A 50-Year-Old Columbine
(Tower, directed by Keith Maitland)
Just for this week, I’d like to take a detour from Forensic Files to talk about a new documentary that’s now available on Netflix: Tower.
The movie re-creates a 1966 University of Texas mass murder that somehow — sandwiched between the more-lurid horrors of Richard Speck and the Manson family — got lost in America’s collective memory bank.
On August 1 of that year, a former Marine named Charles Whitman packed up his own personal arsenal, rode the elevator to the 27th floor of the school’s centrally located clock tower, and began shooting at people on the campus below.
Situated within the structure’s walled wraparound observatory deck, the 6-foot-tall blond sniper seemed to have found an invulnerable spot from which to execute strangers in a rain of bullets for an hour and a half.
He hit 46 men and women and at least one child. Sixteen died.
At the time, of course, the massacre made headlines around the world and terrified Americans. (And elicited a prescient opinion piece from Walter Cronkite, which the film shows.) But the horrific saga was referenced only lightly in popular culture over the subsequent years.
A brief mention of the Texas tragedy in a 2012 Mad Men episode, “Signal 30,” is the only one I can recall seeing on TV.
Perhaps the public forgot about the nightmare-by-daylight because Whitman died at the scene on the afternoon of his crime, eliminating the need for any courtroom drama.
And because the engineering student had murdered his mother and his wife the previous day, there were no prominent female relatives to publicly agonize over how their devoted blue-eyed young man had turned into a deranged executioner.
Tower spends very little time giving background information about Whitman and instead tells the story of the victims and rescuers — via an unorthodox method.
The filmmakers re-created them with an animation technique called rotoscoping and had actors provide their voices. At first, I had trouble getting used to this unusual storytelling element (especially because one of the rotoscoped police officers looked and sounded a little too much like Matthew McConaughey), but after about 15 minutes, I was fully invested.
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The ordeal of a pregnant student named Claire Wilson James, who was shot and immobilized during the attack, is the emotional centerpiece of the drama.
But I don’t want to spoil any more of the movie’s revelations for those who will get a chance to see it.
One thing not included in the film is the fact that the 25-year-old Whitman sensed he was coming unhinged a few months before the tragedy.
“Whitman was intelligent enough to realize he had problems, so he went to a psychiatrist,” author Jay Robert Nash wrote in his true-crime encyclopedia Bloodletters & Badmen (M. Evans and Company, 1973).
Dr. Maurice Heatly later said that Whitman suffered from rage related to his parents’ breakup; his father had badly abused his mother during the marriage. Whitman also revealed to the doctor that he had thoughts of shooting people with a deer rifle from the clock tower.
In those pre-Columbine days, however, the confession apparently wasn’t enough of a red flag to trigger preventative action.
I hope that Tower, directed by Keith Maitland and produced by Meredith Vieira reaches the wide audience it deserves.
The movie had me spellbound for 96 minutes, the same amount of time it took Charles Whitman to traumatize a nation unused to mass shootings. — RR
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Sounds fascinating! I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t made it into a major motion picture by now.
There is a TV with Kurt Russell playing Whitman. I have been to the tower. Very eerie place.
Must be hard to look at the tower and not think it. Thanks for letting me know about the movie with Kurt Russell in his pre-Hawn days.
Didn’t Whitman also have a brain tumor? I remember seeing a medical show once that indicated it could have played a role in his violent behavior, although the evidence was inconclusive. Apparently a perfect storm of an abusive home life, a medical condition and maybe even his military experience. Not to disrespect his service, but there was a study not too long ago that showed that even non-combat vets have a higher rate of suicide than the general population, although some theorize that people with abusive pasts may be more likely to seek refuge in the military. It’s so complicated — all that’s certain is that it was a terrible tragedy for everyone involved. I hope that the movie raises awareness of mental health issues.
