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Charles Joseph Whitman

whitman000.jpg


A.K.A.: "The Texas Tower Sniper"

Classification: Mass murderer
Characteristics: Parricide - Shooting rampage
Number of victims: 15 + 1
Date of murders: August 1, 1966
Date of birth: June 24, 1941
Victims profile: His mother Margaret Whitman (43) / His wife Kathy Whitman (23) / Edna Townsley (47) / Mark Gabour (16) / Marguerite Lamport (45) / Paul Sonntag (18) / Claudia Rutt (18) / Roy Dell Schmidt (29) / Thomas Aquinas Ashton (22) / Thomas Eckmann (18) / Baby Boy Wilson (unborn) / Thomas Karr (24) / Karen Griffith (17) / Doctor Robert Boyer (32) / Harry Walchuk (39) / Billy Speed (22)
Method of murder: Shooting
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Status: Shot and killed by Austin Police Officer Houston McCoy the same day



After killing his mother and wife, went to the top of the University clock tower after the lunch break and began to pick off the stragglers who remained.

3 police and one retired Air Force Tailgunner found their way into the Tower, where they shot him 6 times with a .38, and twice in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun from 5 feet away.

Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin who shot and killed 14 people (including those who survived the initial shooting but later died as a result of their injuries) and wounded 31 others from the observation deck of the University's Main Building of The University of Texas at Austin on August 1, 1966, after murdering his wife and mother, and before being shot by Austin police.

The autopsy requested in the suicide note left by Whitman revealed that he had a brain tumor. This has led to speculation that the tumor was responsible for his rampage.

Background

A widely released image, of Charles Whitman on a family vacation holding two rifles.The eldest of three brothers raised on South L Street in Lake Worth, Florida, Whitman, who had scored 138 on an IQ test at the age of 6, attended St. Ann's High School in Palm Beach, where he was a pitcher on the school's baseball team. He also took five years of piano lessons.

All three brothers served as altar boys at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, and Whitman chose the Confirmation name Joseph for himself. As a 12-year-old, he was among the youngest ever to achieve Eagle Scout, to his father's delight.

When Whitman was 14 and still serving as an altar boy, his Scout leader Joseph Leduc completed seminary and served as the priest of Sacred Heart for a month. Leduc, later a confidant of Whitman, was a family friend who had accompanied Whitman and his father on several hunting trips. At the age of 16, Whitman underwent a routine appendectomy and was hospitalized following a motorcycle accident.

The wedding of Kathy Leissner and Charles WhitmanAgainst his father's wishes, Whitman joined the Marines on July 6, 1959. He explained to Fr. Leduc that he had come home drunk several weeks earlier and his father had hit him repeatedly and pushed him into the family's swimming pool.

While Whitman was aboard a train headed towards Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, his father telephoned "some branch of Federal Government" to have his son's enlistment cancelled, but was rebuffed.

Following his enlistment, Whitman was accepted into the University of Texas' mechanical engineering program on September 15, 1961 through a USMC scholarship. His hobbies at this point included karate, scuba diving, and hunting. This last hobby got him into trouble at the University, when he was involved in a "teenage prank" in which he shot a deer, dragged it to his dormitory, and skinned it in his shower. As a result of both this incident and sub-standard grades, Whitman's scholarship was withdrawn in 1963.

In August 1962, Whitman married Kathleen Frances Leissner, another University of Texas student, in a wedding that was held in Kathy's hometown of Needville, Texas, but presided over by Fr. Leduc.

The following year, he returned to active duty at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he was both promoted to Lance Corporal and involved in an accident in which his Jeep rolled over an embankment. After rescuing his pinned comrade, Whitman was hospitalized for four days.

That November, Whitman was court-martialed for gambling, possessing a personal firearm on base, and threatening another Marine over a $30 loan for which Whitman demanded $15 interest. He was sentenced to 30 days of confinement and 90 days of hard labor and was demoted to the rank of Private.

In December 1964, Whitman was honorably discharged from the Marines and returned to the University of Texas, this time enrolling in its architectural engineering program. Now lacking his scholarship, Whitman worked first as a bill collector for Standard Finance Company and later as a bank teller at Austin National Bank.

By 1965, he had taken a temporary job with Central Freight Lines and worked as a traffic surveyor for the Texas Highway Department. He also volunteered as a Scoutmaster for Austin Scout Troop 5, while Kathy worked as a biology teacher at Lanier High School.

Family issues

The Whitman family had a long history of dysfunctionality. By 1966, Whitman's mother Margaret had announced she was divorcing his father. Whitman drove to Florida to help his mother move to Austin, Texas, where she found work in a cafeteria. The move prompted his youngest brother John to move out, as well. Meanwhile, his brother Patrick decided to continue living with their father, whose plumbing business employed him.

Whitman's father began to telephone Whitman several times a week, pleading with him to convince his mother to give the marriage another try, but Whitman refused.

Shortly afterwards, John was arrested for throwing a rock through a window and released after paying a $25 fine.

Declining health

Whitman's daily journal.In 1966, Whitman discussed his depression with the University's doctor, Jan Cochrun, who prescribed Valium and recommended he visit campus psychiatrist Maurice Dean Heatly. On March 29, 1966, Whitman met with Heatly and spent an hour explaining his frustration with his parents' separation and his increasing strains at work and school.

During the interview, he made a remark about feeling the urge to "start shooting people with a deer rifle" from the University tower. Heatly noted that Whitman was "oozing with hostility", yet never returned. Whitman mentioned the visit with Heatly in his final suicide notes, saying that it was to "no avail". By the summer, Whitman was prescribed Dexedrine.

Although Whitman had been prescribed drugs, the autopsy could not establish if he had consumed any prior to the attacks. However, it was revealed during the autopsy that Whitman had a cancerous glioblastoma tumor in the hypothalamus region of his brain. Some have theorized that it may have been pressed against the nearby amygdala, which can affect emotive passion. This has led some neurologists to speculate that his medical condition was in some way responsible for the attacks.

Fr. Leduc met with Whitman for the last time two months prior to the shootings and said that Whitman had confided that he had lost his faith, and no longer considered himself a practicing Catholic.

After the attacks, a study of Whitman's journal showed him lamenting that he had acted violently towards Kathy, and that he was resolved both not to follow his father's abusive example and to be a good husband. However, John and Fran Morgan, close friends of Whitman's, later told the Department of Public Safety that he had confided in them that he had struck Kathy on three occasions.

Leadup to the shootings

Six images from the two rolls of film Whitman asked to be developed. They highlight a trip to Barton Springs and a trip with Kathy and his brother John to the Alamo.The day before the shootings, Whitman purchased binoculars and a knife from Davis' Hardware, as well as Spam from a 7-Eleven store. He then picked up Kathy from her summer job as a Bell operator, and they went to a matinée before meeting his mother for lunch at her job.

Around 4:00 PM, they went to visit friends John and Fran Morgan, who lived in the same neighborhood. They left at approximately 5:30 so that Kathy could leave for her 6:00-10:00 PM shift that night. At 6:45, Whitman began typing his suicide note, a portion of which read:

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

The note explained that he had decided to murder both his mother and wife, but made no mention of the coming attacks at the university. He also requested that an autopsy be done after his death, to determine if there had been anything to explain his actions and increasing headaches. He willed any money from his estate to mental health research, saying that he hoped it would prevent others from following his route.

Margaret Whitman, as found by policeJust after midnight, he killed his mother Margaret. The exact method is disputed, but it seemed he had rendered her unconscious before stabbing her in the heart. He returned to his suicide note, now writing by hand:

To Whom It May Concern: I have just taken my mother's life. I am very upset over having done it. However, I feel that if there is a heaven she is definitely there now...I am truly sorry...Let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.

Whitman returned to his home at 906 Jewell Street and stabbed Kathy five times as she slept naked, leaving another note that read:

I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job...If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts...donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.

He wrote notes to each of his brothers and his father and left instructions in the apartment that the two canisters of film he left on the table should be developed, and the puppy Schocie should be given to Kathy's parents.

Tower shootings

Weapons

12 gauge shotgun
Remington 700 with 4x Leupold Scope
6 millimeter Remington rifle
M1 Carbine
.357 Magnum
Galesi-Brescia pistol
Luger pistol

Nesco machete, scabbard
hatchet
Ammunition box with gun-cleaning kit
Camillus hunting knife, scabbard
Randall knife inscribed with name
Locking pocketknife
1' steel rebar
Hunter's body bag
Whitman's gear
Channel Master 14 transistor radio
Blank Robinson notebook
Black Papermate pen
light green towel
White 3.5 gallon jug full of water
Red 3.5 gallon jug of gasoline
Nylon and cotton ropes, and clothesline
1954 Nabisco premium toy compass
Davis Hardware receipt
Hammer
Canteen
Binoculars
Lighter fluid, lighter and box of matches
Alarm clock manufactured by Gene
Pipe wrench
Green and white flashlight, 4 C batteries
Two rolls of tape
Green duffel bag from the Marine Corps
Extension cord
Grey gloves
Eyeglasses
Earplugs
Mennen spray deodorant
Toilet paper
Food
Twelve cans of food
Two cans of Sego condensed milk
Bread, honey and SPAM (incl. sandwiches)
Planters Peanuts and raisins
Sweet rolls

At 5:45 A.m. on August 1, 1966, Whitman phoned Kathy's supervisor at Bell to explain that she was sick and could not make her shift that day. He made a similar phone call to Margaret's workplace about five hours later.

Whitman rented a dolly from Austin Rental Company and cashed $250 worth of checks at the bank before returning to Davis' Hardware and purchasing an M1 Carbine, explaining that he wanted to go hunting for wild hogs. He also went to Sears and purchased a shotgun and a green rifle case.

After sawing off the shotgun barrel while chatting with postman Chester Arrington, Whitman packed it together with a Remington 700 bolt-action hunting rifle with a 4x Leupold Scope, the M1 Carbine, a 6mm Remington rifle, three pistols, and various other equipment stowed between a wooden crate and his Marine footlocker. Before heading to the tower, he put khaki coveralls on over his shirt and jeans and under a green jacket. Once in the tower, he also donned a white sweatband.

Pushing the rented dolly carrying his equipment, Whitman met security guard Jack Rodman and obtained a parking pass, claiming he had a delivery to make and showing Rodman a card identifying him as a research assistant for the school. He entered the Main Building shortly after 11:30 AM, where he struggled with the elevator until employee Vera Palmer informed him that it had not been powered and turned it on for him. He thanked her and took the elevator to the top floor of the Tower, just beneath the clock face.

Whitman then lugged his trunk up three flights of stairs to the observation deck area, where he found a receptionist named Edna Townsley. He knocked her unconscious with the butt of his rifle and concealed her body behind a couch; she later died from her injuries. Moments later, Cheryl Botts and Don Walden, a young couple who had been sightseeing on the deck, returned to the attendant's area, encountering Whitman, who was holding a rifle in each hand. Botts later claimed that she believed that the large red stain on the floor was varnish. Whitman and the young couple spoke briefly and the couple left the room. When they were gone, Whitman barricaded the stairway.

Shortly afterwards, two families of tourists were on their way up the stairs when they encountered the barricade. Michael Gabour was attempting to look beyond the barricade when Whitman fired the shotgun at him. Whitman continued to shoot as the families ran back down the stairs. Mark Gabour and his aunt Marguerite Lamport died almost instantly; Michael and his mother Mary were permanently disabled.

Sniper fire commences

Main Building of The University of Texas at Austin. Guadalupe Street is out of frame to the right. (Dobie Center, in the background, was not constructed until 1972.)

The first shots from the tower's outer deck came at approximately 11:48 AM. A history professor was the first to phone the Austin Police Department, after seeing several students shot in the South Mall gathering center; many others had dismissed the rifle reports, not realizing there actually was gunfire.

Eventually, the shootings caused panic as news spread and, after the situation was understood, all active police officers in Austin were ordered to the campus. Other off-duty officers, sheriff's deputies, and Texas Department of Public Safety officers also converged on the area to assist.

Once Whitman began facing return gunfire from the authorities, he used the waterspouts on each side of the tower as loop holes, which allowed him to continue shooting largely protected from the gunfire below, which had grown to include civilians who had brought out their personal firearms to assist police.

Ramiro Martinez, an officer credited with neutralizing Whitman's threat, later stated in his book that the civilian shooters should be credited, as they made it difficult for Whitman to take careful aim without being hit. Police lieutenant and sharpshooter Marion Lee reported from a small airplane that there was only one sniper firing from the parapet. The plane circled the tower trying to get a shot at Whitman, until it came under fire and was forced to retreat.

Whitman's choice of victims was apparently indiscriminate, and most of them were shot on Guadalupe Street, a major commercial and business district across from the west side of the campus. Efforts to reach the wounded included an armored car and ambulances run by local funeral homes. Ambulance driver Morris Hohmann was responding to victims on West 23rd Street when he was shot in a leg artery.

Another ambulance driver quickly attended to Hohmann, who was then taken about ten blocks south of UT to Brackenridge Hospital and the only local emergency room. The Brackenridge administrator declared an emergency, and medical staff raced there to reinforce the on-duty shifts. Following the shootings, queues at both Brackenridge and the Travis County Blood Bank stretched for blocks as people hurried to donate blood.

Charles Whitman police report

Police Officer Conner and DPS Agent Cowan remained inside the University to cover the windows on the southeast and northeast sides of the reception area. Meanwhile three other officers, Ramiro Martinez, Houston McCoy, and Jerry Day took hastily deputized citizen Allen Crum up towards the observation deck.

Martinez and McCoy, armed respectively with a .38 revolver and a shotgun, went out on the observation deck, proceeded to the north-east corner of the deck, and spotted Whitman seated on the floor of the north-west corner, watching the south-west corner for any signs of police.

Which of the officers actually killed Whitman has been disputed; both claimed responsibility. McCoy fired his shotgun twice, and Martinez fired six rounds from his revolver before taking the shotgun and approaching the limp Whitman and firing again point-blank. Day then took the green towel that Whitman had brought with him, and waved it to those below, indicating that the sniper had been killed.

