Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Vitkovic ran down the stairs to the eleventh floor, which housed the Australia Post accounts department. In the stairwell Vitkovic fired one volley that blew a fist-sized hole in the office window to his right. Turning left he confronted Michael McGuire in the data-processing room, where McGuire trained staff and fixed machines. Vitkovic fired at point-blank range into the young father of three. One bullet passed through the partition McGuire sheltered against and punched a crater in the corridor wall. McGuire had been hoping to be home early that night. His youngest daughter was celebrating her fifth birthday.

  The staff in the accounts department now found their escape path blocked by the killer. The shots rang out as Vitkovic entered the room, his fire concentrated to the far corners of the room. Thirty-two-year-old Rodney Brown was shot beside the desk he had worked at for seven years. He died later in the arms of an ambulanceman. Thirty-eight-year-old Marianne van Ewyk and Catherine Dowling, 28, died as they cowered under their desks.

  Van Ewyk, who had emigrated from Holland as a child, had worked with Australia Post since she was a teenager. Next to her desk was a school-term calendar to keep track of holidays she could spend with her only son. At the same time Frank Vitkovic was downstairs, waiting for the lift, Marianne’s husband, Bernie Sharp, had rung her to warn her of a rail strike.

  The accounts department assistant manager Tony Gloria then put an end to the massacre. A quiet man who was never known to lose his temper, he tackled the gunman.

  A head shorter than Vitkovic, he grabbed the killer around the waist. Another of the office workers, who had been shot in the shoulder, helped to drag Vitkovic down. A third man grabbed the rifle and hid it in the fridge.

  Vitkovic, who was now bent on taking his own life, struggled to make his way through to the broken window. Gloria fought to save him. Office workers in nearby buildings saw the struggle and the shower of glass that preceded the killer as he fell to the pavement 60 metres below, where he died.

  Chapter 4

  Sniper in the Tower

  Name: Charles Whitman Jr

  Nationality: American

  Number of victims: 16 killed, 30 injured

  Favoured method of killing: Shooting, stabbing

  Born: 1941

  Profession: ex-US Marine

  Married: yes

  Reign of terror: 1 August 1966

  Final note: ‘The intense hatred I feel for my father is beyond all description’

  It was a perfect summer day in Austin, Texas. By mid-morning on 1 August 1966, the temperature had already soared to 36 degrees in the shade and the hot air hung heavy over the downtown campus of the University of Texas. The students had taken the opportunity to linger in the sunshine when classes changed at 11.30. But by 11.45, all was quiet again under the university’s 28-storey limestone tower.

  At 11.48, 17-year-old Alec Hernandez was cycling across the campus, delivering newspapers, when a .35 rifle bullet ripped through his leg. It slammed into his saddle and catapulted him from his bike. Then, out of the clear, blue sky, more bullets came raining down. Three students, late for class, fell in quick succession.

  At first, no one could figure out what was happening. There was a distant report, then someone would crumple to the ground. On the fourth floor of the tower building 23-year-old postgraduate student Norma Barger heard what she took to be dynamite exploding. In fact, it was the sound of a deer-hunting rifle echoing from the low buildings that nestled around the tower. When she looked out of her classroom window, she saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall beneath her. At first she thought it was a tasteless joke. She expected them to get up and walk away laughing. Then she saw the pavement stones splashed with blood – and more people falling beneath the sniper’s deadly rain of fire.

  Eighteen-year-old Mrs Claire Wilson, who was eight months pregnant, was heading across the mall to her anthropology class when a bullet ripped into her belly. She survived, but her unborn child’s skull was crushed and the baby was later born dead. Nineteen-year-old freshman Thomas Eckman, a classmate and aspiring poet, was kneeling beside the injured mother-to-be when another bullet shot him dead.

  Thirty-three-year-old post-graduate mathematician Robert Boyer was looking forward to his trip to England. He had already secured a teaching post in Liverpool, where his pregnant wife and two children were waiting for him. But when he stepped out on to the mall, heading for an early lunch, he was shot, fatally, in the back. Secretary Charlotte Darehshori ran to help him and found herself under fire. She spent the next hour and a half crouched behind the concrete base of a flagpole, one of the few people to venture on to the mall and survive uninjured.

