by Gordon Kerr
Devastation of Innocence
When he arrived at the school 30 minutes after the blast, parents were scratching at the debris with their bare hands, desperately trying to find their children. Catching sight of the target for all his anger – school superintendent, Emory Huyck – Kehoe called to him and Huyck rushed over. As he approached Kehoe picked up a rifle, turned and fired into the space behind his seat. There was a massive explosion as the dynamite he had secreted there blew up. It killed Kehoe and Huyck instantly but also blew the debris he had put in the truck in every direction, lethal pieces of metal slicing through the air like shrapnel. Glenn Smith, the town’s postmaster, was killed in the explosion, as were his father-in-law, Nelson McFarren and eight-year-old G. Cleo Claton.
As searchers dug, they found yet another huge and potentially devastating bomb that the devious Kehoe had set to go off at 9:45 a.m. It had failed to detonate, possibly because the first explosion had short-circuited it.
A total of 45 people – including 38 children aged between seven and 14 – died at Bath Consolidated School that day. It was America’s biggest ever school killing and, of peacetime civilian attacks, only the September 11 atrocity and the Oklahoma City bombing have produced more fatalities.
University of Texas Tower Shootings
Year: 1966
Perpetrator: Charles Whitman
Murdered: 16
Charlie Whitman’s feelings of inadequacy derived from his father. C.A. Whitman was a plumber whose family lived a comfortable and outwardly happy life. Behind closed doors, however, Whitman senior ruled the household with an iron fist. His wife and three sons lived in fear of his violent temper and his unreasonably high expectations of them.
Charlie was a gifted student, an accomplished pianist and an Eagle Scout, but in June 1959, shortly before his 18th birthday, the tensions simmering in the Whitman house finally erupted when he came home drunk. His furious father beat him and threw him in the family swimming pool where he nearly drowned. Shortly afterwards, against the wishes of his parents, Charlie enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Too Little, Too Late
He initially did well and was granted a scholarship to study for an engineering degree at the University of Texas, where he arrived in September 1961. Liberated, however, from his strict upbringing and rigid army discipline, he almost immediately began to get into trouble. He was arrested for poaching deer and began to gamble, accumulating sizable debts. Marriage to his girlfriend, Kathy Leissner, seemed to calm him down a little and his grades began to improve. Nevertheless, it was too late and, to his great disappointment, the Marine Corps withdrew his scholarship. By February 1963, he was back on active duty, leaving his new wife back in Texas to complete her degree.
His problems continued but he managed to persuade his father to pull strings to have his enlistment time reduced. In December 1964, he received an honourable discharge.
Back in Austin, Charlie returned to his studies, determined to make up for his recent failures. He enrolled for a degree in architectural engineering, working as a debt collector and then a bank cashier to pay his college fees. In his spare time, he was a scoutmaster and his journals of the time were filled with self-improvement ideas. Like his father, however, he had a bad temper and he hated the fact that he was overweight. He became depressed, a condition made worse by the divorce of his father and mother. It got so bad that Kathy made him seek counselling. He was prescribed diazepam and sent to see a psychiatrist.
The counsellor very quickly recognized Charlie’s hostility towards his father and his feelings of under-achievement, but she took little notice when he described to her his fantasy of going to the top of the 307ft (93.5m)-tall University of Texas Tower with a deer rifle and shooting people down below. He had been talking about this fantasy for years, but the psychiatrist saw no reason to be worried that he would actually carry it out. Although scheduled for further treatment the following week, Whitman never returned.
To get through his heavy workload in the summer of 1966, Whitman began taking the amphetamine Dexedrine. However, instead of making him alert and focussed, it made him even less efficient and, with his self-esteem at rock bottom, his thoughts began to turn towards making his fantasy a reality.
The Killing Begins
On 31 July, he bought a Bowie knife, binoculars and a supply of canned meat. He took Kathy to a movie and then they joined his mother Margaret for lunch. They stopped at the house of some friends on the way home and in the evening Kathy went back to Southwestern Bell where she was working as a telephone operator. Charlie stayed at home and typed a letter in which he tried to explain what he was about to do, citing unusual and irrational thoughts. He even described how his attempt to get psychiatric help had been unsuccessful. Chillingly, he detailed his plan.
