Wichita sniper: Life and death in 11 minutes

It’s been four decades since Mike Hill shot the Holiday Inn sniper in Wichita and stopped a mass shooting from becoming worse.

On Aug. 11, 1976, Hill and other officers from the Wichita Police Department hurried to the top of the Holiday Inn, where they could hear the crack of a rifle every few seconds.

Michael Soles, the sniper, had chosen his killing perch on the balcony of the 26th floor on what was then the tallest building in Kansas. Soles could aim at hundreds of pedestrians and motorists moving below.

He killed three people and wounded eight. The toll wasn’t higher because Hill and other cops moved fast.

In 11 minutes, Hill and other officers hurried to the hotel from City Hall, took the hotel elevators to the top, found the room where the sniper was shooting – and then Hill shot him six times through a glass door.

Or was it seven?

Hill shrugs; some memories have faded, even for him.

‘Could have been much worse’

People called him a hero for decades, told him “thank you” in rooms full of people where everybody knew what the thank-you was for.

The thank-you thing faded out long ago, Hill says. “Mostly.”

But he has driven past that building thousands of times in the 40 years since. And there’s this thing he does every time he drives past.

He can’t help it; it’s like a little tip of the hat to his past that only he knows about.

He drives past and turns his head. And he looks up, to that balcony on the 26th floor.

It’s not that he’s reliving his moment of glory. It is that he’s remembering a grim thought: “It could have been much worse.”

First shots fired

At 2:50 p.m. on that Wednesday in 1976, Larry Ade was a 25-year-old municipal bond company trainee, working downtown at Mid-Continent Investments at Douglas and Main.

Ade walked out of the Century Plaza Building where he worked and headed for the nearby Quik Print store to pick up documents. Ade heard a metallic smack when a bullet hit the street sign above him. Seconds later, another shot tore a 4- to 6-inch furrow through the side of his scalp, just above his right ear.

Those were the first shots fired. Ade ran back to his office building with blood pouring down his neck.

Two blocks away, Hill was a Wichita police lieutenant helping to oversee the afternoon shift change. He was 34, a 13-year police veteran.

“Shots fired.” Hill heard emergency dispatchers sound the alarm.

He hopped in a car and sped the two blocks to the hotel.

The cops thought the gunfire was coming from street level until they got close. Then they saw the sniper, firing from the 26th floor.

They saw at a glance that if they failed to move fast, a lot of people would get shot.

Photographer killed

Wally Hensley was shot in the torso while installing glass windows on the second floor landing of Page Court, a building next to the Holiday Inn. His buddy Ray Merritt tried to drag him to cover and also was shot.

Janice Goodwin was shot.

Forrest Hudlin was shot.

Joe Goulart was a freelance photographer who always had a police scanner beside him. He raced downtown, not bothering to pull on shoes or socks.

Hill liked Goulart, though he’d annoyed Hill for years.

“Joe always looked like he’d slept in his clothes,” Hill said. “I once arrested him at a fire. He climbed up the ladder, right behind the firefighters, and I told him to get down. He said no and told me he was doing his job, so I arrested him.”

Goulart raced north on Century II Drive. The sniper aimed at the driver’s side of Goulart’s windshield and fired.

Steve Menaugh was a Kansas State University summer reporting intern at The Eagle, one of several Eagle reporters who hurried the seven blocks to Century II after newsroom police scanners fired up with reports of the shootings.

At Century II Drive, just south of Douglas, he came upon Goulart’s car, which had veered suddenly and jumped a curb onto a grass median.

Menaugh looked inside. Goulart lay slumped over, dead; there was a bullet hole in the windshield.

When the cops pulled Goulart out and laid him on the ground, his bare feet stuck out from under the blanket police draped over his body. They found Goulart’s shoes on the floorboards of his car.

Mark Falen, 23, was shot in the neck.

Denise and Penny Guseman, teenage sisters from Derby, were shot in their moving car, Denise in the neck, Penny in an arm and a leg.

‘Nonchalantly walked by’

Elston Kelly, a limousine driver at the hotel, had seen the sniper walk into the hotel carrying rifles and a lunch pail.

“He just nonchalantly walked by,” Kelly said later. “It looked like he had two rifles – two barrels sticking up.”

The sniper made his way to the elevators.

Galena Love, a maid, saw him on the 26th floor. Frightened, she notified hotel security.

Harold Roberts, 58, a hotel security guard, hurried to the 26th floor. He was unarmed.

“Me with no gun,” he told reporters later. “I didn’t know what I would run into.”

Roberts had been told, erroneously, that the sniper was firing from the roof, one floor above Floor 26. Roberts found bullet holes in a door to the roof; the sniper had come there and tried to shoot out the lock but failed.

Roberts hurried to the stairs. He knew the shooter was one floor below him, on the 26th, which the hotel had emptied for remodeling.

He went down the stairs and came face to face with Hill and five officers coming up.

‘Needed to deal with it’

Steven Morgan got shot. Chris Hoy got shot.

On the 26th floor, Hill and the others followed the sound of rifle gunfire and reached the room from where it came, 2608. They could not yet see the sniper but saw gun smoke blasting outward from a balcony with each rifle shot.

“As I went through the door, I thought I heard a clicking sound next door,” police Sgt. Charles Franklin later told reporters. “Like the sound of a rifle bolt being worked.”

Below, a Sedgwick County sheriff’s detective and sharpshooter named Gary Babb had raced to Main and Douglas, carrying a semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight.

Babb aimed at the sniper and yelled, “I can get him! I can get him!” But commanders beside him told him to hold his fire.

