96 Minutes
On August 1, 1966, CHARLES WHITMAN climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower and started firing—and the rest, literally, is history. Here’s what happened on that fateful day, in the words of more than three dozen people who got shot, fired back, lost loved ones, saved lives by risking their own, and otherwise witnessed the nation’s first mass murder in a public place.
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DAVE MCNEELY was a reporter in the Houston Chronicle’s Capitol bureau. He is a syndicated newspaper columnist in Austin.
I met Charles Whitman that summer at his birthday party. I was there by virtue of the fact that the lead guitar player in my rock band was a close friend of his. Whitman was blond, good-looking, solidly built. I remember he seemed like a nice, clean-cut, all-American kind of guy. I was really sort of stunned when I heard the news.
BARTON RILEY was an instructor in architectural engineering. A retired architect, he lives in Kerrville.
Charlie was one of my students. He didn’t have many friends, but he and I had both been in the Marine Corps, and we got along pretty good. From what I understood, his father was a rather crude man and had kicked him around a bit. Charlie felt tremendous anger toward him. When he came to the university, he wanted to excel; he wanted to show his father up. He felt that he had to make A’s, and if he didn’t, he was very hard on himself.
SHELTON WILLIAMS: I had a class that spring in the architecture building, and I was always compulsively early. So was another guy, Charlie, whose last name I didn’t know until I saw his picture in the paper. He always chewed on his fingernails while he read over his notes. I’d never seen anyone work so vigorously on their fingernails; I couldn’t believe there was anything left to chew. I remember a kid walked up to him once and said, “Say, Charlie, are you going to go to Vietnam and kill Charlie?” The kid thought that was hilarious. Whitman said, “The Marines can kiss my red-white-and-blue ass.”
BARTON RILEY: Charlie called me at eleven o’clock one night and said, “I need to see you.” I said, “Now?” and he said yes. So I turned the porch light on and waited for him. He was one of those guys who got red-faced when he was upset, and he was very flushed when he walked in the door. He was carrying an architectural drawing that I suppose he wanted to show me, but the moment he saw that I had a baby grand in my living room, he dropped his papers, sat down, and played “Claire de Lune.” It’s a fairly tough little tune to play, but he did it beautifully. Then he played something else, though I don’t remember what. When all that red had drained out of his face, he stood up. I said, “Well, I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Charlie.” He said, “Okay,” and left.
GARY LAVERGNE is the author of A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders.
Whitman had been thinking about doing this for a while. In early September of 1961 he was standing on the seventh-floor balcony of the Goodall Wooten dorm, looking at the Tower, when he turned to a friend and said, “You know, that would be a great place to go up with a rifle and shoot people. You could hold off an army for as long as you wanted.” He wasn’t like you or me; instead of seeing the Tower, he saw a fortress. Instead of rain spouts, he saw gun turrets. It never occurred to his friend that he might be serious.
“WE WALKED OUT ONTO THE OBSERVATION DECK AND ENJOYED THE VIEW …”
The day before the shootings, a teenager from Rockdale named Cheryl Botts (now Cheryl Dickerson) came to Austin to visit her grandmother. When she arrived at the Greyhound station, she met UT student Don Walden, and they struck up a conversation. Walden offered to show her around campus the next day on his motorcycle, and she accepted. They arrived at the Tower the following morning, not long before Whitman took control of the observation deck. The Gabours, a family visiting from Texarkana, arrived soon after.
CHERYL DICKERSON was a freshman at Howard Payne University, in Brownwood. She is a textbook consultant in Luling.
We walked out onto the observation deck and enjoyed the view on all four sides, looking down at the whole city. I grew up in a very small town, so the thing that impressed me was how big everything was. I mean, there were buildings and highways for as far as you could see; it just went on and on, and it was so beautiful. We looked around for at least a half an hour. We didn’t know much about each other, so we did a lot of visiting too.
DAVID MATTSON was a Peace Corps trainee living in Austin. A retired teacher, he lives in Hastings, Minnesota.
I’m reminded of the article that was in Time magazine a week or two later that compared the shootings to Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the book, people from all walks of life were, for various reasons, drawn together by fate to a critical time and place in space. Everyone was there for a different reason when the bridge, which spans a gorge in Peru, collapses and they fall to their deaths.
