Word: towering
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Love My Mother." The evening before his trip to the tower, Whitman sat at a battered portable in his modest brick cottage. Kathy, his wife of four years (they had no children), was at work. "I don't quite understand what is compelling me to type this note," he began. "I've been having fears and violent impulses. I've had some tremendous headaches. I am prepared to die. After my death, I wish an autopsy on me to be performed to see if there's any mental disorders." He also wrote: "I intend to kill my wife after...
Left to Die. Around 11 a.m., Whitman boldly breezed into a parking spot reserved for university officials, near the main administration and library building at the base of the tower. Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a pale polo shirt, he wheeled the loaded dolly toward an elevator, gave passersby the impression that he was a maintenance man. The elevator stops at the 27th floor; Whitman lugged his bizarre cargo up three flights of steps to the 30th floor. There, at a desk next to the glass-paneled door that opens onto the observation deck, he encountered Receptionist Edna...
Splashed with Blood. Outside, on the six-foot-wide walkway that runs around all four sides of the tower, Whitman positioned himself under the "VI" of the gold-edged clock's south face. Looking toward the mall, a large paved rectangle, he could see scores of students below him. Had Mrs. Townsley and the Gabours not held him up, he might have had another thousand students as targets when classes changed at 11:30 a.m. Now, at 11:48 a.m., Charles Whitman opened fire. The 17-chime carillon above him was to ring the quarter-hour six times before...
...moment, nobody could make out what the odd explosions from atop the tower meant. Then men and women began crumpling to the ground, and others ran for cover. On the fourth floor of the tower building, Ph.D. Candidate Norma Barger, 23, heard the noises, looked out and saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall. At first she thought it was just a tasteless joke. "I expected the six to get up and walk away laughing." Then she saw the pavement splashed with blood, and more people falling. In the first 20 minutes, relying chiefly on the 6-mm. rifle...
...south end of the mall, Austin Patrolman Billy Speed, 23, one of the first policemen on the scene, took cover behind the heavy, columnar stone railing, but a bullet zinged between the columns and killed him. Still farther south, 500 yds. from the tower, Electrical Repairman Roy Dell Schmidt, 29, walked toward his truck after making a call, was killed by a bullet in the stomach. To the east, Iran-bound Peace Corps Trainee Thomas Ashton, 22, was strolling on the roof of the Computation Center when Whitman shot him dead...