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 (77 page)

Page 264


quit it all. I feel like the only thing he wanted was to bring shame down on his father. ²³

But Gary Boyd, a classmate, candidly admitted, "That's not the Charlie Whitman I knew. When he got up there he was somebody else."
²⁴The opinions of those who knew Charles Whitman ran the full spectrum, from belief that he had suffered a complete mental breakdown and total insanity to belief that he was a cold-blooded mass murderer.

The verdict on Charles Whitman's insanity lies in the definition of insanity itself, for which there is no common standard. If defined by the act itself, Charles Whitman was clearly insane, as Senator Robert Kennedy had suggested. He could not have known the particulars of the Whitman case at the time of his comments. Using the act as the standard, the argument would have been that no sane person would amass an arsenal, go to the Tower and kill people. That was simply a crazy thing to do. The application of such logic, however, could be extended to an absurd degree. If no one in his right mind could kill anyone, maybe murder, as such, is not a crime but a manifestation of mental illness. Charles Whitman's actions on 1 August 1966 obviously had grossly deviated from the norm. Some acts were insane, but was Charles Whitman insane?

In his book
In Cold Blood
, Truman Capote wrote about the rule many states apply to determine insanity in criminal cases, called the McNaughtan Rule, an "ancient British importation." In
Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace,
Levin and Fox quote the postulate:


A defendant must be shown to be labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as to not know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong. ²⁵

As Capote pointed out, the rule is that if a defendant understands the nature of the act, and more importantly, knows that it is wrong, then he is competent to stand trial and should be held accountable for his crime. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for Charles Whitman to effectively argue insanity via the McNaughtan Rule.

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The evidence and his behavior suggest that Whitman had made a decision to become a mass murderer no later than the early afternoon of 31 July 1966 when he purchased a Bowie knife and binoculars at Academy Surplus. From that moment on he made hundreds of deliberate and conscious decisions. He successfully covered up the murder of his mother by leaving a note on her door and calling Wyatt's Cafeteria to report her illness. He did likewise in Kathy's case. He clearly knew that he should hide what he was doing because it was wrong.

As Capote had illustrated in the question of insanity for Smith and Hickock in
In Cold Blood
, if the insanity plea were applied as a result of the much more lenient Durham Rule, which states that a defendant is not responsible for his crimes if he suffers from mental disease or defect, Charles Whitman would have had a much greater chance of successfully pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.
²⁶Unquestionably, he suffered from severe bouts of depression. Many of his friends, family, teachers, and a university psychiatrist could have provided testimony and documentation to that effect.

The harder question is whether he could have prevented himself from killing. The process of getting to the deck and controlling it required planning, patience and discipline, hardly the attributes of someone incapable of preventing himself from killing. Whitman's behavior towards Cheryl Botts and Donald Walden removes any doubt about his control. He could have killed them in an instant. Instead, he let them walk over Edna Townsley's blood and out of the reception area. Minutes later, he gunned down the Gabours and Marguerite Lamport. Such behavior was not random, but instead quite the opposite. Walden and Botts were leavinggetting out of his way; the Gabours and Lamports were arrivinggetting in his way. Charles Whitman did what he had to do to secure the twenty-eighth floor.

The insanity plea, as Fox and Levin have pointed out, "assumes an absolute: you are either insane or not."
²⁷Charles Whitman's behavior does not suggest insanity. He did too many things requiring clear thinking, a sense of right and wrong, and judgment. Even "temporary insanity" is without foundation because his crimes were spread over a period from 12:15
A.M.
to 1:24
P.M.
over thirteen hours. His

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actions would have required him to turn his temporary insanity on and off several times during the day to accomplish what he did.

Whitman fits the definition of a sociopath, someone who is not just mentally ill or, as Levin and Fox explain, "grossly out of touch with reality." Sociopaths are "bad, not mad." They care only for themselves. They can make themselves nice, but they cannot feel passion or empathy. Sociopaths are typically held accountable for their actions.
²⁸

