by Sid Holt
Then one day, at age fourteen, he started complaining of blinding headaches. His physician initially believed he had meningitis, but after further testing, he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system, often causing temporary paralysis. Sirak was rushed to the hospital, where he soon found himself unable to walk. Seeing Sirak confined to a hospital bed—so weak, at first, that he could not play the keyboard his teacher had brought him—Claire was seized by terror. As she sat vigil at his bedside, she closed her eyes and bowed her head, silently pleading with God not to take this son from her too.
The syndrome, exotic-sounding and mercurial, eventually ebbed with treatment, and Sirak returned to the ninth grade a month later, shuffling behind a walker. No sooner was his body strong again than he faced another ordeal; during his hospitalization, doctors had discovered he needed open-heart surgery to repair his aorta, this time unequivocally. The operation, performed in the spring of 2000, was a success, though it would be another three years—when his cardiologist told Claire that his heart had fully healed—before she felt any sense of relief. Sirak, who was eighteen by then, would be a healthy adult, the doctor explained.
Sometimes, in those days after Sirak’s recovery, Claire thought back to an epiphany she’d had years before, while on a hike in Wyoming. She had come across a tree whose trunk bent at a dramatic angle at its midway point, forming a curvature that resembled the letter C. Something catastrophic—lightning? drought?—had diverted it from its path, but the tree, resilient, had righted itself and grown straight again.
V.
Claire was still living in Virginia in the spring of 1999 when one word—Columbine—became synonymous with mass murder. Because she did not own a TV, she was not subjected to the disturbing footage that seemed to play on every channel, in which petrified teenagers streamed out of their suburban Denver high school, hands over their heads, frantic to escape the carnage inside. Still, when she saw the headlines, she felt her pulse race. She scoured the newspaper for details—about the pair of teenagers who had come to school armed with bombs and guns; about the twelve students and the teacher who had been slaughtered; about the twenty-one gunshot victims who had survived. Even as she grieved for them, Claire was taken aback by the attention the shooting commanded. As the victim of a crime that was still cloaked in silence and shame, she felt strangely envious. “So much of what had happened to me was still a mystery,” she said. “Every single detail that revealed itself was precious.”
In fact, Claire had begun to reconstruct parts of her story the previous Thanksgiving. That week, she had stopped in a bookstore in Washington Dulles International Airport, where she was waiting for a flight that would take her to Arizona to see her sister. Sirak was staying with friends for the holiday, and Claire, who was rarely apart from him, was on her own. Someone she knew had recently mentioned an item in the Washington Post on a new book called A Sniper in the Tower, by Texas historian Gary Lavergne, and Claire, who was curious to see it, eyed the shelves. Though pop culture had elevated Charles Whitman to near-mythic status in the intervening decades through both film and music—Harry Chapin’s 1972 song “Sniper” cast him as a misunderstood antihero—the tragedy itself had received scant attention, save for the obligatory anniversary stories that ran in Texas newspapers.
Claire finally spotted the book, whose cover featured an old black and white yearbook photo of Whitman wearing a wide grin. Rather than start at the beginning, she flipped to the end and scanned the index, where she was startled to see her name. Turning to the first citation, on page 141, she skimmed the text and then came to a stop. “Eighteen-year-old Claire Wilson … was walking with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend and roommate, Thomas F. Eckman,” she read. “Reportedly, both were members of the highly controversial Students for a Democratic Society. She was also eight months pregnant and due for a normal delivery of a baby boy in a few short weeks.”
Claire could feel her heart thumping in her chest at what came next:
Looking down on her from a fortress 231 feet above, Whitman pulled the trigger. With his four-power scope he would have clearly seen her advanced state of pregnancy. As if to define the monster he had become, he chose the youngest life as his first victim from the deck. Given his marksmanship, the magnification of the four-power scope, an unobstructed view, his elevation, and no interference from the ground, it can only be concluded that he aimed for the baby in Claire Wilson’s womb.
