was running low on ammunition. "I ran out of bullets," he later said, "so I went home."
In his wake, twelve people were dead—five men, five women and two small children--and four were badly wounded—a man, a woman, and two teenagers. One of these would later die, bringing the toll to thirteen. Had he hit everyone at whom he took a shot, as Time-Life's Mass Murderers says, the number of deaths would have been twenty-six.
The police were scrambling to go after this man, having run into or been called to the massacre, but the shooter reached his apartment first. He barricaded the door and reloaded. One officer found a boy running in the street, who turned out to be Charles Cohen, the boy who had been spared by being shoved into the closet in his home. He had nearly suffocated, he said, and had finally kicked open the door to get out. He remembered watching his grandmother fall just as the door closed, and he had heard screams and shooting. He was taken to the home of a relative.
People had now identified the rampaging shooter to the first arriving officers as Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old recluse and "religious nut." All available police reserves were dispatched. None had ever dealt with such an incident before. Ironically, Unruh's name in German meant "unrest."
A cordon of between 50 and 60 police officers surrounded the two-story gray stucco building that housed Unruh's apartment at 3202 River Road, behind and next to the Cohens' pharmacy and residence. Unruh was barricaded inside, and he shot at them from a window. From the number of victims, the police believed they were dealing with more than one killer. They armed themselves with rifles and machine guns. For a time, the road was a state of confusion, with people in the milling crowd getting in the line of fire.
The police shot into the apartment in what reporters called a "rain of gunfire" intended to drive the shooter out or to kill him. Pedestrians formed a ring around the area and within half an hour, more than 1,000 people were watching. Several marksmen on the roof of a nearby shed tried to get a clear shot into the room from which the suspect himself was shooting. One officer shouted that he had hit the man.
Meanwhile, the bodies of the dead and the wounded were removed to Cooper Hospital, and some officers were collecting stories from eyewitnesses. One woman suffering from shock and a man who had injured his leg trying to escape were also rushed to the hospital.
Freda Unruh, the shooter's mother, had returned home around this time, just after 10 A.M. When she saw the police barricade and heard spectators talking excitedly about what had occurred, she knew it was about her son, and she wandered off in a daze. She finally made her way (or was taken) to the home of her sister, five blocks away, who found a doctor to treat her and who kept the breaking details of the story from her. It was the sister's opinion that this had all been caused by "terrible experiences" that Howard had suffered during his three-years in the war.
Reporters were aware of the events, and Philip W. Buxton, an assistant city editor of the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's phone number, Camden 4-2490W, and called the home. To his surprise, Unruh answered with a calm voice.
"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?"
Buxton could hear the sound of bullets coming through the window, breaking glass. He identified himself as a friend and then asked, "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 then wanted to know why he was killing 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." He slammed down the phone.
Who those friends might be was never clarified.
To get him to leave the apartment, the detectives on the roof got close enough to lob a canister of tear gas through the broken bedroom window. It proved to be a dud, which alerted Unruh to their strategy, so he went into another room. As he returned, 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, looked out and said, "Okay, I give up. I'm coming down."
"Where's the gun?" a sergeant yelled up at him.
"It's on my desk, up here in the room. I'm coming down."
He came out the door, unarmed, with three dozen guns trained on him, and surrendered without a word to motorcycle officer Charles Hance. Forty-five minutes after he had taken his first shot, Unruh was ushered through the angry crowd, who swore at him and called for a lynching, and into a police car and driven away.
One observer murmured, "You gotta watch them quiet ones."
Three coroners came to oversee the autopsies. The wounded were tended, but the 12-year-old boy who had been sitting in the backseat of a car was in critical condition. The bullet had gone through his neck to the base of his brain. The prognosis was poor.
The police did not comprehend the killer's motives. They had never dealt with such an incident before. "What's the matter with you?" one officer asked Unruh. "Are you a psycho?"
"I'm no psycho," Unruh insisted. "I have a good mind."
Whether or not he was right remained to be seen.
At City Hall, a gaunt Unruh was taken into a private room and questioned for hours by detectives and those who would be involved in prosecuting him. At all times, he seemed calm, as Berger reported for The New York Times. "Only occasionally excessive brightness of his dark eyes indicated that he was anything other than normal."
To Camden County Prosecutor Mitchell Cohen he admitted that before going to sleep the previous night he had made up his mind to go on this rampage. He was willing to offer a shot-by-shot account. "I shot them in the chest first," he explained, "and then I aimed for the head." Although some people were pre-planned targets, a few just got in the way. About the insurance agent on the pharmacy doorstep, Unruh simply explained, "That man didn't act fast enough. He didn't get out of my way."
He'd gone out that morning, he admitted, with one bullet in the chamber, 16 loose bullets and two clips of eight, because his neighbors "had been making derogatory remarks about my character."
A check of his records indicated no report of mental illness before, during, or after his Army service. In fact, he had an exemplary record as a soldier and those who knew him reported that he was not a drinker. No one knew much then about post-traumatic stress disorder, or even combat fatigue (which they called war neurosis). Few people knew much about paranoid character disorders or schizophrenia.
Eighteen civilian witnesses were interviewed and most claimed that Unruh had entered the barbershop first, but Unruh insisted it was the shoemaker, with the barbershop second, so his report became the official one.
Between what neighbors said and what Unruh told his questioners (this was in the days before people were told they had the right to remain silent), a narrative about was pieced together.
It was learned that on September 5, the evening before, Unruh was in Philadelphia at the 24-hour Family Theater, where he watched a double feature. One movie was "I Cheated the Law," about how a lawyer seeking justice tricks a gangster into confessing to murder. The other was "The Lady Gambles," starring Barbara Stanwyck, about a woman with a gambling addiction who destroys nearly everything in her life. Unruh sat through both three times, thinking that Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors. He left the theater for home at about 3:00 a.m.
At that time, he discovered that someone had stolen his outside gate. He and his mother's friend had just installed it that day, because the only other way to get access to the apartment door was through the gate owned by Rose and Maurice Cohen. They owned the pharmacy downstairs in the same building and had their residence next door on the same floor as the Unruh's. Prior to cutting a gateway into the fence, he'd had to walk through a weedy lot to get out to the street, or use their gate. Rose sometimes complained that Howard left the gate standing open, and she and her husband both disliked the loud music that Howard played on the radio late at night. Their squabbles had led to a threat to revoke his gate privileges.
"When I came home last night and found my gate had been taken," Unruh said, "I decided to shoot all of them so I would get the right one."
He went to bed angry and got up around 8:00 a.m. to eat a breakfast of fried eggs that his mother had prepared. She asked him what was wrong but he told her nothing about his plan. He went into the basement to retrieve some items and came back, going into the living room. He seemed to go into a trance, according to the statement Mrs. Unruh gave later, and when she probed to find out what was wrong, he spun around and menaced her with a wrench.
She left the house and went to the home of friends, the Pinnars, to tell them she was afraid that tensions were coming to a head and that her son no longer loved her. (By some accounts, she had narrowly escaped death by leaving when she did.) It was Mr. Pinnar who had helped build the gate the day before. David Everitt claims that Mrs. Unruh had told them she was most afraid of her son's eyes. "Freda Unruh would later tell reporters, he stared at her as if he had no idea who she was."
After she left, Unruh returned to his preparation. He figured that 9:30 was the time to begin, because most of the stores would be open at that time. He could shoot everyone who had been talking about him. He had a German 9-mm. Luger that he had bought for $37.50 at M&H Sporting Goods in Philadelphia, and he had thirty-three rounds of ammunition. It was enough to do what he had in mind.
At just after nine o'clock, he had walked out into the neighborhood, fully armed.
