A Death in Wichita (12 page)

Linda Carter first surfaced in Kansas politics in 1987 as the executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in the town of Marysville and the head of the Marysville Travel and Tourism Bureau. Her husband, John Carter, was the Marysville city administrator, and the couple had three children. Within two years, Linda had resigned both positions because, according to the
Marysville Advocate
, of “controversies and criticisms.” In her resignation letter, she wrote that her jobs had been “terribly incompatible” with her husband’s.

“People,” she added, somewhat vaguely, “expect you to be so perfect.”

After a few years in McCook, Nebraska, the Carters resettled in Johnson County and John found work as city administrator of the town of Roeland Park. In 1996, Linda became a part-time secretary for the Johnson County DA, at $8.19 an hour. She had a nose for office politics and a thing for her boss, Paul Morrison, confessing to several other women in the courthouse that the DA was the sexiest man she’d ever met. By late 1997, Carter had been promoted to part-time victims’ advocate in the property crime unit. Two years later, Morrison hired her full-time as a victim-witness coordinator, and they began working more closely together. She had big blond hair, a Southern drawl, large expressive eyes, and a face suggesting both determination and experience. If she’d been a few pounds overweight when entering the DA’s office, she was shedding them now and wearing tighter clothes.

Halfway through 2000, the director of administration left the office and Carter wanted the empty post. She’d gotten to know her boss’s wife, Joyce, and called up Mrs. Morrison, hoping she’d put in a good word for Linda with her husband. Joyce was happy to because everyone liked Carter and felt that she’d blossom in this new position. On January 21, 2001, the DA gave her the job and bumped her salary up to $49,004. Morrison had thirty-three lawyers under him and countless cases to keep track of—he needed to hand off some authority and decision-making to a trusted subordinate, and Linda was always there to handle the extra duties. Putting in long hours without complaining, she was soon running seven staff supervisors and the DA’s fiscal coordinator.

With her power consolidated, Linda formed a women’s group inside the office, the Rose Club, where she began expressing parts of herself hidden throughout the past half decade. She liked taking the ladies out for dinner and collecting gossip about other employees, including members of the Rose Club. Over drinks, Carter invariably turned the conversation toward sex. She was insatiable, wanting to know what the women liked and didn’t like, whom they found attractive in the workplace, and if they had fantasies about that person. Most of hers centered on the DA—“the sexiest man alive.” Rose Club members were disturbed by Carter’s erotic chatter, but what could they do? She was their supervisor now, and challenging her could place their jobs in jeopardy. Better to order more drinks, keep laughing at her outlandish stories, throw in a few tidbits of gossip yourself, and hope for the best.

As the director of administration, Carter got as much pleasure bossing around the female employees as she did talking with them about sex. When reports of her heavy-handed behavior filtered back to Morrison, he dismissed them. Linda was an excellent worker who got things done, both for the office and the DA himself. It was important to keep her happy so the system would continue running smoothly, yet Carter was becoming increasingly prickly. When she suspected one member of the Rose Club was having an affair with a lawyer in the office, she confronted the woman, who quit and wrote a sharp critique of her supervisor. Carter disbanded the group and cultivated a new set of female workers, the Doll Club. The name came from a local theater production of
Valley of the Dolls
, based on the racy 1960s Jacqueline Susann novel.

Instead of business outfits, Carter began coming to the DA’s office dressed in leopard-print miniskirts and matching shoes. She once commanded the Doll Club to gather in her fifth-floor office, where she locked the door, dropped her skirt, and showed off a new pink thong. She liked to think of herself as the real “Wonder Woman,” as opposed to the fictional Wonder Woman made famous on television by that other Lynda Carter. Linda showed up at the DA’s office one day wearing a shiny blue dress, a red neck-scarf, knee-length golden boots, a golden bustier, and a red cape—Wonder Woman in the flesh.

For years, she and Morrison had been trading glances and smiles in the office and courthouse hallways. Finally, in June 2005, they traveled together to New York City for an event at the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank conducting a study of racial profiling. In their hotel lobby, Morrison approached her and confessed that he wanted a romantic relationship. She didn’t discourage him. By September, they were sneaking into an empty space at the courthouse and having oral sex. They made love in the same office where a few years earlier Morrison had told me that he and his wife Joyce offered counseling to young church couples about the challenges of a long marriage.