Although Whitman had requested cremation in his suicide note, this was not carried out: Whitman and his mother shared a funeral service officiated by Fr. Tom Anglim at his home parish of Sacred Heart in Lake Worth. Due to his status as a former Marine, Whitman had a casket draped with an American flag for his burial in Section 16 of the Hillcrest Memorial Park in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Casualties

Killed

Margaret Whitman, killed in her apartment

Kathy Whitman, killed while she slept

Edna Townsley, receptionist

Marguerite Lamport, killed by shotgun on stairs

Mark Gabour, killed by shotgun on stairs

Thomas Eckman, shoulder wound, kneeling over Claire Wilson

Robert Boyer, back wound, visiting physics professor

Thomas Ashton, chest wound, Peace Corps trainee

Thomas Karr, spine wound

Billy Speed, police officer, shoulder/chest wound

Harry Walchuk, doctoral student and father of six

Paul Sonntag, shot through the mouth, age 18, hiding behind construction

Claudia Rutt, age 18, killed helping fiancé Sonntag

Roy Schmidt, electrician shot outside his truck

Karen Griffith, chest wound, age 17, died after week in hospital°

Unborn Child

David Gunby, survived the initial shooting but required life-long dialysis as a result of his injuries. More than 30 years after the shooting, he announced he was quitting dialysis and died within a week as a result.

° Survived the initial shooting and later died in hospital

Wounded

Allen, John Scott
Bedford, Billy
Ehlke, Roland
Evgenides, Ellen
Esparza, Avelino
Foster, F. L.
Frede, Robert
Gabour, Mary Frances
Gabour, Michael
Garcia, Irma
Harvey, Nancy
Heard, Robert
Hernandez, Alex
Hohmann, Morris
Huffman, Devereau
Kelley, Homar J.
Khashab, Abdul
Littlefield, Brenda Gail
Littlefield, Adrian
Martinez, Dello
Martinez, Marina
Mattson, David
Ortega, Delores
Paulos, Janet
Phillips, Lana
Rovela, Oscar
Snowden, Billy
Stewart, C. A.
Wilson, Claire
Wilson, Sandra
Wheeler, Carla Sue

Aftermath

Extra Houston Chronicle, released within two hours of the shooting.Together with the Watts riots of the early 1960s, Charles Whitman's shootings were considered the impetus for establishing SWAT teams and other task forces to deal with situations beyond normal police procedures. It also led President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for stricter gun control policies.

After the tragedy, the Tower's observation deck was closed for two years, reopening in 1968. However, after several suicides, it was closed again in 1974 and remained closed until September 15, 1999. Access to the tower is now tightly controlled through guided tours that are scheduled by appointment only, during which, metal detectors and other security measures are in place. Repaired scars from bullets are still visible on the limestone walls.

Houston McCoy was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 1998 by Dr. Mink of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Waco, Texas, who related the diagnosis to the tower tragedy three decades earlier. As of 2007, he is living in western Texas.

Ramiro Martinez became a narcotics investigator, a Texas Ranger, and a Justice of the Peace in New Braunfels, Texas. In 2003, Martinez published his memoirs entitled, They Call Me Ranger Ray: From the UT Tower Sniper to Corruption in South Texas.

On November 12, 2001, David Gunby died of long-term kidney complications from a wound he received while on the South Mall. He had been born with only one functioning kidney, which was nearly destroyed by Whitman's shot. After the prospect of losing his eyesight, he refused further treatment and died shortly thereafter. The Tarrant County Coroner's report listed the cause of death as "homicide."

References in popular culture

Though many are unaware of the exact details surrounding the event, Whitman's tower spree has remained at the forefront of public consciousness, as evidenced by many references in popular music, literature, film, and TV.

1966 — A photograph of Whitman appears on the August 12 cover of Time, highlighting an article entitled, "The Psychotic & Society."

1966 — He also appears on the cover of Life for an article entitled, "The Texas Sniper."

1968 — The poem "Dream Song 135" in John Berryman's His Toy, His Dream, His Rest references Whitman, the murder of his wife and mother, and the clock tower shootings.

1968 — Peter Bogdanovich's film Targets, largely inspired by the Whitman case, is released; it describes a man murdering his mother and wife, then embarking on a sniper spree.

1972 — Harry Chapin records an album entitled, Sniper and Other Love Songs. "Sniper," the album's title song, was recorded from both first and third-person points of view, referencing Whitman's issues with his mother and highlighting his isolation.

1973 — Texas singer Kinky Friedman records "The Ballad of Charles Whitman," a satirical tune, on the album Sold American. Friedman attended the University of Texas and graduated in 1966, a few months prior to the shooting.

1974 Movie Groove Tube Sketch Charles Whitman Invitational

1975 — The made-for-TV film The Deadly Tower stars Kurt Russell as Whitman. Officer Ramiro Martinez later sued the producers for its portrayal of him and his wife; Officer Houston McCoy also sued. Martinez settled out of court, but McCoy received no settlement.

1987 — The movie Full Metal Jacket contains a scene in which a USMC drill instructor tells his recruits that Whitman's phenomenal accuracy was a result of his training as a rifleman in the Marines.

1991 — In the movie Slacker, filmed on location in Austin, the Old Anarchist (Louis Mackey) proclaims, "Now Charles Whitman, there was a man...!"

1993 — The movie True Romance references Whitman in the hotel scene with the drug collector and Alabama Worley by way of the line, "You know that guy in Texas...."

1993 — Macabre includes a song about Whitman called "Sniper in the Sky" on the album Sinister Slaughter.

1994 — In the movie Natural Born Killers, Detective Scagnetti tells Warden McClusky that he hunts serial killers because, as a boy in Texas, he was holding his mother's hand when one of the bullets had fatally wounded her.

1994 — The same year, a scene on an episode of The Simpsons entitled, "Homer Loves Flanders" features a scene inspired by the massacre.

1996 — Whitman features prominently in an episode of American Justice entitled, "Mass Murderer: An American Tragedy."

1996 — The movie The Delicate Art of the Rifle features a character based on Charles Whitman and tells of a clock tower shooting from the shooter's point of view.

1996 - In the movie Do not Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, a man portrayed as Whitman shoots Malik from a tower as he goes on to college.

1997 — On the television program Murder One, attorney Arnold Spivak (J. C. MacKenzie) notes the difference between a serial killer and a mass murderer by invoking the Whitman massacre in some level of detail; the reference is prompted by his firm's defense of Clifford Banks, a serial killer played by Pruitt Taylor Vince.

1998 — The book Cat & Mouse by James Patterson, contains numerous references to (fictional) killer Gary Soneji, including his fantasies of being with Whitman in the bell tower.

2000 - In his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain makes several joking references to people under severe stress being considered likely to snap and become Whitmanesque clock tower snipers.

2001 — Dateline NBC broadcasts a special on the tower tragedy in a special called "Catastrophe." The same year, Fox's World's Wildest Police Videos shows a brief clip of the tragedy in a segment about the history of SWAT teams.

2002 — In the CSI: Miami episode "Kill Zone" Calleigh Duquesne mentions Whitman's 14 kills in reference to the skill of snipers.

2002 — Rock band Tomahawk implores the crowd to chant Whitman's name instead of booing during a show with Tool in Austin on July 26.

2006 — On Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Whitman is mentioned in the song "Down There by the Train."

2006 — In the manga Black Lagoon, Dutch likens Revy's homicidal tendencies to those of "Charles fucking Whitman".

2007 — On their album The Tempest, rap duo Insane Clown Posse tell their take of Whitman on the track "The Tower". The director's commentary for Texas Chainsaw Massacre mentions that during filming, the crew were approached by a sheriff who objected to their blocking off a road, and informed them he had been the officer shooting at Whitman from the plane.

Further reading

Clarke, James W. (1990). On Being Mad or Merely Angry: John W. Hinckley, Jr. and Other Dangerous People. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691078521.

Douglas, John; Olshaker, Mark (1999). The Anatomy of Motive. Scribner. ISBN 0-7567-5292-2.

Lavergne, Gary M. (1997). A Sniper in the Tower. University of North Texas Press. ISBN 1-57441-029-6.

Levin, Jack; Fox, James Alan (1985). Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace. New York: Plenum Press. ISBN 0-306-41943-2.

Martinez, Ramiro (2005). They Call Me Ranger Ray: From the UT Tower Sniper to Corruption in South Texas. New Braunfels: Rio Bravo Publishing. ISBN 0976016206.

O'Brien, Bill (2000). Agents of Mayhem. Auckland: Bateman, Ltd.. ISBN 1-86953-423-9.

Tobias, Ronald (1981). They Shoot to Kill: A Psycho-History of Criminal Sniping. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press. ISBN 0-87364-207-4.

Wikipedia.org

Charles Whitman

Charlie was born on 24 June 1941, the first of three boys, to Charles and Margaret Whitman; the second boy was called Patrick and the youngest John. The Whitman’s were aspiring, upwardly mobile people – to all outward appearances a model American family – and Charles Jun. Was a model American boy, the kind mothers of contumacious youngsters looked at with wistful hearts. Charles was "high spirited and lots of fun as a child, but gave no trouble," according to Mrs. L.J. Holleran, who lived across the street from the Whitman’s’ large, ranch-style bungalow. Other neighbours held a similarly high opinion of him.

In his youth, Charlie was an Eagle Scout – at the time, one of the youngest to make the grade – and later he won the Boy Scout "God and Country" award. He was also an altar boy, an achievement that was especially pleasing for his mother, a devout Roman Catholic. Margaret doted on all three boys but had a particular soft spot for her first born.

Charlie had a paper round, delivering the Palm Beach Post, and if it rained she would drive him around the route. Charles Whitman Sen., a successful plumbing contractor – a self-made man and proud of it – also indulged his sons: "I was raised as an orphan, and didn’t have the advantages my boys did. So I gave them everything I could – cars when they were just kids, that kind of thing."

There were, though, strings attached to the father’s material generosity: "I was a strict father… With all three of my sons, it was ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir.’ They minded me." Margaret minded him, too: "I did on many occasions beat my wife… I have to admit it, because of my temper, I knocked her around. But my wife was a fine woman and she understood my nature."

If there were certain of his father’s predilections that the young Charlie found unpalatable, there were others for which he acquired an immediate taste. Charles Sen. Was a self-confessed gun fanatic and there were guns hanging in just about every room of the house. Charlie’s training in the use of firearms began just as soon as he was strong enough to hold them steady. He was, according to his father, "always a crack shot" and, by the time he graduated from Cardinal Newman High School, could plug a squirrel in the eye.

On 6 July 1959, twelve days after his eighteenth birthday, Whitman enlisted in the marines. With his powerful physique – he was six-foot tall and weighed 200 pounds – his good looks, and his neatly cropped, blond hair, he seemed the quintessential all-American boy. A successful career in the Marine Corps looked very much on the cards. To begin with, things went well for him. He gained the rifle rating of sharpshooter, scoring 215 points out of a possible 250, and he qualified for a navy scientific training programme at the University of Texas in Austin, which would have given him the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree and an officer’s commission.

He began his studies at UT-Austin in September 1961. He was soon dating a fellow student, Kathleen Leissner, a trainee schoolteacher. Kathy was a couple years younger than Charlie and the only daughter of a Texan rice farmer and real estate man. She was a pretty, brown-haired girl and she and Charlie were "the perfect couple," according to Frank Greenhaw, a close friend. They married in the summer of 1962.

Less than a year after the wedding, Whitman received a setback. In February 1963, he was forced to quit the University of Texas, apparently because of unsatisfactory academic progress, and was posted to the Second Marine Division, at Camp Lejeune in South Carolina. Having blown his chance of a speedy rise in the ranks, he found it difficult to readjust to life as a regular marine.

After a string of violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, through the summer and early autumn of 1963, he was court-martialled in November. Whitman pleaded guilty to possessing a .25-calibre pistol aboard the USS Raleigh in July, and to possessing the same weapon at Camp Lejeune in October, along with two rounds of 7.62-mm ammunition (the standard round for an M-14 rifle); he pleaded guilty to ten instances of lending money for interest and to gambling with a member of his unit. In addition, he denied a charge of "communicating a threat to another marine to knock his teeth out," but was found guilty of that, too.

Things had gone from bad to worse for him. Not only had his failure at UT-Austin prevented him from gaining an officer’s commission, but the court martial resulted in his being demoted from corporal to private. He also received thirty days’ hard labour. On 4 December 1964, Pfc. C.J. Whitman was honourably discharged from the Marine Corps.

Two years after his failure on the navy-sponsored programme at the University of Texas, he returned to Austin and enrolled in a mechanical engineering programme. Kathy had by this time graduated from the university and was teaching science at Austin’s Lanier High School. On a tight budget, the couple took a small brick cottage in Jewell Street, in a modest suburb of the city south of the Colorado River. Charlie hung a stout rope from the pecan tree in the yard, on which he would do his Marine Corps exercises to the delight of neighbourhood children.

He did not last long on the mechanical engineering course and switched to architectural engineering because, according to his faculty advisor, Dr. Leonardt Kreisle, he felt he "could express his artistic talents better." Study does not appear to have come easily to Whitman. His friend Frank Greenhaw was not the only one to notice how hard the ex-marine had to work in order to maintain a B average for the course: "Charlie would stay up studying all night in the engineering building, sometimes putting his head down on the drafting table for a nap. And in the morning Kathy would come up with his breakfast."

In the spring of 1966, Margaret Whitman telephoned her eldest son from the family home in Florida, telling him that she was going to leave her husband. Charlie drove down to Lake Worth, picked her up, and returned with her to Austin. She moved into an apartment across the river from her son and daughter-in-law’s house, and apparently took a job as a cashier in a cafeteria.

Pressure was beginning to mount on Whitman. He had less than a year to go to graduation and had registered for an unusually heavy fourteen-hour course load that summer. He quit as a scoutmaster with a local troop, worried that he would be unable to maintain a good grade average, but continued to work part time, about three hours a day (he had a string of casual jobs while at college, including one as a collector for a finance company). On top of the pressures of work and study, he was anxious about his mother. "He took very good care of her and tried to see that she wasn’t overworked. She was always over at Charlie’s and Kathy’s" according to the manager of the Penthouse Apartments, where Margaret lived.

Charlie was also being subjected to a torrent of telephone calls from his father, petitioning him to persuade his mother to return to Lake Worth. Charles Sen. was "not ashamed of the fact I spent a thousand dollars a month on the phone bill, begging her to come back. I loved my wife dearly, my sons dearly, and I wanted our home to be happy. I kept begging Charlie to come back to me, too… I promised Charlie that if he’d only persuade his Mama to come back, I’d swear never to lay a hand on her."

Charlie began to suffer headaches and other signs of stress; he complained to friends about overwork and mental strain. Larry Fuess, a fellow engineering student and one of Charlie’s closet friends, called at the Whitman’s place soon after Margaret moved to town.

