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 (45 page)

Page 141

Whitman's white bandanna kept perspiration from affecting his vision. Later, as the citizens of Austin fought back, the bandanna served as a headband to keep dust and bits of limestone from getting into his eyes. He did not spend much time moving his arsenal and supplies about the deck, but he did manage to scatter ''a lot of stuff everywhere," according to Ramiro Martinez. After setting out his guns, Whitman reached for his 6mm Remington with a four-power scope. He would have the luxury of aiming for the first dozen or so shots, but shortly afterwards he would be forced to rush. Positioning himself below the huge gilded clock on the south side, which read 11:48
A.M.
, he leaned over the wall, worked the bolt action, visually placed the cross hairs of the scope, and chose his first target.
¹

The glass-paneled door, located on the
south side of the Tower, against which
Whitman wedged the dolly to keep
others from following him.
Austin
Police Department Files
.

She was described as "a child of the 60s." Eighteen-year-old Claire Wilson had just finished a nine-week anthropology test and was walking with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend and roommate, Thomas F. Eckman. He was a child of the 6Os, too. Reportedly, both were members of the highly controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). She was also eight months pregnant and due for a normal delivery of a baby boy in a few short weeks. Thomas was from Toledo, Ohio, where he had just graduated from high school, but he knew Austin because his father, Professor F. W. Eckman, had

Page 142

taught English at the University of Texas during the 1950s before joining the faculty of Bowling Green University. The
Austin American-Statesman
later reported that Thomas and Claire lived at 806 East 23rd Street, just a few blocks east of the campus. At about 11:45
A.M.
they met near Benedict Hall and headed north and then west.

As Claire and Thomas emerged from the protection provided by the shade of the large, mature trees on the east side of the quadrangle on the South Mall, they strolled into the sunshine within the cemented open area between the steps at the curb on Inner Campus Drive and the Main Building and Tower. The area is called the "upper terrace" of the South Mall. The heat of the day was especially brutal to anyone in an advanced state of pregnancy like Claire Wilson. The hard surface of the upper terrace emitted energy as the sun neared its high-noon position. Looking down on her from a fortress 231 feet above, Whitman pulled the trigger. With his four-power scope he would have clearly seen her advanced state of pregnancy. As if to define the monster he had become, he chose the youngest life as his first victim from the deck. Given his marksmanship, the magnification of a four-power scope, an unobstructed view, his elevation, and no interference from the ground, it can only be concluded that he aimed for the baby in Claire Wilson's womb.

Other people in the area were to tell of hearing a strange noise. It was unlike the usual sounds of construction: the clinking and clanging of metal against metal or the falling of wooden studs or planks. It was not hammering eithereveryone knew what that sounded likenor was it the steady screeching of power tools drilling or cutting. It was a popping sound. The terror on the South Mall had started.

"Help me! Somebody help me!" screamed Claire Wilson as she fell to the searing concrete heated by ninety-eight degrees of relentless sunshine. A decade later Claire remembered, "I thought I'd stepped on an electric wire. It never hurt. It was something giant. It went beyond pain."

The missile from Whitman's 6mm Remington, designed to kill by shock, ripped a rather large hole in her hip and, according to hospital and police reports, traveled through her stomach, colon, and uterus, fracturing the skull of the once-healthy son she carried. Her baby died instantly. Immediately, Thomas Eckman knelt, reached

Page 143

out and asked her what was wrong. Before she could answer, a 6mm round entered his back left shoulder just below the neck. Given the trajectory, the bullet entered and fatally damaged the internal thoracic area. Eckman died instantly and fell on his critically injured girlfriend. Many of his friends knew Thomas Eckman to be a "gentle and affectionate boy" and were convinced that he died trying to shield Claire.
²

In the English building just south and west of the upper terrace where Claire Wilson and Thomas Eckman had fallen, James Ayres had been teaching a Shakespeare class since 11:30
A.M.
The class had reviewed
Henry IV
and in particular the character Falstaff. After the strange noise rang through the buildings bordering the South Mall, Ayers hesitated, glanced at the window, then continued. The strange noises repeated and echoed, so the students moved to the window facing the upper terrace, where they saw bodies falling. In the meantime, another English professor walked into the room and announced that someone was shooting people from the Tower.

Opposite the English building, north of the upper terrace, in the Main Building on the fourth floor's Stark Library, Norma Barger heard the same strange noises and looked outside. In a very short time she saw six bodies lying in grotesque positions all over the South Mall. On a university campus pranks are common. "I expected the six to get up and walk away laughing," Barger said. That was until she saw the blood, and more people beginning to fall.
³

Only a few feet west of Claire Wilson and Thomas Eckman, near the top of the steps connecting Inner Campus Drive to the upper terrace, stood a physics professor named Dr. Robert Hamilton Boyer. Boyer had completed a year as a visiting professor in applied mathematics at the University of Texas in 1965 and was familiar with his surroundings. During his brief teaching career at UT he made many close friends among faculty members and was considered by his colleagues to be a brilliant mathematician and physicist. His impressive academic career included a Rhodes Scholarship; at age thirty-three he had accomplished much and had a bright future in academe. An example of his work included "a search for a rigorous solution of Einstein's equations which would give the complete gravitational field of a rotating body like the Sun or a galaxy." Another close friend, Alfred Schild, an Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics, described Dr.

Page 144

Boyer as a potential insider of the U. S. establishment, but a "free spirit by choice and inclination." Boyer, according to Schild, did not believe Americans were gentle enough, and that they were far too competitive, aggressive and easily swayed towards war and killing.

