Charles Whitman

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas clock tower in Austin on the 1st of August 1966 and began firing at people below. The deck sits on the 28th floor of the Main Building. He kept shooting for 96 minutes. By the end of that night and day, 17 people were dead and 31 more were wounded. It was one of the first mass shootings in modern American history to receive widespread national media coverage.

  Whitman was 25 years old. He was a former Marine and an architectural engineering student, and he had no prior diagnosis of mental illness. Three questions run through his story. What shaped a man who looked accomplished on paper? What did he tell a campus psychiatrist months before the attack? And what did doctors find when they examined his brain?

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• 2. Father's Shadow

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  Judi Faulch was a neighbor of the Whitmans in Lake Worth, Florida. She could not recall how many times her parents phoned the police about the family in the 1940s and 1950s. The calls were about Whitman's father beating his wife, his children and the family pets.

  Charles Joseph Whitman was born in that town on the 24th of June 1941, the eldest of three sons. His father, Charles Adolphus Whitman, had been raised in an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, and called himself a self-made man. Margaret, his mother, was 17 when the two met. The father was an admitted authoritarian. He supported the family financially and demanded near perfection from all of them.

  An examination at the age of six put the boy's IQ at 139. His parents pushed his achievements, and any hint of failure or laziness brought discipline from his father, often physical. Neighbors and teachers described a polite child who seldom lost his temper. Margaret was a devout Roman Catholic, and all three sons served as altar boys at Sacred Heart church in Lake Worth.

  His father collected firearms and taught each son to shoot, clean and maintain them. Hunting trips followed, and Charles became an avid hunter and accomplished marksman. The elder Whitman once boasted, "Charlie could plug the eye out of a squirrel by the time he was sixteen." At 11 the boy joined the Boy Scouts. He reached Eagle Scout at twelve years three months, reportedly the youngest up to that time. He also became an accomplished pianist at 12 and took on an extensive newspaper route.

  In 1966, Margaret announced that she would divorce her husband because of his continued physical abuse. Her eldest son drove overnight to Florida to help her move to Austin. Fearing his father might turn violent while she packed, he asked a local policeman to wait outside the house. His youngest brother, John, moved to Austin with their mother. Patrick, the middle son, stayed in Florida and worked in his father's plumbing supply business. The father later said he spent more than $1,000 on long-distance calls, begging his wife to come back and asking his son to persuade her.

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• 3. Marksman Marine

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  In September 1955 Whitman entered St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach, where he was a moderately popular student. By the next month he had saved enough newspaper money to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which he rode on his route. He graduated seventh in a class of 72 in June 1959.

  Whitman left home on the 6th of July 1959 to join the United States Marine Corps, and he had not told his father. A month earlier he had come home drunk, and his father had beaten him and thrown him into the family swimming pool. Whitman later told a family friend that this incident was the catalyst for enlisting. As he traveled toward Parris Island, his father found out and telephoned a federal government office, trying to cancel the enlistment.

  During his first eighteen months of service, spent in 1959 and 1960, Whitman earned a sharpshooter's badge and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal. On marksmanship tests he scored 215 of a possible 250 points. He did especially well when shooting rapidly over long distances and at moving targets.

  He then applied to the Naval Enlisted Science and Education Program, which sends enlisted personnel to college to train as engineers and later commissions them as officers. High exam scores won him a place at a preparatory school in Maryland, where he studied mathematics and physics. After that he was approved to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin.

  His grades there improved somewhat, but the Marines judged them too weak to continue his scholarship. In February 1963 he was ordered to active duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for the rest of his five-year enlistment. He apparently resented the end of his studies, although he was automatically promoted to Lance Corporal. At Camp Lejeune he spent four days in hospital after lifting a Jeep that had rolled over an embankment, freeing another Marine trapped beneath it.

  Despite a reputation as an exemplary Marine, he kept gambling. In November 1963 he was court-martialed for gambling, usury, keeping a personal firearm on base and threatening another Marine over a $30 loan. He had demanded $15 in interest on that loan. He was sentenced to thirty days of confinement and ninety days of hard labor, and he was demoted from lance corporal to private. While he waited for the court-martial, he began a diary titled Daily Record of C. J. Whitman.

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• 4. Campus and Marriage

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  In September 1961 Whitman entered the mechanical engineering program at UT Austin and started out as a good student. His hobbies included karate, scuba diving, gambling and hunting. Soon after he enrolled, a passerby wrote down the license plate number of a car carrying Whitman and two friends who were poaching a deer. Police arrested the trio while they were butchering the animal in the shower of Whitman's dormitory. He was fined $100.

