Volume 45 - No. 14
April 02, 2015
by lyle e davis
A lot of people today may not remember the name Charles Whitman. He was better known as the Texas Tower Sniper. He was a former Marine and sniper who killed 16 people at the University of Texas in 1966. Dr. Stuart Brown was a young psychiatry professor at Baylor University in Texas.
BROWN: I was walking down the Baylor hall, moving to my office as a assistant professor of psychiatry, carrying books, and the dean of Baylor, Stanley Olson, was walking down the hall with a portable radio. And the radio was broadcasting live from Austin - which is some distance from Houston of course and you could hear gunshots.
Smoke from Whit man’s rifle as fires on the in he nocent victims below.
At that time, Stuart Brown had coincidently been studying the psychology of aggression.
BROWN: So my boss said, well, I want you to try and figure out why this young man - why he perpetrated this horrible crime. And we were going to try and reconstruct the life and times of Charles Whitman, which we did in great detail. Well, you know, there had been a number of factors of course. Whitman's father was an expert in firearms. Whitman was a crack shot, a history of violence and abuse. The father beat the mother virtually mercilessly about once a month. And he was bipolar.
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And then, he found out something else, something very specific about Charles' childhood.
BROWN: Well, we found out that the neighbors - who I interviewed and who I interviewed again 20 years later - had never seen little Charles Whitman engaged in what would've been considered spontaneous free play. Whenever he was crawling and exploring, the father would punish him. And when he was 4 years old, his father insisted he start playing the piano. And if he didn't practice when he was 4 and 5 years old, the father would beat him. His preschool teacher described him as too good, sitting in the corner and waiting to get a cue from the teacher as to how to behave rather than having the kind of anarchic, full-ofyourself playfulness that's normal childhood play. The Paper - 760.747.7119
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After researching Charles Whitman, Stuart thought that maybe missing out on childhood play could leave a mark, and in this case a devastating one. But Charles Whitman was just one research subject.
BROWN: And so I went to one prison, the Huntsville prison in Texas... Here Stuart Brown was able to
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meet 26 convicted murderers and interview them. Now, Huntsville, I should mention, is one of the most infamous prisons in America. And what Stuart found there, in every case - the same story. BROWN: The lack of rough-andtumble play in all 26 of these young murderers we studied and their lack of empathy appeared to me - and I say appeared to me
Texas Tower Sniper Continued on Page 2
- to be linked. And when you listen closely to a developmental trajectory in a person who has a real sense of putting themselves in the shoes of another, you go back into their histories and you hear them say, you know, when I was on a playground I punched a kid once, and he started to cry, and I began to realize that if he did that to me it would hurt, so I didn't do it again. And there is this sort of learned empathy that comes from interaction - direct