Two people believed they had hit Unruh with a bullet -- the tavern owner and a police officer, but only when Unruh got off his chair after hours of questioning did anyone notice the bloodstain. He had been wounded in his right side but he was uncomplaining throughout the interrogation. He was sent to Cooper Hospital, the same place where the victims were being treated or placed in the morgue.
There he underwent surgery for his own wound, but surgeons were unable to remove the bullet. That meant they could not determine who had actually shot him. (While the newspapers offer no answer in later reports, most accounts attribute the hit to Frank Engel.)
Two psychiatrists, Drs. H. E. Yaskin and James Ryan, were assigned to ask Unruh questions while he was still hospitalized at Cooper. What they learned would be compared with assessments by other professionals later, because it seemed clear that, regardless of his past record, he was destined for psychiatric treatment. They (along with reporters looking for Unruh's acquaintances) learned more about his background.
Unruh was living with his mother, Freda, in a small apartment on River Road. He had a married younger brother living in Hadden Heights and his father, Samuel Unruh, was alive but estranged from the family. (Samuel had come to City Hall when he'd heard about the shootings.)
Unruh had had an ordinary childhood and seemed to have been a well-behaved boy, although reportedly he was quiet and moody. He attended the Lutheran church every Sunday and studied the Bible. When he was of age, he enlisted in the army in 1942 to fight for America during World War II, but most people did not realize that this was not just a patriotic duty for him. It was also an experience of death that he painstakingly documented.
He took excessive care of his rifle and was a brave soldier as a tank gunner in Italy, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and France, taking part in the relief of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Whenever he killed a German, he wrote down the day, hour, and place. If he actually glimpsed the remains, he described the corpse in some detail, to the point where a fellow soldier who read the tight-lipped, Bible-reading soldier's diary was quite shocked. Unruh was honorably discharged in 1945. Like many soldiers, he returned home with medals and a collection of firearms.
He decorated his bedroom in the three-room apartment with military pieces. Berger writes that on the walls he had crossed pistols, machetes, crossed German bayonets, and photographs of armored artillery in action. Even his ashtrays were made from German shells.
Unlike other soldiers, he did not try to find a girlfriend and settle down, although for a few weeks prior to his enlistment he had dated a young woman who went to his church but he had ended this relationship by letter from overseas. After coming home, he mostly remained inside his mother's apartment, rarely going out and becoming increasingly more reclusive. She supported them both with her income as a packer for a soap company, although Howard had made and sold several model trains. For three months, he took pharmacy courses at Temple University in Philadelphia, across the river. He also went to church and attended Bible classes.
"I always thought of Howard as a soft-spoken young man," said the pastor of his Lutheran church. "He came to services regularly before the war. After the war, he came mornings and evenings regularly for about a year. About three months ago, he stopped entirely." The pastor's wife called Unruh "the mildest type of man you could meet."
Mrs. Pinnar, who had corresponded with Howard when he was overseas, said when he came back he was different. "He always appeared to be very nervous. He walked very straight on the street, his head rigid, never glancing to the right or left." She thought he was suffering from "war neurosis."
Unruh's brother, James, 25, said that Howard was a "born-again Christian" who had undergone a deep religious experience and had tried to live by the ways of Christ. Yet he'd become "nervous" over the past couple of months, according to statements James made to the New York Times. "He just seemed changed."
Another church member who visited him a month after he stopped going to church said that he exhibited strange behavior, believing that people were making things hard for him. This is precisely what Unruh's mother had been frightened about.
Unruh's primary recreation was collecting guns and target shooting in the basement. Eventually he stopped going out. Without a job, he just sat around the house, often thinking about his neighbors.
He kept a list of grudges against them, imagining how he would get his revenge. He felt that people in the neighborhood were slandering him, talking behind his back. Next to each offender's name he had recorded that particular person's misdeeds. Then he had placed the word "retal," short for retaliation. "I had been thinking about killing them for some time," Unruh commented. "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had bullets enough."
Despite Unruh's claim that he had pondered all of this while at the movies, many people believed that the damage he saw to the gate when he came home from the theater was the final straw. Freda Unruh had sensed that morning that something terrible was going to happen. As she left the Pinnar's home that morning, according to them, she heard gunfire at a distance and went back in, crying, "Oh Howard, Howard, they're to blame for this." She asked for a phone to call the police, but before she reached it, she fainted. (Some accounts say a doctor revived her and took her to her sister's. Others say that the Pinnars revived her and she went back out.)
In sum, Howard Unruh appeared to be a quiet man who developed suspicions but kept them to himself, letting them simmer and grow into paranoid delusions. Now his fate was in the hands of a team of mental health professionals.
When he was able to leave Cooper Hospital, Unruh was sent to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane (now Trenton Psychiatric Hospital), to be installed into a bed in a private cell in the maximum-security Vroom Building.
Only twelve hours earlier, 10-year-old John Wilson, who had been with his mother and grandmother in a car when all of them were shot, had died from his injury. This put the death count at thirteen. Prosecutor Cohen emphasized that the killer had not been declared insane, but that he would be receiving tests to determine his state of mind. It was not an involuntary admission by the court, but a voluntary agreement that four psychiatrists had recommended and Unruh had accepted. He'd asked to be "subjected to further study and observation."
Since he would need bed rest for at least two weeks anyway, the prosecutor had no reservations about leaving him in the hands of psychiatrists. "It will benefit all concerned," he said. "We will get the full and complete results of all possible study." He filed the charges for 13 "willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought" and three counts of "atrocious assault and battery."
On Friday morning, September 9, Freda Unruh learned from her estranged husband the full facts of her son's fate. "Howard, poor Howard," she cried. "He didn't know what he was doing." She fainted before she had heard all the details. Then she worried that the hospital would not have enough handkerchiefs for Howard's hay fever.
Soon there were rumors that two of the four psychiatrists had determined that Unruh was sane. "He appears cognizant of his surroundings," said Dr. Dean Cavalli, a Camden area physician, "and knows between right and wrong." But he added that he himself was not a psychiatrist. Nothing further was forthcoming. They expected the tests to last more then a month.
At the hospital, Dr. Robert S. Garber, assistant superintendent, and Dr. James Spradley began their assessments, attended by the prosecutor and several detectives. News photographers were permitted to enter the isolation cell for pictures. Unruh submitted without expression, although he turned his head when they asked him to.
Reportedly, Unruh was surprised by the treatment he was receiving. "It is certainly a lot better than I deserve," he commented. He expressed some remorse over dropping out of pharmacy courses, because he could have devoted his life to saving lives. No one records him feeling badly about the victims.
During the testing, the relative of the boy who recently had died showed up in the doorway of Unruh's cell.
"I'm going to get him!" the man yelled, trying to rush inside, but the police guards restrained him and took him out.
Dr. Edward Strecker, of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant for the armed services, told reporters that "war does not cause an increase in the number of actual cases of insanity." (Ironically, on the same page is an incident of another veteran creating havoc in a restaurant by hitting people with a chair and being shot dead by the police. He'd been angry that someone suggested he get psychiatric help.) Strecker believed that Unruh's illness must have built up over the years. The type of killing that he had done could not be traced to military service. The war had simply provided the opportunity to learn the weapons. Although he had not examined Unruh himself, he thought the man had gone "gun crazy" once he started shooting.
Another psychiatrist, unidentified, thought that Unruh's overtly religious character might have given him a savior complex, and when he saw that he had failed to save the world, he reacted.
While they awaited the official results, reporters looked around for earlier signs of Unruh's mental instability. The Woodrow Wilson High School yearbook from 1939 indicated that he was shy and that his ambition was to become a government employee. They called him "How." A check of his records revealed Bs and Cs for things like "health," "courtesy," and "personal impression." There was no evaluation of his intelligence, but his mental alertness was average.