Claire stood still, the frenetic energy of her fellow travelers receding into the background. What astonished her more than the notion that Whitman had deliberately taken aim at her child—an idea she could not yet fully grasp—was the simple fact that what had happened to her more than three decades earlier was written down in a book that she could hold in her hands. Though she had no money to speak of at that particular moment—her father had purchased her plane ticket for her—she did not hesitate before handing over her last twenty dollars to buy the book, which she devoured on her flight to Tucson.
The act of reclaiming her history would come afterward in fits and starts, beginning one summer night in 2001, when Claire sat at her computer and used a search engine for the very first time, carefully typing out the words “UT Tower Shooting.” She had only a dial-up connection, and the results were slow to load, but the first link that appeared led to a blog written by an Austin advertising executive named Forrest Preece, who had narrowly escaped being shot by Whitman. Preece had been standing across the street from the Student Union, outside the Rexall Drug Store, on the morning of the shooting, when a bullet had whizzed by his right ear. As Claire read his account of the massacre—“Every year, when August approaches, I start trying to forget … but as any rational person knows, when you try to forget something, you just end up thinking about it more”—she felt strangely comforted. Each detail he described—the earsplitting gunfire, the bodies splayed on the ground, the onlookers who stood immobilized, wild with fright—was one she had carried with her all those years too.
Claire initiated a sporadic correspondence with Preece as she continued her itinerant existence—first heading to New York, to take care of her ailing mother after Sirak left for college, and then moving back to Colorado, in 2005, and Wyoming, two years later, to teach in Adventist schools. In each place, she felt the strange pull of the shooting tug at her. Once, in a sporting goods store in the Rocky Mountains, she decided to stop at the gun counter and ask the clerk if she could look at a .30-06. (Whitman had in fact shot her with a 6 mm bolt-action rifle, but Claire had been told otherwise.) The clerk laid the .30-06 out on the glass counter and Claire studied the weapon, finally reaching out to touch its stock, before pulling her hand back a moment later, unsure what she had come to see. Another time, while driving through the Denver area, she chose to take a detour through Columbine, even circling around the high school. She could not say exactly what she had gone looking for “except for some deeper understanding,” she told me, that went unsatisfied.
Claire had stayed away from Austin for nearly forty years, but in 2008, when Preece asked her to attend a building dedication for the law-enforcement officers and civilians who had helped bring Whitman’s rampage to an end, she felt compelled to return. The previous year, a student at Virginia Tech had armed himself and opened fire, killing thirty-two people and injuring seventeen, and Claire, rattled by yet another tragedy, craved human connection.
At the ceremony, which took place at a county building far from campus, she fumbled for the right words as she tried to convey her thankfulness to Houston McCoy, one of the police officers who had shot Whitman. When she later joined him, Preece, and several former officers on a visit to UT, she was dismayed to find that the only reference to the horror that had unfolded there was a small bronze plaque on the north side of the Tower. Set in a limestone boulder beside a pond, it was easy to miss. As Claire surveyed the modest memorial, an industrial air conditioning unit that sat nearby
cycled on and a dull roar broke the silence. “I had heard about the memorial and had taken solace in thinking that it was a lovely place,” she told me. “I was so disappointed to find no mention of Tom, the baby, or any of the victims.”
Afterward, at his home, Preece showed her old news footage that TV cameramen had shot on the day of the tragedy, looking out onto the South Mall. As she watched, Claire was startled to realize that she was looking at a grainy image of her younger self, lying on the hot pavement. When she saw two teenagers dash out from their hiding places and run headlong toward her, she leaned closer, dumbstruck. Local news stations had aired the footage in the aftermath of the shooting and on subsequent anniversaries, but Claire had never seen any of it, and witnessing her own rescue was revelatory. She had always known the name of one of the students who saved her; James Love, a fellow freshman, had been in her anthropology class, and she had stopped him on campus once in 1967 to thank him for what he had done, but he had seemed ill at ease and eager to break free from the conversation. His partner, a teenager in a black button-down shirt and Buddy Holly glasses, had remained unknown to her, so much so that she had half wondered, until she saw the black and white footage, if he had been an angel.
