Kathy Leissner Whitman, Unheard Witness

Описание: In 1962, Kathy Leissner married a man who—
four years later—became the first modern
mass shooter in the U.S. Her husband stabbed her to death after first
killing his own mother, then went on to kill
15 people from the tower.
at the University of Texas at Austin. She composed hundreds of letters in the years before she was murdered.

Author Jo Scott-Coe reads from Kathy's letters and shares her family's restored home movies from 1957-1961, showing
the years leading up to Kathy’s
high school graduation. Scott-Coe's book UNHEARD WITNESS recovers Kathy's voice in her letters and centers her life, her perspective, and her experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival.

UNHEARD WITNESS: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman will publish October 17, 2023.

[ABOUT THE BOOK]

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.

[ABOUT THE AUTHOR]

Jo Scott-Coe is a professor of English composition and literature at Riverside City College and the author of two nonfiction books, Teacher at Point Blank andMASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest. Learn more at joscottcoe.com.