In January, the Department of Justice released
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As with this and other mass shooting tragedies, investigators may draw upon the accounts of the perpetrator’s family and friends to understand the attack and how to prevent future shootings like it. But those vital perspectives can sometimes be hidden from public view. The history of Kathy Leissner, the wife of
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The
But the Travis County Grand Jury was missing crucial information. Although acknowledging that Whitman had first killed his mother and then murdered his 23-year-old wife in the hours leading up to the shooting, the jury—like most Americans even today—did not recognize that domestic murders represent the far end of a continuum of ongoing abuse rather than a sudden or random incident. And there had been signs, even if they weren’t apparent to the jury. In 2015, I was granted access to a private archive, not publicly accessible to other researchers, containing roughly 600 personal letters between Charles Whitman and his wife Kathy Leissner, and between Leissner and other family members, which documents the years of abuse that Whitman inflicted on his wife behind closed doors. Leissner’s eldest surviving brother, Nelson, had protected and preserved these documents for five decades before allowing me permission to study them.
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Kathy Leissner’s history prior to her marriage reminds us that, even in the 1960s,
Leissner had known Charles Whitman for roughly nine months when they got married. Charmed by his good looks and a whirlwind courtship, she agreed to his proposal and they were wed in August 1962. But his superficial charms camouflaged
By February 1963, after he lost a college scholarship, Whitman pressured Leissner to drop out of college herself and move away from Texas. Once they’d moved, he sought to isolate her from her friends and family, prohibiting her access to a telephone. However, with the assistance of her mother, Leissner managed to escape, return home, and re-enroll at UT on her own while her husband completed his military service. During their separation, letters show that he monitored her body obsessively, requiring she adhere to exacting physical standards, and when they were together during his leaves, he pressured her to get pregnant. He controlled his wife’s spending even as he violated military rules against gambling. His letters, as well as hers, show that he was emotionally abusive and physically violent. When she spoke up, he gave rote apologies or blamed her for his actions, and his behaviors didn’t change.
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In her short life, Leissner struggled to navigate
Leissner wrote many letters to her husband to communicate her deepest needs and her hopes for the future. Her responses to him reveal a great deal about the violence she experienced and the survival strategies she used. Some letters communicated heart-wrenching despair. At one point, she struggled to reason with Whitman after he had attacked her for crying. “What do you call a genuine reason for tears?” she wrote. “I cry when I need to, not to gain sympathy, my way, or your attention.” From the relative safety of temporary distance, she also frequently challenged him. Upon learning of his arrest and pending court martial as a Marine in 1963 for threatening another serviceman, having an unauthorized firearm, and loan-sharking, she wrote: “[I]f we are going to make anything out of our marriage, there are going to have to be some powerful changes as far as I can see.”
Through her four years of marriage, Leissner fought to affirm her own agency and independence. She worked multiple jobs, eventually finishing her college degree. She earned a teaching credential and, then, a full-time position as a high school science teacher.
But despite every possible effort, Leissner’s once-bright spirit was worn down by Whitman’s cruelty and the sense that, try as she might, she could never satisfy his ever-shifting demands and expectations. “How do you apologize for something you can’t name?” she wrote in 1964, struggling to address one of her husband’s tangled criticisms. “It’s something I didn’t do and should have, and then again it is something I did.”
When the couple was finally reunited in the last year of her life, Leissner began, tentatively, to break the seal of secrecy and shame that abusers rely on. Between 1965 and 1966, it seemed she was planning to escape the relationship for good. She asserted some private independence by opening a new bank account in her name (it is unknown whether Whitman knew about it). She also began acknowledging her fear and used the word “divorce” with her friends and parents, imagining the possibility of a new life.
But it would not be. Leissner’s future was brutally stolen away in the dark morning hours of Aug. 1, 1966, when Whitman stabbed her to death in her own bed.
And within hours, he would lug a trunk of weapons and supplies to the top of the Texas Tower and wreak mayhem on an unsuspecting community.
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Fifty years later, it is not much easier for witnesses in private pain to be heard and recorded. Stigma and fear of blame still lead many survivors to withhold their stories.
It is inadequate merely to acknowledge that
Far from suddenly “going berserk,”
In an age when threat assessment experts emphasize the need for de-escalation, disruption, or even prevention of violent events, we must also make it possible for people to share, without shame, the abuse they witness or experience. Kathy’s voice,
Jo Scott-Coe, Professor of English at Riverside City College, is the author of
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians.