A Death in Wichita (15 page)

When he wasn’t in Wichita, Roeder returned home to his new apartment. He now shared a few rooms in Westport, a bar-and-restaurant district on the Missouri side of Kansas City, with a man he’d known for years through their common interest in Messianic Christianity. Kamran Tehrani was born in Iran and his father had worked in the shah’s regime, but after the 1979 overthrow of the Iranian government and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, Kamran’s family moved to America. He was raised a Muslim, but became an atheist living in Washington State and California. In 1988, he had a personal crisis and asked God to reveal Himself.

“I had a dream and saw Christ’s deity,” Kamran says, “and this presence nearly killed me. He shrouded his glory so that I could look right at him, and that started my Christian journey.”

Kamran, who’d earned a master’s in business administration, came to Kansas in 1991 and worked as a mortgage broker. In the late 1990s, he met Roeder through the Prophecy Club, a religious group in Topeka, led by Pastor Stan Johnson. To Kamran, the Prophecy Club was a “cutting-edge, national ministry.” It embraced many of the same anti-tax, anti-immigration, and anti-gay-rights convictions held by the far right. In a quiet and polite Midwestern tone, Pastor Johnson could be heard on the Internet asking the faithful for money and decrying the state of modern America, while delivering a broad-based attack on those he felt were outside the Christian fold. His delivery was much softer than that of Fred Phelps, who preached savagely against gay people at Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, but their messages overlapped.

“The Prophecy Club didn’t meet at a church but a motel,” Kamran says. “We had discussions about a wide range of subjects, including our Hebrew roots.”

He ran into Roeder at the motel and at similar events held by the International House of Prayer (IHOP).

“The Lord,” reads the IHOP Web site, “has called us to be a community of believers committed to God, each other and to establishing a 24/7 house of prayer in Kansas City—a perpetual solemn assembly gathering corporately to fast and pray in the spirit of the tabernacle of David.”

Small clusters of Prophecy Club or IHOP followers got together at their homes and held Bible study sessions, with an emphasis on carrying on Old Testament traditions. For a while, Kamran lived at the Merriam, Kansas, home of the lawyer Michael Clayman, but he moved out and Roeder moved in. In mid-decade at Clayman’s, Kamran led a course called the “Four Quadrants,” about what had become of the Bible’s Lost Tribes of Israel. Kamran’s teachings echoed those given to the men in the Order back in the early 1980s, when they were hearing sermons at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho: these lost tribes had formed the countries of Europe and eventually came to America. At Clayman’s, they also studied what Kamran called the “Synagogue of Satan,” made up of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews.

“People today,” says Kamran, “call themselves Jews, but they’re not. They’re really the Synagogue of Satan. We’re going to be revealing all this in the Last Days.”

After both men had left Clayman’s and Kamran took an apartment in Westport, Roeder settled in with him. They continued studying these subjects in their new living room, but abortion wasn’t really a part of their discussions. Nor was it a large part of Kamran’s belief system or interests. The men kept the Sabbath on Saturdays, when students got together and pored over the Bible. Kamran was born Persian, and a Persian proverb says that if you want to get to know someone well, either live or travel with that individual. Sharing an apartment with Roeder, watching his habits and listening to his rants, Kamran got to know the hulking, balding, fifty-one-year-old man with the light-colored, wispy mustache much more intimately.

“He was just very dogmatic in his feelings about the unborn,” Kamran says. “He had a real strong passion on this issue. I tried to tell him that my calling is for the born versus the unborn, and that you cannot force women to not abort their children. Not even Operation Rescue can do that. He talked a lot about Operation Rescue and I’d hear him in the apartment speaking with one of their leaders on the phone. It was a woman. They were talking about Tiller and his trial.

“He also talked about Tiller with me and one time he went to Topeka for an anti-abortion demonstration. Scott was very tight with his money, so that really impressed me. It was a long way for him to drive to protest. He told me that Tiller had become a multimillionaire as an abortion doctor and had aborted seventy thousand children. He once asked me my opinion about shooting abortion doctors. I said if you want to go to prison for life that is your decision and nobody can stop anybody from what they choose to do.”

