whitman’s rampage--2/25/2026

25 Feb 2026

whitman’s rampage--2/25/2026

1 COMMENTS

Today's selection-- from Incognito by David Eagleman. The fateful 1966 shootings of Charles Whitman from the University of Texas Tower:

“On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The twenty-five-year-old climbed three flights of stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a trunk full of guns and ammunition. At the top he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. He then shot at two families of tourists coming up the stairwell before beginning to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As others ran to help her, he shot them as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and the ambulance drivers that came to rescue them.

“The night before Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

“I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

“As news of the shooting spread, all Austin police officers were ordered to the campus. After several hours, three officers and a quickly deputized citizen worked their way up the stairs and managed to kill Whitman on the deck. Not including Whitman, thirteen people were killed and thirty-three wounded.

“The story of Whitman's rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even more grim: in the early hours of the morning before the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep. After these first killings, he had returned to his suicide note, now writing by hand.

“It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight…I love her dearly, and she has been a fine wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this....

“Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions and his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was a former Eagle Scout and marine, worked as a teller in a bank, and volunteered as a scout-master for Austin Scout Troop 5. As a child he’d scored 138 on the Stanford Binet IQ test, placing him in the top 0.1 percentile. So after he launched his bloody, indiscriminate shooting from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

Whitman in 1963

“For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had. A few months before the shooting, Whitman had written in his diary:

“I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome by 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.

“Whitman's body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman's brain harbored a tumor about the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region, called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially as regards fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, biologists Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage showed inappropriate maternal behavior, often neglecting or physically abusing their infants. In normal humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias.

“Whitman's intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.

“I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job. . . . If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts .. , donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.

“Others had noticed the changes as well. Elaine Fuess, a close friend of Whitman's, observed, ‘Even when he looked perfectly normal, he gave you the feeling of trying to control something in himself.’ Presumably, that ‘something’ was his collection of angry, aggressive zombie programs. His cooler, rational parties were battling his reactive, violent parties, but damage from the tumor tipped the vote so it was no longer a fair fight.

“Does the discovery of Whitman's brain tumor modify your feelings about his senseless murdering? If Whitman had survived that day, would it adjust the sentencing you would consider appropriate for him? Does the tumor change the degree to which you consider it ‘his fault’? Couldn't you just as easily be unlucky enough to develop a tumor and lose control of your behavior?

“On the other hand, wouldn't it be dangerous to conclude that people with a tumor are somehow free of guilt, or that they should be let off the hook for their crimes?

“The man on the tower with the mass in his brain gets us right into the heart of the question of blameworthiness. To put it in the legal argot: was he culpable? To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right?”