On August 1, 1966, the deaths of sixteen people in Austin, Texas, were laid at the door of one man. Charles Joseph Whitman was twenty-five, a former Marine and a senior in architectural engineering at the University of Texas. In the hours before dawn his mother and his wife died in Austin, and before that day ended twelve people on and around the university campus were dead, one more would die a week later, and another would die of the same day's injuries thirty-five years afterward. More than thirty others were wounded. Austin police officers killed Whitman on the campus that afternoon.
He was never arrested, never charged and never tried. His responsibility rests on the findings of the Austin police, on the work of a Travis County grand jury that sealed the police file for twenty years, on inquests held by a Travis County justice of the peace, on a committee of specialists appointed by the governor of Texas and, for the death in 2001, on medical examiners. No court ever weighed the evidence. The deaths are attributed to him, firmly and by every agency that examined them, but they were never proved against him in law.
Whitman was born on June 24, 1941, in Lake Worth, Florida. He became an Eagle Scout at twelve years and three months, one of the youngest on record at the time, and finished at St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach in 1959.
Shortly after high school, on July 6, 1959, Whitman enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He was eighteen. He spent a year and a half at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then passed an examination that opened a path toward officer training. The Marines sent him to a preparatory school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and from there, in September 1961, to the University of Texas in Austin to study engineering at the service's expense.
The arrangement did not last. In 1963 a state game warden cited him and two friends for a game-law offense in Austin, and the three were fined. His grades fell below what the program required, and on February 12, 1963, the Marine Corps withdrew him from the university and ordered him back to duty as an enlisted man. He was posted to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and served in H Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, as a corporal and rifle squad leader. He was also married, which was unusual for a first-term enlisted man.
In November 1963 Whitman came before a special court-martial at Camp Lejeune. Cases of that kind went to a board of about five company-grade officers, assigned so that none of them supervised the accused. The charges were ten counts of lending money for profit, two counts of unauthorized possession under military rules, and one count of orally threatening to kill a fellow Marine. He pleaded guilty to everything except the threat, saying he had only threatened to knock the other man's teeth out. The board found him guilty of every charge except the threat. He was reduced from corporal to private and given thirty days' restriction, which one member of the board later described as among the mildest sentences it handed down.
In the months after the court-martial, the young corporal who had meant to make the Corps his career decided to leave it. He stayed in uniform for another year, and in the summer of 1964 took classes at East Carolina State College while still in service. He then asked for an early release so that he could return to the University of Texas, and the Marine Corps granted it. He was discharged on December 4, 1964.
Kathleen Leissner grew up in Needville, Texas. She finished high school in 1961 with a strong academic record and went up to Austin to the University of Texas, where she met Whitman. They married in Needville on August 17, 1962, after a short courtship and shortly before her second year of college, in a ceremony that joined his Catholic faith and her Methodist one. She was nineteen.
She was a prolific writer of letters. Between 1962 and 1966 she wrote roughly 180,000 words to her husband, her family and her friends, nearly all of it by hand in ink, on blue and pink stationery, airmail onion skin and greeting cards, and most of it still in the original envelopes. Early in the marriage she told her husband she had "enough love" to keep him busy "for about 80 years."
The marriage soon became a long-distance one. In February 1963, when the Marine Corps sent him back to North Carolina, she left her studies to join him at Camp Lejeune. In Jacksonville, North Carolina, she made friends and found work, and then she made her own plan to return to Texas alone. She lived in Austin for nearly two years while he finished his service, went back to her studies, and kept writing, even in the months when she was most isolated. In November 1963 she wrote that she felt detached from everything that meant anything to her. The letters show a young woman eager to learn and to make things, determined to keep making time for her own thoughts and for the people she cared about.
They also record how the marriage changed. From a distance she challenged him in writing about his moods and his temper. They describe a husband who took control of her pay, monitored her calls and letters and set rules for her appearance, and by his own account in March 1966 he had struck her a few times and was trying to control himself. In the last year of her life, after they were together again in Austin, she had begun to talk about divorce.
