A Sniper in the Tower (62 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 214
At 1:24 P.M. the terror came to an end when Austin policemen Houston McCoy and
Ramiro Martinez turned the northeast corner of the observation deck and killed
Whitman, who wore coveralls over his clothes to look like a janitor. More
ammunition and another gun would be found hidden in Whitman's clothing after his body
had been taken to Cook's Funeral Home. 
Austin Police Department Files.
II
Charles Whitman was dead; no more shooting would come from the Tower. But the ground fire continued, and the deck was still exceedingly dangerous. Police and civilians below continued to shoot at anything that moved, namely Martinez and McCoy. For a second Martinez stood over Whitman, now completely sprawled out on the deck. Emotion overwhelmed him, and he threw Houston's shotgun onto the floor. As Chief Miles would say later, "He got the shakes." He began to scream, "I got him! I got him!" as he stood up straight. He may not have been as tall as McCoy, but Martinez was still nearly six feet tall. Ground fire began hitting the walls all around him. This time, it was McCoy's turn to get his fellow officer to duck for cover.
8
 
Page 215
After administering first aid to the wounded inside the Tower, DPS Officer Cowan and APD Officers Shoquist, Moe, and Shepard had begun to climb the stairs. The gunfire from above was so loud that they took cover and prepared for a gunfight in the stairways and halls. On the south side of the deck Jerry Day and Allen Crum could hear the shooting. They braced themselves and prepared to shoot anything that rounded the southwest corner as both Martinez and McCoy had instructed. Inside the reception area, Phillip Conner pointed his rifle at a window near the same southwest corner; he, too, was prepared to shoot anyone he saw. After all of that shooting it was a safe bet that someone else was dead or severely wounded, but they had no way of knowing whether it was the sniper or Martinez and McCoy. Their muscles tensed as they clutched their rifles and continued to focus on the southwest corner. The hope, of course, was that Martinez and McCoy would come back around the southeast corner, from where they left the glass-paneled door, to let everyone know that the sniper was dead and everything was over.
9
Martinez still had the shakes. "I got him! I got him!" he continued to scream in a vain attempt to halt ground fire. It did not take him long to realize that no one could hear him. McCoy told him to tell Jerry Day to call the radio stations to halt ground fire. Running in a southerly direction towards the heavily guarded southwest corner, Martinez came into Conner's view through the window. A fraction of a second later, Martinez rounded the corner itself, coming face to face with Day and Crum. Finally Martinez reached Harold Moe and reported an end to the sniping; Moe called it in on his walkie-talkie. In his report Officer Shepard wrote that Martinez had nearly been shot by his fellow officers.
10
Meanwhile, McCoy picked up Martinez's pistol and discarded the empty shells onto the deck floor, placed the pistol in his belt, and walked towards Whitman. McCoy picked up his shotgun and leaned it against the corner of the north and west walls. He knelt over the sniper's bullet-ridden body and checked the pockets for identification. He noticed the blood from Whitman's body flowing over the white grout between the floor's red tiles. It got closer and closer to McCoy's new Wellington boots. He talked to the dead sniper as he went through the pockets, "If you get blood on my boots, I'll throw you over." Phillip Conner, who came upon McCoy
 
Page 216
talking to Whitman's dead body wondered whether McCoy would actually do it. After retrieving the billfold and the contents of Whitman's pockets, McCoy was able to make a tentative ID from the documents and the stenciling on the footlocker. Then it dawned on him: "He planned everything that day, even how we would get him. He could have killed Martinez and me pretty easy. It was almost as if he was waiting for us."
11
Officer McCoy sat on the floor and leaned against the west wall as he continued to look through the contents of the wallet. He discovered the sniper's nameCharles Joseph Whitman.
Crum grabbed a green towel from the footlocker and waved it in an attempt to signal an end to the siege. At other moments, Day and Martinez waved handkerchiefs as well. But so many people were firing towards the Tower that an end to the shooting did not occur until some time later. While waiting for the firing to stop, Day joined McCoy near Whitman, whose blood continued to flow over the grout and into a drain on the floor. McCoy did not notice it, but one of the items in the wallet was an index card on which was scrawled, in a handwriting that was not Whitman's, the name and address of a business Officer McCoy had visited twice that morning:
Everett's Hardware Store
2820 Guadalupe
GR8-5365
12
Slowly, more officers arrived: Conner, Shoquist, Cowan, Moe, and Shepard. Day and McCoy continued to wait for the firing to stop. "Should we throw the son-of-a-bitch over?" McCoy asked facetiously. Day said they had better not. Conner had a similar conversation with McCoy and still wondered whether he was serious. Day asked Officer McCoy who "got" Whitman; McCoy's answer, "Martinez,'' modestly excluded his own role in bringing down the sniper. As the two officers listened to Neal Spelce's broadcast over Whitman's radio, Day asked if any officers were killed. McCoy told Day that he had seen Billy Speed get shot, but that it was a shoulder wound, and he looked like he would be okay. At almost that exact moment, Joe Roddy, reporting live, announced that Officer Billy Speed was dead on arrival at Brackenridge Hospital. After a
 
