DELIVERED FROM EVIL-Ron Franscell

aboard a chartered yacht. A brave firefighter suddenly finds himself in the crosshairs of a racist sniper almost nine stories above the ground, and astonishingly, they all survived from Howard Unra's nineteen forty nine shooting rampage through a quiet New Jersey neighborhood to Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee's reign of Terror in two thousand and two, the corpses piled up and few lived to tell their tale of horror. Award winning journalist Ron Francell explores the wounded hearts and

minds of the ordinary people these monsters couldn't kill. His mesmarine mesmerizing accounts crackle with gritty details to put the reader in the midst of the carnage and offer a front row seat on the complex, painful process of surviving the rest of their haunted lives. Delivered from Evil takes the reader on a pulse pounding dash through the murky intersection of pure evil and the potency of the human spirit. A journey into the darkest corners of the American crime scape.

Delivered from Evil with my special guest, journalist and author Ron Francell. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Ron Francell, Dan, thank you for having me.

the survivor experience. It was at the heart of my first true crime book, The Darkest Night, which was a very intimate story because it happened to two friends of mine, two childhood friends of mine, and I wanted to capture

some of that intimacy in Delivered from Evil. So in each of these ten stories, they're told in the narrative journalism style, where we're we're offering some dramatic interpretation of what happened, largely through the eyes of these survivors, and you know, I think that it makes it a much more personal story. And and for any readers who have read it, and those I think who will read it in the future, they'll get that. They'll they'll see a crime from a perspective that could be theirs right.

didn't matter much to these people. They were in the line of fire, they were wounded, they could have died, They lost loved ones, and they live with with the aftermath of this almost as certainly as Representative Gabby Giffords will live forever with her wounds from the Tucson shooting a couple of months ago. So in my mind it became the story, became the survivor's story, and not necessarily the notoriety of the killer. So we have in this

book we have these ten incidents. The first one and the earliest one, and the first one in the book is Howard Unru, a nineteen forty nine shooting spree in his quiet little neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey. Unru was a troubled World War Two veteran and ultimately some paranoid tendencies got the best of him and he, you know, walked through his neighborhood with a pistol, killing his own neighbors and a few people he didn't even know. He

was very calm, very methodical, and very efficient. Among the people he killed was a father, mother, and grandmother of twelve year old Charles Cohen, who hid in a closet and escaped being killed as his whole family was but unru you know, killed I think thirteen that day, and he became erroneously he got the label of the father of mass murder in America. And he wasn't the first mass murderer in America. He wasn't he and the most

prolific mass murderer to nineteen forty nine in America. But something he did captured the imagination of the media and of the people, and he did set in motion sort of what has been, you know, a long history of mass shootings here. So he's one of the more recognizable

names in there. The Lubi's Cafeteria killing in nineteen ninety one in Colleen, Texas, where George Hanard crashes his truck through the front windows of this cafeteria and then begins methodically killing the diners inside and kills ultimately twenty three and wounds many more.

he comes across during this day long siege. And the survivor that I talk about in Delivered from Evil is a firefighter who is responding to these fires, hoping to save people, and he literally comes face to face with this killer, this sniper and a high powered rifle and almost nine stories in the air as he's climbing the ladder. So a harrowing moment, as you can imagine.

mother are killed in that massacre, but Keith survives. And if that weren't harrowing enough, the story of his next eight or nine years dealing with this post traumatic stress will will curl your hair. I mean, it is in many ways more horrifying than what he went through laying there under that table. In the McDonald's. So they're all in that vein and again all put a lot of a lot of their energy into the perspective of the survivor.

profiled in the book are still on that journey. They haven't completely returned to anything that looks like normal yet, but they're getting there. But they'll dill avoid certain people and places and situations that remind them of their tragedy. They've stuffed their emotional responses down a little bit and kind of purposely numbed them among them. Among these people, I spent as much as ten days to two weeks

with the each of these survivors. I went to them and spent intensive time in interviews with them, and I found that almost in every case, the first day or so was spent just listening to a story that they'd told a thousand times, and after that they started they increasingly, for the next couple of weeks, had to answer questions that sometimes they hadn't even thought about before, and they had they had to summon up emotions that they had

pushed down. In many cases, of course, you can imagine we're doing interviews, and I would often say, Hey, let's go get some lunch, or let's go get some dinner or something. In the cases of for instance, Keith Martins from the McDonald's or Susanna Gracia Hup from the Luby's cafeteria, they were they were visibly nervous about going to a restaurant, and even though they would always go, they I would always notice them watching the door, you know, positioning themselves

