On August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin with a cache of rifles, handguns, shotguns and ammunition. In 96 minutes he shot 45 people and killed 16. It was the biggest mass-shooting in the U.S. at that time.

At the age of 12 Whitman had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the U.S. and he lead a troop of Boy Scouts at the Catholic Church where he was an altar boy. Whitman was an exceptional young man who would routinely bested his friends and won small wagers in various feats of strength and carried himself with the bravado of a young man who knew he was exceptional. Under the tutelage of his overbearing father, Charles became an expert marksman who could “shoot the eye out of a squirrel at 50 yards” before reaching his teens.

Whitman’s story begins in an abusive home where violence and love combined in a wicked alchemy that exploded on that day in 1966. Here is a Discovery Channel documentary about a gifted kid, a brutal father and a one-time exceptional U.S. Marine whose exceptional talents and intelligence were subsumed in a torrent of precision violence that culminated in the end of his life and the birth of his infamy.

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