Whitman returned to the University of Texas in the spring of 1965 to study architectural engineering. He took summer classes at Alvin Junior College in 1965 and was back at the university for the 1965 and 1966 school year, a non-resident student from Florida. He carried nineteen semester hours in the spring of 1966 and was enrolled for fourteen that summer, a heavy load. Classmates remembered him as older than most of the engineering students, married, a former Marine and a sharp dresser. He was a B student. He worked part time and served as a scoutmaster. The couple had no children.
The pressure on him grew sharply that spring. In March 1966 his mother separated from his father and moved to Austin to be near her eldest son. On March 29, 1966, at the urging of his wife and friends, Whitman sought medical and psychiatric advice at the university health center. He spent about two hours with the staff psychiatrist, who asked him to come back the following week. He did not return.
On the evening of July 31, 1966, Whitman sat down and wrote. He wrote of fears and impulses he could not explain, and of a readiness to die. Police later said he had written that he killed his wife and his mother to spare them the embarrassment of what he planned to do. In one note he asked for an autopsy.
His mother, Margaret Whitman, and his wife died in Austin in the night between July 31 and August 1, 1966, in their separate residences.
Later that Monday morning Whitman went to the University of Texas campus. He is held responsible for the deaths of twelve people on and around the campus that day: Edna Townsley, Mark Gabour, Marguerite Lamport, Thomas Eckman, Robert Boyer, Thomas Ashton, Thomas Karr, Billy Paul Speed, Harry Walchuk, Paul Sonntag, Claudia Rutt and Roy Dell Schmidt. Karen Griffith, among the wounded, died a week later. Another of the wounded, David Gunby, lived with his injuries for thirty-five years; when he died in 2001, medical examiners attributed his death to the injuries of that day.
That afternoon two Austin police officers killed Whitman on the campus. At the time it was the deadliest attack of its kind by a single person in the nation's history.
Because the man held responsible was dead, the investigation that followed was never building toward a trial. Its work was to establish what had happened, to whom, and why, and it moved in stages through several agencies at once.
The first stage belonged to the Austin Police Department. Every available city officer and the highway patrolmen of the Texas Department of Public Safety were sent to the university that day, and the Texas Rangers came with them. The university itself had no police force of its own; its safety rested with a traffic and security office under its own chief. The same day the Austin police learned of the two deaths in the family and recovered three notes Whitman had written in the last hours of his life.
The second stage was the paperwork of the next morning. On August 2, 1966, Austin officers who had been on the campus began filing supplemental offense reports, each officer's own account of what he had seen and done. Copies of several of them went into the files of the Department of Public Safety's Criminal Law Enforcement Division, which ran its own investigation alongside the city's. The university's security office kept its own folder of reports by officers at the scene and of papers Whitman had signed as a student in 1965; on its cover his typed name carried a handwritten notation, "Deceased," with the date of August 1, 1966. Federal agencies, among them the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service, took part as well, and FBI reports became part of the Austin police file.
The third stage was legal and medical. The Travis County justice of the peace for Precinct 3, Place 2, held the inquests on most of the dead and on Whitman himself; the inquest on his wife was entered in the docket of the justice of the peace for Precinct 5. The autopsy Whitman had asked for in his note was carried out, and its findings went to the inquiries that followed.
The notes raised a problem that the authorities had to decide. In them Whitman accused his father of having abused the family for years. Neither the police nor the FBI could substantiate those accusations. The notes and the police file went before a Travis County grand jury. They ruled that the notes would be released only to authorized investigating agencies, on the ground that they contained unverified statements, and they agreed to seal the police file on Whitman for twenty years. When the file finally opened, it ran to about nine inches of paper.
The governor of Texas was abroad on a tour of Latin America when the news reached him. He cut the trip short and came home, and within days of the deaths he commissioned a special committee to study Whitman's life and anything that might explain what he had done. It was a task force of medical and psychiatric experts, more than thirty in all: psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, pathologists and others. The committee's psychiatrists worked backward through Whitman's life, interviewing his friends, his family and his grade-school teachers.
