Ron Franscell - Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived

TRUE STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE WHO FACED
MONSTROUS MASS KILLERS AND SURVIVED

RON FRANSCELL

Text 2011 by Ron Franscell

First published in the USA in 2011 by
Fair Winds Press, a member of
Quayside Publishing Group
100 Cummings Center
Suite 406-L
Beverly, MA 01915-6101
www.fairwindspress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-1-59233-440-7
ISBN-10: 1-59233-440-7

Digital Edition: 978-1-6105-9494-3
Softcover Edition: 978-1-5923-3440-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Franscell, Ron, 1957

Delivered from evil : true stories of ordinary people who faced monstrous mass killers and survived / Ron Franscell.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59233-440-7

ISBN-10: 1-59233-440-7

1. Mass murderUnited StatesCase studies. 2. Serial murdersUnited StatesCase studies. 3. Victims of violent crimesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

HV6529.F73 2011

364.15234092273dc22

10028368

Cover and book design: Peter Long
Book layout: Sheila Hart Design, Inc.
Cover image: Bettmann/CORBIS. A women hides behind a statue from Charles Whitmans bullets.

Printed and bound in China

In memory of
Charles Cohen

(19372009)

He opened his heart to a stranger
and revealed why
these stories must be told

When shell-shocked World War II veteran Howard Unruh finally snapped, he embarked on a twenty-minute shooting rampage through his otherwise peaceful Camden, New Jersey, neighborhood, killing everyone he saw. Seconds after druggist Maurice Cohen ran into his pharmacy and told his family to hide, Unruh burst in. He shot Cohen dead, then rushed upstairs, where Cohens wife, mother, and twelve-year-old son Charles were hiding.

Mark Barton was a cocky, hotshot day trader obsessed with making a killing in the dot-com boom. But when his big dreams went spectacularly bust in 1999, the crazed misfit killed his wife and two children, then walked into two Atlanta day-trading offices, murdering nine more innocent people and wounding thirteen others in the bloodiest workplace massacre in American history. His friend Brent Doonan was shot four times and near death when he escaped the bloodbath, just ahead of the pursuing Barton.

Twelve-year-old Keith Thomas had just sat down to a Happy Meal with a childhood friend and his family when deranged gunman James Huberty stormed into the San Ysidro, California, McDonalds with an Uzi semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun. For the next seventy-seven minutes, he stalked men, women, and children, including survivor Keith Thomas.

Until the Virginia Tech killings in 2007, the deadliest shooting rampage in American history happened at Lubys Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when George Hennard crashed his pickup truck into the restaurant and began the calm, systematic killing and wounding of forty-three people inside. Suzanna Gratia survived, but her parents were killed in the carnage. A hundred feet from where they were gunned down was a handgun Suzanna had left in her car.

After suffering racist abuse in the Navy, Mark Essex joined the Black Panthers and declared war on honkies. In 1973, he began a murderous spree in New Orleans, finally holing up in a downtown hotel, where he shot white guests, set fires, and then began firing at the police and firefighters who responded to the attack. Among the firefighters was young Tim Ursin, who climbed a ladder to get to a fire on an upper floor. But Essex leaned over a balcony and rained fire on Ursin.

Roland Ehlke was walking across campus with two friends in 1973 when Charles Whitman opened fire from twenty-eight stories up in the University of Texas clock tower in Austin. He killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-one. Ehlke was hit twice and survived, but the course of his life was changed forever.

When Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee asked to use the phone in nurse Dianne Alexanders trailer one night in 2002, she let him in. After attempting to rape her, he bludgeoned her and tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. Despite sustaining serious injuries, she was eventually the star witness in the serial-murder case against Lee.

Chicago gangbanger Tony Majzer first met David Maust in prison, and they became fast friends. Later, when their moment of freedom came, Maust was living in a dowdy Chicago apartment and Majzer was about to leave a halfway houseand be murdered. Maust tricked Majzer into getting drunk and beat him severely with a steel pipe, but the tough con Majzer didnt die. Majzer forced Maust to take him to the hospital with a fake mugging story, where he received dozens of stitches but refused to stay the night. Astonishingly, he returned to Mausts apartment instead.

Fifteen-year-old Missy Jenkins had just said a prayer to begin a new school day when her fourteen-year-old classmate Michael Carneal opened fired with an automatic pistol in the foyer of their western Kentucky high school.

A dream vacation aboard a chartered yacht turned into a nightmare when the hired skipper killed his own wife and four of the five members of the Duperrault family, set the boat on fire, and escaped in the Bluebelles only life raftleaving eleven-year-old Terry Jo Duperrault to drown or burn to death.

EMMA WOLF WAS ONLY EIGHT MONTHS OLD on April 22, 1920, when an angry neighbor murdered her father, mother, five sisters, and the chore boy on the family farm in Turtle Lake, North Dakota.

The berserk killer left little Emma in her crib, where she lay for two days until the slaughter was discovered.

Within days, the Wolfs neighbors set to the bleak task of burying the family. Before the eight caskets were lowered side by side into the prairie earth on a windswept hill, the good people of Turtle Lake posed behind them for a grim photograph. One of the womenfolk held little Emmaand standing among the mourners was the killer.

Weeks later, the killera nearby farmer infuriated by the Wolfs wandering dogswas identified, and he quickly confessed. A jury sent him to prison for the rest of his life, which wasnt long; he died behind bars in 1925.

For the rest of her life, Emma was known by the locals simply as the girl who lived. As a young woman, she worked in a local mercantile where strangers would sometimes come just to gawk at her. She was a living reminder to people of the horror they were trying not to talk about. Not because they wanted to forget, but because they didnt want anyone else to know.

Even now, more than ninety years later, the curious still drive past the old farmhouse or the cemetery and whisper about it.

Emma had already died when I found her son Curtis, a hospital chaplain who lives today in Turtle Lake and still owns the family farm where the horror happened. He says Emma grew up never trusting anyone, never feeling love. After the murders, she was put in the care of an aunt and uncle with their own big family. Later, she was adopted by a family of strangers in Bismarck, who forestalled her threats to run away by locking her in a closet. She was eventually returned to her aging and ailing aunt and uncle, who handed her off to a local store owner, who made her work in his mercantile business. She eventually married and had three childrenand for the first time in her life felt love.