Ninety-Six Minutes at the Tower

At 11:48 on the morning of August 1, 1966, people crossing the University of Texas campus in Austin began coming under fire from above. The gunman was on the observation deck of the university’s clock tower. From there, he could see people on campus and in the surrounding streets. Some of those caught in the open could not tell where the shots were coming from.

The shooting from the deck lasted ninety-six minutes. But the crime had begun hours earlier, away from campus, with two murders that might have remained undiscovered until after the gunman was dead. His name was Charles Whitman. This is the sequence of what he did, how people tried to survive it, and how officers finally reached him.

Whitman was twenty-five, a former Marine and a University of Texas student. Those facts became part of the shorthand used to describe him. They tell us very little about the people closest to him.

His wife, Kathleen Leissner Whitman, had a life beyond the final hours in which she is usually mentioned. Historian Jo Scott-Coe studied hundreds of letters preserved by Kathleen’s brother, Nelson. Scott-Coe’s account describes abuse during the marriage. Kathleen was not merely a figure in her husband’s story; she was someone he harmed before the campus ever became a crime scene.

Whitman had also sought help at the university health center and expressed disturbing thoughts. Looking back, that visit raises painful questions about whether anyone could have intervened. It does not, by itself, tell us what caused the murders or establish that the shooting was inevitable.

In the early hours of August 1, Whitman went to his mother Margaret’s apartment near downtown Austin and killed her. About three hours later, he returned to his home in south Austin and killed Kathleen as she slept.

Then he prepared for an extended attack. He wrote notes, bought and packed guns and ammunition, and assembled supplies. The historical account describes roughly seven hundred rounds of ammunition among what he brought. By about 11:30 that morning, he had arrived on campus.

There is an awful division in this timeline. To anyone passing Whitman as he entered the university, it was an ordinary summer morning. To Whitman, it was the continuation of a killing spree already underway.

Whitman wore overalls and moved a footlocker on a dolly into the Main Building. He took an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, then carried his equipment upstairs toward the observation deck.

Edna Townsley was working as the deck’s receptionist. Whitman attacked her. Minutes later, a family of visitors came up the stairs. Whitman fired on them, killing two family members and severely wounding two more. The attack inside the tower happened before most people below knew there was a gunman at all.

That matters to the chronology. The shooting did not start with an unexplained noise somewhere over the campus. By the time Whitman stepped onto the outdoor deck, people inside the building had already been wounded or killed.

At 11:48, Whitman began firing down from the deck. It circled the twenty-eighth floor, giving him views in every direction. Openings in its outer walls offered cover as he moved and shot. Over the next ninety-six minutes, the historical account estimates that he fired about a hundred and fifty rounds at people below.

There is no useful way to turn that span into a shot-by-shot list. It was not one crowd in one place. People were struck at different points across the campus and nearby business district. Some fell in open areas. Others tried to work out whether they could reach shelter or help somebody who had been hit. Austin police officer Billy Speed was among those killed.

The height of the tower made every movement below dangerous. The gunfire reached people who had come to the university for reasons entirely unrelated to Whitman.

Inside the tower, employees of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health were caught in a different kind of uncertainty. Employee Linda Swan-Adkins later recalled opening a stairwell door, seeing smoke, and hearing people call for help. She and her colleagues barricaded their offices with desks and chairs. They had only one telephone connecting them with the outside world.

Below, reports of shooting brought Austin police and highway patrol officers to the university. Officers had to respond while people were still exposed and while the attacker remained above them. The people sheltering inside could not know how or when anyone would reach the observation deck. The people outside could not know when it would be safe to move.

The police response exposed serious gaps. The university did not yet have the commissioned campus police force it later established. Austin officers lacked the coordinated command, communications, equipment, and tactical preparation needed for an attack of this kind.

Some armed civilians also fired toward the tower. Whether that helped is contested. Officer Ramiro Martinez later believed their fire forced Whitman to take cover and limited his ability to shoot. Texas governor John Connally warned that it also complicated the officers’ approach: they had to consider fire coming up from the ground as well as shots coming down from the deck. Neither judgment changes what the officers still had to do. To stop Whitman, someone had to reach the top.

Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy made it onto the observation deck. Allen Crum, an armed employee of the University Co-op, had accompanied Martinez up the tower and waited near the deck doorway. Another officer, Jerry Day, was also reported at that doorway.

At 1:24 p.m., Martinez and McCoy confronted Whitman on the deck’s northwest corner and shot him dead. There was no arrest and no trial. The gunman’s death ended the attack, but it did not immediately settle the count of those he had killed. Some of the wounded were still fighting to survive.

The Texas State Historical Association records seventeen people murdered by Whitman in total, including his mother and wife. Its count includes victims who died after August 1: one the following week, and another in 2001 from a wound connected to the shooting. It also records thirty-one people treated for injuries. Accounts of the death toll can differ because they count deaths at different points in time.

Governor Connally convened a commission to examine the tragedy. An autopsy found a small brain tumor, which became the focus of attempts to explain Whitman’s actions. The commission could not positively identify a cause for the rampage. A tumor’s discovery is not proof that it made him kill. An explanation for his violence cannot be extracted from one finding, and none diminishes what he chose to do.

The aftermath changed the university. Texas legislation in 1967 led to the creation of the University of Texas Police Department. The university also expanded counseling and mental-health services. A memorial garden was dedicated in 1999; in 2016, a monument was dedicated with the names of the seventeen people recorded as murdered.

A list of names resists the shorthand of ‘the tower sniper.’ It includes Margaret and Kathleen, whose deaths came first. It includes Edna Townsley, who was at work, and people who had simply come to campus that morning. For those who survived, the end of the gunfire was not the end of what happened.

The clock gives us two times: 11:48, when the shooting from the deck began, and 1:24, when officers stopped it. The fuller story begins before either one—with the people Whitman killed in their homes—and continues in the lives he changed after the tower fell silent.