Charles Whitman

[cruororism]

One man's massacre


In the early evening of Sunday 31 July 1966, Whitman sat down at his desk in the living room of the house on Jewell Street. The temperature had been up in the mid-nineties during the afternoon and it was still very hot. Outside, the lawns, parched by the summer sun, were full of dust. A month earlier, the United States had begun bombing targets in the demilitarized zone in Vietnam and had launched the first attacks against Hanoi, the North Vietnam capital, and the port city of Haiphong. Whitman put a sheet of paper in an old, portable typewriter and started to type: To whom it may concern. I don't understand what is compelling me to type this note. I've been having fears and violent impulses. I've had some tremendous headaches ...

At about 7:30 P.M. he was interrupted by a visit from Larry Fuess and his wife, Elaine. The Fuesses asked him what he was writing and he replied, "Letters to old friends," and put the sheet away. Larry Fuess would later recall that Charlie "was in good spirits. It didn't seem like anything at all was bothering him. In fact it was strange because he had a test the next day and usually he was very tense before tests ... Looking back, it seemed that he was particularly relieved about something - you know, as if you had solved a problem." Whitman and the Fuesses chatted generally for an hour or so, and at one point the conversation turned to Vietnam. Whitman "said he couldn't understand why boys from the United States had to go over there and die for something they didn't have anything to do with." When Larry and Elaine left, Charlie returned to his typewriter. I intend to kill Kathy. I love her very much, he wrote. I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don't want her to face the embarrassment that my actions will surely cause. He did not elaborate on what these actions might be, but did write: I am prepared to die.

At about 10:00 P.M. Whitman drove into town to pick up Kathy from the Southwestern Bell Telephone office where she was working the summer as an information operator. He dropped her off at home and then went out again to visit his mother. At the Penthouse Apartments, he stabbed his mother in the chest and shot her in the back of the head. Margaret may have put up a struggle because several bones in her left hand were broken with such force that the band of her engagement ring was driven into her finger. Detectives would find her body the next day, together with a letter in her son's neat handwriting: I have just killed my mother. If there's a heaven, she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart. He left the Penthouse Apartments at around midnight, pinning another note on his dead mother's door: Roy, mother ill and not able to come to work today. Then he drove home.

In the first hour of the morning of Monday 1 August, Whitman appended a hand-written note to the letter he had earlier composed on the typewriter: 1230 A.M. - mother already dead. At 3:00 A.M. he added his final remark: Wife and mother both dead. He had stabbed Kathy three times in the chest, apparently as she slept, and carefully wrapped her naked body in a bed sheet. At 5:45 A.M. he telephoned Kathy's supervisor at Southwestern Bell. She was scheduled to start a shift at half past eight that morning. He told the supervisor that she was ill and would not be in for work.

At 7:15 A.M. Whitman drove to the Austin Rental Equipment Service office and hired for cash a three-wheeled dolly, used for moving crates. At the drive-in window of an Austin bank, he cashed two $125 cheques; one of the cheques was on his account and nearly depleted it, and the other was on his mother's. At the Davis Hardware store, he bought a reconditioned Second World War .30-calibre M-1 carbine, and at Chuck's Gun Shop, several magazines for the M-1 and ammunition for it and for other rifles. He paid the bill by cheque for which there were now insufficient funds in his account. A clerk inquired, with friendly interest, what he wanted all the ammunition for and he replied, "To shoot some pigs." The clerk thought nothing of it; plenty of Austin hunters liked to shoot wild pig.

At 9:30 A.M. Whitman appeared at the large, modem Sears Roebuck department store in downtown Austin. He bought a twelve-gauge shotgun on credit and during the next hour sawed off part of the stock and barrel. He put the shotgun in his old marine corps footlocker, together with the M-1 carbine he had bought. Then, he added a 6-mm Remington bolt-action rifle with a four-power Leupold telescopic sight, a .35-calibre Remington pump rifle, a 9-mm Luger pistol, a .25-calibre Galesi-Brescia pistol, a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver, and well over 500 rounds of ammunition. Some of his guns, including two Derringer pistols, he decided to leave at home. All his weapons were legally owned.