in what they believed was a safe location. And in both of those cases, we are, you know, twenty or more years past the event. But that's how haunted these people are. Many of them turned to alcohol and drugs to kind of dull their pain and this sense of helplessness that they have. Most of them developed survivor guilt. They didn't understand and couldn't compute why they survived when

other people didn't. Most of them need to talk about their experiences, or did need to talk about their experiences, but people around them sometimes frustrated that or or in some of the successful cases, made it possible. So I came to the conclusion that of a survivor of this kind of event really needs somebody to listen to them. And I hope that some of the survivors of the Tucson tragedy have those people. The fact is that some

of these people will. Some of the survivors that go through this they just never survive or they just never recover. Really they kind of just stop and just wait to die. In effect, they have already died now. They just need to stop walking around. And that's the sad part of this. Many of the people that I considered for this book had sort of stalled out in.

would wouldn't talk about it as a religious element. They would talk about as as a kind of realization that they couldn't move forward until their monsters no longer played a role in their life, or at least didn't play a starring role. They came to know that, you know, they couldn't possibly hope to regain any of their equilibrium, you know, unless they sort of revoked permission for Charles Whitman and James Huberty and Derek Toddley to influence their

choices anymore. Now, these people haven't forgotten what happened, you know, and they and accepting one one case among these ten, they haven't absolved to their killers, or there would be killers. They haven't said it's okay. I understand they don't feel that way. But I think each of them, each of them, has limited their monsters roles in their life, and that's, you know, I think, a step in the right direction for them, and each of them, each of them understands

that they got a gift on that day. They were given life when people all around them were dying. And in that sense, when I finished this book, I had this sense that if these ten people can recover kind of get back to normal, then the rest of us have hope.

these people were married and had children. So at least in my mind, that seems to be a good sign of recovery, if you can move on enough to find a mate that can deal with you despite this these nightmares and this certainly post traumatic stress disorder from all of these people. But the thing is, what you had said was that most of these people somehow put this away at least try to not have it affect them.

They didn't to absolve themselves of this. But Charles Cohen wanted to see this person leave this planet or so he was a little bit different. But I thought that this,

especially to start the book. All the stories are fascinating, but especially I thought was the Charles Cohen story, because, like you say, at twelve years old, and I think that if you could talk a little bit about just the day in question too, that he had thought that maybe his mother had just died, his grandmother, I believe Rose had put him in the closet to hide, but

his horror started progressive. He had not only did he hear this whole thing go down and then found his mother dead, that he also didn't realize till right away that his whole family was gone. And then from there, maybe talk a little bit more about Charles Cohen because

it was unique in his recovery. Not only did he have all these horrible things at a young age embedded in his mind, but the way he recovered and the fascinating story of how Howard Unra becomes sort of more continual pain for Charles Cohen with what turn of events happened because of Howard Unraw and his case and what they do with his court case.

It's the day before school starts, or it's it's a day or two before school starts, and his grandmother has promised him a trip into Philadelphia to buy some school clothes and that sort of thing, and so he's kind of anxiously waiting for this, and he's sitting at the window, the second story window of his father's drug store in this little neighborhood of Camden, and he sees Unrude, their next door neighbor, walking down the street firing a gun,

and he watches as unru actually walks up to somebody and shoots him, and he sounds the alarm, you know, he yells, you know, he's shooting people. His mother and father are down the stairs in the drug store. She runs upstairs. Charles is hidden in the closet. Quickly, Unrum comes through the drug store, kills the father who's trying to get away, kills the mother, the grandmother, and then

leaves without finding Charles. And he actually had an ax to grind with Charles because Charles was a musician and played his trumpet at night and it bothered Unrue to no end, and he intended to kill Charles, but he moved on on this little walk of death, and Charles was left alive. So Charles now is an orphan. Unrue is arrested.

this little boy, this little orphan. He bounces around with some family for a while, never talking about this, and probably never being allowed to talk about this, and he pushes it deep down inside. Men of that of those the forties, you know, of that time, and we're expected to live with their disappointments, live with their pain, and not complain. And Charles grew up in that mold. He

pushed it all down. He never talked about it. He grows up to be to find the woman he's going to marry, but he doesn't even tell her until their wedding night what has happened to him, and then he never really mentions it again. He has three daughters. They grow up to be adults. And in the nineteen in the early nineteen eighties, Unrue, still in the insane asylum, wants some a little extra freedom. This request necessitates a

