Berserk gunman kills 6 friends

LOCK HAVEN, Pa., – Leo Held, who inflicted a 90-minute reign of terror on this region yesterday, suffered some of the classic symptoms of a persecution complex, his neighbors said today.

Held, a chunky, baldish, 39-year-old laboratory technician in a paper mill, killed six persons and wounded six others before he was trapped and disarmed in his backyard in nearby Loganton.

Loganton is a neat, tiny village of 400, lost in a fold of Appalachians and reached by a winding mountain road. No one there professed to know the grievance, real or imagined, that sent Held on his shooting rampage.

Most of the people there said that, until yesterday, Leo seemed to be a quiet, peaceful citizen, devoted to his wife and four children, a member of the Sugar Valley School Board, a director of the Loganton Boy Scout troop, and an ardent deer hunter and woodsmen.

Still, there were other things. They said Leo was gnawed by suspicions that someone was out to get his job, and that he felt he had been passed over for promotion.

They said he thought his telephone was being tapped, and that he feuded with a neighbor over an inconsequential strip of boundary land.

They said he thought neighbors burned leaves just to spite him, knowing he hated the smoke, and that some of them unfairly criticized his driving.

Nonetheless, Sugar Valley residents had not thought much of their quiet neighbor’s peculiarities. Then they heard the broadcast.

Leo, a .45-caliber automatic pistol in one hand and a .38-caliber Magnum revolver in the other, had stalked into the Hammermill Paper Company, coldly and methodically wiped out four of his fellow employees, and was now speeding toward Loganton.

The Sugar Valley School, where three of the four Held children are enrolled, was put under a state of siege. The acting principal, William Harbach, a math teacher who used to hunt groundhogs with Held, ran home to fetch a revolver.

Harry Mark, the janitor, and some of the male teachers rushed to their homes for rifles.

Children are Separated

Shades were drawn on the ground-level classrooms and children were evacuated from the aisles nearest windows. They were told that they would have to remain indoors, perhaps even during luncheon recess. They were not told why.

Then the armed teachers deployed near the school entrances and waited for Held.

The Held children, Barbara, 12, Gerald, 13, and Curt, 5, were separated from their classmates and taken to an interior hall. They were told there later that their father had been involved in some shooting.

Uptown, the Rev. Stephen McKittrick of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, heard the news on his car radio. He ran into his house and armed himself with a recent birthday present from his wife, and over-and-under shotgun that he hoped to use during the wild turkey season.

A police car from Lock Haven had just arrived and men were beginning to surround Held’s home, a new story-and-a-half brick house, where he was believed to be hiding.

They had arrived too late, however, to prevent the slaying of Held’s sixth and last victim.

Avoiding state police roadblocks by taking a back road over Pine Mountain, Held had reached Loganton and broken into the home of his neighbors, the Floyd D. Quiggles. One he had protested to them about leaf burning.

Mr. Quiggle, a self-employed truck driver, and his wife, were upstairs in bed. They were sleeping late because Mr. Quiggle had no trip scheduled.

Held strode into the bedroom and opened fire, killing Mr. Quiggle instantly and critically wounding Mrs. Quiggle in the face and neck.

Then he walked downstairs and helped himself to several rifles from a gun cabinet before crossing the road to his own home.

He brushed past the Quiggle’s 4½-year-old daughter, Jody Lynn, whom a neighbor later found crying into the downstairs telephone.

"Just as clear as though she was reciting a lesson in classroom," the neighbor said, Jody Lynn was saying:

"Help me, mommy and daddy have been shot."

Held got inside his front door just as the police arrived.

Lock Haven’s assistant police chief, William B. Ryan, walked up and knocked on the door. Held parted the curtains on the door window, stared at Ryan, and then vanished into the interior of the house.

A moment later he came out the back door and started running across the lawn. He had his pistol and revolver and according to Chief of Police Domer G. Orndorf, he fired.

Assistant Chief Ryan, who had ducked around the side of the house, returned the fire, dropping Held with a bullet that shattered his right thigh.

The police called on Held to surrender.

Spread-eagle on the grass, but snarling defiance, Held replied:

"Come and get me. I’ve had enough."

When Mr. McKittrick reached the scene, Held was firing at the police, who now were reinforced by state troopers.

Held’s brother-in-law, Harold M. Brungard, a cashier at the Loganton National Bank, walked to the edge of the yard, starkly exposed to the slayer’s guns, and pleaded with Leo to give up.

Held stared at him, but said nothing. Then the shooting resumed.

"There was a dream-like quality about the whole thing," Mr. McKittrick recalled. "Fear didn’t come in until later. Leo already had been shot and disabled and I could feel only pity for him."

Held was now caught in a cross-fire. The police, taking pains not to kill him, they said, aimed for his hands. Their bullets finally shattered both wrists and knocked the guns away.

Muttering incoherently and under deep sedation, Held remained in critical condition today in Lock Haven Hospital. Not only his wrists and right thigh had been shattered, he also had been hit in the left shoulder. The police were unable to question him.

The police are unable to find any convincing reason why Held selected some of his victims. His last act before leaving Lock Haven yesterday was to drive from the paper mill to the local airport, where he shot and seriously wounded Mrs. Geraldine Ramm, an employee of the Piper Aircraft Company.

Mrs. Ramm, wife of a Loganton undertaker, belonged to a car pool with Held and other Sugar Valley residents, and there is a report that Held had been "blackballed" by members of the pool for fast driving.

The police have found that Mrs. Ramm had criticized Held’s driving, but they do not think this pressing enough for Held to kill her. Besides, he has not used the car pool for several weeks, they said.

Among those shot and killed by Held were supervisors whose advancement he might have resented. But reports that Held was fearful of retaining his own job are discounted by company officials.

There had been talk of layoffs at the plant, but Held, because of seniority, was not likely to lose his job, employees there said.

Still, to his neighbors, Held had seemed edgy, and occasionally he had showed a spark of truculence.

W. Edwards Meyer, president of the Loganton National Bank, recalled:

"He was not a good mixer; he was retiring almost to the point of being shy. But on the school board he’d take a firm stand and be obstinate and inflexible."

Mr. Meyer said Held would "pick up an argument" with neighbors, once complaining that a neighbor was encroaching on his property line, another time saying that smoke from neighbor’s fires was drifting onto his lawn.

Many Sugar Valley residents worried today lest the mass slayings encourage a state crackdown on firearms. Virtually everyone in the valley seems to have a rifle. This is fine deer country; even bear are still taken in numbers in the central Pennsylvania wilderness.

The population of Sugar Valley is long settled, white, Protestant, and largely of German origin. In about a month many kitchens in the valley will be smelling of roast venison, red cabbage and homemade sauerkraut.