It was 1 August 1966, and Gary Lavergne was a 10-year-old boy in Church Point, Louisiana. His family did not have much, but they had a television. When his father, the local chief of police, came home after work they watched the evening news on CBS.

Professors sue University of Texas and state attorney over campus carry laws Read more

The anchor, Walter Cronkite, related the big story of the day: a man had climbed the famous tower at the core of the University of Texas campus in Austin and shot passersby with a rifle. The act felt shocking in its scale and its originality.

“That nut is showing everybody what’s possible and we’re going to see a lot more of this,” Lavergne recalled his father saying.

“I’ll never forget the way he said that,” he added. “And I’ll be danged if he wasn’t right.”

Charles Whitman killed 17 people, including an unborn child, and injured more than 30. The UT Tower massacre was the first mass shooting on a US college campus.

At a time when television news was expanding in reach and cultural influence and melding important moments into shared national experiences, it was arguably mainstream America’s introduction to a now familiar type of crime: an armed individual inflicting tremendous and unexpected violence at a location whose name would come to be used as shorthand for tragedy.

Lavergne wrote a thorough account of Whitman’s murders, A Sniper in the Tower, in 1997. Today he works in the university’s admissions research department and his office is on the ground floor of the tower.

“It was kind of an introduction to the concept that a person will do this and he doesn’t give a damn about whether he’ll live or die,” he said. “We weren’t used to that. People who committed crimes, you assume they wanted to get away. Well, not this guy. He went up there and he knew he wasn’t coming down alive.

“What we do find about the people who do these things is that they’re losers, and by that I mean they’re failures, even if only in their own mind, and they decide they don’t want to live any more but they don’t want to commit suicide. They want to die in a big way, being in complete control and essentially doing the thing they can do better than everybody else, and in Whitman’s case that’s using a gun.”

A diligent and intelligent student from Florida who at age 12 was said to be the world’s youngest Eagle Scout, Whitman was an exceptional marksman. He joined the US Marines aged 18, escaping his violent, oppressive father. In 1961, he was sent on a scholarship programme to the University of Texas but his behaviour became erratic and indisciplined. Despite being court-martialled for offences including gambling, he was honourably discharged from the marines in 1964 and returned to Austin to resume his studies. His parents separated, his mental health deteriorated and he fantasised to a psychiatrist about shooting people from the tower.

On 1 August 50 years ago, a little after 11.30am, the 25-year-old took the elevator to the 27th floor, then climbed the steps to the observation deck, 231ft up, and enacted his horrific vision. He had killed his wife and his mother earlier that day, as well as three people inside the tower, one a 16-year-old boy.



As Lavergne writes, at about 11.45am, Claire Wilson, an 18-year-old student, and her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman, were strolling through a tree-lined part of the main quadrangle into an open, concreted area below the tower that looks much the same now as it did then, save for last year’s removal of a couple of statues.

There was a “pop” sound and Wilson dropped to the ground. The precisely aimed 6mm bullet had ripped through her womb, instantly killing the baby boy she had carried for eight months. Eckman knelt down and asked what was wrong. A round entered his back and he fell down, dead, on his girlfriend. The body count quickly grew as Whitman walked around the 360-degree deck, picking targets.

One was on the edge of the campus, a short walk from the middle of downtown Austin and the Texas statehouse and more than 500 yards from the tower. Crouching behind a Chevrolet as the spree continued, Lavergne writes, Roy Dell Schmidt “stood up to say something like, ‘It’s OK, we’re out of range.’” Whitman shot him dead, through the abdomen. The last victim did not die until 2001, when David Gunby passed away aged 58 from complications related to a wound in his only functioning kidney.

Wilson was seriously injured but survived. She is scheduled to speak on Monday, when the university dedicates a new memorial to the victims. The anniversary coincides with the implementation of a new and highly controversial law passed by Texas’ Republican-dominated legislature that compels public universities, including the University of Texas, to allow licensed individuals aged 21 and over to carry concealed handguns in most campus buildings.