In addition to the firearms, he also packed into the footlocker a Bowie knife, machete and hatchet, two jerry cans - one filled with water, the other with petrol - matches, lighter fuel, adhesive tape, rope, a flashlight, a clock and a transistor radio, various canned foods, including Spam and fruit cocktail, packets of raisins, a bottle of deodorant and a roll of toilet paper.

It was about 11:00 A.M. and 90 degrees Fahrenheit when Whitman's Chevrolet rolled into a parking area reserved for executives at the northwest comer of the 307-foot tall Main Building of the University of Texas. The granite tower, housing the university's library and administrative offices, and the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, dominated the campus of otherwise low, Spanish-style buildings with terracotta roofs. Whitman, wearing a grey, nylon boiler suit over his blue jeans' white shirt and tennis shoes, loaded his marine corps footlocker onto the rented dolly and wheeled it into the Main Building. He smiled at a receptionist, who assumed he was a maintenance man, and headed across the marble hall towards the two automatic lifts.

The lift went as far as the twenty-seventh floor, and Whitman hauled the trunk up the last few flights of steps to the top floor. Mrs. Edna Townsley, the receptionist on the top-floor observation deck, apparently approached him to see what it was he wanted. Whitman smashed her over the head with the butt of a rifle, with such force that part of her skull was torn away. He then dragged her limp body behind a couch in the reception room, put a bullet in her head and left her for dead. She actually died some two hours later.

As Whitman manhandled the footlocker over to the door that led out onto the open walkway around the top of the tower, a group of sightseers arrived in the lift on the twenty-seventh floor: M.J. Gabour, a gas station operator, his wife, Mary, and their two sons, 19-year-old Mike, a cadet at the Air Force Academy, and 15-year-old Mark. Accompanying them were Gabour's sister, Mrs. Marguerite Lamport, and her husband, William. The two teenage boys were the first members of the party to reach the top floor, a few steps ahead of their mother and aunt. The women's husbands trailed a little behind. "Mark opened the door to the observation deck and a gun went off," Gabour later recalled. "Mike screamed." A sawn-off shotgun was discharged twice in rapid succession. Mary, Marguerite, Mike and Mark, Gabour said, "came rolling down the stairs. Whoever did the shooting slammed the door." Gabour and Lamport hauled the four victims down to the twenty-seventh floor. Mark was already dead.

Whitman, meanwhile, had barricaded the door from the stairs to the reception room and now had the entire observation deck to himself. He went out onto the open walkway and looked over the chest-high, stone parapet. Immediately above him, the south clock face was reading ten to twelve. Above the clock was the bell tower and above the bell tower nothing but clear blue sky. Mapped out below him was the 232-acre university campus, the whole of the city of Austin and sixty-five miles of Texas countryside in whichever direction he looked: to the south and east, lush farmland; to the west, distant, mist-veiled mountains and the road to the LBJ Ranch where one night, five years earlier, he and a couple of companions shot a deer after it became trapped in the headlights of their car. Someone had noticed the automobile, with the young buck lashed to the back of it, and telephoned the licence number to the Texas Game and Fish Commission.

At 4:30 A.M. on the morning of 20 November 1961, Game Warder Grover Simpson and three Austin police officers found Charlie and his roommates dressing the deer in a dormitory bathroom. Now, five years on, Whitman was poaching people. He opened fire from the top of the tower and the huge bell, twenty feet above his head, began to chime. It was high noon in Austin.

[cruororism]

A newsboy, 17-year-old Alec Hernandez, suddenly teetered and fell from his bicycle. Denver Dolman, a bookstore operator on the edge of the campus, unaware that a high velocity bullet had just drilled through the newsboy's groin, looked on - bemused by what appeared to be an inexplicable cycling accident. Then, he heard gunshots and all around him "people started falling."

