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.
(Page 5 of 6)
A security guard was sitting inside, and I asked if I could borrow his handheld radio. I tried all the channels, but I couldn’t make contact with the department. I tried the phone, but the lines were jammed; all I got was a busy signal. At that point, I decided that I needed to get upstairs. My training in the Army had taught me that when you encounter a situation like this, you establish a command post right away. Then you organize an assault team. I figured I just needed to get upstairs and find out what the game plan was.
I got on the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-seventh floor. By that time I was starting to feel pretty uneasy, because I wasn’t seeing any other officers. As a Catholic, I was taught to ask the good Lord for forgiveness if I thought my life might be in danger. And so as I was going up in the elevator, watching those little numbers light up, I decided to say an Act of Contrition. Then I pulled out my .38 and pointed it at the elevator doors. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I got to the top of the Tower.
When the elevator doors opened, police officer Jerry Day and a civilian named Allen Crum were facing me holding a pistol and a rifle. We all let out huge sighs of relief the moment we saw each other. An officer with the Department of Public Safety’s intelligence section was sitting at a desk, dialing, trying to establish communications. The man next to him was drawing a map of the observation deck—and that was it. I couldn’t believe it. There was no game plan. We were the whole enchilada.
I decided to secure the floor, and I had started opening doors when I saw a very distraught middle-aged man holding a pair of white women’s shoes with blood on them. I didn’t know this at the time, but he was M. J. Gabour [Michael’s father]. He said, “The son of a bitch killed my family up there. Let me have your gun and I’ll go kill him.” He tried to grab my gun away from me, so Jerry Day and I had to restrain him. We wrestled him into the elevator, and Day took him downstairs. We couldn’t afford to have any distractions.
Finally, I opened the door that led up to the observation deck. There were bloody footprints on the stairs. Knowing I had to walk up those steps was a lonely feeling. Allen Crum said, “Where are you going?” I said, “Up.” He said, “Well, I’m coming with you.” I didn’t realize until a little while later, when he asked me to deputize him, that he wasn’t a police officer, but as far as I was concerned, he had more than passed the test, and I was glad to have him with me. To say I wasn’t scared would make me either a liar or a fool.
When we reached the first landing, I could see the face of a young boy. His eyes were open, looking at me, and he was dead. I advanced toward him, hugging the wall. It seemed like an eternity to get to him. I quickly looked around the corner and saw a dead woman lying at his feet. Another woman was lying there, and we turned her on her side to keep her from drowning in her own blood. There was a wounded young man who was slumped against a wall, still conscious. He said, “He’s outside,” and pointed upstairs.
The shooting outside sounded just like rolling thunder, and the reports of the guns down below were echoing back and forth off of the buildings. I couldn’t see the sniper, so I slowly opened the glass door, a little at a time, and stepped outside. There were shell casings everywhere. Crum kept me covered while I looked around the southeast corner, but the sniper was not in sight. I told Crum to remain in his position while I went to the northeast corner. I kept down, because the bullets that civilians were firing from down below kept hitting the limestone and showering dust and little pieces of rock.
Before I reached the northeast corner, I turned and saw an officer I knew, Houston McCoy, standing behind me with a shotgun. All I had was my .38, so that shotgun looked pretty beautiful at that moment. I advanced to the northeast corner, looked around it, and that’s when I saw the sniper. He was sitting about forty feet away with an M1 carbine, and he looked like he had a target in his sights. I immediately fired a round at him and hit him somewhere on his left side. He leapt to his feet and started to turn around, trying to bring his rifle down to return fire. I emptied my gun. I hollered at McCoy to fire, which he did, hitting him. The sniper started going down, and that’s when I reached up—my gun was empty—and grabbed the shotgun from McCoy. I blasted him one more time as he was falling. And then it was over. He was flat on his back, and I knew he was dead.
“EVERYBODY POURED OUT OF THEIR HIDING PLACES.”
The shooting ended at 1:24 p.m. Allen Crum found a towel and waved it over his head to signal that the ordeal was over. Neal Spelce, who was broadcasting live several blocks south of the Tower and whose report was playing on transistor radios across campus, said, “The sniper is dead.” All told, Whitman had shot 43 people. Fifteen were dead, including his wife and his mother.
