In 1962, a small group of students were hanging out on the balcony of their dorm at the University of Texas in the capitol city of Austin. From where they sat, a tall building, simply known as The Tower was visible. From a distance it looked like a slender white needle with rows of windows, 28 floors, an observation deck, a clock on each side, and a peaked roof. One of the students jokingly made a comment that it would be a great place to shoot people from because, with the proper preparation, a single man could hole off a whole army if he wanted to. None of the other students took him seriously. He often made strange jokes like that and besides, he was a nice guy who would never do anything to hurt anybody. They laughed it off and moved on to another topic of conversation. The one student who made the comment was named Charles Whitman. His comment was the first but not the last time he would be associated with the UT Tower.
An old photograph of Charles Whitman, taken when he was two years old, shows him at the beach. In each hand he holds a rifle as if they were ski poles. From an early age, guns would be an important part of his life. His father, C.A. Whitman Jr., collected firearms and had a large supply of them in the family home. Charles was C.A.’s firstborn son in a family of five including his two younger brothers and his mother Margaret. The family lived in Lake Worth, Florida. C.A. Whitman owned his own business which specialized in sewer maintenance and repair. He was a successful businessman but also a strict disciplinarian. He sometimes beat his children when they stepped out of line or did not work hard enough in school. He kept a belt on top of the piano to remind Charles of what would happen if the boy did not practice his music with enough enthusiasm. The Whitmans were Roman Catholics who attended church regularly even though they were not especially preoccupied with the Christian religion. The Tower, the firearms, the father...all three would later be factors in an event that makes Charles Whitman notorious long after his death.
Charles Whitman was an ordinary American boy. He was intelligent, athletic, hard friends, got good grades in school, and never did much to cause trouble. He joined the Boy Scouts at age 11. But his GPA declined during his junior year in high school after missing two months because of a surgical procedure to remove a blood clot from his testicle. It was a setback, but the boy managed to get his grades up to a C average by the time he graduated. All throughout his youth, his father kept taking him to the rifle range to practice shooting. Charles took after his father and developed a passion for guns. His aim was accurate and he excelled at hitting moving targets from a distance.
But tensions between Charles and his father kept getting worse. In his senior year, Charles came home drunk so his father beat him up and threw him into the family’s swimming pool. After graduation, the boy enlisted in the Marines without telling his father. While on his way to the training camp at Parris Island, C.A. contacted the federal government in an attempt to get Charles’ enlistment canceled. C.A. had no success and his son did an 18 month tour of duty in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During his military service, Charles’ marksmanship earned him a sharpshooter’s badge and a medal. Aside from being a good soldier, he also started becoming obsessed with outdoing his father. The young marine wanted to be tougher, richer, and more successful than the man who brought him into the world and this fixation would remain a part of his life until the end. When his tour of duty ended, Charles Whitman applied for a military scholarship and, after receiving high grades, went to a Maryland preparatory school where he excelled in math and physics. The government agreed to pay his way through college and he enrolled at the University of Texas in their mechanical engineering program.
The Autumn of 1961 was the year Whitman started college. He moved to Austin and began classes; this transition was tough for him but he never encountered any problems he couldn’t handle. His obsession with making money continued to grow and so did his desire for revenge on his father. Whitman liked gambling and often stayed up all night playing cards with other students in the dorm. He was a sore loser and sometimes got in fights when he felt he was being cheated. He developed a reputation as a practical joker and sometimes could be a bit of a bully. People regarded him as being tense and nervous but usually in control. Charles Whitman’s grades were mediocre.
One night in a nearby public park, a neighbor heard gun shots. They looked out the window and saw a car driving away with a dead deer hanging out of the partially closed trunk. He wrote down the license plate number and called the police on suspicion of poaching. The cops traced the number to Whitman’s address at the UT dorms and went to investigate. They found his car with a trail of blood leading into the building, up the stairs and into the men’s shower. There they found Charles Whitman skinning the deer carcass. They charged him with hunting out of season; Whitman went to court to fight the charges and lost the case. He was charged a $29.00 fine.
