Austin Story

  This is my sister's house in Austin.  The house on the right of the one in the pic, out of camera shot, is where Charles Whitman stabbed his wife to death.  It has been extensively rebuilt but for years it looked just like it did on the front page of the Austin paper the day of that horrible event.  This is now an upscale neighborhood but I worked with a guy who said it was not paved until after WWII.  In the above I have captured a raccoon who had been living under the house.   Me and my brother took him to an Episcopalian church that sits in some woods a few miles away and let the beautiful, stinky animal go.  He went off like a brown and white flash.  He almost exactly matched the saddle shoes visible behind the cage, a good thing because I wouldn't want us to clash.  I am very fond of raccoons but they can do enormous damage to a house.

     Bon chance little one!

     (An aside.  My brother worked  for the Austin American-Statesman and one of the contract employees was a mailman that August day who walked in on Whitman out in his garage while he was sawing down a 12 gauge.   He exchanged a few words about the legality of this action and left.  I say again, this was a couple of hours before the shootings and Whitman's mother and wife were dead at this point.  A lot of lives could have been saved had this individual just called the police, Whitman used that shotgun on a receptionist and a family that walked in on the scene, 3 dead.  When I met the old (epithet redacted) I knew he was telling the truth, it was just what Gary Lavergne related in his excellent book Sniper In The Tower. books.google.com/books?id=AMqP… Except this person insisted that he was a policeman at the time, which makes him an even bigger (same epithet redacted again).  Fortunately he was lying, things were bad enough that day without morons on the police force.  His name was Chester Arrington and he was an extremely unpleasant person that was probably in dementia when I met him.  I have read an interview where he expressed remorse but he sure showed no sign of that when he told me his story.

Kathy Whitman being removed from the house at 906 Jewel St., August 1st, 1966.