The Story of the First Mass Murder in U.S. History

[rangerrebew]

The Story of the First Mass Murder in U.S. History
Howard Unruh’s “Walk of Death” foretold an era in which such tragedies would become all too common
 
By Patrick Sauer
smithsonian.com
October 14, 2015
 

On Labor Day, 1949, Howard Unruh decided to go to the movies. He left his Camden, New Jersey, apartment and headed to the Family Theatre in downtown Philadelphia. On the bill that night was a double feature, the double-crossing gangster movie I Cheated the Law and The Lady Gambles, in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a poker-and-dice-game addict. Unruh, however, wasn’t interested in the pictures. He was supposed to meet a man with whom he’d been having a weeks-long affair.

Unfortunately for Unruh, 28 years old at the time, traffic held him up and by the time he reached theater, a well-known gay pick up spot on Market St., his date was gone. Unruh sat in the dark until 2:20 a.m., bitterly stewing through multiple on-screen loops of the movies. At 3 a.m., he arrived home in New Jersey to find that the newly constructed fence at the rear end of his backyard—one he’d erected to quell an ongoing feud with the Cohens who lived next door and owned the drugstore below the apartment he shared with his mother—had been tampered with. The gate was missing.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-first-mass-murder-us-history-180956927/#cwrWbkc3QPXfsHAX.99
 

[thackney]

First - 1949?

I don't think that could be close to correct.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/early-american-mass-murder-changes-common-perceptions-of-crime

In one of the most famous crimes of post-Revolution America, Barnett Davenport commits an awful mass murder in rural Connecticut. Caleb Mallory, his wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren were killed in their home by their boarder, Davenport.

Davenport, born in 1760, enlisted in the American army as a teenager and had served at Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. In the waning days of the war with the British, he came to live in the Mallory household. Today, Davenport’s crime might be ascribed to some type of post-war stress syndrome, but at the time it was the source of a different sociological significance.

On February 3, apparently unprovoked, Davenport beat Caleb Mallory to death. He then beat Mallory’s seven-year-old grandchild with a rifle and killed his daughter-in-law. Davenport looted the home before setting it on fire, killing two others.

[GtHawk]

How odd that that would be in the Smithsonian Mag, don't they even do the diligence of checking their own prior publications?
Apparently they didn't consider this  massacre a mass murder?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1927-bombing-remains-americas-deadliest-school-massacre-180963355/

And what about the slaughter of settlers by Indians and the slaughter of Indians by settlers and the military? And I know I read about serial killers that racked up high numbers well before 1949. How sad the Smithsonian Magazine has become.

[WarmPotato]

Eh, heard about it during the last shooting :P