A Sniper in the Tower (51 page)

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Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

BOOK: A Sniper in the Tower
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Page 167
11
Ramiro
I
Early on the morning of 1 August 1966, a handsome young Hispanic police officer named Ramiro Martinez began his day by bringing his two-year-old twin daughters, Janette and Janice, to day care. Mrs. Vernell Martinez, a native of Fredericksburg and of proud German heritage, was an employment counselor. She had already reported to work. Ramiro was scheduled to report for duty at the Austin Police Department at 3:00
P.M.
Originally from a small West Texas town called Rotan, Ramiro was the son of a share-
 
Page 168
In July of 1966 the Ramiro Martinez family sat for their first formal portrait. Only
two weeks earlier Janice and Janette celebrated their second birthday. Two weeks
later Ramiro confronted Charles Whitman atop UT's Tower. 
Photo courtesy of Ramiro
and Vernell Martinez.
cropper who worked on the "one third" systemone third of the harvest went to the landowner. It was a hard way to live. Cotton was king and the Martinez family was poor. While Spanish was spoken most often in the home, Ramiro and his two brothers and two sisters, like many Hispanics of the era, were encouraged to speak English. Ramiro's father and his children were bilingual. Mother Martinez, a native of Mexico, mostly spoke Spanish. At Rotan High School, Ramiro established himself as an athlete, earning all-district honorable mention as an end on the football team. Not surprisingly, the Martinez family was staunchly Catholic, and occasionally, the children had to tolerate silly jokes about their religion. The Hail Mary; the Our Father, the Rosary and other prayers like the Act of Contrition were taught at home and the children attended Catechism regularly on Sundays. The family moved from farm to farm and did not have much, but they were good, honest people.
1
After graduation, Ramiro attended the University of Texas at Austin for a year, but dropped out to join the Army where, like Houston McCoy, he spent most of his time in Germany. While at UT, he met Vernell, who would become his bride on 30 July 1961. Seven months earlier he had received his commission with the Austin
 
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Police Department after going through a seventeen-week training academy. That day, 21 January 1961, was a proud one. It was Ramiro's birthday, he had made it through the academy, and John E Kennedy took the oath of office of the President of the United States.
2
1 August 1966 was a Monday, a work day. The Saturday before, on 30 July 1966, the couple had celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in style at a nice hotel in San Antonio. On the way home on Sunday they stopped by the famous Smokehouse Restaurant in New Braunfels. On Monday morning Ramiro was alone at home. In many reports of the day's events, his routine has been incorrectly described as a ritual of cleaning and pressing his uniform. He was proud of his uniform, but those chores had been expertly done by Vernell. The uniform had been laid out on the bed for Ramiro by the time he was ready to dress and report to work. At lunchtime, he took out what newspapers described as a pork "steak," but, in Ramiro's words, "it was more like a piece of meat." He turned on the oven to cook it as he watched television station KTBC and Joe Roddy's news broadcast. Roddy, who had been handed a slip of paper, announced that shootings were in progress at the University Tower and that people should stay away from the campus area. Ramiro called APD Headquarters and spoke to Lieutenant Kendall Thomas, who told him to report to the scene for traffic control. He turned off the oven, hurriedly put on his uniform, and sped in his 1954 Chevrolet towards the University of Texas. As he started to leave, neighbors cheered, "Go get him!''
3
II
Meanwhile, the Drag had become a war zone. Joe Arthur, a twenty-two-year-old sophomore remembered that "everything that moved on the sidewalk seemed to get shot at." He watched from the inside of a barber shop as four people were shot down. Just south of that position, Harry Walchuk, a thirty-eight-year-old navy veteran and political science teacher from Alpena Community College in Michigan, stood in full view of the Tower on a sidewalk. Walchuk had graduated from the University of Texas twelve years earlier but had returned to begin work on his doctorate. He was the father of six children. On 1 August, he did not have a scheduled class until
 
