At one point, Kathy writes this response to one of her husband’s angry episodes: “I want to know your every whim all over again and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten some of them. Charles Whitman), what they wore, and what jobs they could hold. Scott-Coe sketches gripping episodes tied to intimate letters originally intended to remain between a young married couple that illustrate how completely Charles controls Kathy-remarkable even for the 1960s, an era when many American men dictated how their wives would be addressed (in this case, as Mrs. Marine Corps, all while keeping his more stable and successful spouse’s desires and wishes on a tight leash. The author then shares increasingly disturbing narratives that reveal how Charles deeply disappoints his loving wife and himself by flunking out of school and getting kicked out of the U.S. The daughter of a successful farmer and a teacher, Kathy dutifully stands by her man as he roams from the University of Texas at Austin to Florida, a Marine base in North Carolina, and finally back to UT, where she’s among the first to die in 1966 when Charles fully loses control of the erratic, abusive, and violent impulses that surface in staccato bursts throughout the book. Īuthor Jo Scott-Coe begins with the love story of how Charles, a good-looking, muscular Marine, woos and wins Kathy in their UT student days, during which Charles presents her with a “bespoke tag pendant” signifying they’re officially “dropped” (the 1960s parlance for promised) on February 12, 1962. But that doesn’t leave the reader any less compelled to want to scream, “Get away now!” at this well-coiffed and intelligent young woman. We know from the beginning that Kathy, the charming Central Texas protagonist and, through her letters, the narrator, will die terribly at the hands of her husband, Charles Whitman, in a massacre still remembered as the first mass shooting in modern U.S. Unheard Witness The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman, published October 17 by University of Texas Press. They see that woman in love, browbeaten and abused, and finally, stabbed to death by her husband in the pages of Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman, out this month from (appropriately) the University of Texas Press. Told in vivid detail through an enormous trove of letters that Leissner’s brother kept long after her violent death, the reader plunges immediately, uncomfortably, and intimately into the life and thoughts of a doomed woman. An unusual new book dives deeply into the mind of an all-but-forgotten victim of the University of Texas Tower Shooting: the sniper’s wife, Kathy Leissner Whitman.
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