The Rag Blog

Mass shootings of the innocent are commonplace now. But Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, shocked the nation’s psyche.

Charles Whitman. Image from The Cactus (1963) / Austin History Center.

By Jeff Shero Nightbyrd | The Rag Blog | March 29, 2016

With introduction by Thorne Dreyer

On August 1, 1966, 25-year-old engineering student, Eagle Scout, and former Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman murdered his wife and mother and then took three rifles, two pistols, and a sawed-off shotgun to the observation deck atop the iconic Texas Tower at the UT-Austin administration building and for an hour and a half mowed down students and random pedestrians on the grounds below, killing 14 and wounding 32 others. Among those injured were our dear friends and colleagues Sandra Wilson and Claire Wilson (no relation), who lost her unborn child and her fiancé. Claire was saved by John Fox, Austin personality and musician now known as Artly Snuff, who, along with James Love, carried her to safety.

In her 2005 oral history of the shootings, Pamela Colloff wrote, “The crime scene spanned the length of five city blocks . . . and covered the nerve center of what was then a relatively small, quiet college town… Hundreds of students, professors, tourists, and store clerks witnessed the 96-minute killing spree as they crouched behind trees, hid under desks, took cover in stairwells, or, if they had been hit, played dead.” Coloff, as cited by Texas Monthly, wrote that Whitman “introduced the nation to the idea of mass murder in a public space.”
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