court hearing. Charles is faced with this decision. Does he keep his secret or does he step up and speak on behalf of the dead, on behalf of his wiped out family, against a little more freedom for this insane killer. He decides he's going to speak up, literally comes out and becomes the vocal representative for all the people who were injured or killed that day, and maybe by that time a lot of people who who had gone through

similar circumstances. So you're along the way. A fascinating little tidbit that I learned was along the way he left his parents' drug store that and never went back. He took some of his possessions in a suitcase. He later turned that suitcase into a kind of time capsule. He would put clippings and pictures and all kinds of artifacts and mementos of this event and stick them in that suitcase and keep it hidden. He successfully hid it all

those years. By the time we got to know each other, he had told me that his dream was that someday Unru would die, and that he would take that suitcase out and bury it, and in a sense he would be burying he would be burying the memory and the haunt that that had collected over all these years. As it happened, he died about six weeks before Unru died in two thousand and nine and he didn't get a

chance to do that. But after his death, I was privileged to be able to look through that suitcase and essentially feel his memories and feel his haunt through the things that he had put there. He hated Unru, He absolutely hated him. I say forgiveness, it's not in the traditional sense. All Charles understood was that he couldn't let un ruin the rest of his life, the life that came after twelve years old, and that was his forgiveness.

And ultimately he understood his role was to speak up for the dead, and he did that eloquently.

she was alive. And but but one of the things Charles said in opposing this new freedom within the asylum was that, you know, he wants to see his mother, but when I want to see my mother, I have to go to a cemetery. And a very poignant he gave a very poignant voice, I think to a lot of.

about Jared Loughman in and Tucson. Political rhetoric will be mentioned such as it was. It's such. So it was with Unru Unru was, you know, had had been in World War Two. He had been a fairly good soldier, a very meticulous soldier. He would keep a diary of the Germans he killed, and.

to you know, as badly as it's viewed today. It seems I'll multiply that by one hundred in the nineteen forties and I think that I think that ultimately you can see in his behavior, in his psychology that his difficulties go back to childhood or had very little to do, if anything, with his war experience. As it happened, he had kept a list of people that he wanted to kill, and this he'd been doing this for about two years

by the time the shooting happened. He had gone to a gay cinema in Philadelphia the night before, came back very late, and a new little gate that he had built in his yard, mostly so he didn't have to cut through the Cohen's backyard. This little gate had been knocked off his hinges, and he believed it was done on purpose, And he went to bed and decided that tomorrow morning he would go and kill all the people

on his list, and he did. He waited till nine thirty because he knew that the shops would then be open, and many of the people he wanted to kill were shopkeepers. He then begins this methodic trek through his neighborhood, killing killing not only people who are on his list, but then anybody who has to be around, including a little six year old boy who's getting a haircut from the barber.

Uh So, what set him off, Well, it seems like it was that little gate thing, but we can see that there was there were these two years of a building paranoia that people were talking about him and insulting him. Behind his back and and so on.

twenty years and until it was just finally dropped. There's no question that in today's atmosphere, and possibly even in the atmosphere of his time, that he would have been judged to be guilty and probably would have faced the death sentence, even though I think people would have said, yeah, he's he's nutty. But he knew he was doing wrong. He talks about that. Sure, so he qualified for you know, the for a guilty verdict, even though I think we would all agree that he had mental difficulties.

kept hidden from from the people around him. And he he he had he had had a wife who with her mother, had ultimately been murdered by an unknown assailant at at some years in his past, but he he in the in the nineties got into something that was

big back then called day trading. Basically, it was you get on the computer and you do these stock trades and it might be seconds, and you might only hold a stock for anywhere from minutes to hours and then sell it, hopefully at something higher than what you paid for it, so that you would end every day, the goal being that you would end to end every day with more money than you started with. Sure, and a lot of little sort of boutique storefronts opened up all

over the country to enable this. All they needed was, you know, fairly fast, very fast internet connection, some computers and give them some training. The guy would pay a fee and to use the computers and maybe a percentage of his of his profits. So it was a lucrative kind of thing. And Barton by this time is remarried, he's got a couple of kids, and this is his only this is his only income, is this day trading.

