Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [32]
Reacting to what he called the ‘shocking tragedy’ in Austin, President Johnson urged the speedy passage of the bill ‘to help prevent the wrong persons from obtaining firearms’. However, no one was sure how you could recognise the ‘wrong persons’.
Austin’s police chief said that ‘this kind of thing could have happened anywhere’. But that was no comfort. Psychiatrists began to speculate that there was something intrinsic to modern American society that created crazed killers like Whitman. Time magazine reported that nearly 2.5 million Americans had been treated for mental illness in hospitals and clinics that year. Almost a third of them were classified as psychotic – people who, by the minimum definition, had lost touch with reality. They lived in a world of fantasy, haunted by fears and delusions of persecution. An accidental bump on a crowded sidewalk or a passing criticism from an employer or relative could easily set any of these psychotics off.
The menace of the psychotic killer was all the more frightening because they may seem like the model citizen – until they go berserk. Many of these people have a feeling that there is a demon within themselves, said Los Angeles clinical psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn. They try to kill the demon by model behaviour. They live the opposite of what they feel. Like Whitman, they become gentle, very mild, extremely nice people who often show the need to be perfectionists.
Some psychiatrists estimated that the number of potential mass killers in the US ranged as high as one in every thousand, or at that time 200,000 people. Most of these, of course, would never carry out their murderous desires. But Houston psychiatrist C.A. Dwyer warned the American public: ‘Potential killers are everywhere these days. They are driving cars, going to church with you, working with you. And you never know it until they snap.’
Americans were warned to stay alert. They were told to watch for sudden personality changes in friends and loved ones and that special attention should be paid to habitually shy and quiet people who suddenly become aggressive and talkative – or the reverse. Other danger signs were depression and seclusion, hypersensitivity to tiny slights and insults, changes in normal patterns of eating or sleeping, uncontrolled outbursts of temper, disorganised thinking and a morbid interest in guns, knives or other instruments of destruction.
Psychiatrists were quick to point out that the appearance of any of these symptoms does not necessarily mean that someone is about to turn killer. However, those exhibiting them were in need of psychiatric help. Unfortunately, even if a dangerous psychotic – like Charles Whitman – did reach the examining room, it was by no means certain that they could be headed off. Most doctors agreed that the University of Texas psychiatrist who took no action, even after Whitman confessed his urge to climb the Austin tower and kill people several months before the actual incident took place, was not at fault. University of Chicago psychiatrist Robert S. Daniels said, ‘Thousands – and I mean literally thousands – talk to doctors about having such feelings. Nearly all of them are just talking.’
Deciding who was, and who wasn’t, going to follow their murderous impulses was more of an art than a science. It was also a matter of practicality. The practice of psychiatry depended on trust between patient and doctor. Psychiatrists could hardly be expected to report every threatening remark. Besides, as the New York deputy-police commissioner pointed out, ‘We can’t arrest people because they are ill.’ New Jersey psychiatrist Henry A. Davidson added: ‘We are in a situation now where there is the enormous pressure of civil rights. The idea of locking someone up on the basis of a psychiatrist’s opinion that he might, in future, be violent could be repugnant. It would be a very poor way to help the vast majority of disturbed people who make threats that they will never carry out.’
However, some American states had already empowered doctors to forcibly commit any patient