Boyer had just completed a one-month teaching assignment in Mexico, and in a letter to a close friend, he had written, "I shall probably be passing there the first week in August." On 1 August 1966, he had been in Austin for less than a full day and had been staying at the home of a friend, a UT philosophy professor named Robert Palter. He planned to leave on Tuesday (the next day) for Pittsburgh and continue to Liverpool, England, to join his family, but his plans were complicated by a nationwide airline strike, forcing him to purchase a train ticket and to telegraph his parents informing them of changes in his itinerary. Dr. Boyer was ready to travel: he had $200 in American travelers checks, another $150 in Bank of America travelers checks, a University of Liverpool ID card, a passport to England, and only $1.75 in change on his person.
⁴

Robert Palter drove Boyer to the campus at approximately 11:40
A.M.
Boyer proceeded directly to the Main Building, where he took care of personal business. It is possible that he was on the first floor of the building as Charles Whitman wheeled his footlocker to the elevator. In any case, Boyer was to meet Palter in the faculty lounge at 12:30
P.M.
for lunch. A few minutes before noon, however, Robert Boyer looked to the east and saw Claire Wilson and Thomas Eckman fall to the hot pavement. He may have decided to descend the steps to take cover behind the wall that separates the grassy lower terrace of the South Mall from the concreted upper terrace, but he never made it. Just before he could reach the top step, Whitman shot a round from the 6mm Remington into his lower left back, destroying his kidney and sending him sprawling across the steps near the statue of Jefferson Davis. He fell hard, severely bruising his chin, lacerating his face and cutting the left eyebrow area on the cement steps. But his fall quite likely caused no pain; almost immediately Dr. Robert Hamilton Boyer was dead.
⁵

Judith Parsons and Leland Ammons were more fortunate. They were able to reach the wall separating the upper and lower terraces. Huddled just below the statue of Jefferson Davis, they began shouting at others, telling them to get down. They also pleaded to others

Page 145

to call for an ambulance and notify the police. After witnessing Whitman shoot several others, Parsons and Ammons wisely decided to stay behind the wall and close to the ground.
⁶

UT's Computation Center, located directly east of the Tower, was built into the side of a hill so that steps cradle the sides of the building and its roof is actually a pedestrian walkway. In that area a twenty-two-year-old native of Redlands, California, named Thomas Ashton strolled towards the Tower. After earning a B.A. degree in business administration from the University of California system the previous June, and before entering the business world, he was attracted to the Peace Corps because of its opportunities to travel and provide goodwill for America. He had arrived in Austin along with seventy-six other Peace Corps trainees on 20 June 1966. He was among several trainees assigned to teach English in Iran, all of whom were scheduled to leave on 14 September. Ashton had just finished a class and was to meet several of his friends, other Peace Corps trainees, in the Student Union for lunch. Undoubtedly, Ashton noticed the strange noises, saw bodies fall, and looked towards the Tower to ascertain what was going on. As he gazed directly towards the west, Whitman aimed and shot him in the left chest. Ashton would die at Brackenridge Hospital at 1:35
P.M.
7

On the upper terrace David Gunby, a twenty-three-year-old electrical engineering major from Dallas, was walking. He had enrolled in summer school to earn credits in engineering and physics. With his wife, who worked in one of the university's libraries, Gunby lived in the Brackenridge Apartments. By 11:55
A.M.
Gunby knew it was going to be one of "those" daysdamn hot. Reportedly, he was dressed in a sport shirt and bermuda shorts. The Tower deck, twenty-eight floors above, placed Gunby at a steep angle to Whitman, but not steep enough to escape the sniper's attention. The missile Whitman fired tore through Gunby's upper left arm and entered his abdominal cavity.
⁸Like Claire Wilson, he lay critically injured on an extremely hot sidewalk in full view of Charles Whitman, who, at any time, could decide to shoot again.

Claire Wilson, David Gunby, and many others wounded during Whitman's reign of terror could only endure the fearand the heat. For some, it lasted over an hour. "We got a lot of people with second degree burns lying on that hot pavement," said Dr. Robert Pape, the

Page 146

Director of Medical Education at Brackenridge Hospital. The deck had no shade and the sun beat down directly on the top of Charles Whitman's head, but if there had been shade Whitman would probably not have made use of it. He did not even bother to take off the coveralls he had on top of his clothes, and the white headband kept sweat out of his eyes. He wanted to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. As the morning turned into afternoon the white headband soaked up more and more sweat.

"Devereau" is an unusual first name in Texas; nearly everyone called him Matlin (pronounced "MATE-lin"), his middle name. Devereau M. Huffman was near the completion of his doctoral program in psychology, specializing in business administration. He taught classes at the university as well. Incredibly, at age thirty-one, he would be one of the older victims. He, too, happened to be strolling the South Mall after having left the psychology building. Whitman sent a round through his right arm. Huffman, like the other wounded, could only endure. As he lay face down near the bushes encircling the upper terrace, he did his best to "play dead."
⁹

An attractive young brunette named Charlotte Darenshori had been working in the office of the Dean of the Graduate School for only a month. She was the wife of a salesman named Sherman and the mother of a three-year-old daughter. When she reported to work on 1 August 1966 she wore a sleeveless blue shift. The air conditioning of her office building made closing the windows and exits necessary, which made hearing noises outside extremely difficult, if not impossible. The occupants of the offices never heard the strange noises, but a full view of the South Mall was visible through the closed windows. As she looked outside Charlotte saw three people fall on the pavement. Instinctively, she ran out of the office, through a hallway, and out of the building onto the upper terrace to help. She headed directly to the nearest body, and upon reaching the young man, bent over. Then, for the first time, Charlotte heard the strange noises. After looking up, she immediately realized what was going on. Shots were landing all around her. She does not recall what went through her mind, but she headed straight for the nearest coverthe concrete base of one of a pair of very large stainless steel flagpoles in the center of a grassy area adjoining the quadrangle. The base measured five feet in diameter and was only about two feet tall.

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