In October 2005, Morrison announced he was leaving the Republican Party to run for Kansas attorney general against Phill Kline. Nowhere was the news more welcome than in Wichita. Back in 2002, when Kline had first sought the AG’s office, Dr. Tiller decided that he needed his own political action committee. He contacted Julie Burkhart, a local pro-choice activist during the Summer of Mercy, now working as an administrator and counselor at a nearby abortion clinic.

“With Kline running for office,” Tiller told Burkhart, when offering her the job of overseeing his PAC, “there’s a lot to lose.”

She took the position, and Tiller spent $153,000 to help defeat Kline, sponsoring a last-minute radio ad blitz questioning the candidate’s qualifications and potential violations of his law license. The effort failed.

“Dr. Tiller didn’t realize soon enough,” says Burkhart, “that if Kline was elected, he’d be nothing but a pain in the neck. When we finally got involved in the race, it was too little, too late. It was a wake-up call for Kansas Democrats who thought they could run and easily win against real right wingers.”

In November 2002, Kline had defeated a relatively weak candidate, Chris Biggs, and then launched his Inquisition. Governor Sebelius had watched with dismay as the AG had gone after women’s private medical records in order to shut down WHCS. Four years later, Sebelius put her hopes behind Morrison, and Tiller donated more money to the cause. Abortion would be the key issue in a nasty race, with Morrison’s team referring to Inquisitor Kline as “Snoop Dog.”

After joining the Democratic Party, Morrison began talking up Linda Carter at the governor’s mansion. In July 2006, Sebelius selected Carter to be on the state’s new Interagency Council on Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation. After she attended council meetings in Topeka, Morrison drove over from Olathe and the couple rendezvoused at a local hotel. During one tryst in the DA’s office in the middle of the campaign, Morrison gazed out the courthouse window and wondered aloud if Kline had a spy watching them through a telescope.

They met in other hotels in Wichita, Overland Park, and Salina, Kansas, and in cities in at least three other states. Carter handled the details, making the reservations and paying cash for the rooms. The more they saw each other, the more heatedly they discussed their options. Should they leave their spouses and file for divorce? Who should go first? Shouldn’t they wait till the campaign was over? The pair had fallen into a volatile dance. When Morrison was at his most fervent, Carter had a tendency to cool off, which only made him more fervent—a tough spot for a man accustomed to commanding all the lawyers in his office and representing law and order to the outside world. And at work, Carter flirted with other men, blowing kisses at attorneys who walked into the DA’s office and talking with the Doll Club about bedding them. It was difficult enough to manage hundreds of criminal cases when things were going smoothly, but now the office was filled with anxiety and tension. The Morrison-Carter relationship was anything but stable when he decided to take it to the next level.

He bought her an engagement ring, appraised at more than $16,000, and gave it to her during a visit to the Carter family home in Western Grove, Arkansas. But he didn’t propose, because the timing wasn’t right. How would it look to conservative Kansas voters, not to mention Morrison’s avowed enemies in the Kline camp, if he bolted from his wife and children on the eve of the biggest election of his career? They needed to be patient a while longer, and to keep their secrets intact.

“When Paul was running for attorney general,” says one of his top campaign aides, “I was around him every day for days on end. We traveled together all over the state. I had no clue what was going on.”

With only weeks left before the 2006 mid-term elections, Kline and many other GOP candidates around the country were lagging in the polls (Democrats were about to win a majority of seats in Congress). The war in Iraq that President George W. Bush had started in March 2003 with the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was increasingly unpopular—especially after no such weapons were found. Just as disturbingly, reports had leaked out about the U.S. Army’s abuse of prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, would tell Congress that more than a hundred detainees had died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least twenty-seven of those deaths declared homicides by the military. The victims had allegedly been drowned, suffocated, shot, or kicked to death. The graphic photos coming out of the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad—images of American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners—made the reports unnervingly real. U.S. military personnel appeared to be in violation of international law.

My father, and many like him, had never voted for a Democrat in his life, but by mid-2006, approaching eighty-three, he was changing his mind. It pained him greatly that as he’d become an old man and my son was nearing an age when he could be called into military service, American soldiers were engaging in torture in so-called “black sites” around the world. They’d disregarded the very rules concerning POWs that had protected him from the Nazis, and kept him alive. He was an unstoppable letter writer and began composing heartfelt messages to politicians, both locally and nationally, including President Bush. He urged Bush to go visit VA hospitals across America, and to talk with the men who’d been wounded in combat and find out how long their injuries and trauma lasted, once wars were declared over. He never heard back from anyone in Washington, and died two months before the 2006 election that provided a mandate against the Republican Party he’d supported so unwaveringly all his life.