"I walked into Charlie’s one morning and he was packing his bags. He said he was going to leave everything – school, his wife, everything – and become a bum." Fuess and Whitman talked a while and in the end Charlie abandoned the plan. He stayed on in Austin but, he was no longer the "happy Charlie" his friends knew.

One man's massacre

In the early evening of Sunday 31 July 1966, Whitman sat down at his desk in the living room of the house on Jewell Street. The temperature had been up in the mid-nineties during the afternoon and it was still very hot. Outside, the lawns, parched by the summer sun, were full of dust. A month earlier, the United States had begun bombing targets in the demilitarized zone in Vietnam and had launched the first attacks against Hanoi, the North Vietnam capital, and the port city of Haiphong. Whitman put a sheet of paper in an old, portable typewriter and started to type: To whom it may concern. I don't understand what is compelling me to type this note. I've been having fears and violent impulses. I've had some tremendous headaches ...

At about 7:30 P.M. he was interrupted by a visit from Larry Fuess and his wife, Elaine. The Fuesses asked him what he was writing and he replied, "Letters to old friends," and put the sheet away. Larry Fuess would later recall that Charlie "was in good spirits. It didn't seem like anything at all was bothering him. In fact it was strange because he had a test the next day and usually he was very tense before tests ... Looking back, it seemed that he was particularly relieved about something - you know, as if you had solved a problem."

Whitman and the Fuesses chatted generally for an hour or so, and at one point the conversation turned to Vietnam. Whitman "said he couldn't understand why boys from the United States had to go over there and die for something they didn't have anything to do with." When Larry and Elaine left, Charlie returned to his typewriter. I intend to kill Kathy. I love her very much, he wrote. I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don't want her to face the embarrassment that my actions will surely cause. He did not elaborate on what these actions might be, but did write: I am prepared to die.

At about 10:00 P.M. Whitman drove into town to pick up Kathy from the Southwestern Bell Telephone office where she was working the summer as an information operator. He dropped her off at home and then went out again to visit his mother. At the Penthouse Apartments, he stabbed his mother in the chest and shot her in the back of the head. Margaret may have put up a struggle because several bones in her left hand were broken with such force that the band of her engagement ring was driven into her finger. Detectives would find her body the next day, together with a letter in her son's neat handwriting: I have just killed my mother. If there's a heaven, she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart. He left the Penthouse Apartments at around midnight, pinning another note on his dead mother's door: Roy, mother ill and not able to come to work today. Then he drove home.

In the first hour of the morning of Monday 1 August, Whitman appended a hand-written note to the letter he had earlier composed on the typewriter: 1230 A.M. - mother already dead. At 3:00 A.M. he added his final remark: Wife and mother both dead. He had stabbed Kathy three times in the chest, apparently as she slept, and carefully wrapped her naked body in a bed sheet. At 5:45 A.M. he telephoned Kathy's supervisor at Southwestern Bell. She was scheduled to start a shift at half past eight that morning. He told the supervisor that she was ill and would not be in for work.

At 7:15 A.M. Whitman drove to the Austin Rental Equipment Service office and hired for cash a three-wheeled dolly, used for moving crates. At the drive-in window of an Austin bank, he cashed two $125 cheques; one of the cheques was on his account and nearly depleted it, and the other was on his mother's. At the Davis Hardware store, he bought a reconditioned Second World War .30-calibre M-1 carbine, and at Chuck's Gun Shop, several magazines for the M-1 and ammunition for it and for other rifles. He paid the bill by cheque for which there were now insufficient funds in his account. A clerk inquired, with friendly interest, what he wanted all the ammunition for and he replied, "To shoot some pigs." The clerk thought nothing of it; plenty of Austin hunters liked to shoot wild pig.

At 9:30 A.M. Whitman appeared at the large, modem Sears Roebuck department store in downtown Austin. He bought a twelve-gauge shotgun on credit and during the next hour sawed off part of the stock and barrel. He put the shotgun in his old marine corps footlocker, together with the M-1 carbine he had bought. Then, he added a 6-mm Remington bolt-action rifle with a four-power Leupold telescopic sight, a .35-calibre Remington pump rifle, a 9-mm Luger pistol, a .25-calibre Galesi-Brescia pistol, a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver, and well over 500 rounds of ammunition. Some of his guns, including two Derringer pistols, he decided to leave at home. All his weapons were legally owned.

In addition to the firearms, he also packed into the footlocker a Bowie knife, machete and hatchet, two jerry cans - one filled with water, the other with petrol - matches, lighter fuel, adhesive tape, rope, a flashlight, a clock and a transistor radio, various canned foods, including Spam and fruit cocktail, packets of raisins, a bottle of deodorant and a roll of toilet paper.

It was about 11:00 A.M. and 90 degrees Fahrenheit when Whitman's Chevrolet rolled into a parking area reserved for executives at the northwest comer of the 307-foot tall Main Building of the University of Texas. The granite tower, housing the university's library and administrative offices, and the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, dominated the campus of otherwise low, Spanish-style buildings with terracotta roofs. Whitman, wearing a grey, nylon boiler suit over his blue jeans' white shirt and tennis shoes, loaded his marine corps footlocker onto the rented dolly and wheeled it into the Main Building. He smiled at a receptionist, who assumed he was a maintenance man, and headed across the marble hall towards the two automatic lifts.

The lift went as far as the twenty-seventh floor, and Whitman hauled the trunk up the last few flights of steps to the top floor. Mrs. Edna Townsley, the receptionist on the top-floor observation deck, apparently approached him to see what it was he wanted. Whitman smashed her over the head with the butt of a rifle, with such force that part of her skull was torn away. He then dragged her limp body behind a couch in the reception room, put a bullet in her head and left her for dead. She actually died some two hours later.

As Whitman manhandled the footlocker over to the door that led out onto the open walkway around the top of the tower, a group of sightseers arrived in the lift on the twenty-seventh floor: M.J. Gabour, a gas station operator, his wife, Mary, and their two sons, 19-year-old Mike, a cadet at the Air Force Academy, and 15-year-old Mark. Accompanying them were Gabour's sister, Mrs. Marguerite Lamport, and her husband, William.

The two teenage boys were the first members of the party to reach the top floor, a few steps ahead of their mother and aunt. The women's husbands trailed a little behind. "Mark opened the door to the observation deck and a gun went off," Gabour later recalled. "Mike screamed." A sawn-off shotgun was discharged twice in rapid succession. Mary, Marguerite, Mike and Mark, Gabour said, "came rolling down the stairs. Whoever did the shooting slammed the door." Gabour and Lamport hauled the four victims down to the twenty-seventh floor. Mark was already dead.

Whitman, meanwhile, had barricaded the door from the stairs to the reception room and now had the entire observation deck to himself. He went out onto the open walkway and looked over the chest-high, stone parapet. Immediately above him, the south clock face was reading ten to twelve. Above the clock was the bell tower and above the bell tower nothing but clear blue sky. Mapped out below him was the 232-acre university campus, the whole of the city of Austin and sixty-five miles of Texas countryside in whichever direction he looked: to the south and east, lush farmland; to the west, distant, mist-veiled mountains and the road to the LBJ Ranch where one night, five years earlier, he and a couple of companions shot a deer after it became trapped in the headlights of their car.

Someone had noticed the automobile, with the young buck lashed to the back of it, and telephoned the licence number to the Texas Game and Fish Commission. At 4:30 A.M. on the morning of 20 November 1961, Game Warder Grover Simpson and three Austin police officers found Charlie and his roommates dressing the deer in a dormitory bathroom. Now, five years on, Whitman was poaching people. He opened fire from the top of the tower and the huge bell, twenty feet above his head, began to chime. It was high noon in Austin.

A newsboy, 17-year-old Alec Hernandez, suddenly teetered and fell from his bicycle. Denver Dolman, a bookstore operator on the edge of the campus, unaware that a high velocity bullet had just drilled through the newsboy's groin, looked on - bemused by what appeared to be an inexplicable cycling accident. Then, he heard gunshots and all around him "people started falling."

Claire Wilson, 18 years old and eight months pregnant, had just left a first-year anthropology class in the company of a fellow freshman, Thomas Eckman. The pair were strolling across the sun-drenched South Mall when a bullet struck Claire in the lower abdomen, tearing into her womb and shattering the skull of her baby. Claire survived, but the baby was stillborn. As the horrified Eckman knelt beside his wounded friend, a second shot was fired, killing him instantly.

Robert Boyer, a research physicist and lecturer in applied mathematics, had just left the Main Building to meet a friend for lunch. As he walked out onto the South Mall, heading away from the tower, he suddenly collapsed, a bullet in his back. Seeing the first victims fall, Charlotte Dareshori, a secretary in the Dean's office, rushed outside to help - but was soon under fire herself. She found refuge behind the concrete base of a flagpole and crouched there, under Old Glory, for ninety minutes, isolated but safe, one of the few people to venture out onto the exposed South Mall and survive.

Outside the Rae Ann dress shop, in a street bordering the campus to the west, chemistry student Abdul Khashab, his fiancée, Janet Paulos, and a friend Lana Phillips, all fell wounded within a few seconds of each other. A jewellery shop manager was just leaving the building to go to the aid of another trio of wounded victims on the pavement, when the shop windows shattered and bullet fragments tore into his leg. Harry Walchuk, a political scientist and graduate student working towards his doctorate, suddenly gasped, staggered backwards clasping his throat, and collapsed by a newsstand, mortally wounded. A block away, 18-year-old Paul Sonntag, a summer lifeguard at the municipal pool, was strolling north with Claudia Rutt, also 18, when Claudia suddenly clutched at her chest, cried out and slumped to the pavement. Seconds later, another bullet brought Sonntag down beside her.

Most of Whitman's victims were shot during the first twenty minutes of sniping and he relied mainly on the 6-mm Remington rifle with the four-power scope, a weapon and sight configuration with which even a moderate marksman can consistently hit a target the size of a human head at 300 yards. Thomas Karr, a senior from Fort Worth, was shot dead at just about that range to the west of the tower. Thomas Ashton, a Peace Corps trainee was shot dead to the east. North of the tower, Associated Press reporter, Robert Heard, running at full tilt, caught a bullet in the shoulder. It was a painful wound, but not sufficiently serious to prevent him from marvelling "What a shot!"

South of the tower, one of the first police officers on the scene, 23-year-old patrolman Billy Speed, took up a position behind the stone columns of a balustrade. Leland Ammons, a law student, saw the young cop suddenly go sprawling. "The shot hit him high in the shoulder," Ammons said later. "It must have either ricocheted or the bullet came through one of the slits between the fence pillars." Whichever way he was hit, it made no difference to Speed; the shot killed him.

At the top of the tower, Whitman frequently changed his position, each time finding fresh prey in his sights. Karen Griffith, a 17-year-old Austin girl, was shot in the chest and died a week later from the wounds. Four students were wounded on Twenty-fourth Street, north of the tower. Three people were wounded on the roof of the Computation Center, just east of the tower.

Meanwhile, over 100 law enforcement officers had responded to the trouble signal that had gone out over all police channels, soon after the sniping started. City cops, highway patrolmen, Texas Rangers, and even US secret servicemen from Lyndon Johnson's Austin office, had converged on the tower. Off-duty officers began showing up, as news of the shooting spread. Patrolman Ramiro Martinez was at home cooking steak when he heard a newsflash on the radio. He buckled on his service revolver and rushed to the scene. Local gun-owning citizens materialized and started shooting at the tower. A cop angrily demanded of one such public-spirited citizen what the hell he thought he was doing. The man, reportedly dressed in battle fatigues and with an M-14 rifle set up on a tripod, replied, "Just helping out."

Police desperately tried to seal off the area around the tower but Whitman's wide shooting radius and easy access to all points of the compass made the task impossible. Three blocks south of the tower, Roy Dell Schmidt, an electrician with a service call to make in the area, got out of his van to find out what a police roadblock up ahead was all about. Told to leave the area, Schmidt retreated to where a group of onlookers was gathered on the sidewalk. Suddenly, a bullet tore through his chest. "He told me we were out of range," the man who had been standing next to him revealed later.

The dead and the dying were scattered over an everwidening area as Whitman looked farther afield for his victims. A police marksman, Lieutenant Marion Lee, was sent up in a light aircraft to try to pick the sniper off. Rescuers in an armoured car worked to retrieve the wounded from the dangerous no-man's-land of the South Mall. Unintimidated by the sharpshooting cop above him or by the barrage of fire coming from the ground below him, Whitman first forced the plane to retreat, with a few accurate shots at its fuselage, and then turned his attention back to zeroing in on his human targets.

Three blocks north and two blocks west of the tower, a basketball coach, Billy Snowden, was just stepping into a barbershop when a bullet crashed into his shoulder. Way over to the southeast, two students sitting near windows were nicked by bullets. An ambulanceman, trying to help some of the wounded to the west of the tower was himself shot and wounded.

In the meantime, the hail of police bullets ricocheted from the bell turret at the top of the tower, peppered the clock faces, or chipped away at the stone parapet around the walkway - but failed to find the vulnerable flesh of the sniper's body. Whitman stayed low. Utilizing the narrow drainage ducts as gunports, he was virtually impossible to hit.

If an architect had set out to design a building with the express intention of it being used by a sniper, he could have done little better than produce the blueprint of the University of Texas tower. For more than one and a half hours, Whitman's position was unassailable. He had such an unobstructed view of the campus and its environs that police were unable to rush the building, and he was so well protected that they were unable to shoot him down at long range. It was not until a few, resourceful officers found themselves together in the tower, after gaining entry by various means - through underground conduits or by zig-zagging from building to building - that the initiative switched to the police. Ramiro Martinez, the off-duty patrolman who had abandoned his steak dinner to come to the scene, was joined by a handful of other officers, including Houston McCoy and Jerry Day, and by a civilian, Allen Crum, an employee of the university and a former air force tailgunner.

Crum was deputized on the spot. The group took the lift to the twenty-sixth floor because, Crum later explained "we didn't want to take a chance of running into [Whitman] if he was waiting for us on the twenty-seventh." Cautiously, they made their way up the final flights of steps. On the twenty-seventh floor, they came across members of the Gabour and Lamport families, some dead, some wounded and the remainder grief-stricken. While their colleagues tended to the victims, officers Martinez and McCoy, and the newly deputized Crum, continued up the stairs to the observation deck.