‘It literally was a gun battle that went on’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neal Spelce re-creates his broadcast, a few days after the massacre. Photograph: Spelce

Proponents argue that the concealed carry law could aid in personal safety. Critics believe that more guns on campus is a recipe for increased danger and confusion. Lavergne said he was asked for his opinion on the issue by advocates from both sides but declined to take a public position.

Still, he said, “to believe that citizens responding to a crime in progress in 1966 is the same as responding to a crime in progress in 2016 I think is just foolish”.

Whitman’s spree lasted 96 minutes before he was shot dead by police officers who reached the deck. It was more than enough time for civilians to arrive in pickup trucks with their hunting rifles and try to take him out from below.

“It literally was a gun battle that went on, people screaming and shouting and dodging and ducking and running and hiding and sirens screaming, gunshots echoing through the buildings on the campus,” said Neal Spelce, then a 30-year-old local television reporter and anchor who broadcast live from the campus soon after the shooting started.

There were no barriers or officers to stop Spelce getting dangerously close to the action. Robert Heard, a reporter for the Associated Press, was shot but survived. An ambulance driver, Morris Hohmann, was hit in the thigh and transported to hospital in his own emergency vehicle.

Spelce said Whitman did most of his lethal damage in the first half-hour or so, before the nature of the event was fully clear. Once he was being shot at he had to keep low and had less time to take aim.

The UT shootings, along with the Watts riots in Los Angeles of 1965, are often credited with inspiring the widespread introduction of Special Weapons And Tactics (Swat) units, enabling police departments to respond rapidly and effectively to serious threats.

In 1966, campus security mainly consisted of aged security personnel who did little more than oversee parking. Now, in common with other large US academic institutions, the University of Texas has its own armed police department – founded in 1968 and currently employing 89 sworn officers, 43 of them patrol officers. It was tested in 2010 when a 19-year-old student began firing an AK-47 a short walk from the tower, before killing himself in the library.

Today the Austin police would be ready … they have a Swat team, they have armoured carriers, they have proper weapons Gary Lavergne

“Everything went wrong for the Austin police department,” said Lavergne. “They didn’t have the right clothing or uniforms, they didn’t have the right weapons, they didn’t have the right communications gear, they didn’t even have the right shoes. Nothing went right. And so a bunch of citizens showing up and firing at a sniper 230ft up, well, that might have been helpful.

“Today, the Austin police department would be ready for something like this. They have a Swat team, they have armoured carriers, they have the proper weapons, they have the proper training and citizens showing up and shooting back would probably get in the way. And everybody would be in danger when that happens.”

Authorities are also better prepared for the after-effects of tragedy. In April, when Haruka Weiser became the first person murdered on the Austin campus since the massacre, the university stepped up security and offered counselling.

“That didn’t happen after a mass murder where 50 people were shot 50 years ago, but it happened after a single homicide just a few months ago. That’s a big difference,” Lavergne said. “Our experience with all these other tragedies has taught us that you don’t just suck it up, you don’t just go back to work and pretend like it never happened. The people in 1966 were no less caring; they were good people, they just didn’t know what to do.”

‘I don’t think I used the word “shooter”’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest News footage of the UT Tower massacre.

That feeling of bewilderment extended to those reporting the massacre in what was then a quiet city with a population of less than 220,000. Mass shootings did not yet have their own lexicon.

“I don’t think I used the word ‘shooter’. I didn’t use the word ‘lockdown’,” said Spelce, who described Whitman as an “apparent madman” during his hours-long live broadcast. “I just made that conclusion trying to figure out who the heck would get up there and start shooting indiscriminately.”

As he spoke into a push-to-talk microphone tethered to a vehicle that he used for cover, his radio commentary was accompanied on television by a static shot of the tower from an unwieldy camera that belonged to the university’s in-house station. A roaming crew produced dramatic film that was used by the big three national networks in their nightly news bulletins.

Spelce did not realise it at the time, but Whitman was listening to the live broadcast using a handheld transistor radio that he had taken up the tower.

“Afterwards you start thinking, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. If I had known that he was listening to me, what could I have done?’” Spelce said. “I answered that in my own mind pretty easy – frankly, I don’t think it would have made a difference.” For one thing, it was not a two-way communication. For another: “The very act of him listening to me describe his rampage? Sick. I mean, that’s a sick guy to begin with.”

