Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  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.

  AFTER FIRING AT WILL FOR MORE THAN NINETY MINUTES, TEXAS TOWER SNIPER CHARLES WHITMAN WAS KILLED BY TWO AUSTIN COPS ON THE TOWER’S OBSERVATION DECK.

  Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

  He commenced shooting anyone he could see. He had a 360-degree field of fire, and he proved lethal.

  For the next ninety-six minutes, Whitman killed with uncanny precision. He hit some victims up to 500 yards (457 meters) away, and zeroed in on frantic, running bodies with deadly accuracy. He dropped them all: first, the pregnant freshman and her boyfriend, who tried to shield her …then the young math professor …Peace Corps volunteer Thomas Ashton, who was simply walking toward the sound of gunshots …the student running away …the cop who peeked out from his hiding place …the Ph.D. candidate with six kids …the new high-school graduate and his girlfriend who dreamed of being a dancer …the city electrical repairman who just wanted to help somebody …the seventeen-year-old girl who attended the same school where Kathy taught …the electrical engineering student who’d take another thirty-five years to die from his wounds …

  With one hundred fifty bullets, Whitman hit almost fifty people.

  All the while, a CBS television crew was filming inside the free-fire zone, and news photographers were risking their lives to snap images for the next day’s paper. Citizens all over the city—including Whitman himself—had dialed their transistor radios to listen to the live coverage.

  Minutes after the first shot, Austin police scrambled to the scene, where one of them had already been killed. A police sniper was sent aloft in an airplane, but Whitman drove them away with his gunfire. As word spread on the radio, dozens of angry citizens arrived with deer rifles and returned fire at the Tower.

  As police slowly moved across the killing ground toward the Tower, they helped the wounded as best they could, even as Whitman continued to fire at the ambulances trying to save them.

  A handful of policemen finally got to the Tower. Once inside, Officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy—with the help of a civilian deputized on the scene—crept to the observation deck but found the door wedged shut. When McCoy finally breached the door, they both snuck toward the sound of Whitman’s shots, even as bullets from the ground ricocheted off the walls around them.

  McCoy caught Whitman’s eye for a split second, then blasted him in the face with a shotgun. Charlie’s head flipped back and his body spasmed as McCoy hit him with another blast in the left side of his head. At the same moment, Martinez emptied six shots from his service revolver into Whitman.

  He was dead, but McCoy and Martinez ran to his twitching body and each fired a last shot at point-blank range into him. As Whitman’s blood drained into a rain gutter near his shattered head, McCoy grabbed a green towel from Whitman’s footlocker and waved it to the people on the ground.

  The siege was over. At 1:24 p.m., Charles Whitman was dead.

  PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

  Whitman was likely already dead when Cap and the others hiding in the jewelry store—and most people on the ground—escaped into an alley and scrambled over a wooden fence into the arms of paramedics on the other side. In the alley, Cap saw ordinary people aiming their rifles toward the Tower, and a few more pieces of this bloody puzzle fell into place.

  Several injured people were already in the ambulance, including the driver himself, who was critically wounded. Driver Morris Hohmann was responding to the victims on West Twenty-Third Street when one of Whitman’s bullets pierced his leg artery. His partner used his belt as a tourniquet and took him to Brackenridge Hospital with the other victims.

  At Brackenridge, the dead and wounded were piling up in the city’s only full-service emergency room. Chaos reigned in the hospital’s hallways, where cops, reporters, and relatives rushed around among the dead and dying. Meanwhile, hundreds of local citizens lined up at Brackenridge and the local blood center to donate.

  In the ER, somebody told Cap what had happened: A madman in the Tower had been shooting innocent people, and many were dead.

  When a doctor finally saw Cap, he found serious shrapnel wounds in his upper left arm, the front of his left leg, his back, and his left hand—all caused by Whitman’s soft-tipped bullets splattering against his friend Dave’s wrist bones and the walls and sidewalks of Guadalupe. He had also been hit directly in the soft flesh of his upper right arm; the bullet furrowed 6 inches (15.2 centimeters) across the meat of his triceps. None of the injuries were life-threatening, but all had come close to something much more serious.

  Brackenridge soon transferred Cap to the University Health Center, where he spent a week recuperating from his wounds, some of which suppurated for months. There, he was told that Thomas Ashton, his Peace Corps buddy, had been killed. And he began to contemplate how close he had come to death.

  Outside of his hospital window the Tower loomed. This edifice, seemingly within an arm’s reach, had come to symbolize so many things to so many people, including Charles Whitman. Now it became a symbol of something else to Cap Ehlke: the nearness of death.