The door to the reception room was still barricaded. Carefully, the trio pushed against the door, easing back the desk that blocked it, until there was a sufficiently large gap to squeeze through. They were advised, by radio, of the sniper's position - he was on the north side of the roof - and Martinez crawled out onto the walkway on the south side, and began moving stealthily eastwards. Crum and McCoy followed, Crum turning to the west and McCoy backing up Martinez. Martinez rounded the southeast comer of the tower, onto the east walkway. If Whitman was in the position he was supposed to be, Martinez would find him when he turned the next comer. He made his way towards it.

Crum, meanwhile, had turned onto the west walkway. Suddenly, he heard footsteps up ahead. He fired a shot from his rifle into the northwest comer to prevent the sniper from bursting around it and shooting him. On the other side of the tower, Martinez turned cautiously onto the north walkway. Fifty feet away crouched Whitman, the M-1 in his hands. waiting for Crum at the opposite comer. Martinez raised his .38 service revolver and shot into Whitman's left side. "He jerked up the carbine toward me," the patrolman later recalled. "He couldn't keep it level. He kept trembling, going up instead of coming down with it. I don't know how many shots I fired."

In fact, he fired all six, emptying his revolver. McCoy moved up, stepped around him, and blasted Whitman with a shotgun. Martinez grabbed the shotgun: "Mat guy was still flopping and he had that carbine in his hands ... and I ran at him and shot at the same time. I got to him and saw that he was dead." Crum took a towel from Whitman's footlocker and waved it above the parapet signaling to the men on the ground that it was all over.

Charles Whitman

Whitman was the eldest of three boys, his father, also named Charles, owned his own plumbing business. Most family friends said he was the model son, good-looking, intelligent, popular and all that stuff. He was an Eagle scout, an alter boy and an accomplished pianist. The only downfall in this seemingly perfect life was his father. It seems old Charles Sr. like to make sure that everyone knew who was boss of the house, and didn't mind reinforcing his rules with violence. Remember - The 'American Dream' comes at a price.

Charles Jr.'s life got better in 1959 when he moved out of home and joined the Marines. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Texas, where he met his wife Kathy. But, as with all things good in this world, it didn't work out. He was court marshaled for money lending and gambling, which led to him loosing his scholarship. He left the marines in 1964.

Following this Whitman went back to University. he was in a hurry to graduate so he took on a big workload, taking extra classes. He was also studying to be an estate agent, and also worked part-time so his wife didn't have to support him.

In March 1966 Whitman's world began to fall apart. His parents broke up and his temper began to get worse. He spoke to his friends about leaving his wife as he was scared he would start to beat her, but they talked him into staying in the relationship. Around this time he also spoke with the University psychiatrist whom he told that he felt like he would "go up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting at people." He made a second appointment with the shrink but never showed up.

The end finally came on July 31, 1966. He sat down at his desk and typed: "I don't quite understand what is compelling me to type this note. I have been to a psychiatrist. I have been having fears and violent impulses. I've had some tremendous headaches in the past. . . . After my death I wish an autopsy on me performed to see if there's any mental disorder . . . I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don't want her to have to face the embarrassment my actions will surely cause her. . . Life is not worth living"

After he picked his wife up from work he took a pistol over to his mothers apartment. In the ensuing struggle she had all the fingers on one hand broken.

She was also stabbed in the chest. But she was still breathing, so Whitman pushed her down onto the ground and put a bullet into the back of her head, killing her instantly. He then picked her up and put her to bed to make it look as if she were sleeping. Next to the body he left a note attacking his father.

The note signed off with - "I love my mother with all my heart."

When he got back home he added to the bottom of his letter - "12.30 a.m. Mother already dead." He then went into the bedroom and stabbed his wife to death. He then added to his letter again - "3.00 a.m. - Wife and mother both dead."

He left the house at 9.00 a.m. the next morning and bought a second hand .30 M-1 carbine from a hardware store. He then went on to another store and bought hundreds of rounds of ammo. At 9.30 he was in Sears and Roebuck purchasing a 12-gauge shotgun. He then went on to a tool supply shop where he rented a trolley. He then took his supplies home where he altered the weapons a little, and even stopped for a chat with the postman. Later the postman spoke about how he knew that what Whitman was doing with the guns was illegal, but he didn't think there was any harm in it. Whitman then grabbed his own guns and put them with these two new ones (seven in all) in a metal trunk. He then put on a pair of grey nylon overalls, placed the gun trunk into his car and left to fulfill his destiny.

When Whitman reached his destination point, a 307 ft clock tower at the university of Texas, it had reached 98º F. A bloody hot day by all standards.

Whitman dragged his trunk to the tower elevator where he went to the 27th floor (as far as it went). He then took the trunk out of the elevator and walked toward a woman working behind a desk there. She was Edna Townsley, 51, and she was about to die. Whitman smashed her in skull with a rifle butt, but she was still alive at this point. He then dragged his guns up the four remaining flights of steps and walked out onto the platform overlooking most of Austin.

A few minutes later a family left the elevator and started to head upstairs to the tower top when Whitman jumped out and fired three shots into the group. He killed Mark Gabour, 15, and his aunt Marguerite Lamport, 45. He also injured two others. Whitman then barricaded the door, walked back to the receptionist, Edna Townsley, and put a shot into her already smashed head, killing her this time. He then went outside on to the viewing area of the tower where he found protection from the chest high, 18 inch thick, limestone parapet that surrounded the viewing area.

His first shot was fired at the people below at around 11.45 a.m. It was fired from his .35 Remington rifle and ripped through the leg of Alec Hernandez, 17, who was delivering newspapers around campus. He then fired at random at any and everything that he felt worthy of his bullets. The first call went through to police at 11.52 a.m. and soon after every single available policeman in Austin was at the scene. One cop, Billy Speed, 22, was sheltered behind a balustrade when a Whitman bullet tore though him, ending his life. About 100 yards away an electrician step out of his van to see what was going on when he copped a bullet in the chest, he was soon dead also.

One of the most successful tactics used by Whitman was the use of the injured as bait. As someone would try to help an injured victim who was in the open, Whitman would pick them off. This happened to Paul Sonntag, 18, who ran to help his girlfriend, Claudia Rutt, who was shot by Whitman while shopping. As Sonntag bent to help Claudia he was cut down. Both died before anyone else could reach them.

But the killing was not confined to a small distance. One guy, Harry Walchuk, 38, was a few hundred yards away looking at magazines at a newsstand when a bullet ripped his throat out, killing him. Whitman was working his way around the lookout area and firing in all directions. So much so that the police thought there was a gang up in the tower doing the shooting. But they would soon learn.

Most of the deaths occurred in the first 20 minutes of the massacre. He was deadly accurate, hitting most victims in vital organs, in particular around the heart. It would seems that the Marines had taught him well.

Police boarded a helicopter to try and get a good shot at Whitman, but 30 minutes later it was given up as the wind was playing havoc, and there was a fear Whitman might hit the Chopper. So eventually police stormed the building.

Three officers made it into the tower, where they met up with a former Air Force man, Alan Crumb, who they deputized on the spot. They then went upstairs to make sure they had some level of justice for the community. At around 1.20 p.m. two of the officers, Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy, along with Alan Crumb stormed out onto the tower to confront Whitman. They say that he attempted to shoot them but they got him first, but as there is no evidence of this all we have to go on is the fact that Whitman was filled with bullets (at least six from Martinez's pistol, two shotgun blasts to the body at close range and one shotgun blast at point blank range into his head.) and there was not a scratch on any of the "hero's".

A few hours later Whitman's name was released to the press. When his father heard the news he rang police and asked them to check on Whitman's wife and mother - and we all know what they found there.

Once a body count was made it seems that Whitman had scored 15 dead on arrivals.

One of the injured died soon after, and he also shot a woman though the stomach who was eight months pregnant, killing the fetus/baby, which would take the count up to seventeen if you believe that counts. All in all Charles Whitman created himself a place in America's history as one of the most influential mass murderers of this century - if not the most.

Interesting Bits

When Whitman bought the Ammunition for the days activities a clerk askerd him why he needed so much, he replied, "To shoot some pigs."

Whitman's auytopsy showed that he a small brain tumour in the part that controls emotianal responses. From here there were two different findings. One report says that the tumour was malignant and would have killed him within a year, and contributed to his complete loss of control. But another report released prior to that one says that the tumor was benign and could not have caused any pain.

Either way, at least it proved that Whitman wasn't crazy by thinking he had something wrong in his head.

In 1972 Whitman's guns were sold by the Austin police for only $1500 to a collector in Kansas.

The tower was reopened for the public in July, 1967. It then became a very popular place for suicide attempts. At least three every year until it was closed again in 1975. It was then reopened again, and the suicide jumpers came back until a few months ago when it was closed down for good.

"I taught all my boys to use guns. All of them are good."

Charles Whitman Sr.

TEXAS UNIVERSITY SNIPER SHOOTS 12 DEAD

2 August 1966, THE TIMES

Bodies of wife and mother also found.

A deadly accurate sniper, firing from the windows of the twenty-sixth floor of the University tower in Austin Texas, today killed 12 people, including a policeman and a professor, and wounded 34 others on all sides of the campus below him, before he was fatally wounded by policemen who ambushed him from above as he was still shooting.

For nearly an hour and a half, from just before midday until 1.20 p.m., Whitman terrorized the whole campus and adjacent streets, shooting indiscriminately at anyone who came in sight. Some were killed at a range of 500 yards. The dead included at least one women, while another nine women were wounded.

SNIPER IN TEXAS U. TOWER KILLS 12, HITS 33
WIFE, MOTHER ALSO SLAIN; POLICE KILL HIM

2 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

AUSTIN, Tex., Aug. 1 - An architectural honor student carried an arsenal of weapons to the top of the 27-story tower on the University of Texas campus today and shot 12 persons to death and wounded at least 33 others before the police killed him.

Students, professors and visitors ran for cover. A student on a bicycle was shot and toppled off. Passers-by ran to help him, and began to fall. A small boy was shot. Three bodies lay on the campus for nearly an hour in the 98-degree heat. Rescuers could not reach them until an armored car was brought up.

SNIPER BROUGHT SHOTGUN ON CREDIT EARLY IN DAY

2 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

One of the guns used by Charles J. Whitman as he fired at his victims was a .12-guage shotgun, bought on credit at Sears Roebuck & Co. after 9:30 A.M. today, the police said.

Officers said Whitman cut off part of the stock and barrel of the semiautomatic weapon.

27-STORY TOWER HAVEN FOR SNIPER

2 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

The tower that today served as a fortress for Charles J. Whitman is the tallest building in Austin, jutting 27 stories above the normally placid campus of Spanish-style buildings with their terra cotta roofs.

The granite tower, which houses the university's library and administrative officers, is the focal point of the campus and its observation deck. This deck, from which the sniper did his shooting, is one of the city's major attractions.

From it there is an unlimited view of the city and its environs. To reach the top visitors take an elevator to the 27th floor and then walk up five short flights of stairs to the open platform.

SNIPER IN TOWER TERRORISES CITY

3 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

15 Killed, 31 Wounded By Berserk Student

New York - An honours student and former marine sharpshooter yesterday shot dead 13 people and wounded 31 from his sniper's lair at the top of the 26-storey tower of Texas University at Austin.

Until an off-duty policeman pumped six bullets into him at close range, he picked off his victims as far as two blocks away in the main street of the city. Earlier he had murdered his wife and his mother in their apartments - leaving a "do not disturb" note outside his mother's door.

TEXAS SNIPER HAD BRAIN TUMOUR

3 August 1966, THE TIMES

Austin, Texas, is today a city of mourning, with flags flying at half-mast and the university trying to recover from yesterday's worst mass slaughter by an individual civilian in the history of the nation.

A post-mortem examination made today revealed a small brain tumour, which could have caused intense headaches and so contributed indirectly to his murderous rampage. According to a police surgeon, it was close to the brain stem. It did not directly affect the frontal lobe, or thinking part, of the brain.

GUNMAN WAS THOUGHT "GREAT GUY"

3 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

Fellow students described Charles Whitman as "well liked" and "a great guy." A university advisor said he "seemed to be more mature than most people his age." Neighbours described him as a pleasant, easy-going young man. He and his wife - a former science teacher and a graduate of the university - were a happy couple, they said.

The Defence Department said records showed that Whitman had qualified as a sharp-shooter.

FATHER SHOCKED BY SON'S CHARGE

3 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

The father of Charles J. Whitman, the Texas sniper, said last night, "I just don't believe my boy could have told a psychiatrist I was brutal and domineering and that was the cause of his trouble."

Charles A. Whitman, a plumbing contractor in Lake Worth, Fla., said in a telephone interview that a report, prepared after young Whitman visited a University of Texas psychiatrist, was "all about a sick boy and not the boy I loved and who loved his father."

"It's true, just like the psychiatrist says, I was a strict father," Mr. Whitman said. "With all three of my sons, it was 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.' They minded me. I was raised as an orphan, and didn't have the advantages my boys did. So I gave them everything I could - cars when they were just kids, that kind of thing."

Mr. Whitman said he talked by telephone with his son "no more than two weeks ago," and he said:

'I Love You as a Son'

"That boy told me, 'Daddy, I love you, I love you as a son, and I'm just sorry Mama couldn't take it any more, your hitting her.'"
Mr. Whitman said it was true that "I did on many occasions beat my wife, but I loved her and I love her to this day."

FIRST USE FOR REVOLVER

3 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

For the first time in his five years as a policeman Romero Martinez fired his revolver at another person.

Mr Martinez, the policeman who killed Charles Whitman in the University of Texas tower, was at home cooking a steak when he heard a call on the radio for all officers to report to duty.

He drove his car to where the sniper was firing and made his way to the building.

WHITMAN TOLD A DOCTOR HE SOMETIMES THOUGHT OF "SHOOTING PEOPLE"

3 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

A University of Texas psychiatrist said today that Charles J. Whitman, who killed 14 persons and an unborn baby yesterday, came to him in March for consultation, explaining that he had intense periods of anger.

Dr. Maurice D. Heatly, the psychiatrist, said Whitman "sometimes found himself thinking about going up the tower with a deer rifle an start shooting people." Dr. Heatly said he had not attached too much significance to Whitman's statement at the time.

TIGHT FIREARMS CURBS URGED AFTER MASSACRE

4 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

The Governor of Texas, Mr John Connally, pledged yesterday to re-examine his State's gun laws following the massacre at the University of Texas in Austin.

The Governor, who was wounded in November, 1963, by the sniper's fire that killed President Kennedy in Dallas, told reporters in Miami after cutting short a Latin American tour that he would take a good look at the gun law in Texas.