While Republicans struggled nationally, Kansans watched the growing combativeness of the attorney general’s race, with abortion as the main issue. On February 3, 2006, the state Supreme Court had finally ruled on Kline’s request to gain access to the WHCS and CHPP records. The AG would be allowed to see these medical files, but they’d be heavily redacted, with the patient names removed. Kline and his subordinates were ordered not to release these materials to anyone. The files “could hardly be more sensitive,” the court said, so everyone must “resist the impulse” to make them public.

Kline didn’t resist. He took recommendations on finding medical experts sympathetic to his cause from anti-abortion groups such as Kansans for Life and Women Inflaming the Nation. Then he went out and tried to hire these experts to view the records. At first, he brought in the Kansas doctor Ronald Erken, who informed members of Kline’s staff that they had no case against Tiller. Then he went after Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a professor of psychiatry. Dr. McHugh looked at twenty-eight medical files and discussed them in a forty-four-minute videotaped interview put together by anti-abortion activists. The tape found its way to Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, and onto the Internet. Dr. McHugh contended that the medical reports held diagnoses such as anxiety, depression, and adjustment disorder—conditions that were not “substantial and irreversible,” and therefore did not warrant abortion to protect the health of the mother.

“I can only tell you,” he stated in the interview, “that from these records, anybody could have gotten an abortion if they wanted one.”

The interview failed to mention the facts in many case files, including one that evoked the late Christin Gilbert. This patient was a ten-year-old girl, twenty-eight weeks pregnant, but unlike Christin, she’d been raped by an adult relative.

By late October 2006, Kline was trailing Morrison in the polls and desperate to catch up. On the evening of November 3, four days before the election, Fox featured an “exclusive segment” on
The O’Reilly Factor.
Kline appeared on the show and O’Reilly created the clear impression that he’d had access to the redacted medical records. To an audience of millions, he declared that he had an “inside source” with documentation indicating that Dr. Tiller had performed late-term abortions to alleviate “temporary depression” in pregnant women.

Jared Maag was the deputy solicitor general for the Kansas attorney general’s office. Under oath, he later said, “The words that he [O’Reilly] was using suggested that he had a record in front of him because of the statements that Dr. Tiller would perform an abortion because of depression…When you listen to his statement in full, the assumption that I came to was that it came from the office of the attorney general.”

O’Reilly’s performance outraged Morrison, his supporters, and Dr. Tiller. The latter demanded that Kline be held in contempt for sharing the files with outsiders, while his lawyers asked the court to deposit “the records with a special prosecutor or master appointed to investigate any leak of information from, or the mishandling of, the records.”

Morrison blasted Kline’s Inquisition and said that his opponent, if reelected, would go after other people’s confidential medical records. Kline reminded voters that in 1990 Morrison had faced allegations of drunkenly propositioning a DA employee in a bar. The woman, Kelly Summerlin, was a victim-witness coordinator, the same job later held by Linda Carter. Two federal lawsuits based on Summerlin’s claims against the DA were dismissed in the early nineties, but in the campaign’s final weeks, Kline trotted out the old charges, jolting Morrison’s wife into action. In a TV interview, Joyce said that Kline had “lost his moral compass” by delivering this “malicious attack on the integrity of our marriage.”

Morrison had more pressing concerns. During a stump speech in Wichita, he’d been rushed by an anti-abortion protester who’d taken a swing at him, before security jumped in and separated the men. The near injury shook the DA and his campaign staff, who now had a firsthand taste of what Tiller and his employees had endured throughout the past three decades.

On election night, November 7, Kline traveled to Wichita to conduct his final press conference in front of WHCS—Tiller and abortion were the centerpiece of his campaign to the very end. Morrison and his team were far away in the northeast corner of the state, huddling together in a Lawrence restaurant, the Free State Brewery, and waiting for the votes to be counted. The toasts were about to begin, as Kansans had had enough of Phill Kline.

Morrison won an easy victory, by 17 percentage points, to the great relief of many. After four years of an Inquisition costing uncalculated amounts of time, energy, and money to all sides, WHCS and CHPP had not been found to be in violation of any laws. At the Democrats’ victory party that night in Lawrence, the winners could only hope that the election signaled the start of a new political environment in Kansas and especially in Wichita. Their opponents, of course, felt otherwise.

