Dave McNeely
WHEN I learned of the UT Tower sniper’s massacre on the TV news on Aug. 1, 1966, I was in Evergreen, Colo., with my family for a weeklong vacation. When they identified the shooter as Charles Whitman, I was stunned. I had just met Charlie within the last few weeks. My thenwife Saundra and I had even been present at an evening party with him and his wife, Kathy, at their apartment on June 24 — his 25th birthday.
I checked in with the Chronicle, but from 1,000 miles away, I couldn’t be of much help.
We and our two young daughters had just moved back to Austin from Houston earlier in June, after a year on my first professional newspaper job at the Houston Chronicle, after graduating from UT with two degrees. I had been promoted to the Chronicle’s capitol bureau in Austin, to cover my favorite topic: politics and government.
My buddy Larry Fuess was working on a degree at UT in architectural engineering. He was my good friend from his years of playing lead guitar in a rock and roll band, in which I was the bass player, and for a while, lead singer. Eager to welcome us back to Austin, Larry and his wife, Elaine, invited us to go with them to their friend Charlie’s birthday party.
We did, and Charlie and Kathy seemed like pleasant, approachable people. Charlie had apparently chosen Larry as his best friend in the architecture engineering department.
I do remember that Charlie and I got into some discussion about something — politics, probably. He expressed an opinion, and I responded with a counterargument. It stands out in my mind, because at the end of our brief discussion, he essentially said, “You’re right. I’m wrong.” It stood out because that was one of a very few times someone has told me they actually changed their opinion about something after talking with me
few weeks later, we joined Larry and Elaine, and Charlie and Kathy, and possibly another couple, for a late afternoon cocktail cruise in the powerboat that Larry kept on Lake Austin. It was a pleasant outing, and most likely some beer was consumed.
Calculating later, I realized that was eight days before Charlie lugged a trunk with his arsenal up to the top of the UT tower.
Whether Larry or Elaine saw the prospect of Charlie committing such heinous acts is hard
to figure. They knew he could be moody, and could get tremendously angry — though they didn’t see that side of him much. They knew that his mother had finally divorced his abusive father in March, and moved from Florida to Austin, to be closer to Charlie and one of his two brothers.
The night before Charlie went up on the tower, Larry and Elaine stopped by Charlie’s apartment about 7:30 p.m. to visit for a while. Kathy was working at a telephone job. They stayed for two hours, sharing some ice cream from a passing vending truck, before Charlie went to pick up his wife.
That was the night that Charlie murdered his mother, and his wife — probably to protect them from the backlash of what he was about to do. The next morning, he went to the tower.
LIFE Magazine, in its Aug. 12, 1966, account of the Tower massacre, closed its piece by mentioning that Larry Fuess was on the UT campus that day.
“The next afternoon, with the dead and wounded scattered like leaves on the ground,. Larry FuessA crouched by a building and wondered, as did everyone on the campus, who in God’s name was up there. The name of Charles Whitman flashed across his mind, and he was instantly ashamed that he could think such a thing of a friend. When it was over, Larry saw Charlie’s body carried from the tower.”