TROUBLE IN MARINES OVER GUNS

4 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Austin mass killer, Charles Whitman, who grew up in a home full of guns, had been court-martialed while he was a marine on charges that included illegally possessing a pistol and ammunition. He was demoted from corporal to private.

DRUGS IN POCKETS OF KILLER

6 August 1966, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

Charles Whitman may have been under the influence of stimulant tablets known as goofballs when he slaughtered 15 people in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday.

A justice of the peace, Mr Jerry Dellana, told reporters last night that some pills had been found in Whitman's pockets and on the basis of his apperance doctors were testing his body for traces of the drug.

SNIPER'S FATHER BEARS NO GRUDGE

9 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

AUSTIN, Tex., Aug. 8 - Charles J. Whitman's father today told one of the policemen who shot and killed his sniper son: "I have respect for you for doing your job."

Funeral services, meanwhile, were scheduled tomorrow for 17-year-old Karen Griffith, of Austin who died early today - a week after being shot in the chest by the sniper.

NO DRUGS DETECTED IN BLOOD OF SNIPER

11 August 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

AUSTIN, Tex., Aug. 10 - A laboratory report today said that the blood of Charles J. Whitman, the University of Texas sniper, contained no detectable alcohol, barbiturates or other drugs or stimulants.

After Whitman was killed by police. It was found that he possessed capsules of amphetamines, a stimulant. This led to an analysis of his blood to see if he were under the influence of such a drug.

Justice of the Peace Jerry Dellana said that the filing of the report by the Texas Department of Public Safety completes his formal inquest into Whitman's death.

TEXAS SNIPER'S TUMOR IS FOUND 'HIGHLY MALIGNANT'

9 September 1966, THE NEW YORK TIMES

AUSTIN, Tex., Sept. 8 - A "highly malignant" brain tumor could have contributed to the murder rampage of Charles J. Whitman last Aug. 1, a panel of 32 physicians and psychologists said today.

However, the committee, which included a number of nationally known psychiatrists, said the relationship between the tumor and Whitman's actions "on the last day of his life cannot be established with clarity."

TEXANS CONFRONT AWFUL MEMORY OF TOWER SNIPER

5 September 1999, THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR

University will reopen its infamous landmark, 33 years after a heavily armed gunman perched there and killed 16 people.

AUSTIN, Texas - For 33 years, the ghost of Charles Whitman has peered down at the University of Texas' red-tiled campus, a deer rifle in his hands.

They remember him, a flat-topped graduate student and former Marine, the nice young fellow with the pretty wife. He ascended the university tower one blazing August morning. Calm, polite, smiling even, he lugged a footlocker up the stairs, loaded for Armageddon.

The Madman in the Tower

Time.com

Friday, Aug. 12, 1966

In the forenoon of a blazing August day, a blond, husky young man strolled into a hardware store in Austin, Texas, and asked for several boxes of rifle ammunition. As he calmly wrote a check in payment, the clerk inquired with friendly curiosity what all the ammunition was for. "To shoot some pigs," he replied. At the time, the answer seemed innocent enough, for wild pigs still abound not far from the capital. The horror of its intent only became obvious a few hours later, when the customer, Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, a student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas, seized his grisly fame as the perpetrator of the worst mass murder in recent U.S. history.

That morning, Charles Whitman entered two more stores to buy guns before ascending, with a veritable arsenal, to the observation deck of the limestone tower that soars 307 feet above the University of Texas campus. There, from Austin's tallest edifice, the visitor commands an extraordinary view of the 232-acre campus, with its green mall and red tile roofs, of the capital, ringed by lush farm lands, and, off to the west, of the mist-mantled hills whose purple hue prompted Storyteller O. Henry to christen Austin the "City of a Violet Crown." Whitman had visited the tower ten days before in the company of a brother, and had taken it all in. Today, though, he had no time for the view; he was too intent upon his deadly work.

Methodically, he began shooting everyone in sight. Ranging around the tower's walk at will, he sent his bullets burning and rasping through the flesh and bone of those on the campus below, then of those who walked or stood or rode as far as three blocks away. Somewhat like the travelers in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, who were drawn by an inexorable fate to their crucial place in time and space, his victims fell as they went about their various tasks and pleasures. By lingering perhaps a moment too long in a classroom or leaving a moment too soon for lunch, they had unwittingly placed themselves within Whitman's lethal reach. Before he was himself perforated by police bullets, Charles Whitman killed 13 people and wounded 31—a staggering total of 44 casualties. As a prelude to his senseless rampage, it was later discovered, he had also slain his wife and mother, bringing the total dead to 15.

In a nation that opened its frontiers by violence and the gun, Whitman's sanguinary spree had an unsettling number of precedents, both in fiction and in fact. The imaginary parallels are grisly—and suggestive—enough: from The Sniper, a 1952 movie about a youth who shoots blondes, to The Open Square, a 1962 novel by Ford Clarke, whose protagonist climbs a tower on a Midwestern campus and begins picking people off. (So far as police know, Whitman had neither seen the movie nor read the book.) Even the fiction, however, pales before the fact. There was Scripture-reading Howard Unruh's 20-minute orgy that brought death to 13 people in Camden, N.J., in 1949, and bandy-legged Charles Starkweather's slaying of ten during a three-day odyssey through Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958. There were the two murderers of the Clutter family, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, now enshrined in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the year's most talked-about bestseller. Only last month, when eight student nurses were slain in a Chicago town house, and Richard Speck was charged with the crime, an official there called the murders "the crime of the century." Sadly, Austin Police Chief Robert A. Miles observed last week: "It isn't any more."

Unusual Undercurrents. Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar boy and a newspaper delivery boy, a pitcher on his parochial school's baseball team and manager of its football team. At twelve years and three months, he became an Eagle Scout, one of the youngest on record. To all outward appearances, the family in which he grew up in Lake Worth, Fla.—including two younger brothers besides his mother and father, a moderately successful plumbing contractor—was a typical American family. Charlie joined the Marines in 1959 when he was 18, later signed up at the University of Texas, where he was a B student.

Yet beneath the easy, tranquil surface of both family and boy there flowed some unusual undercurrents. Charlie was trained to use guns as soon as he was old enough to hold them—and so were his brothers. "I'm a fanatic about guns," says his father, Charles A., 47. "I raised my boys to know how to handle guns." Charlie could plug a squirrel in the eye by the time he was 16, and in the Marine Corps he scored 215 points out of a possible 250, winning a rating as a sharpshooter, second only to expert. In the Marines, though, he also got busted from corporal to private and sentenced to 30 days' hard labor for illegal possession of a pistol, was reprimanded for telling a fellow Marine that he was going "to knock your teeth out." He rated his favorite sports as hunting, scuba diving and karate.

A tense situation also prevailed behind the family façade. His father was—and is—an authoritarian, a perfectionist and an unyielding disciplinarian who demanded much of his sons and admitted last week that he was accustomed to beating his wife. In March, Margaret Whitman walked out on him, summoning Charlie from Austin to help her make the break. While his mother was packing her belongings, a Lake Worth police car sat outside the house, called by Charlie presumably because he feared that his father would resort to violence. To be near Charlie, Mrs. Whitman moved to Austin. The youngest son, John, 17, left home last spring. When he was arrested for pitching a rock through a storefront glass, the judge gave him a choice of a $25 fine or moving back in with his father; he paid the fine. Patrick, 21, who works for his father, is the only son who lives with him.

His parents' separation troubled Charlie deeply, and last March 29, he finally went to Dr. Maurice Heatly, the University of Texas' staff psychiatrist. In a two-hour interview, he told Heatly that, like his father, he had beaten his wife a few times. He was making "intense efforts" to control his temper, he said, but he was worried that he might explode. In notes jotted down at the time, Heatly described Whitman as a "massive, muscular youth" who "seemed to be oozing with hostility." Heatly took down only one direct quote of Whitman's—that he was "thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people." That did not particularly upset Heatly; it was, he said, "a common experience for students who came to the clinic to think of the tower as the site for some desperate action."* Nonetheless, Heatly urged Whitman to return the next week to talk some more. Charlie Whitman never went back. Instead, some time in the next few months, he decided to act.

"I Love My Mother." The evening before his trip to the tower, Whitman sat at a battered portable in his modest brick cottage. Kathy, his wife of four years (they had no children), was at work. "I don't quite understand what is compelling me to type this note," he began. "I've been having fears and violent impulses. I've had some tremendous headaches. I am prepared to die. After my death, I wish an autopsy on me to be performed to see if there's any mental disorders." He also wrote: "I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don't want her to have to face the embarrassment that my actions will surely cause her."

At one point he had to break off when a fellow architecture student, Larry Fuess, and his wife dropped by to chat. Fuess found him looking "particularly relieved about something—you know, as if he had solved a problem." After the couple left, Whitman drove off in his black '66 Chevrolet to pick up Kathy at her summer job as a telephone information operator. He apparently decided not to kill her immediately, instead dropped her off at their house and sped across the Colorado River to his mother's fifth-floor flat in Austin's Penthouse Apartments. There he stabbed Margaret Whitman in the chest and shot her in the back of the head, somehow also breaking several bones in her left hand with such force that the band of her diamond engagement ring was driven into her finger and the stone broken loose. "I have just killed my mother," Charlie wrote in a hand-printed note addressed "To whom it may concern." "If there's a heaven, she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart."

Tragic Timetable. Back home—it was now after midnight—Whitman stabbed his wife three times in the chest, apparently as she lay sleeping, and drew the bed sheet over her nude body. Then he returned to the note—partially typewritten, partially handwritten, partially printed—that was to be his valedictory. Included was a tragic timetable: "12:30 a.m.—Mother already dead. 3 o'clock—both dead." He hated his father "with a mortal passion," he wrote, and regretted that his mother had given "the best 25 years of her life to that man." Clearly, the erratic orbit of his mind had already carried him off to some remote aphelion of despair. "Life is not worth living," he wrote. He had apparently concluded that if it were not worth living for him, it need not be for the others, either. With the special lucidity of the mad, Whitman meticulously prepared to take as many people with him to the grave as he possibly could.

Into a green duffel bag and a green foot locker that bore the stenciled words, "Lance Cpl. C. J. Whitman," he stuffed provisions to sustain him during a long siege and to cover every contingency: Spam, Planters peanuts, fruit cocktail, sandwiches and boxes of raisins, jerricans containing water and gasoline, rope, binoculars, canteens, transistor radio, toilet paper, and, in a bizarre allegiance to the cult of cleanliness, a plastic bottle of Mennen spray deodorant. He also stowed away a private armory that seemed sufficient to hold off an army: machete, Bowie knife, hatchet, a 6-mm. Remington bolt-action rifle with a 4-power Leupold telescopic sight (with which, experts say, a halfway decent shot can consistently hit a 6½-in. circle from 300 yds.), a 35-mm. Remington rifle, a 9-mm. Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia pistol and a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver. At home, he left three more rifles, two derringers.

Whether Whitman slept at all during the following few hours is not known. He was next seen at 7:15 a.m. when he rented a mover's dolly from an Austin firm. Then, deciding that he needed even more firepower, he went to Sears, Roebuck and bought a 12-gauge shotgun on credit, sawed off both barrel and stock. He visited Davis Hardware to buy a .30-cal. carbine. And at Chuck's Gun Shop, he bought some 30-shot magazines for the new carbine. All told, he had perhaps 700 rounds.

Left to Die. Around 11 a.m., Whitman boldly breezed into a parking spot reserved for university officials, near the main administration and library building at the base of the tower. Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a pale polo shirt, he wheeled the loaded dolly toward an elevator, gave passersby the impression that he was a maintenance man. The elevator stops at the 27th floor; Whitman lugged his bizarre cargo up three flights of steps to the 30th floor. There, at a desk next to the glass-paneled door that opens onto the observation deck, he encountered Receptionist Edna Townsley, 47, a spirited divorcee and mother of two young sons. Whitman bashed her head in, probably with a rifle butt, with such force that part of her skull was torn away, also shot her in the head. Then he left her behind a sofa to die.

As Whitman began assembling his equipment on the deck, six sightseers arrived, led by Mark and Mike Gabour, the 16-and 19-year-old sons of M. J. Gabour, a service-station owner in Texarkana, Texas. "Mark opened the door to the observation deck and a gun went off," said Gabour. "Mike screamed." Then his sons, his wife and his sister, Mrs. Marguerite Lamport, "came rolling down the stairs. Whoever did the shooting slammed the door." Gabour turned his younger son over, saw he had been shot in the head. He was dead. So was Gabour's sister. Critically injured, his wife and his older son were bleeding profusely. Gabour and his brother-in-law dragged their dead and wounded to the 27th floor, sought help but could find none.

Splashed with Blood. Outside, on the six-foot-wide walkway that runs around all four sides of the tower, Whitman positioned himself under the "VI" of the gold-edged clock's south face. Looking toward the mall, a large paved rectangle, he could see scores of students below him. Had Mrs. Townsley and the Gabours not held him up, he might have had another thousand students as targets when classes changed at 11:30 a.m. Now, at 11:48 a.m., Charles Whitman opened fire. The 17-chime carillon above him was to ring the quarter-hour six times before his guns were silenced.

For a moment, nobody could make out what the odd explosions from atop the tower meant. Then men and women began crumpling to the ground, and others ran for cover. On the fourth floor of the tower building, Ph.D. Candidate Norma Barger, 23, heard the noises, looked out and saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall. At first she thought it was just a tasteless joke. "I expected the six to get up and walk away laughing." Then she saw the pavement splashed with blood, and more people falling. In the first 20 minutes, relying chiefly on the 6-mm. rifle with the scope but switching occasionally to the carbine and the .357 revolver, Whitman picked off most of his victims.

On the sun-dappled mall, Mrs. Claire Wilson, 18, eight months pregnant, was walking from an anthropology class when a bullet crashed into her abdomen; she survived, but later gave birth to a stillborn child whose skull had been crushed by the shot. A horrified classmate, Freshman Thomas Eckman, 19, knelt beside her to help, was shot dead himself. Mathematician Robert Boyer, 33, en route to a teaching job in Liverpool, England, where his pregnant wife and two children were awaiting him, stepped out onto the mall to head for lunch, was shot fatally in the back. More fortunate was Secretary Charlotte Darehshori, who rushed out to help when the first victims dropped, suddenly realized she was under fire and spent the next hour-and-a-half crouched behind the concrete base of a flagpole—one of the few persons to venture onto the mall and survive the siege uninjured.