And he's kind of bombastic about it, you know. They called him the Rocket because he would do these things. But he yet he was still a friendly guy. Everybody

liked him. In time, things start going south and he starts getting more and more behind and borrowing more money from these firms to do his day trading, until by this time in nineteen ninety seven, of the time of the shooting in nineteen ninety seven, he's in deep and the people around him who have kind of been enabling this at these firms are kind of beginning to call in their markers. Well, one day he just decides, you know,

he's going to end it all. He kills his two children in their beds, He kills his wife and leaves a suicide note basically that says he did all this, but he didn't kill his first wife, you know, which was an odd thing for a suicide note. But then he goes down to one of the day trading firms in Atlanta and goes in and shoots up the place. Then walks across the street to another one which is co owned by the survivor that I write about in

Delivered from Evil, Brent Donan, and he shoots Brent. He shoots several other people and then escapes all before cops kind of click to what's happening. So he gets quite a quite a jump on the police. You can imagine Ultimately twelve people are killed, thirteen or wounded, and he's surrounded by cops later and commits suicide. Brent Dounan has shot five times, he loses all of his blood over the next twenty four hours, all of the blood he

started with anyway, and barely survives. And so this is about him, and I would say in Brent's case, this is a similar story. He's got an intense hatred of Barton, He's got an intense hatred of the kind of infamy and notoriety that these killers get. And yet we can't name any of the survivors. I mean, you've got a very learned audience, so let me speak to them for a second. I'll give you Sharon Tate, But name one other survivor, well, name one other victim of a serial

killer or a mass murderer. And we can name a lot of serial killers and mass murderers, but most of us would have difficulty naming two victims. And I think Brent Donan carried that kind of resentment, still carries that kind of resentment even though his life has gotten on a good track and he's doing very well now.

no relatives. The fears of the father are transferred to the son. It was from my father to me and from me to my son. He already had it and now to be left alone, I had to take them with me. I killed Leanne because she was one of the main reasons for my demise as I planned to kill the others. I really wish I hadn't killed her now she really couldn't help it, and I love her so much. Anyway, I know that Jehovah will take care of all of them in the next life. I'm sure

the details don't matter. There is no excuse, no good reason. I'm sure no one would understand. If they could, I wouldn't want them to please know that I love Leanne, Matthew, and Michelle with all of my heart. If Jehovah is willing, I would like to see all of them again in the resurrection, to have a second chance. I don't plan to live very much longer, just long enough to kill as many of the people that greedily sought my destruction. You should kill me if you can, Mark Obarton, Yeah.

for including a lot of the victim stories. But in this particular case, you do really have, you know, really good, fine examples of people that have There's never closure, and there's never full recovery obviously, but some very very strong characters and strong examples of survival instinct with these people, especially given the magnitude.

have not returned. They're not whole again, sure, but I'm not sure. I think it would be a myth. If you introduced me to somebody who who went through what these people had gone through and said, but it has absolutely no impact on his life anymore, and he doesn't even think about it, and he's perfect, he's better than he started, then I would disbelieve that.

was last year. And I think there is a therapeutic value to that. You know, they in in in all of these cases, I think they had to spend a little bit of time trying to see things through different a different prism and uh and it helped them so well. And Missy Jenkins who survived the Heath High School shooting, one of the early school shootings before Columbine, she also

wrote a book. And in each of those four cases, I think they did a pretty good job of telling the story more or less fairly to all people involved. And I think that that that's pretty that's pretty note when you've been shot or paralyzed or you know, traumatized the way they were.

Peace Corps. He graduates from college in Wisconsin and joins the Peace Corps. He's assigned by the Peace Corps to teach English in a little Iranian school. In order to be able to do that, he has to go to some training at the University of Texas that last I believe six or eight weeks. So he travels to Austin and he's doing the courses when on August first, nineteen sixty six, Charles Whitman climbs the Texas Tower and begins this spree, this ninety minute spree of shooting anybody he

can from the tower. Famous one of our most famous mass murders. Roland is with a couple of friends walking down the street that they hear what they think are firecrackers or backfires, but it's just it registers, but it's not a concern. At one point, a friend who's walking

there are three walking abreast down the street. The boy in the middle kind of suddenly stops and looks down at his hand, which has just been struck by a bullet, and the nearly it breaks his wrist and nearly severs his hand, and you can imagine what has just happened. You know, they don't know. But very quickly more shots are fired and a couple of them hit Roland, and they scramble to safety ultimately get out of the line of fire, and never really knowing what's going on. They

don't know there's a man in the towers shooting. They know that some shooting is going on, but they don't know really what's happening, or they would be in the middle of it and they don't see anything. Ultimately, he's taken to the hospital where he recovers from his wounds, oddly in a room that overlooks the Texas Tower, and of course by this nay he knows what has happened.