  The sniper took a shot at a small boy. People began to take cover. A woman on the eighteenth floor of the administration block rang a friend in a nearby university building and said: ‘Somebody’s up there shooting from the tower. There’s blood all over the place.’ Soon hundreds were pinned down on the campus.

  At 11.52, four minutes after the shooting started, the local police received a hysterical phone call. At first, all they knew was that there had been ‘some shooting at the university tower’. In seconds, a ‘ten-fifty’ went out. All units in the vicinity were ordered to head for the university. Soon the quiet of the Texas high noon was torn by the sound of sirens as more than a hundred city policemen, reinforced by some thirty highway patrolmen, state troopers, Texas Rangers and Secret Service men from President Lyndon Johnson’s Austin office, converged on the campus – along with a number of ordinary gun-toting Texans.

  One of the first policemen on the scene was rookie patrolman Billy Speed. He quickly figured out what was happening. He spotted the killer on the observation deck of the tower. The young patrolman took cover behind the base of a statue of Jefferson Davis and took careful aim. But before he could take a shot, the sniper shot him dead. Speed was just 23 and left a wife and baby daughter. The shot alerted the other lawmen. Volleys of small-arms fire cracked around the top of the tower. A few rounds smashed into the huge clock-face above the killer. Most pinged ineffectually off the four-foot-high wall around the observation deck, kicking up puffs of white dust.

  Ducking down behind the low wall, the sniper was safe. Narrow drainage slits around the bottom of the wall made perfect gun ports. There the unknown gunman proved impossible to hit. And he kept finding new targets.

  A hundred yards beyond Patrolman Speed, 29-year-old electrical repairman Roy Dell Schmidt was getting out of his truck on a call. He looked up at the tower and saw puffs of smoke coming from the observation gallery. The police told him to get back but, nonchalantly, Schmidt told a man standing next to him that they were out of range. They weren’t. Seconds later, a bullet smashed into Schmidt’s chest, killing him instantly.

  To the west of the campus ran a main thoroughfare called Guadeloupe Street, known to the students as ‘The Drag’. Among the window-shoppers on Guadeloupe Street that sunny lunchtime was 18-year-old Paul Sonntag. He was a lifeguard at Austin swimming pool and had just picked up his week’s pay cheque. With him was 18-year-old ballet dancer Claudia Rutt who was on her way to the doctor’s for the polio shot she needed before entering Texas Christian University. Suddenly Claudia sank to the ground, clutching her breast. ‘Help me! Somebody, help me!’ she cried. Bewildered, Sonntag bent over her. The next shot took him out. Both were dead before help could get to them.

  Further up Guadeloupe Street, visiting professor of government 39-year-old Harry Walchuk was browsing in the doorway of a news-stand. A father of six and a teacher at Michigan’s Alpena Community College, he was hit in the throat and collapsed, dead, among the magazines. In the next block, 24-year-old Thomas Karr, who had ambitions to be a diplomat, was returning to his apartment after staying up all night, revising for a Spanish exam which he had taken at ten o’clock that morning. Before he reached his own front door, he dropped to the sidewalk, dying. In the third block, basketball coach Billy Snowden of the Texas School for the Deaf stepped into the doorway of the ba
rbershop where he was having his haircut and was wounded in the shoulder.

  Outside the Rae Ann dress shop on Guadeloupe Street, 26-year-old Iraqi chemistry student Abdul Khashab, his fiancée 20-year-old Janet Paulos – they were to have married the next week – and 21-year-old trainee sales assistant Lana Phillips fell wounded within seconds of each other. Homer Kelly, manager of Sheftall’s jewellery store, saw them fall and ran to help. He was trying to haul them into the cover of his store when the shop window shattered. A bullet gashed the carpeting on the sidewalk outside his shop and two bullet fragments smashed into his leg. The three youths had to wait over an hour, bleeding on Sheftall’s orange carpet, before an ambulance could get to them. In all, along picturesque, shoplined Guadeloupe Street, there were four dead and 11 wounded.

  To the north, two students were wounded on their way to the biology building. Beyond that, far to the north of the campus, 36-year-old Associate Press reporter Robert Heard was running full tilt from cover to cover when he was hit in the shoulder. ‘What a shot,’ he marvelled as he winced with pain.