At the south end of the mall, Austin Patrolman Billy Speed, 23, one of the first policemen on the scene, took cover behind the heavy, columnar stone railing, but a bullet zinged between the columns and killed him. Still farther south, 500 yds. from the tower, Electrical Repairman Roy Dell Schmidt, 29, walked toward his truck after making a call, was killed by a bullet in the stomach. To the east, Iran-bound Peace Corps Trainee Thomas Ashton, 22, was strolling on the roof of the Computation Center when Whitman shot him dead.

Directing his fire west, Whitman found shop-lined Guadalupe Street, the main thoroughfare off campus—known locally as "The Drag"—astir with shoppers and strollers. Paul Sonntag, 18, lifeguard at an Austin pool and grandson of Paul Bolton, longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson and news editor of the Johnsons' Austin television station, was accompanying Claudia Rutt, 18, for a polio shot she needed before entering Texas Christian University. Claudia suddenly sank to the ground. Paul bent over her, then pitched to the sidewalk himself. Both were dead. A block north, Political Scientist Harry Walchuk, 39, a father of six and a teacher at Michigan's Alpena Community College, browsed in the doorway of a newsstand after working all morning in the college library. He was shot dead on the spot. A few steps farther up the street, Senior Thomas Karr, 24, was walking sleepily toward his apartment after staying up almost all night for a 10 a.m. exam when he dropped to the pavement, dying.

Impossible to Hit. Four minutes after Whitman opened fire, Austin police received a report about "some shooting at the University Tower." In seconds, a "10-50" trouble signal went out, directing all units in the vicinity to head for the university. In a din of wailing sirens, more than 100 city cops, reinforced by some 30 highway patrolmen, Texas Rangers and U.S. Secret Service men from Lyndon Johnson's Austin office, converged on the campus.

The lawmen sent hundreds of rounds of small-arms fire crackling toward the tower deck. A few smashed into the faces on the clocks above Whitman, and most pinked ineffectually into the four-foot-high wall in front of him, kicking up puffs of dust. Ducking below the wall, Whitman began using narrow drainage slits in the wall as gunports. He proved almost impossible to hit, but he kept finding targets—to the north, where he wounded two students on their way to the Biology Building; to the east, where he nicked a girl sitting at a window in the Business Economics Building; but particularly to the south, where the mall looked like a no man's land strewn with bodies that could not safely be recovered, and to the west, where The Drag was littered with four dead, eleven wounded.

Riding along The Drag, Newsboy Aleck Hernandez was practically catapulted off his bicycle when a bullet slammed into its seat—and his, inflicting a painful wound. Three blocks up The Drag, Basketball Coach Billy Snowden of the Texas School for the Deaf stepped into the doorway of the barbershop where he was having his hair cut and was wounded in the shoulder. Outside the Rae Ann dress shop on The Drag, Iraqi Chemistry Student Abdul Khashab, 26, his fiancée Janet Paulos, 20, whom he was to have married next week, and Student-Store Clerk Lana Phillips, 21, fell wounded within seconds of each other. At Sheftall's jewelers, Manager Homer Kelley saw three youths fall wounded outside, was helping to haul them inside when Whitman zeroed in on the shop. Fragments from two bullets tore into Kelley's leg. Windows shattered. Bullets tore huge gashes in the carpeting inside. North of the tower, Associated Press Reporter Robert Heard, 36, was hit in the shoulder while he was running full tilt. "What a shot!" he marveled through his pain.

Green Flag. Unable to get at Whitman from the ground, the police chartered a light plane, sent sharpshooting Lieut. Marion Lee aloft in it. The sniper's fire drove it away. Finally four men, who had made their way separately to the tower building through subterranean passages or by zigzagging from building to building, decided to storm the observation deck. Three were Austin patrolmen who had never been in a gunfight: Houston McCoy, Jerry Day and Ramiro Martinez, who was off duty when he heard of the sniper, got into uniform and rushed to the campus. The fourth was Civilian Allen Crum, 40, a retired Air Force tailgunner, who had "never fired a shot" in combat.

The four rode to the 27th floor, headed single file up the last three flights, carefully removed a barricade of furniture that Whitman had set at the top of the stairs. While cops on the ground intensified their fire to divert Whitman's attention, Martinez slowly pushed away the dolly propped against the door leading to the walkway around the tower, crawled out onto its south side and began moving stealthily to the east. Crum followed through the door and turned toward the west. Hearing footsteps, Crum fired into the southwest corner to keep Whitman from bursting around the corner and shooting him. Martinez, meanwhile, rounded one corner, then, more slowly, turned onto the north side of the walkway.

Fifty feet away from him, in the northwest corner, crouched Whitman, his eyes riveted on the corner that Crum was about to turn. Martinez poured six pistol shots into Whitman's left side, arms and legs. McCoy moved up, blasted Whitman with a shotgun. Martinez, noting that the sniper's gun "was still flopping," grabbed the shotgun and, blasted Whitman again. As an autopsy showed, the shotgun pellets did it: one pierced Whitman's heart, another his brain. Crum grabbed a green towel from Whitman's foot locker, waved it above the railing to signal ceasefire. At 1:24 p.m., 96 murderous minutes after his first fusillade from the tower, Charlie Whitman was dead.

Tumors & Goof balls. Whitman's bloody stand profoundly shocked a nation not yet recovered from the Chicago nurses' murders. One effect was to prompt a re-examination of U.S. arms laws and methods of handling suspected psychotics (see boxes). There was a spate of ideas, some hasty and ill conceived. Texas Governor John Connally, who broke off a Latin American tour and hurried home after the shootings, demanded legislation requiring that any individual freed on the ground of insanity in murder and kidnaping cases be institutionalized for life. New York's Senator Robert Kennedy proposed that persons acquitted of all federal crimes on the ground of insanity be committed for psychiatric treatment. Had Whitman lived to face trial, said Kennedy, he would "undoubtedly" have been acquitted because "he was so clearly insane."

An autopsy showed that Whitman had a pecan-size brain tumor, or astrocytoma, in the hypothalamus region, but Pathologist Coleman de Chenar said that it was "certainly not the cause of the headaches" and "could not have had any influence on his psychic behavior." A number of Dexedrine tablets—stimulants known as "goofballs" —were found in Whitman's possession, but physicians were not able to detect signs that he had taken any before he died.

Half-Staff. Precisely what triggered Whitman's outburst is a mystery. And it is likely to remain so, though psychiatrists will undoubtedly debate the causes for years. The role of Whitman's father in shaping—or misshaping—his son's personality has already come under intense scrutiny, but other psychiatrists feel that the cause of his illness must be sought in his relationship with his mother. Whatever its cause, Charlie Whitman's psychosis was poured out in detail in his farewell notes, which, a grand jury said, will be released only to "authorized investigating agencies, since they contain unverified statements of an insane killer concerning an innocent individual."

In the end, Charlie Whitman and his mother returned together to Florida, he in a grey metal casket, she in a green-and-white one. With hundreds of curiosity seekers gawking and jostling in a rolling, palm-fringed cemetery in West Palm Beach, mother and son were buried with Catholic rites. Charlie had obviously been deranged, said the Whitmans' priest, and was not responsible for the sin of murder and therefore eligible for burial in hallowed ground.

In Austin, where two of those wounded by Whitman remain in critical condition and three in serious condition, most flags flew at half-staff through the week. This week the flags go back to full staff as the university and the capital attempt to return to normal. That may take a while. The 17 chimes in the tower from which Charlie Whitman shot peal each quarter-hour, resounding over the tree-shaded campus and the mist-mantled hills beyond.

* Three persons have jumped from the tower to their deaths since its completion in 1937. Two others have died in accidental falls

Suicide Letter

This is the letter written by Charles Whitman the evening before his shooting rampage from the clock tower on the University of Texas campus, which left 13 people dead and 31 wounded. The first section was typewritten by Whitman, the second section handwritten after he had murdered his mother and his wife. (mispellings in original)

Sunday
July 31, 1966
6:45 P.M.

I don't quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately ( I can't recall when it started ) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks. In March when my parents made a physical break I noticed a great deal of stress. I consulted a Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had. I talked with a Doctor once for about two hoursand tried to convey to him my fears that I felt come overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottlesof Excedrin in the past three months.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight after I pick her up from work at the telephone company. I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationaly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this. I don't know whether it is selfishness, or if I don't want her to have to face the embrassment my actions would surely cause her. AT this time, though, the p rominent reason in my mind is that I truly do not consider this world worth living in, and am prepared to die, and I do not want to leave her to suffer alone in it. I intend to kill her as painlessly as possible.

Similar reasons provoked me to take my mother's life also. I don't think the poor woman has ever enjoyed life as she is entitled to. She was a simple young woman who married a very possessive and dominating man. All my life as a boy until I ran away from home to join the Marine Corps

( At this point in the note, Whitman broke off his writing, picking it up later that same night )

friends
interrupted
8-1-66
Mon.
3:00 A.M.
Both Dead

I was a witness to her being beaten at least one a month. Then when she took enough my father wanted to fight to keep her below her usual standard of living.

I imagine it appears that I bruttaly kill both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job.

If my life insurance policy is valid, please see that all the worthless checks I wrote this weekend are made good. Please pay off my debts. I am 25 years old and have been financially independent.

Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.

Charles J. Whitman

Give our dog to my-in-laws please. Tell them Kathy loved "Schocie" very much.

R. W. Leissner
Needville, Texas

If you can find it in yourself to grant my last wish Cremate me after The autopsy.

*****

Whitman also left a handwritten note beside the body of his mother. It read:

I have just taken my mother's life. I am very upset over having done it. However I feel that if there is a heaven, she is definitely there now, and if there is no life after, I have relieved her of her suffering here on earth.

The intense hatred I feel for my father is beyond description. My mother gave that man the 25 best years of her life and because she finally took enough of his beatings, humiliation, degredation, and tribulations that I am sure no one but she and he will ever know - to leave him. He has chosen to treat her like a slut that you would bed down with, accept her favors and then throw a pittance in return. I am truly sorry that this is the only way I could see to relieve her suffering but I think it was best. Let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved the woman with all my heart. If there exists a God, let him understand my actions and judge me accordingly.

Whitman was shot dead by police officers Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez, 96 minutes after he began his deadly assault.

Victims

Edna Townsley

51-year-old secretary was killed Monday, August 1, 1966. She was at the observation deck check-in desk waiting to be relieved for lunch, and was the first of Whitman's victims on campus. Mrs. Townsley had worked at University of Texas since 1958, first as an elevator operator, later as a secretary. Her co-workers described her as a "real scrapper," and attested to her hearty laughter which used to fill the halls of the tower. She left behind two beloved sons: Danny Townsley, 16, and Terry Townsley, 12. She also left a nameplate on her desk reading "Mrs. Edna Townsley."

Mark Gabour

16-year-old boy was killed Monday, August 1, 1966. He and his family were visiting the University of Texas observation deck immediately after Charles Whitman arrived. His family was stopping to visit Marguerite Lamport (Gabour's aunt) on their way to an All-Star High School football game. His family included his brother Mike (18), who was critically wounded by Charles Whitman; his mother, Mary, critically wounded by Charles Whitman (she later wrote the memoir "The Impossible Tree"); and his father, M.J. 30 years later, Mark's friend, John, voiced his grief.

Marguerite Lamport

45-year-old resident of Austin was killed Monday, August 1, 1966. She was taking her brother, M.J. Gabour of Texarkana, and his family--his wife Mary and their sons Mark and Mike--on a tour of the tower when Charles Whitman attacked them.

Paul Sonntag

18-year-old fiancee of Claudia Rutt, died Monday, August 1, 1966. He was a recent graduate of Stephen F. Austin High. At the time he was shot, he was a lifeguard at Reed Pool, picking up his paycheck from the Parks and Recreation Department. His last words to Josephine Bailey, the secretary, were: "As far as I know, I'll be back next summer." As he stood up from a construction barricade to glimpse Whitman in the tower, he said to Claudia and a friend, Carla: "Carla! Come look, I can see him. This is for real." He was shot immediately after finishing the last sentence. He would have attended the University of Colorado in the fall. Instead, Sonntag was buried at Austin Memorial Park.

Claudia Rutt

18-year-old fiancee of Paul Sonntag, died Monday August 1, 1966. She was a recent graduate of Stephen F. Austin High. "Some sort of memorial" was planned for her and Paul Sonntag, said Grady Rylander, Senior Class President of 1966. After Sonntag fell, she moved from the baracade, and knelt beside him. Her friend Carla tried to move her, but Claudia was struck by a bullet in the chest. Claudia Rutt died wearing Sonntag's ring on a chain around her neck. She was survived by her parents Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Rutt, and one sister, Mary Anne Rutt. She was buried in the Beth Israel section of Oakwood Cemetary. Her dream was to be a dancer.

Roy Dell Schmidt

29-year-old city of Austin employee died at University of Texas on Monday, August 1, 1966. He was shot while making a customer service call at the University for the electric company. He stood behind his service vehicle and was shot; his last words were, "I'm hit! I'm hit!" His survivors included his widow, Nancy White Schmidt, and daughter, Kimberly Dawn Schmidt.

Thomas Aquinas Ashton

22-year-old college graduate from Redlands, California, died Monday, August 1, 1966. He was at the University of Texas attending a Peace Corps training class and would have left for Iran on September 14. He was on his way to the Student Union to meet a few friends for lunch. His survivors include his parents, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Ashton.

Thomas Eckmann

18 year old from Barcelona, Spain, died at a local hospital on Monday, August 1, 1966. He had just completed a 9-week exam for anthropology, and was walking with Claire Wilson near Benedict Hall at the University. As Whitman began shooting, Eckman threw himself onto Claire Wilson, in a vain attempt to protect her. A bullet passed through him and into Claire Wilson's abdomen. He left behind his mother, Mary Louise Eckman, his father, Frederick Eckman, and half-brother, Michael R. Campbell. He was described as a "gentle and affectionate boy."

Baby Boy Wilson

Died Monday, August 1, 1966, while emergency surgery was being performed on his mother, Mrs. Claire Wilson, who was shot in the abdomen by Charles Whitman. Mrs. Claire Wilson survived.

Thomas Karr

24 year old died on the operating table Monday, August 1, 1966. He had just left Batts Hall, pleased with a Spanish test he had taken. His survivors included his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ray T. Karr.

Karen Griffith

17-year-old victim of Charles Whitman, died Monday, August 8, 1966. Karen would have been a Lanier High School senior. She left behind her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Griffith, and a sister, Pamela Griffith.

