Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (23 page)

TIM URSIN’S NATIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BAYS AND INLAND WATERS AROUND NEW ORLEANS EVENTUALLY MADE HIM AN EXPERT FISHING GUIDE—BUT TURNING HIS WOUNDS INTO A COLORFUL REPUTATION AS “CAPTAIN HOOK” GAVE HIM A NEW LIFE.
Courtesy of Tim Ursin

Among the many ironies and enigmas still surrounding the Howard Johnson massacre, there’s this one: An American flag is planted on Mark Essex’s grave every Memorial Day.

“IT JUST WASN’T MY TIME”

Tim Ursin had never heard of Mark Essex, never looked him in the eyes. Their paths had never crossed until that miserable January morning at the Howard Johnson hotel.

He heard fragments of the story as he drifted in and out of sedation at the hospital, but he didn’t hear the full story of what happened that day until about three weeks later. By that time, he was involved in a different kind of fight.

During his six weeks in the hospital, Tim endured excruciating pain to save his arm.

As many as ten times, his wound was debrided, an agonizing procedure to strip away dead, rotting flesh from his wound. Doctors laid moist pig skin over the mutilated tissue to protect it from infection.

Later, surgeons planed paper-thin ribbons of skin from Tim’s thigh to seal the wound permanently and to finally offer some relief from the electric ache of air hitting the exposed meat and raw nerves.

But within his first two weeks, a repaired artery in his forearm burst. Rather than repair it, surgeons simply sealed it off—a risky move. A few weeks later, as a doctor examined his gangrenous thumb, he accidentally thrust his finger through the squishy rotten tissue of Tim’s hand. So they removed the thumb in hopes of saving the rest of his left hand.

Things didn’t get better. To stabilize the remaining palm and fingers, doctors inserted a stainless-steel pin in the wrist end of his shattered radius, but the pin eventually worked its way out through the skin of his hand.

His hand was now useless.

Tim had made many difficult decisions in his life, but the next one was easy. He asked his doctors to remove his mangled left hand entirely and replace it with a prosthetic stainless-steel hook.

While he was still in the hospital, the fire chief asked him to take on the department’s public information job, but Tim wasn’t a desk rider. If he couldn’t fight fires, he didn’t want to be around the firehouse, where he’d be reminded more of his weaknesses than his strengths. If he couldn’t ride a truck, he knew he would always be on the periphery of the brotherhood.

He leaned hard on his wife, Mary, in those dark days. A daughter and sister of firefighters, she never gave him a chance to feel sorry for himself. While he tried to keep himself together, she kept the family together. When people would stare at his hook, he felt more embarrassed for Mary and the kids than for himself.

When Tim’s sick leave ended in 1975, he drifted. He worked as a concrete tester, a boat salesman, and a sporting-goods clerk. He bought a boat and taught himself how to handle a fishing rod with his hook.

At first, friends were asking him to take them out on the bayous. Then he started doing a few weekend charters for rich fishermen from the interior.

By 1982, he was chartering fishing expeditions full time from Delacroix Island and then from Shell Beach, fishing the inland marshes and the outer bays for speckled trout and redfish. And he began to use a marketing moniker that, for better or worse, had literally come from above: Captain Hook.

When his fishermen ask, he often spins a wild tale about a hungry shark because it makes people laugh, but he makes no effort to hide the real story. Everybody on the water knows him as Captain Hook.

He still feels his phantom hand. He can tell you the exact position of it because when they clipped the tendons and tied them off, its sensory pose was fixed forever. The thumb is extended, the index and middle fingers spread apart, the ring finger curled in …

And he keeps the brass nozzle that saved his life. It still bears the bullet hole that might have been in his neck if not for the simple intervention of a different unseen hand.

But he seldom imagines what he might say to Mark Essex if they were to meet, finally, face to face. It no longer matters. He wants only to live without the hate that consumed the man who tried to kill him for no better reason than the color of his skin.

Every morning, Tim Ursin, more than ever a devout Catholic, says a prayer and thanks God for another day. And at the end of every Saturday, he attends Mass without fail.

But he’s philosophical about it. He bears no malice for Mark Essex, although he rarely speaks the name. He’s lucky to be alive—and most important, he knows it.

“I’ve been living on borrowed time for more than thirty-five years,” he says today. “It just wasn’t my time.”

The evening after he voted, Tim was watching television when the phone rang. It was the young black man he’d met at the election hall that morning.

“Look, I’ve been thinking about our conversation all day,” the man said. “I came home and told my wife that I met you and that you told me your story, and, well, I just kept thinking all day that you have a good way of looking at a bad thing.”

“Thanks, man,” Tim said. “I appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry about the man …a black man …I don’t feel that way …”

“Hey, this was one man,” Tim said. “It wasn’t personal and it doesn’t make me feel any different about black people who don’t think that way. You can’t spend your life blaming others for what only a few bad people do. Hate will eat you up, man.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you taught me some things, and I just wanted to say …”

The man paused for a long moment.

“I just wanted to say I won’t ever forget you.”

And for the first time in a long time, Tim cried.

A MIDSUMMER THUNDERSTORM WAS BREWING
to the west. A warm mist had settled over Milwaukee.

Reverend Roland Ehlke rolled up his car window against the sultry air and listened to the radio as he drove on his afternoon hospital rounds.

Then a newscaster broke in with a bulletin about a sniper who was killing people from a perch in a tower high above the University of Texas campus in Austin.