At 9:30 a.m., he picked Kathy up from work and she went to bed while he drove to his mother’s apartment. At some point during his visit, he choked her with a length of rubber hose and then stabbed her in the chest. At around 12:30 p.m., he wrote another letter, explaining his actions before putting his mother’s body in bed and pulling the bedclothes over her. He stuck a note on the door for the apartment block’s caretaker reading ‘Roy, I don’t have to be to work today and I was up late last night. I would like to get some rest. Please do not disturb me. Thank you. Mrs. Whitman.’
Back home, he stabbed Kathy five times in the chest as she lay sleeping, before scrawling on the letter he had already written ‘Both dead’. He wrote more letters to his family before packing a vast array of equipment in his old Marine footlocker – a radio, three gallons of water, petrol, a notebook and pen, a compass, a hatchet and hammer, food, two knives, a flashlight and batteries, a 35-caliber Remington rifle, a 6mm Remington rifle with a scope, a 357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, a 9mm Luger pistol, and a Gales-Brescia pistol. As if that was not enough, he additionally bought a 30-caliber M-1 carbine and a 12-gauge shotgun.
The next morning, he bought a two-wheeled trailer, loaded the footlocker into it and set off in his car for the university campus. Arriving at a security checkpoint, he used the ID that he had had as a research assistant and got a 40-minute permit for unloading equipment. At 11:35 a.m., wearing blue coveralls, he unloaded and entered the tower.
His first victim there was 47-year-old Edna Townsley, receptionist on the 28th floor observation deck. He bludgeoned her with a rifle butt and she would die a few hours later. Shortly afterwards, two people walked through reception, not really noticing anything untoward. Whitman let them get into the elevator and, unbeknownst to them at the time, escape unharmed.
M.J. and Mary Gabour, their sons Mark and Mike, and William and Marguerite Lamport were making their way upstairs from the floor below. When the two Gabour boys appeared at the door, Whitman opened fire with his sawn-off shotgun, killing 16-year-old Mark instantly. Further firing killed Marguerite Lamport and seriously wounded Mike and Mary Gabour. William Lamport and M.J. Gabour ran to get help.
Fantasy Becomes Reality
Whitman methodically unpacked his gear on to the observation deck and immediately started firing at the people in the piazza below. He shot pregnant 18-year-old Claire Wilson, killing the baby she was carrying. A 19-year-old, Thomas Eckman, tried to help her and was shot dead. 33-year-old Dr. Robert Boyer died next. Thomas Ashton, a 22-year-old Peace Corps trainee was shot in the chest and would later die.
University police officers arrived and secured the doors and exits. Meanwhile, Whitman moved to the west side of the tower and shot and wounded a boy on a bicycle on Guadalupe Street which was known as the Drag. A 17-year-old, Karen Griffin, fell to the ground and would die a week later, while 24-year-old Thomas Karr, took a bullet in the back trying to help her. He only lived for another hour.
Two Austin police officers tried to get to the tower but one of them, 22-year-old Billy Speed, received a fatal wound fired through a 6in (15cm) gap in a balustrade. Meanwhile, back on the Drag, 38-year-old Harry Walchuk fell dying from a bullet w
ound in his chest and 18-year-old Paul Sonntag was shot dead through his open mouth as he peered from behind a construction barricade. As Sonntag’s 18-year-old fiancée, Claudia Rut, tried to help him, she was also shot. She died a few hours later.
A full 500 yards from the south of the tower, a 29-year-old electrician named Roy Schmidt joined a group of onlookers hiding behind cars. When he stood up, thinking he was too far away for there to be any danger, he was hit in the abdomen. A few minutes later, he was dead.
As word of the horror at the tower had spread, many had gone home to get their own guns and by now bullets were ricocheting off the stonework around Whitman as he changed weapons and re-loaded. Overhead, police snipers fired at him from a light aircraft, but they were wide of their target.
