Word: whitmans
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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...
...drawn by an inexorable fate to their crucial place in time and space, his victims fell as they went about their various tasks and pleasures. By lingering perhaps a moment too long in a classroom or leaving a moment too soon for lunch, they had unwittingly placed themselves within Whitman's lethal reach. Before he was himself perforated by police bullets, Charles Whitman killed 13 people and wounded 31?a staggering total of 44 casualties. As a prelude to his senseless rampage, it was later discovered, he had also slain his wife and mother, bringing the total dead...
...nation that opened its frontiers by violence and the gun, Whitman's sanguinary spree had an unsettling number of precedents, both in fiction and in fact. The imaginary parallels are grisly?and suggestive?enough: from The Sniper, a 1952 movie about a youth who shoots blondes, to The Open Square, a 1962 novel by Ford Clarke, whose protagonist climbs a tower on a Midwestern campus and begins picking people off. (So far as police know, Whitman had neither seen the movie nor read the book.) Even the fiction, however, pales before the fact. There was Scripture-reading Howard Unruh...
Unusual Undercurrents. Like many mass murderers, Charles Whitman had been an exemplary boy, the kind that neighborhood mothers hold up as a model to their own recalcitrant youngsters. He was a Roman Catholic altar boy and a newspaper delivery boy, a pitcher on his parochial school's baseball team and manager of its football team. At twelve years and three months, he became an Eagle Scout, one of the youngest on record. To all outward appearances, the family in which he grew up in Lake Worth, Fla.?including two younger brothers besides his mother and father, a moderately successful...
...tense situation 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...