  To the east, 22-year-old Peace Corps trainee Thomas Ashton was sunning himself on the roof of the Computation Center. A single round ended his life. A girl sitting at the window of the Business Economics Building was nicked by a bullet. But to the south was the worst killing field. The university’s main mall had been turned into a no-man’s land. It was strewn with bodies that could not be recovered safely.

  One man was responsible – one man 30 storeys up in the university tower had turned the peaceful campus into a free-fire zone. The Austin Police Department had never had anything like this to deal with before.

  The bullet-scarred clock of the Austin tower was booming out its Big Ben chimes at 12.30 when a local Texan turned up in camouflage fatigues and began chipping large chunks of limestone off the wall of the observation deck with a tripod-mounted, high-calibre M-14. Meanwhile a Cessna light aircraft circled the tower with police marksman Lieutenant Marion Lee on board. He tried to get a clear shot at the gunman but the turbulent air currents around the tower made aiming impossible. The plane was eventually driven away when the sniper put a bullet through the fuselage.

  Down below an armoured truck laid down smoke cover and a fleet of ambulances, sirens wailing, began loading up the dead and wounded. Students braved the sniper’s fire to haul other victims to shelter.

  Austin Police Chief Robert Miles decided that he could not risk using helicopters against the sniper. His accurate fire could easily bring one down. So Police Chief Miles ordered his men to storm the tower. His directive was curt – ‘Shoot to kill’.

  Patrolmen Houston McCoy and Jerry Day found their way through the underground passageways that connected the university buildings into the foyer of the tower. There they met Patrolman Ramiro Martinez who had been at home cooking steaks when he heard news of the shootings on the radio. A handsome 29-year-old and veteran of six years with the Austin Police Department, he had driven to within a couple of blocks of the tower, then ran to the passageways, zigzagging across the open plaza with the sniper’s bullets kicking up dust around him. None of the patrolmen had ever been in a gun fight before.

  With them was 40-year-old retired Air Force tailgunner Allen Crum, who was a civilian employee of the university. Although he, too, had never fired a shot in combat, Crum insisted on accompanying the officers. He was given a rifle and deputised on the spot. That day, he was to see more action than during his entire 22 years in the Air Force. One of the four men punched the lift button. They were about to make the same 27-floor lift ride that the crazed gunman had taken less than two hours before.

  Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a white sports shirt under a pair of workman’s overall, the gunman had pulled into a parking space reserved for university officials between the administration building and the library, at the base of the tower, at around 11 a.m. He unloaded a trolley and placed a heavy footlocker on it. Then he wheeled the trolley into the foyer of the building. The ground-floor receptionist thought he was a maintenance man.

  When the lift door opened he wheeled the trolley into the lift and pushed the button for the top floor. During the 30-second ride, he pulled a rifle from the locker. On the twenty-seventh floor, he unloaded his heavy cargo, then climbed the four short flights of stairs from the lifts to the observation deck. The observation gallery was open to visitors and the gunman approached the receptionist, 47-year-old Edna Townsley, a spirited divorcée and mother of two young sons, who was working on what was normally her day off. He clubbed her with the butt of his rifle with such force that part of her skull was torn away, and dragged her behind the sofa.

  At that moment, a young couple came in from the observation gallery. The girl smiled at the gunman, who smiled back. She steered her date around the dark stain that was slowly spreading across the carpet in front of the receptionist’s desk. The gunman followed them back down to the lift. As they travelled innocently down in the lift car, he lugged his heavy locker up the stairs and out on to the observation gallery which ran all the way around the tower, 231 feet above ground level. From that height he could see clean across the shimmering terracotta roofs of old Austin’s Spanish-style buildings. Below him the handsome white university buildings were separated by broad lawns and malls. This gave the gunman a clear field of fire across the campus below and the surrounding streets. He assembled his equipment for what he plainly imagined would be a long siege while the lift began to climb from the ground floor up to the twenty-seventh storey again. In it were Marguerite Lamport and her husband, together with Mrs Lamport’s brother, M. J. Gabour, his wife Mary and his two teenage sons, 16-year-old Mark and 19-year-old Mike, who were visiting from Texerkana, Texas.

