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Surviving a Mass Killer Rampage

When Seconds Count, Police are Still Minutes Away

Privateer Publications

THE TEXAS TOWER: THE RISE OF SWAT

Allen Crum:"Are we playing for keeps?"

Officer Ray Martinez:"You God damn right we are."

Crum:"Well, I guess you'd better deputize me."

Martinez:"Consider yourself deputized."

Ramiro "Ray" Martinez and his wife VerNell woke about 6 a.m., in time for VerNell to get to work at her job as an executive secretary for Steck Vaughn, an Austin publishing company. She had to be at work at 8 a.m., while Martinez did not go on duty until 3 p.m. He would look after their two-year-old twin daughters until he took them to nursery school later in the morning. Martinez had been a patrol officer with the Austin Police Department for more than five years.

It was August first, 1966. He was twenty-nine, and he and his wife had just returned from San Antonio where they had celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. After his wife left for work, Martinez played with his daughters until it was time for them to leave. He took them to the nursery about 10:30.

When he returned, he laid out his uniform on the bed. His wife had pressed his heavily starched shirt. He checked his wool pants to make sure they were properly pressed and clean.

"Then I polished all the brass on my belt," he said.

The heavy leather belt had a holster on the right side for his Smith & Wesson revolver.

"It was a .38 Special caliber on a .44 frame. They call them the heavies."

The revolver was loaded with Remington-Peters rounds with round-nosed lead bullets, he recalled. He had two small pouches on the left side of his belt buckle. Each one opened at the bottom to drop six rounds into the hand. He also had handcuffs.

"I was proud of my department; I was proud of my uniform," Martinez said.

Shortly before noon, he started preparing his lunch.

The Shooting Starts

Meanwhile, about 11:50 a.m., Allen Crum was at work in the University of Texas Co-op across Guadalupe Street from the University of Texas Tower. The Tower was built between 1932 and 1937 and is 307-feet tall. Crum, then forty, was the first-floor supervisor at the Co-op. He had retired after twenty-two years in the U.S. Air Force where he had been a tail gunner in a B52.

According to his statement, Crum had walked to the front of the store and was standing beside one of the cash registers. He noticed a group of students milling around a boy on the ground. They were dragging the boy on the grass, and as they dragged him more students gathered around.

"I told my cashier that it looked like a fight, and I thought I would go check to see if I could stop it."

When he left the store, a boy was beginning to run across the street toward the Co-op. At the same time, Crum heard the sound of a shot, though at the time he did not recognize it as a rifle shot.

The boy ran past Crum and yelled that the boy on the grass had been shot. Crum heard several more gunshots, this time recognizing what they were, though he didn't know where they were coming from. When he reached the east side of Guadalupe Street, he found the boy had been shot in the right buttock. Crum tried to stop the flow of blood.

He heard more shots and thought perhaps the shooter was on the roof of the Student Union building, which was next to where the boy had been shot.

"Several of us yelled for everyone to take cover," Crum stated.

He stayed with the boy but realized the people in the store didn't know what was happening. So he called on one of the students to get the wounded boy under some nearby bushes and showed him how to stop the blood flow. He ran back across Guadalupe to the Co-op. Traffic was flowing normally along the street, but he noticed some students redirecting traffic from the south. Inside the store he instructed an employee to get customers away from the windows and back into the store.

Looking out of the window, Crum realized no one was stopping traffic coming from the north, so he ran up Guadalupe in that direction. He redirected traffic onto Twenty-third Street away from the campus.

"I realized that I made a fine solitary target, and I went to the east side of the street where I tried to find a telephone to call the store and my wife. My wife knew it was my lunch hour, and I knew she would worry," his statement reads.

He reached the building immediately west of the Tower without finding a phone. He thought he would find one in the Tower where he could call the store and his wife.

"I stood behind a pillar on the east side of this building. I waited until the individual started firing on the east side of the Tower, then I ran across the street into the Tower building."

Back at their house, Martinez turned on the television to watch the 12 o'clock news. It started as usual, then shortly into the broadcast somebody handed a message to Joe Roddy, the anchor. He looked at the message and, as he remembers, said: "We want to advise you that there is a shooter on top of the University of Texas Tower. We have reports of a number of injuries so far, and we'll keep you posted. Stay away from the university area."

Martinez continued preparing his lunch as he waited to hear more about the shooting.

Roddy made another announcement: "I have been handed a note, and there are reports of one or two deaths and quite a number of people wounded. The shooting is continuing, and the police are converging on the scene. Please stay away from the university area. We'll keep you posted."

