It was 50 years ago on this day, a drizzly Wednesday afternoon on August 11th, 1976, terror gripped downtown Wichita for 11 minutes during a deadly shooting spree.
A gunman, 19-year-old Michael Soles from Oklahoma, distraught over a break-up with a girlfriend and the loss of his job, made his way to the top of the 26-story Holiday Inn Plaza in downtown Wichita, west of Douglas & Main -- at that time, it was the tallest building in Kansas.
Armed with two rifles and a lunch-pail full of ammunition, he fired randomly at people on the streets below, killing three men and wounding other victims before law enforcement personnel shot him in the legs, stopped the siege, and took him into custody.
Three men were killed that day (loan officer Mark Falen, free-lance photographer Joe Goulart, who was covering the shooting, and glass-company employee Elmer Hensley), and multiple others were wounded.
Soles is still serving time in prison for multiple convictions of first-degree murder; he's currently being held in Winfield; he is currently the third longest-tenured inmate in the Kansas prison system. He's been denied parole and requests for clemency multiple times during the years.
The Holiday Inn shooting was among the first few mass shooting incidents in which the shooter opened fire at their victims from a high floor or rooftop of a building. One of them was the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting, where Marine veteran Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people from atop the tower on campus; another case was a sniper atop a hotel in New Orleans who killed nine people in 1973.
