Charlie Whitman was to all appearances a straight-A American. At one time he’d been the youngest Eagle Scout in the World. He’d graduated seventh in his class at a Catholic School in Lake Worth, Florida; and he’d won a Navy and Marine Corps scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin. Yet in one morning, on August 1st 1966, this 6-foot-tall, twenty-five-year-old killed fifteen people and wounded another twenty-eight in the bloodiest single rampage within living memory.
What exactly was in his mind when he took the service elevator up to the observation-deck on the clock tower next to the University of Texas’s administration-building, we will never know. But he was carrying six rifles and pistols with more than 700 rounds of ammunition, not to mention three hunting knives, a machete and a hatchet.
He had already stabbed to death first his mother and then his wife, leaving notes beside their bodies saying how much he loved them. He also said that he hated his father and that life was no longer worth living.
He meant, then, to die. But first there was business to attend to. So at the entrance to the observation deck he killed the receptionist and two visitors. Then he went out onto the deck itself and, protected by 4-foot high stone parapets, he started shooting anyone he could see. One of the people he hit was crossing a street 500 yards away.
When the police arrived they knew there was little they could do from the ground. While a police marksman in a light aircraft distracted Whitman, a team of police and volunteers entered the tower unseen and then climbed up to the deck. Whitman fought back, but died in a hail of shotgun fire, just an hour and a half after he’d arrived.