The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  He wrote, “3:00 a.m.”

  Both dead. It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight after I pick her up from work at the telephone company. I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this. I don’t know whether it is selfishness, or if I don’t want her to have to face the embarrassment my actions would surely cause her. At this time, though, the prominent reason in my mind is that I truly do not consider this world worth living in, and am prepared to die, and I do not want to leave her to suffer alone in it. I intend to kill her as painlessly as possible.

  Similar reasons provoked me to take my mother’s life also. I don’t think the poor woman has ever enjoyed life as she is entitled to. She was a simple young woman who married a very possessive and dominating man. I was a witness to her being beaten at least one [sic] a month. Then when she took enough, my father wanted to fight to keep her below her usual standard of living.

  I imagine it appears that I bruttaly [sic] kill [sic] both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job. If my life insurance policy is valid, please see that all the worthless checks I wrote this weekend are made good. Please pay off my debts. I am 25 years old and have been financially independent. Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.

  As the sun came up, Whitman placed the following items in a green footlocker: One (1) Channel Master 14 AM/FM transistor radio, one (1) blank Robinson Reminder notebook, one (1) 3 1/2 gallon water jug, one (1) 3 1/2 gallon plastic gas jug, four (4) “C-”cell flashlight batteries, several lengths of cotton and nylon ropes, one (1) plastic Wonda-scope compass, Paper Mate black ballpoint pen, one (1) Gun Tector, one (1) green rifle scabbard hatchet, one (1) Nesco machete with green scabbard, one (1) Hercules hammer, one (1) green ammunition box with gun-cleaning equipment, one (1) Gene alarm clock, cigarette lighter, one (1) canteen filled with water, binoculars, one (1) green Sears rifle scabbard, one (1) Camillus hunting knife with brown scabbard and whetstone, one (1) large Randall bone-handle knife (with “Charles J. Whitman” inscribed on the blade) with brown scabbard and whetstone, large lock-blade pocket knife, one (1) ten-inch pipe wrench, one (1) pair of eyeglasses in a brown case, one (1) box of kitchen matches, twelve (12) assorted cans of food and a jar of honey, two (2) cans of Sego, one (1) can of charcoal starter, one (1) white-and-green six-volt flashlight, one (1) set of earplugs, two (2) rolls of white adhesive tape, one (1) solid steel one-foot bar, one (1) green rubber army duffel bag, one (1) green extension cord, several lengths of clothesline wire and yellow electric wire, one (1) pair of gray gloves, one (1) deer bag, one (1) loaf of bread, sweet rolls, Spam, Planters Peanuts, sandwiches, a box of raisins, one (1) plastic bottle of Mennen spray deodorant, three (3) rolls of toilet paper.

  At 5:45 a.m. he called Kathy’s supervisor at the phone company and told her his wife was sick and wouldn’t be in today. He spent the morning accumulating supplies. At around 7:15, he went to Austin Rental Company and rented a two-wheeled dolly to help him transport the heavy footlocker. He cashed $250 in checks at the Austin National Bank, and bought guns and ammunition at Davis Hardware, Chuck’s Gun Shop, and Sears.

  He packed the guns (a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, a Galesi-Brescia pistol, a .35 Remington, a sawed-off Sears 12-gauge shotgun, a 6-mm Remington bolt-action rifle with a 4-power Leupold scope, and a .30 caliber M-1 Carbine) into the footlocker, along with the receipt from Davis Hardware. He also had more than seven hundred rounds of ammunition.

  It was time to get moving.

  At home he called his mother’s employer and said she was ill and wouldn’t be coming to work. It was ten thirty in the morning. He needed to hurry if he was going to get this done before lunch. Then he took his new shotgun out to the garage and sawed off part of the barrel and the stock. At eleven he pulled a set of blue coveralls on over his clothes, trundled his footlocker to the car, and headed for campus.

