The Madman on the Tower
I remember every detail of that day twenty years ago—the blue sky, the noonday heat, the gunshots, the screams, the blood, and …
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And something else incredible was happening. From about noon on, I had been hearing the occasional crack of return fire from the ground. I supposed it to be police, who at last were dashing around, revolvers in hand like pacifiers, looking helplessly officious. A couple of them had riot shotguns, which likewise could not have served much more than the psychological purpose of reducing frustration. But when I walked out the front door of the Union, staying out of Tower range, I felt the concussion of a high-powered rifle firing from somewhere nearby. I thought, “Ah, now we’re getting someplace!” though I wasn’t sure where. Minutes later I saw a man in street clothes with a scoped deer rifle in one hand and an Army surplus ammo can in the other, running in a crouch across Guadalupe toward the back of the architecture building, where he disappeared into bushes. I went back inside to find a safe route to the Academic Center, the only building between the Union and the Tower, and God help me if I didn’t see a middle-aged man in a hunting cap and full camouflage hunting outfit, pockets bulging, standing in the Union’s protected courtyard and squinting up at rooftops, apparently looking for a position from which to shoot. Later I heard some bizarre stories. A member of the Confederate Air Force antique-aircraft club in the Valley supposedly called the Department of Public Safety and offered to head north at full throttle in a World War II fighter, armed with privately owned .50-caliber machine guns. I somehow doubt that, but such a thing would not have been out of the question. Some friends of mine who were glued to a television set in the old San Jacinto Cafe a few blocks southeast of campus said that a man carrying a deer rifle rushed in, bought a six-pack of beer, and rushed back out.
About the only difference between police and citizens that day were uniforms and radios, and some cops had neither. Nobody seemed to know what to do except keep down, and I found out afterward that the officers on campus were angry and frustrated that no helpful suggestions were coming from headquarters, which had not even unlimbered the department’s supply of fairly old .35-caliber rifles, which at least had the range. The only cops with useful weapons were those who went home and got them or those who came from home and brought them. One I knew, Lieutenant Burt Gerding, had headed for the campus with a .30-06 Army Springfield, scoped and sporterized from its World War I configuration, and several bandoliers of Army surplus armor-piercing ammunition. He took up a position on the roof of the business and economics building off the Tower’s southeast corner and doesn’t mind admitting now that before he got sighted in, the first shot went high and put the most conspicuous hole in the Tower clock’s translucent glass face. After that, he hit a bag of cartridges that Whitman had set on the parapet and maybe one of Whitman’s rifles, which appeared to have been struck by an armor-piercing bullet.
The ground fire was picking up, maybe a shot every five or ten seconds, which was causing me to think, “Just what we need—a bunch of loonies lobbing bullets all over the place, killing even more people.” But I noticed that as the ground fire increased, the shots from the Tower came less often. Peeking carefully upward from a corner of the Academic Center, I could see puffs around the Tower’s parapet that were not smoke from the sniper’s guns but bullets striking the soft stone, sometimes knocking out sizable chunks that seemed to waft slowly downward. At one point the shooting picked up in much the same way that kernels of corn begin to pop—sporadically for a time, then more and more often, until all of a sudden the popping blends into a roar before tapering off again.
I was trying to figure out what that barrage was all about when somebody pointed toward the mall in front of the Main Building, where a girl was stranded in the grassy area, squeezed behind the thick base of a flagpole, her face in her hands. A man’s body was lying out there in the sun, cooking on the intensely hot concrete. Through the space between some large shrubbery I glimpsed someone running across the mall, fully exposed to the Tower. I found out later that some students had dashed out into the open, distances of twenty, thirty, maybe forty yards, to pick up the dead and wounded and carry them back out of range. The sniper wasn’t firing because the fusillade from the ground was hitting the Tower’s parapet like a slow-motion discharge from a giant shotgun.
