How evil thoughts led to first mass shooting on an American college campus at University of Texas 50 years ago

IT took 40 years for the University of Texas to commission a plaque to remember “the tragedy of August 1, 1966”, although it has no details of the first mass shooting on an American college campus, that killed 14 people and injured another 30.

A policeman is carried to a waiting ambulance after being shot by sniper Charles Joseph Whitman in the University of Texas shooting in Austin in 1966.

IT took 40 years for the University of Texas to commission a discreet plaque to remember “the tragedy of August 1, 1966”, although the memorial has no details of the first mass shooting on an American college campus, that killed 14 people and injured another 30.

In the years that followed architecture student Charles Whitman’s atrocity, guides leading tours around the 27-storey university tower in Austin, Texas, were told not to speak of the shooting unless asked.

An ex-Marine, Whitman was born on June 24, 1941, at Lake Worth, Florida, the first of plumber Charles and wife Margaret’s three sons. Socially ambitious, Charles built a successful plumbing business with 28 employees and was elected to the Democratic Party county executive. He was also a domestic tyrant, admitting “I did on many occasions beat my wife, but I loved her. I have an awful temper, but my wife was awful stubborn”.

Charles also used paddles, belts and his fists to raise his “yes, sir, no sir” sons to meet his expectations. He also taught them to handle guns, while Whitman learned piano and was described as a good student.

Charles Joseph Whitman killed 14 people during a shooting spree at the University of Texas in Austin, 1966.

Home life collapsed just before Whitman’s 18th birthday when he came home drunk after a night out. His father beat him and threw him into the pool, where Whitman almost drowned. Days later he applied to enlist in the Marine Corps and left for training in July 1959.

Whitman served at Cuba’s Guantanamo Navy Base for more than a year and was accepted to study engineering on a military scholarship at the University of Texas in September 1961, when he met student Kathryn Leissner, whom he married in 1962.

Called back to active Marine service in 1963 because of poor academic performance, Whitman was honourably discharged in 1964, despite a court-martial for gambling and usury in November 1963. He returned to the University of Texas in March 1965 to study architecture.

Late in 1965 Whitman suffered severe headaches and saw five doctors. One prescribed Valium and referred him to a psychiatrist. In his suicide note, Whitman wrote of his March 1966 consultation with university health centre psychiatrist Maurice Heatly: “I talked with a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses. After one visit, I never saw the doctor again, and since then have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”

Heatly noted “This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility ... that something seemed to be happening to him and he didn’t seem to be himself.”

Heatly also noted Whitman’s admission to “overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of provocation” and “his vivid reference to ‘thinking about going up on the tower with a rifle and start shooting people’.”

Before doing just that, Whitman killed his mother, Margaret, 43, who in July asked Whitman to help her leave her abusive husband to start a new life in Austin. Whitman went to her home on the night of July 31 and after stabbing and shooting her, left a note saying he was “truly sorry that this was the only way I could see to relieve her sufferings but I think it was best”.

Whitman returned home and after his wife went to sleep, stabbed her to death. Before that he wrote, “I love her dearly ... I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this,” but suggested it was his selfishness, or desire to spare her from embarrassment.

Next Whitman, dressed in overalls, took a trunk packed with an assortment of weapons to the University of Texas tower. Stopped by receptionist Edna Townsley as he headed to the observation deck, Whitman knocked her down and split hit her head open with his rifle butt.

Confronted by a family group, he killed Mark Gabour, 16, and his aunt Marguerite Lamport, before opening fire from the deck 70m above the ground. His victims included Mary Wilson, whose unborn child died when she was shot in the stomach, and her boyfriend Thomas Eckman, 18. Whitman was shot dead by Austin Police Officer Houston McCoy.

Whitman had asked for an autopsy, which found a pecan-sized brain tumour labelled as an astrocytoma, with some necrosis. Specialists concluded the tumour could have influenced his actions.

Originally published as How evil thoughts led to first mass shooting on an American college campus at University of Texas 50 years ago