Reverend Ehlke turned up the volume and listened closely. After all, his twenty-one-year-old middle son, Cap, was on the UT campus, being trained for a Peace Corps job overseas.

“But it’s a big campus,” the pastor silently reassured himself. “He won’t be involved in this.”

Later, the newscaster came back on the air with more details about the unfolding tragedy in Texas. And again, Reverend Ehlke thought about his Cap. He was a little disappointed that Cap, who’d recently graduated from a Lutheran college, had skipped going directly to seminary and decided instead to go adventuring. When Cap joined the Peace Corps and got assigned to teach English to Iranian kids, he couldn’t exactly find Iran on the globe, but he didn’t care. He was going to see the world.

IN 1967, LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE TEXAS TOWER ATTACK, CAP EHLKE VISITED WITH SOME OF HIS PEACE CORPS CLASSMATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER RECOVERING FROM HIS WOUNDS.
Courtesy of Roland Ehlke

The Peace Corps had sent him to Austin for the summer with other volunteers to learn basic Farsi and about Iranian customs and Muslim culture.

Now the world was watching as a madman with a high-powered rifle sprayed the college with bullets from a lofty tower.

“…many people have reportedly been wounded,” the man on the radio said, “and some are dead …”

Misty rain streamed down the Ford’s windshield. Cap was a fresh-faced Midwestern boy from Wisconsin. The son of a preacher knew how to detour around trouble, his father reasoned. And Austin was a big enough city. What were the chances? Good kids didn’t just find themselves in the crosshairs of lunatics.

Cap wouldn’t be involved
, the Reverend Ehlke told himself.

One thousand two hundred miles (1,931 kilometers) away, Cap was indeed involved.

UNREST AND UPHEAVAL

By the long, hot summer of 1966, the simmering fever of Americans’ unrest with the war in Vietnam, with the status of women and blacks, with the old sexual ethos, with the establishment—with almost everything that represented the previous generation’s sensibilities—had exploded into a furious furnace of violence and disorder. Time had inexplicably sped up. The world was in upheaval. Wars raged between nations, races, sexes, faiths, young and old, fathers and sons.

It seemed like everything was falling apart that summer. A president had been assassinated fewer than three years before. Race riots were erupting in major cities. More American soldiers were dying than South Vietnamese in “their” war. Armed troops and demonstrators were squaring off in the street. Draft cards and bras were being burned in spectacular fires of discontent. The sexual revolution was redefining relationships between men and women while sowing seeds that would rock the rest of the century. Some professors were encouraging their students to use psychedelic drugs. A new kind of book about mass murder, Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, became an instant best seller. And a homeless ex-con named Richard Speck had raped, stabbed, and strangled eight student nurses in Chicago in one of the most horrifying American crimes ever committed.

There were a lot of ways to get hurt in those days of rage. Some people simply went mad.

And college campuses were among the most dangerous of danger zones. The ivory towers and tree-lined quads had become incubators for protest, radicalism, and experimentation.

Yet the national unrest had pretty much skipped the University of Texas at Austin. Maybe because Austin was a tiny island floating in a sea of more conservative values, unlike Berkeley, Rutgers, or even University of Wisconsin-Madison in their liberal enclaves. Or maybe because Austin already had the reputation of going against the grain. But outside of minor incidents of civil disobedience, mostly over race issues during the civil rights movement, the UT campus had so far been spared the roiling turbulence of the 1960s. So far.

Roland Cap Ehlke was a preacher’s kid, as white and impressionable as a fresh sheet of paper. Born of good German stock in the tiny lakeside village of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, he had grown up in a middle-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side, where his father pastored a Lutheran church. A soft-spoken kid, Cap loved school, played intramural tennis, dated a few girls casually, and stayed out of trouble. His parents always hoped he would go into the ministry someday.

After graduating from a prep school, Cap entered Northwestern College, a small school established at the end of the Civil War in Watertown, Wisconsin, to train Lutheran pastors. Most of Cap’s classmates intended to graduate and continue their theological studies to be ordained as ministers, but by the time he graduated in 1966, Cap had different ideas.

It wasn’t that he didn’t wish to be a pastor. He just wanted something else more. Or first. Or for now. He didn’t even know what it was. He couldn’t give it a name or point to it on a map. He just knew it wasn’t the cloistered life of a Wisconsin seminarian on a long slide into the life of a Wisconsin clergyman in a cold Wisconsin village.

He let it be known that after graduation he would be joining the Peace Corps, a fledgling army of young American volunteers dispatched to the most desperate corners of the earth to put a human face on the United States as they lent a helping hand. By 1966, a record fifteen thousand volunteers—almost all idealistic young students—were digging wells, teaching school, harvesting crops, and administering medicine throughout the Third World.

The president of Northwestern himself tried to talk Cap out of it. He said the ministry was more important, that he could affect far more lives as a pastor than by spending a couple years on the other side of a troubled world. Besides, he reminded Cap that he might have to repay Wisconsin’s Lutherans for his “free” education if he didn’t take the next logical step into seminary in the fall.

But Cap stood his ground, shaky as it was. The next chapter in his young life would be an adventure, not more books and Wisconsin winters. When the Peace Corps assigned him to teach English to Iranian children, he consulted an atlas to see where exactly in the world Iran was located. After a summer training course at the University of Texas, he would ship out in the fall to begin his two-year tour of duty in a place he didn’t know, far away from the only place he had known.