This article originally appeared in the February 1999 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
The first target was a fetus. Claire Wilson was eighteen years old and eight months pregnant as she walked across the South Mall at the base of the tower at the University of Texas in Austin. It was 11:48 A.M., August 1, 1966, as the crosshairs of a 4-power scope caressed her form, the finger pulled the trigger, and a bullet from the 6mm Remington streamed down from the top of the tower 231 feet above, tore through her hip, stomach, colon, uterus, and then fractured the skull of the boy she carried in her belly. The baby died instantly. Thomas Eckman, also eighteen and the father of her child, knelt over her, wondering what was wrong, when another round killed him.
That was the beginning of a barrage that would leave fourteen dead around the tower, thirty-one wounded. During those ninety-six minutes, no one knew who or how many were shooting from the tower. The Austin cops had little or no communication once they left their cars (the department had about twelve walkie-talkies with limited range) and, like the rest of the country, had no notion of the nature or function of SWAT teams. That would change forever by 1:24 P.M. that afternoon, and we would start lurching as a people toward gated communities, car alarms, private security forces, and fear. When it was over, two men—Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez, both of west Texas, guys in their twenties—would be official heroes. Both would be awarded the Medal of Valor by the city of Austin.
Thirty-two years later, Martinez sits behind his desk at his justice-of-the-peace office in New Braunfels, Texas. He’s about sixty, balding, wearing a white shirt and a tie. His suit jacket on the coatrack has a Lions Club pin on the lapel. He has had a successful life. He spent a couple of years on a state narcotics force and did a stretch with the legendary Texas Rangers, and now he is retiring from the bench. A hundred and fifty miles north, McCoy sits in a chair in a rural house where the forests of east Texas begin to give way to the grasslands. He hasn’t had it quite as good, and the bottle has taught him several of life’s mean lessons, but he’s not bitter. He is a bit irked by foreigners moving in—too many Yankees, he argues, “calling the last meal of the day ‘dinner.’ Now, that guy who made the painting sure as hell didn’t call it The Last Dinner.”
Both men have their children raised, and both revisit that day in 1966 as if it were a box they open when requested and then peer into. This hero business does not come naturally to them, because Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez know one thing often left out of heroic tales: They were scared. As they talk and ease into that day, they start to move, get up, and act out what happened, feel the sensations that raked their flesh, taste the bitter drug of adrenaline that coursed through their bodies. For a brief while, the past becomes the present, and it is all happening again.
Houston came to the tower first. He had done morning traffic control, parked for a while, and talked with fellow officer Billy Speed, who, at twenty-three, was thinking of quitting the department and going back to school. Then a city worker came over and told of a social security card found near the river. Houston checked it out, found some clothes, thought maybe the guy had jumped in, and then cussed out some boys who were swimming unlawfully. The radio crackled, but he couldn’t understand the message, just heard urgency in the voice, so he drove off, picked out the phrase “University Tower,” and sped toward the campus. As he drove, he made out the word “shooting,” and that was all he knew when he arrived with a .38-caliber pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun. He made it to the base of the tower but, because of its design, couldn’t pick out a doorway. He glanced up and saw the twenty-seven floors of windows and felt “like there was a radical with a machine gun behind each window.” He left, stumbled into a student who said he had a high-powered rifle in his room, and drove the kid to get it.
All this was normal that day—no one knew what was happening, and the various police swarming in were on their own lookout. There was no command center, no plan, no communication. Houston took the student and his scoped rifle back to campus and got up to the second-story window of a building facing the South Mall. He tried using the scoped rifle, but it was too jiggly for him—his west-Texas roots had been no money and open sights. He’d become a marksman as a kid by shooting turtles in the head, because if you hit them in the head, they don’t sink. He looked down and saw Billy Speed crouched near the statue of Jefferson Davis. Claire Wilson was nearby, sprawled on the hot sidewalk and alive, but Houston did not notice her. “I was confused, bewildered, and bumfuzzled,” he allows. What he did notice was a round ripping through his friend Billy Speed. Houston handed the rifle back to the student, who asked if he should shoot to kill. Houston answered, “Shoot the shit out of him.” It was now 12:08.