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moment of stunned silence, McCoy asked again, "Are you sure you don't want to throw the son-of-a-bitch over?"
13
III
It was over, but word was slow to get out. Those who had radios heard Neal Spelce announce "the sniper is dead." The number of people Charles Whitman had pinned down with his fire soon became evident as hundreds of people emerged from dozens of buildings, from behind hundreds of trees, bushes, and parked cars. Dozens still carried their pistols and rifles. The South Mall was teeming with humanity. In the midst of the crowd it occurred to Spelce that if he were wrong and there
was
another sniper up there, a lot more people could easily be killed. The sniper could hit anywhere and not miss a shot.
In the midst of the crowd, Larry Fuess was thinking about his friend Charlie. He wanted to talk to him about the shooting and ironically, he thought "Charlie would have done it that way." Then, Larry heard the unthinkable. Spelce announced the identity of the sniperCharles Joseph Whitman. Larry stood silently, in utter shock.
From the second floor of Calhoun Hall, the second building from 21st Street on the west side of the South Mall, Officer Bobby Simpson had been returning fire with a scoped rifle when he found out that the sniper was dead. He located two doctors, Robert C. Stokes of the Student Health Center, who had already faced considerable danger helping other victims, and Richard Alexander, a local psychiatrist. Officer Simpson escorted them to the Tower, along with a Catholic priest, Father David O'Brien, the Director of the Catholic Student Center. An
Austin American-Statesman
reporter named Al Williams accompanied the group on the elevator ride to the twenty-seventh floor. After boarding the elevator, a policeman told the doctors to "look for those who are still alive." The doctors, Williams, and Father O'Brien were not prepared for what they saw when the elevator doors opened. Dr. Stokes later wrote, "The entire floor was so blood-soaked that one had to step with caution to avoid slipping." Likewise, Williams wrote of having to step over and around bodies to avoid the blood. Phillip Conner remembered that Mark Gabour's body had "dammed up'' so much blood on the stairway that when
 
Page 218
he was removed the blood flowed down the stairs. Father O'Brien immediately began to administer Extreme Unction, the last rites of the Catholic Church. On the floor near the elevator Dr. Stokes began to treat Edna Townsley. He observed "ecchymotic" eyelids (bluish due to hemorrhaging) and shallow respiration. The "scrapper" was still alive, but she had been viciously attacked and the doctors and policemen instinctively knew she had no chance of surviving. She would be taken to Seton Hospital for emergency surgery, where she would die at 3:18
P.M.
Dr. Alexander was taken to Mary Gabour. Although her condition was not much better than Edna's, Mary would survive. She would be permanently crippled and legally blind.
14
Al Williams moved past the bloody stairway towards the reception area. He saw the trail of blood that Cheryl Botts and Don Walden had stepped over. Someone had moved Edna's desk completely away from the door and placed her glasses and nameplate on the top. Williams stepped out onto the deck followed shortly by Dr. Stokes, who had been warned to walk in a stooped position, just in case some vigilante had not yet heard the news that the sniper had been killed. Williams noticed six bullet holes in the face of the Tower clock and saw Whitman lying on his back with the binoculars draped around his neck. Stokes was able to confirm the obvious; Charles Whitman was dead. Later that same week, in a statement to the Food and Drug Administration, Stokes wrote: "In my thirty-four years of practice I have never before seen such violence manifested by a human being."
15
Indeed, Dr. Stokes had seen much that day. But in a couple of hours he would make one more shocking discovery
IV
Merle Wells, APD's head of homicide, supervised the Tower crime scene and the removal of evidence and bodies. He asked Jerry Day to get a camera to take photos. McCoy stayed with Whitman until Wells instructed policemen and ambulance attendants to wrap up the body and remove it to Cook's Funeral Home. Officer Martinez, still suffering from the shakes, nearly collapsed. Wells instructed Lieutenant Lowell Morgan to assist Martinez downstairs. Morgan

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