Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (27 page)

The Tower’s symbolism is so potent that for years UT offered a college course, “The UT Tower and Public Memory.”

“After more than thirty years of institutional repression and silence,” its teacher, professor Rosa Eberly, wrote in 1999, “UT has been presented with an opportunity to come to terms publicly with one of the most troubling incidents in its history. The university … has, at least institutionally, begun to heal and move beyond the violent effects of Charles Whitman’s actions in 1966 and the enduring pain of those who witnessed or were otherwise affected by the several suicides there.”

Forty years later, in 2006, the university mounted an inconspicuous bronze plaque beside a turtle pond just north of the Tower as a memorial “to those who died, to those who were wounded, and to the countless other victims who were immeasurably affected by the tragedy.” This is the only memorial to the massacre on the UT campus.

For a long time, the Tower bore the pockmarks where bullets had hit, but they were all eventually patched, and the divots are barely noticeable. Today, Tower tour guides are instructed not to talk about the Whitman massacre, as the university tries to minimize the memory of August 1, 1966. All visitors must first pass through a metal detector at ground level, and an armed guard accompanies all tour groups to the observation deck.

But many people will never forget. Officer Houston McCoy, who suffered from posttraumatic stress for years after he killed Whitman in the Tower, is one.

“If I get to heaven and see Charles Whitman,” he once said, “I’m going to have to kill him all over again.”

THE LANGUID BROWN WATER OF BAYOU TECHE
runs slow as a cemetery. It twists and turns among giant moss-bearded oaks, haunted swamps, and decaying mansions built with sugar money.

The meandering bayou’s name comes from a local Indian word for “snake” because, in the Indian culture’s mythic history, a giant snake attacked their scattered villages, and it took many years for an army of warriors to kill it. The serpent’s enormous corpse sunk into the Louisiana mud and rotted where it lay until the rain filled its death hole with water.

Muddy Bayou Teche is the sclerotic artery through the heart of Cajun country, where crawfish boils and Mass are both religious sacraments. On its shifting banks, Longfellow’s Evangeline waited for her long-lost lover. And its syrupy water nourishes the very roots of Cajun history in the former French colony known as Louisiana.

Cecilia is one of the farming villages that settled on the rich soil of Bayou Teche more than two hundred years ago. Today, it’s one of those backwater places few people go unless they live there, but residents are friendly enough to answer the door when somebody needs directions.

After all, people have been known to disappear into the
petite pluie fine
—the mists—of Bayou Teche.

SAFE AT HOME

Gospel music poured from the radio like light. Dianne Alexander was humming along as she fixed lunch for her son, Herman, who’d soon be home from his morning classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a half hour away.

She’d spent her morning running errands in Breaux Bridge and Lafayette, picking up groceries, gassing up, and stopping at the post office. A nursing student, Dianne had just started working the evening shift for her clinical studies at Lafayette General Medical Center, and she was grateful for a morning off. She only wished her husband, Oliver, a delivery driver for a local seafood company, could be there to share that sultry morning of July 9, 2002, with her, but he was off on a run to Houston and wouldn’t be back until after she was at work later that night.

The errands took all morning, but Dianne’s timing was perfect. She had time to make lunch and start dinner. She’d gotten home to the comfortable mobile home where she had lived for twelve years, plopped her purse on the kitchen counter, and took off her wedding ring, which she always did before cooking. While some turkey necks sizzled on the stove, she set up an ironing board in Herman’s room so she could press her student nurse uniform after lunch.

The daughter of a construction worker, Dianne was the second of seven children. Her strict father worked hard, but the family barely scraped by. She grew up with eight other people in a tiny, three-bedroom wood-frame bungalow in the black section of Breaux Bridge. They had a TV, but Dianne liked to listen to rhythm-and-blues shows on the radio while she helped her mama do the laundry on an old wringer machine on the back porch. She went to class in homemade clothes and played the xylophone in the school band.

Education wasn’t a priority for her devoutly Catholic parents, but church was. Because Dianne was the family’s only driver at age thirteen, this little girl who peered in the mirror and spoke to God quit school in the eleventh grade.

Dianne grew up tall and pretty. A light-skinned African American woman with striking hazel eyes, she caught plenty of boys’ attention, and she liked it. Although she’d met Oliver in high school, she was pregnant at eighteen by another boy. When that marriage fell apart, she and Oliver found each other again and eventually married.

She also found Jesus. Although faith ran through her like the beat in one of her beloved R&B songs, she had never been a staunch churchgoer until she picked up an evangelistic tract from a nearby church one day. “God knows the number of hairs on your head,” it said. The notion intrigued her. So she and a friend drove to the church one night and were caught up in a frenzy that excited her, made her feel good. She was saved that night.

DIANNE AND OLIVER ALEXANDER MET IN HIGH SCHOOL AND FOUND EACH OTHER YEARS LATER AFTER PRIOR MARRIAGES. IN THE PAINFUL DAYS AFTER DERRICK TODD LEE’S ATTACK, OLIVER BECAME DIANNE’S STURDIEST SUPPORTER.
Courtesy of the Alexander Family

By age forty-six, she lived with a hardworking man she loved in a house that sat on two acres of land in Cecilia, just up the road from where she grew up. Life hadn’t always been easy, but she was a wife and a mother of four children, one going to college. She’d earned her GED years before and had been taking college classes since 1992 to become a nurse. She not only felt loved as she cooked and sang along to the gospel station, but she also felt safe.