Doctor Robert Boyer

33-year-old former mathematics professor at the University of Texas was killed on Monday, August 1, 1966. Boyer had just completed a month of teaching in Mexico. He was visiting friends in Austin, and was on his way to Liverpool University, where he would have taught applied mathematics. Upset by a national airline strike, Boyer left his friends' house to buy a train ticket. On his way, he was to stop at the Main Building to take care of some last-minute business. His survivors included his widow, Mrs. Lyndsay Boyer, a daughter, Laura Boyer, and a son, Matthew Boyer.

Harry Walchuk

Died Monday, August 1, 1966, while in emergency surgery from a gunshot wound. He was at the University working on his PhD, when, at lunch time, he crossed Guadalupe to buy a magazine. The newsstand didn't have the magazine he was looking for. He was shot and killed immediately afterward. His family included his widow, Marilyn Walchuck, six children--John, Peter, Christopher, Jennifer, Thomas, and Paul. By August 6, 1966, over $850 had been contributed to a memorial fund in his honor, mostly by married students at the University of Texas. He was well known for the love he held for his family.

Billy Speed

22-year-old policeman who was killed Monday, August 1, 1966, by Charles Whitman. He was commissioned into the Austin Police Department on July 2, 1965. He was a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division and a member of the Austin Police Association.




Charles Whitman

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A widely released image, of Charles Whitman on a family vacation holding two rifles.


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Charles with his father


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The Whitman family, Charles in the back row


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Charles Whitman as marine


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Photo of Charles Whitman from the 1963 Cactus, the student yearbook of the University of Texas


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Charles Whitman in an uncharacteristically relaxed moment at home.
Friends knew Whitman as driven but without focus.
(
Austin Police Department Files)


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The wedding of Kathy Leissner and Charles Whitman


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Charles Whitman the day of his wedding



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Charles Whitman sits on the porch of the home at 906 W. Jewell St. he shared with his wife, Kathleen, and their dog, Schocie. In the letter he left after stabbing Kathleen to death, Whitman asked that Schocie be given to Kathleen's parents because she cared so for the dog.
(Austin Police Department Files)



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Asleep on his couch with Schocie. Friends seldom found Whitman relaxed until the night of July 31, when — in a letter he left at home for authorities — he had already made up his mind to kill his wife. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Whitman at Barton Springs with an unidentified child. For reasons no one has been able to explain, Whitman asked whomever found the body of his wife to develop rolls of film from which this picture was developed. The rolls contained nothing more than Whitman, family and friends relaxing at Barton Springs and visiting the Alamo. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Kathleen Whitman posing in front of the Alamo. In his diaries, Whitman professed to adore his wife, but he admitted abusing her, physically and emotionally. (Austin Police Department Files)


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One of the photos Charles Whitman left on two rolls of film shows him and his wife, Kathleen, as he apparently wanted them to be seen: a happy couple enjoying a visit to the Alamo in San Antonio. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Only two weeks before he murdered her, Charles Whitman posed for this picture with his wife Kathy during a trip to the historic Alamo in San Antonio. The trip occurred during a visit by Charles' younger brother, John Michael. While there he climbed the Alamo Monument for a picture, probably taken by John. These and other pictures from Charles Whitman's cameras are reproduced in A Sniper in the Tower. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Charles Whitman posed for this picture during a trip to the historic Alamo in San Antonio.


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Picnicking during a day of boating. Whitman had boasted of his Marine-carved physique and criticized his wife's heavy thighs, but he had put on considerable weight in the summer before the Tower shootings. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Whitman reaching for a bottle of beer on a boat outing, perhaps on Lake Austin. This was a photograph from one of the two rolls of film he asked authorities to develop after his death. (Austin Police Department Files)

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Charles Whitman liked to write or type self-help notes to himself. This is a handwritten version of a saying he also had typed on a page dated the day he killed his mother, wife and then 14 strangers passing by the University of Texas Tower. (Austin Police Department Files)
 

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Charles Whitman's Austin Public Library card


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Charles Whitman's diary, February - March 1964


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The shooting

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The South Mall as seen from the University of Texas Tower was only one of the areas where Charles Whitman's 45 shooting victims fell, as he constantly changed positions on the observation deck.
(Austin Police Department Files)



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Friends of Whitman recalled him marveling at the advantage a gunman would have shooting from the observation deck of the Texas Tower. He told a UT psychiatrist he was angry enough to do it. On his third visit to the Tower, Whitman came armed with four rifles and three handguns.
(Austin Police Department Files)



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Smoke rises from a sniper's gun as he fires from the tower of the University of Texas administration building on crowds below in this August 1, 1966, file photo. Until the carnage at Virginia Tech Monday, April 16, 2007, the 1966 sniping rampage by Charles Whitman from the Austin school's landmark 307-foot tower had remained the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history. (AP Photo)


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A victim of sniper Charles Whitman is placed into a waiting ambulance during the shooting spree at the University of Texas in Austin, Aug. 2, 1966. Until the carnage at Virginia Tech Monday, April 16, 2007, the Aug. 1, 1966, the sniper rampage by Charles Whitman from the Austin school's landmark 307-foot tower had remained the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history. (AP Photo).


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On his third visit to the University of Texas Tower, Charles Whitman came armed with three rifles, a shotgun and three handguns. He used a bolt-action Remington with a scope in the early minutes of the shooting, when he had the luxury of aiming, and an M-1 for rapid firing in a gunfight with those below. Whitman had sawed off the barrel and butt of a 12-gauge shotgun for the close-quarter fighting.
(Austin Police Department Files)



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This Smith and Wesson .357-caliber magnum, one of the many guns Whitman brought with him to the Texas Tower, was found near Whitman's body on the observation deck after Austin Police officers shot and killed him. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Visitors to the Tower, which had been closed to the public for many years after the Whitman shootings, can still see the bullet scars from gunmen on the ground trying to keep Whitman pinned down.
(Austin Police Department Files)



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Bullets pock marked the detailing on the Texas Tower. The shooting was so unlike anything that had happened before in Austin, police officers allowed citizens with their own rifles to assist them in the gunfight. (Austin Police Department Files)


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Whitman's body


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Police carry away Whitman's body.

Special report: A killer's conscience

Trove of police evidence to be made public Dec. 18 reveals Charles Whitman's malevolent yet mundane psyche

By Mark Lisheron

American-Statesman Staff

Sunday, December 9, 2001

Whitman's notes and other documents that are reprinted here appear exactly as written.

Charles Whitman liked to keep lists, neat little reminders of ways to better himself.

In the Marine Corps it was: "Think — don't be so ready with an excuse." "Organize yourself and your work." ". . . Exhaust all efforts to find answers." "Know your status and position and conduct yourself accordingly."

At the top of the list, the 20-year-old Marine implored himself to "Grow up."

For his wife, there was the card that read, GOOD POINTS TO REMEMBER WITH KATHY: "Don't nag. Don't try to make your partner over. Don't critize. Give honest appreciation. Pay little attentions. Be courteous. BE GENTLE." Be gentle is underlined.

And there were THOUGHTS TO START THE DAY, a list of somewhat mangled beauty pageant homilies Whitman had neatly typed out to READ AND THINK ABOUT, EVERY DAY.

It was a list he read and thought about on the morning of Aug. 1, 1966. Whitman had killed his mother and his wife, Kathleen, earlier that morning.

Whitman wrote farewell letters to his brothers, Johnnie and Pat. He set out two rolls of film and a note asking whoever found them to develop them.

He was on his way out the door on a shopping binge that would complete the arsenal he took up to the 27th floor of the University of Texas Tower.

From the UT Tower later that morning and into the early afternoon, Whitman would shoot and kill 14 more people, wound 31 and be killed by two Austin police officers who converged, guns firing, on the observation deck.

One of those 31 wounded, David Gunby, became Whitman's 15th victim Nov. 12 in Fort Worth. Whitman had shot Gunby, a 23-year-old UT student in the back, damaging a kidney. Gunby spent the rest of his life in dialysis, suffered a failed kidney transplant, went blind and was, finally, bedridden.

The Tarrant County medical examiner blamed all of those problems on Whitman, ruling Gunby's death a homicide 35 years after the shootings.

Before leaving his tiny house at 906 W. Jewell St., Whitman took a last look at the list:

STOP procrastinating (Grasp the nettle)

CONTROL your anger (Don't let it prove you a fool)

SMILE — Its contagious

DON'T be belligerent

STOP cursing, improve your vocabulary

APPROACH a pot of gold with exceptional caution (Look it over twice)

PAY that compliment

LISTEN more than you speak, THINK before you speak

CONTROL YOUR PASSION; DON'T LET IT lead YOU — Don't let desire make you regret your present actions later (Remember the lad and the man)

If you want to be better than average, YOU HAVE TO WORK MUCH HARDER THAN THE AVERAGE.

NEVER FORGET; when the going gets rough, the ROUGH get going !!!!!

YESTERDAY IS NOT MINE TO RECOVER,

BUT TOMORROW IS MINE TO WIN OR TO

LOSE. I AM RESOLVED THAT I SHALL

WIN THE TOMORROWS BEFORE ME !!!

Whitman took out a pen, and at the top of the page, he wrote the date, 8/1/66, and above the initials CJW, he wrote, "I never could quite make it. These thoughts are too much for me."



History finds a home

Whitman's written surrender to the basic expectations of his daily life is tagged, sheathed in clear plastic and filed in one of 10 gray rectangular boxes stored in the unearthly still workroom of Rebecca Rich-Wulfmeyer at the Austin History Center.

It was once part of the police file of Charles J. Whitman, who, at the time, was the correct answer to the question posed by the headline above The Austin Statesman's masthead on Aug. 2, 1966, "Greatest Mass Slayer in History?"

Hundreds of pages of letters, diary entries, police reports and photographs had for years been kept in a single cardboard box in a locked room alongside open investigations in the homicide division at the Austin Police Department.

Sgt. Hector Reveles, who joined the homicide division in 1992, discovered the box and understood this was more than an ordinary homicide file. Reveles also knew the Police Department didn't have the personnel to monitor the people who occasionally asked to review the Whitman case.

"We thought the more inquiries we had the more likely it was that something would turn up missing," Reveles says. "We were concerned about the condition of the file. You could see that some of the papers were deteriorating."

Reveles obtained a supervisor's permission to offer the Whitman box to the University of Texas, the Texas State Library and the Austin History Center. No one was sure they had the resources to catalog and keep track of this sort of archive, he says.

With the support of police Cmdr. Shauna Jacobson, Reveles kept at it. Shortly after Rich-Wulfmeyer took the post of archives and manuscripts curator at the history center in July of 2000, Reveles called again with his offer.

Having grown up in Austin, with a curating background that included work with the Texas Confederate Museum and the Santa Fe International Museum of Folk Art, Rich-Wulfmeyer took personal responsibility for organizing and protecting the Whitman file.

"I took a deep sigh when she took over," Reveles says.

As she continues work on the file, she makes available the bulk of the material for public review for the first time at the Austin History Center beginning Dec. 18. Rules will be strict. The Whitman file will not be viewed out of Rich-Wulfmeyer's sight. Notes must be taken in pencil.

Each year in the days leading up to Aug. 1, Rich-Wulfmeyer says, the Austin History Center fields requests from people to pore over the considerable file of newspaper clips and books on the UT Tower shootings. With the inclusion of Whitman's personal letters, interest is likely to sharpen, she says.

Gary M. Lavergne, the author of the definitive book about Whitman, "A Sniper in the Tower," told Rich-Wulfmeyer to expect the kind of people he hears from every Aug. 1.

"I clear my calendar that day," says Lavergne, who now works as director of admissions research for the University of Texas. His office, coincidentally, is in the main building of the UT Tower. "Some people are just curious. Some are just nuts."

Rich-Wulfmeyer, too, was torn. She understood the historical importance of the collection, one that might be the most important she would ever archive. The 36-year-old with the quiet, even manner knew she'd be forever lashed to Whitman's infamy.

"I guess I had a lot of emotions going in," Rich-Wulfmeyer says. "I was familiar with the Whitman story, but I didn't know how much of it was true. Before I began, I read Gary's book, and it disturbed me. I didn't know what I was supposed to think. And then everyone I met had stories that made the case personal to them. I realized I was working with the stories of real people whose lives were forever altered by this one day."

To give her archival work context, Rich-Wulfmeyer stayed in close contact with Lavergne, who continues to call or e-mail weekly. Since the mid-1980s the Police Department had allowed visitors under supervision to review the Whitman file. Lavergne spent nearly every workday for 10 months with it in 1994 to produce the first and only book-length account of Whitman and the shootings.



The devil's in the details

The whole of Lavergne's book, of Whitman's life and death, cannot be found here in the Whitman file. Review the complete file, and what you find are details, like Whitman's lists.

Look carefully at the wording, what is and isn't capitalized, in these notes Whitman made to himself. These aren't the exhortations of a fellow with a Norman Vincent Peale outlook. They don't sound like Whitman at all. They sound like orders, like the kind his father issued when Whitman was growing up in Florida.

The essay Whitman wrote in a beautifully controlled 15-year-old cursive in 1956 at St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach would have his class believe he had an ideal childhood. In the file, there is a newspaper photo of Whitman shaking hands with a scoutmaster after becoming the youngest Eagle Scout in the country when he was 12.

A panel of experts called upon by then-Gov. John Connally to review the Whitman case after his death remarked that as a youngster, Whit- man was "quite good at the piano."

This same report mentions, in passing, that Whitman's father, Charles A. Whitman, expected his son to excel at the piano and everything else. Whitman's Scout leaders objected to him pushing so hard for the Eagle Scout rank, but Whitman told them his dad was pushing even harder, according to the Rev. Joseph Leduc, the founder of the troop and Whitman's parish priest, in a statement he gave to an FBI agent two weeks after the UT Tower shootings.

The pressure affected Whitman and his relationship with his father, Leduc told the FBI agent.

"Subject Whitman was a very nervous type of individual and had the characteristic of doing things on the spur of the moment," Leduc told the FBI agent who translated it into J. Edgar Hoover syntax. "Subject Whitman was constantly biting his fingernails and finally overcame this habit after much coaxing.

"Subject Whitman always appeared to have resentment toward his father and this resentment of subject Whitman's father appeared to be by too much regimentation. Subject Whitman's father was very strict in rearing his children and desired perfection from them."

This resentment of regimentation did not deter Whitman from joining the Marine Corps, by reputation the most rigidly disciplined of the military branches, without telling his father. Leduc told the agent he thought Whitman had done well for himself in the Marines, a notion the documents in his file show he did not discourage outside of his family.