Claire Wilson, 18 years old and eight months pregnant, had just left a first-year anthropology class in the company of a fellow freshman, Thomas Eckman. The pair were strolling across the sun-drenched South Mall when a bullet struck Claire in the lower abdomen, tearing into her womb and shattering the skull of her baby. Claire survived, but the baby was stillborn. As the horrified Eckman knelt beside his wounded friend, a second shot was fired, killing him instantly. Robert Boyer, a research physicist and lecturer in applied mathematics, had just left the Main Building to meet a friend for lunch. As he walked out onto the South Mall, heading away from the tower, he suddenly collapsed, a bullet in his back. Seeing the first victims fall, Charlotte Dareshori, a secretary in the Dean's office, rushed outside to help - but was soon under fire herself. She found refuge behind the concrete base of a flagpole and crouched there, under Old Glory, for ninety minutes, isolated but safe, one of the few people to venture out onto the exposed South Mall and survive.

Outside the Rae Ann dress shop, in a street bordering the campus to the west, chemistry student Abdul Khashab, his fiancée, Janet Paulos, and a friend Lana Phillips, all fell wounded within a few seconds of each other. A jewellery shop manager was just leaving the building to go to the aid of another trio of wounded victims on the pavement, when the shop windows shattered and bullet fragments tore into his leg. Harry Walchuk, a political scientist and graduate student working towards his doctorate, suddenly gasped, staggered backwards clasping his throat, and collapsed by a newsstand, mortally wounded. A block away, 18-year-old Paul Sonntag, a summer lifeguard at the municipal pool, was strolling north with Claudia Rutt, also 18, when Claudia suddenly clutched at her chest, cried out and slumped to the pavement. Seconds later, another bullet brought Sonntag down beside her.

Most of Whitman's victims were shot during the first twenty minutes of sniping and he relied mainly on the 6-mm Remington rifle with the four-power scope, a weapon and sight configuration with which even a moderate marksman can consistently hit a target the size of a human head at 300 yards. Thomas Karr, a senior from Fort Worth, was shot dead at just about that range to the west of the tower. Thomas Ashton, a Peace Corps trainee was shot dead to the east. North of the tower, Associated Press reporter, Robert Heard, running at full tilt, caught a bullet in the shoulder. It was a painful wound, but not sufficiently serious to prevent him from marvelling "What a shot!"

South of the tower, one of the first police officers on the scene, 23-year-old patrolman Billy Speed, took up a position behind the stone columns of a balustrade. Leland Ammons, a law student, saw the young cop suddenly go sprawling. "The shot hit him high in the shoulder," Ammons said later. "It must have either ricocheted or the bullet came through one of the slits between the fence pillars." Whichever way he was hit, it made no difference to Speed; the shot killed him.

At the top of the tower, Whitman frequently changed his position, each time finding fresh prey in his sights. Karen Griffith, a 17-year-old Austin girl, was shot in the chest and died a week later from the wounds. Four students were wounded on Twenty-fourth Street, north of the tower. Three people were wounded on the roof of the Computation Center, just east of the tower.

Meanwhile, over 100 law enforcement officers had responded to the trouble signal that had gone out over all police channels, soon after the sniping started. City cops, highway patrolmen, Texas Rangers, and even US secret servicemen from Lyndon Johnson's Austin office, had converged on the tower. Off-duty officers began showing up, as news of the shooting spread. Patrolman Ramiro Martinez was at home cooking steak when he heard a newsflash on the radio. He buckled on his service revolver and rushed to the scene. Local gun-owning citizens materialized and started shooting at the tower. A cop angrily demanded of one such public-spirited citizen what the hell he thought he was doing. The man, reportedly dressed in battle fatigues and with an M-14 rifle set up on a tripod, replied, "Just helping out."

Police desperately tried to seal off the area around the tower but Whitman's wide shooting radius and easy access to all points of the compass made the task impossible. Three blocks south of the tower, Roy Dell Schmidt, an electrician with a service call to make in the area, got out of his van to find out what a police roadblock up ahead was all about. Told to leave the area, Schmidt retreated to where a group of onlookers was gathered on the sidewalk. Suddenly, a bullet tore through his chest. "He told me we were out of range," the man who had been standing next to him revealed later.

