Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (25 page)

ARMED WITH A WIDE ARRAY OF WEAPONS, SNIPER CHARLES WHITMAN HAD EVEN MORE BLOODSHED IN MIND WHEN HE BARRICADED HIMSELF ONTO THE UT TOWER’S OBSERVATION DECK.
Associated Press

A little after 9:30 p.m., Charlie picked up Kathy in their new black Chevy Impala and took her home. The night was uncommonly hot and the Jewell Street house had no air-conditioning, so Charlie asked his mother if he and Kathy could come to her air-conditioned apartment to cool off before bed. Kathy begged off, but a little before midnight, Charlie drove over to Margaret’s flat, while Kathy slipped naked into bed, hoping for the slightest Texas breeze through their little bedroom window.

Margaret met Charlie in the high-rise’s lobby around midnight and escorted him up to her fifth-floor apartment. Alone inside, he strangled her with a piece of rubber hose before stabbing her in the chest with a hunting
knife and either shooting her or bashing the back of her head violently. He also smashed her left hand with such force that the diamond flew out of her wedding ring, which became embedded in the ruined flesh of her finger. She was only forty-three.

He then sat down with a yellow legal pad and wrote another letter, explaining that he had killed his mother to relieve her suffering at the hands of her husband. He lifted her corpse onto her bed, covered her wounds with the bedspread, and laid the letter neatly upon her. A little after 2 a.m., he returned to the Jewell Street house, where Kathy slept peacefully.

Standing over her in the darkness, he plunged his Bowie knife into her naked chest five times, hitting her heart and killing her instantly. He pulled the blankets over her and washed his hands before he returned to the unfinished letter he had begun hours before. In his own handwriting—not typing, as he had started the letter—he scrawled in the margin:

friends

interrupted

8-1-66

Mon

3:00 A.M
.

Both Dead

I was a witness to her being beaten at least once a month. Then when she took enough my father wanted to fight to keep her below her usual standard of living
.

I imagine it appears that I bruttaly [sic] kill both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job
.

If my life insurance policy is valid, please see that all the worthless checks I wrote this weekend are made good. Please pay off my debts. I am 25 years old and have been financially independent
.

Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type
.

Charles J. Whitman

If you can find it in yourself to grant my last wish Cremate me after the autopsy
.

Not once did he mention the horror he was about to visit upon a city and a nation. He spent the rest of the night rereading his journals, writing good-bye notes to others, and gathering the supplies he needed for the daylight, just a few hours away. Many items that he packed in his old Marine footlocker spoke more of survival than death: a radio, a blank notebook, jugs of water and gasoline, Spam and other food, deodorant, toilet paper, several knives and a hatchet, ropes, a compass, an alarm clock, a flashlight and batteries, a machete, several gun scabbards, matches, and various pieces of hunting equipment. He expected a long siege.

CHARLES WHITMAN CLAIMED IN HIS SUICIDE NOTE THAT HE KILLED HIS YOUNG WIFE KATHY TO SPARE HER FROM THE EMBARRASSMENT OF HIS IMPENDING MASS MURDER.
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

But some of it spoke of death, too. After the sun rose on another hot Texas day, he visited at least three Austin stores, where he bought more guns and ammunition and a dolly with which to wheel his deadly arsenal, which now included a high-powered 6 mm Remington rifle with a scope, two other hunting rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, three pistols, the large hunting knife he’d already used to kill his wife and mother, and an astounding seven hundred rounds of ammo.

He dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a plaid shirt under blue nylon overalls, trying to disguise himself as an inconspicuous workman hauling a dolly of equipment.

He scrawled a last note and left it in the house:

8-1-66. I never could quite make it. These thoughts are too much for me
.

A little past 11 a.m., Charles Whitman closed the front door of the little bungalow on Jewell Street for the last time, loaded his footlocker into his car, and drove away toward the UT campus.

IN THE LINE OF FIRE

Cap Ehlke sat in a Peace Corps training class, watching the clock tick toward lunch. For more than a month, the preparatory classes had been droning on. It was intense, but not much different from regular college work. He was eager to get into the field and see the world, and another month of classes seemed more like an obstacle than a necessity.

