Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  IN 1967, LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE TEXAS TOWER ATTACK, CAP EHLKE VISITED WITH SOME OF HIS PEACE CORPS CLASSMATES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER RECOVERING FROM HIS WOUNDS.

  Courtesy of Roland Ehlke

  The Peace Corps had sent him to Austin for the summer with other volunteers to learn basic Farsi and about Iranian customs and Muslim culture.

  Now the world was watching as a madman with a high-powered rifle sprayed the college with bullets from a lofty tower.

  “…many people have reportedly been wounded,” the man on the radio said, “and some are dead …”

  Misty rain streamed down the Ford’s windshield. Cap was a fresh-faced Midwestern boy from Wisconsin. The son of a preacher knew how to detour around trouble, his father reasoned. And Austin was a big enough city. What were the chances? Good kids didn’t just find themselves in the crosshairs of lunatics.

  Cap wouldn’t be involved, the Reverend Ehlke told himself.

  One thousand two hundred miles (1,931 kilometers) away, Cap was indeed involved.

  UNREST AND UPHEAVAL

  By the long, hot summer of 1966, the simmering fever of Americans’ unrest with the war in Vietnam, with the status of women and blacks, with the old sexual ethos, with the establishment—with almost everything that represented the previous generation’s sensibilities—had exploded into a furious furnace of violence and disorder. Time had inexplicably sped up. The world was in upheaval. Wars raged between nations, races, sexes, faiths, young and old, fathers and sons.

  It seemed like everything was falling apart that summer. A president had been assassinated fewer than three years before. Race riots were erupting in major cities. More American soldiers were dying than South Vietnamese in “their” war. Armed troops and demonstrators were squaring off in the street. Draft cards and bras were being burned in spectacular fires of discontent. The sexual revolution was redefining relationships between men and women while sowing seeds that would rock the rest of the century. Some professors were encouraging their students to use psychedelic drugs. A new kind of book about mass murder, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, became an instant best seller. And a homeless ex-con named Richard Speck had raped, stabbed, and strangled eight student nurses in Chicago in one of the most horrifying American crimes ever committed.

  There were a lot of ways to get hurt in those days of rage. Some people simply went mad.

  And college campuses were among the most dangerous of danger zones. The ivory towers and tree-lined quads had become incubators for protest, radicalism, and experimentation.

  Yet the national unrest had pretty much skipped the University of Texas at Austin. Maybe because Austin was a tiny island floating in a sea of more conservative values, unlike Berkeley, Rutgers, or even University of Wisconsin-Madison in their liberal enclaves. Or maybe because Austin already had the reputation of going against the grain. But outside of minor incidents of civil disobedience, mostly over race issues during the civil rights movement, the UT campus had so far been spared the roiling turbulence of the 1960s. So far.

  Roland Cap Ehlke was a preacher’s kid, as white and impressionable as a fresh sheet of paper. Born of good German stock in the tiny lakeside village of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, he had grown up in a middle-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side, where his father pastored a Lutheran church. A soft-spoken kid, Cap loved school, played intramural tennis, dated a few girls casually, and stayed out of trouble. His parents always hoped he would go into the ministry someday.

  After graduating from a prep school, Cap entered Northwestern College, a small school established at the end of the Civil War in Watertown, Wisconsin, to train Lutheran pastors. Most of Cap’s classmates intended to graduate and continue their theological studies to be ordained as ministers, but by the time he graduated in 1966, Cap had different ideas.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t wish to be a pastor. He just wanted something else more. Or first. Or for now. He didn’t even know what it was. He couldn’t give it a name or point to it on a map. He just knew it wasn’t the cloistered life of a Wisconsin seminarian on a long slide into the life of a Wisconsin clergyman in a cold Wisconsin village.

  He let it be known that after graduation he would be joining the Peace Corps, a fledgling army of young American volunteers dispatched to the most desperate corners of the earth to put a human face on the United States as they lent a helping hand. By 1966, a record fifteen thousand volunteers—almost all idealistic young students—were digging wells, teaching school, harvesting crops, and administering medicine throughout the Third World.

  The president of Northwestern himself tried to talk Cap out of it. He said the ministry was more important, that he could affect far more lives as a pastor than by spending a couple years on the other side of a troubled world. Besides, he reminded Cap that he might have to repay Wisconsin’s Lutherans for his “free” education if he didn’t take the next logical step into seminary in the fall.

  But Cap stood his ground, shaky as it was. The next chapter in his young life would be an adventure, not more books and Wisconsin winters. When the Peace Corps assigned him to teach English to Iranian children, he consulted an atlas to see where exactly in the world Iran was located. After a summer training course at the University of Texas, he would ship out in the fall to begin his two-year tour of duty in a place he didn’t know, far away from the only place he had known.

  First stop: Austin.

