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 (75 page)

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was being supported by the two jobs his wife held and the regular allowance sent by his father. For someone who had tried desperately not to bite his fingernails because it was not manly, who had a disdain for government workers because they had no ambition, and who had a general disrespect for anyone who did not accomplish, Whitman must have hated facing that reality.

As an adolescent he had often resorted to taking dares to draw attention to himself. Knowing that in an adult those behaviors would be seen as silly and childish, he had displayed a facade of seriousness and maturity to his teachers, probably because he saw them as authority figures and wanted to please them. Charles Whitman was always who he was expected to be. He could act extraordinarily immature and indulge in juvenile behavior in front of friends who were equally juvenile. His immaturity should not be underestimated. In many ways his physical development was what had made him face the cold world of adulthood, which he had entered without goal-setting and decision-making skills. Even the frustration of controlling his own weight had once become an occasion for lashing out at Kathy. Some of his pictures included one in which he was shown walking with a little boy (probably Kathy's baby brother), along the sidewalk adjacent to Austin's famous Barton Springs. Another had him seated along the walkway with his feet dangling in the Springs' famous sixty-eight-degree water. Both depicted a pronounced "gut" pouring over Whitman's belt line and "saddlebags" above both hips; he must have hated that.
⁴

Whitman's frustrations, according to the commission, had led to "profound personal dissatisfaction" and a poor self-concept.
⁵Numerous notes he wrote display his need to berate himself in regard to his shortcomings. His childhood in Lake Worth, Florida, and his service in the marines as a young adult had been filled with taking orders from domineering authority figures. His notes to himself, consisting of lists of ways to improve, had become pathetic replacements for those authority figures. Consequently, freedom, self-reliance, intrinsic motivation, and persistencewithout the goading of an authorityhad become occasions for failure.

Another result of his inability to focus on goals was that he could not decide what he wanted to do with his life. He went through career aspirations like many children go through favorite toys. Within

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a period of less than five years, his plans shifted from mechanical engineer, to career marine officer, to architectural engineer, to real estate agent, and finally to lawyer (with an engineering degree). In an eighteen-month period from 196465 he held six different jobsall menial and inconsequential. His best friend believed he wanted to be a lawyer with an engineering degreenot for any love of the law or engineering, but for money. Additionally, he had once confided to a friend that he would return to Lake Worth to work for his father. As an avocation, music seemed to give him respite, but he mostly repressed urges to play and often refused the requests of his closest friends to do so. On yet another occasion of extreme despair, he had decided to become a bum. Charles Whitman had what career counselors call a "flat" interest profile: he could do many different things, but
loved
nothing. As a result, from a career standpoint, he knew a little about and was fairly good at many things, but he excelled at nothing. (Except, of course, guns.)

Whitman's indecision had not been limited to career options. The frequency with which he wrote the word "definitely" in his diary is striking. For instance, he had once written, "I am definitely going to learn more about electronics," but of course, he never did. There had been nothing definite in Charles Whitman's life. Consequently, there had been few accomplishments.
⁶

The only person that Charles Whitman ever truly loved was Kathy and, without question, she loved him. Her attempts to get him to help himself had been limited to her gentle pleas to see a psychiatrist. Other than a single reference in his diary to her having been angry at him for gambling, getting himself court-martialed, and locked up in the brig at Camp Lejeune, there are no references or other documented occasions of her having been assertive with him. On the contrary, he wrote pages of gushing prose about how perfect she was in every respect. In neat penmanship he groped for superlatives to detail her physique and how she had satisfied him.
⁷He clearly worshiped her, but his love for her had been immature as well. He sought to dominate her and in many ways he had succeeded, even recording in his notebook how he had "taught" her to satisfy him.

Kathy Whitman, as Charles wrote on the note he left on her dead body, had been as good a wife as any man could hope for,

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though it is obvious that she feared his temper and was disturbed at the extent and frequency of his bouts of deep depression. But Kathy had also engaged in what we now call "enabling" behaviors. Her laudable attempts to support her troubled husband had supported his frustrations, depression, and immaturity instead. He had hit her, probably on the two occasions he related to Dr. Heatly, and their arguments often reached a volume that could be heard beyond the walls of their home, but there is no testimony by neighbors, family or friends that his physical abuse of her had been constant. Most likely he had exerted control over her through mind games and taking advantage of her seemingly endless supply of patience and support. Moreover, she had certainly known of his sleep deprivation and had probably known that he took Dexedrine or some other substance to stay awake. Most likely, like her husband, she made herself believe he could handle it. Like many spouses in a troubled relationship, she probably also believed that she could eventually change him, and she may even have been heartened by how he was able to control himself during the last few months of their lives together. In reality, his laudable self-control had been dangerous repression.

