“Something Unusual in My Mental State”: The Mass Murderer in Austin

Forty years ago today the temperature in Austin, Texas, was climbing toward 100 degrees. Claire Wilson, an 18-year-old student, was walking across the University of Texas campus with her boyfriend Thomas Eckman. Wilson was eight months pregnant. Suddenly, a bullet from a high-powered rifle smashed through her abdomen, dropped her to the ground, and killed the fetus in her womb. As Eckman, a teenager described as “gentle and affectionate,” knelt over her, a second bullet killed him.

“I thought the whole world had gone crazy,” another wounded victim would remember.

America was well-acquainted with horrific crime. In Cold Blood was the much-discussed bestseller that spring. Truman Capote’s book described the pointless murder of the Clutter family of Kansas seven years earlier. Just that July the alcoholic drifter Richard Speck had horrified the nation with his methodical killing of eight young nurses in a Chicago apartment. In 1949 Howard Unruh, a delusional army veteran, had shot and killed 13 citizens on a stroll through Camden, New Jersey.

Who was now gunning down students, professors, shopkeepers, even a paperboy, from the observation deck of the University’s 231-foot clock tower? Was it the Black Panthers? War protesters? A madman? The answer was to prove even more disturbing. Citizens were being murdered indiscriminately by a clean-cut young man, once the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout, a former altar boy, a Marine, an accomplished engineering student.

His name was Charles Whitman. He had grown up in Florida, the son of a self-made plumbing contractor whom he had grown to hate “with a mortal passion.” Superficially an all-American boy, Whitman had his dark side. Yes, he had been a Marine, but disciplinary problems had resulted in a court martial and early discharge. He had brought his mother to Austin to live near him because of his father’s brutality. He was a heavy user of amphetamines and other prescription drugs.

As early as 1964 he had noted, “I definitely feel as though there is something unusual in my mental state.” He had visited a campus psychiatrist, to whom he described thoughts of “going up on the tower with a deer rifle and . . . shooting people.” The doctor, though lambasted after the crime, declared that “I found no psychosis symptoms at all.”

On the night of July 31, Whitman went to his mother’s apartment, strangled her, and caved in the back of her head. Later he stabbed to death his wife, Kathy, a fellow student who worked as a telephone operator. In one of several notes he left behind, he said he had decided to murder her “after much thought” in order to save her “embarrassment.” He left instructions about caring for their dog.

He prepared meticulously for his next foray. He bought a rifle and shotgun that morning to add to his arsenal—two long guns, three pistols, and 700 rounds of ammunition. He loaded the guns, along with knives, ropes, water, and food, into a footlocker and proceeded up an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor of the tower. He smashed the skull of the receptionist, smiled pleasantly at a couple departing the observation deck, then shot up a family of tourists who were arriving to take in the view, killing two of them.

His rampage began at 11:48 a.m. and lasted for an hour and a half. Using a bolt-action Remington with a four–power scope, he gunned down victims up to a quarter of a mile away. After 15 minutes he began to receive return fire from the ground, from police, students, and others who had hauled out their own deer rifles. But the platform’s 18-inch stone walls gave protection, and drainage slots provided portals from which he could fire.

The official response was feeble. This was before SWAT teams, which were established partly as a reaction to Whitman’s spree. At the time, Austin police lacked bulletproof vests, high-powered weapons, and even walkie-talkies. They had no command post, no communications, no plan. One officer had already been shot dead on the plaza. They tried shooting at Whitman from a small airplane, but the gunman’s return fire drove the plane away.

The killing continued. Altogether Whitman left 15 dead and 31 wounded. Some of the wounded had to lie for an hour on the scorching pavement until armored cars could be rounded up to recover them.

Finally three police officers independently made their way up the tower and met in the reception room. Along with a deputized bookstore manager, they snuck onto the observation walkway, rounded the tower, and shot Whitman dead.

The massacre shook the nation’s psyche. Numerous explanations were proffered. An autopsy revealed that Whitman had an acorn-size tumor in his lower brain. Could this have been the cause of his “tremendous headaches” and bizarre behavior? Doctors disagreed. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough blamed the rampage on the effects of television—this in the era of Gilligan’s Island and The Andy Griffith Show. Some pointed to Whitman’s drug use. Others insisted the gunman had been insane, even though he had previously shown no signs of irrationality or detachment from reality.

Could his Marine training have desensitized him to the suffering of others? Was the easy availability of guns a factor? His dysfunctional family? Societal pressures to succeed?

A similar litany of questions would be hauled out with each subsequent mass murder, from the slaughter of 21 in a San Ysidro, California, McDonald’s in 1984, to the death of 12 students in the Columbine school shooting of 1999. The answer in almost every case was that there was no answer. As much as we might like to explain such tragedies, no explanation ultimately sufficed.

“I never could quite make it,” Whitman wrote in his last note before ascending the tower. “These thoughts are no fun for me.”

It’s no fun for us who are left to contemplate the senseless violence that erupts from the clear sky of a seemingly normal personality. We are left only with the stark tragedy itself, and its victims, who are not numbers but human beings.

In November 2001 David Gunby intentionally ceased the thrice-weekly dialysis treatments he had been enduring for 27 years. Gunby had been wounded back in 1966. One of Whitman’s well-aimed bullets had damaged his only functioning kidney. When Gunby expired, his death was ruled a homicide, adding one more casualty to the toll of that grim August day.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).