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round, but the fight was far from over.
    For the rest of his natural life, Howard Unruh was entitled to a similar hearing once a year. Every year, a judge would determine whether the killer was entitled to a more comfortable life.
    â€œI was only twelve years old,”
Charles Cohen told one reporter.
“I was a kid. I listened to my mother.
She yelled ‘Hide, Charles, hide!’
That’s what I did. I hid in the closet.”
    So Charles Cohen became a zealot. His story came pouring out in great torrents. He spoke to every newspaper, TV, and radio reporter who would listen. He began to speak into a portable tape recorder, as he planned to write a book about the massacre and its aftermath. He wanted everyone to see how this one man, Unruh, had outlived all the families he destroyed in his berserk, twelve-minute rampage. Charles wanted the world to understand what he’d lost. He wanted other survivors to be able to get past it, even if he hadn’t. He wanted Unruh to never enjoy a moment of freedom beyond the dark, noisy walls of the Vroom Building.
    But most of all, he wanted his parents to be proud of him. If he said nothing, the dead could never forgive him. He must live with purpose so there would be a purpose in their deaths.
    The only place he never spoke was the courtroom. Throughout Unruh’s many hearings, no judge, jury, or lawyer ever asked Charles to speak for the dead.
    â€œI was only twelve years old,” he told one reporter. “I was a kid. I listened to my mother. She yelled ‘Hide, Charles, hide!’ That’s what I did. I hid in the closet.
    â€œThing is, I’m still in there.”
    He talked about the suitcase full of ghosts he kept in the attic, too.
    He told another reporter about his fantasy of a phone call delivering the news that Howard Unruh was dead. He’d give his statement of condolences to the surviving families of Unruh’s victims, piss on his grave, then bury the suitcase once and for all. His ghosts would be exorcised.
    Unruh remained confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit. And every year, Charles Cohen sat through another hearing, ready to speak for the dead.
    And every time some other lunatic cut loose with a gun—Nebraska, Austin, New Orleans, San Ysidro, Killeen, Atlanta, Littleton, Red Lake, Montreal, Virginia Tech, Binghamton, and all the places whose names and streets would be forever stained by mass murderers—the ghosts of Cramer Hill came back to life for Charles. He knew there’d be people who would live with the horror for the rest of their lives and never know what to do.
    Headlines called him “the father of mass murder,” but Unruh had not been the first American mass murderer, or even the most prolific. But he stood out, albeit for mysterious reasons.
    His body count was nowhere near records set in earlier mass murders, such as the all-but-forgotten 1927 school bombing in Bath, Michigan, in which forty-five people—mostly children—died. But the most shocking American mass murders have never been purely about the number of deaths.
    Unruh’s crime has echoed for decades because nobody could possibly have predicted his explosion, which happened in a place that seemed all too familiar to most people—in this case, an ordinary neighborhood. For the rest of the twentieth century and beyond, the shocking combination of unexpected horror in a “safe” place would happen again and again in restaurants, schools, public parks, and small businesses.
    But Unruh also fascinated America, in part, because he lived. There was no suicide, no fatal shootout with cops, no electric chair, not even emotional death by remorse. He was different because he survived.
    Charles Cohen survived, too. He sometimes walked past the old drugstore, but he