Read Online Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time by Nigel Cawthorne - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nigel Cawthorne
Tags: True Crime
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Texas. The students had taken the opportunity to linger in the sunshine when classes changed at 11.30. But by 11.45, all was quiet again under the university’s 28-storey limestone tower.
At 11.48, 17-year-old Alec Hernandez was cycling across the campus, delivering newspapers, when a .35 rifle bullet ripped through his leg. It slammed into his saddle and catapulted him from his bike. Then, out of the clear, blue sky, more bullets came raining down. Three students, late for class, fell in quick succession.
At first, no one could figure out what was happening. There was a distant report, then someone would crumple to the ground. On the fourth floor of the tower building 23-year-old postgraduate student Norma Barger heard what she took to be dynamite exploding. In fact, it was the sound of a deer-hunting rifle echoing from the low buildings that nestled around the tower. When she looked out of her classroom window, she saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall beneath her. At first she thought it was a tasteless joke. She expected them to get up and walk away laughing. Then she saw the pavement stones splashed with blood – and more people falling beneath the sniper’s deadly rain of fire.
Eighteen-year-old Mrs Claire Wilson, who was eight months pregnant, was heading across the mall to her anthropology class when a bullet ripped into her belly. She survived, but her unborn child’s skull was crushed and the baby was later born dead. Nineteen-year-old freshman Thomas Eckman, a classmate and aspiring poet, was kneeling beside the injured mother-to-be when another bullet shot him dead.
Thirty-three-year-old post-graduate mathematician Robert Boyer was looking forward to his trip to England. He had already secured a teaching post in Liverpool, where his pregnant wife and two children were waiting for him. But when he stepped out on to the mall, heading for an early lunch, he was shot, fatally, in the back. Secretary Charlotte Darehshori ran to help him and found herself under fire. She spent the next hour and a half crouched behind the concrete base of a flagpole, one of the few people to venture on to the mall and survive uninjured.
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
At 11.48, 17-year-old Alec Hernandez was cycling across the campus, delivering newspapers, when a .35 rifle bullet ripped through his leg. It slammed into his saddle and catapulted him from his bike. Then, out of the clear, blue sky, more bullets came raining down. Three students, late for class, fell in quick succession.
At first, no one could figure out what was happening. There was a distant report, then someone would crumple to the ground. On the fourth floor of the tower building 23-year-old postgraduate student Norma Barger heard what she took to be dynamite exploding. In fact, it was the sound of a deer-hunting rifle echoing from the low buildings that nestled around the tower. When she looked out of her classroom window, she saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall beneath her. At first she thought it was a tasteless joke. She expected them to get up and walk away laughing. Then she saw the pavement stones splashed with blood – and more people falling beneath the sniper’s deadly rain of fire.
Eighteen-year-old Mrs Claire Wilson, who was eight months pregnant, was heading across the mall to her anthropology class when a bullet ripped into her belly. She survived, but her unborn child’s skull was crushed and the baby was later born dead. Nineteen-year-old freshman Thomas Eckman, a classmate and aspiring poet, was kneeling beside the injured mother-to-be when another bullet shot him dead.
Thirty-three-year-old post-graduate mathematician Robert Boyer was looking forward to his trip to England. He had already secured a teaching post in Liverpool, where his pregnant wife and two children were waiting for him. But when he stepped out on to the mall, heading for an early lunch, he was shot, fatally, in the back. Secretary Charlotte Darehshori ran to help him and found herself under fire. She spent the next hour and a half crouched behind the concrete base of a flagpole, one of the few people to venture on to the mall and survive uninjured.
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
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