I was watching part of this on live television in the basement of the Academic Center. One of the school’s TV cameras had been rolled outside the door of some building and had been left there, unmanned, zoomed in on the top of the Tower and feeding a TV monitor in the lower level of the Academic Center. That was eerie—seeing the observation deck close up, seeing the little puffs of dust kicked out of the limestone by bullets, with the sound coming not from the TV but from outside, where it all was happening. A reminder of that was a wounded girl stretched out on a table in the same room. No one seemed to be looking after her when I walked in, so I asked if I could do anything or get her anything, and she shock her head no, as if she preferred to be left alone. I turned my attention to the TV and after a few minutes was perversely thinking that this show didn’t have much action. Then, finally, something did happen—a piece of cloth waved briefly above the parapet, signaling the end.
I went outside to see maybe a thousand students emerging from everywhere and stampeding toward the Tower, nearly overwhelming several cops who were trying to keep them back. It crossed my mind that if the signal were a trick, the sniper had just cleverly replenished his supply of targets. But it was over, and I could hear a transistor radio calling for a halt to the ground fire on orders of the police. And now I was on the Academic Center breeze-way, watching the crowd trying to turn itself into a mob, some overadrenalinized students starting to yell obscenities and words like “lynch” and “kill,” as if more of that were needed. I found myself wanting to strike out at them as much as at whatever tortured creature had been in its death throes up in the Tower.
The accounts of Charles Whitman’s death were pretty garbled at the time, and there was no way that those of us on the ground would understand what had just happened on the Tower. After the pilot of the small plane reported only one sniper, it seemed obvious to me that he had knowingly trapped himself, intending to die and to take with him as many others as possible. When the finale came, at about 1:25 p.m., it did so in a stoke that was at once a monument to official disorganization, dumb luck, and great personal courage.
The cops who had made it into the Main Building were trying to control the fairly panicky situation there, while others, deciding they were on their own, had taken the Tower elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, which gave access to the switchback stairs leading two more flights up to the observation level. There they encountered new problems. Whitman, after lugging his gear up to the central reception area, had first killed the middle-aged woman who was well known to the campus for her insistence that everyone sign the visitors’ register and not make jokes about jumping; then he had not killed a sight-seeing couple who came in from the outside walkway. Those two went on out, assuming that the man holding a gun who had cheerily said, “Hi, how are you?” was a school employee preparing to shoot pigeons. But six members of a tourist family who next came up were received with blasts from Whitman’s sawed-off 12-gauge and four of them, two dead, were now lying on the stairs on top of one another in a great bloody mess.
Efforts to help those people and to push through the sniper’s hastily erected barricades of furniture resulted in four men reaching the reception room at the observation level with no plan of action. Whitman was outside and unseen, but the sound of his shots seemed to be coming from the northwest corner of the outside walkway that circumscribed the clock tower. Luckily, that was exactly opposite the doorway leading outside, which was at the southeast corner.
The first man through the door was 29-year-old Ramiro Martinez, an officer who without discussion turned left and began working his way north along the Tower’s east side, armed only with a revolver. Following him was Officer Houston McCoy, 26, armed with a revolver and a riot shotgun. Posted to guard the south side was a civilian, Allen Crum, the 40-year-old floor manager of the University Co-op bookstore who had asked to join the attack party; he was more or less deputized and given a rifle by a policeman downstairs. Joining him moments later was Officer Jerry Day, also acting as rear guard in case the sniper retreated in that direction.
Martinez and McCoy traversed the walkway on the east side of the building one after the other, hopping past drain spouts that were still funneling in bullets from the ground. Then, in a move of terrible courage that might now seem short on wisdom, Martinez leapt from cover and with one hand began firing his revolver at the young man with blondish hair who was backed into the opposite corner, about fifty feet away, holding a semiautomatic Army carbine. The carbine was swinging around to fire when McCoy delivered two bursts of double-aught buckshot to Whitman’s head and neck, making up for the .38 bullets that appeared to be missing their target.
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