On the brighter side, in 1962 Charles Whitman met a student named Kathy. She came from a remote and dusty town on the desolate planes of Texas. After a brief relationship, the two got married. They moved off-campus to a small rental home but they struggled financially to pay rent. Kathy was a high achiever. She soon graduated and went to work as a public high school teacher. She proved to be popular with both the students and the faculty but having ambitions for a higher career, she moved on after two years and got employed at Bell Telephone.
She became the breadwinner of the household while Charles, getting more and more obsessed with making money, struggled with college. He considered changing majors and pursuing a career as a lawyer but worried about losing his military financial aid. His low grade point average later led him to lose his scholarship anyways. The anxious young student was having trouble making up his mind ablut his future. He began binge-eating junk food and rapidly gaining weight.
In the early years of their marriage, Charles and Kathy fought frequently. Neighbors sometimes heard them shouting until the early hours of the morning. On at leas two occasions, Charles beat Kathy but she hid her bruises and did a good job of keeping the violence secret. Like so many battered wives, she believed she could change her husband for the better.
Charles Whitman had enlisted in the Marines for five years and his university courses were considered part of his tour of duty. But his grades continued to waver and they decided to end his funding and call him back to camp. Whitman had to leave Kathy behind for a while when he returned to duty at Camp Lejeune. He continued to be an excellent soldier and earned accolades one day when a jeep rolled over into a ditch and Charles single-handedly lifted it up so the man inside could escape. This caused an arm injury and Charles had to spend time in the hospital for surgery and recovery. He was promoted to lance corporal. This promotion did not prevent him from getting into trouble.
One night during a clandestine poker game, Whitman kept winning and one player ran out of money. Whitman advanced the soldier $30 which he quickly lost and then quit the game. Days later, Whitman cornered the soldier and demanded he pay back the loan with 15 percent interest. When he refused, Whitman went and fetched his personal gun which he had been hiding in his bunk. He approached the borrower again and threatened to shoot him if he did not pay the money back. When his superiors found out about this incident, Charles Whitman was sentenced to 30 days in the brig and 90 days of hard labor. They demoted him from lance corporal to private.
While in the brig, Whitman did a lot of thinking. He was lonely and missed Kathy. He wrote letters to her every day and she wrote back. He decided to work on cleaning up his act and become a better husband upon his return. Despite his disciplinary problems, Charles Whitman was discharged with honors. He returned to the house in Austin and he proved to be as good as his word. Fights with his wife happened less and less often. As he had promised he, never physically abused her again. Well, at least he didn’t until July 31 of 1966.
Charles Whitman returned to the University of Texas to finish his degree. His grades remained adequate but not excellent. He continued on his steady diet of junk food. Kathy stopped buying snacks altogether to prevent him from gaining any more weight. He maintained a friendly persona but was often sweaty and breathing heavily. Whitman began using amphetamines to help him stay up late at night, cramming for exams and working on assignments. He often complained of headaches and started using valium to calm down when the speed made him too tense. Sometimes he became surly and irritable but he managed to keep his temper under control.
At the end of Winter in 1966, Whitman paid a visit to the campus psychiatrist. He complained of being confused and feeling as though something foreign was taking over his mind. He didn’t know where he was heading in life and sometimes fantasized about going on a shooting spree around the campus. The psychiatrist dismissed this comment as a common fantasy, something that many students say, citing the evidence that other patients have never acted this daydream out and often use it as a an escape valve for relieving stress when their study-load gets too demanding. Although the doctor would later say that Whitman sounded intelligent and polite, he also appeared to be barely holding back an intense amount of rage. In the end, he decided the student was not a threat to himself or anybody else but strongly recommended that he return in a week for another consultation. Charles Whitman never came back.
Later that spring, Charles Whitman got a phone call from his mother. In his mind, the worst had happened. Margaret Whitman was calling from a hotel room where she was hiding from Charles’ father. C.A. had beaten her severely during a fight and as she left the house, he tried to force the wedding rings off her finger. She wanted a divorce after a long marriage of being abused. Charles Whitman flew into a rage and drove straight to Florida without stopping. He took his mother to the family home where she collected her belongings. C.A., begged her not to leave but also kept insisting that she give him back the wedding rings. She refused and they immediately left for Austin. Charles helped his mother find an apartment in a tower block and a job in a cafeteria. He also helped her file papers for divorce. C.A. began stalking his wife. He called Charles’ home just about every other day demanding that he tell him where Margaret was. The constant calls persisted for several months. Later that spring, Charles’ younger brother also moved to Austin, claiming he also wanted to get away from their father who was bullying him on a regular basis too.
