Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

A Sniper in the Tower (2 page)

BOOK: A Sniper in the Tower

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Page x

with the flag of the United States, and, like his devoutly religious mother, he was accorded full burial rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The celebrant of the funeral Mass, Father Tom Anglim of Lake Worth's Sacred Heart Church, asked the world to try to understand that Charlie was obviously deranged.

Charles Joseph Whitman is buried next to his first victim, his mother, Margaret
Elizabeth Whitman, in section 10 of the Hillcrest Memorial Park in West Palm
Beach, Florida. Both were afforded full burial rights of the Catholic Church and
Charles's coffin was draped with the American flag.
Gary Lavergne

Page xi


We trust that God in his mercy does not hold him responsible for these last actions. We trust that our nation, with its traditions for fairness and justice, will not judge his actions with harshness. ²

But it was hard to understand. He had killed thirteen others earlier in the same week, and four days later another of his victims, a critically injured seventeen-year-old girl named Karen Griffith, would die. She would not return to Austin's Lanier High School to join a senior class filled with the former students of Kathy Whitman's biology classes. Instead, Karen has her own weathered metal plaque in Crestview Memorial Park in Wichita Falls, Texas. What should have been her senior yearbook was dedicated to her and Kathy Whitman.

Surely, Charlie Whitman had to have been an animal, void of virtue and conscience. But the
Austin American-Statesman
described him as "a good son, top Boy Scout, an excellent marine, an honor student, a hard worker, a loving husband, a fine scout master, a handsome man, a wonderful friend to all who knew himand an expert sniper."
³In articles that followed, the
Austin American-Statesman
and the media in general presented a more accurate and sober portrait, but no one would ever completely understand Charlie Whitman.

Twenty years after her death Kathy's father, Raymond W. Leissner, still referred to his son-in-law as "Charlie." Remarkably resigned to life without Kathy, Raymond Leissner harbored no ill will towards the man who murdered his only daughter. Instead, he believed that Charlie was driven to madness by a brain tumor discovered the day after his life ended as violently as that of his victims. "He was a brilliant boy," Leissner said, but he has given up trying to understand why it happened. ''It's neither here nor there. It's done. It's over with; it's gone. There's no use trying to find out why. . . . I got my consolement [sic] from Almighty God. I kind of left it in his hands. That's the only way to live a decent life."
⁴

It took Charles Whitman an hour and a half to turn the symbol of a premier university into a monument to madness and terror. With deadly efficiency he introduced America to public mass murder, and in the process forever changed our notions of safety in open spaces. Arguably, he introduced America to domestic terrorism, but it was terrorism without a cause.

Page xii

In 1991 a University of Texas employee stated, "I can tell you now with total veracity that never once in the past twenty-five years have I looked at the Tower and not thought about Charles Whitman." Another UT alumnus who was present during the incident, William J. Helmer, lamented, "I can't quite shake an ever so slightly uneasy feeling that the Tower, somehow, is watching me." On the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Austin's Brackenridge Hospital, where so many lives were lost and saved because of Charles J. Whitman, one of the saved, Robert Heard, told the world of how he once suffered from recurring nightmares: "In my dreams, I'm looking through that scope at me, running. And I see the cross hairs right over my chest."

"He was our initiation into a terrible time," reflected a Guadalupe Street vendor. "[W]e grew numb. He was supposed to be an all-American boy The sad thing is, maybe he really is."
⁵

In an article in
Esquire
in August, 1977, noted author Harry Crews wrote of a visit to the University of Texas and how his host gave an unsolicited tour of the Tower massacre site. "That mindless slaughter was suddenly alive and real for me, as though it were happening again, and it was all I could do to keep from running for cover." Crews noticed his host glancing over his shoulder as they walked across UT's South Mall. Later in the evening Crews returned to the Tower and as he stared upwards, a disturbing personal revelation occurred:


What I know is that all over the surface of the earth where humankind exists men and women are resisting climbing the Tower. All of us have a Tower to climb. Some are worse than others, but to deny that you have your Tower to climb and that you must resist it or succumb to the temptation to do it, to deny that is done at the peril of your heart and mind. ⁶

In 1991, twenty-five years after the Charles Whitman murders, Catherine H. Cantieri summed up the danger of trivializing and forgetting the details of such a tragic story:


After twenty-five years and the attendant anniversary requiems, the story loses something. The edges blur, the facts

Page xiii


lose meaning, the horror evaporates as it becomes just another media circus brought to you at six and ten by concerned-looking anchors. The salient points, the meat of the story, are tossed aside, although they are the stuff that will make you lose sleep. ⁷

For individuals affected by the tragedy, like Raymond W. Leissner, there is wisdom in accepting what happened in Austin, Texas, on 1 August 1966, as something that can never be understood. Accepting the unknown as part of God's plan often brings peace and comfort to the faithful and the bereaved; it enables them to go on with their lives. But for society, and institutions, the crime looms too large to be forgotten. Periodic attempts to understand
what
happened and
why
are worthy; since 1 August 1966 there have been other Charles Whitmans, and there will certainly be more. Potential mass-murderers live among us; some of them are nice young men who climb their towers. It is no longer enough to look upon the University of Texas Tower and sigh, "This is where the bodies began to fall," because the story is larger than that. It is a story of how a nation discovered mass murder, and that nation's vulnerability to the destructive power of a determined individual.

GARY M. LAVERGNE
CEDAR PARK, TEXAS

1 Greenlawn Memorial Park,
Internment Order
, Kathleen Frances Whitman, 3 August 1966. (The Greenlawn Memorial Park is now called the Davis-Greenlawn Memorial Park.)

2
Austin American-Statesman
, 4 August 1966; Father Tom Anglim quoted in
Palm Beach Post,
6 August 1966;
Time
, 12 August 1966.

3
Austin American-Statesman
, 2 August 1966.

4 Raymond Leissner quoted in
Austin American-Statesman
, 1 August 1986.

5 Adrienne de Vergie quoted in
Daily Texan
, 1 August 1991; William J. Helmer quoted in
Texas Monthly
, August, 1986; Robert Heard quoted in Lisa Fahrenthold and Sara Rider,
Admissions: The Extraordinary History of Brackenridge Hospital
(Austin: City of Austin, 1984), p. 93; Guadalupe Street vendor quoted in
Dallas Morning News
, 1 August 1986.

6
Esquire
, August, 1977.

7
UTmost
, September 1991.

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