A Bloody End to the Terror
Meanwhile, three police officers had succeeded in getting to the base of the tower where they met ex-serviceman, Allen Crum. The four made their way up the tower to the floor on which the observation deck was located.
Splitting into two groups of two, they thought they had Whitman trapped, but as they edged closer, Crum accidentally discharged the gun the officers had given him. It was now or never. Officer Ramiro Martinez leapt from around a corner and opened fire with his .38 pistol at Whitman, who was approximately 50ft (15m) away from him. His partner, Officer Houston McCoy, jumped out from behind Martinez and blasted Whitman in the neck, head and left side with a 12-gauge shotgun. Martinez, having emptied his .38, grabbed McCoy’s shotgun and ran at Whitman firing at him and shouting ‘I got him!’ It was over, but down below 15 people lay dead and 32 had been wounded. For one man, electrical engineering student David Gunby, shot in the lower back by Whitman, it was the beginning of 30 years of dialysis. On 7 November 2001 he announced to hospital staff and his family that he had suffered enough and would be discontinuing his treatment. A week later, he died. He was Charles Whitman’s 16th victim.
Interestingly, when Whitman’s autopsy was carried out, it was discovered that he had been suffering from a brain tumour that, according to the autopsy report, ‘conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions’.
Ecole Polytechnique Massacre
Year: 1989
Perpetrator: Marc Lepine
Murdered: 14
‘I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker,’ he wrote in the suicide letter found afterwards. ‘For seven years life has brought me no joy and being totally blasé, I have decided to put an end to those viragos.’
Marc Lepine
On 6 December 1989, the last day of term before the Christmas holidays, students were relaxing in the Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering faculty associated with the University of Montreal. The college’s management had even provided free wine in the cafeteria that day. For 14 people, however, Christmas would not come that year and many more would undergo an experience that would scar them for the remainder of their lives.
Dangerously Anti-Social
Marc Lepine had been born Gamil Gharbi to an abusive Algerian father and a French-Canadian mother. Eventually, when Gamil was seven, his mother decided that she had endured enough cruelty and divorced her husband. Gamil hated his father enough to change his name at the age of 13 to Marc Lepine, but although he could easily shake off his father’s name, he found it more difficult to renounce the warped views about women espoused by him. Gradually they evolved into an obsession.
He believed that women should not be permitted to go to university and argued that the reason he was a failure was that educated women were taking all the jobs he wanted. He applied for a place at Ecole Polytechnique and when his application was rejected, he claimed that it was because the college was enrolling too many female students. Even at home, Lepine felt undermined by women. His younger sister publically humiliated him about his chronic acne and his failure to find a girlfriend. He fantasized about her death, even digging a mock grave for her.
By that fateful December day in 1989, Lepine, who had never been able to make friends and was interested only in computers, electronics and weapons, had become dangerously anti-social.
He had spent months planning the atrocity. In August, he had applied for a firearms certificate, an application that was accepted in October. Towards the end of November, he purchased a Sturm Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle from a sporting goods store, telling the shop assistant that he was going to use it for hunting small game. Meanwhile, he visited Ecole Polytechnique on a number of occasions, familiarizing himself with the college’s layout. He even took his mother a birthday present, even though it was still weeks until her birthday. He knew he would not be around to help her celebrate.
That afternoon, Lepine sat outside the registrar’s office for a long time. He was wearing a white baseball cap, a grey parka and heavy boots and had a green plastic bag beside him. He seemed nervous and every now and then would check the bag as if to make sure that its contents were still there. When a curious employee finally asked him if she could help him, he suddenly stood up and walked away.
By this time – 5 p.m. – people were beginning to drift away from the college, locking their offices and classrooms. As Lepine walked in the direction of classroom 230, he reached into the bag and pulled out his rifle, armed with a magazine containing 30 rounds.