“Right after Paul won,” says one of his staffers, “the anti-abortion groups put up awful things on their blogs. Like, ‘Morrison slithers into office on the backs of dead babies.’ It was truly disgusting.”

Despite the blogs, there was much cause for optimism. Morrison’s supporters were certain that he’d drop the Inquisition and Tiller’s legal battles might at last be behind him. The grand strategy to get rid of Kline and take the attorney general’s office and Kansas in a new direction had worked.

Or had it?

Kline didn’t have to vacate the AG’s office until noon on January 8, 2007, and he intended to use every remaining minute to accomplish his unfulfilled goals. On December 20, he charged Tiller with thirty misdemeanors, many involving abortions the physician had allegedly performed on minors. Within hours of the unsealing of these charges in Wichita, a Sedgwick County judge tossed them out—after DA Nola Foulston had made this request and said that her office hadn’t been properly consulted by Kline about the matter. On December 28, Kline appointed a special prosecutor, the Wichita lawyer Don McKinney, to continue investigating Tiller. It was the most defiant and inflammatory (some said outrageous) thing Kline had done since taking office four years earlier, as McKinney made Kline look like a moderate.

During the Summer of Mercy, Don “the Dingo” McKinney had demonstrated with Operation Rescue at Tiller’s clinic and was an associate and admirer of the late Paul “the Jackal” deParrie. The Jackal had been McKinney’s Wichita house guest in 2001, at the ten-year anniversary of the massive abortion protests. He was an Army of God supporter who’d publicly endorsed the killing of abortion providers in general and of Shelley Shannon’s 1993 attempted murder of Tiller. Papers filed with the Court of Appeals in Oregon in August 1997 read:

“Respondent [deParrie] is a leader of Advocates for Life Ministries, a group that opposes abortion, and is also the editor of Life Advocate magazine. At various times, Life Advocate magazine has editorialized that the use of ‘godly force’ is ‘morally justified’ in defense of ‘innocent life.’ In addition, on two occasions, respondent signed declarations or manifestos of support for anti-abortionist activists who killed abortion providers. In 1993, respondent and 28 other activists signed the following statement concerning Michael Griffin, who shot and killed Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida: ‘We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child. We assert that if Michael Griffin did in fact kill David Gunn, his use of lethal force was justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children. Therefore, he ought to be acquitted of the charges against him.’

“The primary sponsor of that declaration was a group called ‘Defensive Action,’ whose director, Paul Hill, also signed the statement. In July 1994, Hill shot and killed Dr. John Britton and James Barrett, Britton’s escort, and wounded Barrett’s wife at another clinic in Pensacola. Respondent and 30 others subsequently signed a declaration that reiterated the earlier declaration and stated that Hill’s ‘actions are morally justified if they were necessary for the purpose of defending innocent human life.’

“In 1994, respondent described Shelley Shannon, who had attempted to kill Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider, as ‘a hero.’ In January 1995, respondent publicly stated that John Salvi was ‘morally justified’ in killing two receptionists at a Boston abortion clinic.”

Following deParrie’s death in 2006, McKinney praised the man online, calling him a true Christian warrior. Like Christ himself, deParrie was a genuine leader who went first into battle and inspired everyone by his example—the very best that pro-life has to offer.

“We are each,” he wrote, “going to have to step up our own efforts to fill the gap in the wall left by Paul’s passing.”

Signed, “Donald ‘The Dingo’ McKinney.”

On December 29, 2006, the day after Kline appointed McKinney as Tiller’s special prosecutor,
talk2.action.org
, a Web site that monitored anti-abortion activists, posted the following message:

“Frame it as he will, the Attorney General of Kansas has vested an overt associate of Operation Rescue, and of at least one member of the Army of God, with the full law enforcement power of the state.”

As Kline planned further actions before leaving office, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue was considering another citizens’ petition drive against Tiller. If he could gather seven thousand more Kansas signatures, he could get a new grand jury to investigate WHCS and possibly subpoena two thousand of its medical records. He wanted the files of every woman who’d gone to the clinic, when at least twenty-two weeks pregnant, throughout the past five years.

While Morrison prepared to depart the DA’s office in Olathe and start his new job sixty miles away in Topeka, he was about to be blindsided. And not for the last time.