"Surviving History'-for 48 Years" by Mike Brown

Milam County Historical Commission
Milam County, Texas

All Credit for this article
goes to Mike Brown
and the
Rockdale Reporter

‘Surviving History’ - For 48 Years

In the UT tower with sniper-killer Aug. 1, 1966

by Mike Brown - Reporter Editor

Rockdale Reporter - May 22, 2014

There aren’t many people who quite literally survived history. Cheryl Botts Dickerson

did.

Forty-eight years ago this summer the self-described “quiet and shy” 1966 RHS honor

graduate, and an acquaintance, strolled into history and horror at the top of the

University of Texas tower.

Dickerson and Don Walden, on their first date, smiled and greeted tower sniper Charles

Whitman, not realizing he was at the beginning of a murderous rampage which would see

him gun down four dozen people, killing 17 and wounding 32.

There were nine people with Whitman on top of the tower during that brief period.

Whitman shot at all of them except Dickerson and Walden, killing three and wounding two.

“We know that we missed death quite literally by seconds,” Dickerson said.

Dickerson, now a longtime resident of Luling, returned to Rockdale briefly last week,

after visiting her mother, Evelyn Botts, who lives in Cameron.

“It’s past history,” she says. But then again, she’s part of that history.

Dickerson has been sought out to tell her story on television, in publications and for

historical records countless times since that bloody summer day so long ago.

‘VARNISH’- Dickerson describes herself as “very shy, very insecure” during high school,

but determined to become more assertive as she headed toward college at Howard Payne

University in Brownwood.

But first she went to Austin to visit her grandmother. She rode the bus from Rockdale.

At the Austin bus station she met Walden, a bus company employee, who said he’d like to

show her around the big city. They made a date. The first place they went was the tower.

At the time tower visitors caught one of two elevators near the circulation desk - the

tower was a big library - and rode it up to the observation deck just below the tower’s

peak, 307 feet above Austin.

Stairs led to an indoor receptionist, who sat behind a desk and greeted visitors, who

then walked outside onto the deck itself.

Dickerson and Walden spent about half an hour on top. “It was so beautiful,” she said.

“And we didn’t know much about each other so we spent a lot of time visiting.”

They came inside, and noticed the receptionist wasn’t there. “We figured she had gone to

lunch,” Dickerson said. “It was lunchtime.”

Then they noticed a reddish- brown swath on the floor which they had to step over. She

cautioned Walden not to step in it.

“I figured someone was about to varnish the floor and that’s what it was,” Dickerson

said.

It wasn’t.

CHAOS - Whitman had just clubbed the receptionist, Edna Townsley, in the head. What the

couple saw was her blood.

During the night Whitman had stabbed his wife and his mother to death, packed a

footlocker with a shotgun, three rifles, three pistols and 700 rounds of ammunition and

charmed his way past what security existed at the time to the top of the tower.

Whitman said he was “delivering equipment.”

Dickerson and Walden saw him as they moved toward the stairs leading to the elevator.

“It was a blond guy, bending over a couch,” she recalled. He was wearing gray overalls.

“We surprised him. He stood up and he had a rifle in each hand.”

“Now, people over the years wondered why this didn’t surprise me,” she said. “But I went

to school with guys who went hunting, then came to school with their guns still in their

pickups.”

“I thought he was there to shoot pigeons,” she added. “I almost asked him that.”

She smiled and said “hi.” “He smiled back and said ‘hello’,” Dickerson said. “All this

took about 15 seconds. We never stopped walking. (Turning their backs on the man), we

walked to the stairwell, went down one floor to the elevator and then went down.”

While the couple was going down, the family of M. J. and Mary Gabour was coming up in

the other elevator.

As they ascended the stairs and tried to get onto the observation deck - Whitman had

barricaded it - he opened fire.

Sixteen-year-old Mark Gabour and his aunt, Marguerite Lamport, were killed. Wounded were

Mark’s mother, Mary Gabour and his 18-year-old brother Mike.

M. J. Gabour and William Lamport, the boys’ uncles, were not hit.

Whitman had been dragging the badly injured Townsley out of sight when Dickerson and

Walden surprised him.

After firing on the Gabour family he then shot Townsley in the head, killing her, and

went out onto the deck to begin his murderous sniping spree.

“We really didn’t figure it out until reading about all this the next day that the

Gabours were coming up as we were going down,” Dickerson said. “They had to have gotten

there a matter of seconds after we left.”

‘WE’LL BE LATE’ - The couple left the main building, from which the tower rises, not

knowing “the blond man” they’d just encountered had begun his murderous barrage.

Dickerson and Walden actually continued their tour of the campus, unaware the first

media age mass public shooting in American history was taking place around them until

they began seeing victims, people running for safety and sensed the general panic.”

“We ended up taking refuge in a building,” she said. “We were where we could see the

woman crouched behind a flagpole (Charlotte Darehshori) who was in that famous photo

that turned up everywhere.”

They thought about making a run for it, but after seeing the carnage continuing outside,

decided to stay put in the safety of the building.

Concerned that her grandmother would worry, Dickerson found a phone. “Granny,” she said.

“We’re going to be a little late.”

THE END - Whitman rained down death and destruction on the university campus and

adjacent areas for more than an hour.

About 1:30 p.m. three brave law enforcement officers and an equally brave civilian, made

their way to the observation deck, confronted Whitman and killed him.

It was over and Dickerson’s “new life” began, but not quite immediately.

During the shooting, while huddled in the safety of a building, Walden had called Austin

police to report their encounter at the top of the tower.

As might have been expected, during that frantic afternoon the couple’s call got lost in

the shuffle. When they still hadn’t heard from police by Thursday—the shooting happened

on a Monday —the couple drove to the police station and gave their statements.

