Texas Tower shooting of 1966

Texas Tower shooting of 1966, mass shooting in Austin, Texas, on August 1, 1966, in which Charles Whitman, a student and ex-Marine, fired down from the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas, killing 14 people and wounding 31 others (one of whom died years later from complications related to his wounds). Earlier in the day, Whitman had killed his wife and mother. The incident was one of the worst mass murders in a public area in the history of the United States and the first to unfold “live” in the era of mass media.

Mass murder defined

Although there is no universally agreed upon definition of mass murder, it is distinguished from serial murder by its several victims being killed at the same time and place, whereas serial murder involves the unlawful homicide of at least two victims carried out in a series over a period of time. While observing that for decades definitions of mass murder differed in the number of victims required (varying from 2 to 10), a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2008 noted that mass murder was generally described as four or more murders “occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders,” typically in a single location. Many sources identify the Texas Tower shooting as the first mass murder in American history, but some academics and researchers have argued that dozens of such shootings took place in the United States between the beginning of the 20th century and Whitman’s rampage. Just weeks before the event in Austin, Richard Speck killed eight female nursing students in a Chicago town house. What set the Texas Tower shooting apart was the instantaneousness of its coverage on radio and television by reporters on the scene who described the events as they happened.

The shooter

Charles Joseph Whitman (the inclusion of his middle name in much of the reporting from the period echoed earlier references to John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and presaged references to later high-profile killers) grew up in Lake Worth, Florida, as the eldest of three sons of an overbearing plumbing contractor father and a devout Roman Catholic mother. Whitman’s father, a perfectionist, apparently was never satisfied with his son’s accomplishments, no matter how impressive, including early mastery of the piano and becoming one of the youngest Eagle Scouts in Boy Scout history. The older Whitman, a fervid gun lover, did, however, take great pride in the precocious expert marksmanship of his eldest son, who was taught from a very early age how to shoot.

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Whitman, like his mother (who was physically abused by her husband), suffered greatly under his domineering, explosive father. Anxious to get away from him, Whitman—who had a high IQ but a checkered academic record in high school—chose as his escape route not college but the Marines, in which he enlisted in July 1959. After qualifying as a sharpshooter in boot camp, he served an 18-month stint at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, where he earned an appointment to officer training school in Bainbridge, Maryland. There he distinguished himself enough to earn a military scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the University of Texas while still on active duty, matriculating in September 1961. In Austin he met and married (August 1962) another student, Kathleen Leissner.

Poor grades resulted in Whitman’s recall to active duty as an enlisted man in February 1963. Discharged from the Marines in December 1964, he returned to the University of Texas in 1965, this time to study architectural engineering. After leaving her husband, Whitman’s mother moved to Austin in spring 1966 to be near Whitman. Meanwhile, Whitman was suffering from feelings of rage, confusion, and violent impulses, which he documented exhaustively in writing. Having visited several university doctors in 1965 and been prescribed a variety of medications, in March 1966 Whitman expressed his concern during a visit to a psychiatrist at the university health center. He also complained of headaches (an autopsy would reveal that he had a brain tumour about the size of pecan). The psychiatrist advised Whitman to return for further counseling. He never did.