“They knew by then we were up there,” Hill said 40 years later. “So they wouldn’t let him shoot.”

Hill quickly figured out the shots were coming from an outside balcony shared by Rooms 2608 and 2609, overlooking southeast downtown Wichita. The sniper was firing from the patio balcony of Room 2608.

The door to 2608 was locked. Room 2609, next door, was open.

Hill and Officers Jerry Carter and Hank Salmans went in there.

Hill can’t remember that he felt fear, nervousness – or anything. He probably felt nothing much, he said.

“I just felt like we needed to deal with it.”

‘I give up’

Hill could see the silhouette of the sniper through the sliding glass window and the thin Styrofoam partition separating the balconies of 2608 and 2609. The sniper was leaning into the partition to steady his aim.

Hill was closest to the sniper’s silhouette. He carried a 12-gauge shotgun.

He fired at the silhouette, blasting through glass and Styrofoam. He jacked the barrel pump of the shotgun, ejected the smoking shell and fired again; the silhouette fell.

Hill relaxed – for a fraction of a second. Then Carter yelled: “He’s pointing the gun!”

Hill fired twice more, emptying his gun. Salmans threw three shotgun shells across the hotel bed to Hill, and Hill quickly reloaded. Again Carter yelled that the sniper was aiming. Hill and Salmans fired every shotgun shell in their guns.

“I give up,” the sniper yelled. He threw his rifles off the balcony; they crashed onto the roof of the hotel parking garage.

John Coonrod, a police lieutenant, shot the chain off the lock still holding the sniper’s door shut.

The sniper was lying on his back, bleeding from his legs and feet. The lunch pail the sniper carried, filled with bullets he used to reload, was shot full of holes.

Only 11 minutes had passed.

Soles, a 19-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., said later that he shot those people because he was upset about losing his girlfriend.

Destroyed lives

Hill went home that night and went to right to sleep.

“Not everybody is like that,” he said recently. “But I’ve always been able to take care of whatever comes, then shut it off. Even today.”

Mark Falen, Wally Hensley and Joe Goulart died. Eight other victims recovered.

Menaugh, The Eagle intern who found Goulart dead, was only 21 then. He still feels sick about that day.

“I felt bad for his family,” he said, “and that it could easily have been me.”

Merritt, who ran into the gunfire to try to rescue Hensley, died of natural causes two years ago. He spent his remaining years mourning Hensley, who had worked beside him, installing glass, for 30 years.

“Dad, who passed in 2014, never considered his actions that day heroic,” Merritt’s son Rob wrote in an e-mail. “But witnesses disagreed, stating that had he not left cover to help another victim, he would have escaped unharmed, and that is why his name can be found on the plaque in front of Century II that honors those who risked their lives in acts of heroism.

“Though gone, I know Dad would like to honor the officers who risked their lives to end the attack,” Rob Merritt wrote.

Ade, who was shot at Douglas and Main, has spent a lifetime helping people since the shooting. He is a licensed financial adviser and takes pride in helping people prepare for happy and secure retirements, he said. God wants us to help other people in life, he said, and he’s done his best to do that.

He did not suffer from fear and grief after 1976 but saw people who did and still grieves for them. He sat through several of Soles’ parole hearings over the years. He saw grief in the faces of victims’ families.

“What Soles did was destroy some of those peoples’ lives,” Ade said.

On a whim, decades ago, he acquired the street sign that took that first bullet. It hangs on his garage wall.

And he did one other thing a couple of years ago.

He walked up to Mike Hill one day.

Reducing crime

Hill was elected as Sedgwick County sheriff in 1984, then was elected to three more terms.

He has no profound insights about how to head off mass shootings. But he thinks he knows how to reduce crime.

“We go in cycles,” he said. “Right now, our (police) relationship with the public is a bit lower than at other times. Eventually, I think, we’ll again hit one of those peak times when it’s more of a partnership.

“But here’s how things changed,” Hill said. “Years ago, we’d actually go out and shoot baskets with the kids on the streets. And our new beat officers on every beat were told to make sure they walked into every business and get to know the people in there. We were doing community policing long before it became a name.

“What changed was that beat officers began to have to go to so many calls. That’s all they could do – run from call to call to call. You can’t do as much community work when that’s all you do.

“You have to try to make those personal relationships work, though. No matter what else might be going on, you still have to have those personal relationships.

“The new (Wichita police) chief, Gordon Ramsay – I’m impressed. I think the new chief has it figured out.”

‘Thank you’

Hill, at age 74, still gets up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. every day, as he did when he wore a WPD badge.

He walks 4 fast miles every morning.

He’s not keen on the word “hero.”

For one thing, Carter, Salmans, Coonrod and other officers ran toward the gunfire with him.

For another, “It was all pretty simple, what happened.”

People came up to Hill for many years after 1976. They said “thank you.”

He didn’t mind.

People hardly ever come up to him now. He doesn’t mind that, either.

“It’s so nice to walk into a room now and nobody knows who you are.”

He gets a haircut every few weeks at Avenue Style, a barber shop just a short walk from 250 Douglas Place, the downtown apartment building that used to be called the Holiday Inn.

Over the years, Hill had noticed another man in the barber shop on occasion. A regular customer. Hill didn’t recognize him.

They saw each other year after year, and the other man would glance over at Hill.

Finally, about two years ago, the man came up to Hill.

“And I thought, ‘What the hell is this going to be about?’ ” Hill said.

It was Larry Ade, who lost a piece of his scalp that day 40 years ago at the corner of Douglas and Main.

“Thank you,” Ade said.

This story was originally published August 10, 2016 at 5:53 PM with the headline "Wichita sniper: Life and death in 11 minutes."