Nov. 1, 1991: The day a university shooting rampage shocked Iowa

First of two parts | Second

IOWA CITY, Ia. — Room 309 is empty on a fall afternoon, 25 years after the murders. Chairs ring a long conference table, and sunlight slants across the room. One can peer in and imagine busy professors and post-doctoral researchers settling in for their Friday afternoon space physics theorists group, hauling along coffee and papers.

That day, Nov. 1, 1991, Gang Lu came down the narrow hallway of Van Allen Hall, named after professor James Van Allen, who discovered the planet’s radiation belts and brought the space physics department at the University of Iowa a fame that lured the leading scientists in the world. It attracted Lu from China, where he was considered among its finest physics students.

Lu was wearing a long, tan coat, his hair wet from early-winter sleet, when he entered the room, where Ken Nishikawa rose to stand before an old-fashioned blackboard to lecture a group of seven. Lu briefly left, which some found odd, witnesses later told police.

He returned minutes later and calmly walked to the head of the table, where professor Christoph Goertz sat. Lu reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a .38-caliber Taurus handgun and shot Goertz in the head at close range.

As a puff of blue smoke appeared, some thought it was a tasteless practical joke the day after Halloween. Lu stepped around Goertz, leveled his arm and shot rival doctoral student Linhua Shan in the head at close range. Professor Robert Smith plunged to the floor to protect himself as the others in the room scurried. Lu shot Smith in the back and arm.

Lu was far from done. Three more were shot that day — department chair Dwight Nicholson and administrator T. Anne Cleary, who both died, and student Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, who was paralyzed — before Lu turned the gun on himself.

Today, social scientists see the shocking murders as a precursor to school mass shootings that are more common now — not so much violent sprees by visibly insane individuals as calculated murders by someone who feels aggrieved.

Lu, 28, was a brilliant student who had planned the attack for months, jealous that Shan had bettered him to win a department award and upset that he couldn’t find a job after earning his doctorate at UI.

He left behind a trail of letters to his family and university officials outlining his grievances and a list of names of people who caused them. He also left behind a wound of 25 years that echoes in these hallways: Professors who still work here have nightmares, and university officials who responded to the corridor that day still enter a room and check for exits.

25 years after UI mass shootings, team works to prevent violence on campus

THE HALLWAYS are quiet now. Students come and go, lugging huge backpacks, walking past a plaque that notes the names of the scientists who died 25 years ago, past the memorial tree outside Van Allen Hall, past the walkway named for Cleary.

“You always think of academia as a quiet and tranquil place. But there is a lot of turmoil beneath the surface,” said Jack Fix, who was an astronomy professor in the UI Department of Physics and Astronomy. He was in his office on the seventh floor of Van Allen that day, when he was told a man was shooting people, and he quietly closed his office door.

Big science research projects faced stiff competition in a time of tight budgets, flaming a demanding culture of scholarship, said Edwin Chen, then a Los Angeles Times reporter who later wrote a book on the murders called “Deadly Scholarship.”

“Obviously, the perpetrator was driven beyond reason, but there were some underlying currents that played into this,” Chen said.

Lu, 28, was from the city, son of a Beijing mother who worked in a hospital, while Shan, 26, was a south China country boy whose parents were dirt-poor tenant farmers.

“Both were bright scholars, two of the best to come out of China,” Chen said.

They both were part of a program established after U.S. relations improved with China in the late 1970s that allowed physics scholars to study for doctoral degrees in the U.S.

“They were competing for funding to stay in the U.S. only two years after Tiananmen Square happened," said Chen of the massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. "So there was pressure on students all over the U.S. who were desperate to stay here. All of that played into the environment of pressure for these students in Iowa.”

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Back then, there were few Chinese students compared to today. Even in 1997, the earliest record available, only 340 Chinese students were enrolled at UI. Today, there are 2,797.

Shan was said to be well-liked by fellow Chinese students. The converted Christian sent money home with notes signed, “May God bless.”

The record is mixed on Lu. After the murders, many called him a loner who had trouble with the English language and had few friends. Retired astronomy professor John Neff said Lu had a hard time fitting in with students, and Neff had received complaints of erratic behavior from one of his students with whom Lu once shared an office.