  Whitman arrived at a security checkpoint on the edge of campus at eleven thirty. He showed Jack Rodman, the guard at the checkpoint, his Carrier Identification Card, and told him that he would be unloading equipment at the Experimental Science Building. He asked for a loading zone permit. Five minutes later Whitman unloaded his gear and entered the tower. With his coveralls and dolly he looked like a janitor or maintenance man. Once in the elevator, he asked for help from an attendant, who informed him how to turn it on. “Thank you, ma’am,” Whitman said. “You don’t know how happy that makes me.”

  There was a receptionist on duty on the twenty-eighth floor. Whitman brained her with his rifle butt, then dragged her across the room behind a couch. Moments later a man and a woman entered the reception area from the observation deck and found Whitman leaning over the couch, holding two guns. They saw blood on the floor. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then the elevator doors opened and the couple climbed on board. Whitman watched them disappear. Then he dragged a desk in front of the stairway door.

  He was reaching for his footlocker when he heard the scraping sound of the moving desk. Someone was trying to force the door open from inside the stairwell. Whitman grabbed a shotgun and moved toward the stairs. Tourists stared up at him, four adults and two children. He leveled the sawed-off and started shooting. Each shot felt like a chain snapping.

  On the roof he wedged the door shut behind him. The time was 11:48.

  It was a hot day, muggy, and the noon sun felt like a blanket smothering him. He took a minute to calm himself. There was a tingling in his groin that was almost sexual. He took the Remington bolt-action and leaned it against the stone balustrade, facing south. He bent his eye to the scope. The South Mall was a sea of teen motion. This is what the Lord must feel, he thought, as he moved the sight of his rifle from bystander to bystander.

  The first shot hit a pregnant woman, killing her unborn baby. The second killed the man next to her. A visiting physics professor took a bullet in the lower back. Whitman saw each shot before he made it. He anticipated the hit and was already on to his next victim before the bullet struck.

  The first squad car arrived just after noon. Whitman had already turned his attention to Guadalupe Street. He shot a newsboy off a bicycle. The way the kid went flying made him burst out laughing. He shot a seventeen-year-old girl, but at the last second the wind picked up and he could tell he’d only wounded her.

  Police officers crouched behind cover and tried to eyeball the shooter’s location. Bodies lay where they had fallen, shimmering in the hundred-degree heat. Whitman shot a kid through a six-inch space between two balusters. Was there no one he couldn’t hit? he thought. He was a prizefighter in his prime, the heavyweight champion of the world. Each shot made him taller, stronger. Each life he took added a hundred years to his own. He crossed the roof and shot a doctoral student coming out of a newsstand. Whitman saw two kids jump behind a barricade. When one of them peered out to see what was happening, Whitman shot him through the mouth.

  He heard gunshots. The police had started shooting back. Austinites had gone home to get their guns, and they, too, were trying to pick him off, raining bullets up at him from the street. It was Texas after all, the land of the cowboy vigilante. Whitman listened to the bullets ricocheting off the stone walls around him. It was only right. What fun would it be if they didn’t fight back? He started shooting through the rainspouts on each side of the building, making himself almost impossible to hit. He’d been up there for half an hour already. In thirty minutes he had brought an entire city to its knees. The sun was beginning to make him feel like a marshmallow over a campfire.

  Fifteen hundred feet to the south, a man standing next to a pickup truck took a bullet in the stomach. Whitman was a killing machine. He was the wrath of God, as unrelenting and imminent as death itself. He could shoot the man in the moon if he wanted to. He could shoot people in the future. He could execute the p
ast.

  Whitman never heard the roof door being kicked open. He was in the zone, bullets from the ground peppering the walls above him. As he took aim on a half inch of bare skull, two police officers came around the corner of the roof. They opened fire. Whitman turned, bringing his rifle around, but he was too slow. A shotgun blast caught him in the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. It was 1:24 p.m. He had been on the roof for ninety minutes. He had been God for ninety minutes. It was more power than most people ever felt in a lifetime.

  Officer Ramiro Martinez stepped up to Whitman’s still-twitching body and fired his shotgun point-blank, nearly severing Whitman’s left arm and killing him instantly.

