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Chapter 1 – Sniper in the Tower

It was a perfect summer day in Austin. The Texan sun was beating down. By mid-morning, the temperature had already soared to ninety-eight degrees in the shade and the hot air hung heavy over the downtown campus of the University of Texas. The students had taken the opportunity to linger in the sunshine when classes changed at 11.30. But by 11.45, all was quiet again under the University’s thirty-storey limestone tower.

At 11.48, on 1 August 1966, seventeen-year old Alec Hernandez was cycling across the campus, delivering newspapers, when a .35 rifle bullet ripped through his leg. It slammed into his saddle and catapulted him from his bike. Then, out of the clear blue sky, more bullets came raining down. Three students, late for class, fell in quick succession.

At first, no one could figure out what was happening. There was a distant report, then someone would crumple to the ground. On the fourth floor of the tower building twenty-three-year-old postgraduate student Norma Barger heard what she took to be dynamite exploding. In fact, it was the sound of a deer-hunting rifle echoing from the low buildings that nestled around the tower. When she looked out of her classroom window, she saw six bodies sprawled grotesquely on the mall beneath her. At first she thought it was a tasteless joke. She expected them to get up and walk away laughing. Then she saw the pavement stones splashed with blood – and more people falling beneath the sniper’s deadly rain of fire.

Eighteen-year-old Mrs Claire Wilson, who was eight months pregnant, was heading across the mall to her anthropology class when a bullet ripped into her belly. She survived, but her unborn child’s skull was crushed and the child was later born dead. Nineteen-year-old freshman Thomas Eckman, a classmate and would-be poet, knelt beside the injured mother-to-be when a second bullet shot him dead.

Thirty-three-year-old post-graduate mathematician Robert Boyer was looking forward to his trip to England. He had already secured a teaching post in Liverpool, where his pregnant wife and two children were waiting for him. But when he stepped out on to the mall, heading for an early lunch, he was shot, fatally, in the back. Secretary Charlotte Darehshori ran to help him and found herself under fire. She spent the next hour-and-a-half crouched behind the concrete base of a flagpole, one of the few people to venture on to the mall and survive uninjured.

The sniper took a shot at a small boy. People began to take cover. A woman on the eighteenth floor of the administration block rang a friend in a nearby university building and said: ‘Somebody’s up there shooting from the tower. There’s blood all over the place.’ Soon hundreds were pinned down on the campus.

By 11.52 four minutes after the shooting started, the local police received a hysterical phone call. At first, all they knew was that there had been ‘some shooting at the university tower’. In seconds, a ‘ten-fifty’ went out. All units in the vicinity were to head for the university. Soon the quiet of the Texas high noon was torn by the sound of sirens as more than a hundred city policemen, reinforced by some thirty highway patrolmen, state troopers, Texas Rangers and Secret Service men from President Lyndon Johnson’s Austin office, converged on the campus – along with a number of ordinary gun-toting Texan citizens.

One of the first policemen on the scene was rookie patrolman Billy Speed. He quickly figured out what was happening. He spotted the killer on the observation deck of the tower. The young patrolman took cover behind the base of a statue of Jefferson Davis and took careful aim. The sniper shot him dead. Speed was just twenty-three and left a wife and baby daughter.

The shot that brought down Patrolman Speed alerted the other lawmen. Volleys of small-arms fire cracked around the top of the tower. A few rounds smashed into the huge clock-face above the killer. Most pinged ineffectually off the four-foot-high wall around the observation deck, kicking up puffs of white dust.

Ducking down behind the low wall, the sniper was safe. Narrow drainage slits around the bottom of the wall made perfect gun ports. There the unknown gunman proved impossible to hit And he kept finding new targets.

A hundred yards beyond Patrolman Speed, twenty-nine-year-old electrical repairman Roy Dell Schmidt was getting out of his truck on a call. He looked up at the tower and saw puffs of smoke coming from the observation gallery. The police told him to get back but, nonchalantly, Schmidt told a man standing next to him that they were out of range. They weren’t Seconds later, a rifle bullet smashed into Schmidt’s chest, killing him instantly.

To the west of the campus ran a main thoroughfare called Guadeloupe Street, known to the students as ‘The Drag’. Among the window-shoppers on Guadeloupe Street that sunny lunchtime was eighteen-year-old Paul Sonntag. He was a lifeguard at Austin swimming pool and had just picked up her week’s pay cheque. With him was eighteen-year-old ballet dancer Claudia Rutt who was on her way to the doctor’s for the polio shot she needed before entering Texas Christian University. Suddenly Claudia sank to the ground, clutching her breast ‘Help me! Somebody, help me!’ she cried. Bewildered, Sonntag bent over her. The next shot took him out. Both were dead before help could get to them.