Chinese students were ashamed of him, some observers said. But others saw a more amiable side.

“He was generally friendly. He would see me and smile, and I would sit and talk to him,” said Mike Rogers, 56, a native of Adel and physics classmate of Lu’s who today works at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “He seemed to be trying to fit into America. He would go to a bar called the Sports Column and order a pitcher of beer.”

Bartenders there called him “sweet Lu” for his smiling nature, yet were puzzled by his social awkwardness, according to “Deadly Scholarship.”

Astronomy professor Robert Mutel, who still works in the department at UI, said Lu didn’t fit the loner portrayal. He saw him as one of the more gregarious Chinese students, who wore blue jeans and “got into the whole American scene,” as opposed to Shan, who was quiet and humble.

Shan’s story was of remarkable achievement in a country where rising above a poor background was difficult and only 5 percent of second-school students attended college, wrote Judy Polumbaum, a UI journalism professor at the time who went to China to research the victim after the murders.

“Shan was a kind of Horatio Alger of learning, rising from modest peasant origins to the heights of China’s intellectual elite,” she wrote in Iowa City Magazine in 1992.

Shan and Lu would meet in Iowa City and become roommates for a time. But a fierce competition ensued.

Lu also became Americanized in other ways. He loved guns, and bought the .38-caliber for $179 at Fin and Feather sporting goods store in town. He went target shooting and reveled in violent Clint Eastwood films.

THEIR PROFESSORS were no lightweights. The hard-driving Goertz, 47, a native of Danzig, Germany, had come to Iowa in 1973 and by 1981 was a full professor in physics. He contributed more than 150 articles to the Journal of Geophysical Research and served as its editor.

“He was critical, but he didn’t give up on people," said daughter Karein Goertz, 50, today a literature teacher at the University of Michigan who recalls him as a demanding father. "I could imagine sometimes students would be frustrated. He didn’t beat around the bush. He had ambition for himself, for his children and I imagine for his students.”

A week before her father died, she visited him in Iowa City. She had doubts about continuing her education and needed his counsel. On the way to the Cedar Rapids airport, they talked until they ran out of time, and he said, “See you at Thanksgiving.”

“That stayed with me for a while,” she said. “That we had a conversation to be continued.”

Goertz was an adviser to Lu, and was part of a thesis committee set up to review the doctoral candidate’s work.

So was Don Gurnett, now in his 51st year as a physics professor, a man who grew up building rockets on an Iowa farm and did some of the first work on early spacecraft communications. To this day, he fears his questions about Gang Lu’s thesis, centering on understanding data on spacecraft, “may have triggered the whole thing.”

“I asked him what computer he used. He said he borrowed it from a friend. It turns out he didn’t validate anything about his computer program,” Gurnett said from his cluttered seventh-floor Van Allen office. “They failed him on the Ph.D. oral exam. He came in to ask questions about it, sat right there in that wooden chair,” Gurnett said, his eyes glancing toward it.

Lu was given another chance, passed, and earned his Ph.D, but Gurnett said the initial failure may have left a mark on his record when doctoral students were considered for the Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize, later given to Shan, along with a researcher position in the department.

Lu complained to Nicholson, who was active in plasma physics research and had become the department chair in 1985, and to other university officials, including Cleary, associate vice president of academic affairs, who was seen as a huge ally for foreign students.

Nicholson, 44, also seemed to be an unlikely target. He went out of his way to help foreign students fit into the university.

Nicholson was a good friend of Smith, 45, also a star at the university, who had come to UI only two years before as a leader in space plasma theory. Smith was often seen puffing his pipe while working equations on a blackboard in Nicholson’s office.

“Dwight was a pacifist,” said his wife, Jane Nicholson, who today lives in Chicago. “He always reached out to help people,” including his students.

But on Nov. 1, while he sat at his office computer, one of those students came to exact a deluded revenge.

AFTER LU had shot Goertz, Shan and Smith in room 309, he headed down the adjacent stairwell to the second floor, where Nicholson's office was.

Nicholson had a cold and was eating a late afternoon snack, a candy bar that perhaps came from the night before. He loved handing out candy to kids on Halloween. On his nightly phone call to his wife, who was teaching in Tulsa at the time, he excitedly said that 20 children had come to his door.