  He earned a reputation as a practical joker. Yet friends also noticed morbid and chilling remarks. In 1962 he told a fellow student, "A person could stand off an army from atop of the Main Building's clock tower before they got him."

  In February 1962 Whitman met Kathleen Frances Leissner, an education major three years younger than he was. She was his first serious girlfriend. They announced their engagement on the 19th of July and married on the 17th of August 1962 at St. Michael's Catholic Church in her hometown of Needville, Texas. They chose the 22nd wedding anniversary of his parents as the date. His brother Patrick was best man. Leissner's family and friends approved, calling Whitman a "handsome young man" who was intelligent and aspirational.

  In December 1964 the Marine Corps honorably discharged Whitman, and he returned to UT Austin to study architectural engineering. He worked as a bill collector for the Standard Finance Company and later as a bank teller at the Austin National Bank. In January 1965 he took a temporary job as a traffic surveyor for the Texas Highway Department through Central Freight Lines. His wife taught biology at Lanier High School, and the teaching salary did not support the lifestyle they wanted, so both held part-time jobs.

  Whitman also volunteered as a scout leader with Austin Scout Troop 5. He carried a full academic workload to finish his degree faster. His diary praised his wife, spoke of longing to be with her, and laid out plans to end his financial dependence on his father.

  Friends later said Whitman told them he had struck his wife on three occasions. They said he despised himself for it and confessed to being "mortally afraid of being like his father." In his journal he resolved to be a good husband and not an abusive one. By 1966 he had also passed the state licensing exam for real-estate agents.

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• 5. Warning Signs

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  Investigators later learned that Whitman had visited several UT physicians in the year before the shootings, and they prescribed various medications. Between the fall and winter of 1965 he saw at least five doctors. Afterward he saw a psychiatrist, who gave him no prescription. Jan Cochrum prescribed him Valium and recommended that he see the campus psychiatrist. He was also abusing amphetamines and suffering severe headaches, which he described as "tremendous."

  On the 29th of March 1966, at his wife's urging, Whitman saw the campus psychiatrist Maurice Dean Heatly for a two-hour session. Heatly's notes describe a somewhat self-centered, egocentric man who constantly strove to better himself. Whitman reported increasingly frequent headaches. He also described disgust at having twice struck his wife and a fear of becoming a frequent wife beater like his "demanding" father. He was frustrated by his father's almost daily calls urging him to bring his mother home.

  Heatly wrote that "This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility." He added that Whitman admitted overwhelming periods of hostility with minimal provocation. The notes record his vivid reference to "thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people." Heatly scheduled a follow-up for the next week. Whitman did not attend.

  His own final note later referred to the visit. "After one visit, I never saw the Doctor again," he wrote, adding that he had since been fighting his mental turmoil alone. It is not known when he decided to end his life, or when he chose the Main Building as the place.

  He is known to have visited the tower's observation deck twice in the ten days before the attack. On the 22nd of July he went with his brother John and a friend. Six days later, on the 28th of July, he went alone.

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• 6. The Last Day

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  On the afternoon before the attack, Whitman bought a pair of binoculars and a knife at a hardware store and some Spam at a 7-Eleven. He picked up his wife from her summer job as a telephone operator, then met his mother for lunch at the Wyatt Cafeteria near campus. At about 4:00 p.m. the couple visited their close friends John and Frances Morgan. They left at 5:50 p.m. so that Kathy could reach her 6:00 to 10:00 shift.

  At 6:45 p.m. Whitman began typing a note. "I don't really understand myself these days," he wrote, and he described himself as a victim of "many unusual and irrational thoughts." He asked for an autopsy after his death to find out whether a biological cause lay behind his headaches. He wrote that he had decided to kill both his mother and his wife, to spare them the suffering of the world and the embarrassment of his actions. He said nothing about an attack at the university.

  Just after midnight he drove to his mother's apartment at 1212 Guadalupe Street and killed her. Beside her body he left a handwritten note. "Let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart," it read. He then went to his home at 906 Jewell Street and killed his wife as she slept.

  Back at the typewritten note, he added in pen: "Friends interrupted. 8-1-66 Mon. 3:00 A.M. BOTH DEAD." He asked that his dog go to his in-laws and that his body be cremated after the autopsy. He also left instructions that two rolls of camera film be developed, and he wrote personal notes to each of his brothers. On an envelope labeled "Thoughts for the Day," he wrote: "I never could quite make it. These thoughts are too much for me."

