On August 1, 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. During the previous evening he had killed his wife and mother, bringing the total to sixteen people dead and at least thirty-one wounded. The murders spawned debates over issues which still plague America today: domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, military indoctrination, the insanity defense, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and public safety.
"Whitman pioneered this country’s experience with the one-man public massacre. . . . He ‘climbed his tower’ to die and take with him as many as he could, for reasons both too logical and implausible to fit the usual notions of insanity". . . . —William J. Helmer,