Ramiro Martinez was at home, roasting a piece of pork in the oven. His uniform was neatly laid out, and his shift did not start until mid-afternoon. He heard a report of the shooting on the television, dressed, and left. To this day, he is not sure if he turned the oven off. As he pulled out of his drive, neighbors cheered. Like Houston McCoy, he came from hard times in west Texas and small-town football, and being a cop in Austin was a way to get a big leg up on life. At a stoplight, a woman with a kid motioned for Martinez to roll down his window, and then she shouted, “My son says for you and Batman and Robin to go get that bad man.” That was the last command Ramiro Martinez got.
For the first fifteen minutes, the shooting had gone on relentlessly, with people being mowed down from the base of the tower to more than five hundred yards away. A paperboy was blown off his bicycle near the Co-op bookstore, and Allen Crum, the manager, ran out, helped get him to cover, taught bystanders how to stop the bleeding, and headed toward the tower. Now the essential players were in motion.
Martinez parked and sneaked through buildings to the South Mall at the base of the tower. He crouched and looked at the concrete plaza, as smooth and open as a billiard table, with two bodies, Claire Wilson and her boyfriend, baking in the sun. Then, on a zigzag pattern in full view of the tower, he raced past the statue where Speed lay dead, and was inside the building.
No one knew what time it was anymore. It was simply gunfire, screams, and the heat of midday. “What the hell to do?” Martinez remembers thinking. “I figured the source was up in the tower—I’d better get up there.”
Meanwhile, Houston McCoy ferried another student to get guns and ammunition. After the first fifteen minutes, the sniper was pinned down by students and other civilians who’d spontaneously flocked to the university area with deer rifles. McCoy then found a university employee who knew the tunnels of the campus, and he plodded through them, with his shotgun off safety, to the tower. The sniper had been killing for more than an hour now.
Reality slammed into Martinez as he rode the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor of the tower, one floor below the deck where the shooting was coming from. As the numbers rose during the climb, he said the Act of Contrition. He figured there would be a police assault unit of some kind on top and he would join it. Instead, he found Officer Jerry Day, bookstore manager Allen Crum, and bodies mangled by whoever had taken over the tower. “I didn’t know it was just us chickens,” he says. Day was busy attending to a man whose family— tourists taking in the vista that day—had been shot to pieces and who now moaned and bled on the stairwell going up to the top.
At the same time, Houston boarded the elevator and rode up with his shotgun ready at his shoulder. When the door opened, he was facing the gun of Jerry Day, and both men slowly lowered their weapons. Meanwhile, Ramiro had gone up with Crum to the office just off the tower platform. Crum had been deputized by Martinez and given a rifle. Houston got to the top just as Ramiro banged open the blocked door to the deck and slipped out. A gangway laced around the tower, just under the clock. Houston told Crum to cover one direction with a rifle and slipped out behind Martinez.
Here is where memory becomes intensely individual. Because of the focus men have in a firestorm, both Martinez and McCoy remember hearing better and seeing better than at any time before or since. McCoy says, “I could have shot a gnat off your nose.” Their bodies were keen with the hunt. Martinez has no memory of McCoy being up there until, as he crawled along the gangway protected by a stone wall from the ceaseless friendly fire, he glanced back and saw him with his shotgun. They knew each other casually—Ramiro had ridden with Houston as a rookie. He says he would never have gone out on the deck with a pistol if he’d known McCoy was there with a shotgun. “If I’d known Houston was there,” he now chuckles, “I’d have said, ‘By your leave.’”
Now they were together. Ramiro says he felt like a robot. Houston had fleeting thoughts of his wife and children and then fears about his newfangled contact lenses—Contact lenses, don’t fail me now! And then his mind went blank. “I was just looking for someone to shoot,” he says.
McCoy is motioned down by Martinez when a bunch of rounds rip the stone four feet over his head. All those deer hunters down below think the two cops are snipers. McCoy keeps glancing upward for signs of gunmen. No one knows how many are shooting from the tower. They get to the corner and hear a shot: Crum has accidentally fired the unfamiliar rifle he has just been handed. Martinez moves out into the open and fires all six rounds from his revolver as fast as he can squeeze the trigger. McCoy swings over him, makes out a white headband, and puts two shells of 00 buckshot in the head of the sniper. Martinez, his pistol empty, reaches up, grabs McCoy’s shotgun, charges the sniper, screaming as he was trained in the Army to do, straddles the body, and fires the shotgun. Then he throws McCoy’s 12-gauge down hard, a gesture that, McCoy remembers, “hurt my soul.”
