The Madman on the Tower
I remember every detail of that day twenty years ago—the blue sky, the noonday heat, the gunshots, the screams, the blood, and …
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Later, neither cop went beyond a few clichés in trying to describe how it felt to climb over the dead and dying victims of a mass murderer and then confront the madman and his rifle face to face, but the psychic energy it took to do that thing displayed itself in ways that were not fully recorded in police reports. McCoy remembers that his colleague gave a war cry when Whitman was knocked backward by the blasts and that Martinez then slammed his empty revolver to the tiles, grabbed a shotgun from McCoy’s hands, and ran to the still-jerking body to fire point-blank into its heart. After that he threw the shotgun down too hard to suit its owner and ran, shouting for the shooting to stop, toward the others on the walkway, who recognized him in time. Martinez doesn’t recall being so rough on the guns but admits he was a bit rattled at the time and needed a hand getting back to the police station. That night he hid from the press at his brother’s house, drinking an entire bottle of gin without—he said later—feeling its effects. McCoy stayed crouched by the body, searching it for identification, and spoke to it, warning it that if its spreading pool of blood ruined his boots he was going to heave it over the side. He likewise avoided reporters and spent the evening drinking.
Since neither cop claimed personal credit for killing Whitman, it went by default to Martinez, who was found more newsworthy by reporters pleased to have a genuine minority hero. He was widely honored and ended up a Texas Ranger, now stationed in New Braunfels. McCoy quickly faded from the picture and today works at a Boy Scout camp near Menard.
It took time for the magnitude of August 1, 1966, to sink in and for the press to sort out what had happened. You don’t get the biggest mass murder in the country’s history very often, and whether this one qualified depended somewhat on definitions. Even the body count hinged upon the theological issue of a fetus that was killed but whose mother survived, and then there was the matter of Whitman’s mother and wife, whom he had killed the previous night. Counting the latter and the fetus, the final toll came to 16 dead and 31 wounded, though it was possible that one or two others were treated for minor wounds at the height of confusion and did not make the list. That Whitman, a 25-year-old architectural engineering student, was discovered to be a former altar boy and Eagle Scout provided delicious irony—the ugly duckling tale in reverse. That his marksmanship was astounding could be attributed to good Marine Corps training. Superficially he presented the image of a happily married college student and an all-American boy from the proverbial good family. But on closer examination, it turned out that his marriage wasn’t happy, his family situation was thoroughly screwed-up, and Whitman was a driven, pill-popping, self-flogging bully and all-around psycho with a talent for concealing it.
Exactly why Whitman snapped (and that seems to be the word) can never be known, but in the preceding weeks he had talked to a university psychiatrist about the emotional strain he was under, pressures that were building up, and his increasingly violent impulses, which apparently began to surface (or resurface) with the breakup of his parents’ marriage a few months earlier. “I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt come [sic] overwhelming violent impulses,” Whitman wrote in a letter. “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.”
In fact, Whitman had told the psychiatrist that his urge was to go up on the Tower with a rifle and begin killing people. That was dismissed as fantasy, since thoughts of the Tower were not uncommon in the minds of troubled students, the doctor told a press conference the next day. I’m sure that’s true, but I attended the press conference and was interested to see that the psychiatrist was the same one whom my wife and I had consulted independently a few months earlier when a pending divorce was causing us both some serious depression. My visit consisted mainly of listening to him talk on the telephone with the driller who was putting in a water well on his ranch, after which he gave me a prescription for Librium. My wife came back from her visit crying and said that after pretty much baring her soul, his advice to her was “Grow up.” I won’t hazard a guess as to what comfort and advice he gave Charles Whitman.
Whitman professed hatred for his rigid and authoritarian father in Florida, just as he expressed deep love for his wife and mother—feelings he described in remarkably lucid and introspective notes written the previous evening in the course of killing them both. In a letter dated “Sunday, July 31, 1966, 6:45 P.M.” before his first step was even taken, the mixture of past and present tense suggest that a final decision had been made very recently by a compulsive man who placed great importance on following through:
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. …
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 [sic] 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 [sic] of my actions would surely cause her. AT this time, though, the prominent 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. …
At about that point in the letter, with his mother still alive in her apartment across town, Whitman remained true to his tightly scripted personality by scribbling in the margin, “Friends interrupted.” The friends, a student and his wife, later described Whitman as acting “particularly relieved about something—you know, as if he had solved a problem.” And he had. The exact nature of Whitman’s madness is open to speculation—there were many family factors and possibly religious ones; there was a report of a small brain tumor whose possible effects are disputed. But most students of the mind would agree that he resolved some intolerable psychological conflict by turning over to his personal demon all responsibility for his actions and placing his skills at its disposal. With that came, evidently, the kind of relief psychiatrists and criminologists sometimes see in prisoners for whom a single but exceptionally brutal killing has been the safety valve gone pop! Afterward those people confront their fate with an equanimity bordering on apathy. For them, death is only a further release—possibly the one they unconsciously sought all along but without Whitman’s ability to turn it all into a prolonged drama. He returned to the letter and scribbled the matter-of-fact notation “8-1-66. Mon. 3:00 A.M. Both Dead.”
Whitman spent the rest of the night and the next morning readying himself to depart life in a style reflecting the pressures that had been building for months, maybe years. He had several guns but bought two more, plus ammunition, without arousing suspicion, chatting amiably with clerks. Then he dressed in overalls, parked his car near the Main Building sometime after eleven in the morning, giving the appearance of a maintenance man, dollied a duffel bag and a footlocker crammed with ordnance and supplies to the observation deck of the Tower. His encounter with the receptionist and the tourists may have caused him to miss the changing of classes at eleven, when the campus below him would have looked like a busy ant bed. About eleven-forty-five he fired his first shot from the parapet. An hour and a half later, he was killed.
I saw Whitman when they brought him out. When the shooting was over, my journalistic instincts revived, and I went to one of the back doors of the Main Building to avoid the crowd. The police, likewise avoiding the crowds at other doors, wheeled out a stretcher bearing the sniper’s body under a blood-soaked sheet. My sense of time may be off, but it seemed as if they brought their bundle out quickly, as if they wanted it out of there before the mob could get to it.
I finished school in 1968, left Austin, and since then have worked in other cities, but the memories of that day are as lasting as the proofmarks on the barrel of a gun. I come back to Austin to visit friends and family, and I visit the UT campus often enough that it no longer affects me to walk around there, though I occasionally find myself idly figuring out the least-exposed route from one building to another. I don’t actually go that way, of course. And I don’t give more than a moment’s thought to the things I saw and did that day. But if I’m walking from the Main Building across that wide concrete mall, say, or along one of the inner-campus drives, I can’t quite shake an ever so slightly uneasy feeling that the Tower, somehow, is watching me.
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