Further up Guadeloupe Street, visiting professor of government thirty-nine-year-old Harry Walchuk was browsing in the doorway of a news-stand. Father of six and a teacher at Michigan’s Alpena Community College, he was hit in the throat and collapsed, dead, among the magazines. In the next block, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Karr, who had ambitions to be a diplomat, was returning to his apartment after staying up all night, revising for a Spanish exam which he had taken at ten o’clock that morning. Before he reached his own front door, he dropped to the sidewalk, dying. In the third block, basketball coach Billy Snowden of the Texas School for the Deaf stepped into the doorway of the barbershop where he was having his haircut and was wounded in the shoulder.

Outside the Rae Ann dress shop on Guadeloupe Street, twenty-six-year-old Iraqi chemistry student Abdul Khashab, his fiancee twenty-year-old Janet Paulos – they were to have married the next week – and twenty-one year-old trainee sales assistant Lana Phillips, fell wounded within seconds of each other. Homer Kelly, manager of Sheftall’s jewellery store, saw them fall and ran to help. He was trying to haul them into the cover of his store when the shop window shattered. A bullet gashed the carpeting on the sidewalk outside his shop and two bullet fragments smashed into his leg. Three youths had to wait over an hour, bleeding on Sheftall’s orange carpet, before an ambulance could get to them. In all, along picturesque, shoplined Guadeloupe Street, there were four dead and eleven wounded.

To the north, two students were wounded on their way to the biology building. Beyond that, fu to the north of the campus, thirty-six-year-old Associate Press reporter Robert Heard was running full tilt from cover to cover when he was hit in the shoulder. ‘What a shot,’ he marvelled as he winced with pain.

To the east, twenty-two-year-old Iran-bound Peace Corps trainee Thomas Ashton was sunning himself on the roof of the Computation Center. A single round ended his life. A girl sitting at the window of the Business Economics Building was nicked by a bullet. But to the south was the worst killing field. The university’s main mall had been turned into a no man’s land. It was strewn with bodies that could not be recovered safely.

One man was responsible – one man thirty storeys up the Austin bower had turned the peaceful campus into a free-fire zone. The Austin Police Department had never had anything like this to deal with before.

The bullet-scarred clock of the Austin tower was booming out its Big Ben chimes at 12.30 when a local Texan turned up in camouflage fatigues and began chipping large chunks of limestone off the wall of the observation deck with a tripod-mounted high-calibre M-14. Meanwhile a Cessna light aircraft circled the tower with police marksman Lieutenant Marion Lee on board. He tried to get a clear shot at the gunman but the turbulent air currents around the tower made aiming impossible. The plane was eventually driven away when the sniper put a bullet through the fuselage.

Down below an armoured truck laid down smoke cover and a fleet of ambulances, sirens wailing, began loading up the dead and wounded. Students braved the sniper’s fire to haul other victims to shelter.

Austin Police Chief Robert Miles decided that he could not risk using any more helicopters against the sniper. His accurate fire could easily bring one down. So Police Chief Miles ordered his men to storm the tower. His directive was curt – ‘shoot to kill’.

Patrolmen Houston McCoy and Jerry Day found their way through the underground passageways that connected the university buildings into the foyer of the tower. There they met Patrolman Ramiro Martinez who had been at home cooking steaks when he heard news of the massacre on the radio. A handsome twenty-nine-year-old and veteran of six years with the Austin Police Department, he had driven to within a couple of blocks of the tower, then run, zigzagging across the open plaza with the sniper’s bullets kicking up dust around him. None of the three patrolmen had ever been in a gun fight before.

With them was forty-year-old retired Air Force tailgunner Allen Crum, who was a civilian employee of the university. Although he, too, had never fired a shot in combat, Crum insisted on accompanying the officers. He was given a rifle and deputised on the spot. That day, he was to see more action than during his entire twenty-two years in the Air Force. One of the four men punched the lift button. They were about to make the same twenty-seven-floor elevator ride that the crazed gunman had taken less than two hours before.

Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a white sports shirt under a pair of workman’s overall, the gunman had pulled into a parking space reserved for university officials at around 1l a.m. between the administration building and the library, at the base of the tower. He unloaded a trolley and placed a heavy footlocker on it. Then he wheeled the trolley into the foyer of the building. The ground-floor receptionist thought he was a maintenance man.

