Word: austine
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...forenoon of a blazing August day, a blond, husky young man strolled into a hardware store in Austin, Texas, and asked for several boxes of rifle ammunition. As he calmly wrote a check in payment, the clerk inquired with friendly curiosity what all the ammunition was for. "To shoot some pigs," he replied. At the time, the answer seemed innocent enough, for wild pigs still abound not far from the capital. The horror of its intent only became obvious a few hours later, when the customer, Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, a student of architectural engineering at the University of Texas...
That morning, Charles Whitman entered two more stores to buy guns before ascending, with a veritable arsenal, to the observation deck of the limestone tower that soars 307 feet above the University of Texas campus. There, from Austin's tallest edifice, the visitor commands an extraordinary view of the 232-acre campus, with its green mall and red tile roofs, of the capital, ringed by lush farm lands, and, off to the west, of the mist-mantled hills whose purple hue prompted Storyteller O. Henry to christen Austin the "City of a Violet Crown." Whitman had visited the tower...
...enshrined in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, the year's most talked-about bestseller. Only last month, when eight student nurses were slain in a Chicago town house, and Richard Speck was charged with the crime, an official there called the murders "the crime of the century." Sadly, Austin Police Chief Robert A. Miles observed last week: "It isn't any more...
...also prevailed behind the family façade. His father was?and is?an authoritarian, a perfectionist and an unyielding disciplinarian who demanded much of his sons and admitted last week that he was accustomed to beating his wife. In March, Margaret Whitman walked out on him, summoning Charlie from Austin to help her make the break. While his mother was packing her belongings, a Lake Worth police car sat outside the house, called by Charlie presumably because he feared that his father would resort to violence. To be near Charlie, Mrs. Whitman moved to Austin. The youngest son, John...
...drove off in his black '66 Chevrolet to pick up Kathy at her summer job as a telephone information operator. He apparently decided not to kill her immediately, instead dropped her off at their house and sped across the Colorado River to his mother's fifth-floor flat in Austin's Penthouse Apartments. There he stabbed Margaret Whitman in the chest and shot her in the back of the head, somehow also breaking several bones in her left hand with such force that the band of her diamond engagement ring was driven into her finger and the stone broken loose...