Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [27]
Born in 194l at Lake Worth, Florida, Whitman 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 12, 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 demoted 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.
After winning a Marine Corps scholarship Whitman moved to Austin and enrolled at the University of Texas to study architectural engineering. It was in Austin that he met and married his wife, Kathy Leissner, the 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 His academic work suffered and his scholarship was withdrawn.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 in December 1964 suddenly he quit the Corps 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.
In March 1966, just five months before Whitman’s murder spree, the long-suffering Margaret Whitman left her violent husband. Whitman was summoned home 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, 17-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 $25 fine or move back in with his father. He paid the fine. Only 21-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