Preece helped her solve the mystery in 2011, after he spotted a headline in the American-Statesman that read “Man Who’s the Life of the Party Has Brush With Death.” Below it, the article detailed how a local performance artist named Artly Snuff, a member of the parody rock band the Uranium Savages, had survived a near-fatal car accident. Born John Fox, Snuff had graduated from Austin High and been weeks away from starting his freshman year at UT when Whitman opened fire. Though the article never referenced the shooting, the mention of Snuff’s name jogged Preece’s memory, and he recalled a Statesman column on Snuff years earlier in which he was praised for having helped carry a pregnant woman in the midst of the massacre.
Preece tracked down Snuff on Facebook, and in 2012, he put him and Claire in touch. “To finally hear her voice was stunning, because I’d wondered what had happened to her so many times,” Snuff told me of their first phone call, which spanned hours. “For both of us, just talking was a catharsis. I’d seen things no seventeen-year-old should ever have to see, and I’d carried those memories with me, and Claire understood.”
Snuff told Claire how he had crouched behind the Jefferson Davis statue with Love—a friend of his from high school whose life was later cut short by bone cancer—as gunfire erupted around them. They had agonized about what to do, he explained, as they looked onto the South Mall and saw her lying there, still alive. Too terrified to move, they had initially stayed put—Snuff’s own cowardice, as he saw it, measured in fifteen-minute increments whenever the Tower’s bells chimed on the quarter hour. In a voice thick with emotion, he told her that he had always regretted taking so long to work up the courage to help her.
Claire assured him that he owed her no apologies, saying that she loved him and would always think of him as her brother. She said so again when they saw each other in Austin in 2013, wrapping her arms around him in the entrance of the Mexican restaurant where they had agreed to meet. Oblivious to everyone else, they embraced for several minutes. “It was so affirming to finally say thank you,” Claire told me.
Around them, a national debate about gun control had just erupted with new force. Three months earlier, in Newtown, Connecticut, a disturbed young man had fatally shot twenty children, none more than seven years old, and six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In a forceful speech at a memorial service for the victims, President Barack Obama had pushed for tighter regulation of firearms, warning that the cost of inaction was too great. In response, many gun owners had bristled at the notion that fewer licensed weapons, and more government regulation, would keep anyone safe. In Texas, where the Legislature was in session that spring, lawmakers had proposed several “campus carry” bills, which sought to upend the long-standing state law banning firearms at public universities. If passed, concealed handguns would be permitted on university grounds, in dorms, and in college classrooms.
Claire had returned to Austin because Jim Bryce, a lawyer and gun-control activist whom she had met when they were both students at UT, had asked if she, as a victim of campus gun violence, would testify at the Capitol. Though she had not engaged in any activism since the sixties—the Seventh-day Adventist Church advocates strict political neutrality—she felt that she could not turn down Bryce’s invitation. And so on March 14, 2013, Claire appeared before the Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee, one among scores of people who had come to voice their support or opposition to the bills. No longer the campus radical she had once been, she did not stand out in the overflow crowd; at sixty-five, everything about her—from her chin-length silver bob to the reading glasses she slid on when it was her turn to speak to her comfortable shoes—was muted and sensible.
Like the other speakers, Claire was allotted three minutes. Compressing the totality of her experience into a few sound bites seemed impossible, but once at the microphone, she tried. “I never thought about somebody using a gun to kill themselves or others until August 1, 1966, when I was walking across the campus of the University of Texas,” she said, her voice clear and steady. She sketched out what had happened to her in a few unadorned sentences—“I was eighteen and eight months pregnant”—and when she reached the end of her story, she added, “I was not able ever again to have a child.”
She expressed her reservations, as both an educator and a sixth-generation Texan who had grown up around guns, about the proposed bills, arguing that the Legislature’s objective should be to prevent future attacks, not arm more civilians. “A campus is a sacred place,” she said. Then her time was up.