  “OOZING WITH HOSTILITY”

  Charlie Whitman was an enigma wrapped in a man-child. An Eagle Scout and altar boy with a high IQ, he grew up in a family that could afford the better things in life. Charlie learned to play the piano very young, took up a paper route, and learned to shoot so well that his proud father once crowed, “Charlie could plug a squirrel in the eye by the time he was sixteen.” Outgoing and ambitious, he grew to be a popular athlete and model student at his parochial high school in Florida, where he graduated seventh in his class in 1959.

  But Charlie had a tense relationship with his domineering, abusive father, who demanded perfection from his wife and children—and who beat them when they disappointed him. Just before Charlie’s eighteenth birthday, when Charlie came home from a party drunk, his father beat him fiercely and threw him into the swimming pool, where he nearly drowned. It was the last straw for Charlie, who enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps a few days later. He wanted nothing more than to be better and smarter than his cruel, semiliterate father. That would show him.

  Early on, he thrived in the Corps, as he had under his father’s authoritarian watch. With his blond crew cut and skinny frame, he might not have looked the part of a leatherneck, but he developed into a good one on active duty in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, one of the world’s Cold War hot spots. Qualified as a sharpshooter, he excelled at rapid-fire marksmanship, especially with moving targets.

  In fact, Whitman was such a good Marine that he won a special military scholarship to study engineering and set himself on track to become a commissioned officer. In the fall of 1961, Whitman enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin and declared his major in mechanical engineering, still a Marine but beyond the daily control of his superiors.

  Without the rigid discipline he had known for his whole life, school was a disaster. Whitman’s grades tanked. He gave up studying for gambling and began wearing a .357 handgun under his shirt, ostensibly as protection against enemies he made in his late-night, high-stakes poker games.

  One night, Whitman sat on the balcony of his dorm room and peered across the campus at the 307-foot (94-meter) Tower, a Spanish colonial building that stood at the dead center of the sprawling campus. Austin’s tallest building—even taller than the nearby state capital dome—the Tower was the city’s first skyscraper when it was built in 1937. Rallies and debates took place on its steps, and it loomed over all graduation ceremonies. Deep inside were twenty tons of bells, and its limestone walls were regularly swathed in orange floodlights after major sports victories.

  The Tower
was not just the most visible symbol of the University of Texas; it was its beating heart, as well.

  “A person could stand off an Army before they got to him up there,” the Marine sharpshooter mused. He would love to shoot people from up there, he said to nobody in particular. But nobody took him seriously. After all, Charlie was a good soldier, a mature guy, and a joker at heart. He couldn’t be serious.

  In February 1962, Whitman was introduced to a freshman coed named Kathy Leissner, who was studying to be a teacher. After a starry-eyed courtship, they married six months later.

  If marriage improved Whitman’s attitude, it didn’t improve his grades. A semester after the wedding, the Marine Corps withdrew his scholarship and ordered him back to active duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, while Kathy stayed in Austin to finish her education.

  The return to regimented military life was claustrophobic. No longer a good soldier, Whitman rebelled. He was court-martialed for gambling and busted back to the rank of private. Desperate to get out, he turned to an unlikely ally, his father, who used his political connections to cut Charlie’s enlistment. Charles Whitman was honorably discharged in December 1964 and returned to Austin, where he reenrolled at UT in the spring of 1965. His new major: architectural engineering.

  He took a part-time bank teller job for $1.25 an hour and worked as a Scoutmaster in his spare time. But he wrote secretly in his journals with a darkening hand about his lack of self-esteem, expressing frustration with the dysfunctions in his family, blaming himself for his problems, and meticulously listing ways he could be a better husband. He hated that Kathy, who worked at the local phone company, was a better breadwinner than he was, and he was ashamed of accepting money from his father. He feared that something was wrong inside his brain and that he was sterile. He openly declared he didn’t believe in God anymore. He began to see himself as an all-American loser.

  The psychiatrist concluded whitman was

  unlikely to hurt himself or anyone else and

  asked him to come back in a week for another

  session. Charles Whitman never returned.

  Whitman didn’t know what a happy marriage looked like; his own father and mother had made for a poor example. As a result, if his spirit was willing to try to be a better husband, his flesh had no idea how a good husband behaved.

  And he behaved badly. He was a perfectionist like his father, and he began almost from the beginning to expect more of Kathy than she could give. He would check for dust behind picture frames and talk about his sex life with friends while Kathy was in the room. He hit her on at least three separate occasions during their marriage, and his journals reflected his regrets over being too harsh with her.

  FORMER MARINE CHARLES WHITMAN’S REPUTATION AS A CLEAN-CUT ALL-AMERICAN KID MASKED DEEPER, TROUBLING ISSUES, MANY OF THEM ARISING FROM A BRUTAL CHILDHOOD WITH AN ABUSIVE FATHER.