The Connally Commission's final report contained the collective expertise of some of America's premier physicians and behavioral scientists. It included accurate observations and detailed data on the life and death of Charles Whitman. But in the end the commission could not explain why he had comitted what was at the time America's largest mass murder: "Without a recent psychiatric evaluation of Charles J. Whitman, the task force finds it impossible to make a formal psychiatric diagnosis."
⁸

So why did he do it?

The explanations that have emerged tend to reveal the agendas of their advocates. The anti-military crowd, at the time growing as the Vietnam War escalated, offered Whitman's marine training as the culprit. Even the Connally Commission issued a recommendation that combat-trained personnel, in effect, be deprogrammed in order to "re-learn in such a way as to de-emphasize in their minds those hostile acts taught as laudatory in time of war."
⁹Consisting

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largely of academics and university administrators, the commission may have betrayed an anti-military slant just beginning to flourish on campuses throughout the United States. Other faculty, like Dr. Alfred Schild, noting that Lee Harvey Oswald had also been a marine, called for the abolition of the Marine Corps.
¹⁰The question remained. Had Whitman's military training contributed to his crimes?

Several elected officials saw the Tower sniping as an occasion to lament the prevalence of violence in the media, especially television. United States Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas mourned:


The sharp increase in crimes of violence against the person and in murder in recent years are likely to continue unless America stops teaching violence to her people. Every night T.V. programs stress homicide. Murder, sudden and quick, is piped into every home as "entertainment."

Yarborough elaborated by saying that television was building a "Frankenstein" which, left unchecked, would destroy America. He also pointed out that newspapers were hardly better and that even the United Nations and countries at war, like the United States, reported "kill ratios" as routinely as traffic accidents.
¹¹

The Connally Commission, clearly not wanting to advocate censorship, called upon the media to conduct a self-study on how news of violent acts is disseminated. The impetus to review the effect of violence depicted on television was given a jolt when on 5 August 1966 a fifteen-year-old boy was arrested for shooting a night watchman in the West Texas town of Roscoe. "I've been thinking about why I did it. I wanted to have fun like the guys in Chicago [Richard Speck] and Austin who had fun killing people," said the pathetic youngster.
¹²The question is as old as the mass media itself: Does violence depicted in the media breed real-life violence?

Public officials and some members of the medical community, alarmed by the drastic rise of the "drug culture," quickly and strongly argued that Whitman's use of illicit drugs, namely Dexedrine [dextroamphetamine], contributed to his violent explosion. The Connally Commission concluded that there was no evidence of acute drug

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toxicity on 1 August 1966, but Whitman did have six Dexedrine tablets in a metal container on his person while on the deck. Further, after a review of the autopsy data, the Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control concluded that "failure to recover the urine, etc., made analytical proof of amphetamines impossible." The report indicated that while Whitman's blood analysis had not suggested drug toxicity, other fluids like urine and the contents of his stomach would have been better indicators of the presence of drugs. Because Whitman had already been embalmed at Cook's Funeral Home at the time of the autopsy on the morning after the snipings, the contents of his stomach and his urine had already been discarded.
¹³Had they been analyzed they would almost certainly have contained traces of Dexedrine. But would that have explained what he did?

Gun control advocates pointed to Whitman's weapons as the real culprit. News reports with a bevy of statistics followed the incident. Americans learned that from January through July of 1966, 175,768 pistols had been sold in the state of Texas alone. In 1965, an incredible 571,058 hunting licenses had been issued; another 160,000 exemptions from licenses were issued to children under the age of seventeen and the elderly over age sixty-five. In 1965, the only requirements for the purchase of a gun were a name, address, and the age of the buyer. In America, approximately 100 million handguns and other firearms were already in the hands of private individuals in 1966, and about one million additional "dangerous weapons" were being sold every year. Mail order purchases of dangerous weapons were commonplace, the most infamous purchase being the rifle used to kill President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald had bought his rifle without incident using the alias "A. Hidell." Charles Whitman had purchased all of his guns through transactions which were perfectly legal, using his own name. Gun control, normally associated with liberal causes, picked up a strange bedfellow in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who stated shortly after the Tower incident, "Those who claim that the availability of firearms is not a factor in murders in this country are not facing reality."
¹⁴

Other gun control advocates saw the 750,000-member National Rifle Association (NRA), of which Whitman was ironically not a member, as the chief obstacle to a safer American society. NRA backers envisioned an assault on a constitutional right by Communists and

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