  Danny sat back from the computer. He was surprised to find that it was dark out. Had he really been here for more than five hours? He couldn’t describe the feelings he was having. But then he’d never been good at that, turning hurt into words. The hunger he felt for the details of what had happened that day in 1966 unnerved him. It was an unhinged sensation. A moment of terrifying sobriety, where the driver realizes he is drunk and speeding down a crowded highway with his lights off. What scared him was not the recklessness of Whitman’s crimes, the randomness of his victims. It was the recognition of justice. An acknowledgment he felt in parts of him that he wouldn’t even admit existed, that a man who had been so wronged by the world, by his friends and family, could exact revenge. And that that revenge, though terrible, would be justified.

  There is a moment for each and every one of us in this life where we discover, often to our great surprise, whether we are wolves or sheep. To be a sheep is to surrender to fear. But there is fear, too, for the wolf. Fear when we realize that the rules of society do not apply to us. Rules are for sheep. And this moment of realization is terrifying in its liberation.

  What resonated for Danny was not Whitman’s violence. It was his transgression. He had renounced every convention of civilized life. He had rejected hundreds of years of evolution. By standing atop that tower and leveling his rifle at the world below, Charles Whitman had declared his independence from the society he lived in.

  And it was this idea that made Daniel Allen feel faint.

  My father, who died when I was eleven, grew up in southern Michigan. There was automobile money in his family. His father, Darryl Allen, was a senior executive at General Motors. Darryl’s wife, Francine, died giving birth to my father. A few years later Darryl fell in love with the receptionist at his local auto mechanic’s garage, a woman named Margie Brubaker. They dated and married quickly. Margie soon became pregnant, and nine months later another boy was born. A half brother. They named the boy Ellroy Buck Allen.

  Ellroy was a troubled child from the start. He suffered from dyslexia and what was most likely attention deficit disorder. Ellroy was hyperactive as a child, quick to anger, always lashing out. Unlike my father, who would go on to get his engineering degree from MIT, Ellroy dropped out of high school. He felt uncomfortable around members of my father’s family, many of them wealthy, preferring to spend time with his mother’s blue-collar relations. One of these relations was a no-good cousin named Busby Hix who had been arrested several times, starting in elementary school, for crimes as varied as petty larceny, public drunkenness, and assault.

  It was with Busby on a chilly night in November that Ellroy walked into a convenience store and ordered the clerk to empty the cash register. They had been drinking and had recently taken speed. Busby was carrying a .38 Special with four bullets. Just before entering the shop he had given Ellroy a .22-caliber revolver. The wooden grip of the .22 was held together with electrical tape. It held a single shot. While Ellroy aimed his pathetic gun at the clerk, Busby went to the refrigerator to get a six-pack of beer. Coming back, he attempted to open one of the bottles with his key chain but dropped it. The bottle smashed on the floor. Ellroy turned at the sound. The clerk reached for a pistol hidden under the counter. Busby yelled “Look out,” and Ellroy fired the only shot in his gun, striking the clerk in the temple. There was sixty-five dollars in the cash register.

  Ellroy was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. He served eighteen, and died three years later, after passing out drunk in a snowbank.

  A hapless armed robber and a political assassin. Was there a genetic connection? It is not an easy mystery to solve. Because Ellroy was my father’s half brother the lineage is not pure. It’s easy to postulate that it was Margie’s genes, her blue-collar blood that infected Ellroy, not my father’s.

  And yet there is another symptom to factor into the diagnosis: my grandfather, Darryl Allen, was said to have been abusive. A staunch conservative, he believed in corporal punishment, administered at the end of his belt. Most of his “corrections” were aimed at Ellroy, the black sheep. But my father also saw his share of beatings—when he brought home a low grade or snuck in past curfew. Were these beatings the sign of an inherently violent nature or simply a philosophy of child rearing? If it was inherent, if my grandfather was a violent man, is it possible his aggression was the source of Ellroy’s aggression? And yet, if this is the case, then that aggression was just as likely a product of environment and not genetics. Aggression as learned behavior.