He too punched the lift button. When the elevator door opened he wheeled the trolley into the lift and pushed the button for the top floor. During the thirty-second ride, he pulled a rifle from the locker. On the twenty-seventh-floor, he unloaded his heavy cargo, then climbed the four short flights of stairs from the lifts to the observation deck. The observation gallery was open to visitors and the gunman approached the receptionist, forty-seven-year-old Edna Townsley, a spirited divorcee and mother of two young sons who was working on what was normally her day off. He clubbed her with the butt of his rifle with such force that part of her skull was torn away, and dragged her behind the sofa.

At that moment, a young couple came in from the observation gallery. The girl smiled at the gunman, who smiled back. She steered her date around the dark stain that was slowly spreading across the carpet in front of the receptionist’s desk. The gunman followed them back down to the lift. As they travelled innocently down in the elevator car, he lugged his heavy locker up the stairs and out on to the observation gallery which ran all the way around the tower 231 feet above ground level. From that height he could see clean across the shimmering terracotta roofs of old Austin’s Spanish-style buildings. Below him were the handsome white university buildings with their red-tiled roofs, separated by broad lawns and malls. This gave the gunman a clear field of fire across the campus below and the surrounding streets. He opened his locker and unpacked three rifles, two pistols, three knives, a machete, 700 rounds of ammunition, enough canned food for several days, a five-gallon bottle of distilled water, sunglasses, a compass, an alarm clock and a lantern. Also in the locker was some pink toilet paper, a spray deodorant and a green towel.

As the gunman assembled his equipment for what he plainly imagined would be a long siege, the lift began to climb from the ground floor up to the twenty-seventh storey again. In it were M J Gabour, a gas-station owner from Texerkana, Texas, his wife Mary and his two teenage sons, sixteen-year-old Mark and nineteen-year-old Mike, along with Gabour’s sister Marguerite Lamport and her husband, whom the Gabours had come to visit in Austin.

The two boys led the way up the stairs from the lift, followed by the two women. The men dawdled behind. As Mark opened the door on to the observation deck, he was met with three shotgun blasts in quick succession. The gunman slammed the door shut. The two boys and the women spilled back down the stairs. Gabour rushed to his younger son Mark and turned him over. He saw immediately that Mark was dead. He had been shot in the head at point-blank range. Gabour’s sister Marguerite was dead too. His wife and his older son were critically injured. They were bleeding profusely from head wounds. Gabour and his brother-in-law dragged their dead and wounded back down in to the lifts.

The gunman quickly barricaded the top of the stairs with furniture and jammed the door shut with the trolley. He went over to the receptionist Mrs Townley and finished her off with a bullet through the head. Then he went out on to the gallery, which was surrounded by a chest-high parapet of limestone eighteen inches thick. He positioned himself under the ‘VI’ of the gold-edged clock’s south face and began shooting the tiny figures in the campus below.

As the elevator reached the twenty-seventh floor again, two hours later, Officer Martinez said a little prayer and offered his life up to God. Immediately the lift doors opened, the officers were faced with a distraught Mr Gabour, whose wife, sister and two sons lay face up on the concrete floor.

‘They’ve killed my family,’ he cried.

Mad for revenge, he tried to wrest a gun from the officers.

As officer Day led the weeping man away, Crum, Martinez and McCoy stepped around the bodies and pools of blood on the floor, and began to climb the stairs up to the observation deck. The door at the top of the stairs was all that stood between them and the mad killer they were about to confront.

Although he had already killed fifteen innocent people and injured thirty-one more, the sniper was nothing like the crazed psychopath who rampaged through their adrenaline-charged imaginations. Until the night before, Charles Whitman Jr had seemed the model citizen. Ex-altar boy and US Marine, he was a broad-shouldered, blondhaired, all-American boy who was known to one and all as a loving husband and son.

Born in 194l at Lake Worth, Florida, Charles Whitman Jr was the eldest of three brothers. He had been an exemplary son. Pitcher on the school’s baseball team, manager of the football team and an adept pianist, he brought home good grades and earned his pocket money doing a paper round. At twelve, he became an Eagle Scout, one of the youngest ever.

His father was a fanatic about guns and raised his boys knowing how to handle them. By the time Whitman enlisted in the US Marines in 1959, he was an expert marksman, scoring 215 out of a possible 250, which won him the rating of sharpshooter. He was also a keen sportsman, enjoying hunting, scuba diving and karate.