Today the names of victims are often not made public for hours, or even days. In 1966, Spelce gave the go-ahead for a reporter at the hospital to read on air an early casualty list, in an attempt to calm panicked Austinites, many of whom had connections to the university.

“My logic was [it was] for the greater good,” he said. “Telephone lines in Austin were jammed … people could not get information.”

A newsroom colleague, Paul Bolton, cut in and asked for the list to be repeated. He had heard correctly the first time: his grandson was among the names.

This was not in anyone’s psyche. Today if you hear a car backfire in downtown I guarantee you'll see somebody duck Neal Spelce

“I live with that heartbreak to this day,” Spelce said. “I still think we did the right thing.”

Spelce suspects that one reason there were so many victims 50 years ago was that people wandered into danger and stood around because they did not have a consciousness of mass shootings that might have helped them quickly process what was taking place.

“This was not anything in anyone’s psyche,” he said. “Today, if you hear a car backfire in downtown, I guarantee you you’re going to see somebody duck.”

Still, some details in reports appear remarkably familiar to a modern reader. Friends and neighbours expressed incredulity that such a nice, ordinary-seeming young man would be capable of an atrocity.

A 7 August article in the New York Times headlined What Lessons in Texas Tragedy? opined: “Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that the way is made easier by the fact that guns of all sorts are readily available to Americans of all shades of morality and mentality … after President Kennedy was shot to death on a Dallas street in November 1963, there was a public clamour for stricter controls over the sale and use of firearms. But proposed legislation was stalled, in large part because of opposition from sportsmen’s groups and the National Rifle Association.”

Passed soon after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was signed into law by President Lyndon B Johnson – a Democrat who was born and raised near Austin. It was a limited compromise bill that restricted interstate weapons sales.

“We just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them,” Johnson said. “I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country – more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country.

“The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.”

‘Far from “snapping”, they’re doing exactly the opposite’

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As with any modern mass murder, there was great interest in the mental health of the killer. Whitman had complained of severe headaches in the weeks before the shootings. He was an amphetamine user and an autopsy revealed he had a brain tumour, though whether it affected his decision-making is debatable. Lavergne does not believe that Whitman would have been found insane by a court as a result of his actions: he clearly knew the difference between right and wrong and his decision-making before and during the massacre suggests careful calculation.

A chilling conclusion is that Whitman and some of his successors may be too easily characterised as crazed when their actions were not motivated by madness but cruelty. “Far from ‘snapping’, they’re doing exactly the opposite,” Lavergne said last Wednesday, standing at the spot where Wilson and Eckman were hit. “Far from losing control, they’re taking control. The ultimate control, because in that moment in time they’re deciding who will live and who will die.”

America did not suffer a deadlier mass shooting than Whitman’s until 1984, when James Huberty killed 21 people in a McDonald’s in California.

“A lone wolf individual killing innocent people for no apparent reason shocked everybody,” said Jeffrey Simon, author of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat and a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But there wasn’t a wave and a rash of similar events. In that sense it’s different from today, where each mass shooting seems to be followed by more mass shootings whether or not each individual is inspired by what they have seen before.”

The UT Tower massacre did, however, promote a national mood of unease: a knowledge that to live in America is to live with the risk, however tiny, that one ordinary day you might be hurled into a scene of carnage that, after Austin, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown, Charleston, Orlando and the rest, can no longer truthfully be described as unimaginable.

The tower’s observation deck will be closed on Monday. It reopened to visitors a couple of months after the massacre but shut in 1974 following four suicides in six years. With new safety and security measures, it was opened again on 15 September 1999.

“The Tower has become the most powerful symbol of higher education in Texas, and we are proud to share it fully once again,” Larry Faulkner, then university president, said in a speech. This optimistic tale of renewal would be overshadowed by events 190 miles north.

Later that day, Larry Gene Ashbrook, a 47-year-old whose life had spiralled into bitterness and anger, walked into a concert for teenagers at a Baptist church in Fort Worth. He was carrying two handguns and a pipe bomb. He shot dead seven people and injured seven more, then sat in a pew, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.