In the file is a laminated card issued by the Marine Corps indicating that the Corps honorably discharged Whitman on Dec. 4, 1964 after a hitch of more than five years. The police officers who shot and killed Whitman found the card in his wallet.

The Corps, in fact, court-martialed Whitman, busted him to private from corporal and sentenced him to 30 days hard labor for loan-sharking to the men in his own company, according to an investigation report filed Nov. 12, 1963, at Camp Lejune, N.C.

Had it not been for the intervention of his father, Whitman might have been drummed out altogether. Instead, he spent the rest of his hitch writing of a hatred for the Marines so intense "it seems to be overwhelmingly possessing me."

Whitman was too self-possessed to let any single hatred own him. He makes an entry in a diary on Nov. 15, 1963, and one on Nov. 26, both about court-martial matters. Between those dates President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his assassin murdered and a vice president from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, sworn in. No mention is made in any diary.

Even his private pinings turn on himself. Whitman had begun The Daily Record of C.J. Whitman, a green, cloth-bound Federal Service Supply notebook.

The entries ostensibly concern his wife, Kathleen, but they begin, he writes, at a time when "I seemed to have reached the pit of my life's experiences." They abruptly end forever after two months when he is granted leave to see "the most precious possession I have in life."

Cpl. Whitman had met his wife, Kathleen, in 1962 while she was a student and he was squandering a Naval science scholarship at UT. The couple married Aug. 17, 1962. Kathleen stayed behind to finish school, while the Marines called Whitman back to Camp Lejune for bad grades.

While they were apart, Whitman was a lovesick puppy. Kathleen was a dream wife, he writes, perfect in every way except for her thighs. "However, I feel that when we live together again, that working together we will be able to trim her legs down to the right proportion."

After all, Whitman writes, he was able to correct their lovemaking by teaching Kathleen how to please him.

Whitman goes on to write that Kathleen's family finds him big and strong. His boss wonders why his desirable charge isn't sleeping around. His work habits are exemplary.

And yet all of the love talk and the bravado are swamped by Whitman's admission that he has not yet learned how to negotiate life.

"I wonder if I will ever amount to anything in this world? I have great plans and dreams and I can think a beautiful plan for anything I need or desire, but my motivation comes in spells. I must find the secret of making this motivation permanent," Whitman writes. "This lack of getting things done is definitely the only thing that will keep me from getting ahead in life. I must conquer it. I have the ambition, initiative and imagination to make the proper plans. Now I must train myself to execute them."

No evidence exists in the file to suggest Whitman was capable of this kind of execution. In April of 1963, Whitman reapplied for the Naval scholarship to UT and was rejected. After his discharge from the Marines, Whitman enrolled again in the engineering program at UT and pulled mostly C's.

Through 1965 and into 1966, Whitman worked as a collector for a finance company, a bank teller and a free-lance real estate broker and insurance agent while he went to school. In the summer of 1966 he worked as an engineering aide at NASA in Houston. The motor vehicle ID card found in Whitman's wallet was due to expire five days after the killings.

In truth, Whitman was being supported by Kathleen, who taught biology at Sidney Lanier High School and worked days and nights at Southwestern Bell in the summer, and Whitman's father, who sent them $140 a month, according to the report ruling his death a justifiable homicide.

The Eagle Scout signed on to be the scoutmaster of Troop 5 in January of 1965. According to reports in the file, Whitman was overbearing, disorganized and often frantic.

"He had to give up the Scout Master's job," fellow Scoutmaster Albert J. Vincik told police in the afternoon of Aug. 1, 1966. "In my opinion he was just spread out too thin and worked too hard at everything. He was nervous, meticulous and wanted to excel at everything. He also could not stand constructive criticism."

In spite of, or perhaps in part because of the financial aid, by 1966 Whitman no longer made a secret of his hatred for his father. When longstanding emotional and physical abuse became too much for his mother, Elizabeth Whitman, her son drove to Lake Worth to move her to Austin on March 2.



Like father, like son

As he loathed his father for the way he was treating his mother, Whitman was treating Kathleen in precisely the same way. Kathleen told friends John and Fran Morgan that Whitman had hit her three different times, according to a Department of Public Safety intelligence report dated Aug. 2, 1966. Whitman's perfectionism was driving Kathleen to divorce. The Morgans told authorities they presumed the couple later worked out their problems.

Whitman decided he needed help working out his own problems. A doctor at the University Health Center referred Whitman to the center's staff psychiatrist, Maurice D. Heatley.

In his report, filed March 29, 1966, Heatley said Whitman called his father "brutal, domineering and extremely demanding. He admitted to two assaults on Kathleen. He said his reason for coming was the upset of his parents' separation.

"His real concern," Heatley writes, "is with himself at the present time. He readily admits having overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of provocation. Repeated inquiries attempting to analyze his exact experiences were not too successful with the exception of his vivid reference to thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people."

Other friends would later come forward to report that Whitman had made a point of telling them what a great vantage point the observation deck of the UT Tower would make for a marksman to shoot people. Whitman may have failed at basic aspects of Marine protocol, but the score book of his M-1 rifle practice, which is now part of the file, proves he was a marksman.

Whitman had twice gone up in the tower before Aug. 1, once with a friend on April 5, the day he failed to keep an appointment with psychiatrist Heatley, and on July 22 with relatives, according to the reports.

Whether either or both of those visits constituted premeditated planning is conjecture informed by history. Some at the time suggested Whitman was insane, precluding premeditation. Americans were still relatively unsophisticated about random mass murder. Only 19 days before Whitman's shootings, Richard Speck had strangled and stabbed eight student nurses in a dormitory in Chicago.

The shootings that followed, like Luby's in Texas and Columbine in later years, would change and harden public opinion on the sanity issue. In his book, Lavergne makes a convincing case against the argument that insanity drove Whitman to kill.

Others posited that the tumor found at the base of Whitman's brain stem during his autopsy might have set him off, in spite of the dearth these past 35 years of similar cancer-fueled mass killings.

The Whitman file conclusively supports the notion that for the first and only time in his adult life, Whitman successfully carried out a plan he made.

Whitman bought the Bowie knife he used to kill his mother and the binoculars found around his bloody neck on July 31 at what was then known as Academy Surplus. He shopped that day for some of the food he expected to last him through a long siege: Del Monte fruit cocktail, Chef Boyardee ravioli, Spam, a 49-cent coffee cake.

Whitman packed a footlocker that would prepare him for any eventuality. Gallons of water and gallons of gas, ropes of different types and lengths. Batteries and extension cords. Knives, a hatchet and a machete. A Channel Master transistor radio and a Genie alarm clock.

He brought his own guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition for them and a pair of ear plugs; a Remington 6 mm bolt-action rifle with a scope; a Remington .35-caliber rifle; three of his pistols; and his U.S. Carbine, .30-caliber M-1.

He also brought along a 12-gauge shotgun he bought for $137.65 that morning when Sears opened. He had sawed off the barrel and the stock, knowing how narrow was the walkway leading up to the observation deck.

To carry all of it up to the reception room of the tower, he rented for $2.04 from Austin Rental Equipment Service a dolly he later used to barricade the door to the observation deck.



A final act of terror

The file fails to do justice to the chaos and grief Whitman caused that Aug. 1. The police reports from survivors and witnesses, many of them taken just after Whitman was killed, attest to the confusion and the inability to judge the scope of Whitman's massacre.

The report of Allen Crum, a 40-year-old supervisor at the University of Texas Co-Op, tells just a fragment of an old-fashioned Texas volunteerism that might today be seen as vigilantism.

An untold number of citizens came armed to the UT Tower mall that day, defying Whitman's barrage and helping Austin police pin Whitman down with return fire. Crum asked to be deputized, asked for a rifle and covered the officers, Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy, who shot and killed Whitman at 1:24 p.m. that day.

Martinez and McCoy, who became heroes and legends in Austin, summarized their roles that day in reports of no more than a page and a half. The final gun battle — Martinez unloading his service revolver, McCoy firing two shotgun blasts, Martinez grabbing McCoy's shotgun and firing down point blank on Whitman's twitching body — are flattened out in a few paragraphs of precise police jargon.

After calling for officers to stop firing, Martinez, betraying his only emotion in his report, wrote, "This officer then became (ex)hausted and weak and left the scene as I felt like was goint into shock. Met Lt. Morgan and he helped this office out of the building and Sgt. Pope then brought this officer to the police station."

Whitman had the final word after he was dead. Investigators sent to check on the well-being of Whitman's mother and wife, found Elizabeth Whitman, 43, with wounds to the head and left chest under her covers in the bedroom of her West 13th Street apartment. Pulling back the sheets they found a yellow legal pad upon which her son had left a letter "To Whom It May Concern."

"I have just taken my mother's life. I am very upset over having done it," the letter begins. Whitman repeats the hatred he feels for his father who beat and humiliated his mother. "I am truly sorry that this is the only way I could see to relieve her sufferings, but I think it was best. Let there be no doubt in your mind I loved that woman with all my heart. If there exists a God, let him understand my actions and judge me accordingly."

Officers who converged on the Whitman home at 906 W. Jewell St. found a naked Kathleen stabbed to death in her bed and a letter Whitman had started typing at 6:45 p.m. July 31 while his wife was at work. "It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy tonight after I pick her up from work at the telephone company.

"I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this. I don't know whether it is selfishness, or if I don't want her to have to face the embarrassment my actions would surely cause her.

"I truly do not consider the world worth living in, and am prepared to die, and I do not want to leave her to suffer alone in it."

Whitman left one last list, like all of the others, one he would never complete. He asked "whomever" to give their dog, Schocie, to Kathleen's parents and, for himself, that he be cremated after his autopsy.

He asked that his insurance cover the worthless checks he used to finance his slaughter. And if there was anything left over, Whitman asked that it be donated anonymously to a mental health foundation.

"Maybe," he wrote, if not for his own betterment, for some betterment, "research can prevent further tragedies of this type."
 

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The victims

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Margaret Whitman
Mother of Charles Whitman, who was stabbed in the chest and shot in the back of the head in the early morning of Monday, August 1, 1966. She left behind two other sons besides Charles Whitman: Patrick Whitman, who died of AIDS complications, and John Michael Whitman, who was shot and killed at a bar called "Big Daddies" in 1973 at age 24. Margaret Whitman's remains now rest in Lake Worth, Florida, along with those of her three sons.

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Margaret Whitman, as found by police

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The body of Margaret Whitman


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Kathleen Whitman
23-year-old wife of Charles Whitman, Stabbed three times in the chest while she was sleeping early Monday, August 1, 1966.

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The body of Whitman's wife and the house of the mass murderer


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Edna Townsley
Age 47. Receptionist. Divorced mother of two sons. Whitman encountered her on the 30th floor. He bashed her head in, probably with a rifle butt, with such force that part of her skull was torn away, also shot her in the head. He left her hidden behind the sofa to die.


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Marguerite Lamport
Mike and Mark Gabour, the 16- and 19-year-old sons of M.J. Gabour, led their father, mother, aunt and uncle up to the observation deck of the tower just as Charles Whitman was just assembling his arsenal. He opened fire on them. M.J. Gabour heard the guns go off as his sons, his wife and his sister, (Mrs. Lamport), "came rolling down the stairs. Whoever did the shooting slammed the door."


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Mark Gabour
M.J. Gabour turned his younger son over, saw he had been shot in the head. He was dead. So was Gabour's sister. Critically injured, his wife and his older son were bleeding profusely. Gabour and his brother-in-law dragged their dead and wounded to the 27th floor, sought for help but could find none.


Baby Wilson
Eight months pregnant, Mrs Wilson was walking from an anthropology class when a bullet crashed into her abdomen; she survived, but later gave birth to a stillborn child whose skull had been crushed by the shot.


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Thomas Frederick Eckman
Age 19. As Whitman began shooting, Eckman threw himself onto Claire Wilson, in a vain attempt to protect her. A bullet passed through him and into Claire Wilson's abdomen. Thomas died at a local hospital.


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Robert Hamilton Boyer
33 years old. He was en route to a teaching job in Liverpool, England, where his pregnant wife and two children were awaiting him, stepped out onto the mall to head for lunch, was shot fatally in the back.


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Billy Paul Speed
23 year old Policeman. He was one of the first patrolmen on the scene. He took cover behind the heavy, columnar stone railing at the south end of the mall; but a bullet zinged between the columns and killed him.


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Roy Dell Schmidt
29 years old. Electrical Repairman. He was walking toward his truck after making a call when a bullet struck him in the stomach and killed him.


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Thomas Ashton
22 years old. Peace Corps Trainee bound for Iran. He was strolling on the roof of the underground Computation Center when Whitman shot him dead.


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Paul Sonntag
18. Paul was a lifeguard at an Austin pool, was accompanying Claudia Rutt ( below ). He stood up from a construction barricade to glimpse Whitman in the tower, he said to Claudia and a friend, Carla: "Carla! Come look, I can see him. This is for real." He was shot immediately after finishing the last sentence.


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Claudia Rutt
18. Claudia was going for a polio shot she needed before entering Texas Christian University. After Sonntag fell, she moved from the baracade, and knelt beside him. Her friend Carla tried to move her, but Claudia was struck by a bullet in the chest.


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Harry Walchuk
39. Father of six and a teacher at Michigan's Alpena Community College. He browsed in the doorway of a newsstand after working all morning in the college library. Died while in emergency surgery from a gunshot wound.
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Thomas Karr
24 year old died on the operating table. He was walking toward his apartment after staying up almost all night for a 10 a.m. exam when he dropped to the pavement dying.


Karen Griffith
17-year old daughter of Harvey Griffith, Karen also had a sister Pamela. She was a student from Sidney Lanier High School, where Whitman's wife, Kathy, was a teacher. She was shot in the lung and died after a week in the hospital. Her funeral was held the following day at Crestview Memorial Park in Wichita Falls. Together with Kathy, she was the subject of dedication for her school's 1967 yearbook. Died Monday, August 8, 1966


David Gunby
A 23-year old electrical engineering student, Gunby was shot in the lower-left back, while walking towards the University library. During surgery to reconnect his severed small intestine, doctors realized that Gunby's sole kidney had also been damaged by the shooting. He later required a kidney transplant, and to go on dialysis. He moved to Fort Worth, Texas and on November 7, 2001 announced he was stopping dialysis. He died a week later at Harris Methodist Hospital


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Whitman's campus-area victims
 
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