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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