12/19/2023 0 Comments Charles whitman diary![]() ![]() Although he obtained a real estate license and became bonded as an insurance salesman, he did not actually sell any real estate or insurance. Whitman continued to receive financial support from his father, while holding various jobs including that of bill collector and bank teller. Upon her graduation, Kathy began teaching high school biology, providing the majority of the household income. After his discharge from the service, Whitman reenrolled at UT, this time majoring in architectural engineering. On the plus side of his experience in the Marines, Whitman received a sharpshooter badge and an honorable discharge.ĭuring his initial enrollment at UT-Austin, Whitman (then age 21) met and married fellow student Kathy Leissner (age 19). Later, there were also a court martial, time spent in confinement, and a demotion in rank (from lance corporal to private) for lending money to fellow Marines at usurious rates, threatening a Marine, and possessing a personal firearm on base. However, Whitman dropped out of school and returned to active duty after a year and a half when the military withdrew the scholarship, due to declining grades and prankish behavior (e.g., poaching a deer and then butchering it in a dorm shower). He won a highly competitive Naval Enlisted Science Education Program scholarship and entered UT-Austin as a mechanical engineering major. His time in the Marine Corps had its ups and downs. Three days after Whitman’s 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Marines, reportedly to escape his domineering father. In a photograph (now widely viewed) of Charles Whitman taken at age two, he could be seen holding a rifle upright in each hand the rifles stood taller than the toddler. Whitman taught his sons to use guns at an early age. Whitman), the owner of a successful plumbing business in Lake Worth, Florida, was a strict disciplinarian toward his sons and physically abusive toward his wife. ![]() He graduated seventh in a class of 72 from a Catholic high school in West Palm Beach, Florida. He studied piano and excelled at that activity at an early age. Whitman, the eldest of three boys brought up in an intact upper middle-class home, was a former altar boy and, at age 12, the youngest Eagle Scout in the country. In contrast, the 6-foot-tall, 198-pound, blonde-haired Whitman had the background and appearance of the proverbial “boy next door.” Speck had the lifestyle and demeanor of the public’s stereotype of someone who would harm innocent strangers. At the time, the nation was still recovering from a shock that had occurred two weeks earlier, when eight student nurses were brutally stabbed and strangled in their shared Chicago townhouse in July 1966 by a down-and-out drifter, and sometime merchant marine, named Richard Speck. Whitman’s was a very public and random attack by someone who appeared to be the all-American boy. Mass murders were a rare occurrence in the United States in 1966. ![]()
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