After two months of personality and physiological tests, the assessment was concluded and the final diagnosis was "Dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring." Unruh was a paranoid schizophrenic, caught in a world of his own delusions and separated from reality. His mental illness had come upon him slowly and was not caused by combat.
Pronounced insane, he was immune from criminal prosecution but was sentenced for the remainder of his life to the Vroom building, the unit for the criminally insane.
In Who Killed Precious?, a book about the FBI's approach to mass murderers and serial killers, H. Paul Jeffers says that before Howard Unruh's rampage, mass murders in America were rare. "After Unruh, there's hardly been a year stained by it." On "Mass Murders," an American Justice documentary, it was claimed that mass murders have been on the rise over the past three decades and that around the country there are an average of two a month. Two hundred people each year become victims, and seven of the ten worst cases in our history have occurred since 1980. Many experts see this as a sign of the breakdown of social controls.
A mass murderer, according to the FBI Crime Classification Manual, is someone who kills four or more people in close succession in a single locale, or in closely related locales. This differs from a spree killer, who may have similar motives and ambitions, but who tends to travel over a series of loosely related or unrelated locations. Mass murderers come in two basic varieties: family killers such as John List, who slaughtered his mother, wife, and three children, or classic mass murderers, like Charles Whitman or Richard Speck.
Mass murderers are male, white, usually over 30, and generally own at least one gun. Criminologist James Fox says the availability of guns has influenced the increase in mass murders because guns distance people from their crimes—a desire common to mass murderers. They want it to be easy and fast.
Mass Murderers are typically quite ordinary. They're reclusive, have few if any friends, and have no criminal record. However, they do not let go of past grievances and they tend to build and fester, with minor incidents being perceived as major offenses, and impersonal ones as personal. Some stress, such as a broken relationship, a loss, or unemployment, may be the trigger that sets everything in motion. They blame others for their failures and their motive is generally to strike back, to punish, and to exact as much damage as they can manage. The higher the death toll, the better they have succeeded. People who have been dismissing or ignoring them are not going to forget them now. Their choice of targets is typically irrational, and often does not even include the one against whom they wanted vengeance. Some, like Unruh, have shown signs of psychosis, but most have been judged sane at the time of the incident.
The time period for mass murder can be minutes, hours or days, and such people typically have a mental disorder, are frustrated, and their problems have increased to the point of having to act out aggressively. Charles Whitman and James Huberty are held up as the typical example. In 1966, Whitman took an arsenal up the tower at the University of Texas in Austin to take shots at unsuspecting people from above until he was killed. In an hour and a half, he killed sixteen and wounded thirty. He had also killed his wife and mother that day. Huberty, crushed by unemployment, went "hunting for humans" at a McDonald's fast food restaurant in San Ysidro, California in 1984, killing 21 and wounding 19.
While the FBI manual says that because Unruh moved to different locations, his act was not classified as a mass murder, but other criminologists disagree. His spate of killings was one of the shortest on record, it was a contained neighborhood, and he did not travel in the way that spree killers like Andrew Cunanan or Charles Starkweather did. The manual calls Unruh a spree killer, but there is clearly disagreement on this classification. Since the Crime Classification Manual has not been universally adopted the way the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been in psychiatry, exactly how to classify Unruh seems unclear.
Other examples of killers like him include:
Martin Bryant On April 28, 1996, Bryant, 28, killed the two owners of Seaside Cottages in Australia, then took two semi-automatic rifles to a tourist area in Port Arthur, where in 15 seconds he shot and killed 20 people, wounding fifteen. He then walked around shooting more, got into his car to drive a few hundred yards, killed more people, stole a car, killed more people, took a hostage, and went back to the cottages, where he killed several people driving by and then killed the hostage. The police held him under siege overnight and he ran out when the building went up in flames. His total in less than a day had been 35 dead, 18 wounded. While he is considered a mass murderer, he did move around quite a bit and he killed people in a lot of different areas, but not in the manner in which classic spree killers do, who generally stretch things out over days or weeks.
Michael Ryan - In August 1987, Ryan, 27, a gun-loving, hypersensitive young man prone to exaggerated fantasies, took an AK-47 assault rifle and several other weapons on a shooting spree in Hungerford, England, killing 15 and wounding as many before retreating to his former school and turning the gun on himself. He began in the woods, killing a woman who ran from him, then drove home to shoot the family dogs and grab ammunition. When his car failed to start, he set fire to his house and began a two-mile walk through the streets of Hungerford, shooting both acquaintances and strangers. When his mother found him and confronted him, he killed her, too. She was his eighth victim, felled by four bullets. Police set up blockades and inadvertently sent motorists directly into the killer's path, where their cars were sprayed with bullets and many were killed. Ryan even entered one home and shot an elderly man to death. Finally he went into the John O'Gaunt School. Surrounded by police, he demanded to know about his mother and his dog. Before he shot himself in the head, among his last statements was, "I wish I had stayed in bed."
Marc Lépine Enraged against feminists and believing that some woman got a position intended for him, militaristic Lepine armed himself on December 6, 1989 and committed the worst mass murder in Canadian history. Most of the victims were women and all of them were strangers. Lepine went to the Engineering school at the University of Montreal, separating the women from the men in one classroom before he started shooting. Six died and three were wounded. Then he left the classroom and roamed the building, now treading the line that divides mass from spree killers. Like Unruh, he just kept walking and shooting when he found people. Then he went into another classroom, killed more students and then plunged a knife into a woman struggling to survive a shot. As a final gesture, he turned a pistol on himself. Fourteen women had died; fifteen men and women had been wounded, and in the months to come, some people who had survived would kill themselves.
Given these examples of killers who move around in a fairly tight area, either we need to pinpoint a better distinction between mass and spree killers or develop a new category into which to place those who appear to be not quite in either camp. Most criminologists call Unruh a mass murderer, and his rampage does bear all the marks of a disgruntled, militaristic loner who decided to just act out.
"The more random the killings," says sociologist Jack Levin, "and the more it occurs in public places among absolute strangers, the more likely it is that the killer is psychotic, or insane."
That was not the case with Howard Unruh. He knew most of the people he had killed, he'd placed them on a list, it was his neighborhood, and the spate of killings was the result of what he called a preconceived plan. He even believed he was not crazy. When he heard sirens, he rushed home. Thus he knew that what he had done was illegal or wrong. He was aware and he had made a plan. That frame of mind generally does not pass in today's courts as insane.
Dr. Richard Noll, professor of psychology at DeSales University and author of The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and the Psychotic Disorders, now in its second edition, offers a perspective on the manner in which Unruh may have been diagnosed in 1949.
"It sounds more like schizoid personality disorder or paranoid personality disorder, in modern DSM-IV parlance. When someone was violent back then, they always invoked the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. If someone was distraught (from emotional trauma, for example), that might be called 'pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia.'
"Paranoid schizophrenia is traditionally one of the most misused diagnostic labels in both clinical and forensic contexts. Schizophrenia is an insidious, chronic brain disease that takes many forms, the paranoid subtype being one of them. The age of onset for this subtype tends to be slightly older than for other subtypes, has a better prognosis, and is most likely to be helped by treatment. The hallmark of the paranoid subtype is delusions, usually of a persecutory or grandiose nature. For the individual in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital since 1949 who killed 13 people because he believed his neighbors were slandering him, you would have to place that explosive event in the context of prior mental status and subsequent clinical observations. Anyone -- especially a male under great stress due to a divorce, job loss, death of a loved one, etc. -- could become paranoid and violent under conditions of extreme and prolonged stress.
