Remembering Kathy Leissner

On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed a tower located on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin and killed fourteen people with a sniper rifle, resulting in, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in US history. Earlier that morning, before the attack, Whitman not only killed his mother, Margaret, but also his wife, Kathy Leissner.

This March, we published “Listening to Kathy,” an essay by Jo Scott-Coe, which chronicled the brief life and untimely death of Kathy Leissner, and the impact of her loss upon the Leissner family, including her brother Nelson, and the tight-knit community of Needville, Texas.

In this essay commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the UT shooting, Jo Scott-Coe revisits “Listening to Kathy,” provides a fresh perspective in the wake of the gun-related tragedies in Orlando, Baton Rouge, San Bernadino, and Dallas, and highlights the violence too often aimed at women by their intimate partners.

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The fiftieth summer since Charles Whitman’s sniper attack from the tower at UT Austin in 1966 has been hot and ultra-violent, an accumulation of bad news in real time that has set Americans on edge. The shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando now stands as the most deadly rampage in our history. In July, we witnessed more shootings of black citizens by law enforcement in open view and on camera—in Baton Rouge, in St. Paul—followed by a calculated and fatal attack on police during a peaceful citizen protest in Dallas, and then another ambush of police in Baton Rouge.

It has been a sequence of weeks and days too close to the brink.

In early December last year, as I was finishing “Listening to Kathy,” a rampage shooting took place twenty miles from my home, in San Bernardino, California. It felt disconcertingly close. One of the perpetrators had been a student at the college where I teach. The FBI revealed that, along with another friend, also a student, he had planned a massacre on our campus several years before, actually identifying locations they intended to target.

Nelson Leissner sent me a text: “Are you watching this? Are you OK?”

We talked on the phone about how bizarre it was, in the midst of repetitive madness, to be working on the story of his sister, Kathy—one of Whitman’s first victims in private the night before the tower shooting.

When I think about it now, it’s shocking how the danger under ordinary surfaces is even closer than we sense.

The CDC reported in 2011 that 42.4 million American women will experience some form of violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime, which means that we are far, far, far more likely to know a victim or a perpetrator of private abuse than to be killed or wounded in a mass shooting. Nevertheless, the horrific spectacles on television and on social media crowd our awareness, make us guarded, fearful, angry, on the lookout for scapegoats, fortresses, even blood.

Kathy’s story, her lived experience, speaks to something different. She could not know that the future would be so ugly. I look at the pages of her pretty handwriting, sometimes in pencil and other times in ink, the seams of her pale blue stationery, the addresses she penned carefully and the stamps she pressed onto envelopes. Some exude the distinct scent of old paper mingled with a faint impression of perfume or powder.

None of these letters were intended for me.

I can’t ignore the terrible irony: Had she not died so cruelly, had her death not been followed by so many other deaths, I would not know Kathy’s name. Nelson and I likely never would have met, and her story would probably not be told.

Permission to read—essentially, to eavesdrop—on Kathy’s intimate words showed me how her life was more than a footnote to someone else’s crime. Her daily letters are something very close to a diary, showing the thoughts of a young woman who wanted to make her marriage work, to sustain friendships, to find employment, and build a normal life. She was at times lonely. She worried about money, about how to fix her hair and keep her figure, whether or when she would get pregnant, finish her degree, and find a job teaching science.

So many aspects of the letters are moving, but there is one line I come back to again and again. During the early days of her marriage, shortly after her twentieth birthday and her first wedding anniversary, she wrote to her husband, “Please don’t be mad at me.”

Some part of me hears that sentence deeply. It dredges up my own familiar feelings. Don’t leave me. Don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be a problem. I have played that part, too.

At age twenty-two, my first year working as a teacher, I attached myself to a man who I gradually realized was suffering from severe and untreated mental illness. While I knew within two years that this was not a healthy place for me to stay, it took me five more years to end the relationship. Here I was: a competent, educated, professional woman acting as if bound by vows I had never taken.

In Kathy’s voice, I recognized a woman who would have been disoriented after only a few months of marriage by her husband’s suggestion that she needed a psychiatrist—guy code during the sixties for “she gets ideas in her pretty little head.”

Kathy’s openness, her vulnerability, and her loyalty were not flaws that caused her death. These traits simply did not compute within a troubled marriage to a man unwilling or unable to treat her as a person instead of a possession.

During twenty-five years teaching, I’ve witnessed hundreds of young women and men trying to find the best place to be themselves. Trying not to lose it when the world feels mad. I’ve seen the surreptitious texts that lead to quick exits from the classroom, the worried frowns in a side row desk, the split lip, the tears, the flashes of frustration or temper. Sometimes I hear their stories, help them find resources. Sometimes they push away or simply disappear.

I wish I could have met Kathy in person instead of on paper. I wish I could say to her: It was never your fault. You didn’t fail. You have friends on the other side.

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