Charlie Whitman died as he had lived, an enigma.
Ironically, he was buried beside his beloved mother—his first victim—in a Catholic cemetery in Florida. A priest blessed Charlie’s gray, flag-draped casket as it was lowered into hallowed ground, saying he had obviously been mentally ill and was therefore not responsible for the sin of murder.
Kathy Leissner Whitman, only twenty-three when her husband stabbed her to death, was buried in Rosenberg, Texas, not far from the little town where she grew up.
As so often has happened after gun crimes, a groundswell of anti-gun hysteria erupted after the Tower massacre. But it was stillborn: Charlie Whitman was a military-trained marksman who possessed legal weapons that he legally purchased. He had no previous criminal record and knew more about firearms than most gun owners do. As many pointed out at the time, he could have taught the gun-ownership courses that any state might have mandated.
For many, it wasn’t what Whitman knew or what he couldn’t control that caused his crimes. He was in complete control of his actions and understood their profound consequences.
“Charles Whitman knew that what he was doing was evil,” Lavergne concluded in A Sniper in the Tower. “[He] became a killer because he did not respect or admire himself. He knew that in many ways he was what he despised in others.
“He wanted to die in a big way …he died while engaging in the only activity in which he truly excelled: shooting.”
For two years after the mass murder, the Tower’s observation deck was closed. After it reopened in 1968, a series of suicide leaps forced it to close again in 1974. Finally, after several safety improvements, it reopened in 1999.
Nine years after the killings, when Hollywood proposed a TV movie about the massacre, starring a post-Disney Kurt Russell as Whitman, the University of Texas refused to allow filming at the Tower, saying it would be an affront to the still-raw emotions in Austin. The Deadly Tower was eventually filmed at the state capital building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and aired in late 1975 to lukewarm reviews. The movie itself is five minutes shorter than Whitman’s real-time shooting spree.
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 child
ren, 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.
He was making one last effort to penetrate her when he suddenly looked up and listened intently. He had heard something he didn’t expect: a car in the driveway.
Dianne watched him as he leaped up, dressed, and grabbed her purse and cordless phone. Frustrated at being interrupted—at losing control of the situation—he stomped Dianne hard in the stomach and fled out the back just as her son Herman came in the front door.
Dianne was numb and barely conscious. She felt no pain, just relief.
She was alive.
Herman had come home for lunch to find a strange car parked in his spot in the driveway. He noticed a gold-colored Mitsubishi Mirage with front-end damage and a front license plate advertising a local dealer, Hampton Motors. It belonged to nobody he knew.
He went inside, and everything was quiet until he heard his mother’s distressed voice in the living room.
“Help!” she cried. “Get a knife!”
Dianne was splayed on the bloody rug, delirious, with her skirt pulled up around her waist. Her face was badly bruised and her eyes were swollen shut. Then Herman saw the back door swinging open and ran outside to see the gold Mirage speeding away down Highway 31, with a silvery cord hanging from a rear window. He ran back inside, got his keys, and peeled out of the driveway to chase the man who attacked his mother, but he quickly lost sight of him.
When he returned to the mobile home, he followed a trail of blood to find his mother, who had stumbled into the bedroom, called 911, and passed out.
When detectives arrived, they found Herman waiting for them in the driveway, furious. His fury was so intense he couldn’t describe what he’d seen.
Dianne was Li
fe Flighted to Lafayette General, where doctors found she had a skull fracture; many cuts and bruises around her neck, face, and scalp; and other injuries to the back of her head. They were unable to collect any of the attacker’s DNA. Over the next five days in the hospital, while police scoured her home for clues, an investigator gently worked through the details with her and asked her to describe her assailant for a police sketch artist.
The next day, St. Martin’s Parish cops released a composite sketch of Dianne’s would-be rapist and a description of his gold Mitsubishi sedan.
What they didn’t know at the time was that they were releasing the first public portrait of a serial killer. It never crossed their minds that this crime in little Cecilia could be related to a recent series of killings in Baton Rouge.
And they didn’t know that Dianne Alexander was his first and only living victim. All the rest were dead. And there would be more.
THE WRONG PROFILE
Three days later, on July 12, Pam Kinamore, a forty-four-year-old mother and antique-store owner, disappeared from her Baton Rouge home one evening. Her nude, rotting corpse was found four days later under a swampland bridge 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Baton Rouge, nearly decapitated by three vicious slashes across her throat. She had been raped.
The body, exposed to humid Louisiana summer heat and various bayou predators, was unidentifiable except for a gold wedding band on its left ring finger. It was Pam Kinamore’s. But her husband noticed that the body was not wearing Pam’s favorite thin silver toe ring.
BATON ROUGE POLICE HOPED A 2002 BILLBOARD OFFERING A REWARD FOR INFORMATION WOULD HELP THEM FIND A SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER TERRORIZING THE AREA, BUT THEIR INVESTIGATION WAS HAMPERED BY SEVERAL WRONG TURNS.
Delivered from Evil Page 18