Martinez decided it sounded serious, so he called the police station and asked if the department needed any help. He was put through to Lieutenant Kendall Thomas. Martinez asked the lieutenant if he needed any assistance. Thomas said they did and suggested he come in. Martinez asked if he should report to the police station or go to the scene. Thomas told him to go to the university area, find a main intersection, and direct traffic away from the campus.

Martinez then called his wife and told her: "There's a man on top of the University of Texas Tower shooting people, and I'm going to go to work early. I'm going to find an intersection around the campus to keep people from coming into the campus."

VerNell Martinez told her husband to be very careful, and he promised he would. He dressed in his uniform, cinched on his gun belt, and got into his 1954 Chevrolet. As he backed out of his driveway, a neighbor who had obviously been listening to the news shouted, "Go get him, Tiger!"

At the intersection of Barton Springs Road and South Lamar Boulevard, he saw two detectives, a lieutenant, and a sergeant, but they were heading south on Lamar away from the university campus. Martinez thought this was odd. "I later found out they were going to the lieutenant's house to get deer rifles."

He listened to KTBC radio station on his car radio as he drove north on South Lamar. Neal Spelce, the reporter, was giving a shot-by-shot account of what was going on. However, the officer was not getting everything Spelce was saying. The radio in his '54 Chevrolet would fade in and out. In those days the radios were not transistorized. "They were tube type, and I had a weak tube."

Martinez continued north on Lamar. At an intersection he pulled alongside an unmarked car driven by a detective sergeant from forgery. He rolled down the window and asked the sergeant what was happening.

"There's a guy up there at the university shooting," the sergeant replied. He added that he thought another police officer, Bobby Sides, had been killed. Sides had been shot and wounded in 1964 by a burglar who had killed another police officer. The sergeant didn't seem too concerned, Martinez said. He discovered later that the officer who was killed was not Bobby Sides but Bill Speed.

At another traffic light further north, a woman in a car with a little boy honked at Martinez and indicated that he should roll down his window. She said: "Junior here says you need Batman and Robin to go over there and take care of that bad man."

Martinez drove on. It took him a while to reach the university campus due to the traffic lights and traffic that was bad even in those days. He reached Nineteenth Street, now called Martin Luther King Boulevard, turned east and went up the hill. When it leveled off, he could see motorcycle officers had the main intersections under control. He decided they didn't need any help, so he turned north up San Antonio Street and found a parking spot behind the Saint Austin's Catholic Church at Guadalupe and Twenty-second Street.

Martinez got out of the car, not realizing he was in a two-hour parking zone. "Once I got out of the car, I could hear all this shooting going on — rifle fire — and I could hear sirens."

He knew whatever was going on was serious.

"It sounded like a war zone. Once I got onto Guadalupe Street, I could see the Tower, and right away I determined that, if I can see the top of the Tower, that son-of-a-gun can see me. So I started using concealment. I ran behind buildings, behind trees. Of course the campus had fewer buildings than it has now, so there was a lot of trees out there."

Martinez ran until he reached the South Mall on the south side of the Tower. Behind him was the Littlefield Fountain, where sculpted horses were being sprayed with water. On a sidewalk beside a rock wall, he saw some blood and later learned that was where Officer Bill Speed was shot.

Houston McCoy, then in his mid-twenties, was the officer assigned to the murder of Officer Billy Speed. In a supplementary offense report, he outlined what he did that hot August day.

He went to the university area and obtained two rifles. He also obtained two boxes of .30-06 shells and one box of .30-30 rounds from Everett Hardware Company on Guadalupe Street. He indicated in the report that the company had not been reimbursed for the ammunition.

"After attempting to shoot the subject from several locations, I ascertained that I was too shaky to do any good and gave the weapons back to their owners."

After hearing on the radio that officers were needed to go up the Tower, he went to the University Police Security Office. A university employee led McCoy and several other officers through service tunnels to the Tower.

Martinez had been trained as a combat medic in the U.S. Army, but he decided it was more important for him to get to the Tower and help stop the shooting before attending to the wounded.

"I could see people wounded and dead all on the South Mall. The thing I can recall I saw was a pregnant woman lying on that concrete. It was very hot, and she was like frying on the damn thing. She was wounded."

"I ran as fast as I could by the dead and the wounded, zigzagging. If he saw me, I don't know. If he shot at me, I don't know. But I ran as the shooting was going on. I made it to the building. It's an administration building, and the Tower sits in the middle of it."

