Play Deprived Life – Devastating Result
A Tortured Soul Explodes
On a suffocating August morning at the University of Texas, Austin, Charles Whitman, a seemingly normal, 25 year old engineering student, and former marine sharpshooter, wheeled a trunk onto the elevator of the tower overlooking campus.
On the surface he was a clean-cut, ambitious young man. No one really had a grasp of the complexities of his life nor – as would later be found in his diaries – took seriously his attempts to ward off the homicidal urges that he felt were going to explode. The trunk hid an arsenal of guns and ammunition.
Over a frightening three hour period he shot down from the tower killing 17 and wounding 41 university students and staff. It was later learned that before the tower, he had separately murdered his wife and mother.
This brilliant, tortured soul—a man once described as a “model citizen”, had committed what in 1966 was the largest mass murder in U.S. history.
Why would a seemingly normal person—a former altar boy; the youngest American boy to become an Eagle Scout; a life with no criminal record who had never shown a tendency for violence—go berserk?