  For the last several years, researchers have been experimenting on mice to try to ascertain whether aggression is hereditary. Through select breeding they have tried to identify genes that lead to increased aggressive behavior. Most studies have focused on polymorphisms of serotonin receptors, dopamine receptors, and neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzymes. In particular, the serotonin 5-HT seems to be an influence in intermale aggression either directly or through other molecules that use the 5-HT pathway. Aggression in animals and humans is normally dampened by 5-HT. Mice missing specific genes for 5-HT were observed to be more aggressive than normal mice and were more rapid and violent in their attacks.

  Other studies have been focused on neurotransmitters. Studies of a mutation in the neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase A have been shown to cause a syndrome that includes violence and impulsivity in humans.

  So aggression can be caused by genetics. But were genetics responsible here? Let’s answer this by asking another question. If we look at history’s most violent men, do we find violence perpetuated in their lineage? Take Charles Manson, perhaps the country’s most notorious murderer. In the late sixties, Manson was responsible for the brutal murder of at least six people, including the actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski. Tate was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed multiple times. Manson, the leader of a self-proclaimed “family,” had surrounded himself with drug-crazed followers eager to help him start a race war. After his arrest, he sat in the courtroom with a swastika carved into his forehead. Over the previous ten years, Manson had fathered several sons with different women. Forty years later, not one of those men has ever committed a single violent crime.

  Then there was Gary Gilmore, who, seven years after the Manson murders, became the most famous criminal in America. In the summer of 1976, Gilmore murdered two men in Utah, gunning them down in cold blood after successive robberies. Like Manson, Gilmore had been in and out of prison since he was a boy. His father routinely beat him and his brothers, often for no reason. Gilmore came from a long line of hucksters and religious zealots. He had become the most famous criminal in America, because when sentenced to death he chose to be executed by a firing squad. As the son of a Mormon mother, Gilmore was drawn to the concept of blood atonement, which states that the only way to atone for spilling blood was to have your own blood spilled. And so when given the choice Gilmore chose to be executed by firing squad, and on January 17, 1977, he was shot to death by five men. His last words were: “There will always be a father.”

  There will always be a father. What did it mean? Was he blaming his crimes on his father? Was he talking about God? Gilmore was the product of a long line of criminals. He was beaten regularly by an angry father and raised by the prison system. Whether violence was in his genes
or his blood, he was in many ways a product of his environment.

  This was not my son. None of these killers were anything like my son. Not just because aggression is different from premeditation. One could argue that what my son was accused of doing to Senator Jay Seagram was the opposite of aggression. There was a cold calculation to the act. Premeditated crimes, by definition, are not crimes of passion. The assassination of Seagram was planned and executed meticulously.

  But if murder is not an act of aggression, what is it? And where does it come from? If it is not an act of passion, at a time in a young man’s life when he is consumed by passions, then what is it? My son was a boy with no history of aggression, a peaceful child, a pacifist.

  When I made this argument to Ellen, she reminded me of the Spider Incident. It happened when Danny was thirteen and still living with her, two years before he came to live with me. One day Ellen called to say she had found a jar full of dead spiders in Danny’s room.

  “What kind of spiders?” I asked.

  “I don’t know the kind,” she said, “but there are a lot of them, and, honestly, I almost threw up when I saw it. You know how I feel about spiders.”

  I told her she was being dramatic. Maybe it was a science project for school.

  “Then why hide them in the closet?” she asked.

  I told her I’d been to her house. She lived near the state park and there were a lot of spiders. Maybe Danny had developed a fear of them as a child, and this was his way of conquering that fear. Besides, I said, we didn’t know that he’d killed the spiders. Maybe he collected dead ones.

  “Because there are tons of dead spiders just lying around,” she said.

  Ellen told me that when she’d asked Danny about it he’d gotten angry. He accused her of spying on him, of going through his things. I told her it all sounded like perfectly normal teenage behavior.