Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman

by Jo Scott-Coe Narrated by Tanya Eby

Overview

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy's writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.

Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy's life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy's perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability-in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.




Contains mature themes.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

10/23/2023

Historian Scott-Coe (Mass) paints a richly textured portrait of Kathy Leissner Whitman, whose husband, Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper,” killed 15 (including Kathy and his mother) and wounded 31 in 1966. Drawing on family documents released by Kathy’s brother, Scott-Coe relates how Kathy met Charlie in 1962 at the University of Texas, Austin. Charmed by his good looks and the “promise of the man she thought Charlie was becoming,” Kathy married him at 19 after a whirlwind courtship. The family’s correspondence and recollections portray Kathy as eager to be accepted by her in-laws and looking forward to motherhood. But she was immediately confronted by her husband’s coercive and controlling behavior, which escalated into violence. Without the knowledge and resources for domestic abuse victims that now exist, Kathy was, according to Scott-Coe, a victim of her era as much as of her abusive husband. (In one letter from Kathy’s mother to her son-in-law, she exhorts the couple “to go to a marriage counselor as soon as possible,” a response that would now be considered insufficient to address the abuse Kathy was experiencing.) Telling the story in flashbacks and vignettes, Scott-Coe presents this cautionary tale with compassion and sensitivity. The result is an insightful close study of the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings. (Oct.)

The Austin Chronicle

Scott-Coe [is] uniquely positioned to approach the story of Whitman's long-suffering wife with expert care and thorough research...The author raises important questions and points out what research has found about intimate partner violence, framing Kathy's story as a cautionary tale, but one that is all too common. Without Whitman, she might be 80 years old today, enjoying retirement from a successful career as a teacher. With him, a promising life was cut short, and his terrorism overshadowed her memory, but this carefully crafted tribute ensures it will not be erased.

Texas Observer

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 . . . She chooses to bring back to vivid life Kathy . . . and Scott-Coe succeeds: This book is an intimate and uncomfortable read that puts the reader deep inside Kathy’s mind.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159347435
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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