Page 170
7:00
P.M.
, but he had been on campus all morning to work in the library. By noon he was hungry and strolled out to the Drag. He browsed at the doorway of a newsstand where he asked for a certain magazine. It was not in stock. As Walchuck turned to leave, he directly faced the Tower. Whitman aimed and fired. At six feet and 185 pounds Harry Walchuk was a fairly large, well-built man. The bullet pierced his chest and sent him to the sidewalk. Witnesses remember how his white shirt slowly turned to a blood-red and how his pipe made a clinking sound as it hit the sidewalk just before he collapsed. Harry Walchuk died of massive wounds to his lungs, stomach, spleen and heart.
4
Across the street from the entrance to the West Mall, in front of a store called Snyder-Chenards at 2338 Guadalupe, Paul Sonntag and his steady girlfriend Claudia Rutt walked together. Both eighteen-year-olds were recent graduates of Austin High School. Claudia wore her class ring and had Paul's on a chain around her neck. Paul, from a prominent Austin family, had worked three consecutive summers as a lifeguard at the city-owned Reed Pool. He had just picked up his $75.12 paycheck from the Parks and Recreation Department, where he told Josephine Bailey, a receptionist, "As far as I know, I'll be back next summer." Sonntag had thick, sun-bleached brown hair. At five feet nine inches and 140 pounds, he looked too young to already have enrolled at Colorado University for the fall semester.
Claudia, with ambitions to become a dancer, had enrolled at Texas Christian University. TCU required incoming freshmen to be inoculated against polio, but before getting the shot, Claudia and Paul had decided to go to the University Co-op to look at and possibly buy some records. After Paul parked his car on Guadalupe near the West Mall, the couple crossed the street and hit the Drag, meeting there another 1966 Austin High School graduate named Hildy Griffith. They asked her to accompany them to the Co-op, but she declined and instead went north towards the Varsity Theater and Kinsolving Dorm, where she had been staying during freshmen orientation. The couple then encountered another classmate, Carla Sue Wheeler, and as they were conversing, a strange noise interrupted them. Paul thought it was a car that had backfired; Carla thought it was a gun. Then a stranger to the three of them, probably Allen Crum, began to warn everyone to take cover. As he did so, a bullet
 
Page 171
whipped by, causing them to dive behind a construction barricade. Paul then opened the barricade's door, saying, "Carla, come look, I can see him. This is for real."
As the young lifeguard gazed at the Tower, the blazing sun had to have caused his eyes to squint. He opened his mouth slightly. Charles Whitman was looking back at him. He aimed and fired, sending a bullet through Paul's open mouth, killing him instantly. His body knocked open the door of the barricade and he fell against a parking meter. Claudia moved toward Paul as Carla tried to restrain her. Whitman saw that, too, and fired again. The bullet hit Carla's left ring, middle, and index fingers before entering the left side of Claudia's chest.
5
The sniper appeared to be everywhere and victims seemed to be falling on both the Drag and the South Mall at the same time. There were fewer victims to the east and north, where Whitman spent less time. The return fire tended to be more accurate from the east due mostly to privately-owned guns used by policemen. For the police, and the dozens of civilians who chose to fight back, the best guns Texas had to offer in the way of deer hunting became weapons of choice. The Austin Police Department was simply not equipped to deal with a crisis of that magnitude. The violence and domestic unrest that characterized the 1960s had not yet taken root here. Something like this had never happened before.
To the east of the Tower, situated on the sixth floor of a building under construction, two off-duty patrolmen named Con Keirsey and Nolan Meinardus, along with a civilian with a telescope, focused on the east side of the deck and patiently watched the rain spouts for a shot at the sniper. The man with the telescope spotted Whitman at one of the spouts; Meinardus fired one shot from his deer rifle and came as close as anyone would come to shooting Whitman from the ground. Meinardus, Keirsey and the civilian waited for another chance, but Whitman never returned to the east side.
6
The top of the Business and Economics Building on the corner of 21st and Speedway had also become a center of offense against the sniper. At any given time during the incident, as many as eight APD officers, Texas DPS, Travis County Deputies, and even a Secret Service Agent assigned to protect President Lyndon Johnson focused on the rain spouts on the south side of the Tower. Whenever the
 