It's during that week recovering from his wounds that Roland decides that maybe he does want to become a minister after all, and not because he's afraid, not because somehow Whitman has changed his view of the world or anything like that, other than he sees that he wants, that he has a value, that he wants to help people like himself. And he returns to Wisconsin where he becomes a minister, a Lutheran minister, and also now a college

professor in a different religious school. So in that case we have, you know, this, this encounter with a killer changes the course of his life and gives him purpose. We don't necessarily see that in all of those cases where they're just kind of scrambling to get back to some sense of normalcy. In his case, it seemed to inoculate him with a sense of purpose, which was interesting to me.

exclusively been attacking white women. A task force that was set up to catch him presumed he was a white killer, a white serial killer because for a lot of reasons, one is so few non white serial killers, and because serial killers tend to attack victims within their own race, so so they made the presumption that it was a white serial killer, and they're off looking in there in

that world. Diane, who's black but very fair skinned looks white actually from a block away, is home from classes preparing lunch for her son when a black man appears on her porch and knocks on the door. She answers

the door, and he has a story. He's looking for someone who lives in the neighborhood and he's lost, and she doesn't know who he's talking about, and he says, well, can I come in and make a phone call, and she's reluctant to do that, but before before she makes a decision one way or another, he storms in and he attempts to rape and kill her. Her son coming home early, something that he hadn't counted on, startles him

and he runs away. Ultimately, DNA that he leaves behind is what links him to her, but it also links him, after quite a while, to the serial killings that have been happening. So now the whole, the whole situation has been upended and the cops now know who they're looking for. They just don't know where he is. Uh and and he is and Lea Derek Tudley ends up, you know, in the in the sort of b list of American serial killers. He's frightening and a lot of legends grow

up about him. He he he never did it, but it was if the one of the myths going around was that he lured these women out of their homes by playing the recording of a crying baby at their front door. Didn't. Really, that didn't happen, but it showed how frightened and how desperate for information the citizens were.

a whole other interesting thing. You know, families of these killers are they're victims too, They go through some of the same traumas and that yet they have two added problems. One is that they they suffer this sort of stigma, you know, that as if they had something to do with it, a kind of a social stigma. The other one is that they're they're torn between defending their relative and condemning you know, so they they're they're doing what family does do and trying to be on on on

the side of the relative. But at the same time it's very difficult for them to say, well, you know, this man who annihilates twenty three people is just misunderstood. So they struggle with that, which is kind of interesting and that that's you know, that's a kind of a sidebar. But I did try to do an interview with Derek Tuddley, and he's never spoken to anyone on this case. He's never spoken even I think to his defense about whether he did or he didn't. But he was large, like

as I say, largely convicted by DNA. So I guess that spoke spoke volumes.

So but was there any was it was that part of the reason why some of these killers wouldn't agree to be interviewed.

is in our care. Sure, so that's that's a non starter. Uh. Derek Todd Lee was is remains still alive, but again no no response on the interview request. And Michael Carneil, who was the Heath High School shooter, I also asked for an interview with him, and again was just it wasn't denied, It just wasn't. I didn't get any response. So, as I say, in most of these cases, in most

mass murder cases, the killer doesn't survive anyway. So it's kind of rare and in uh, you know, in a very macab sort of way, it's a gift that Jared Loughner uh survived in Tucson. If we if we ever hope to really understand these people, we've got to be able to talk to people like.

captivate our imagination. Even though there are people that have empathy for victims, it seems in all fictional accounts and even in true accounts, that we really know who the killers are. We're a little more fascinated about the killers and their and their murderous ways rather than the victim and what happens to them after and their welfare.

things happen. These victims, whether they survive or not, are are being acted upon generally, and in these in Delivered from Evil, I'm I'm looking at what happens now after when when those victims and survivors now have to become the actors, They have to take charge and make something happen in their lives or they will simply just stop and die where they stand, so that it's that transition for them from being the target to being the catalyst for a change in their life.

for the true crime fan. It's always looking for something a little bit different, and this, certainly this book provides that. So congratulations to you on this book. Thank you very much, Thank you so much. So yes, I want to thank you very much, Ron for a fascinating interview about an incredible book delivered from evil. And I want to know what's your next project or what's on the agenda for you. I know you're a busy, prolific author.

them for decades. I'm fascinated by that kind of passion. But I'm also looking at maybe taking a little bit of a break from the true crime and letting my subconscious refill a little bit, and doing a few other projects that that I you know, that will please me. I have a book coming out in the fall called The Sourtoe Cocktail Club, which largely takes place there in Canada.

It's a it's a road trip memoir about this extraordinary journey I took with my teenage son to Dawson in the Yukon Territory and then after that to the to the Arctic beyond. Where you know, it's about a father and son trip, but we went up there basically to test ourselves against the famous sour Toe cocktail, which is a dream into which they drop a mummified human tow.