Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

A Sniper in the Tower (14 page)

31 Ibid., entry of 22 January 1964.

32 Ronald Russell quoted in
Austin American-Statesman
, 7 August 1966.

33 APD Files:
The Daily Record of C. J. Whitman
, entry of 7 February 1964.

Page 35

34 Ibid., entries of 10, 12, 16, 21, and 24 February 1964.

35 Ibid., passim in February, 1964.

36 Ibid., 26 and 29 February and 12 March 1964; FBI Files:
Cole Reports
, 4 and 8 August 1966.

37 Ibid., passim.

Page 36

3
Austin is Different

Metropolitan Austin has always had a large representation of families who are relatively new to the area, with roots spread throughout the United States. "Native Texans" call them "naturalized Texans." Many people relocate believing in the Texas stereotype: a state filled with cowboys, good-ole-boys, and rich oilmen; where music is country-and-western and western swing; politics are conservative and crooked; the land is dry and flat; food means meat; law enforcement is strict and effective, and if it is not, the Rangers are called to straighten

Page 37

everything out. Naturalized Texans soon discover that Austin, at least, is different from all that.

Charles Whitman might have fallen for the Texas stereotype, but he lived in Austin, whereas John I. Davis and J. B. Colson have writtenequally stubborn influences of southern nostalgia and western idealism meet and battle.
¹Added to the mixture are rich Latino and African-American influences with literate and articulate leaders. Throughout Austin's history incredulous observers have been entertained by some of the nation's most memorable city council and school board meetings. Like it has in the rest of Texas, legend has infiltrated much of Austin's history. Austin has always been different.

Mirabeau Lamar, one of Texas's founding fathers, first visited the area that would become the City of Austin while on a buffalo-hunting trip. The beauty of the area stunned him. A four-family settlement called Waterloo had been situated there near the Balcones Escarpment, better known as the Balcones Fault, a dramatic topographical boundary separating dark, fertile alluvial bottoms on the Coastal Plains to the east from thin rocky sediments on the Edwards Plateau and the Texas Hill Country to the west. The confluence at the fault would not be limited to a geographical dichotomy; it would become the scene of cultural clashes as well.

In May of 1839, Edwin Waller headed a surveying team that mapped out the original capital city. The team designed a 120-foot-wide street named Congress Avenue to serve as the main street. In September, government archives and furniture for the struggling Republic of Texas were transported from Houston City by fifty ox-drawn wagons. By that time Waterloo had been renamed Austin to honor the just-deceased Stephen F. Austin, often called the "father of Texas," sometimes ironically since he was a bachelor. Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic, was disturbed to learn of the capital's relocation; he considered Austin remote and impossible to defend, and it was both. Nevertheless, on 11 November the Fourth Congress of the Republic of Texas met there.
²

Sam Houston never liked Austin, and during the first violent years of the Republic of Texas he tried to maneuver a relocation of the capital. Evidently, elected officials considered the physical location of the archives to be the
de facto
seat of government. During the

Page 38

war with Mexico a ludicrous struggle ensued between Houston City, Washington-on-the-Brazos, and Austin for control of the archives. The three cities struggled less over the prestige of having the seat of government than what the capital's location could do to the value of the surrounding property. Sam determined that the papers and furniture should be moved out of Austin to the more secure Washington-on-the-Brazos. He succeeded in moving his wife and the furniture, but once Austinites heard that the papers were being removed, an unruly mob at Kenny's Fort on Brushy Creek hijacked the cargo and returned it. A disgruntled Sam Houston announced shortly afterwards that he was no longer personally responsible for the archives, and thus Austin remained the capital of Texas.
³

The early history of Austin is inextricably connected to the history of the young Republic of Texas, and again, legend has embellished an already colorful story. Only France established a legation in Austin. On the verge of bankruptcy, Texas needed French financial assistance, and the arrival of Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, the
Chargé d'Affaires
, should have been an occasion of great joy. Instead, Saligny and his Texan innkeeper, Richard Bullock, began to bicker over debts, and Saligny moved next door into a spacious residence that became the French Legation. By 1841, Saligny and Bullock's feud reportedly took a ridiculous turn when a new dispute erupted over Bullock's pigs. The Frenchman's temper flared when the Texan's pigs persistently invaded the garden of the legation. The subsequent controversy has been ingloriously called "The Pig Wars." Legend has it that Saligny ordered his servant to kill any trespassing pig. Bullock then beat the hapless servant and threatened Saligny. When Saligny demanded immediate justice, Texas officials were slow to act, claiming Bullock had rights of due process. (And besides, Bullock was a Texan!) Saligny responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with Texas, putting a stop to a proposed five-million-dollar loan to the financially-starved republic, and moving to the more exotic and entertaining New Orleans.
⁴The incident was not atypical of Austin's colorful history. Austin is different.

Austin began to look more like a state capital towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although decades behind schedule, construction began on the capitol building and the new University of Texas. Both would become monuments to size. The capitol dome was in-

Page 39

tentionally built seven feet taller than the Capitol in Washington, D. C. Construction at the University of Texas at Austin did not begin until 1882, a year after Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute, a college for black students, opened in Austin with an enrollment of 250.
⁵Thus, the first seed of higher education in Austin produced a predominately black institution.

East of Austin, productive farmlands yielded a diversity of crops; to the west huge ranches with panoramic Hill Country views raised fine breeds of cattle. From its beginning Austin became a cultural, intellectual, economic, and geographic center of staggering diversity. Because of its position as a topographical crossroad and the mass of people attracted to and employed by a large university, Austin became multiculturaland liberal, even radical, by Texas standards. A popular saying around town is, ''Put two Austinites in a room, and you're likely to get three opinions."
⁶.

Austin's criminal history tended to focus on a few infamous cases. In a case eerily similar to that of Jack the Ripper, the "Servant Girl Annihilator" terrorized Austin from 188485. The serial killer hacked young girls while they slept. At the time, City Marshal James E. Lucy had a police squad of fourteen men. The force, citizen patrols, and several posses with bloodhounds never caught the killer. The last two Annihilator murders occurred on Christmas Day, 1885, when two women were hacked and their bodies dragged from their homes. During the reign of terror thirteen women were killed. The crimes have never been solved.
⁷

In 1925, E. E. Engler, his wife, and their twenty-five-year-old daughter were victims of a brutal ritual-like torture and murder. They were found shot to death in their modest farmhouse near Del Valle, a small suburb south and east of Austin.
⁸

In all of 1965 Austin would have only nineteen homicides. James C. Cross, Jr., of Fort Worth confessed to the two best known of the murders. He strangled two University of Texas coeds and dumped their bodies in a field in north Austin. Cross was sentenced to life in prison.
⁹The crime was still the talk of the campus when Charlie and Kathy Whitman returned to make a home for themselves. While the Austin community grieved the loss of the young coeds, Austin was still thought of as a good and safe place to live. Murder was seen as an infrequent crime committed by stalkers who crept up on their

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