"In a clinical contest, it is really quite difficult to distinguish between paranoid schizophrenia, an agitated manic episode of bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, a brief psychotic reaction, or someone with a paranoid personality disorder (a character disorder, not a psychotic disorder), who simply 'loses it.' Without a detailed clinical history, it is hard to assess whether the diagnosis was a correct one. However, it is true that the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia have tightened up considerably since the 1940s when this incident took place, and back then the term paranoid schizophrenia was liberally dispensed in a forensic context as almost a euphemism for 'raving madman.' Anytime violence entered the case history, the 'paranoid schizophrenia' diagnostic label was almost automatically applied, even if someone was bipolar and violent, or under stress and violent."
In other words, had he gone on his rampage today, his paranoia would have been acknowledged but unless psychosis actually affected his ability to appreciate that what he was doing was wrong or made him unable to comply with what he knew, then he would have been declared legally sane.
Howard Unruh remained at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as of this writing, is still there, according to Ramsey, mopping floors. Now in his 80s, he reportedly has spoken to no one since his mother died some years ago. He has ground privileges now and just keeps to himself.
Bibliography
"Besieged Slayer Talks with Reporter on Phone," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Berger, Meyer. "Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street, The New York Times, Sept 6, 1949.
"Boy Escapes Unruh's Shots, Almost Suffocates in Closet," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 7, 1949.
Di Marco, Roxy, "Slayer Missed his First Target," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Douglas, John, Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess, and Robert K. Ressler. Crime Classification Manual. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Everitt, David. Human Monsters: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Most Vicious Murderers. New York: Contemporary Books, 1993.
"I ran Out of Bullets, Went Home," Killer Says," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Jeffers, H. Paul. Who Stole Precious? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
"Killer 'Changed' by War Service," New York Times, Sept. 7, 1949.
Lane, Brian. Chronicle of Twentieth Century Murder, Vol. II. New York: Berkley, 1995.
Mass Murderers. Time-Life Books, Alexandria, VA , 1992.
"Mad Camden Killer Spirited To State Asylum at Trenton," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 8, 1949.
"Madman Traces His Murder Path," Philadelphia Inquirer. Sept 7, 1949.
"Mass Murder: An American Tragedy," American Justice, A&E Network, 1994.
"Mother Wanders off In Daze as She Sees Siege of Home," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept, 7, 1949.
"Nation's First Mass Murder was the Top Story of Sept 6, 1949," Courier-Post, April 29, 2003.
Noll, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and the Psychotic Disorders, Second Edition, New York: Facts on File, 2000.
"Police Coordinate Stories of Killings," Philadelphia Inquirer. Sept 6, 1949.
Ramsey, Ed. "The Silent Life of the Incurable Howard Unruh." The Trenton Times, May 4, 2003.
Scott, Gini Graham. Homicide: One Hundred Years of Murder in America. Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1998.
Smith, Wilfred. "Mad Camden Veteran Shoots Twelve Dead, Wounds Four in Mass Murder Orgy," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
Tomlinson, Gerald. Murdered in Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
"Unruh's Church Shocked by News," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 6, 1949.
"Unruh's Mother Faints When Told of Murders; Killer Guarded in Cell," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 9, 1949.
"Unruh Described as Good Soldier," Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 7, 1949.
With special thanks to John Timpane, opinion page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In Memory of Kristin Palumbo Longo
Kristin Mary Palumbo Longo
Visitation:
Thursday, October 1, 2009
4:00 PM until 8:00 PM
V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home Inc.
203 Second Ave.
Frankfort, NY 13340
Service:
Friday, October 2, 2009
10:00 AM
Our Lady Queen of Apostles Church
S. Frankfort St
Frankfort, NY 13340
Utica - Kristin Mary Palumbo Longo
Utica - Kristin Mary Palumbo Longo, 39, of Cosby Manor Rd passed away unexpectedly Monday, September 28, 2009 in her home.
She was born in Ilion on October 18, 1969, the daughter of Joseph and Judith Hopkins Palumbo. She attended St. Mary's School, Frankfort, Annunciation School,Ilion and graduated from Notre Dame High School with the class of 1987. She later attended and graduated St. Elizabeth's School of Nursing and received her Nursing Degree from MVCC with the class of 2000. Kristin was a Registered Nurse for Liberty Mutual Insurance, Syracuse.
Kristin is survived by her beloved children, Joseph A. Longo, Catherine Longo, Gianna Longo and Jared Longo; her mother, Judith Palumbo, of Utica; her father & step mother, Joseph & Joann Palumbo of Utica; paternal grandmother, Vita Palumbo of Frankfort; one brother & sister in law, Joseph & Jami Palumbo of San Marcos, CA; one sister & brother in law, Gina & Steve Pearce of New Hartford; her uncles & aunts, Frank & Jill Palumbo of Frankfort, Rick & Joanne Palumbo of Green Island and John & Nancy Dick of Eagle River, AK; she was the “favorite” aunt of Luca Palumbo, Sienna Palumbo, Kendall Pearce, Jackson Pearce, Anthony Gilberti and A J Gilberti; her cousins, Rick Palumbo, Christina & Jerry Sangiacomo, Elizabeth Dick, Nathaniel Dick and Matthew Palumbo & his fiancée, Brook Bennett and several great aunts, great uncles, cousins, extended family & friends. She was predeceased by paternal grandfather, Joseph Palumbo and her maternal grandfather & grandmother, Orrin & Dorothy Hopkins.
Her funeral will be held Friday at 9:15 am from the V. J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, Inc., 203 Second Ave. Frankfort and at 10:00 am in Our Lady Queen Of Apostles Church where a Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated by the Rev. Anthony Barrett, pastor and assisted by Deacon James Bower. Interment will be in St. Agnes Cemetery. Calling hours will be Thursday from 4-8 at the V. J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, Inc. Contributions in Kristin's memory may be made to her children's college fund to the
2009 Longo Childrens Fund
8855 Tibbitts Rd
New Hartford, NY 13413
Envelopes will be available at the funeral home.
Expressions of sympathy may be placed on Kristin’s online memorial page by going to www.iocovozzifuneralhomes.com
UTICA —
In the hours after Kristin Longo’s death Monday, her friends and relatives struggled to come to terms with what had happened.
“I don’t understand what goes through people’s minds sometimes,” friend Angelina Aceto wrote on her Facebook page. “A good woman/friend was lost today, please help me in praying for her friends and family, that they get through this awful time in their lives.”
Another acquaintance wrote simply on Facebook: “This is hell on earth.”
Longo, 39, was fatally stabbed at her Deerfield home Monday by her husband, Utica police Investigator Joseph Longo Jr. Kristin Longo recently had filed for divorce, and Longo Jr. also killed himself during the incident, police said.
As a lifelong resident of the Mohawk Valley, Longo — born Kristin Mary Palumbo — touched many lives here. An official obituary was not available Tuesday, but those who knew her described the former nurse as kind, outgoing and, above all else, a devoted mother.
Longo’s attention to her four children, ages 9 to 17, especially stood out to Aceto, who had been her hairdresser for several years.
“She loved her family and friends so much,” Aceto said in an e-mail Monday evening. “She was a ‘mom-on-the-go,’ always running for those kids. I remember one time she came and got her color on her head, then ran out to bring one of them to their tutor … plastic cap and all.”
Longo’s grandmother, Vita Palumbo of Frankfort, said her granddaughter’s concern for other people was evident even at a young age.
“She was very respectful, very friendly,” she said. “Would do anything for you if she could, if you needed her.”
Palumbo said Longo is the daughter of Joseph and Judy Palumbo of Utica. Her sister, Gina Pearce, still lives in the area. Her brother, Joseph Palumbo, lives in San Diego.
Longo graduated from Mohawk Valley Community College in 2000 with an associate’s degree in nursing, and later worked as a nurse at Kernan Elementary in the Utica City School District. The name of her current employer was not immediately available.
