Free Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time by Nigel Cawthorne

finding new targets.
    A hundred yards beyond Patrolman Speed, 29-year-old electrical repairman Roy Dell Schmidt was getting out of his truck on a call. He looked up at the tower and saw puffs of smoke coming from the observation gallery. The police told him to get back but, nonchalantly, Schmidt told a man standing next to him that they were out of range. They weren’t. Seconds later, a bullet smashed into Schmidt’s chest, killing him instantly.
    To the west of the campus ran a main thoroughfare called Guadeloupe Street, known to the students as ‘The Drag’. Among the window-shoppers on Guadeloupe Street that sunny lunchtime was 18-year-old Paul Sonntag. He was a lifeguard at Austin swimming pool and had just picked up his week’s pay cheque. With him was 18-year-old ballet dancer Claudia Rutt who was on her way to the doctor’s for the polio shot she needed before entering Texas Christian University. Suddenly Claudia sank to the ground, clutching her breast. ‘Help me! Somebody, help me!’ she cried. Bewildered, Sonntag bent over her. The next shot took him out. Both were dead before help could get to them.
    Further up Guadeloupe Street, visiting professor of government 39-year-old Harry Walchuk was browsing in the doorway of a news-stand. A father of six and a teacher at Michigan’s Alpena Community College, he was hit in the throat and collapsed, dead, among the magazines. In the next block, 24-year-old Thomas Karr, who had ambitions to be a diplomat, was returning to his apartment after staying up all night, revising for a Spanish exam which he had taken at ten o’clock that morning. Before he reached his own front door, he dropped to the sidewalk, dying. In the third block, basketball coach Billy Snowden of the Texas School for the Deaf stepped into the doorway of the barbershop where he was having his haircut and was wounded in the shoulder.
    Outside the Rae Ann dress shop on Guadeloupe Street, 26-year-old Iraqi chemistry student Abdul Khashab, his fiancée 20-year-old Janet Paulos – they were to have married the next week – and 21-year-old trainee sales assistant Lana Phillips fell wounded within seconds of each other. Homer Kelly, manager of Sheftall’s jewellery store, saw them fall and ran to help. He was trying to haul them into the cover of his store when the shop window shattered. A bullet gashed the carpeting on the sidewalk outside his shop and two bullet fragments smashed into his leg. The three youths had to wait over an hour, bleeding on Sheftall’s orange carpet, before an ambulance could get to them. In all, along picturesque, shoplined Guadeloupe Street, there were four dead and 11 wounded.
    To the north, two students were wounded on their way to the biology building. Beyond that, far to the north of the campus, 36-year-old Associate Press reporter Robert Heard was running full tilt from cover to cover when he was hit in the shoulder. ‘What a shot,’ he marvelled as he winced with pain.
    To the east, 22-year-old Peace Corps trainee Thomas Ashton was sunning himself on the roof of the Computation Center. A single round ended his life. A girl sitting at the window of the Business Economics Building was nicked by a bullet. But to the south was the worst killing field. The university’s main mall had been turned into a no-man’s land. It was strewn with bodies that could not be recovered safely.
    One man was responsible – one man 30 storeys up in the university tower had turned the peaceful campus into a free-fire zone. The Austin Police Department had never had anything like this to deal with before.
    The bullet-scarred clock of the Austin tower was booming out its Big Ben chimes at 12.30 when a local Texan turned up in camouflage fatigues and began chipping large chunks of limestone off the wall of the observation deck with a tripod-mounted, high-calibre M-14. Meanwhile a Cessna light aircraft circled the tower with police marksman Lieutenant Marion Lee on board. He tried to get a