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At one point he had to break off when a fellow architecture student, Larry Fuess, and his wife dropped by to chat. Fuess found him looking "particularly relieved about something—you know, as if he had solved a problem." After the couple left, Whitman drove off in his black '66 Chevrolet to pick up Kathy at her summer job as a telephone information operator. He apparently decided not to kill her immediately, instead dropped her off at their house and sped across the Colorado River to his mother's fifth-floor flat in Austin's Penthouse Apartments. There he stabbed Margaret Whitman in the chest and shot her in the back of the head, somehow also breaking several bones in her left hand with such force that the band of her diamond engagement ring was driven into her finger and the stone broken loose. "I have just killed my mother," Charlie wrote in a hand-printed note addressed "To whom it may concern." "If there's a heaven, she is going there. If there is not a heaven, she is out of her pain and misery. I love my mother with all my heart."
Tragic Timetable. Back home—it was now after midnight—Whitman stabbed his wife three times in the chest, apparently as she lay sleeping, and drew the bed sheet over her nude body. Then he returned to the note—partially typewritten, partially handwritten, partially printed—that was to be his valedictory. Included was a tragic timetable: "12:30 a.m.—Mother already dead. 3 o'clock—both dead." He hated his father "with a mortal passion," he wrote, and regretted that his mother had given "the best 25 years of her life to that man." Clearly, the erratic orbit of his mind had already carried him off to some remote aphelion of despair. "Life is not worth living," he wrote. He had apparently concluded that if it were not worth living for him, it need not be for the others, either. With the special lucidity of the mad, Whitman meticulously prepared to take as many people with him to the grave as he possibly could.
Into a green duffel bag and a green foot locker that bore the stenciled words, "Lance Cpl. C. J. Whitman," he stuffed provisions to sustain him during a long siege and to cover every contingency: Spam, Planters peanuts, fruit cocktail, sandwiches and boxes of raisins, jerricans containing water and gasoline, rope, binoculars, canteens, transistor radio, toilet paper, and, in a bizarre allegiance to the cult of cleanliness, a plastic bottle of Mennen spray deodorant. He also stowed away a private armory that seemed sufficient to hold off an army: machete, Bowie knife, hatchet, a 6-mm. Remington bolt-action rifle with a 4-power Leupold telescopic sight (with which, experts say, a halfway decent shot can consistently hit a 6½-in. circle from 300 yds.), a 35-mm. Remington rifle, a 9-mm. Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia pistol and a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver. At home, he left three more rifles, two derringers.