![]() JUSTICE STORY has been the Daily News’ exclusive take on true crime tales of murder, mystery and mayhem for more than 100 years. “It appears there is nothing you can do short of outlawing guns for every person in the country,” Texas Governor John Connally said after the massacre. A brain tumor, nestled between his thalamus, hypothalamus and amygdala, developed quietly. But as the sandy-haired boy grew up into a tall, athletic ex-Marine, beneath his mop of blond hair, something else was also growing. President Johnson made a plea to “press urgently for legislation now pending in Congress to help prevent a criminal from obtaining firearms.” It passed in 1968.īut not everyone was convinced that gun laws were the answer. Smart, strong, talented and popular, the young Charles Whitman seemed, outwardly, like a poster child for the all-American boy stereotype. Seymour Halpern (R-N.Y.) Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) Joseph Barr, undersecretary of the Treasury Rep. Bennett, retired director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons Rep. Thomas Dodd (D-Conn.), almost hidden James V. Johnson signs a gun control bill at the White House, Oct. Then, as now, the country was in the grip of a crime nightmare that defied explanation. When the killer’s brain structure offered no explanation, blame was placed on guns and society. Still, Heatly did not think these thoughts were signs of a psychopath. Then, in a chilling statement, he told the psychiatrist that he was “thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.” The angry young man said he hated his cruel, domineering father and was upset about his parents’ recent separation. Margaret Whitman was the first of Charles Whitman’s victims that day. She was struck on the head, shot, and fatally stabbed in the chest in the same manner that Whitman would also kill his wife. Whitman was “oozing with hostility,” Heatly recalled. Troubled by his parents’ separation, among other issues, Charles Whitman murdered his mother in her apartment on August 1, 1966. Maurice Heatly, a psychiatrist at the university health center. “After my death,” he said, “I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder.”Īn autopsy revealed a pecan-sized tumor on his brain, but doctors did not believe that it had triggered his violence.ĭespite outward appearances, this tall, handsome, intelligent All-American boy was a time bomb - and he knew it. Whitman, a 24-year-old student at the University of Texas, in a 1966 photograph.
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