‘I Am Fighting Feminism’
Arriving at the door at around 5:10 p.m., he turned the handle and walked in. Inside was a mechanical engineering class consisting of 60 students. He stopped the presentation being given by one of the students and ordered the male and female students to go to opposite sides of the room. When no one moved, believing this to be simply an end of term prank, Lepine raised his weapon and fired a round into the ceiling. He then ordered the male students to leave the room and, speaking in French, asked the nine women who remained if they knew why they were there. Someone said ‘No’ and Lepine answered, ‘I am fighting feminism’. One of the students, Nathalie Provost, tried to argue that they were nothing of the kind, but Lepine replied, ‘You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists!’ He then opened fire, sweeping his weapon across the cowering girls from left to right. Six of them were killed and three wounded.
He left the classroom and climbed the stairs to the second floor where he wounded several more women. As he moved towards the financial services department, 24-year-old Maryse Laganière hastily locked the door to the office in which she worked but before she could duck down out of sight, Lepine fired through the door’s window, killing her.
He made his way downstairs again, to the first floor cafeteria where around 100 people were enjoying the free wine provided by the college. He shot and wounded a couple of women, scattering the diners in all directions. He found two women in an unlocked storage area and coldly shot them dead.
He next walked up the escalator to the third floor, finding a room where, oblivious to the horror unfolding below, a class was still in progress. A couple of male students and 23-year-old Maryse Leclair, were delivering a presentation from a low stage at the front of the classroom. Watching were 25 fellow students and two teachers. Lepine, told the two male presenters to get out before shooting Maryse. He then turned and killed two female students who were frantically trying to flee. The students still in the room dived under their desks, but that was not enough cover. Lepine walked towards three of the girls, shot one dead and wounded the other two.
From Murder to Suicide
Calmly, he put a fresh magazine in his gun and walked to the front of the class, firing randomly. Maryse, critically wounded and lying on the stage moaned for help. Lepine unsheathed a hunting knife and callously stabbed her three times, snuffing out whatever life was left in her.
Suddenly, Lepine must have decided it was enough. He removed his white baseball cap, wrapped his parka around the barrel of his rifle and raised it to his head. He exclaimed, ‘Oh shit!’ and squeezed the trigger. Part of hi
s skull was blown off and his lifeless body slumped to the floor.
It seemed to be over, but for some the hell was just beginning. Many entered counselling and therapy that continued for years. One young man, Sarto Blais, found himself unable to cope with the trauma and hanged himself. His parents subsequently also committed suicide.
Jonesboro Massacre
Year: 1998
Perpetrators: Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson
Murdered: 5
‘Tomorrow you will find out if you live or die. Everyone that hates me, everyone that I don’t like is going to die.’
It was Monday 23 March 1998 and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson was angry. His 11- year-old girlfriend, Candace Porter, had broken up with him but not only that; it was rumoured that she had also insulted him in some way. He was furious and wanted revenge. But, as usual, nobody believed his big talk. This was the same boy, after all, who had claimed to be a member of a gang called the Treetop Piru that had associations with the notorious South Central Los Angeles street gang, the Bloods. Everyone knew that it was just the efforts of a teenager with low self-esteem to gain respect from his peers.
Two Troublesome Boys
Johnson lived with his mother and stepfather and had difficulties at both home and school. In the past year, in fact, he had been suspended three times and had been charged with molesting a three-year-old girl on a visit to southern Minnesota with his family. The case was dismissed, however, on account of his age. Together with 11-year-old Andrew Golden, he was about to commit a much bigger crime, one that would scar a town’s population for generations.
Andrew Golden shared an interest in firearms with his father and had been given his first when he was just six years of age. He competed alongside his father in shooting competitions, even winning a few of them. He had recently shot his first duck and looked forward to going deer-hunting with his dad. Troublesome at school, Golden often got into fights with schoolmates and he was regularly in trouble for swearing at teachers. He was accused by one of his classmates of killing her cat with a BB gun and Johnson would later claim that it was after that incident that Golden approached him and suggested that they take guns to school and scare a few people. Johnson claimed he was initially reluctant to become involved but Golden told him that no one would get hurt and that all he had to do was find transport to move their supplies and weapons to the vicinity of the school. Golden told him he would provide the guns.