A Letter from Austin #23: Dark Nights and a Deadly Day
Exploring Austin’s Most Notorious Crimes
Austin was still a city of sandals when I arrived. It was 1979, and while the haze of marijuana smoke was starting to thin, Austin’s capital remained a counter-culture oasis, replete with hippies, topless sunbathers at Barton Springs, Willie Nelson picnics and the last days of the Armadillo World Headquarters. In the decades since, Austin’s reputation as a stoner’s paradise has been supplanted by a tech-centered, heavily caffeinated gestalt, but the city’s image is still generally positive, if not self-congratulatory. Austin is electric cars and music festivals, college football and SXSW. Austin rides scooters. Austinites, it sometimes seems, are twelve years old.
But amid the growth and general giddiness lie some uncomfortable shadows. Like any metropolis, Austin has harbored crime and depravity. Dallas has the Kennedy assassination. Houston has the Candy Man killings and the Camp Logan riots. Remarkably, though, given its sparkly public face, Austin is not only where the first documented serial killings occurred, in 1885, but also where America’s first high-profile mass shooting took place eighty years later. The city, in other words, is a monument to modern crime.
*
The serial killings actually started right at the end of 1884 and lasted until Christmas of 1885. In what became known as the “Servant Girl Annihilator Murders,” five African-American women and girls, one African-American man, and two white women were brutally slain by a person or persons who was never caught or positively identified. The perpetrator, sometimes called the Midnight Assassin, struck at night, in the homes of his victims. He seems to have been either preternaturally stealthy or unusually lucky, as he was rarely seen nor heard. The single most salient characteristic of the murders was the rage they reflected. The killer beat, stabbed, raped, and in a couple of the cases, lobotomized his victims.
Two nights ago, my wife Pati and I joined a group of twelve out-of-towners on the Servant Girl Murder Walk, a guided tour of locales associated with the killings 140 years ago. We started at the site of the first murder, near the Whole Foods Market headquarters at West Sixth Street and Lamar Boulevard. From the land of gelato and overpriced goat cheese we worked our way east, stopping at other crime scenes near what was at that time police headquarters, and winding up at Congress Avenue and East Third Street, where one of the chief suspects was employed as a chef in 1885. It wasn’t all mayhem. We stopped for a drink along the way at the Driskill, the city’s spirit-haunted hotel. Pati chatted with a couple taking the tour with us. He was from Newcastle, in the U.K. His fiancée haled from Philadelphia. They were visiting Austin for the first time, and loving it. Bars, barbecue, minor league baseball. People here, they enthused, are so happy.
And then we hit the streets again. It’s difficult to imagine what the Live Music Capital of the World looked like back then, even with the aid of the digital photographs our guide, Tyler, shared with us. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the emotions of the survivors of those who were killed, or the paranoia of the population as it tried to understand that a predator was living beside it, or the frustrations of Austin’s police force as it struggled to figure out what was happening and what might come next. A number of suspects were detained and arrested. Most of them were African-American. But given that all of this took place in 19th Century Texas, it’s actually something of a testament to Austin’s relatively progressive attitude that no one was lynched or summarily convicted of the crimes. There was, in other words, no mob justice exacted against the black community. So there’s that. The killings just stopped, as suddenly and arbitrarily as they had begun. Historians attribute the end of the spree to the fact that of the three chief — and unrelated — suspects, one was killed early in 1886; another left town; and the third was locked up in a mental hospital.
*
Austin’s mass shooting occurred eight decades later. In the early morning hours of August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman stabbed both his mother and his wife to death. Not long before noon, the beefy blonde ex-Marine and former Eagle Scout drove to the University of Texas campus with a bag full of anguish, including an M1 carbine, a sawed-off shotgun, and 700 rounds of ammunition. He took an elevator to the top of the University’s iconic limestone tower, clubbed the receptionist to death, and proceeded onto the Tower’s 28th floor observation deck, where he started shooting at pedestrians on the plaza below. By the time he was finished that day, killed by two Austin cops, he’d murdered fourteen people, including an unborn child, and injured another 31.
