Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [28]
At the time, these ominous words did not cause the psychiatrist any concern. Students often came to his clinic talking of the tower as a site for some desperate action. Usually they threatened to throw themselves off it. Three students had killed themselves by jumping off the tower since its completion in 1937. Two others had died in accidental falls. But others said that they felt the tower loomed over them like a mystical symbol. Psychiatrists say that there is nothing unusual about threats of violence either. Dr Heatly was not unduly concerned, but recommended that the 25-year-old student come back the following week for another session. Whitman never went back. He decided to fight his problems in his own way. The result was that he declared war on the whole world.
Whatever plans Whitman made over the next four months we cannot know. But those who knew him said that in his last days his anxiety seemed to pass and he became strangely serene. On the night before the massacre, Whitman began a long rambling letter which gives us a glimpse of some of the things going through his fast-disintegrating mind. Shortly before sunset on the evening of 31 July 1966, Whitman sat down at his battered, portable typewriter in his modest yellow-brick cottage at 906 Jewell Street.
‘I don’t quite understand what is compelling me to type this note,’ he wrote. ‘I have been having fears and violent impulses. I’ve had some tremendous headaches. I am prepared to die. After my death, I wish an autopsy on me to be performed to see if there’s any mental disorders.’ Then he launched into a merciless attack on his father whom he hated ‘with a mortal passion’. His mother, he regretted, had given ‘the best 25 years of her life to that man’. Then he wrote: ‘I intend to kill my wife after I pick her up from work. I don’t want her to have to face the embarrassment that my actions will surely cause her.’
At around 7.30, he had to break off because a friend, fellow engineering student Larry Fuess, and his wife dropped round unexpectedly. They talked for a couple of hours. Fuess said later that Whitman seemed relaxed and perfectly at ease. He exhibited few of his usual signs of nervousness. ‘It was almost as if he had been relieved of a tremendous problem,’ Fuess said.
After they left, Whitman went back to the typewriter, noted the interruption and wrote simply: ‘Life is not worth living.’
It was time to go and pick up his wife. Whitman fed the dog then climbed into his new black 1966 Chevrolet Impala and drove over to the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company where Kathy had taken a job as a telephonist during her summer vacation from teaching to augment the family income. After driving his wife back to the house, he apparently decided not to kill her immediately. Instead, he left her at home, picked up a pistol and sped across the Colorado River to his mother’s fifth-floor flat at Austin’s Penthouse Apartments at 1515 Guadeloupe Street. There was a brief struggle. Mrs Whitman’s fingers were broken when they were slammed in a door with such force that the band of her engagement ring was driven into the flesh of her finger and the diamond was broken from its setting. Then Whitman stabbed his mother in the chest and shot her in the back of the head, killing her.
He picked up her body, put it on the bed and pulled the covers up so it looked like she was sleeping. He left a hand-written note by the body addressed ‘To whom it may concern’. It read: ‘I have just killed my mother. If there’s a heaven she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart. The intense hatred I feel for my father is beyond