Unheard Witness
Jo Scott-Coe takes a story you might think you know and turns it on its head. The life of Kathy Leissner Whitman, told with intimacy, empathy, and care, reveals how private cruelty and public violence are deeply entwined. Too often, stories about mass shooters inadvertently glorify the perpetrators while the victims remain an afterthought. This perceptive, beautifully written book shows how much there is to learn when we do the opposite.” – Rachel Monroe
MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas at Austin’s clock tower and performed the first televised and (at the time) deadliest mass shooting in American history. Two weeks after the murders, FBI agents interviewed a Catholic priest in Alaska who had known Whitman and his family for fifteen years.
Jo Scott-Coe discovered the report of this interview in an online search about the shooting nearly fifty years later. As a stray Catholic, she was intrigued: Was the priest still alive?
Teacher at Point Blank
Haunted and compelled forward by memories of a classmate who commits suicide on campus, a former teacher-colleague who dies all alone, Hollywood fantasies of the “ideal teacher,” and chronic reports of school violence and increasing gender crime, Scott-Coe reveals how her hopes, past and present, struggle for breath at the point blank of denial, confinement, addiction, isolation, hostility, subliminal eroticism—and, at times, a healthy dose of fear.