However, in the Marines, things began to go wrong. Whitman got busted from corporal to private for the illegal possession of a pistol and was reprimanded for threatening to knock a fellow Marine’s teeth out. Meanwhile the facade of his perfect, all-American family began to crack.

Charles Whitman Sr was a prominent civic leader in Lake Worth and one-time chairman of the chamber of commerce. But he was an authoritarian, a perfectionist and an unyielding disciplinarian who demanded the highest of standards from his sons. Nothing Charles Jr did was ever good enough for his father. He resigned himself to regular beatings. But what the young Whitman could not resign himself to was that his father was also a wife-beater. Whitman could not stand the sight of his mother’s suffering. He withdrew into himself for long periods and bit his nails down to the quick.

In March 1966, just five months before Whitman’s murder spree, the long-suffering Margaret Whitman left her violent husband. By that time, Charles Jr had won a Marine Corps scholarship and enrolled at the University of Texas to study architectural engineering. He moved to Austin, Texas, where he met and married his wife, Kathy Leissner, daughter of a rice-grower and Queen of the Fair of her hometown, Needville. They seemed to be the perfect couple she a teacher, he the local scoutmaster. But life did not go as smoothly as the young couple had hoped. Whitman began to take his growing hostility out on his wife. He became a compulsive gambler and soon faced court martial for gambling and loan sharking. His academic work suffered and his scholarship was withdrawn. He dropped out of college and went back to finish his tour with the Marines. Then he suddenly quit the Corps in December I964 and went back to university, determined to be a better student and a better husband. He overloaded himself with courses in an attempt to get his degree more quickly. He tried studying real estate sales part-time in case his degree course did not work out and he took on casual jobs to earn cash. Under pressure of work, he began to lose control of his temper. Fearing that he might lash out at his wife Kathy, he packed, ready to leave her – only to be talked out of it by a friend.

Whitman was summoned home in March to help his mother make the break. While she packed, a Lake Worth patrol car sat outside the house. Charles Jr had called it in case his father resorted to violence. To be near to her devoted son Charles Jr, Mrs Whitman moved to Austin. Her youngest son, seventeen-year-old John, moved out at about the same time. Later, he was arrested for throwing a rock through a shop window. A judge ordered him to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine or move back in with his father. He paid the fine. Only twenty-one-year-old Patrick, who worked in Whitman Sr’s lucrative plumbing contractors’ firm, stayed on with his father in the family home.

After the separation, Whitman’s father kept calling Charles Jr, trying to persuade him to bring his mother home. By the end of March, this constant hassle was troubling Charles so much that he sought help from the university’s resident psychiatrist, Dr Maurice Heatly. In a two-hour interview, Whitman told Dr Heatly that, like his father, he had beaten his wife a few times. He felt that something was wrong, that he did not feel himself. He said he was making an intense effort to control his temper but he feared that he might explode. He did not mention the blinding headaches that he was suffering with increasing frequency. In his notes, Dr Heatly characterised the crew-cut Whitman as a ‘massive, muscular youth who seemed to be oozing with hostility’. Heatly took down only one direct quote from Whitman. He had kept on saying that he was ‘thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and to start shooting people’.

At the time, these ominous words did not cause the psychiatrist any concern. Students often came to his clinic talking of the tower as a site for some desperate action. Usually they threatened to throw themselves off it. Three students had killed themselves by jumping off the tower since its completion in 1937. Two others had died in accidental falls. But others said that they felt the tower loomed over them like a mystical symbol. Psychiatrists say that there is nothing unusual about threats of violence either. Dr Heatly-was not unduly concerned, but recommended that the twenty-five-year-old student come back the following week for another session. Whitman never went back. He decided to fight his problems in his own way. The result was that he declared war on the whole world.

Whatever plans Whitman made over the next four months we cannot know. But those who knew him said that in his last days his anxiety seemed to pass and he became strangely serene. On the night before the massacre, Whitman began a long rambling letter which gives us a glimpse of some of the things going through his fast-disintegrating mind. Shortly before sunset on the evening of 31 July 1966, Whitman sat down at his battered portable typewriter in his modest yellow brick cottage at 906 Jewell Street, Austin, Texas.