They have just killed Charles Whitman, twenty-five, ex-marine, crack shot, student, and at one time the youngest Eagle Scout in the United States. Whitman has committed the largest single-day mass murder in American history. The night before, he slaughtered his wife and his mother. He left a note with the heading THOUGHTS TO START THE DAY. The first two points rang out clearly: “STOP procrastinating (Grasp the nettle), CONTROL your anger (Don’t let it prove you a fool).” A handwritten note on the list confessed, “8-1-66, I never could quite make it. These thoughts are too much for me. CJW.”
Judge Martinez has gotten out of his chair now to act out the killing. He is back there again. He offers, “To say I wasn’t afraid would be a lie. I just repressed it. I was hot—my adrenaline was pumping ninety miles an hour.”
Houston McCoy leans forward in his seat, a tall, rail-thin man. He remembers leaning over the body, checking the pockets for identification, and saying, “You son of a bitch, if that blood gets on my boots, I’m gonna throw you over.” Ramiro felt so shaky, he could hardly stand. He left the platform to tell Crum and get the word out so the shooting would stop. He and Houston had not spoken a word. And the two have not spoken of killing Whitman to this day. When Martinez got back to the station, he had the dry heaves for about thirty minutes. McCoy remembers asking various officers as they came out on the platform if they’d help him throw Whitman over. “I can tell you why,” he says now. “After a policeman shoots someone, he gets angry, because that person made him shoot him.” That night, both men drank for hours, to no effect. McCoy didn’t eat for two weeks. Exactly one week later, Martinez was shaving when he suddenly started shaking and cut himself.
In the confusion, the Austin police department issued a report placing only Martinez on the tower when the sniper was taken out. McCoy, west Texas to the core, said nothing, and the moment the two men shared with Whitman is poisoned a bit by this inaccuracy. Later, another debate occurred over who fired the fatal round, a matter that should concern the world no more than it concerned Whitman. The perfunctory autopsy did little more than pronounce the sniper dead, so there will never be a clear forensic answer about which round proved fatal.
There is no monument, plaque, or notice on the University of Texas campus about that day and the killings. Every few years, the matter comes up, and every few years no one can decide what, if anything, to do. Near the base of the Jefferson Davis statue, there is one pockmark left from one of Whitman’s rounds. That’s it.
But now, for the first time since it was closed to the public in 1975, the tower’s upper observation deck, Charles Whitman’s perch, is reopening in late spring. Before Whitman, ninety thousand people a year enjoyed the view. The university will charge five dollars for the visit, which will pay for the barriers that will keep anyone from shooting or jumping and ensure that another Charles Whitman and his arsenal will not ruin another fine summer day.
Claire Wilson lived. Three days after the shooting, a body was fished out of the river: the owner of the clothes Houston found by the bank that morning. The mail brought letters with a few dollars in each and notes telling Ramiro to buy another piece of pork. He and McCoy left the Austin police after a few years because they couldn’t raise families on $360 a month. Martinez’s life went fairly smoothly, and now he is about to retire from JP court and tend to his golf game. McCoy faced a few more bumps in the road because of his bouts with the bottle and now lives catch-as-catch-can. But neither man based his life on that day. McCoy reported for duty the following morning. He never fired at a human being again. Martinez squeezed off a few more rounds as a police officer but missed. They’ve met a few times since, at anniversaries of the tower shootings. “To me,” McCoy says, “the word anniversary don’t fit. Anniversaries are happy.”
They have a hard time thinking of themselves as heroes. McCoy thinks soldiers in war are the real heroes. Martinez says he did his job and that’s all there is to it. He’s got no time for this hero talk. Neither has given a moment’s thought to Whitman, then or now. McCoy says that if somehow Whitman is in heaven, then he’ll “just have to shoot that son of a bitch again.”
What McCoy thinks of is flying—his love since he saw World War II planes overhead as a child. He’s got a glider stored in pieces that he aims to rebuild. And he’s left instructions with his sons on what to do when he dies: Cremate him and tie the ashes to a balloon, and when that balloon gets way up there, high as the tower, higher even, it will explode, and his ashes will hang in the blue sky, some drifting down, some staying up there forever.