What Kamran didn’t know was that over the years Roeder, by his own claims, had donated at least a thousand dollars to Operation Rescue—a large amount for someone beyond frugal, who held minimum-wage jobs and was occasionally out of work. He also didn’t know that in August 2008, Roeder had driven to Wichita one weekend and attended a Sunday service at Dr. Tiller’s Reformation Lutheran Church, concealing a 9-millimeter handgun in a shoulder holster.

“Scott once asked me,” Kamran says, “what I thought, biblically, about killing an abortion doctor. I told him that if you act it out, you’ll pay for it with prison time. I didn’t say, ‘No, don’t do it,’ because in America people have guns and people get shot all the time. They just do what they do.”

As someone born and raised in another country, Kamran was often struck by how well armed Americans were, with ninety guns for every hundred citizens. It further impressed him that the United States is believed to be the most heavily armed society on earth, owning 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms. Between 1980 and 2006, firearm death rates in America averaged 32,300 annually, well over twice that of the next highest country among industrialized nations.

Roeder had thought about running Tiller over with his car, but that might not work. If he was able to get close enough, he could chop off the doctor’s hands (his ex-father-in-law kept a sword in a cedar chest in Lindsey’s home, left over from World War Two, and Roeder himself had a long, nasty-looking serrated knife under the seat of his car). But even if he removed Tiller’s hands, the physician could teach others how to perform abortions. Roeder considered climbing onto a rooftop across the street from the clinic and using a high-powered M50 sniper’s rifle as Tiller came to work in the morning, but it would be extremely difficult to get a clean shot at the man inside the armored car or after he’d entered WHCS through a security fence and parked in a locked garage. The Tillers lived in a gated community that was virtually impenetrable, so Roeder couldn’t do it at his home. That really left only a single option, and wasn’t it the best one of all? Where were people more trusting and open than at a Sunday church service? He’d walked right into Reformation Lutheran carrying a Bible and a hidden handgun and nobody had suspected a thing. Several people had welcomed him that day and all they’d wanted to talk about was bringing him into their fold.

Deputy Attorney General Barry Disney was the prosecutor in the Tiller trial, which opened on March 23, 2009, with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling the courthouse for explosives. Disney didn’t seem to have nearly as much fire for his job as Dan Monnat had for defending the doctor against the nineteen misdemeanor charges. Some spectators in the gallery, including Roeder, noticed this, and he talked about it angrily on the phone with the woman from Operation Rescue. Couldn’t the attorney general’s office have come up with somebody more forceful? How did the prosecution expect to win if its leader conducted himself like this? Didn’t law enforcement in Kansas understand how important it was to convict Tiller? And why did things move so slowly in the courtroom when it was so obvious that Tiller was guilty? Anti-abortion protesters had parked a “Truth Truck” near the courthouse for the trial, so the media and public would see it as they came and went. In their eyes, this was an effective strategy for spreading their message, far more effective than Barry Disney himself.

On the twenty-third, following the prosecutor’s limited opening remarks, Monnat stood and delivered a much lengthier statement, reminding the six Wichita jurors what most of them already knew from years of living in the city. Every patient who came to WHCS from across town or around Kansas or from a distant state or foreign country was “heckled and discouraged and approached by the protesters…[who] will pursue her to her motel…[bringing] more fear and inconvenience to an already bewildered and frightened pregnant woman…”

Monnat then laid out the fundamental questions and full substance of the defense’s case, a moment that Tiller and his attorney had been building up to throughout the past decade. This was their chance to establish the physician’s innocence once and for all, in a court of law, by a jury of the doctor’s peers, in his own hometown. As he was about to reveal in the courtroom and in front of the national media in Wichita for the trial, Monnat was more than prepared for this occasion.

