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 (55 page)

Page 186

They reached a driveway 150 yards north of the Tower on 24th Street at 12:15
P.M.
Stromberger drove up behind a highway patrol car coming to a stop. When Heard saw the two patrolmen step out of the car putting shotguns together, he wondered what they thought they could do with short-range weapons against a sniper high in the Tower. He later concluded that they intended to confront the sniper inside.

The patrolmen walked to a spot on the southwest side of the Home Economics Building one block north of the Tower. From there they ran across the street toward the Biological Sciences Building. Heard decided to follow. Before beginning his trek, however, he counted to five in case the sniper (or snipers) had seen the officers and was waiting for anyone who might follow. That is probably exactly what happened.

A fairly new Austinite, having moved there from Houston on 10 January 1966, Heard was assigned campus work as an AP reporter, which had taken him only to UT's football stadium and the Gregory Gym. He knew little more of the campus and did not know that the Tower had an observation deck. Before following the patrolmen, he scanned the top story windows. Limited to about eighty percent of his normal running speed because of knee-cartilage surgery the previous June, Heard's timing could not have been more tragic. He needed to cover only twenty-six yards to reach the cover of the Biological Sciences Building. Whitman must have pulled the trigger as soon as Heard began his dash.


I tried to run across a street in the shadow of the tower. I felt and heard a shot at the same instant. Like a brick it drove back my left shoulder, shattering the arm below the shoulder joint. "He got me!" I remember yelling. There was no pain, just a numbing sensation with my left arm flapping uncontrollably at my side.

The shot pushed him a quarter turn to his left, and after three steps he fell to the hot pavement near the Biological Sciences Building. Whitman could no longer see him. Unlike many of the other wounded, he did not have to languish on the searing pavement for very long. Incredibly courageous witnesses from the Biological

Page 187

Sciences Building, who could not have known that Heard had stumbled out of Whitman's line of vision, immediately ran to him and dragged him to cover behind a car. The patrolmen looked up at the Tower from some bushes nearby and they saw Charles Whitman carefully searching for the group, now safely out of his field of vision, through binoculars he had draped around his neck. As he peered through the eyepieces just below his white headband, either hoping to finish off the wounded Heard or to relish another "hit," an angered patrolman fired back. Whitman ducked and moved to a new position to shoot at someone else.
¹⁹

A few minutes later an ambulance arrived to carry Robert Heard to Brackenridge, and yet again, the attendants exposed themselves to danger in order to retrieve the wounded. Like Billy Snowden, who chastised himself for standing at the door of a barber shop while the shooting occurred, Robert Heard later lamented, "I forgot my marine training; I should have zigged-zagged [sic], but he was a really good shot." Hours later, doctors and staff at Brackenridge marveled at Heard's determination to complete his duties as a reporter. "He was reluctant to undergo an anesthetic and surgery in order to be alert," remembered Dr. Joe Abell, who would later operate on Heard. From his hospital bed in Brackenridge, the reporter dictated his story between instances of hospital operators "clearing the lines." Before Abell left Brackenridge he would find Robert Heard propped up in his bed typing with one hand. His account would be published all over the world. "What a shot!"
²⁰

At the KTBC newsroom a young reporter named Neal Spelce heard reports of shooting at the Tower over a police scanner. His first thoughts were that it could be a prank, but after arriving at the campus, Spelce witnessed the horrible reality. On live radio he announced:


This is a warning to the citizens of Austin. Stay away from the university area. There is a sniper at the University Tower firing at will. . . . It's like a battle scene. There's a shot, and another shot, and another shot. . . . It's a battle between the sniper and the police.

Page 188

The KTBC television station carried live coverage as well. Correspondent Phil Miller arrived with photographer Gary Pickle and another newsman named John Thawley. At different times, each of the journalists attempted to rescue the wounded. Whitman's shots came to within four feet of Thawley, who took cover behind a tree.
²¹

Later in the afternoon the station's semi-retired news director, Paul Bolton, anchored coverage from the newsroom. Well-known in news circles, Bolton was a personal friend of President Lyndon Johnson, who happened to own KTBC, Austin's premier AM radio and only VHF television station. During a live report from Brackenridge Hospital, Joe Roddy, in a departure from a KTBC policy of not reading the names of dead people before their families had been contacted, read a list of names of the confirmed dead. As Roddy listed the names, Bolton, quite uncharacteristically, frantically interrupted the reporter. "Joe, hold it a minute, this is Paul over at the newsroom. Everyone is interested in that list of names. I think you have my grandson there. Go over that list of names again, please." After Roddy read the names again, Paul Bolton slowly removed his earphones and went home to his family. Shortly afterwards, the general public would learn that Paul Sonntag's full name was Paul Bolton Sonntag. He had been named after his grandfather.
²²