Charles Whitman’s anger continued to smolder. On July 31, 1966 he stopped at a hardware store and bought a knife, binoculars, a water bottle, and some ammunition. The shopkeeper did not see anything unusual in this, assuming that the customer was simply going on a hunting trip. Whitman also stopped at a 7-11 and bought a large supply of spam and pain medications.
July 31 was a day of hot Texas weather. Muggy and uncomfortable, it was difficult to feel at ease. Charles drove his wife Kathy to her job; she began her evening shift at Bell Telephone at 6:00 pm. He then drove home, stripped down to his underwear, ate a dinner of candy bars, and sat down at the typewriter to write a suicide note. Charles Whitman wrote that he felt confused and unable to control his thoughts. He requested that, after his death, an autopsy be performed to determine if he had anything biologically wrong with him. He also said that he blamed his father fr what he was about to do. He claimed he hated his father for physically abusing his mother and psychologically tormenting the whole family.
While writing, he was interrupted by the doorbell. A friend of his and his wife had stopped by to say hello. They sat in the living room, chatting for a while until they got up and left. The friend would later say that Charles was not acting strange. He was joking around as usual, seemed relaxed, and talked about a vacation he was planning for later in the summer. Whitman went back to writing his suicide note but he finished writing it by hand. He also hand wrote three others, one to be left with his mother, one to be left with his wife, and one to be sent to his father.
As the sun began to set, Charles Whitman drove to pick up his wife at work. He brought her home and then said he was going to visit his mother because her apartment had air conditioning and the heat was making it difficult for him to concentrate on his homework. Kathy was so uncomfortable in the summer heat that she undressed and lay on their bed completely naked while Whitman left with a duffel bag.
Just after midnight, Charles Whitman, bag in hand, arrived at his mother’s apartment. She let him in, gave him a snack, and then he came up from behind her and wrapped a cord around her neck. As he suffocated her, she had no time to be shocked or to scream. She collapsed immediately and he gathered up her limp body and laid her on the bed. Whitman stabbed his mother in the heart five times then stabbed her left hand and crushed the fingers with the knife handle, thereby mutilating the diamond ring his father coveted so much. He covered her with her bed sheets. He left an envelope containing his handwritten note on the body. On his way out, he taped another note to the door. It said not to disturb her as she was not feeling well.
Charles Whitman returned home. He entered the darkened house quietly and found his wife in bed. The night was so hot that she had fallen asleep without getting under the covers. He stood over her nude body and rapidly stabbed her in the heart several times. As the blood began to soak the sheets, he pulled her left arm straight and turned her head so that it was resting on the arm. The blood began to mat her hair and he covered her with a blanket. He also left an envelope with his handwritten note inside on Kathy’s dead body.
Charles Whitman spent the rest of the night, sitting on his couch in his underwear, gorging himself on candy.
Early in the morning, when the sun came up, Whitman called the cafeteria where is mother worked to tell them she was too sick to come in. He also called Bell Telephone to tell them the same about his wife. Then he drove back to the hardware store and bough two shotguns, two pistols, and a rifle. He also bought enough ammunition to fight a small war. The shopkeeper did not bother to ask Whitman for identification. He knew him as a friendly neighborhood boy with an all-American passion for shooting. In Texas there was nothing unusual about that. Whitman paid for it all with a check. Later, the check bounced.
Whitman packed all his gear into a metal army trunk. Packed full of weapons, a change of clothes, a first aid kit, pain killers, a portable radio, a bottled water, and a small supply of food, it was too heavy to carry for a long distance. Whitman put it in the trunk of his car and drove back to the hardware store where he rented a dolly for one day, again paying for it with a check that would later bounce. He was wearing coveralls to make himself look like a maintenance worker.
Charles Whitman drove on to the University of Texas parking lot gate. He told the security guard he had work to do in the Tower. The rent-a-cop wrote him up an extended parking permit and waved him through. Whitman parked the car, loaded the trunk onto the dolly, and took the Tower elevator up to the 27th floor. He got out and dragged the dolly and trunk up the one flight of stairs leading to the observation deck.