ANN MAJOR: Everybody poured out of their hiding places. It was a beautiful, sunny day, but I saw many dead people, mostly young, lying on the grass where they had been shot. Mike Cox was a copyboy at the Austin American-Statesman. He is a spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation in Austin. I remember hearing the chilling sound of what surely was every siren on every ambulance in Austin.
JOHN PIPKIN: The world came alive again. Hundreds of people emerged from wherever they had been hiding. The Tower was like a magnet; everyone started walking toward it.
BILL HELMER: I was standing outside of the Academic Center when I heard a group of students yell, “Lynch the son of a bitch!” Judging from their nice haircuts and neat clothes, I judged them to be frat boys. That was the only time I heard that sort of thing.
FORREST PREECE: I was part of a huge mass of people sweeping east toward the Tower. The whole crowd was silent. No shouts, no cries for revenge—just a mass of humanity moving as one. When I had reached a spot near the steps of the Academic Center, a weird tableau of three men walking west, against the grain, parted us like the Red Sea, slowing me for a few seconds. I instantly knew who they were and what they had done—that they had killed, or somehow stopped, the shooter. In the middle was a Hispanic police officer who seemed to be in a state of shock. His uniform was soaked through, as if someone had hosed him down. His eyes were locked into the thousand-yard stare. Two men were holding him up. The man on his left was whispering soothing words to him as they walked past: “You did okay, buddy. Ease up. You did okay. It’s all right.”
CLIF DRUMMOND: We reached the west side of the Tower, and I had never seen that many people crammed into such a small space. I want to say there were easily a thousand people standing shoulder to shoulder. There wasn’t a breeze moving in any direction, and the crowd was totally quiet. It was so hot that you could almost see the heat. There were lots of rifles—all on safety, barrels pointed up, butts resting on waistbands. You could see the barrels sticking up out of the crowd.
BRENDA BELL: We all gathered at the Tower, as if by common agreement. We wanted to take a look at the guy who did this; we wanted to see him led out in handcuffs, or dead. That was why we were there. But instead, there was this procession of bodies.
BILL HELMER: The cops brought out the dead and wounded. That was really grim: blood everywhere, heads blown apart, hands dragging on the pavement. It took fifteen or twenty minutes. They wheeled Whitman out on a stretcher—out the back, to avoid the mob. He was covered by a sheet that had gotten partly pulled back, and he was all shot to hell. He looked like bloody steak tartare.
CLIF DRUMMOND: Someone, maybe a policeman, said, “That’s the shooter. They got him.” There was lots of cheering when they brought the guy out.
BRENDA BELL: I walked around afterward, and there was blood everywhere. It was hot, so it had turned dark. It was on the mall, all over the sidewalk, up and down the Drag, on the carpet of Sheftall’s jewelers. A lot of store windows were shot out. But it was all cleaned up very fast. One of the orders that [UT regent] Frank Erwin gave was “Clean this mess up.”
SHEL HERSHORN was a photographer for Life magazine. Now retired, he lives in Gallina, New Mexico.
I’d gotten a call in Dallas from Life telling me to get down to Austin. By the time I got there, Whitman was dead. I’d heard there was a foot-wide swath of blood across the carpet at Sheftall’s, so I went there and started making pictures. One of those pictures ended up being the cover photo for the magazine; it was taken through the store window, which was shot up with bullet holes, looking up at the Tower. But this competing photographer had other ideas; he was pacing up and down the sidewalk outside, waiting his turn. So when I was done, I kicked the window out. The store owner came running up to me, very upset. I told him not to worry. I said, “Life magazine will pay for that.”
BILL HELMER: At Scholz’s, students were taking up donations and passing around a petition on a spread-out grocery bag thanking the ambulance drivers for their terrific work.
MIKE COX: My friend Don Vandiver and I didn’t get out of the Statesman until after midnight. We went to campus and walked around in the dark, drinking cans of beer. We were trying to process what we had seen, trying to get drunk so we could wash it away. Lots of students were still walking around campus in amazement. I remember noticing that sand had been spread out on the concrete to soak up the blood.
My Library