‘I don’t quite understand what is compelling me to type this note,’ he wrote. ‘I have been having fears and violent impulses. I’ve had some tremendous headaches. I am prepared to die. After my death, I wish an autopsy on me to be performed to see if there’s any mental disorders.’ Then he launched into a merciless attack on his father whom he hated ‘with a mortal passion’. His mother, he regretted, had given ‘the best twenty-five years of her life to that man’. Then he wrote: ‘I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don’t want her to have to face the embarrassment that my actions will surely cause her.’

At around 7.30, he had to break off because a friend, fellow engineering student Larry Fuess, and his wife dropped round unexpectedly. They talked for a couple of hours. Fuess said later that Whitman seemed relaxed and perfectly at ease. He exhibited few of his usual signs of nervousness. ‘It was almost as if he had been relieved of a tremendous problem,’ Fuess said.

After they left, Whitman went back to the typewriter, noted the interruption and wrote simply: ‘Life is not worth living.’

It was time to go and pick up his wife. Whitman fed the dog then climbed into his new black ‘66 Chevrolet Impala and drove over to the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company where Kathy had taken a job as a telephonist during her summer vacation from teaching, to augment the family income. After driving his wife back to the house, he apparently decided not to kill her immediately. Instead, he picked up a pistol and sped across the Colorado River to his mother’s fifth-floor flat at Austin’s Penthouse Apartments at 1515 Guadeloupe Street. There was a brief struggle. Mrs Whitman’s fingers were broken when they were slammed in a door with such force that the band of her engagement ring was driven into the flesh of her finger and the diamond was broken from its setting. Then Whitman stabbed his mother in the chest and shot her in the back of the head, killing her.

He picked up her body, put it on the bed and pulled the covers up so it looked like she was sleeping. He left a hand-written note by the body addressed ‘To whom it may concern’. It read: ‘I have just killed my mother. If there’s a heaven she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart. The intense hatred I feel for my father is beyond all description.’

Before leaving, Whitman rearranged the rugs in his mother’s apartment to cover the bloodstains on the carpet. And he pinned a note on the front door saying that his mother was ill and would not be going to work that day.

Back at Jewell Street, he typed another line to his letter ‘12.30 a.m. Mother already dead.’ Some time after that he walked through into the room where his wife was sleeping. He stabbed her three times in the chest with a hunting knife, then pulled the bed sheet up to cover her naked body. He added to his letter, this time in longhand: ‘3.00 a.m. Wife and mother both dead.’ Then he began making preparations for the day ahead.

He got out his old green Marine Corps kitbag which hat his name, ‘Lance Cpl. C. J. Whitman’, stencilled on the side. Into it, he stuffed enough provisions to sustain him during a long siege twelve tins of spam, Planter’s peanuts, fruit cocktail, sandwiches, six boxes of raisins and a vacuum flask of coffee, along with jerry cans containing water and petrol, lighter fuel, matches, earplugs, a compass, rope, binoculars, a hammer, a spanner, a screwdriver, canteens, a snake-bite kit, a transistor radio, toilet paper and, in a bizarre allegiance to the cult of cleanliness, a plastic bottle of Mennen spray deodorant. He also stowed a private armoury that was enough to hold off a small army – a machete, a Bowie knife, a hatchet, a g-mm Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia pistol, a .357-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver, a 35-mm Remington rifle and a 6-mm Remington bolt-action rifle with a four-power Leupold telescopic sight. With this, experts say, a halfway decent shot can consistently hit a six-and-a-half inch circle at 300 yards. He left three more rifles and two derringers at home.

It is not known whether Whitman slept that night. But at 7.15 a.m. he turned up at the Austin Rental Equipment Service and rented a three-wheeled trolley. At 9 o’clock he called his wife’s supervisor at the telephone company and said that she was too ill to work that day. Then he drove to a Davis hardware store where he bought a second-hand .30 MI carbine, which was standard issue in the US Army at that time. At Chuck’s Gun Shop he bought some thirty-shot magazines for his new carbine and several hundred rounds of ammunition. And at 9.30 a.m. he walked into Sears Roebuck’s department store in Austin and bought a twelve-bore shotgun, on credit.

Back at Jewell Street, he took the shotgun into the garage and began cutting down the barrel and stock. The postman, Chester Arrington, stopped by and chatted to Whitman for about twenty-five minutes. He was probably the last person to speak to Whitman before the massacre. Years later he recalled: ‘I saw him sawing off the shotgun. I knew it was illegal. All I had to do was pick up the telephone and report him. It could have stopped him. I’ve always blamed myself.’