August 1, 1966 was a sweltering hot day. By noon the temperature would reach up to 100 degrees fahrenheit. The pudgy murderer had worked up a sweat when he burst through the doors of the reception room that led to the deck. It was 11:35 am. He walked in and shot the receptionist in the neck as she was about to leave for lunch. He hid her body behind a couch where she lay bleeding but she didn’t die. A young couple who had been hanging out on the observation deck entered through the glass door. They saw Charles and said hello. He politely said hello back and they went down the stairs without a clue that anything strange was in the process of happening.
The Tower, officially named The Beaux Arts Main Building was completed in 1937; it was designed by the architect Paul Philipe Cret. The belfry above the clock faces contains a carillon of 56 bells that are rung by students, marking the hours, half hours, and quarter hours throughout the day. It stands tall in the center of the campus, the south side facing academic buildings, offices, and the student union. The north side faces the tree lined mall that leads to a street with stores, restaurants, and coffee houses that are popular with students; this is the outer block of an area known as The Drag. From the observation deck, the dome of Austin’s capitol building can be seen in the distance. On the western horizon, the hills outside the city limits are visible and to the east there are houses and more city streets. The Tower is a source of pride for the students of the attractive University of Texas campus. It is also a symbol of pride for the city of Austin and other residents of Texas too. As a landmark building, it is a tourist destination, popular on sightseeing tours, and it is said that every visitor from out of town should see the Tower at least once.
And so a group of visitors were coming up the Tower stairs to the 28th floor observation deck. Charles Whitman saw them emerging up into the reception area. One was a middle-aged German woman and her son. Her husband, a gas station owner and her other son were close behind with the owner’s sister and her husband who were visiting Austin during a summer getaway. Charles Whitman began shooting at them. The mother fell back against her son and together they rumbled down the stairs. On the landing, she fell dead on top of him and the son lay bleeding underneath her while the rest of the group stood still in silence, playing dead for fear that the shooter might come after them.
Whitman went out onto the deck. The balmy air and intense sunshine made him sweat so he tore off a piece of his shirt and tied it around his head, making a white headband to prevent the perspiration from dripping into his eyes. He walked over to the south barricade and began to shoot. One person lay dead in a spreading pool of blood while another limped away with a bullet in her leg. He shot a couple more people then ducked and ran in a crouch along the barricades to the north side of the Tower. He opened fire on the mall and saw several bleeding bodies collapse while bullets ricocheted off concrete and chalky chunks of statues flew up into the air, raining gravel and dust on the concrete walkways. A pregnant woman, unaware of the danger, began hobbling across the mall when a bullet ripped through her stomach, killing the fetus instantly. Given Whitman’s excellent sharpshooting skills, it is highly unlikely that this target was hit accidentally. Some bullets reached as far as the road running along the outer edge of The Drag. Some pedestrians were hit, either being killed or injured while people fled into stores and hid behind parked cars. Back on the south side, Whitman shot a bullet that hit a window on the top floor of the student union; the frightened students hiding inside were showered with fragments of glass.
Charles Whitman took out his binoculars and surveyed the scene. Bodies lay limp all around. Injured people played dead, thinking that any movement would get themselves shot again. But they had no reason to worry; Whitman never shot at a body twice whether the victim get killed or not. This was probably not out of mercy since he appeared to have none at this time. Rather, he might have wanted to prove to the world what a great marksman he was, able to kill many people with only one single bullet at a time.
The hour struck noon but on this terrible day the carillon bells would not chime. The campus was quiet and still. Charles Whitman sat down for a snack and a drink of water. The burning heat and blinding white sunlight was making him feel fatigued. He turned on his battery powered transistor radio and listened as the DJ’s warned everybody in Austin to stay inside since a sniper was firing gunshots from the Tower.
Police cars were dispatched to the area to block people from the University of Texas campus. Many people got around these barricades, though. Every time Whitman’s head popped up over the wall surrounding the deck, a battery of shots rang out. Armed citizens had taken to hiding behind trees and statues, on the roofs of buildings, and under parked cars. People stood waiting with fingers on the triggers of every kind of gun they could get, just waiting for a chance to shoot the sniper in the head. We’re talking about Texas here, so you know that means there were a lot of people with a lot of guns. Not one of them hit their target.
