The Reckoning
Over 50 years ago, when Claire Wilson was eighteen, she was critically wounded during the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting—the first massacre of its kind. How does the path of a bullet change a life?
Texas Monthly
Pamela Colloff
Part I.
In the spring of 1967, when Claire Wilson was a freshman at the University of Texas, she went to the library one afternoon to track down an old copy of Life magazine. Thumbing through a stack of back issues, she scanned the dates on their well-worn covers. Finally she arrived at the one she was looking for, and she slid it off the shelf. On the cover was a stark black and white photograph of a fractured store window, pierced by two bullet holes; in the distance loomed the UT Tower. Above the university’s most iconic landmark were three words in bold, black letters: “The Texas Sniper.”
Claire sat down and studied the large, color-saturated pictures inside, turning the pages as if she were handling a prized artifact. She read how Charles Whitman, an architectural engineering major, had brought an arsenal of weapons to the top of the Tower on August 1, 1966, and trained his rifles on the students and faculty below, methodically picking them off one by one. She pored over the images of people crouching behind cars as the massacre unfolded, and the aerial photo of campus dotted with red X ’s showing where Whitman had hit his intended targets.
On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Her gaze fell on Tom’s picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all mid-century yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. Claire stared into his eyes, tracing the contours of his face. Holding the magazine in her hands, she felt some reassurance that what she had witnessed on campus that day had actually happened.
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