![]() ![]() The prevailing theory about why they survived is that at the point the couple came inside, Whitman was not ready to use his weapons and he calculated that the two fit young people might have proven to be a decent match for him if it came to a fight. ![]() Observers said that they were the "luckiest people in town" that day. He remarked afterwards that the look in Whitman's eyes told them that they had better move along. The boy, Don Walden, almost asked if he was there to shoot pigeons, but just said "Hi" instead, possibly blunting Whitman's aggressiveness. Whitman was holding a rifle at that point. The girl saw "a mess" on the floor, but did not realize it was the attendant's blood. Palmer had helped Whitman get on the elevator minutes before her co-worker was fatally attacked.Ī young couple who had been out on the deck sightseeing came into the attendant's area moments later and encountered Whitman. By the luck of the draw, she was filling in for one of her co-workers who was on vacation that August day and at noon she would have been relieved by Vera Palmer, the third lady. Townsley was one of three women who staffed the upstairs deck and the elevator at the ground floor. Encountering a middle-aged attendant named Edna Townsley at her desk in the small room guarding passage to the four-sided deck, he bashed her skull in with a rifle butt, shoved her behind a couch and left her for dead. Upon arriving at the highest floor the elevator reached, Whitman pulled his trunk up two short flights of stairs to the deck area itself. Wheeling his steamer trunk inside on a dolly, he told an attendant on the ground floor, "You don't know how happy you've made me," when she helped him enter the elevator. Whitman parked at the foot of the university's Main Building, a 307-foot tower with an encircling observation deck. Claiming to be a maintenance worker, he had obtained a permit at a UT Police checkstand on West 24th Street northwest of the tower to enter the inner campus drive. The tower's observation deck is located immediately below the clock faces near the top of the tower.ĭobie Center, the large building in the background, was not constructed until 1972, well after the shootings.ĭressed as a workman and pushing a steamer trunk packed with his weapons and supplies, Whitman entered the Main Building of the University of Texas (UT) slightly after 11:30 a.m. Guadalupe Street (The Drag) is just out of frame to the right. ![]() The tower of the University of Texas Main Building. ![]()
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