The dead and the dying were scattered over an everwidening area as Whitman looked farther afield for his victims. A police marksman, Lieutenant Marion Lee, was sent up in a light aircraft to try to pick the sniper off. Rescuers in an armoured car worked to retrieve the wounded from the dangerous no-man's-land of the South Mall. Unintimidated by the sharpshooting cop above him or by the barrage of fire coming from the ground below him, Whitman first forced the plane to retreat, with a few accurate shots at its fuselage, and then turned his attention back to zeroing in on his human targets.

Three blocks north and two blocks west of the tower, a basketball coach, Billy Snowden, was just stepping into a barbershop when a bullet crashed into his shoulder. Way over to the southeast, two students sitting near windows were nicked by bullets. An ambulanceman, trying to help some of the wounded to the west of the tower was himself shot and wounded.

In the meantime, the hail of police bullets ricocheted from the bell turret at the top of the tower, peppered the clock faces, or chipped away at the stone parapet around the walkway - but failed to find the vulnerable flesh of the sniper's body. Whitman stayed low. Utilizing the narrow drainage ducts as gunports, he was virtually impossible to hit.

If an architect had set out to design a building with the express intention of it being used by a sniper, he could have done little better than produce the blueprint of the University of Texas tower. For more than one and a half hours, Whitman's position was unassailable. He had such an unobstructed view of the campus and its environs that police were unable to rush the building, and he was so well protected that they were unable to shoot him down at long range. It was not until a few, resourceful officers found themselves together in the tower, after gaining entry by various means - through underground conduits or by zig-zagging from building to building - that the initiative switched to the police. Ramiro Martinez, the off-duty patrolman who had abandoned his steak dinner to come to the scene, was joined by a handful of other officers, including Houston McCoy and Jerry Day, and by a civilian, Allen Crum, an employee of the university and a former air force tailgunner.

Crum was deputized on the spot. The group took the lift to the twenty-sixth floor because, Crum later explained "we didn't want to take a chance of running into [Whitman] if he was waiting for us on the twenty-seventh." Cautiously, they made their way up the final flights of steps. On the twenty-seventh floor, they came across members of the Gabour and Lamport families, some dead, some wounded and the remainder grief-stricken. While their colleagues tended to the victims, officers Martinez and McCoy, and the newly deputized Crum, continued up the stairs to the observation deck.

[cruororism]

The door to the reception room was still barricaded. Carefully, the trio pushed against the door, easing back the desk that blocked it, until there was a sufficiently large gap to squeeze through. They were advised, by radio, of the sniper's position - he was on the north side of the roof - and Martinez crawled out onto the walkway on the south side, and began moving stealthily eastwards. Crum and McCoy followed, Crum turning to the west and McCoy backing up Martinez. Martinez rounded the southeast comer of the tower, onto the east walkway. If Whitman was in the position he was supposed to be, Martinez would find him when he turned the next comer. He made his way towards it.

Crum, meanwhile, had turned onto the west walkway. Suddenly, he heard footsteps up ahead. He fired a shot from his rifle into the northwest comer to prevent the sniper from bursting around it and shooting him. On the other side of the tower, Martinez turned cautiously onto the north walkway. Fifty feet away crouched Whitman, the M-1 in his hands. waiting for Crum at the opposite comer. Martinez raised his .38 service revolver and shot into Whitman's left side. "He jerked up the carbine toward me," the patrolman later recalled. "He couldn't keep it level. He kept trembling, going up instead of coming down with it. I don't know how many shots I fired." In fact, he fired all six, emptying his revolver. McCoy moved up, stepped around him, and blasted Whitman with a shotgun. Martinez grabbed the shotgun: "Mat guy was still flopping and he had that carbine in his hands ... and I ran at him and shot at the same time. I got to him and saw that he was dead." Crum took a towel from Whitman's footlocker and waved it above the parapet signaling to the men on the ground that it was all over.