  “As I lay in the clean, white bed at the clinic, I could look out the window and see that lofty tower,” he wrote later. “At night it was lit up. Piercing into the dark sky, it gave me an eerie feeling, as stark as death itself. It made me think about the ultimate meaning of things.”

  After he was released, Cap joined up with another Peace Corps group that had been sent to Mexico to practice teaching before shipping out to the Middle East. He was assigned to a high school in Mexico City for a few weeks, but he felt out of sync with the group. His wounds weren’t healing properly, and he was still obsessed with his brush with death. Or with God.

  NOW A PROFESSOR OF RELIGION, WRITING, AND LITERATURE AT WISCONSIN’S CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, CAP EHLKE FINALLY FULFILLED HIS DREAM OF SEEING THE WORLD BEFORE COMING HOME TO MILWAUKEE, WHERE HE GREW UP, TO BECOME A LUTHERAN MINISTER.

  Ron Franscell

  The shooting had jolted him back into a spiritual focus. He still wanted adventure, but maybe it wasn’t as far as Iran or all the other places he never knew. Maybe it was closer than all that.

  He picked up the phone and called the seminary. The new semester had already begun, he was told, but they took him anyway.

  The next summer, he went to Iran to visit some of his old Peace Corps friends, including Dave Mattson, whose hand had been reattached by surgeons. He explored Europe that summer, too, before traveling to Jerusalem six weeks after the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. The air was electric in those days, and it thrilled him.

  Later, he attended the Hebrew University of Israel before finishing at seminary. He was sent to a small church in Little Chute, Wisconsin, and made a family. He was, at last, the minister his father expected him to be.

  In time, he returned to Milwaukee as an editor for a Lutheran publishing house, where he worked for fifteen years. Cap eventually collected four master’s degrees and a doctorate, and he took a teaching position at Concordia University, a Lutheran college on the shores of Lake Michigan in Mequon, a northern suburb of Milwaukee.

  For many years, he kept the bloodied pants he wore that day in Austin, but they have disappeared. So have some of the memories he thought he’d never forget. Somewhere there’s a box full of clippings and mementos from those dark days, but he has lost track of them. Reading other people’s memories might somehow taint his own.

  “I just have never looked at my survival as some kind of great accomplishment,” he says now. “It was just something I was involved in. In some ways, it seemed kind of morbid to want to revisit it.”

  He feels no animosity toward Charles Whitman, partly because he never saw it as a personal attack.

  “What he did was terrible, and he went over the edge,” Cap says. “It was like
being hit by lighting, being touched by some force outside of me. I happen to have been shot by him, but my relationship to Charles Whitman is no different than someone’s who wasn’t even there.

  “If anything, it made me aware of how we are always close to death. An inch or two either way can make all the difference.”

  WORKMEN USE WIRE BRUSHES TO REMOVE BLOOD STAINS FROM THE CONCRETE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS TOWER IN AUSTIN, THE DAY AFTER CHARLES WHITMAN’S ASSAULT.

  Associated Press

  THE ENIGMA IN THE TOWER

  In ninety-six horrifying minutes, Charles Whitman had killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one. The discovery of his wife’s and mother’s corpses brought the day’s grim toll to sixteen.

  A long line of American mass murderers preceded Charlie Whitman, and a longer line came after, but the Texas Tower massacre became an archetype for wholesale slaughter possibly because of the iconic Tower itself. Or possibly because it would be twenty-two years before another crazed shooter—James Huberty, at the San Ysidro McDonald’s in 1984—would exceed Whitman’s grisly body count (see chapter 3).

  In the days after the orgiastic slaughter in Austin, an autopsy showed that Whitman had a malignant, walnut-sized tumor deep in his brain, just as he had feared. But doctors concluded that it was unlikely to have caused his rampage, even though they believed it might have killed him within a year.

  Some scoff at the suggestion that a tumor, drug abuse, insomnia, or anything but raw evil caused Whitman’s rampage.

  “Charlie Whitman knew precisely and completely what he was doing when he ascended the University of Texas Tower and shot nearly fifty people,” wrote Gary Lavergne, whose meticulously detailed book, A Sniper in the Tower, stands as the definitive account of the crime. “He could not have done what he did without controlled, thoughtful, serial decision-making in a correct order to accomplish a goal. Nothing he did remotely appears undisciplined or random … [He] was a cold and calculating murderer. Those who say they can’t believe he would commit such a monstrous crime are only admitting that they didn’t really know him.”