Charles Whitman disturbed Americans, who had previously thought of a mass murderer as a "glassy-eyed lunatic who kills innocent and helpless people in order to satisfy sadistic and lustful impulses." Whitman taught Americans that murder was seldom a crime of hardened criminals, but of usually law-abiding citizens. In 1965, the American public learned, a total of 9,850 murders had been committed in the United States, a large majority of which were instances of domestic violence by "normal" people with little or no criminal record.
²⁹In many ways Whitman forced America to face the truth about murder and how vulnerable the public could be in a free and open society. He caused everyday Americans, most of whom were never affected by the horror of mass murder, to question their assumptions of safety, especially in public places. Now America could see the "face'' of mass murder, and it was the handsome face of a nice, all-American boy with no serious criminal record. "From that point on the concept of mass murder was real. . . . It really changed Americans' feelings of safety," stated James Alan Fox.
³⁰The criminal justice system responded as well. Before 1966, mass murder was so rare that the system had no special category or documentation for it. Statistics and procedures had treated such criminals and their crimes in the same manner as a single murder. Whitman also forced law enforcement agencies to acknowledge realistically the firepower that existed in the hands of ordinary citizens. It could not be denied that Charles Whitman had held off an army. Throughout the United States, especially in urban jungles where structures could be turned into fortresses, police departments began to take inventories of their weapons, training and personnel and to attempt to match the exper-

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tise and weaponry of the citizenry. For most of the larger police departments those efforts took the form of special weapons and tactics teams called SWAT.
³¹Unfortunately, since 1966 SWAT teams have become extraordinarily useful.

In the search for a reason for Charles Whitman's actions of 1 August 1966, it has seldom been postulated that he just decided to do it. The historical record has been complicated by emotional acquaintances and writers seeking to "discover" a "cause" for the Tower incident. The influences most often cited as contributing factorshis military training, the depiction of violence by the media, his drug abuse, his fondness for guns, spankings by his father (and probably his mother as well), and the tumor on his braincannot, at least by themselves, explain what he did.

Millions of young men experience the regimen of the United States Marines and other branches of the armed forces. Virtually all Americans Whitman's age watched television as a child, read the newspapers and listened to the radio. Hundreds of thousands of young people took "goofballs" to stay awake for exams or just to get giddy. Hunting and collecting guns, indeed "loving" guns is common, more common than many Americans would like. But there was only one Charles Whitman.

The effect of Whitman's brain tumor will probably be debated forever. The type, and very existence, of a tumor had been questioned. Violence caused by brain disorders, although rare, is usually sudden or episodic; but Whitman's crime, as James Alan Fox has pointed out, was neither sudden nor episodic.
³²He did not "suddenly" pack a footlocker. His physical health during the months before the snipings and his actions on the deck effectively eliminate any notion that the tumor had a physical effect on him. The coordination required to aim and shoot as well as he did was astounding. The tumor could possibly have given him headaches, but most people deal with severe headaches by going to a doctor, not by shooting nearly fifty people. For nearly thirty years after the discovery of the tumor, most of those who knew Whitman and who thought he was not capable of such a slaughter have cited the growth as the cause: a

Page 268

pecan-sized demon that took possession of him. But in the past thirty years nearly all of the physicians and criminologists who have made themselves familiar with the case have pronounced the tumor "innocent."

Whitman's excellent hand-eye coordination on the deck also effectively eliminates drug intoxication. According to numerous classmates, when under the influence of drugs, Whitman's motor and cognitive skills had been sharply reduced. Given his known activities the night before, it is safe to assume that he had not slept. Since Dexedrine was found on his body, there is a good chance that he had taken something during the morning to combat fatigue. But if he had taken any drugs, he could not have taken enough to have a significant effect on his movement, cognition, or judgment. Like insanity, a drug-induced psychosis would most likely have resulted in a loss of touch with reality Given his actions during his murderous spree, he would have had to control his psychosis, which is oxymoronic.

Calls for gun control following the Whitman murders implied that if firearms had been regulated the crime could have been prevented. Sadly, the regulation of firearms would not have prevented Charles Whitman from getting guns because no conceivable set of regulations would have disqualified him from his purchases. Any background check would have described a young, literate man with an honorable discharge from the marines, who had no history of violent crime, who could produce a history of hunting licenses, and who could assemble an army of character witnesses. To think that he needed classes in firearm safety (which has often been attached to gun control legislation) would be ludicrous; he could easily have qualified to teach the classes (which he had done as a Boy Scout leader). Only the confiscation of over 100,000,000 privately-owned handguns, rifles, and shotguns nationwide might have prevented the University of Texas tragedy; it is a degree of gun control that, even if possible, would never find political acceptance in the United States. One week after the murders President Lyndon Johnson called for the speedy passage of gun control legislation "to help prevent the wrong persons from obtaining firearms." But before 1 August 1966, Charles Whitman would not have been considered one of those "wrong" persons.
³³

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