Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

A Sniper in the Tower (20 page)

Page 57

object can move itself; instead, every movement has been caused by a prior movement. Equally evident is that there can be no infinite regress in which things move other things; there must be a first mover. Thomism asserts that the cause of the first movement is the Prime MoverGod.
¹⁶

But Charlie saw energy as God. He maintained that since mankind was a form of energy, God must be within mankind. God was each man's conscience, and since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, an afterlife must exist as a destination for a person's energy following death.
¹⁷

Charlie's religious beliefs may simply have sprung from guilt and simple rationalization. During most of his life he found comfort in being dutiful. Abandoning the Catholic faith required a justification. The Whitman rationalization could be logically and dangerously extended; maybe death does not exist except as a change in the form of energy. If this life is hell, then the afterlife must be better. For Charlie Whitman, the moral basis for the value of life slowly began to erode.

III

Even a childless couple like Charlie and Kathy Whitman must have found the apartment at 1001-A Shelley small. In the spring of 1966, Charlie heard of a tiny house available for rent in south Austin across from Town Lake (the Colorado River) and the couple arranged to rent it. Charlie surprised everyone by buying a couple of rooms of fine furniture, including a wooden dining room set. Shortly afterwards he and Kathy moved to 906 Jewell Street.

The five-room bungalow had a small front and back yard; behind and to the right of the house stood a one-car garage that resembled a workshop. The Jewell Street area teemed with families and children, and both Charlie and Kathy seemed to enjoy the youngsters. "He loved children and they loved him," stated a neighbor. The children, especially the young boys, felt comfortable playing in the Whitmans' yard. Charlie tied a rope to a large oak tree in the backyard and used it to exercise. He taught the boys of the neighborhood how to climb the rope hand-over-hand as marines are trained to do. A twelve-year-old, Mark Nowotny, knew the Whitmans well.

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"Both were real nice," he said. Mark's older sister Judy said of Charlie: "He was the nicest person I know at the university. He was always a lot of funalways joking." The adults of the area admired the young couple. "He was such a handsome young man, husky and strong," said Mark and Judy's mother. And after his landlord chimed yet another "nice," he observed that Charlie appeared worried at times, ''but you know how students are, they have a lot on their minds." Judy Nowotny made the same observation. Mike Merino, another neighborhood kid, noticed that Charlie loved guns and made frequent trips to the rifle range. More than a few of the neighbors knew of the collection of military paraphernalia in the garage in his back yard.
¹⁸

The Jewell Street neighbors also observed a hardworking couple. Their move to Jewell Street took place towards the end of Kathy's first year as a teacher at Lanier High School. During the previous summer she had worked as a bookkeeper at Clear Lake Yacht Basin near NASA, and during the summer of 1966, after her first year of teaching, Kathy applied for and obtained a part-time position as an information operator for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. She listed her banker, the Superintendent of Schools, and a pharmacist in Needville as references.
¹⁹

Kathy's ability to learn quickly and work hard universally impressed her co-workers at Southwestern Bell. "She acted a lot older than she looked," said Patricia Barber. Kathy's station was located on the third floor of the telephone building on the corner of Colorado and 9th Streets in downtown Austin. On 6 June 1966 she reported for her first day of training and met Linda Damereau, a coworker who became her close friend. Damereau discovered what everyone else knew: Kathy was quick, alert, and very easy to get along with.
²⁰Southwestern Bell supervisors saw her as a well-adjusted and happy young wife. No one suspected that Kathy had ever been abused by Charlie in any way.

The Whitman marriage held a mystery. Without question the young couple had arguments, shed tears and entertained notions of breaking upeven divorcing. But most acquaintances of the young couple find it hard to believe that Charlie ever laid a hand on Kathy "I just can't believe he ever beat her. If he did, she certainly hid it well," an operator supervisor would later say.
²¹No one in the

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Whitman or Leissner families ever related any direct knowledge of abuse. All of their mutual friends considered them a fun couple. They remember trips to Austin's famous Barton Springs, the picturesque Highland Lakes north and west of Austin, and visits to the historic sites of nearby San Antonio. Surviving pictures of their home life suggest a laid-back Charlie enjoying the company of Kathy, friends, and their little dog Schocie. Curiously, the most credible references to Charlie ever getting physical with Kathy come from Charlie himself. He claimed to have attacked her on two occasions. Certainly, he often lost his temper and would rant at her; given his size and power, she must have been frightened. Kathy would confide to her parents that she feared Charlie's temper, which was so explosive she thought he could actually kill her. On one occasion close friends witnessed an embarrassing verbal shot at Kathy. "Wouldn't you think we would have enough self-discipline to exercise every day?" Again, Charlie fit the description of what he appeared to detest. Kathy was disciplined and as a result had a fine figure; Charlie was the one who ate too much and was getting fat.
²²One close friend of the couple, Elaine Fuess, observed:

