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

clear shot at the gunman but the turbulent air currents around the tower made aiming impossible. The plane was eventually driven away when the sniper put a bullet through the fuselage.
    Down below an armoured truck laid down smoke cover and a fleet of ambulances, sirens wailing, began loading up the dead and wounded. Students braved the sniper’s fire to haul other victims to shelter.
    Austin Police Chief Robert Miles decided that he could not risk using helicopters against the sniper. His accurate fire could easily bring one down. So Police Chief Miles ordered his men to storm the tower. His directive was curt – ‘Shoot to kill’.
    Patrolmen Houston McCoy and Jerry Day found their way through the underground passageways that connected the university buildings into the foyer of the tower. There they met Patrolman Ramiro Martinez who had been at home cooking steaks when he heard news of the shootings on the radio. A handsome 29-year-old and veteran of six years with the Austin Police Department, he had driven to within a couple of blocks of the tower, then ran to the passageways, zigzagging across the open plaza with the sniper’s bullets kicking up dust around him. None of the patrolmen had ever been in a gun fight before.
    With them was 40-year-old retired Air Force tailgunner Allen Crum, who was a civilian employee of the university. Although he, too, had never fired a shot in combat, Crum insisted on accompanying the officers. He was given a rifle and deputised on the spot. That day, he was to see more action than during his entire 22 years in the Air Force. One of the four men punched the lift button. They were about to make the same 27-floor lift ride that the crazed gunman had taken less than two hours before.
    Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a white sports shirt under a pair of workman’s overall, the gunman had pulled into a parking space reserved for university officials between the administration building and the library, at the base of the tower, at around 11 a.m. He unloaded a trolley and placed a heavy footlocker on it. Then he wheeled the trolley into the foyer of the building. The ground-floor receptionist thought he was a maintenance man.
    When the lift door opened he wheeled the trolley into the lift and pushed the button for the top floor. During the 30-second ride, he pulled a rifle from the locker. On the twenty-seventh floor, he unloaded his heavy cargo, then climbed the four short flights of stairs from the lifts to the observation deck. The observation gallery was open to visitors and the gunman approached the receptionist, 47-year-old Edna Townsley, a spirited divorcée and mother of two young sons, who was working on what was normally her day off. He clubbed her with the butt of his rifle with such force that part of her skull was torn away, and dragged her behind the sofa.
    At that moment, a young couple came in from the observation gallery. The girl smiled at the gunman, who smiled back. She steered her date around the dark stain that was slowly spreading across the carpet in front of the receptionist’s desk. The gunman followed them back down to the lift. As they travelled innocently down in the lift car, he lugged his heavy locker up the stairs and out on to the observation gallery which ran all the way around the tower, 231 feet above ground level. From that height he could see clean across the shimmering terracotta roofs of old Austin’s Spanish-style buildings. Below him the handsome white university buildings were separated by broad lawns and malls. This gave the gunman a clear field of fire across the campus below and the surrounding streets. He assembled his equipment for what he plainly imagined would be a long siege while the lift began to climb from the ground floor up to the twenty-seventh storey again. In it were Marguerite Lamport and her husband, together with Mrs Lamport’s brother, M. J. Gabour, his wife Mary and his two teenage sons, 16-year-old Mark and