Inside his well-appointed office a few blocks south of the courthouse, the attorney kept a row of thick law books in neatly aligned rows behind his desk. Nothing was even a fraction out of place. He was punctual, dressed nattily, had pointed features that seemed to define his highly focused personality, and spoke in measured, clipped tones, as if offering a summation to a jury when he was only meeting with a journalist. With virtually no prompting, he spoke with conviction and passion about the value of the American Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, and you couldn’t help thinking that if you ever got into serious trouble with the police, you’d want him at your side. One had to look a little deeper into his life to learn that he was known around town as a pretty fair rock ’n’ roll drummer who liked to jam in nightclubs on the weekend.

If his opening statement seemed exhaustive, it was because he was determined to lay the entire Phill Kline Inquisition and pursuit of Dr. Tiller by the state of Kansas to rest for good. According to the prosecution’s own brief, Monnat began, the term “legally affiliated simply means…a formal business association that would include physicians who are part of the same corporation or who practice together in a partnership or a limited liability company. But the evidence will show that Dr. Tiller and Dr. Neuhaus are not associated as employer and employee, are not associated as business partners, are not associated as joint venturers, are not associated as separate stockholders in the same corporation. They’re not even associated as landlord and tenant. More importantly, Dr. Tiller never has had any sort of written, oral or implied contract with Dr. Neuhaus.

“In other words, Dr. Neuhaus can refuse to consult with Dr. Tiller’s patients at any time, and Dr. Tiller can stop referring patients to Dr. Neuhaus at any time. Neither is contractually, that is, legally obligated towards one another in any way to accept or give referrals to or from the other. The evidence will also be clear that Dr. Neuhaus and Dr. Tiller are never knowingly and intentionally financially affiliated in any way. Dr. Tiller never pays any money or anything of value to Dr. Neuhaus, whether as salary, stock ownership, investment, profit or expenses. Dr. Neuhaus is always paid directly by the patients themselves and usually in cash, because Dr. Neuhaus doesn’t want to have to worry about whether a check is going to bounce…Dr. Neuhaus meets separately with each patient and conducts her own independent evaluation of the patient. Dr. Neuhaus keeps her own files on the patients…”

If Neuhaus recommended that Tiller not do an abortion on a patient, he accepted her view and didn’t seek another opinion. She wasn’t paid any differently if an abortion was or was not performed.

“Dr. Tiller and Dr. Neuhaus,” Monnat said, “have no shared bank accounts, they have no shared equipment leases or purchases. They have no profit sharing. Dr. Neuhaus maintains her own policy of malpractice insurance and is not covered by Dr. Tiller’s. Dr. Neuhaus has a separate Medicare reimbursement number and a separate Canadian health care system number. Dr. Tiller files income taxes completely separate from Dr. Neuhaus’s obligation to do so.

“The evidence will show that the evaluations are scheduled and done at Women’s Health Care Services, not because Dr. Neuhaus and Dr. Tiller are affiliated but because it is too unsafe, complicated and obnoxious to ask pregnant women who have come to Kansas for an abortion to turn around and then drive two and a half hours to Lawrence for a second evaluation, turn around and drive back, both times having to withstand the ever-present gauntlet of protesters out in front of the clinic who will approach them, heckle them and try to discourage them…Actions taken merely by both doctors for the safety and comfort of their patients do show each doctor’s affiliation with the patient, but they don’t show any affiliation between Dr. Neuhaus and Dr. Tiller.”

Dr. Neuhaus, Monnat conceded, occasionally used the WHCS printer, but always paid for the paper and the toner she consumed.

“She used a Tiller car in 2006,” he said. “It was a 1997 Toyota Camry that I think belonged to Jeanne Tiller at one point that had been parked on the lot of Women’s Health Care Services, so that visiting doctors from time to time could use it to get around…Dr. Neuhaus and Dr. Tiller, of course, were worried that somebody might suggest that if she bought the car from Dr. Tiller that would be some kind of financial affiliation. So very conscientiously they had the car appraised by a dealership in Wichita who gave them a $300 figure for what this kind of junker car was worth with its bashed-in side and bashed-in rear end, and that’s what Dr. Neuhaus paid to Dr. Tiller, and I submit that will be insufficient to establish the affiliation in 2003 that the prosecution is required to…