Whitman often fit the description
of the very traits he claimed to
despise in others. He considered
being overweight a sign of a lack
of will power, yet overlooked his
own inability to keep off excess
pounds.
Austin Police Department
Files, from film left in one of
Whitman's cameras.

Page 60


Even when he looked perfectly normal, he gave you the feeling of trying to control something in himself. He knew he had a temper, and he hated this in himself. He hated the idea of cruelty in himself and tried to suppress it. He had seen cruelty before and he didn't want it in his own house. ²³

But the Whitman house on Jewell Street did hold cruelty, and Charlie seemed incapable of preventing it. Their marriage probably survived only through Kathy's remarkable patience and loyalty and her belief that Charlie made real attempts to control himself. She may have feared his emotional outbursts, but she stood by him. While others nodded in agreement, one of her colleagues at Southwestern Bell would later comment: "She loved him, there's no doubt about that."
²⁴

On 17 June 1966, two weeks after Kathy began her training as an information operator for Southwestern Bell Telephone, Charlie abandoned plans to sell insurance or real estate and applied for a job as an engineering laboratory assistant. He had just completed nineteen hours of coursework in the 1966 spring semester, a heavier than average load. He then enrolled for the 1966 summer semester and scheduled fourteen semester hours of coursesa very heavy load. He wanted to get his coursework out of the way. The combination of the summer job and school work added to pressures he placed on himself.
²⁵

Charlie's supervisor, Dr. Clyde Lee, an associate professor of civil engineering, headed a team engaged in a highway research project entitled "Evaluation of Traffic Control at Hiway Intersections." The twenty-five-hour-a-week job paid $160 a month. On the job Charlie proved himself reliable. He impressed Lee with his maturity and thoughtful questions about the objectives of the project. Lee stated, "He was an unusually good worker."
²⁶

Charlie's breakneck pace seemed to include his driving. He received at least two traffic tickets in a two-week period during the spring of 1966. He could not have been pleased to pay the fines. As a result of running a red light and being ticketed yet again, he con-

Page 61

tested the citation on 9 July 1966. He defended himself in a manner that the Austin Chief of Police, Bob Miles, would later characterize as brilliant, but he still lost the case and had to pay the fine. It may have been the onset of his interest in the law. In an odd coincidence, Charlie's brother, John, had been arrested in Lake Worth for "physical possession of alcohol" on the same day. Johnnie Mike's relationship with his father had by this time nearly ceased to exist. He had left the Whitman residence altogether, preferring instead to live at the home of friends. A judge offered to suspend the fine if John moved back to 820 South L Street; John refused and paid the fine instead.
²⁷

Charlie's adult life consisted largely of tribulations that he brought upon himself. He maintained slightly above-average grades, but because of the dismal grades he had earned before the revocation of his NESEP scholarship, his overall GPA never reached the 2.0 mark. He did dependable work, and became popular with his teachers, some of his fellow students and neighbors. But he had no direction. Inner insecurities and obsessions to make money began to take their toll. While in the brig at Camp Lejeune, he wrote lovingly about both of his parents, his father in particular. But after his return to Austin he began to feel alternately embarrassed and indifferent towards his father.

Meanwhile, the Florida Whitman family began to disintegrate. Patrick had married Patricia Smith of Lake Worth on 14 July 1965 and was now the head of his own household. Widely considered the kindest of the Whitmans, Patrick could not escape the turmoil that would envelope his parents and brothers. As the youngest brother John reached his late teens and his rebellion grew more serious, he wanted nothing to do with his father. Very soon Margaret would no longer have the presence of children as a motivating factor to sustain her marriage. But as unhappy as every Whitman was, each of them knew that they were nearly wholly dependent on C. A. Whitman for their financial and material support. And, at least according to some observers, he never let them forget it.
²⁸Unfortunately, by the end of 1965 Charlie's attitude evolved into embittered hatred towards his father. Very soon more troubles would be imported from Lake Worth, Florida, the pressures would increase, and the nice facade would disappear altogether.

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