Terrie, thanks for reminding me about the brain tumor theory! I looked around for some concrete evidence and found it mentioned in an autopsy report and UT archives (links below).
http://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/Other/whitman,%20charles_report.pdf
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/aushc/00489/ahc-00489.html
I remember this incident clearly and agree that had Whitman not been killed, a court trial might have cemented this horrific incident in more people’s minds. Also, it was so egregious that I think most people just wanted to wipe if from the collective memory banks and/or chalk it up to a rare aberration. It does, however, point out how important it is for warning signs of mental instability to be taken seriously. It should be a continuing lesson to us all.
It really was a gripping movie. As regrettable as “active shooter” security drills are, this movie shows how helpful such knowledge might have been, as victims and witnesses relate how their naïveté put them in the line of fire.
Really good walk off your beaten path. Would it be fair to say that the Whitman case was the first in a series of gun massacres?
Well, yeah. Except for that Boston Massacre thingy.
Oops.
Well, my pa was a truck driver, much like myself, and he said it was a hair care tragedy. Men with platinum blond flat tops are dangerous, no matter what kinda’ load they’re hauling. Might be a hundred tons of cabbage in the trailer, but a dude with a blond flat top always keeps a big peacemaker in the glove box, and a hundred feet of rope. Also a library of lifestyle magazines that will curl your hair. Early intervention is the best hope. Next best hope is just throw a net over people with a blond flat top. If that don’t work, I’d go directly to organized fundamentalist religion.
Wow! Speck, Whitman and Manson really did happen close together, didn’t they? I remember them at the time, and you got it exactly right, as I recall — Whitman got the cover of Time and then … nothing. Time to move on or something. Strange, especially considering (not to be too ghoulish about it) a casualty count of more than 40.
All I can imagine in terms of the lack of continued interest is that Speck was “a drifter” and the Manson family were “homicidal hippies” — both of which the news outlets of the day knew how to report and present — but a clean-cut ex-Marine might have thrown them.
But perhaps it’s more likely because he died at the scene, so there were no followup “manhunt” stories. A one-day story in the most literal sense.
Anyway, thanks for the post! And I’m going to see the movie.
Fascinating piece, Rebecca! I recall seeing the news about the horrific Whitman shootings as a teen. What is now clear, in my memory: The event felt like such an anomaly. Who would have thought at that time that the U.S. and world would contend with significantly more mass shootings and an American society that has so many gun owners?
That is an unusual angle in the movie, and I’ll try to see it.
It’s so unfortunate that Whitman’s own warning wasn’t given more attention and that more preventative action didn’t occur. Tragic.
So true, Susan, it’s getting harder to remember that there was ever a time when these shootings were anomalies.
“Tower” is available at least one of The Pirate Bay mirror bit-torrent sites. I suggest you search for “Tower 2016” as there are hundreds of other videos with “tower” in their name.
A preview of it is available at: http://www.towerdocumentary.com/
It seems to be very historically accurate without the encumbrance of a Hollywood drama.
“The Deadly Tower” is the Hollywood drama which seems relatively historically accurate.
If you can’t get either of these message me here or e-mail me at: AjiSabaki@hotmail.com so I can upload them to my website.
Wikipedia links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_(2016_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deadly_Tower
The first school massacre in the USA (1927) still holds the body count record and took place in my state of Michigan I am ashamed to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres_by_death_toll
Back then there was not even television, much less the Internet, so people weren’t exposed to the violence of every nut in the world.
Such a sad episode. For me one question’s why he took the ‘tower’ lives when he rationalizes his mother’s and wife’s as ‘removing them from painful circumstances’ – abuse/the aftermath of the killings. The others seem able only to be understood as a function of ‘rage’. He seemed to be drawn to guns, but I can’t say inordinately so before he killed.
What would happen today? I imagine a person expressing rage to a clinician would have gun-ownership removed per potential report to police – but apart from that, unless something of a credible intention to self- or other-harm were expressed, nothing more from a medic0-legal perspective. One would hope, though, that the dr would strongly encourage the person to have at least out-patient treatment. Perhaps this happened, but it seems apt to ask if, and what, things would be done differently today.
As to the tumour, no firm conclusion seems to’ve been drawn: it may or may not have elicited violent behaviour.