In the middle of the lunch hour on Wednesday, October 16, 1991, 23 people were killed in Killeen, Texas, the city beside the Army post of Fort Hood, and police attributed every death to George Hennard. At least 20 more were wounded. More than 100 people were inside when he arrived. He died by suicide the same afternoon, before he could be taken into custody. He had turned 35 the day before. He was unemployed and living alone in Belton, the Bell County seat, about 25 minutes' drive away.
There was never a charge, a hearing or a trial. Every one of the 23 deaths stands attributed to Hennard by the Killeen Police Department and the state and federal agencies that worked beside it, and none of that finding was ever tested in a courtroom. At the time the toll made it the deadliest attack by a single person in the history of the United States, a distinction it held for 16 years. Its longer reach was political. Killeen lost twice as many of its people in those few minutes as it had lost in the whole of the Gulf War earlier that year. Within four years the killings had helped carry a change in Texas law that a survivor of that afternoon then spent a decade in the state Legislature defending.
George Hennard was born on October 15, 1956. He grew up moving from one Army post to another, finished high school in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1974, served briefly in the Navy and then went to sea with the merchant marine. By 1991 he was living alone in Belton.
The merchant marine gave Hennard the closest thing he had to a settled life, and in 1989 he lost it. He was put out of the service that year after he was found with a small amount of a controlled drug. When the matter came before a judge, Hennard tried to keep his place at sea. The job, he said, was "all I've got. It's all I know." The plea did not save his papers. By the fall of 1991 he was a seaman with no ship and no prospect of one.
What filled the time afterward is only partly known. He played drums now and then in rock bands, and he kept his yard and his vehicle with an exactness his neighbors remarked on.
The months before the killings were the months in which his neighbors came to fear him. They described a recluse and an oddball who shouted obscenities at women as they walked past and sent threatening letters to people living near him.
Two episodes that spring and summer reached the Belton police, and neither became a case. In May 1991 a woman who lived nearby said Hennard had shouted abuse at her in a way she took as a threat. No charge was filed. Later that summer the mother of two young women who lived near him took a letter he had written to her daughters to the police. It disparaged women in the language of contempt that ran through so much of what people later remembered about him, and it named the women of Belton and Killeen together. The police did not judge him to be dangerous. Weeks before October 16, Hennard was following and harassing those same two young women.
Those who knew him did not agree about him. Some neighbors called him standoffish but friendly enough in passing; others called him sullen and frightening. None of it, set down piece by piece, amounted to a crime that a prosecutor in Bell County had been asked to charge.
October 16 was National Boss's Day, and the lunch crowd in Killeen was larger than usual for a Wednesday. Offices had sent people out in groups.
Killeen police officers reached the building within minutes, and Hennard died by suicide inside it. Twenty-two people were already dead. One more of the wounded died later, bringing the toll to 23.
The response of the Killeen Fire Department's paramedics that afternoon became a model for mass-casualty events in the years that followed.
The dead had come from across Central Texas and from beyond it, from 11 communities in all, reaching from Killeen itself to Metz, Missouri.
Three were from Killeen itself: Kriemhild Davis, Sylvia King and Thomas Simmons. Copperas Cove, the next town to the west, lost six: Al Gratia, Ursula Gratia, known to her friends as Suzy, Debra Gray, Michael Griffith, Ruth Pujol and John Romero Jr. Steven Dody lived at Fort Hood. Glen Arval Spivey and Nancy Stansbury were from Harker Heights, between Killeen and Belton. Patricia Carney, whom Killeen knew as Pat, was from Belton, and Juanita Williams was from Temple.
Others had driven in from farther away. Olgica Taylor, James Welsh and Lula Welsh were from Waco. Clodine Humphrey and Zona Lynn had come from Marlin. Jimmie Caruthers and Connie Peterson were from Austin, Su-Zann Rashott from San Antonio, and Venice Henehan from Metz, Missouri.
The Killeen police did not have a suspect to question or a case to prove. What they had was a dead man and a city that wanted to know why. Local and state police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Texas Rangers took up the inquiry together in the days after October 16, working to establish a motive for what had been, by the count of the time, the worst attack of its kind in the nation's history.
The Killeen police chief said that nothing investigators recovered in Belton or anywhere else suggested that Hennard was capable of such an act, or that he had intended it. The chief warned that the reasons might never be known.
