He wouldn't listen to a damn thing," he said. He'd have killed me too, if I'd went there. Charles was beating his head against the bathroom wall, Whitman said. His daughter-in-law, Kathleen, called them often from Texas. Whitman is convinced the killer was a different person. He frequently took his boys hunting.īut a love of guns does not explain the rage that exploded on that August day in Texas. The authorities know about them, he said. Part of his 60-gun collection is mounted on the bedroom walls - he has rifles, pistols, even two machine guns. "I know there's one around here somewhere. He couldn't find a photograph of Charlie. He has three or four the exact figure escapes him. Pictures of grandchildren stand on any litter-free space and hang from the walls. He does plumbing work just for friends now, but his bedroom is lined with desks piled high with files and the familiar debris of 53 years in Lake Worth and Lantana. His second marriage lasted less than a week, he said. He is amicably separated from his third wife, Betty, after more than 25 years of marriage. He lives alone in a rambling, cluttered home on five acres in Lantana, a small city adjacent to West Palm Beach in South Florida. Some stories have said that he demanded to be paid for interviews - but there was no suggestion of that last week. "I've known Charlie for more than 20 years, and we've never talked about it," said Monte Crosby, chief plumbing inspector of Palm Beach County. No one was cruel, he said, and he tried not to mention it. For years, he said, his friends asked how he was doing. People rarely bother him now about the shooting. He has no defense from his night visitors but, awake, he holds back the storm of memories by sheer determination and self-inflicted silence.
But it did, so you accept it," said Whitman, 78, a plumbing contractor. I don't know why in hell all this happened. And the nightmares that wake him up in the night are the same. But the dreams continue, he said, of things that happened to his son Charles over the years.
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