• • •
That fall, Claire received an e-mail from Gary Lavergne, with whom she had met and corresponded after reading A Sniper in the Tower. The e-mail told of an astounding discovery. “My Dear Friend, Claire,” it began. “A few years ago, while working on my last book, I downloaded a database of grave sites located in the Austin Memorial Park. (My purpose was to locate the graves of some of the persons I had written about in Before Brown.) It wasn’t until this past weekend that, while browsing among the almost 23,000 entries in that dataset, I noticed an entry for a ‘Baby Boy Wilson.’ ”
Lavergne went on to explain that the burial date for the child was listed as August 2, 1966—the day after the massacre. Records showed that the unmarked plot had been purchased by a Lyman Jones, a man whose name Lavergne did not recognize. Claire did, immediately; a veteran journalist who had written for the Texas Observer during the fifties and sixties, Jones was her mother’s second husband, and Claire’s stepfather, at the time of the shooting.
Claire had always been aware that the baby had received a proper burial, but she had not pressed her mother for details until her later years, when her mother’s memory was failing and she could no longer summon them. The small plot, she now learned from Lavergne, was located in a section of the cemetery mostly devoted to infants and stillborn babies. “Claire, I hope this gives you comfort,” he wrote, explaining that he had gone to Austin Memorial Park to find the burial place. “Attached is a picture I took of the grave site. Your son is buried beneath the flowers I placed there so that you can see the exact spot.”
Claire read and reread the e-mail in silence, brushing away tears. Your son. Buried beneath the flowers.
She would visit the cemetery the following August, after Lavergne and his family had a headstone made, with Claire’s blessing. Below the image of a cross, it read:
Baby Boy Wilson
August 1, 1966
It stood near the perimeter of the cemetery, on a sunburned stretch of grass near a single hackberry tree. When Claire found it, she knelt down and gathered a handful of soil, placing it inside a folded sheet of paper, for a keepsake. Then she prostrated herself, pressing her forehead against the marble marker, which was cool even in the blazing August sun. She thought about
Tom and about the baby’s father, John Muir, whom she had called and spoken with, after a decades-long estrangement, before he had passed away that June. As she lay there, she was acutely aware of the baby’s presence, of the molecules somewhere below the earth’s surface that belonged to him. Claire stayed for a long time and prayed. “I felt not so hollow,” she said. “I felt close to God.”
VI.
Claire lives in Texas now, having finally, after all her years of wandering, come home. Six years ago, she moved to Texarkana—which, with some 37,000 residents, is the most densely populated place she has lived for some time. An Adventist school had needed a teacher, and so, as she had done more than a dozen times before, she started over. Not since Eden Valley has she remained in one place for so long.
When I went to visit her earlier this year, we met at her white double-wide trailer, which sits on the pine-studded, western edge of town. Her bedroom window looks out onto a pasture, and though the view lacks the grandeur of the Rockies or the Great Plains, it allows her to imagine that she still lives in the wilderness, far from civilization. A few steps from her front door, in raised beds she built herself with wood, she had planted a winter garden. Collard greens and kale flourished next to fat heads of cabbage, and despite a recent freeze, a few stalwart strawberry plants thrived. As we talked, Claire bent down and tore off a few sprigs of mint, handing me some to taste. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, her pale blue eyes widening.
When Claire told friends about her life in Texarkana, she focused on the happy things: her garden; the Nigerian family she had befriended; her students, many of whom lived below the poverty line, who hugged her waist and called her Miss Claire. She did not share her worry about Sirak, who was standing beside her on that January morning. He wore a cheerless expression, a black wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows, his shoulders squared against the cold. He had moved back in with her in August, not long after his thirtieth birthday, but he bore little resemblance to the young man she had sent off to college. Unless prodded to talk, he said little, and his speech was slow and leaden. Every now and then, as Claire and I chatted, he would smile at the mention of a childhood friend or a story about his and Claire’s days in the Arizona high desert. Except for those moments, he seemed to have taken up residence in a world of his own.