She also is a 1987 graduate of Notre Dame High School. A handful of teachers at the school Tuesday said they still remembered her more than two decades later.
Barbara McDonough, who taught science at the time, described Longo as an “outgoing, caring person” who “enjoyed life as a student.”
McDonough, math teacher Kevin Morrisroe and religion teacher Paul Hanley agreed Longo was popular and well liked by her classmates, and the teachers still could rattle off a list of her high school activities: cheerleading, the Future Business Leaders of America, yearbook and the planning committees for the junior prom and the senior ball.
“She’s in our prayers, and her family is in our prayers, and that’s all we can say,” Hanley added.
Funeral arrangements for Longo are being handled by the V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home in Frankfort but were incomplete as of Tuesday evening.
Joseph Longo’s funeral arrangements are being handled separately through the Matt Funeral Home in Utica.
__________________________
Attorneys for Longos speak of hours preceding deaths
Both seemed calm after divorce proceedings
Loading multimedia...
By ROCCO LaDUCA
Observer-Dispatch
Posted Sep 30, 2009 @ 06:25 PM
Last update Oct 01, 2009 @ 01:06 AM
UTICA —
When Utica police Investigator Joseph Longo Jr. left divorce proceedings Monday, he didn’t appear to be angry about what was going on, his attorney, Devin Garramone, said Wednesday.
Likewise, his wife, Kristin Longo, seemed satisfied with how the day’s proceedings had ended, according to her attorney, George Massoud.
But in the few hours that followed, something went terribly wrong.
While Longo Jr.’s reasons for stabbing his wife more than a dozen times later that afternoon inside their Deerfield home will forever remain left to speculation, his attorney offered what he believed might have pushed the 13-year police veteran over the edge.
“He was still in love with her, and I think that he would have been happier to reconcile with herKRISTIN LONGO SERVICES
Kristin Longo’s funeral will take place at 9:15 a.m. Friday at the V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, 203 Second Ave., Frankfort, and at 10 a.m. at Our Lady Queen Of Apostles Church, where a Mass of Christian burial will be celebrated. Calling hours will take place from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday.
than get a divorce, but then it finally dawned on him that he was losing his wife,” said Garramone.
“The prospect of losing her, and her meeting somebody else and starting a new life, it freaked him out,” Garramone added. “Like any typical break-up, there was a period of reckoning, and I think that’s where he was at. It was a real critical point, and he just went overboard.”
After 41-year-old Longo Jr. repeatedly stabbed his wife shortly before 4 p.m. Monday, he then stabbed himself about 20 times and slashed at his throat, police said. Once Kristin Longo died, Longo Jr. was alive long enough to be discovered by their 8-year-old son and to admit to the stabbings.
Although Kristin Longo, 39, did fear for her safety as her husband’s emotional stability spiraled downward in the weeks leading up to the murder-suicide, she appeared to believe everything would be OK after Monday’s appearance in state Supreme Court, Massoud said.
At Kristin Longo’s request, Acting Supreme Court Justice James Griffith issued a “refrain from” order prohibiting Longo Jr. from assaulting, harassing, stalking, menacing or committing any other crimes against his wife and her family, Massoud said. On Friday, the same day Longo Jr. was served with divorce papers, Kristin Longo also had been granted exclusive use and possession of their home, and Longo Jr. was ordered to stay away.
But a “refrain from” order doesn’t have as many teeth as a formal order of protection, which would have required a mandatory arrest upon violation, Massoud said. Any violation of the “refrain from” order would likely have resulted in Longo Jr. being found in contempt of court.
An order of protection was never issued against Longo Jr., Massoud said, because Kristin Longo believed such an order would cause too much trouble for Longo Jr. at his job with the Police Department and possibly result in his termination.
“She was working with his employer to keep him under control and to hopefully get him the help he needed,” particularly counseling for his emotional and violent tendencies, Massoud said. “If he was terminated from his job, then he’d be out on his own and only God knows what would happen.”
Kristin Longo felt confident that her husband’s police supervisors were keeping their eye on him, since they already had taken away his service weapon and prohibited him from having any contact with his wife while he was on duty, Massoud said.
The Police Department, however, was only able to legally control Longo Jr.’s actions during the eight hours he was at work, Police Chief Daniel LaBella said. Longo Jr.’s behavior had already become a concern over the summer after he inappropriately displayed his weapon on two occasions at Thomas R. Proctor High School. He had since been removed from the school as a police liaison and reassigned to desk duty.
So when Kristin Longo and Longo Jr. left Monday’s divorce proceeding, Massoud believed his client had taken all of the appropriate precautions.
“She certainly seemed to have a sense of relief that her husband was going to behave himself and abide by the terms of the order,” Massoud said. “It was her hope that she would have actual protection, and not just the protection of a piece of paper.”
Kristin Longo’s desire for a divorce not only stemmed from marital troubles over her husband’s alleged infidelity and threats of violence; it also was meant to end the longtime verbal abuse she and her four children had to endure, Massoud said.
“The course of action that she took is consistent with an abused person who was trying to appease her husband and trying to work things out in a fashion that is not scandalous,” Massoud said.
Kristin Longo’s relief walking out of court, therefore, is exactly what might be expected from someone who is trying to escape a cycle of domestic abuse, said Rosemary Vennero, non-residential director of the YWCA of the Mohawk Valley.
“More so than not, victims of abuse who go to court don’t necessarily see their abuser as being punished,” Vennero said. Instead, “They just want the abuse to stop, and they want to see someone make them stop. They think that will be good enough, and she probably did feel really good about the step she finally took.”
But in the end, the resolution wasn’t the one Kristin Longo was looking for, Vennero said. Once a victim of domestic abuse starts to take action, she said, that person is at a 50-percent-or-higher risk of either further abuse or possible death.
“Kristin began taking action 10 days earlier, and in Joe’s mind, in his desperation, he probably thought he was losing control of Kristin,” Vennero said.
In the end, though, neither Longo probably ever expected their lives would end so tragically, Longo Jr.’s attorney said.
“I’m sure it surprised her that this happened, and Joe might have even surprised himself,” Garramone said.
_____________________________________
DEERFIELD, N.Y. (WKTV) - Just days after the tragic death of Kristin Palumbo Longo at the hands of her husband - Joseph Longo Jr. - during a killing/suicide in their Cosby Manor Road Home, the family of Kristin Palumbo Longo says they are honoring her memory, but looking to the future of her children.
"Our family wishes to extend our gratitude for the tremendous outpouring of love and support," the family said in a statement. "Our priorities at this time are to ensure that the immediate and future needs of the children are met and that we honor the life and memory of our beloved Kristin. We ask that everyone please respect the privacy of the family and appreciate your continued support."
State Police found the body of Kristin, and a critically wounded Longo in the home Monday after one of the couple's children came home then ran to a neighbor's house to call 911. Investigators say Longo admitted stabbing his
wife and then himself.
Kristin Longo's attorney, George Massoud, says his client had exclusive use and possession of the home, and that while Longo's presence there would not have lead to his arrest, he would have been held in contempt of court.
Massoud says Kristin Longo had a 'refrain from' order against Longo. The attorney says the wording and protection offered is similar to a restraining order, stating that Longo must refrain from stalking, harassing or otherwise menacing his wife.
State Police, who are investigating the crime, say that neither they nor Oneida County Sheriff's deputies had ever responded to the Longo's Deerfield home for any kind of domestic dispute.
Attorney Massoud, also a long-time family friend of Kristen Longo, says 'disbelief and devastation' are the only words remotely strong enough to describe what those who knew her are feeling following Monday's tragedy.
