By Jerry Morgan, Reporter

This is the conclusion of an article started last week about the Charles Whitman sniping incident at the University of Texas tower on August 1, 1966. The author recalls his experiences during the incident.

Word came over the policeman’s portable radio. “Cease firing, we have people in the tower.”

WHAT WHITMAN SAW. This is the view from the UT Tower looking toward the South Mall and the State Capitol building. The Main Building plaza at the bottom of the photo is where many victims where shot. One of Whitman’s farthest kills was near the far end of the open plaza near 19th Street

That was all I needed. If the policeman was no longer allowed to shoot, he didn’t need me to load his rifle clips, so I headed back downstairs.

The Architecture building opens onto the west mall, near the Drag. As I ran out to the front of the building I recall many students gathered in safe places. One had a transistor radio. It was being reported that the number of deceased had exceeded the number of murders committed earlier by Richard Speck, who had killed eight student nurses in Chicago only weeks earlier. Speck’s horrific murders had shocked the entire nation and been described as the crime of the century. The tower sniper had now exceeded Speck’s number of killings.

I was determined to see what was happening if I could. Up to this point I had not seen the gunman, only the aftermath of his evil and demented work. He was obviously a good shot. From the front part of the Architecture building I could see the Tower high above as I looked through the elm trees lining the West Mall. I knew that there were policemen up on the Tower and that a ceasefire had been called. The ceasefire call had not stopped all of the gunfire, however.

Suddenly I saw something like a white sheet waved over the west side of the Tower. It must have been the signal that it was all over. I believe I recall the radio commentator mentioning the signal as well. I still hadn’t seen all I wanted to, but I was pretty sure I knew how to see some more. I ran up the West Mall toward the Main Building which is in front of the Tower. As I rounded the southwest corner of the Main Building and headed toward the front steps, I saw the young woman who spent the entire time of the shooting, more than an hour, crouched behind a large flagpole base. I saw the remaining casualties lying on the large plaza.

THE LARGE PLAZA. There were numerous wounded and dying sniper victims who were felled while walking to and from classes near the noon hour on August 1, 1966.

There were many people standing on the front steps, sheltered from the rifle fire from above, yet having a view of the carnage on the plaza before them. I ran up the steps and into the building shouting that it was over. As far as I know, my declaration was the first that most of the UT administration heard that the killing had ceased.

I was determined to enter the staircase up the Tower building and make my way to the top. Only a little more than a year earlier, while enrolled in an experimental aerobic conditioning class, I had regularly run up the 28-floor staircase of the Tower building for nothing more than exercise. Now, however, I was unable to quickly locate the entrance to the Tower staircase from the Main Building. I was unaware that they are actually two separate structures.

I was not alone in my desire to get into the building and be as close as possible to the crime scene. The ground floor hallway in the Main Building where the Tower Building elevator makes its bottom stop was now filling up with people. Newsmen and curious onlookers were everywhere.

THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING STEPS. A crowd of onlookers stood on the steps under the archways looking out onto the carnage on the main plaza while protected from the gunfire from the tower.

Soon, the police began to remove everyone from the hallway who was not a reporter. In a bit of desperation, I borrowed a sheet of paper from a reporter standing next to me, took my pen in hand and described myself as a reporter for the Daily Texan, the campus newspaper. The police were not checking credentials and accepted my pen and paper act as evidence that I was a bona fide member of the fourth estate.

What follows next in my story is not for the faint of heart. Of course, I had already witnessed a dead policeman and dead and wounded on the south mall plaza, and helped a policeman return fire for the gunman, so I was game for anything.

They began bringing out the dead and wounded from the tower on stretchers. We all were amazed at how many there were. The sniper had killed the receptionist at the Tower and a family of tourists who made the unlucky choice to come up for a view shortly after he arrived. The tower victims were not covered. Their condition was plain for all to see.

It was apparent that the gunman just didn’t shoot and kill his victims. He seemed to have abused some of the bodies in a fit of rage. To my inexperienced eye is seemed that he had beaten them with his rifle butt. It was an ugly, bloody sight.

One after another the victims were brought down from the Tower elevator as it traveled from near the top of the edifice. The enormity of the gruesome situation was evident to all. I’m sure no one there has ever forgotten it.

THE TOWER ELEVATOR HALLWAY. This hallway connects the base of the tower to the main administration building.

The last body brought out was the only one covered with a cloth. It was a bloody, white cloth, possibly the same one unfurled over the side of the tower only a little while earlier. I remember there was a bloody arm or leg hanging down to the side as the stretcher as it was carried past. The word amongst the reporters in the hallway was that this last one was the shooter. That may not have been the case, however, as I have since read that Whitman’s body was brought out a different route.

After a while I left the building and walked out into the afternoon sunlight on the west side of the building, finally having time to realize what I had seen and how my world had changed. I called home to DeLeon to tell Sheri that I was okay and asked her to call my parents.

My roommate, Chris Hershberger, had been trapped in the Home Economics building, a short distance north of the Tower. While he was there, a newsman made his way to the building, just a narrow, one-lane inner campus drive width from the Journalism building where he could file a newswire report. Chris described how the reporter waited until he thought the gunman had moved to the other side of the Tower and made a fast dash across the narrow roadway. In only that short dash, however, he was shot. It was not a fatal wound. Luckily, he was only hit in the arm.

As stated earlier, the gunman was an excellent marksman. It turned out that he was a former Marine named Charles Whitman who had also killed his wife and mother before setting out on his murderous rampage. He had carefully planned his day and had brought multiple weapons, ammunitions and other provisions for an extended stay in the Tower.

His only apparent mistake in planning was the failure to carefully block the entrance to the main observation floor of the Tower. Fortunately, two brave policemen armed with a pistol and a shotgun gained access to the murdering field and put an end to Whitman’s folly in a hail of gunfire.

Two years later, in 1968, I too had completed military rifle training. The U.S. Army had trained us to shoot with Korean War vintage rifles. It didn’t matter that the nation was now fully engaged in warfare in Viet Nam using completely different rifles. While shooting for qualification with an open sight rifle, I managed to earn an Expert Marksman badge by hitting targest as far away as 300 yards.

Returning home from my active duty training, I visited the re-opened Tower and checked out the still visible damage caused by the returned rifle fire. I looked over the edge of the railing, and through the rainwater downspouts, and realized that the shots Whitman made from that vantage were not terribly difficult for a trained rifleman.

It took a madman, however, to even contemplate the Tower’s potential as a sniper’s lodge.

Not long thereafter an irreverent local area musician named Kinky Friedman, backed up by the group he referred to as the “Texas Jewboys,” released a musical album which included a tune called, “The Ballad of Charles Whitman.” It included the line, “There was a rumor, about a tumor, nestled at the base of his brain.”

Despite the future gubernatorial candidate’s lyrics, from all that I have since read, there was never any physiological explanation for Whitman’s actions. The most logical speculation involved his tortured relationship with his father and his frustrations with his own academic and personal shortcomings.

As I contemplate a brass rifle shell casing that I picked up as a souvenir from that terrible day, I think about how fortunate I was that Charles Whitman never noticed my wanderings, even though he found targets much farther away and more difficult to hit. I thank the Lord that he spared me. I just wish I had taken part in the rescue efforts.

In only 96 minutes, Charles Whitman gunned down 45 people, killing 14. In the previous evening he had killed both his wife and mother, bringing the total murdered to 16. Austin PD officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy killed Whitman.