Page 172
barrel of Whitman's rifle poked through, a volley of shots from all directions rang out. One of the officers on the roof was APD's Detective Burt Gerding. Like most other peace officers on or near the campus, he was off duty at the time. He had brought along his personal 30.06 Springfield rifle and several bandoliers of armor-piercing ammunition. With Patrolman Ferris spotting with binoculars, Gerding returned fire. During the exchange, Ferris spotted something on the ledge of the deck just below the south face of the clock. Gerding fired three times and knocked it off with the third shot. They did not know it at the time, but Officers Gerding and Ferris knocked off one of Whitman's rifles, eliminating the 35-caliber Remington from the sniper's arsenal. Unfortunately, he had much more at his disposal.
Others on the roof of the Business and Economics Building had similar firepower. Officer R. B. Laws brought along his 300 Remington model 722 with a four-power scope and fired eight rounds. Patrolman Fred Estepp fired from a 243-caliber Remington, model 700 with a four-power Weaver scope. Detectives Harvey Gann, Tommy Olsen, Lowell Morgan, and Jack Woody each returned fire as well. The return fire made it difficult and dangerous for the sniper to fire from over the top of the parapet, so he was forced to use the rain spouts. It is not surprising, then, that Whitman did most of his killing and maiming during the first twenty minutes of the drama.
7
But Charles Whitman had been right all along. He said he could hold off an army from the top of the Tower, and that was exactly what he was doing. And the killing continued.
III
Adrian Littlefield, at nineteen years of age, had already decided to dedicate his life to God. He would soon become an evangelist for the United Pentecostal Church. At high noon he and his wife Brenda, even younger than Adrian, were about fifty feet from the base of the Tower. They had just left the Main Building where Brenda picked up her paycheck. Just before reaching a set of steps on the east side of the quadrangle, heading towards the speech building, they heard strange noises. Adrian was seriously wounded in the stomach by a
 
Page 173
missile that entered his back. Brenda was shot in the hip. And so, two more people lay wounded on the South Mall.
8
Farther south, at the confluence of University Boulevard and 21st Street where strange bronze creatures holding "things" emerge from the waters of the Littlefield Fountain, visitors have a majestic view of the South Mall and the Tower that arises from the Main Building. The great distance, approximately 500 yards from the Tower, provides a panoramic view. There, Roy Dell Schmidt and Solon McCown, electricians employed by the City of Austin, parked their service truck after asking reporter Joe Roddy if they could have his parking space. They had been eating lunch at 12:05
P.M.
at the city's electric distribution department on West Avenue when they received instructions to make a service call. As they got closer to the campus, the traffic appeared more abnormal. Heading east on 19th, they were not allowed to turn north onto Guadalupe. Not knowing why, Schmidt and McCown proceeded east on 19th to University and turned left in a northerly direction towards the Tower. Immediately, the men spotted another city service truck, a radio television mobile news unit with Neal Spelce delivering a live broadcast, and a Chevrolet blocking the street. Schmidt thought "there might be a fire." He and McCown left their truck to see if they could be of any help. Nearby, another city employee named Don Carlson told them of the sniper and warned them to take cover. The three men then crouched behind the Chevrolet for a few minutes.
9
Roy Dell Schmidt would have been thirty years old on 18 September. He had been a city employee since 1954. At six-foot-one and 165 pounds, he had a slender build. His height probably made crouching behind the Chevrolet very uncomfortable. He stood up to say something like, "It's okay, we're out of range." It was a fatal error. From over five hundred yards away, Whitman sent a round from the deck, over the entire length of the South Mall, over the Littlefield Fountain, over Neal Spelce's mobile unit, over the hood of the Chevrolet, and into the abdomen of Roy Dell Schmidt. "I'm hit! I'm hit!" cried the electrician as he fell to the hot pavement. Those were his last words. It was 12:19
P.M.
McCown raced to the truck to call an ambulance and get a first aid kit, but Roy Dell was dead on arrival at Brackenridge Hospital less than ten minutes later.
10

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