Martinez walked around to the west side of the building and entered the hallway leading to the elevators that go up the Tower. He didn't go up the Tower because he wanted to get some help for the wounded outside. He thought a commercial armored truck could reach the wounded and get them out of the line of fire.

At the time, the Austin Police Department had about eight hand-held radios, but they were in the captain's office. "They were not issued to the rank and file," Martinez said.

The radios were provided by the Secret Service for use when President Lyndon Johnson came to town. The radios would then be issued to supervisors responsible for Johnson's security. Patrol officers did not have hand-held radios, however, their patrol cars did have two-way radios.

"Once you got out of your patrol car, you were on your own, because you didn't have communication with the police station."

Arrival at the Tower

Having arrived in the Tower building, Allen Crum said in his statement he talked to several of the university security officers and asked them if they had called the police. They said they had. They directed him to where the telephones were, and he tried to call the Co-op and his wife. The lines were busy. As he turned away from the telephone, he saw Officer Jerry Day.

"I went up to him and offered my help," Crum said.

They got a radio from one of the security officers, intending to keep in contact with other officers, but they could not get the radio to work, he said.

Someone came up to Day and told him there were people lying on the Mall to the south of the Tower.

"We went directly there, and we saw one man on the grass and two women, a man, and a boy student on the concrete Mall," Crum said.

He and Day realized there was not much they could do for the wounded. The sniper was still firing rapidly, and they could not figure out where he was located.

"At this time, we both thought there was a possibility of two people in the Tower."

Jerry Day felt he might be able to get a shot at the sniper, if he could find a window from which to shoot. They went up to the north side of the library floor of the building, which is part of the Tower. There, Day took a shot at someone on the observation deck, but according to Crum missed.

He and Day returned to the street floor, where they found W.A. "Dub" Cowan, an officer from the Texas Department of Public Safety, Intelligence Division, who was carrying a rifle in addition to his revolver.

"I asked this man if he would give me the rifle, and I would volunteer to go with them. They agreed," Crum stated.

As Martinez was looking for a telephone, he came across Day and Crum, who he said was wearing a white shirt. He knew Day, but didn't know who Allen Crum was and didn't realize he was not a law-enforcement officer.

"I didn't know him from Adam," Martinez said.

He found a phone and tried to reach the police department. It was a phone with a dial, and as soon as he dialed the first digit he got a busy signal, because the system was overloaded and jammed.

While Martinez was on the phone trying to line up an armored truck to move the wounded, Day and Crum left. He didn't see where they went.

At the time Austin had no emergency medical services, and what they called ambulances were actually hearses from the local funeral homes.

"It was pretty backwards because normally they just hired students, and they didn't know the first thing about first aid; they were just drivers," Martinez said. They would put patients on a gurney in the hearse and drive as fast as they could for the hospital.

Then he saw a campus security officer. In those days, campus security officers had uniforms and looked like policemen, but they were unarmed. All they had was a nightstick and a flashlight. However, they did have hand-held radios, so Martinez asked if he could use the officer's radio.

"I tried to use the hand-held radio to communicate with the police department; couldn't find the channel."

Up the Tower

Having failed to reach his department, Martinez decided he needed to go up the Tower to where he assumed a group of officers was preparing to assault the sniper on the observation deck. When he got to the elevator, he found a young man with a clipboard who asked Martinez his name and wrote it down. Martinez thought at least somebody knows what he's doing.

"To this day, I never found out who he was or anything."

Martinez got into the elevator and punched the button for the top floor, which was the twenty-seventh.

"You could hear the firing that was going on outside. It was muffled, but you could still hear it in the elevator," he said.

As the elevator was going up, Martinez watched as the little numbers indicating the floors were flickering.

"It felt pretty serious. I'm a Catholic, and I was taught in the event of imminent death, if you say an Act of Contrition, God will forgive you your sins. So I said an Act of Contrition as I was going up. I didn't know what to expect at the top. Of course I was hoping there was a whole squad of police — an assault squad."

Martinez had pulled his gun out and pointed at the doors as the elevator arrived at the twenty-seventh floor. When the doors opened, he found himself looking down the barrels of two guns, a revolver held by Jerry Day and the rifle pointed by Allen Crum.

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Excerpted from Surviving a Mass Killer Rampage by Chris Bird. Copyright © 2016 Chris Bird. Excerpted by permission of Privateer Publications.
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