Charles Whitman becomes the youngest Eagle Scout in the country at 12, an accomplished pianist at 13, and by 16 is rated the finest shot in Austin, Texas. He enlists after high school and is accepted into the United States Marine Corps. The film traces that trajectory forward to August 1966, when at 25 he stabs his mother and his wife to death, then loads a rifle and ammunition into a footlocker and carries it to the top of the University of Texas Tower. From that vantage point he shoots for over an hour, killing 13 people and wounding 32 more, an attack that stood at the time as the worst mass murder in American history. The documentary lays out the biography in a straight chronological line, letting the gap between the decorated, disciplined young man on paper and the killer on the tower stand as its own unresolved question.