Most days, he and some of his Peace Corps classmates would grab a quick lunch on “the Drag,” as UT students called Guadalupe Street, a noisy thoroughfare that cut across the western edge of campus where many cafés and shops catered to the kids. Cap loved the college hangouts and the different people he met.

When class finally let out at noon, Cap and two friends, Dave Mattson and Tom Herman, started a long, hot walk to a school cafeteria, where they planned to meet a new friend, Thomas Ashton, for lunch. All four were headed to Iran in the fall.

The heat was oppressive and the humid air still as death as they walked three abreast down Guadalupe. Road workers were fixing the street, and the lunchtime traffic was heavier than usual. Kids passed them on the sidewalk, where newsstands displayed front pages depicting Vietnam, and many passing girls wore their hair long and straight. Cap noticed both.

As they passed traffic barricades in front of Sheftall’s Jewelers, a little shop beside the university bookstore, Cap heard several pops.
Firecrackers
, he thought.
Or road workers with an air hammer, or maybe a stupid fraternity prank
.

Beside him, Dave shrieked. Cap looked down to see Dave cupping his right hand in his left. It was nearly severed from his wrist and bleeding profusely.
What the hell?
he thought.
Don’t they know that firecrackers can hurt people?

Then he noticed the left sleeve of his madras shirt was riddled with small holes and flecked with blood, and it made him angrier.

Suddenly, his upper right arm was jolted, as if he’d been punched by someone unseen. A deep gash in his triceps began to pour blood into his shredded sleeve.

“Take cover!” somebody yelled down the street.

Cap and Tom, who wasn’t wounded, hunkered near the wall of the bookstore, but Dave simply crumpled in shock on the sidewalk, holding his dismembered hand and muttering to himself. People were running all around them, taking cover. Cap thought he saw a girl’s lifeless body lying on the pavement up the street. His arm wounds were starting to burn.

Nobody knew what was happening. He heard more distant pops, but there was so much confusion, and Dave needed help.

“We’ve got to get off the sidewalk,” he hollered.

Cap and Tom left their hiding place and crawled to Dave. Together they dragged him across the hot concrete to the jewelry store’s front door, just a few feet away. Little pings and puffs of dust erupted all around them as the mysterious, distant pops continued.

A HEAVILY ARMED CHARLES WHITMAN PROWLED THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS TOWER’S OBSERVATION DECK, FIRING HIS HUNTING RIFLE AT PEOPLE 231 FEET (70 METERS) BELOW WITH DEADLY ACCURACY. ONE OF HIS VICTIMS WAS KILLED MORE THAN 500 YARDS (455 METERS) AWAY.
Associated Press

Jewelry store manager Homer Kelley saw kids crawling around on the sidewalk and was suspicious of a college prank—until he saw the blood. As the sixty-four-year-old Kelley ran outside to help drag the boys to safety, something hit him in the lower left leg.

Inside, Cap collapsed on the ripped carpet with Dave, still stunned. All around him, more than a dozen other people hid behind display cases and furniture as broken glass flew from the front windows. Some were also wounded. One man lay bleeding from his belly while others made bandages from handkerchiefs.

Cap could hear gunshots behind the store. It slowly dawned on him that they’d been hit by bullets fired in front of the store, and they continued to fly from the opposite direction. It made him think they were caught in the crossfire of a spectacular gunfight, or maybe a jewelry store robbery.

The frightened people around him were coming to the same fearful conclusion.

“It’s a whole gang out there,” somebody said. “They’re coming in here!”

Then Cap noticed that the left thigh of his tan jeans was perforated with tiny holes, and blood welled up in a widening stain. He had been wounded three times. He didn’t know his friend Thomas Ashton, who the three boys were on their way to meet, was already dead. And he didn’t know why anyone would shoot at him.

ENDING THE SIEGE

There was no reason. There was no gang. There was no robbery.

Just one berserk killer in a tower.

Pretending to be a janitor, Charles Whitman had wheeled his arsenal into the University of Texas Tower, killing three innocent people there before barricading himself on the Tower’s observation deck.

At 1 p.m., with his weapons arrayed all around him in his impenetrable fortress, Charlie Whitman took aim at a heavily pregnant young woman walking with her boyfriend on campus. He hit her in the belly, and as she fell, her boyfriend crouched over her. Charlie shot him, too.