CHERYL DICKERSON: We stepped back inside, and I noticed that the receptionist was not at her desk, but I just assumed she had gone to lunch. The next thing I saw was this reddish-brown swath that we had to step over. My instinct—I mean, I’m a naive small-town girl, okay? I had a rationalization for everything—was that someone was about to varnish the floor. So we stepped over it, and immediately to our right, a blond guy stood up. We had surprised him, apparently. He was bending over the couch, and we found out later that he had put the receptionist’s body there and that she was still alive at that time. He turned around to face us, and he had a rifle in each hand. Don thought—I know this sounds crazy—that he was there to shoot pigeons. So I smiled at him and said, “Hello,” and he smiled back at me and said, “Hi.” All of this took about fifteen seconds; we never stopped walking. We walked to the stairwell and went down one floor to the elevator. I figured out later when I read the newspaper that while we were going down in one elevator, the Gabours must have been coming up in the other.
MICHAEL GABOUR was a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He owns a radio station in Port Douglas, Australia.
After getting off the elevator, we began the climb to the observation deck. A desk had been pulled across the doorway at the top of the stairs, so I volunteered to go up and inquire whether or not the observation deck was closed. My brother, my aunt, and my mother followed slightly farther behind. As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw a pretty-good-sized blond dude wearing aviator shades running toward me. The barrel of what looked like a sawed-off automatic twelve-gauge shotgun was coming up to firing position. In nanoseconds my brain tried to process the images for a response. I had just started to turn toward my family when the first blast caught my left shoulder. I’m not sure if it was that round, or one of the many subsequent ones, that killed my brother and my aunt.
HERB RITCHIE was a sophomore. He is a criminal defense lawyer in Houston.
I was in the classics department, on the highest floor of the Tower, just below the observation deck, helping an assistant professor catalog some cards for his dissertation. There was a really loud noise that sounded like filing cabinets had fallen down the stairs. Professor Mench ran to the stairwell and went up the steps a partial distance. He came running back and said, “There are bodies in the stairwell.”
MICHAEL GABOUR: I regained consciousness when my father tried to pull me down the blood-filled hallway. I told him to go for help, and he did. I tried to escape but realized that I was unable to move my left leg. I became aware that my mother was still alive, so I kept her that way by not letting her drift away.
HERB RITCHIE: We barricaded ourselves inside an office in the classics department. I put a rolling blackboard up against the door, and we shoved a desk up against that. There were about eight of us, including two nuns. One of the sisters talked about the poor, twisted soul up there who was shooting people, and I thought that was a nice attitude to have, but from where I was sitting, I could see the bodies lying on the mall. I didn’t have much sympathy for whoever was up there shooting. I didn’t have much sympathy at all.
“… HE WAS SHOOTING AND KILLING PEOPLE A LONG WAY OFF, ALL UP AND DOWN THE DRAG.”
In the first few minutes of Whitman’s killing spree, many students were unaware of what was happening; some thought it was the work of drama students or an experiment being performed by the psychology department or just a joke. Claire Wilson (now Claire James) found herself stranded on the South Mall, eight months pregnant and hit in the abdomen. She and other victims lay where they had fallen on the hot cement and tried to play dead. But Whitman never shot again once he had hit his target. In the sniper tradition of “one shot, one kill,” he never wasted a bullet on someone who was down.
CLAIRE JAMES: I didn’t know it at the time, but I was losing a lot of blood; I felt like I was melting. The heat was just deadly. The pavement was so hot that it was burning the backs of my legs.
DAVID MATTSON: I was walking with two other Peace Corps volunteers, Roland Ehlke and Tom Herman, down the Drag; we were headed to Sheftall’s jewelers, because I needed to get my watch fixed. We’d had a water fight at our dorm the night before, and I’d gotten water under the crystal. I was showing my friends my watch—I had stopped and was holding my hand up by my head, at eye level—when all of a sudden my hand came crashing down. The terrific force of it spun me around, and when I looked down, I saw that part of my wrist had been blown away. Ehlke was bleeding too. The manager inside Sheftall’s pulled us into the store, and we crawled on our hands and knees behind the display cases.
ANN MAJOR was a senior. She is a romance novelist living in Corpus Christi.
I went down to the basement of Parlin Hall, and people were panicking. We listened to the radio and realized he was shooting and killing people a long way off, all up and down the Drag. I remember hearing the radio announcer say he had shot a boy off his bicycle near the Night Hawk restaurant, several blocks away.
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