At last everything was ready. Whitman loaded his kitbag and the last of his guns into a metal truck and loaded the locker into the boot of his car. He covered it with a blanket, then zipped a pair of grey nylon overalls over his blue jeans and white shirt and, around 10.30 a.m., set off for the university.

Nearly three hours later, Whitman was still fulfilling his deadly mission. Dead bodies were strewn across the streets and plazas below him and hundreds cowered from his bullets. But it could not last for ever. Outside the door to the observation deck, just a few feet away, were two policeman and a veteran Air Force tailgunner determined to put an end to his psychopathic spree.

Crum, the civilian, took charge.

‘Let’s do this service style,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll cover you and you cover me.’

They cleared away the barricade at the top of the stairs and, while the cops on the ground intensified their fire to distract the killer, Martinez slowly pushed away the trolley that was propped against the door. Using an overturned desk as a shield, they crawled towards the observation gallery. Crum, carrying a rifle, headed west, while Martinez, with a .38 service revolver, headed eastwards around the gallery, followed by McCoy who was carrying a shotgun.

Martinez rounded one corner then, more slowly, turned on to the north side of the walkway. About fifty feet away, he saw Whitman crouched down and edging towards the corner Crum was about to come round.

But Crum heard Whitman coming and loosed off a shot. It tore a great chunk out of the parapet. Whitman turned and ran back, into the sights of Officer Martinez. Martinez, who had never fired a gun in anger before, shot – and missed. Whitman raised his carbine and fired, but he was trembling and could not keep the gun level. As he squeezed the trigger the gun jerked and the bullet screamed harmlessly over the officer’s head. Martinez then emptied his remaining five rounds into the gunman. But still he would not go down. McCoy stepped forward and blasted him twice with the shotgun. Whitman hit the concrete still holding his weapon. Martinez saw that he was still moving. Grabbing the shotgun from McCoy, he ran forward, blasting Whitman at point-blank range in the head. Crum then took Whitman’s green towel from his footlocker and waved it above the parapet. At last the gunman was dead.

At 140 p.m. two ambulance men carried Whitman’s blanket-shrouded body from the tower on a canvas stretcher. The police quickly established his identity and his name was broadcast on the radio. His father rang the police department in Austin and asked them to check his son’s and estranged wife’s apartments. Along with the bodies of the two women and the notes he had written, Whitman left two rolls of film with the instruction to have them developed. The photographs had been taken over the previous few weeks, but only showed the killer in various ordinary domestic poses, such as snoozing on the sofa with his dog, Smokie, at his feet.

Interviewed later by the press, Whitman’s father announced proudly that his son ‘always was a crack shot’. In fact, he said, all of his sons were good with guns.

‘I am a fanatic about guns,’ he admitted. ‘My boys knew all about them. I believe in that.’

Whitman had learned the lesson well. In his house, guns had hung in every room.

An autopsy later revealed that there was, as Whitman himself had suspected, something wrong with his brain. He had a tumour the size of a pecan nut in the hypothalamus, but the pathologist, Dr Coleman de Chenar, said that it was certainly not the cause of Whitman’s headaches and could not have had any influence on his behaviour. The state pathologist agreed that it was benign and could not have caused Whitman any pain, but a report by the Governor of Texas said that it was malignant and would have killed Whitman within a year. The report also concluded that the tumour could have contributed to Whitman’s loss of control.

A number of Dexedrine tablets – known at the time as goofballs – were also found in Whitman’s possession, but physicians were not able to detect that he taken any before he died. He may simply have laid in the stimulants to keep him alert during a long siege.

As it is, he had claimed the lives of fifteen people during his murderous rampage, not including his own. Thirty-one others had been injured. One would die later in hospital. Others were permanently scared or disabled.

The bodies of Charles Whitman and his mother were returned together to Florida, his in a grey metal casket, hers in a green-and white one. With hundreds of curiosity seekers gawking and jostling in the rolling, palm-fringed cemetery in West Palm Beach, mother and son were interred with full Catholic rites. The priest said that Whitman had obviously been deranged which meant he was not responsible for the sin of murder and was therefore eligible for burial in hallowed ground. The grand jury also found that Whitman was insane.

Flags were flown at half-mast on the Austin campus of the University of Texas for a week. The tower was closed to the public for a year, but re-opened in July 1967. Following a number of suicide attempts, it was closed for good in 1975.

The material Whitman had assembled for his murder spree remained in police custody until 1972. Then it was auctioned off to augment the fund set up to help the victims of his crimes. Whitman’s guns fetched $1,500 from a dealer in Kansas.

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