  At 5:45 a.m. he telephoned his wife's supervisor at Bell System and said Kathy was ill. Five hours later he made a similar call to his mother's workplace. His last journal entries were written in the past tense, as though both deaths had already happened.

  At about 11:35 a.m. Whitman reached the UT campus. He told a security guard that he was a research assistant delivering equipment. He climbed the Main Building's clock tower, killing three people inside it, and opened fire from the observation deck. Patrolman Houston McCoy, carrying a shotgun, and Ramiro Martinez of the Austin Police Department raced to the top. Together their shots killed Whitman.

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• 7. Searching For Causes

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  Coleman de Chenar, a neuropathologist at Austin State Hospital, performed the autopsy on the 2nd of August 1966 at the Cook Funeral Home in Austin. Whitman's father had authorized it, honoring the request in his son's notes. The body had been embalmed the day before, which delayed toxicology. De Chenar reported a pecan-sized brain tumor and called it an astrocytoma with slight necrosis. He also noted that the skull was unusually thin, between 2 and 4 millimeters. Whitman had possessed Dexedrine when he died, so his blood and urine were tested for amphetamines and other drugs.

  Texas governor John Connally then commissioned a task force of neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, pathologists and psychologists. It included the University of Texas Health Center directors John White and Maurice Heatly, the same psychiatrist Whitman had seen in March. After a three-hour hearing on the 5th of August, the panel decided that de Chenar's diagnosis was wrong. It found a glioblastoma multiforme, with widespread necrosis and a "remarkable vascular component." Its toxicology tests revealed nothing significant.

  The panel's psychiatrists wrote that "the relationship between the brain tumor and … Whitman's actions … cannot be established with clarity." They allowed that the tumor "conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions." The neurologists and neuropathologists were more cautious. They concluded that existing knowledge of organic brain function "does not enable us to explain the actions of Whitman on August first."

  Forensic investigators have theorized that the tumor pressed on the amygdala, a brain region tied to anxiety and the fight-or-flight response. A 2024 book by a retired medical oncologist, Cause of Death: Ballistic Trauma, proposes another route. Because the tumor lay in or near his right temporal lobe, the author suggests recurrent temporal lobe seizures. Some of these bring sudden fear, panic or anger without loss of consciousness. Whitman never had an electroencephalogram, so the idea remains speculative, though the author calls it credible.

  The same book notes that this kind of tumor usually appears around age 64, while Whitman was 25. One chapter argues that his service at Camp Lejeune may have exposed him to carcinogens. The base's drinking water was later disclosed to be contaminated with neurotoxic and carcinogenic compounds.

  The author also applied the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria and found no recognized psychiatric illness, such as schizophrenia or a violence-linked personality disorder. He rejects the label of sociopath, pointing to Whitman's exemplary childhood, a Good Conduct medal, his popularity on campus and his four-year relationship with his wife. The book speculates about an acute psychotic breakdown in the final hours. It cites the supplies carried up to the deck, which included 12 cans and 2 jars of food, three and a half gallons of gasoline, an alarm clock, a pipe wrench, an extension cord, a compass and a snake bite kit, alongside seven firearms. Only the weapons were used. It adds that killing one's mother accounts for under 1 percent of American homicides each year, and that most such killers have had a psychotic disorder.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  A joint Catholic funeral for Whitman and his mother took place in Lake Worth on the 5th of August 1966. They were buried at Hillcrest Memorial Park in Florida, and as a military veteran he received military honors, with the American flag draped over his casket. A few days later his remains were exhumed because investigators needed more pathological material. His brain was retained for "special research" at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, without the knowledge or consent of his family.

  On the 3rd of July 1973, Whitman's youngest brother, John, then 24, was shot and killed during a fight in Lake Worth. Ceotis Burgess was convicted of homicide and sentenced to 15 years, of which he served only five. Clint Jones was charged with conspiracy. Their father later sued the bar and won more than $200,000 in 1980.

  The attack changed American policing. It is widely credited with spurring the creation of SWAT teams across the country, because police were poorly equipped to deal with a sniper holding such a high position. Whitman's case also became a landmark in the study of neurological factors in criminal behavior. Documentaries, books and academic studies have returned to it ever since.

  The fate of his brain remains unresolved. It may have moved into a collection that de Chenar started at the state hospital. A 2014 audit of that collection, meant to account for missing specimens, found some had been discarded because they had degraded and others had been loaned to another institute. Whitman's brain was not identified, and its fate is unknown.

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