A future journalist, William "Bill" Helmer, walking towards the Student Union from the journalism building north of the Tower, heard the strange noises. At first, he thought of nail-driving guns, since UT always had construction going on somewhere. Later, when writing of the incident, Helmer would tell of others who thought of wooden planks slapping concrete or more exotic explanations like ROTC members shooting blanks during some commemoration or a "goofy crowd response experiment carried out by the psych folks." Even after looking up and seeing a gun barrel jut over the northwest corner of the observation deck, Bill thought that "some fool was going to get himself into a lot of trouble." The sniper's intent became clear as Bill headed towards Hogg Auditorium, where he discovered that a girl standing in the side yard of the Biological Sciences Building had been hit.
²³

Helmer then moved around the back of the auditorium into the Student Union. While on his way to a window with an excellent view of the Tower, he saw someone run through the lobby scream-

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ing, "That man is dead! That man is dead!" The window with the view was situated adjacent to a landing between the third and fourth floors of the Student Union. To get there visitors had to walk up a winding stairway bordered by decorative metal balusters capped by a stained oak balustrade. The large window on the east wall rose from a marble ledge about four feet above the floor in a dark, almost dreary, part of the Union. At least three students were already situated near the window when Helmer reached it. Two girls, standing to the right of an eighteen-year-old freshman pharmacy student, John Scott Allen, looked outside, as if gazing at a movie screen.

The four students watched Charles Whitman move from one spot to another; he seemed to be everywhere. Helmer remembers that whenever the sniper's rifle came into view, the return fire was swift and heavy, but not constantmore like "popping corn." After about an hour, people began to grow accustomed to the gunfire. Soon more civilians would actually go to the campus to watch, giving the sniper more targets for which to aim. Helmer and the three other students watched from the window as Whitman continued firing, probably thinking they were safe inside. Without warning Whitman poked his rifle through one of the rain spouts on the west side of the deck and sent a bullet through the edge of the window. The force sent glass slivers into the faces of the girls, but they were not badly injured. After hitting the window, however, the missile veered towards John Scott Allen and Bill Helmer. All four students hit the floor quickly, but blood began to cover the landing. Most of it came from Allen's right forearm, where an artery had been severed. As Helmer remembered, the blood shot out about three inches from Allen's arm. When Bill asked for a handkerchief to place on Allen's wound, Allen used his left arm to retrieve one from his back pocket. The students moved away from the window. Helmer would later write, "I knew exactly what to do; keep my damn head down."
²⁴

Inside the Student Union, Helmer heard someone cry, "They've shot an ambulance driver!" Across the street at the corner of 23rd and Guadalupe, Morris Hohmann's luck had run out.

Hohmann and Turner Bratton had already delivered Dr. Robert Boyer to Brackenridge and had returned to transport more of the wounded to the hospital. Most of the ambulances had driven to an alley behind the shops on the Drag, but a few minutes before 12:30

Page 190

P.M.
, Hohmann's ambulance stopped near the front door of Sheftall's Jewelry. Hohmann ran inside the store, where he was told to move the ambulance to a rear alley so that the wounded could be loaded away from the line of fire. By that time seven victims were waiting inside Sheftall's to be taken to the hospital. Hohmann ran along the driver's side of the ambulance as Bratton drove slowly along the Drag. Hohmann thought that the ambulance gave him cover, but at 231 feet above ground level, Whitman could have shot him at any time. The ambulance attendants moved north and the ambulance turned left onto 23rd Street to head for the alley. Once the vehicle turned, Hohmann was completely exposed, presenting a target Whitman could not pass up. He shot Hohmann in the right thigh. Hohmann fell and managed to roll himself under a parked car, where he attempted to use his belt as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. But his leg had swollen and the belt was too small. "I laid there for about-forty-forty-five minutes waiting to be rescued, and listening to two construction workers arguing about who was going to expose themselves to recover me," Hohmann remembered.
²⁵The workers, Bill Davis and Phil Ward, were hiding behind the construction barricades where Paul Sonntag and Claudia Rutt had been shot earlier. They eventually pulled Morris Hohmann to safety. His own ambulance transported him to Brackenridge, where he would receive eight pints of blood and his life would be saved.

Everywhere in Austin people huddled near radios and televisions to witness the unfolding drama. Even Charles Whitman tuned his fourteen-transistor Channel Master radio, with the volume as high as possible, to KTBC to listen to Neal Spelce's vivid descriptions. He had to have been pleased with what he heard.
²⁶

III

The continuous shooting delivered an uneasy sense of helplessness. On the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower, Dr. Charles Laughton watched people fall on the Drag and the mail area. He watched people in front of the Varsity Theater scatter as Abdul Kashab, Janet Paulos, Sandra Wilson and Lana Phillips fell to the sidewalk. "We just barricaded ourselves in and waited," Dr. Laughton remembered.
²⁷

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