A Sniper in the Tower (80 page)

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Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

BOOK: A Sniper in the Tower
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Page 272
18
Who Killed Charles Whitman?
I
In 1985 two sociologists from Northeastern University, Jack Levin and James Alan Fox, completed a "comprehensive exploration of the characteristics of and the circumstances which precipitate mass murder," producing a work entitled
Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace
. In 1994 they followed up with
Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed
. In the foreword of
Mass Murder
noted defense attorney F. Lee Bailey wrote that Americans know little about mass murder and that much needs to be done to understand and prevent it.
1
In
 
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their work Levin and Fox present a composite profile of a mass murderer: a white male, in his late twenties or thirties, whose motives to kill include money, expediency, jealousy, or lust. American mass murderers, hardly ever career criminals but sometimes with a history of property crimes, often commit their murders following lengthy periods of frustration. For some, like Charles Whitman, guns become a solution to this frustration and are seen as the "great equalizer."
2
Of course, people are classified as mass murderers only
after
they have committed the murders. Hence, the prevention of mass murders could only be accomplished through predicting who will become one and intervening before the crime. That requires the identification of variables found to have a cause-effect relationship with mass murder. Levin and Fox candidly admit that their profile of a mass murderer fits hundreds of thousands of individuals and that attempts to make the profile more detailed subtract from its accuracy. Moreover, the more prevalent character traits of mass murderers tend to be hidden. Like other mass murderers, Charles Whitman battled feelings of powerlessness and a lack of accomplishment, a brand of impotence Whitman thought made his life not worth living.
3
Accepting any of the sources of frustration as an excuse for his actions is to suggest a cause-effect relationship which should manifest itself in many hundreds of other individuals.
Trying to identify potential mass murderers through observable physical features and societal status continues to be folly because they run the spectrum of looks and conditions, from the charming and the attractive, like Whitman and Ted Bundy, to the ugly, like Richard Speck. Some mass murderers have homes and some are drifters. Some are married and some are single. They include tall and short, rich and poor, urbanites and country boys, literate and illiterate. They love and hate kids, dogs, their parents, their neighbors, and their country. Trying to identify childhood characteristics associated with individuals who grow to be violent is also fraught with danger. For example, the MacDonald Triadwhich includes bedwetting, firesetting, and torturing small animalsdenotes a group of common characteristics in children who grow to become violent adults. The triad has often been attributed to poor parenting. But many well-adjusted, nonviolent adults were children who wet their
 
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bed and liked to play with fire; some might even have been cruel to animals. Yet few become mass murderers.
4
In general, predicting the behavior of individuals is extraordinarily difficult and inexact. (Predicting the behavior of groups of people is much easier. For example, insurance companies can predict the losses of particular groups very accurately.) Usually, predictions for individuals are accurate only when they are based on measurements under standardized conditions and when the measurements are similar to those of the predicted behavior. Exams, like college admissions tests, pose questions that duplicate the thought processes and the problems examinees will later face in college. A test's design and content result from a great deal of science and data. It can be altered and field tested; its effectiveness can be measured and demonstrated. On the other hand, there is no "test" for mass murderers (or for most other anti-social behavior). While teams like the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit have amassed information on known mass murderers, the relative infrequency of the crime and the lack of direct measurements makes prediction problematic.
In predicting mass murderers, there would be four possible outcomes: 1. False-Positive: Someone who is predicted to become a mass murderer but does not become one. 2. True-Positive: Someone who is predicted to become a mass murderer and does become one. 3. True-Negative: Someone who is predicted not to become a mass murderer and does not become one. 4. False-Negative: Someone who is predicted not to become a mass murderer and does become one.
The accurate prediction of a mass murder, or early identification of a potential mass murderer, is nearly impossible because of the large number of false-positives (an inaccurate prediction) and the small number of true-positives (an accurate prediction). Simply put, the more prevalent characteristics of mass murderers, variables like the MacDonald Triad and those "causes" of the Whitman murders, are also common in the general population. Statistically, the accurate prediction of any condition as infrequent as mass murder from a large general population is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. Societally, the consequence of error in predicting such a horrendous behavior is intolerable. It would lead to labeling, baseless discrimination, and unwarranted suspicions among friends, neighbors, and family.
5
 
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Charles Whitman provides a good example of the severe limitations of prediction. All of the variables associated with the cause of his murders are common in the general population. There are too many others who engage in those activities or suffer from those conditions who proceed to develop into normal, productive adults. Charles Whitman
decided
to become a mass murderer.
II
During the week of 1 August 1966, attention fell on the unlikely person of Ford Clark of Ottumwa, Iowa, little-known author of a book entitled
Open Square
. The paperback, published in the early 1960s at about the time Charles Whitman first moved to Austin as a NESEP scholar, was a fictional account of Ted Weeks, a psychotic student who happened to hate his parents. In a haunting coincidence, the Weeks of
Open Square
climbed a tower on a university campus somewhere in the Midwest and began firing a high-powered rifle at students and faculty below. As the real-life drama unfolded in Austin, Clark was working on a new publication:
I was writing when my fiancée called me and told me they were acting out my novel on the University of Texas campus. This must have been about noon. I completely misunderstood her. I thought they were making a play of the book.
Shortly afterwards Clark received an anonymous phone call from someone with a Southern accent: "If you ever come down to our country we're going to put a bullet in your head. I know he read your book. He was a good boy. You're to blame for all of this."
6
On 5 August 1966, the
Austin American-Statesman
listed an astounding list of similarities between Charles Whitman and the fictitious Ted Weeks: the sniper's nest had food; Weeks had an overly loving mother and a perfectionist for a father; he could not live up to the expectations of his father; he was trained to shoot in the military (ROTC); he hauled his supplies in a suitcase, the contents of which included water, gasoline, and five hundred rounds of ammunition; and he used ventilation slits as portholes to fire through.
 
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Astoundingly, the fictitious sniper Ted Weeks was killed by a police force headed by a ''Chief Miles."
7
Dr. Coleman de Chenar, the physician who performed the autopsy on Charles Whitman, was reported to have postulated that the book had given Whitman the idea. Ford Clark replied that de Chenar's statement was irresponsible. Each finally apologized to the other after the physician claimed to have been misquoted. After the eerie similarities became common knowledge, the Austin Police Department obtained a warrant to search 906 Jewell Street for a copy of
Open Square
. The search was conducted on 3 August 1966 and no copy was found.
8
No evidence was ever uncovered that Charles Whitman might have read the book, by checking it out from a library for instance, or even that he might have known such a book existed. In any case, clear evidence does exist that Whitman had immediately recognized the value of the Tower as a fortress the first time he saw it in 1961, almost certainly before
Open Square
was published.
The first attempt to dramatize the Tower incident occurred nine years later. Antonio Calderon produced a made-for-television movie entitled
Deadly Tower
. The film focused on Ramiro Martinez, played by an actor named Richard Yniguez, as the central figure and hero. Kurt Russell played a dazed, almost robotic, Charles Whitman, who had few lines in the entire feature. Ned Beatty played Allen Crum. No other real names were used in the production. In August of 1974 Houston McCoy was approached by the studio, but he refused to sign a release for his name to be used. McCoy proposed more factual script changes. In a letter to Antonio Calderon dated 18 September 1974, Ben Neel, representing McCoy, summarized McCoy's objections and proposals:
Houston's entire objection to your movie, Mr. Calderon, revolves around the actual shooting of Whitman by Martinez in your film. If you will study our position, I will be glad to discuss it with you again. This proposed change in your tower scene would in no way discredit Martinez or your movie, but it would disclose the truth at long last.

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