Repeated true-crime narratives tend to deflect serious examination of the misogynistic attitudes, abuse, and/or fatal violence that too frequently precede a public massacre. A reconsideration of surviving writings by Charles Whitman, the 1966 UT Austin sniper, alongside newly-discovered letters of his wife and second victim, Kathy Leissner, reveals how inflexible gender attitudes and judgments took a profoundly toxic and eventually fatal toll in private, long before Whitman’s display of hyper-masculine force from atop a landmark tower.