The committee delivered its findings to the governor in September 1966, and they were released at a press conference under the title "Report to the Governor, Medical Aspects, Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe." It was candid about the limits of what it could know. Whitman had not had a recent psychiatric evaluation, and without one the task force said it was impossible to make a formal psychiatric diagnosis. What it could do was describe a pattern from the evidence of his behavior.
The picture it drew was of a man under mounting personal stress that he felt he could neither escape nor master, increasingly isolated for years, deeply dissatisfied with himself and possessed of a poorly formed sense of who he was. He was prone to act on impulse and at times lost control. His grades were reasonable, but he was not pursuing the studies that suited him, and he seemed, in the report's words, "to achieve no sense of pleasure or feeling of mastery from learning a subject." The committee counted the strains within his family among the pressures on him. On the tumor, the committee concluded that any link between it and his actions "cannot be established with clarity."
The committee's recommendations looked outward rather than back at Whitman. It called for a broad health program for the students and faculty of the whole university system, including a mental health program, and for a larger and stronger student counseling service. It asked for a study of safety across the university system. It asked the news media to examine, in a self-study, their own role in reporting violence and its possible effects, and to work with educational agencies on how coverage of violence could serve the public good. It proposed a process of relearning for combat-trained servicemen returning to civilian life. And it asked that the people who had been wounded be helped, through existing channels, to recover.
The state acted on part of that program within the year. The university set up a Counseling and Mental Health Center on campus. The Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 162, which took effect on April 27, 1967, and allowed the state's universities to commission their own peace officers. The University of Texas System Police was chartered to employ and commission officers to protect life and property on the system's campuses, and its first academy graduates finished training in January 1968.
In July 1986, when the twenty years of the grand jury's seal had run out, the police file and Whitman's last letter became public. The police department's records of the case are now held in the Austin History Center, the city's public archive, and the Department of Public Safety's investigation files, including the officers' supplemental reports of August 2, 1966, are held by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
No court ever tested the evidence. The deaths of Whitman's mother and wife, and of the fourteen people on the campus, are attributed to him by the police investigation and by every official agency that examined the case, but he was never charged, and no jury or judge ruled on any of them.
His accusations against his father, set out in the notes he left, were never substantiated, and they were part of the reason his words stayed sealed for twenty years.
Why he did it has never been settled. The governor's committee, with more than thirty specialists and access to his family, friends and records, described the pressures on him in detail but could not make a diagnosis or establish a cause.
June 24, 1941: Charles Joseph Whitman is born in Lake Worth, Florida.
1959: He finishes St. Ann's High School in West Palm Beach.
July 6, 1959: He enlists in the United States Marine Corps.
September 1961: The Marine Corps sends him to the University of Texas in Austin to study engineering.
August 17, 1962: He marries in Needville, Texas.
February 12, 1963: The Marine Corps orders him back to duty as an enlisted man.
1963: State game wardens cite him and two friends for a game-law offense; the three are fined.
November 1963: A special court-martial at Camp Lejeune finds him guilty of lending money for profit and two possession counts and acquits him of the threat; he is reduced to private.
December 4, 1964: He is discharged from the Marine Corps on his own request for early release.
Spring 1965: He returns to the University of Texas to study architectural engineering.
March 1966: His mother leaves his father in Lake Worth and moves to Austin.
March 29, 1966: He seeks help at the university health center and does not return.
July 31 to August 1, 1966: His mother and his wife die in Austin.
August 1, 1966: Twelve people die on and around the University of Texas campus; Austin police officers kill Whitman.
August 2, 1966: Austin officers file supplemental offense reports; the Department of Public Safety opens its own investigation file.
August 1966: Travis County inquests are held; a grand jury restricts the notes to investigating agencies and seals the police file for twenty years.
September 1966: The governor's committee reports.
April 27, 1967: Senate Bill 162 takes effect, allowing Texas universities to commission their own peace officers.
January 1968: The first University of Texas System Police academy class graduates.
July 1986: The sealed police file and Whitman's last letter become public.
2001: A man wounded in 1966 dies; medical examiners attribute his death to the injuries of August 1, 1966.