Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [24]
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 barbershop 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,