The one thread investigators could follow was the one his neighbors had already named. The letter the police had seen that summer, with its contempt for the women of Belton and Killeen, the abuse a neighbor had described in May, and the harassment of the two young women in the weeks before all pointed the same way. So did the dead themselves: 14 of the 22 who died that afternoon were women. Speculation that hatred of women had driven him began within days, and it came as close to a motive as the inquiry ever reached. With no trial and no surviving defendant, the inquiry ended where it began: with all 23 deaths attributed to Hennard and the fact of his death the same afternoon.
Killeen was a city of a little over 60,000 people. On the night of October 16 the story led the national evening news, and on October 18 Governor Ann Richards came to Killeen. Some of the help that reached the city had been sent to the area earlier in the year for another purpose: counselors readied for the expected casualties of the Gulf War went to work with the town's own grief instead.
The business where the killings took place reopened five months after the killings, and it closed on September 9, 2000, under the pressure of competition. Another business has occupied the building since.
In 1994 a doctoral study at the University of North Texas followed 25 of the people who had lived through that afternoon and measured how their distress rose in its wake, more sharply among the women, and how those who coped by avoiding the memory carried more anxiety a month on.
In October 1991 Texas law did not allow private citizens to carry concealed in public. A survivor who lost both her parents that afternoon later took the argument that the law should change to Washington, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993, and to Austin.
In the spring of 1993 the Texas House passed House Bill 1776, a measure by Representatives Ron Wilson and Bill Carter, carried in the Senate by Jerry Patterson, that would have put the question of licensing concealed carry to a referendum. Both chambers adopted the final version on May 30, 1993. Governor Richards vetoed it on June 3.
For the 1995 session Patterson wrote Senate Bill 60, which dropped the referendum and created the license itself. It passed the Senate on March 16, 1995, and the House, with amendments, on May 2. After a conference committee, both chambers adopted the final text by May 16, and the governor signed it on May 26, 1995. The statute created a state license to carry concealed, issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety. An applicant had to be at least 21 and a legal resident of Texas for the six months before applying, free of felony convictions and pending felony charges and of a list of other disqualifications, and had to pass a criminal history check and a proficiency and safety course of at least 10 and not more than 15 hours. The act took effect on September 1, 1995, and any license issued before January 1, 1996 took effect only on that date.
The survivor won a seat in the Texas House in 1996 and served five terms, from 1997 through 2006. In 2021 a law signed by Governor Greg Abbott removed the license requirements of the 1995 statute for carrying in public.
Because no court ever heard the case, nothing about Hennard's state of mind was tested under oath. The view that a grievance against women drove him is an investigative conclusion drawn from his letters and his conduct toward his neighbors; it is not a finding of any court. His own explanation, if he had one, died with him.
The complaints his Belton neighbors brought to the police in the spring and summer of 1991 led to no charge, and his conduct toward them was never adjudicated. Whether he had a mental illness was never settled. The police inquiry produced no finding on it that was tested anywhere, and no court or official body resolved the question.
The survivor's belief that the law had kept her from stopping the attack is her own, central to the change in Texas law that followed, and not an established fact about that afternoon.
October 15, 1956: George Hennard is born.
1974: He finishes high school in Las Cruces, New Mexico; he later serves briefly in the Navy and joins the merchant marine.
1989: He is put out of the merchant marine after a minor drug offense.
May 1991: A Belton neighbor complains of his threatening behavior; no charge is filed.
Summer 1991: A Belton mother takes a letter he wrote to her daughters to the police, who do not judge him dangerous.
October 15, 1991: Hennard turns 35.
October 16, 1991: 23 people are killed and at least 20 wounded in Killeen, Texas; police attribute the deaths to Hennard, who dies by suicide the same afternoon.
October 18, 1991: Governor Ann Richards visits Killeen.
1992: The business reopens, five months after the killings.
1993: A survivor testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
June 3, 1993: Governor Richards vetoes House Bill 1776.
May 26, 1995: Senate Bill 60, creating a Texas license to carry concealed, is signed into law.
September 1, 1995: Senate Bill 60 takes effect; the first licenses take effect on January 1, 1996.
1996: The survivor is elected to the Texas House; she serves from 1997 through 2006.
September 9, 2000: The business in Killeen closes for good.