By the next day their story was in newspapers, and on television.

Reporters called the Rockdale home of her parents, Richard and Evelyn Botts, unaware

Cheryl was still in Austin.

She returned to Rockdale, and that “new life” that Sunday.

What followed was an intense several months of interviews and publicity, during which

she recounted her 15-second encounter hundreds of times.

“I think I realized how widespread it was when I found out I was on the front page of a

newspaper in Mexico City,” she said. She only saw Walden a few more times.

INTERNET - While the pace of “being famous” eventually slowed she’s still part of

history and Dickerson finds herself being sought out whenever there’s an anniversary —

any year ending in ‘6’— or a retrospective on Whitman.

The year 1998 was especially busy. That’s when the university reopened the radically

redesigned tower to guided tours.

(It had reopened following the shooting but closed after a series of suicides.)

Dickerson had become a math instructor and had moved around quite a bit, teaching in

Ennis, Lampasas, Fort Stockton and Carrizo Springs, before settling in Luling, where

she’s resided for 19 years.

But one day in 1998 she picked up the phone to find NBC News on the other end. “How did

you find me?” Dickerson asked.

“Oh, we can find anybody on the Internet,” was the reply.

She ended up being interviewed on the Today Show.

NBC isn’t the only news organization that found her.

Dickerson has appeared on the Travel Channel special on Austin - “They bought out a

whole restaurant one day to conduct the interviews” - many times on Austin television

stations and a Bullock State History Museum feature.

She’s mentioned more than a dozen times in author Gary Lavergne’s book “A Sniper in the

Tower,” which is considered the ultimate historical work on the Whitman shootings.

It continues. “Two months ago the Investigation Discovery (ID) Network called and wanted

to fly me to New York for a five-day stay to be interviewed for a special,” she said.

“It didn’t happen. I guess I didn’t ‘make the cut’.”

PURPOSE - So what does it all mean? How was she spared? Why was she spared? Was it for a

purpose?

“I believe there’s two reasons why he didn’t kill us,” Dickerson said.

“First, we surprised him. We caught him totally off guard. He didn’t expect anyone

coming from the deck like we did. He was busy with Mrs. Townsley’s body, looked around

and we were on him.”

“The second is how quick it all happened. It was seconds, a very few seconds,” she said.

“We were there and gone and didn’t give him much time to react.”

There’s little doubt what would have happened if Whitman had been given the opportunity

to react, or if Dickerson had verbalized her query about “shooting pigeons.”

When the Gabour family tried to go up the same stairs Wilkerson and Walden had just

descended, Whitman opened fire, killing two and wounding two.

(The two who weren’t hit were later led to safety by one of the officers who ascended to

the deck.)

As to “why?,” Dickerson doesn’t hesitate. She’s a woman of strong faith. A few months

after the shooting she gave her testimony in a citywide crusade in Brownwood.

“Here was this quiet, shy, reserved high school student giving her testimony before a

crowd of 5,000 people,” she said. “There wasn’t a student on the Howard Payne campus who

didn’t know me after that.”

She believed she was spared to make a difference in the lives of the children she’s

helped educate in the past four decades.

There’s an ironic side to being part of history. “I’ll get introduced as ‘the last one

to talk to Charles Whitman, and then there will be a silence,” Dickerson said.

“It’s awkward sometimes but then you think, really, what do you say after that?” she

said.

PERSPECTIVE - Her two children and two step-children finally figured out that she was

part of a historic event. “I think what really brought it home to them was when I’d get

calls from the television networks,” she said.

She has fond memories of her life in the Rockdale schools. During her RHS years she was

assistant to legendary band director Bill Grusendorf and smiles when recalling she got

to work again with “Mr. G” later in her educational career.

But leave it to another legendary Rockdale teacher, the late N. E. “Zeke” Alford Jr., to

put Dickerson’s fame in perspective.

“I so admired Mr. Alford,” she said. “He was my mentor. When I became a math teacher,

like him, I organized my classrooms like his.”

“I came through Rockdale about 10 years or so ago and wanted to stop and see him,” she

recalled.

“I called and told him my name and he said to come over,” Dickerson recalled. “I rang

the doorbell and he answered.”

The woman who was the last person to talk with one of the 20th Century’s most infamous

killers asked: “Mr. Alford, do you remember me?”

To which Alford replied: “Of course I remember you! You won first in number sense at

district.”

**********

Newsman’s worst fear

One of the saddest stories from the Whitman rampage, unfortunately, has a Rockdale

connection. Paul Sonntag, 18, son of Jim and Beverly Bolton Sonntag, was one of

Whitman’s victims. Paul had lived in Rockdale for six years as a child. Neal Spelce, who

covered the shootings for KTBC television, recalled the station sent radio news director

Joe Roddy to Brackenridge Hospital to obtain, and read live on the air, the first list

of casualties. When he finished, Paul Bolton, the station’s veteran news director,

grabbed the microphone and asked Roddy to read the list again, saying “Joe, I think you

have my grandson in there.” He did. Paul Bolton Sonntag was the newsman’s grandson, and

namesake.

Together as fifth-graders in 1958-59 at Rockdale Elementary School—these photos are from the 1959 Rockdale school yearbook—these three were also ‘together’ at the University of Texas campus Aug. 1, 1966. From left, Cheryl Botts, last person to talk with sniper Charles Whitman; Tommy Thweatt, dropped to the ground as a bullet struck a doorway he’d just exited; Paul Bolton Sonntag, killed by Whitman.

.

Cheryl Botts Dickerson’s story has been in literally hundreds of publications, including The Rockdale Reporter.

Before 9-11, before Columbine, before Newtown, before all the rest, there was Charles Whitman.

Photos: Mike Brown - Rockdale Reporter