On Tuesday, Utica Police Chief Daniel LaBella - Longo's former partner of five years - said that the department had pulled Longo's gun about a month ago, stemming from an incident at Proctor High School.
LaBella said Longo allegedly pulled his weapon while working security at the school. Ironically, Longo's disciplinary hearing for that incident was supposed to happen Tuesday morning, September 29 at 11 a.m.
Instead, Longo's former boss and partner held a news conference at that time regarding the tragic incident.
Chief LaBella also confirms that Longo did appear in Oneida County Family Court Monday, and that he was despondent over situations regarding his marriage.
Court documents show the two had several recent court appearances regarding apparent divorce proceedings and settlements. Chief LaBella says the department saw Longo suffering and made counseling available to him, and that Longo was in the process of taking advantage of the counseling. Still, LaBella says he never saw this coming.
"The police department here did everything possible," LaBella said. "We could not have prevented this in any shape or fashion. I've known Joe for a number of years and his wife and if you were to ask me if I'd seen this coming I would have to say honestly, no. I don't think anybody-anybody seen this coming."
As far as mourning the former investigator, LaBella says, yes, Longo had a long, distinguished career at the Utica Police Department. But LaBella says Longo forfeited the right to any honor that goes with that when he committed this crime, leaving their four children without parents.
The chief says the department is starting a fund drive for the couple's four children, whom he says are the real victims in this tragedy.
Joseph Anthony Longo
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Joseph Anthony Longo, Jr., 41, died on Monday, September 28, 2009 at St. Elizabeth Medical Center.
Joe was born in New Hartford on April 10, 1968, a son of Joseph A. Longo and the late Sue (Allbright) Longo. He was raised in Deerfield and was a graduate of Whitesboro High School. Joe continued his education studying criminal justice at MVCC. Following college, he was employed for many years as a corrections officer for the Oneida County Correctional Facility. In 1995, he became a police officer at the Utica Police Department and had received numerous commendations for meritorious service in his fourteen year career. Joe was an avid hockey player and active dad with his kids in their all their activities.
Joe and Kristin had four beautiful children, Joseph A. , III, Catherine Vita, Gianna Noel and Jared Thomas Longo. He also leaves his father, Joseph Sr.; brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Jennifer Longo; sister and brother-in-law, Stacy and Chris Gilberti; his aunt, Carol “Yaya” Longo; and also many beloved nieces, nephews, friends, and co-workers. He was predeceased by his beloved mother, Sue; grandparents, Darby and Cattie Longo and Muriel and Jim Allbright.
His Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Monday at 12 noon at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel/Blessed Sacrament Parish in Utica. Interment will be in Calvary Cemetery.
Relatives and friends may call on Monday prior to mass at Mt. Carmel Church from 10 a.m. to 12 noon.
A special thank you goes out to the many friends, relatives, neighbors, emergency personnel, local police, state police, and co-workers for their kindness and concern during this most difficult time.
In memory of Joe, please consider the needs of his children, especially in your prayers.
Arrangements are with The Matt Funeral Home of Utica.
Visitation:
Thursday, October 1, 2009
4:00 PM until 8:00 PM
V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home Inc.
203 Second Ave.
Frankfort, NY 13340
Service:
Friday, October 2, 2009
10:00 AM
Our Lady Queen of Apostles Church
S. Frankfort St
Frankfort, NY 13340
Utica - Kristin Mary Palumbo Longo
Utica - Kristin Mary Palumbo Longo, 39, of Cosby Manor Rd passed away unexpectedly Monday, September 28, 2009 in her home.
She was born in Ilion on October 18, 1969, the daughter of Joseph and Judith Hopkins Palumbo. She attended St. Mary's School, Frankfort, Annunciation School,Ilion and graduated from Notre Dame High School with the class of 1987. She later attended and graduated St. Elizabeth's School of Nursing and received her Nursing Degree from MVCC with the class of 2000. Kristin was a Registered Nurse for Liberty Mutual Insurance, Syracuse.
Kristin is survived by her beloved children, Joseph A. Longo, Catherine Longo, Gianna Longo and Jared Longo; her mother, Judith Palumbo, of Utica; her father & step mother, Joseph & Joann Palumbo of Utica; paternal grandmother, Vita Palumbo of Frankfort; one brother & sister in law, Joseph & Jami Palumbo of San Marcos, CA; one sister & brother in law, Gina & Steve Pearce of New Hartford; her uncles & aunts, Frank & Jill Palumbo of Frankfort, Rick & Joanne Palumbo of Green Island and John & Nancy Dick of Eagle River, AK; she was the “favorite” aunt of Luca Palumbo, Sienna Palumbo, Kendall Pearce, Jackson Pearce, Anthony Gilberti and A J Gilberti; her cousins, Rick Palumbo, Christina & Jerry Sangiacomo, Elizabeth Dick, Nathaniel Dick and Matthew Palumbo & his fiancée, Brook Bennett and several great aunts, great uncles, cousins, extended family & friends. She was predeceased by paternal grandfather, Joseph Palumbo and her maternal grandfather & grandmother, Orrin & Dorothy Hopkins.
Her funeral will be held Friday at 9:15 am from the V. J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, Inc., 203 Second Ave. Frankfort and at 10:00 am in Our Lady Queen Of Apostles Church where a Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated by the Rev. Anthony Barrett, pastor and assisted by Deacon James Bower. Interment will be in St. Agnes Cemetery. Calling hours will be Thursday from 4-8 at the V. J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, Inc. Contributions in Kristin's memory may be made to her children's college fund to the
2009 Longo Childrens Fund
8855 Tibbitts Rd
New Hartford, NY 13413
Envelopes will be available at the funeral home.
Expressions of sympathy may be placed on Kristin’s online memorial page by going to www.iocovozzifuneralhomes.com
UTICA —
In the hours after Kristin Longo’s death Monday, her friends and relatives struggled to come to terms with what had happened.
“I don’t understand what goes through people’s minds sometimes,” friend Angelina Aceto wrote on her Facebook page. “A good woman/friend was lost today, please help me in praying for her friends and family, that they get through this awful time in their lives.”
Another acquaintance wrote simply on Facebook: “This is hell on earth.”
Longo, 39, was fatally stabbed at her Deerfield home Monday by her husband, Utica police Investigator Joseph Longo Jr. Kristin Longo recently had filed for divorce, and Longo Jr. also killed himself during the incident, police said.
As a lifelong resident of the Mohawk Valley, Longo — born Kristin Mary Palumbo — touched many lives here. An official obituary was not available Tuesday, but those who knew her described the former nurse as kind, outgoing and, above all else, a devoted mother.
Longo’s attention to her four children, ages 9 to 17, especially stood out to Aceto, who had been her hairdresser for several years.
“She loved her family and friends so much,” Aceto said in an e-mail Monday evening. “She was a ‘mom-on-the-go,’ always running for those kids. I remember one time she came and got her color on her head, then ran out to bring one of them to their tutor … plastic cap and all.”
Longo’s grandmother, Vita Palumbo of Frankfort, said her granddaughter’s concern for other people was evident even at a young age.
“She was very respectful, very friendly,” she said. “Would do anything for you if she could, if you needed her.”
Palumbo said Longo is the daughter of Joseph and Judy Palumbo of Utica. Her sister, Gina Pearce, still lives in the area. Her brother, Joseph Palumbo, lives in San Diego.
Longo graduated from Mohawk Valley Community College in 2000 with an associate’s degree in nursing, and later worked as a nurse at Kernan Elementary in the Utica City School District. The name of her current employer was not immediately available.
She also is a 1987 graduate of Notre Dame High School. A handful of teachers at the school Tuesday said they still remembered her more than two decades later.
Barbara McDonough, who taught science at the time, described Longo as an “outgoing, caring person” who “enjoyed life as a student.”