  The two boys led the way up the stairs from the lift, followed by the two women. The men dawdled behind. As Mark opened the door on to the observation deck, he was met with three shotgun blasts in quick succession. The gunman slammed the door shut. The two boys and the women spilled back down the stairs. Gabour rushed to his younger son and turned him over. He saw immediately that Mark was dead. He had been shot in the head at point-blank range. Gabour’s sister Marguerite was dead too. His wife and his older son were critically injured. They were bleeding profusely from head wounds. Gabour and his brother-in-law dragged their dead and wounded back down in to the lifts.

  The gunman quickly barricaded the top of the stairs with furniture and jammed the door shut with the trolley. He went over to the receptionist Mrs Townley and finished her off with a bullet through the head. Then he went out on to the gallery, which was surrounded by a chest-high parapet of limestone 18 inches thick. He positioned himself under the ‘VI’ of the gold-edged clock’s south face and began shooting the tiny figures in the campus below.

  As the lift reached the twenty-seventh floor again, two hours later, Officer Martinez said a little prayer and offered his life up to God. Immediately the lift doors opened, the officers were faced with a distraught Mr Gabour, whose wife, sister and two sons lay face up on the concrete floor.

  ‘They’ve killed my family,’ he cried.

  Mad for revenge, he tried to wrest a gun from the officers.

  As Officer Day led the weeping man away, Crum, Martinez and McCoy stepped around the bodies and pools of blood on the floor, and began to climb the stairs up to the observation deck. The door at the top of the stairs was all that stood between them and the mad killer they were about to confront.

  Although he had already killed 15 innocent people and injured 31 more, the sniper was nothing like the crazed psychopath who rampaged through their adrenalin-charged imaginations. Until the night before, Charles Whitman Jr had seemed the model citizen. Ex-altar boy and US Marine, he was a broad-shouldered, blond-haired, all-American boy who was known to one and all as a loving husband and son.

  Born in 194l at Lake Worth, Florida, Whitman was the eldest of three brothers. He had been an exemplary son. Pitcher on the school’s baseball team, manager of the footba
ll team and an adept pianist, he brought home good grades and earned his pocket money doing a paper round. At 12, he became an Eagle Scout, one of the youngest ever.

  His father was a fanatic about guns and raised his boys knowing how to handle them. By the time Whitman enlisted in the US Marines in 1959, he was an expert marksman, scoring 215 out of a possible 250, which won him the rating of sharpshooter. He was also a keen sportsman, enjoying hunting, scuba diving and karate.

  However, in the Marines, things began to go wrong. Whitman got demoted from corporal to private for the illegal possession of a pistol and was reprimanded for threatening to knock a fellow Marine’s teeth out. Meanwhile the facade of his perfect, all-American family began to crack.

  Charles Whitman Sr was a prominent civic leader in Lake Worth and one-time chairman of the chamber of commerce. But he was an authoritarian, a perfectionist and an unyielding disciplinarian who demanded the highest of standards from his sons. Nothing Charles Jr did was ever good enough for his father. He resigned himself to regular beatings. But what the young Whitman could not resign himself to was that his father was also a wife-beater. Whitman could not stand the sight of his mother’s suffering. He withdrew into himself for long periods and bit his nails down to the quick.

  After winning a Marine Corps scholarship Whitman moved to Austin and enrolled at the University of Texas to study architectural engineering. It was in Austin that he met and married his wife, Kathy Leissner, the daughter of a rice-grower and Queen of the Fair of her hometown, Needville. They seemed to be the perfect couple – she a teacher, he the local scoutmaster. But life did not go as smoothly as the young couple had hoped. Whitman began to take his growing hostility out on his wife. He became a compulsive gambler and soon faced court martial for gambling and loan sharking. His academic work suffered and his scholarship was withdrawn. He dropped out of college and went back to finish his tour with the Marines. Then in December 1964 suddenly he quit the Corps and went back to university, determined to be a better student and a better husband. He overloaded himself with courses in an attempt to get his degree more quickly. He tried studying real estate sales part-time in case his degree course did not work out and he took on casual jobs to earn cash. Under pressure of work, he began to lose control of his temper. Fearing that he might lash out at his wife Kathy, he packed, ready to leave her – only to be talked out of it by a friend.