Then came a knock on her door.

A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR

Dianne opened the door to find a burly young black man standing on her covered porch. He was tall and good-looking with a neatly trimmed mustache and light brown eyes. His hair was closely cut. Although he was slightly heavy, he was well dressed in a striped golf shirt, denim shorts, and sneakers with white ankle socks. He smiled as she opened the door.

“May I help you?”

“Hi, my name is Anthony,” he said, shaking her hand. “I’m from Monroe. I’m supposed to be doing construction work for the Montgomerys. Do you know them?”

No, Dianne said, she didn’t know of any Montgomery family in the area. But this man was well spoken and pleasant, she thought, and she wanted to help if she could.

“Well do you think your husband would know them?”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“Do you think I could use your phone? Maybe a phone book?” the young man said. “Maybe it’ll have their address.”

Dianne retrieved her cordless phone and directory from the kitchen and handed it to the man on her porch. While he flipped through the pages, she pushed her front door closed—leaving it open just a crack—and went back to the turkey necks cooking on the stove for Oliver’s dinner while she hummed along with the radio. When the man started peeking through the thin gap at the door, she went back.

The man smiled at her.

“Oh, I ain’t gonna do you anything,” he said, smiling big. “But are you sure your husband doesn’t know these Montgomerys?”

Dianne was adamant. “No, he doesn’t know them.”

He could hear the gospel music playing inside.

“I used to sing in a gospel choir,” he said, stepping closer. “Maybe you’ve heard of us …”

He gave Dianne a name she didn’t recognize. She told him she hadn’t heard of him, and she began to get a little annoyed at this chatty guy at her door. She had work to do.

“Are you sure you and your husband don’t know the Montgomerys?” he asked again.

Dianne had heard enough from this annoying guy.

“Look, my husband isn’t home,” she said and started to close the front door.

The man suddenly plowed into the door to force his way inside. She tried to barricade the metal door but in the blink of an eye, his big hands were around Dianne’s throat, and he shoved her against the door.

“Take me to your bedroom!” he demanded, as he pulled a blade out of his back pocket. “I have a knife! I’ll stab you in the eye!”

Everything in Dianne wanted to scream out, to fight back, but she couldn’t. Nothing seemed real. A stranger was in her home and she didn’t know why, but she knew she couldn’t lose her nerve. Instead, she tried to clear her head and speak as calmly as she could to her attacker, who gripped her windpipe. She didn’t want to go to her small bedroom because there was only one way out.

“We don’t have to go into the bedroom,” she managed to whisper. “We can just stay right here.”

With his hand still around her throat, the man walked her a few steps to the living room and eased her down onto the carpet.

“Take off your panties!” he told her.

“I can’t. Your hand’s on my throat,” Dianne rasped, realizing exactly what was happening to her.

He removed his hand, and Dianne lifted her long denim skirt to slip off her panties. He spread her bare legs, propping one on the couch as he unzipped his shorts and played with himself. He touched her, trying to arouse himself. Bending down, he laid his freshly shaved cheek against hers.

“I’m just going to do this and then I’ll leave,” he said, almost tenderly.

“I’m not going to tell anybody.”

Then he kissed her lips lightly and whispered in her ear. “I’ve been watching you.”

Sweaty and breathing harder now, he was trying to get an erection, but it wasn’t happening. He even turned off the mobile home’s humming air conditioner so he could focus better.

Then he put the knife on the floor and tried to concentrate on his flaccid penis. Dianne grabbed the knife, but the man took it away from her before she could use it.

“Where did you see me?” Dianne asked calmly. She was determined to be compliant, fearing he would kill her if she fought back, resisted, or just made
him mad. She studied everything about him—in case she survived. She wanted to be able to describe every detail.

“Shut up! Shut up!” he shouted. Still no erection.

“Can I turn off the fire on the stove?” Dianne asked matter-of-factly. She worried she might be killed and the house might burn down, destroying all the evidence.

“Fuck the pot!” he yelled.

He told her not to move while he took off his shirt and laid on top of her, sweating all over her, trying to get it up but unable to.

“Bitch!” he growled.

Frustrated, the man stood up and looked around the room. His eyes fell on a phone cord connecting the computer to a wall outlet. He cut a length of the cord with his knife.

“You’re not a bad-looking guy,” she said, trying to stall.

“No, I’m not,” he seethed.

He straddled Dianne’s shoulders and lashed the cord around her neck, pulling it tight. Choking, she slipped a finger under the wire, but she couldn’t fight against the man’s weight pinning her to the floor. Unable to penetrate her or strangle her, he flew into a rage, beating her with his fists and finally smashing a heavy ceramic pot on her head.

The next day, St. Martin’s Parish cops
released a composite sketch of Dianne’s
would-be rapist…. What they didn’t know at
the time was that they were releasing the first
public portrait of a serial killer.

She passed out, bleeding profusely from a ragged gash in her forehead. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she would sometimes wake to see him and feel him on top of her, still trying in vain to rape her but still unable to get an erection. She didn’t know how long she lay there, half wake and half dead, while her attacker moved freely around her.