McDonough, math teacher Kevin Morrisroe and religion teacher Paul Hanley agreed Longo was popular and well liked by her classmates, and the teachers still could rattle off a list of her high school activities: cheerleading, the Future Business Leaders of America, yearbook and the planning committees for the junior prom and the senior ball.
“She’s in our prayers, and her family is in our prayers, and that’s all we can say,” Hanley added.
Funeral arrangements for Longo are being handled by the V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home in Frankfort but were incomplete as of Tuesday evening.
Joseph Longo’s funeral arrangements are being handled separately through the Matt Funeral Home in Utica.
__________________________
Attorneys for Longos speak of hours preceding deaths
Both seemed calm after divorce proceedings
Loading multimedia...
By ROCCO LaDUCA
Observer-Dispatch
Posted Sep 30, 2009 @ 06:25 PM
Last update Oct 01, 2009 @ 01:06 AM
UTICA —
When Utica police Investigator Joseph Longo Jr. left divorce proceedings Monday, he didn’t appear to be angry about what was going on, his attorney, Devin Garramone, said Wednesday.
Likewise, his wife, Kristin Longo, seemed satisfied with how the day’s proceedings had ended, according to her attorney, George Massoud.
But in the few hours that followed, something went terribly wrong.
While Longo Jr.’s reasons for stabbing his wife more than a dozen times later that afternoon inside their Deerfield home will forever remain left to speculation, his attorney offered what he believed might have pushed the 13-year police veteran over the edge.
“He was still in love with her, and I think that he would have been happier to reconcile with herKRISTIN LONGO SERVICES
Kristin Longo’s funeral will take place at 9:15 a.m. Friday at the V.J. Iocovozzi Funeral Home, 203 Second Ave., Frankfort, and at 10 a.m. at Our Lady Queen Of Apostles Church, where a Mass of Christian burial will be celebrated. Calling hours will take place from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday.
than get a divorce, but then it finally dawned on him that he was losing his wife,” said Garramone.
“The prospect of losing her, and her meeting somebody else and starting a new life, it freaked him out,” Garramone added. “Like any typical break-up, there was a period of reckoning, and I think that’s where he was at. It was a real critical point, and he just went overboard.”
After 41-year-old Longo Jr. repeatedly stabbed his wife shortly before 4 p.m. Monday, he then stabbed himself about 20 times and slashed at his throat, police said. Once Kristin Longo died, Longo Jr. was alive long enough to be discovered by their 8-year-old son and to admit to the stabbings.
Although Kristin Longo, 39, did fear for her safety as her husband’s emotional stability spiraled downward in the weeks leading up to the murder-suicide, she appeared to believe everything would be OK after Monday’s appearance in state Supreme Court, Massoud said.
At Kristin Longo’s request, Acting Supreme Court Justice James Griffith issued a “refrain from” order prohibiting Longo Jr. from assaulting, harassing, stalking, menacing or committing any other crimes against his wife and her family, Massoud said. On Friday, the same day Longo Jr. was served with divorce papers, Kristin Longo also had been granted exclusive use and possession of their home, and Longo Jr. was ordered to stay away.
But a “refrain from” order doesn’t have as many teeth as a formal order of protection, which would have required a mandatory arrest upon violation, Massoud said. Any violation of the “refrain from” order would likely have resulted in Longo Jr. being found in contempt of court.
An order of protection was never issued against Longo Jr., Massoud said, because Kristin Longo believed such an order would cause too much trouble for Longo Jr. at his job with the Police Department and possibly result in his termination.
“She was working with his employer to keep him under control and to hopefully get him the help he needed,” particularly counseling for his emotional and violent tendencies, Massoud said. “If he was terminated from his job, then he’d be out on his own and only God knows what would happen.”
Kristin Longo felt confident that her husband’s police supervisors were keeping their eye on him, since they already had taken away his service weapon and prohibited him from having any contact with his wife while he was on duty, Massoud said.
The Police Department, however, was only able to legally control Longo Jr.’s actions during the eight hours he was at work, Police Chief Daniel LaBella said. Longo Jr.’s behavior had already become a concern over the summer after he inappropriately displayed his weapon on two occasions at Thomas R. Proctor High School. He had since been removed from the school as a police liaison and reassigned to desk duty.
So when Kristin Longo and Longo Jr. left Monday’s divorce proceeding, Massoud believed his client had taken all of the appropriate precautions.
“She certainly seemed to have a sense of relief that her husband was going to behave himself and abide by the terms of the order,” Massoud said. “It was her hope that she would have actual protection, and not just the protection of a piece of paper.”
Kristin Longo’s desire for a divorce not only stemmed from marital troubles over her husband’s alleged infidelity and threats of violence; it also was meant to end the longtime verbal abuse she and her four children had to endure, Massoud said.
“The course of action that she took is consistent with an abused person who was trying to appease her husband and trying to work things out in a fashion that is not scandalous,” Massoud said.
Kristin Longo’s relief walking out of court, therefore, is exactly what might be expected from someone who is trying to escape a cycle of domestic abuse, said Rosemary Vennero, non-residential director of the YWCA of the Mohawk Valley.
“More so than not, victims of abuse who go to court don’t necessarily see their abuser as being punished,” Vennero said. Instead, “They just want the abuse to stop, and they want to see someone make them stop. They think that will be good enough, and she probably did feel really good about the step she finally took.”
But in the end, the resolution wasn’t the one Kristin Longo was looking for, Vennero said. Once a victim of domestic abuse starts to take action, she said, that person is at a 50-percent-or-higher risk of either further abuse or possible death.
“Kristin began taking action 10 days earlier, and in Joe’s mind, in his desperation, he probably thought he was losing control of Kristin,” Vennero said.
In the end, though, neither Longo probably ever expected their lives would end so tragically, Longo Jr.’s attorney said.
“I’m sure it surprised her that this happened, and Joe might have even surprised himself,” Garramone said.
_____________________________________
DEERFIELD, N.Y. (WKTV) - Just days after the tragic death of Kristin Palumbo Longo at the hands of her husband - Joseph Longo Jr. - during a killing/suicide in their Cosby Manor Road Home, the family of Kristin Palumbo Longo says they are honoring her memory, but looking to the future of her children.
"Our family wishes to extend our gratitude for the tremendous outpouring of love and support," the family said in a statement. "Our priorities at this time are to ensure that the immediate and future needs of the children are met and that we honor the life and memory of our beloved Kristin. We ask that everyone please respect the privacy of the family and appreciate your continued support."
State Police found the body of Kristin, and a critically wounded Longo in the home Monday after one of the couple's children came home then ran to a neighbor's house to call 911. Investigators say Longo admitted stabbing his
wife and then himself.
Kristin Longo's attorney, George Massoud, says his client had exclusive use and possession of the home, and that while Longo's presence there would not have lead to his arrest, he would have been held in contempt of court.
Massoud says Kristin Longo had a 'refrain from' order against Longo. The attorney says the wording and protection offered is similar to a restraining order, stating that Longo must refrain from stalking, harassing or otherwise menacing his wife.
State Police, who are investigating the crime, say that neither they nor Oneida County Sheriff's deputies had ever responded to the Longo's Deerfield home for any kind of domestic dispute.
Attorney Massoud, also a long-time family friend of Kristen Longo, says 'disbelief and devastation' are the only words remotely strong enough to describe what those who knew her are feeling following Monday's tragedy.
On Tuesday, Utica Police Chief Daniel LaBella - Longo's former partner of five years - said that the department had pulled Longo's gun about a month ago, stemming from an incident at Proctor High School.
LaBella said Longo allegedly pulled his weapon while working security at the school. Ironically, Longo's disciplinary hearing for that incident was supposed to happen Tuesday morning, September 29 at 11 a.m.
