Charles whitman body movie#

When the shooting started, a TV station near to the clock tower rolled a camera close - some say it was onto a balcony, others remember it as by an open window. “But what was answerable was what it was like to survive.” “We would never know the answers to those questions,” he added.

Charles whitman body movie#

“I felt like really every other newspaper article, magazine article, the one bad TV movie and other kinds of basic-cable, true-crime investigations were always about the sniper and trying to unravel his motivations,” Maitland said, panning a 1975 Kurt Russell made-for-TV offering called “The Deadly Tower.” Whitman’s name isn’t mentioned until more than hour into the film. The sniper’s face doesn’t appear in animation only his legs are shown after he’s killed by police and a store manager who made their way to the top of the clock tower. Police and ordinary Texans would eventually rush to get their own guns and fire back, in vain, at Whitman from the ground. Some scrambled for any cover they could find in the nearly 100-degree heat. Men, women and a newspaper delivery boy were shot without warning, before they even knew to be afraid - and some survived.

Rather than focusing on the sniper, though, the documentary explores what it was like on the ground during his rampage. He had killed his wife and mother prior to heading to the tower, one victim died a week later and medical examiners eventually attributed a 17th death to Whitman in 2001. The documentary has begun opening in theaters nationally, five decades after an attack in which Whitman, then 25, killed 13 people and wounded nearly three dozen others. No authority saying ‘Stand back.’ We were able to go straight onto the campus.”

There was no police tape marking anything off. “It was really an unbelievable scene, unlike anything anyone had ever seen before and you didn’t have any frame of reference,” Spelce, then 30, said in a phone interview.