On that same night, Lu was communicating something more hateful, a diatribe listing all the people he believed had wronged him at the university, and a note to his sister in China, signing off with a farewell: “My beloved elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you. Your younger brother.”

Scurrying down the stairs after the initial shootings, Lu encountered Rogers, his physics classmate.

“I looked up at him and smiled,” Rogers said. “I think by the way I reacted, he could tell I didn’t know. So he said, ‘Hi,’ and kept going.”

A shot rang out in the hallways, the one that killed Nicholson.

“The noise was out of context,” said Karen Ullom, then a secretary in the physics department offices next door. “I thought it was a book dropping.”

She soon heard that Nicholson was shot, and crawled under her desk.

News spread as Lu returned to the third floor, where researchers Iver Cairns and Paul Hansen were tending to Smith. Lu ordered them from the room and shot Smith several more times to make sure he was dead.

By then, office workers' shaky hands were shutting doorways throughout Van Allen Hall.

Gurnett and his longtime secretary heard there were shootings in the building, closed the door to his office and pushed a desk against the door. They heard a knock. They stood silently until footsteps went away.

Scott Miller, a new Iowa City Police Department trainee, was first to arrive, only a minute after the first call to police at 3:42 p.m. He was led to Nicholson, lying in a pool of blood, but then heard the gunman was now in Jessup Hall. He went there but was too late.

Lu had exited Van Allen and walked west down Jefferson Street, across one street crossing, then another, and entered Jessup, home to administrators. At the top of a short flight of stairs were Cleary's offices. Her role included investigating student complaints.

Lu asked temp secretary Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, 23, to see her. Cleary emerged from her offices, and Lu shot her. He then turned the gun on Rodolfo-Sioson, who was rising in her chair as the bullet struck her in the mouth. She survived, but was paralyzed for the rest of her life.

He then walked to the opposite end of the hallway, to the offices of President Hunter Rawlings. Rawlings was in Ohio in advance of the Hawkeyes' football game with Ohio State.

“My assistant called from under her desk,” said Rawlings, today the interim president at Cornell University. “She had locked the door. He may have tried the door.”

Lu moved on, heading left up the stairs to the second floor, where he entered room 203. He neatly folded and placed his tan jacket over a chair. The next thing he heard may have been the footsteps of Iowa City Police Chief R.J. Winkelhake.

The chief had heard the first emergency calls, and because the department was short-handed that day, sped to the scene at Jessup, where his wife worked as a secretary on the second floor.

He saw that two women were shot, and began checking rooms, where people were grabbing unaware passersby to bring them in for safety. Several doors were locked, with no one inside. He ordered an officer, “Give me the shotgun,” and climbed to the second floor.

“There was my husband wearing his uniform with a regular jacket over it,” Kathy Winkelhake said from the couple’s Galena, Ill., home. “I had never seen him with a shotgun.”

She had already heard that Cleary was shot, a woman she called everybody’s “mother or favorite aunt,” who had a special affinity for foreign students. She told her husband she heard a shot down the hall. As the wife of an officer, she knew the sound of gunfire.

Winkelhake entered room 203 and saw Lu lying on the far side of the room behind a table. He saw the gun, leaped to the top of the table and ordered another officer to handcuff Lu, only then realizing that he was likely dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

He returned to his wife.

“You are safe now,” he said.

Soon officers were combing through Lu’s apartment on East Jefferson Street. According to police files, they found this note in an old Greyhound envelope presumably once holding a bus ticket: “Cowboy action is the only action against corporate crime.”

The new director of university relations, Ann Rhodes, had scurried to Jessup that day to see the scene firsthand and to tell people what had happened and whether they were safe. She saw Lu lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

Like so many horrible, lingering memories carried by others at the university over the next 25 years, the image is something she will never forget.

Coming Monday: Memories of deadly day haunt survivors

Memorial event Tuesday

A 25th anniversary remembrance of the UI campus shooting will be held 4:30 p.m. Nov. 1, on the north side of Old Capitol between Jessup and Macbride halls. The ceremony will include a brief program with remarks by P. Barry Butler, executive vice president and provost, followed by a remembrance from a representative of the department of physics and astronomy. A permanent memorial will be placed on the north side of Old Capitol at a later date.