"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
238 Presidential Historians Rank Obama Near The Top: Dubyah Near The Bottom
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
http://paxonbothhouses.
Canadian Letter To The Editor: "You Americans Have No Idea How Good Obama Is"
Canadian Letter To The Editor: "You Americans Have No Idea How Good Obama Is"
President Obama's 2015 Stand-Up Comedy Routine At White House Correspondents' Dinner
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/05/president-obamas-full-2015-stand-up.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/05/president-obamas-full-2015-stand-up.html
Alan: I cannot locate any online reference to Whitman's political affiliation.
However, back in the 1960s, EVERY white Texan was a Democrat just as today EVERY white American is Republican.
However, back in the 1960s, EVERY white Texan was a Democrat just as today EVERY white American is Republican.
Making an issue of Whitman's presumed political affiliation demonstrates the author's inability to think, like photographing a Nebraska blizzard and using it to "prove" global warming's a hoax.
"The Death Of Epistemology"
"The Guardian: John Oliver's Viral Video Is The Best Climate Debate You'll Ever See"
(How the death of epistemology validates airheads)
By any measure, Charles Whitman is a remarkable fellow: a cradle Catholic from a family of altar boys; a Marine marksman considered "the best shot in Austin"; and the youngest Eagle Scout ever.
| Charles Joseph Whitman 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 | |||
photo galleries
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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
° 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
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.
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