(5 of 9)
Whether Whitman slept at all during the following few hours is not known. He was next seen at 7:15 a.m. when he rented a mover's dolly from an Austin firm. Then, deciding that he needed even more firepower, he went to Sears, Roebuck and bought a 12-gauge shotgun on credit, sawed off both barrel and stock. He visited Davis Hardware to buy a .30-cal. carbine. And at Chuck's Gun Shop, he bought some 30-shot magazines for the new carbine. All told, he had perhaps 700 rounds.
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 Townsley, 47, a spirited divorcee and mother of two young sons. Whitman bashed her head in, probably with a rifle butt, with such force that part of her skull was torn away, also shot her in the head. Then he left her behind a sofa to die.
As Whitman began assembling his equipment on the deck, six sightseers arrived, led by Mark and Mike Gabour, the 16-and 19-year-old sons of M. J. Gabour, a service-station owner in Texarkana, Texas. "Mark opened the door to the observation deck and a gun went off," said Gabour. "Mike screamed." Then his sons, his wife and his sister, Mrs. Marguerite Lamport, "came rolling down the stairs. Whoever did the shooting slammed the door." Gabour turned his younger son over, saw he had been shot in the head. He was dead. So was Gabour's sister. Critically injured, his wife and his older son were bleeding profusely. Gabour and his brother-in-law dragged their dead and wounded to the 27th floor, sought help but could find none.
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 his guns were silenced.
For a 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 with the scope but switching occasionally to the carbine and the .357 revolver, Whitman picked off most of his victims.