It certainly wasn’t the first time one human being killed numerous others. History provides plenty of examples of that. Whitman’s action, though, seems like the first iteration of a peculiarly American psychosis, a typically male explosion of free-form rage expressed in ballistics, spiritual collapse as performance piece. The incident is much better documented than the Servant Girl murders. Indeed, it was, as befits a modern murder spree, broadcast live. Though we’ve become accustomed to such events in Grand Theft America, it was, at the time, a stunning, unfathomable occurrence. Criminologists and laymen alike continue to ponder what drove the outburst. Some say a brain tumor was to blame. Others cite drugs, or the long-suppressed rage that stemmed from life with an overbearing, possibly abusive father. Whitman himself was puzzled by the crushing headaches and violent thoughts that poisoned his waking hours. In a note he typed out on the morning of the shootings, he requested that his body be autopsied for clues.
Other observers were less concerned with the shooter and more alarmed by what he shot with. CONTROLS ON ARMS? asked a headline in a New York newspaper on August 2, 1966. “The massacre yesterday in Austin, Texas by Charles Joseph Whitman underscored how easy it is for almost anyone to accumulate an arsenal in this country, an ease of access that law enforcement officers say is a significant factor in this nation’s high homicide rate.” Obviously, this factor hasn’t gone away. We’re still wrestling with Whitman’s legacy all these years later.
UT ignored the Tower shooting for many years. The observation deck was closed, reopened for a spell, and then closed the whole time I was on campus. There were no markers to memorialize the fallen, and indeed the only reminders of the event on the Forty Acres were the bullet holes in the limestone balustrade above the South Mall. A survivor of the shooting named Claire James recalled, “I had to learn how to walk again. When I went back to school in January, no one said anything to me or talked about it around me. I almost felt like I had imagined the whole thing. Not one person ever called together the students who’d been injured that day and said, ‘How are you?’ or ‘We’re so sorry.’ I guess that’s just the way it was — it was a measure of the times. We didn’t have the vocabulary at that point to deal with what had happened. If it was mentioned at all, it was always called ‘the accident.’”
This institutional neglect was finally remedied in 2006, when the university set up a stone obelisk commemorating those killed on that blistering hot summer day forty years earlier.
*
The Servant Girl Murder Walk isn’t an uplifting activity. In a sense, it’s an exercise in failure: failure of the human heart, failure of a community to recognize and stop a killer, failure, finally, to figure out exactly what happened and who was responsible. But those murders are definable. They’re over, and in fact it sometimes seems as if serial killings may one day be rendered impossible due to DNA testing advances, GPS tracking, and the ever-increasing presence of surveillance technology, both governmental and private. The Tower shooting on the other hand represents the first of a long and continuing series of disasters that shows no signs of abating. Patterns can be recognized. Even the smartest criminals make mistakes. But how do you stop someone like Whitman, who appears to be normal, until he isn’t? Whitman wasn’t a video game player. He was raised in a strict two-parent household. He looked like an upstanding young American — a beach boy with college ambitions. The motivation behind his decision to try to kill a sizeable segment of Austin’s population remains a mystery, as is the prescription for stopping future Las Vegas snipers and schoolyard assassins who are able to put together impressive armories suitable for killing themselves and others.
Not that Pati and I figured out any answers two nights ago. After the lurid revelations of the tour, it seemed important to get home and back to more mundane pursuits. We strolled up Congress to West Sixth to retrieve our car, passing karaoke bars and ersatz speakeasies, hordes of coeds in cut-offs, random eddies of amplified music seeping out of the clubs. We’re watching a television series that involves elaborate government conspiracies, demons from another dimension, and a girl with telekinetic powers. You know: Fun stuff. Not like the stubborn knots in the human soul that lead to whispered histories and unmarked graves. Not like the cries of servants dragged into alleyways, or students bleeding out on the cement of an open plaza on a blinding bright afternoon. Those things we prefer to keep locked away.
Remember, this is Austin. People are happy here. And as far as the casual visitor can tell, everyone always has been.
