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. 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. 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.
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. history. 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. 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.