  Associated Press

  It grew worse when his parents divorced in the spring of 1966 and his mother, Margaret, moved from Florida to Austin to be near her son. She rented an apartment near downtown, not far from Charlie and Kathy’s modest, five-room bungalow at 906 Jewell Street.

  Worse yet, Whitman’s abuse of amphetamines, especially Dexedrine, had gotten out of control. He needed the pills to stay awake, but friends recalled him tossing them back “like popcorn.” During finals week, he reportedly stayed awake for five days and nights, slept over the weekend, and did it again—nearly two weeks hopped up on chemicals and without restorative sleep. He was also taking other drugs—some legal and some not—to combat the effects of the amphetamines and to deal with his depression and stress. His medicine cabinet at home contained thirteen different pill bottles prescribed by seven different doctors.

  Kathy saw her husband’s turmoil. She begged him to get counseling, but he resisted. At the time of his parents’ divorce, he was suffering from severe headaches, and so he finally visited a university psychiatrist.

  He told the doctor how much he hated his father. He lamented what a failure he had become. He even mentioned how he had fantasized about “going up on the Tower with a deer rifle and shooting people.”

  Although the shrink noted that Whitman “seemed to be oozing with hostility,” he wasn’t particularly alarmed. First, he saw Whitman as a man who had basically good values. Second, he’d been listening to troubled, suicidal students fantasize about the Tower for years, and it no longer startled him. The doctor concluded Whitman was unlikely to hurt himself or anyone else and asked him to come back in a week for another session.

  Charles Whitman never returned.

  “THESE THOUGHTS ARE TOO MUCH FOR ME”

  July 31, 1966, was a Sunday, and it dawned Texas-hot. It would reach 101°F (38°C) that day, the hottest day of the year so far. That morning, Charlie drove Kathy to her summer job at Southwestern Bell, where she was working a split shift.

  After he dropped Kathy at her downtown office, he paid cash for some Spam and small food items at a convenience store, then bought a Bowie knife and a pair of binoculars for $18.98 at an Army surplus store.

  At 1 p.m., he picked up Kathy and they went to a movie followed by a late lunch with his mother, Margaret. They killed more time before Kathy had to go back for the late half of her shift by visiting friends, who later remembered Charlie as being unusually quiet.

  SNIPER CHARLES WHITMAN COULD HAVE LIVED FOR SEVERAL DAYS ON THE SUPPLIES HE TOTED IN A MILITARY FOOTLOCKER INTO THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS TOWER ON AUGUST 1, 1966.

  Associated Press

  At 6 p.m. he dropped Kathy back at work and went home to Jewell Street. Alone in the little house where he and his wife had so recently talked about having children, Charles Whitman went to the back bedroom, calmly rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter, and began to explain as best he could why he was about to become a mass murderer.

  Sunday

  July 31, 1966

  6:45 P.M.

  I don’t quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. [Author’s note: Whitman had not actually yet performed these “actions” but was writing this note to be found after he had.] I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks. In March when my parents made a physical break I noticed a great deal of stress. I consulted a Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had. I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt some overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

  After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.

  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 dom
inating man. All my life as a boy until I ran away from home to join the Marine Corps

  A knock at the door interrupted him. It was another couple, best friends of the Whitmans, dropping in for a Sunday visit. Rather than shooing them away, Charlie invited them in.

  They talked for an hour or so about everything and nothing—the Vietnam War, upcoming exams, Charlie’s dream of buying some land near the Guadalupe River. Charlie seemed upbeat to them and talked about Kathy with more affection than he normally did. The pleasant visit came to a happy end around 8:30 p.m. when an ice cream truck passed and they all ran outside to flag it down. The ice cream tasted good because it had been a hot day and the night was not cooling off.

  ARMED WITH A WIDE ARRAY OF WEAPONS, SNIPER CHARLES WHITMAN HAD EVEN MORE BLOODSHED IN MIND WHEN HE BARRICADED HIMSELF ONTO THE UT TOWER’S OBSERVATION DECK.

  Associated Press

  A little after 9:30 p.m., Charlie picked up Kathy in their new black Chevy Impala and took her home. The night was uncommonly hot and the Jewell Street house had no air-conditioning, so Charlie asked his mother if he and Kathy could come to her air-conditioned apartment to cool off before bed. Kathy begged off, but a little before midnight, Charlie drove over to Margaret’s flat, while Kathy slipped naked into bed, hoping for the slightest Texas breeze through their little bedroom window.

  Margaret met Charlie in the high-rise’s lobby around midnight and escorted him up to her fifth-floor apartment. Alone inside, he strangled her with a piece of rubber hose before stabbing her in the chest with a hunting knife and either shooting her or bashing the back of her head violently. He also smashed her left hand with such force that the diamond flew out of her wedding ring, which became embedded in the ruined flesh of her finger. She was only forty-three.