“The evidence will show Dr. Neuhaus didn’t shut down her women’s clinic in Lawrence because she is making so much money from these consults. Really, she charged $250 to $300 for each consult in part because she saw it as a humanitarian thing to do for other women who were in desperate circumstances. Dr. Neuhaus is…married to Michael Caddell, who is a private investigator in Lawrence, Kansas. Unfortunately, in about August of 2002, as their five-year-old son was starting kindergarten…they learned for the first time that their son suffered from severe juvenile onset diabetes and that he needed to have his blood sugar checked five to six times a day and needed to have insulin injections twice a day. Now, what can a mother who also happens to be a medical doctor do for her only child under those circumstances? Dr. Neuhaus does it. She shuts down her women’s clinic in Lawrence so that she can be with her son and watch over her son during this critical time.

“The evidence…will fail to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Dr. Tiller was knowingly and intentionally legally or financially affiliated with Dr. Neuhaus at any time…I will ask each of you to return a fair verdict of not guilty and permit Dr. Tiller to return to continuing to serve the women who so need his medical care. Thank you very much.”

The anti-abortion protesters, both inside and outside the courtroom, were further upset when Barry Disney called only one witness, Dr. Kristin Neuhaus, a close ally of Tiller’s who underscored this when she came in to testify by hugging the doctor in front of the jury. After her earlier dealings with Phill Kline and the attorney general’s office, she was so fearful of the prosecution that she’d sought and obtained immunity from the state before agreeing to testify at the trial. Her hostility to Disney on the witness stand no doubt contributed to his lack of passion for the case.

She told the jurors that she’d received death threats because of her work with Tiller and could never give out her home address to anyone she didn’t personally know. If WHCS received a call from somebody asking for her cell or home number, it was usually from abortion foes trying to find out where she lived so they could come to her house and demonstrate. Some female “patients” who’d tried to contact her were impostors just looking to harass her. She sounded permanently afraid.

Once Disney had finished questioning her, Monnat asked her about being subpoenaed by Kline in December of 2006, as he was about to leave office.

“At the beginning of that Inquisition,” Monnat said, “it was announced to you that also in the room was Special Agent Jared Reed of the Attorney General’s Office, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And Special Agent in Charge Tom Williams of the Kansas Attorney General—is that correct?”

“That’s right…”

“And you were questioned then by Mr. Steven Maxwell. Did you regard him as Phill Kline’s number one man?”

“Absolutely.”

“And just share with the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what it felt like being interrogated under those circumstances.”

“The Inquisition, minus the torture chamber. You know, the Spanish Inquisition. That’s what I felt like.”

“You told that attorney [Maxwell] sometimes the women were too chemically impaired to make an informed decision on anything at that moment and so you would not refer them to Dr. Tiller for an abortion, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“You told that attorney sometimes the women’s cognitive processes were too impaired to make a decision and they didn’t have a guardian with them, correct?”

“Correct…”

One patient had flown all the way from England to Wichita, but Dr. Neuhaus turned her down for an abortion.

How did she feel about being called a “rubber stamp” for Dr. Tiller?

“Well, it’s outrageous,” she testified. “I always put the patient at the center of every interaction. I would not be able to live with doing other than that…I always find that to be my highest and most important duty, to never facilitate harm for anyone. And this is a very, very serious process and a very difficult decision for people…And I don’t want to make a mistake…

“If someone tells me right off the bat that they have reservations, I would never proceed. I…make sure that every aspect of their health—their physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual health—are all being addressed.”

On redirect examination, Disney wasn’t as friendly with his witness—not after Neuhaus said that the trial was a political prosecution of Tiller and it was “open season” on doctors who performed abortions. Disney asked if she’d considered that Tiller could have provided patients with a list of physicians willing to give a second opinion, instead of just repeatedly relying on Neuhaus herself.

“The question is so illogical,” she said, “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Just say yes, ma’am, or no.”

“It’s an illogical question…”

“So you didn’t consider it?”

“It’s impossible. It’s a ridiculous question.”

During the trial, Roeder sat a few feet away from George and Jeanne Tiller, watching the couple and listening to the state’s case with deepening dismay.