Instead, Longo's former boss and partner held a news conference at that time regarding the tragic incident.
Chief LaBella also confirms that Longo did appear in Oneida County Family Court Monday, and that he was despondent over situations regarding his marriage.
Court documents show the two had several recent court appearances regarding apparent divorce proceedings and settlements. Chief LaBella says the department saw Longo suffering and made counseling available to him, and that Longo was in the process of taking advantage of the counseling. Still, LaBella says he never saw this coming.
"The police department here did everything possible," LaBella said. "We could not have prevented this in any shape or fashion. I've known Joe for a number of years and his wife and if you were to ask me if I'd seen this coming I would have to say honestly, no. I don't think anybody-anybody seen this coming."
As far as mourning the former investigator, LaBella says, yes, Longo had a long, distinguished career at the Utica Police Department. But LaBella says Longo forfeited the right to any honor that goes with that when he committed this crime, leaving their four children without parents.
The chief says the department is starting a fund drive for the couple's four children, whom he says are the real victims in this tragedy.
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Joseph Anthony Longo, Jr., 41, died on Monday, September 28, 2009 at St. Elizabeth Medical Center.
Joe was born in New Hartford on April 10, 1968, a son of Joseph A. Longo and the late Sue (Allbright) Longo. He was raised in Deerfield and was a graduate of Whitesboro High School. Joe continued his education studying criminal justice at MVCC. Following college, he was employed for many years as a corrections officer for the Oneida County Correctional Facility. In 1995, he became a police officer at the Utica Police Department and had received numerous commendations for meritorious service in his fourteen year career. Joe was an avid hockey player and active dad with his kids in their all their activities.
Joe and Kristin had four beautiful children, Joseph A. , III, Catherine Vita, Gianna Noel and Jared Thomas Longo. He also leaves his father, Joseph Sr.; brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Jennifer Longo; sister and brother-in-law, Stacy and Chris Gilberti; his aunt, Carol “Yaya” Longo; and also many beloved nieces, nephews, friends, and co-workers. He was predeceased by his beloved mother, Sue; grandparents, Darby and Cattie Longo and Muriel and Jim Allbright.
His Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Monday at 12 noon at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel/Blessed Sacrament Parish in Utica. Interment will be in Calvary Cemetery.
Relatives and friends may call on Monday prior to mass at Mt. Carmel Church from 10 a.m. to 12 noon.
A special thank you goes out to the many friends, relatives, neighbors, emergency personnel, local police, state police, and co-workers for their kindness and concern during this most difficult time.
In memory of Joe, please consider the needs of his children, especially in your prayers.
Arrangements are with The Matt Funeral Home of Utica.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Repost: The Girl in the Window- Unbeliebably true- definitely not a story to ever be forgotten....
The following story, no matter how unbelievable it is, is true. It was found on the following URL:
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece
About this story
St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.
The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.
In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
_______________________________________________________
Part One: The Feral Child
PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.
The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
Months went by. The face never reappeared.
Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.
Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.
They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."
The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.
"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."
Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.
The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.
"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"
While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .
The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
• • •
First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."
The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.
He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?
"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "
He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.
So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.
"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."
• • •
Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.
She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.
She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.
She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.
Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.
The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."
Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."
• • •
The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.
The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.
Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.
"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."
The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.
"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.
The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.
Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?
And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?
"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"
But the most pressing questions were about her future.
When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.
Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.
Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.
"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."
• • •
Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.
"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."
Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.
In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.
"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."
It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.
By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.
A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.
"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"
That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.
In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?
• • •
The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.
Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.
White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.
White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.
Click.
Part Two: Becoming Dani
Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.
Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.
But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.
Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.
Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.
On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."
That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.
Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.
Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.
Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."
• • •
Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.
They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.
But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.
She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.
No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.
No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.
"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.
But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.
• • •
When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.
She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.
Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.
He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.
Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.
That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.
• • •
Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.
So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.
They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.
"It was a disaster," Bernie said.
They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.
She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.
All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.
"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."
When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.
In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.
• • •
Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.
She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.
In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.
• • •
"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.
It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.
After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.
All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.
The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.
Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.
She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.
Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.
Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.
"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.
"Lucky?" Diane asked.
The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."
Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.
It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.
"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."
• • •
Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.
"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.
Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.
Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.
She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.
She's lost inside herself. Again.
But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.
"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."
Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.
She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.
Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."
• • •
William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."
He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.
William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.
He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.
They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."
After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.
He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."
Some day, he's sure, she will answer.
• • •
Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.
Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.
"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.
He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."
For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.
Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.
"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.
Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.
Part Three: The Mother
She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.
Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.
On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.
"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.
The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.
"Part of me died that day," she says.
• • •
Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.
Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.
Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.
Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.
"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."
• • •
For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.
Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.
"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."
When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.
They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.
• • •
She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.
The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”
This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.
The caller continued:
“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”
It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.
Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.
“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.
The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”
Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.
Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?
“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”
The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.
“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.
“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”
• • •
Michelle insists Danielle was fine.
“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”
She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.
“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”
Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”
• • •
A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.
The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.
“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”
The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.
“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.
“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”
She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.
• • •
A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.
Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”
“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”
She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.
“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”
After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.
She’s on probation until 2012.
She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.
• • •
When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.
“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.
She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”
She says she misses Danielle.
“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”
• • •
Is she okay?
Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.
In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece
About this story
St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.
The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.
In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
_______________________________________________________
Part One: The Feral Child
PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.
The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
Months went by. The face never reappeared.
Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.
Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.
They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."
The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.
"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."
Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.
The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.
"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"
While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .
The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
• • •
First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."
The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.
He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?
"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "
He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.
So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.
"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."
• • •
Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.
She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.
She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.
She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.
Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.
The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."
Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."
• • •
The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.
The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.
Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.
"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."
The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.
"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.
The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.
Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?
And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?
"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"
But the most pressing questions were about her future.
When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.
Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.
Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.
"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."
• • •
Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.
"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."
Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.
In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.
"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."
It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.
By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.
A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.
"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"
That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.
In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?
• • •
The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.
Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.
White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.
White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.
Click.
Part Two: Becoming Dani
Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.
Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.
But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.
Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.
Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.
On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."
That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.
Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.
Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.
Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."
• • •
Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.
They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.
But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.
She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.
No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.
No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.
"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.
But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.
• • •
When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.
She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.
Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.
He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.
Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.
That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.
• • •
Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.
So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.
They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.
"It was a disaster," Bernie said.
They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.
She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.
All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.
"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."
When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.
In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.
• • •
Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.
She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.
In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.
• • •
"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.
It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.
After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.
All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.
The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.
Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.
She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.
Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.
Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.
"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.
"Lucky?" Diane asked.
The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."
Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.
It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.
"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."
• • •
Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.
"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.
Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.
Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.
She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.
She's lost inside herself. Again.
But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.
"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."
Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.
She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.
Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."
• • •
William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."
He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.
William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.
He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.
They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."
After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.
He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."
Some day, he's sure, she will answer.
• • •
Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.
Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.
"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.
He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."
For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.
Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.
"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.
Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.
Part Three: The Mother
She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.
Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.
On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.
"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.
The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.
"Part of me died that day," she says.
• • •
Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.
Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.
Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.
Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.
"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."
• • •
For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.
Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.
"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."
When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.
They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.
• • •
She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.
The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”
This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.
The caller continued:
“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”
It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.
Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.
“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.
The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”
Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.
Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?
“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”
The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.
“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.
“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”
• • •
Michelle insists Danielle was fine.
“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”
She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.
“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”
Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”
• • •
A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.
The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.
“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”
The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.
“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.
“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”
She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.
• • •
A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.
Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”
“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”
She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.
“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”
After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.
She’s on probation until 2012.
She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.
• • •
When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.
“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.
She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”
She says she misses Danielle.
“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”
• • •
Is she okay?
Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.
In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.
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