By 12:30, the shooting had all but died down. It was too risky for Whitman to shoot again for fear of revealing his location on the observation deck. Besides, no one would dare go out in the open on the UT campus by this time. Whitman sat on the shady side of the deck and contemplated what to do next.
Around 1:00, he began to hear footsteps and whispers. He crouched and moved along the wall, trying to see who was approaching. He thought that some people had come up the Tower and were now on the deck so he sat by a corner with gun in hand, legs spread out before him. He turned his head around the corner and pointed his shotgun. He saw two uniformed policemen, one kneeling and the other standing aiming their pistols at him. Behind them were several cops backing them up. The two front policemen opened fire, shooting Charles Whitman several times in the head and chest. Within a minute he was bleeding and dead, sprawled out like hunted buffalo on the deck.
The shootings were over, the campus was cleared. Fourteen people were dead and 31 were injured in the 96 minute killing spree. Police immediately went to Whitman’s home where they found Kathy’s body and three suicide notes her psycho husband had written the night before. The inspectors also went to Whitman’s mother’s apartment. There, too, they found her dead body and a suicide note. The notes to his wife and mother said that he loved them intensely and he killed them because he thought they were too good to live in such a terrible world. He mentioned that his mother would never have to fear his father’s abuse and violence ever again. The note that was written to C.A. Whitman, Charles’ father, has never been released for public scrutiny by order of the courts.
During the autopsy of Whitman’s body, the coroner discovered an astrocytoma tumor the size of a walnut in the center of his brain. Experts later made a statement that this probably was not the cause of the sniper’s actions since tumors of this type do not normally cause violent behavior. It might, however, explain the headaches and confusion that Whitman complained of days before his death.
Based on information contained in the suicide notes, it was obvious that Charles Whitman was fixated on humiliating his father. He assassinated and injured a massive amount of people because he knew that C.A. Whitman, his only surviving parent, would receive a lot of unwanted attention from the media in the wake of the tragedy. Whitman wanted to drive his father crazy, possibly to suicide, because of the bullying and abuse the man had subjected the entire family to in Florida. Charles Whitman was afraid of his father and felt unable to stand up to him; he committed mass murder in an attempt to ruin C.A.’s life. He probably killed his mother and wife so they would not have to live with the shame of what he had done.
The University of Texas temporarily closed the Tower observation deck but reopened it later that year. In 1974 they closed it again because, by the time, nine people had attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the deck. Some people believe that the Tower is cursed. The deck was reopened once more in 1998 with added security features to prevent future dangers. The carillon bells are still faithfully rung every day.
The violence coming from the University of Texas Tower was the biggest mass shooting to happen on U.S. soil since the Civil War. Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre during the Prohibition era is the only other one that comes close. But Charles Whitman also started an unfortunate trend. Over the years, mass shootings, many involving random strangers in public places, have increased in frequency and body counts. While the American crime rate peaked and went into decline in the 1990s, mass shootings are the only aspect of crime statistics that continue to grow steadily. In 2003, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired and President George W. Bush refused to renew it. Military-grade assault rifles were put on the market and the rate of mass shootings has spiked since then. America is the only country in the world, excluding war zones, where mass shootings are a regular occurrence. Sure, other nations like Canada, Australia, Norway, and New Zealand have mass shootings every now and then, but these are outliers. No other country has them the way we do on a weekly basis. This is a distinctly American problem.
A forensic pathologist once said that societies get the criminals they deserve. If true, why do American’s deserve the terror of mass shootings? Is there some god out there simply trying to tell us that our gun laws are stupid? Are these killing sprees messages from our collective unconscious reminding us that we aren’t as great as we think we are? Is the universe trying to tell us that, as a society, we have lost touch with reality and can’t face our problems head on? Maybe as a nation we are too cowardly to solve this problem in a sensible and constructive way. It probably is also a sign that our country is on an irreversible decline and it is time to let a more mature and rational nation like China take over. How many mass shootings has China had since the Cultural Revolution? None.
