The Night of the Game

When the police arrested John Arno Schulz, a 16-year-old Milwaukee high-school boy, for speeding in St. Louis County, Mo. this week, they asked him what he was doing so far from home. He readily told them:

"Saturday night I wanted to go to a basketball game. My mother kept arguing about staying out late . . . My mother and I have been arguing and fighting ever since I can remember . . . After dinner I went up into the attic and got my father's .410 shotgun, a bolt-action gun holding four shells . . . My father had left for La Crosse. I put a handful of shells into my pocket and came down the stairs and put the gun in the hall. Ralph Trede called up. He is 17 years old. He asked me if I was going to the basketball game.

"Then I got into an argument with my mother again . . . I asked her where the [car] keys were but she wouldn't tell me. I got the gun [and] went back to the kitchen . . . and called her by her name, Catherine. She turned around . . . I shot her in the stomach. She fell, started to get up, and I fired another shot, hitting her in the face. About that time my brother Robert, eleven years old, started toward the phone . . . to call the police. I shot him, and I think I hit him in the shoulder.

"He ran into the bedroom, and my little sister Catherine, six years old, began screaming. Robert was rolling on the floor and trying to get under the bed, and I shot him again. [Catherine] was screaming too much, so I shot her. I was just mad or something. I went back to the kitchen and shot [mother] again. I went back to the bedroom. My brother was moving a little. I reached over the bed and shot him again. I don't know how many times I shot my sister. I dragged my mother into a bedroom and closed the door. I found the keys to the car in a jewel box on the dresser.

"I picked up Donald Smith and Everett Myers, and we went to the basketball game at Pulaski High School. Pulaski won, I think it was 55 to 46. After I got home from the basketball game, it was about 1 o'clock in the morning. I took a bath, shaved, put on a new suit and packed, my grip. I looked for money. I gathered up about $127. I wrote a note to my father . . . It said: 'Sorry things have happened this way. Maybe we will meet again . . . Your Twisted Son.' Then I drove toward Geneva, Illinois. I followed [Route] 66.

"I had nothing against my brother and sister. They were my buddies. I don't have to go to the funerals, do I?"

When St. Louis police called them, officers in Milwaukee reported that they had no knowledge of such a murder, but 15 minutes later the boy's story was verified--his father got back to Milwaukee, walked into the house, and all but stumbled over the bodies of his wife and two children.

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