Crime: Ten Minutes in Hell

By Richard Woodbury

At first it seemed like a freak accident. As the usual lunchtime crowd jammed Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, last Wednesday, a blue Ford Ranger pickup tore across the parking lot and barreled straight through the restaurant's plate-glass window. A few startled customers ran to help the driver. To their horror, a muscular young man in a green shirt sprang from behind the wheel with a semiautomatic pistol and began firing. "This is what Bell County did to me . . . This is payback day!" he shouted as he made his way through the crowd, pumping bullets in every direction.

One of the gunman's first victims was an elderly man who was struck by the truck and shot in the head as he attempted to get up. The gunman then fired on a grandmother, and killed 71-year-old Al Gratia, who ignored his daughter's pleas and rose to confront the killer. As screams pierced the air, the gunman moved toward the crowded serving line and continued firing. Pausing only long enough to pack fresh clips into his two semiautomatic pistols -- a Glock 17 and a Ruger P-89 -- he worked his way methodically around the rectangular, beige-colored hall. Cool and deliberate, he felled most of his victims point- blank in the head or chest, sometimes reaching under tables where many diners had huddled and flattened themselves on the gray carpet.

Mere chance seemed to determine who lived and who died. At one instant, the killer spared a mother and child, barking at her to get the youngster "out of here." An elderly woman put her arm around her husband, who had been wounded. As the killer approached her, she looked up, then bowed her head, and he shot her. The gunman faced down another patron, Sam Wink, but when a woman nearby tried to race off, he was distracted and fired at her, allowing Wink to flee. "It just seemed like slow motion, and he shot forever," Wink recalled. One woman survived by hiding in a freezer; she was later treated for hypothermia. Food preparer Mark Mathews, 19, escaped by hiding inside an industrial dishwasher. He was so frightened that he did not come out until the following day.

The killer continued for a full 10 minutes, until four police officers arrived on the scene, returned his fire and wounded him four times. The gunman then stumbled into a rear alcove, where he pumped a bullet into his own head. By the time he slumped to the floor, the death toll stood at 23. It was the worst mass murder in U.S. history, surpassing the 1984 massacre at a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif., that left 21 dead.

The killer was quickly identified as George Hennard, 35, an unemployed seaman with a reputation as an oddball. An intemperate recluse who apparently hated women, Hennard was thrown out of the merchant marine in 1989 for possessing a small amount of marijuana. He lived alone in his mother's stately brick house in nearby Belton, where he delighted in screaming obscenities at passing females and harassing neighbors with threatening letters. But Hennard's strange life-style could not begin to explain the enormity of his act. Said police chief Francis Giacomozzi: "There was nothing we recovered to show he was capable or intended to do anything like he did. The whos, whats, whens and whys -- we may never be able to figure them out."

Because 14 of his 22 victims were female, there was speculation that he had been driven by misogyny. As Hennard stomped through the restaurant, he shouted, "Bitch!" and "Take that, bitch!" several times before firing. For years he fought furiously with his mother, who now lives in Nevada; he used to draw caricatures of her with a serpent's body, and once reportedly threatened to kill her. A sometime rock drummer, he liked music with lyrics that expressed violence toward women. "He used to say that women are vile and disgusting creatures," fellow musician Alexandria Garner told the Austin American-Statesman.

An Army surgeon's son, Hennard moved often with his family and graduated from high school in Las Cruces, N. Mex., in 1974. After a brief stint in the Navy, he joined the merchant marine. The ending of Hennard's sea duty following his 1989 marijuana bust left him "very, very depressed," his mother told the Houston Post. Hennard said to a judge at the time, "It means a way of life, it means my livelihood. It means all I've got. It's all I know." He underwent drug treatment at a Houston hospital that year, but in recent months had lived a secluded life in the expansive colonial home at Belton. The house, which his mother had kept after divorcing her husband in 1983, was up for sale.

Hennard had several run-ins with the local cops. Last May, for example, neighbor Judy Beach complained that he had shouted epithets at her and her son as they searched for a lost baseball glove near his home. "I'll never forget how he was looking at me," she said, recalling that Hennard wound a garden hose around his hands "in a threatening manner" and screamed, "Bitch!" No charges were pressed. When he frightened two young sisters with a letter describing women in the community as "treacherous female vipers," their mother reported it to the police. But the cops did not consider him dangerous.

Hennard was meticulous, always cleaning his truck or the yard, and would curse out garbagemen for leaving litter on his lawn. He was also a creature of habit, eating the same sausage-and-biscuit breakfast each day at a neighborhood convenience store. Owner Mary Mead recalls that "he always had such a look on his face, we were scared." But just before the massacre last Wednesday morning, she says, "he seemed real nice" for some reason.

Hennard had had no trouble obtaining his weapons. He purchased both the lightweight, plastic-framed Glock and the Ruger in Nevada, and registered them with the Las Vegas police last winter. In Texas, where the Glock is valued by cops and criminals alike for its rapid-fire action, the pistol can be bought at gun shops and variety stores by filling out nothing more than a brief federal form. After attending a prayer service for the dead and injured, Governor Ann Richards renewed a call for controls on automatic weapons. "Dead lying on the floor of Luby's should be enough evidence we are not taking a rational posture," she said.

As authorities probed Hennard's murky past for answers, Killeen set about burying its dead and consoling the survivors. Townsfolk who had worn yellow ribbons while troops from nearby Fort Hood were in the Middle East began wearing white ones last week. Others left flowers outside the cafeteria's shattered facade. There was talk that the restaurant, like the McDonald's in San Ysidro, might be permanently closed. In its grief, Killeen could be thankful for the network of psychological counselors who rushed in to assist. The Army had brought them to the Fort Hood region to deal with the heavy casualties that were expected during Desert Storm. As it turned out, the community lost twice as many people in last week's rampage as it did in the entire gulf war.

With reporting by Kathryn Jones/Killeen