A Death in Wichita (22 page)

By late afternoon on May 31, federal agents were at Kamran Tehrani’s Westport apartment, interviewing him about his connection to Roeder. He spoke openly to them about his roommate and their mutual ties to Messianic Christianity.

“I was just in shock and awe about the murder,” Kamran says. “Scott was passionate over this issue, but it never entered my mind that he’d actually shoot the doctor. As I told the FBI, we’ve all thought about committing suicide, but how many of us carry it out? After this happened, there was a lot of fear in the people I know. Some didn’t want to do Bible study any more, which I think is cowardly. All we had was an innocent Bible study program and there’s nothing wrong with that. If people want to stop us from doing this, then shed my blood over that because I will stand on conviction.

“This country is in enemy hands and I make no secret of that with anyone. The truth will ultimately come out. Both Scott and I are strongly anti-Bush, anti-Obama, anti-Satan, and anti-those who want to destroy the country. Tiller is no different from them. I can’t regret that he’s been executed for what he was doing. But did I know it was coming? No. Am I still Scott’s friend? He’ll have to walk away from our friendship before I do. I feel very grieved for what has happened with him.”

As Kamran talked with the FBI, the police detectives who’d gone up to Gardner, Kansas, tried to question Roeder, but he’d already asked for a lawyer and was withholding comment. That evening, he was placed in a WPD vehicle and driven back to Wichita, making small talk with the officers sitting beside him, while offering up a few comments about his opposition to abortion. He was booked on first-degree murder charges, held on a $5 million bond, transferred to a cell in the Sedgwick County Detention Facility next to the courthouse, and placed in solitary confinement. By the time he was left alone it was after midnight but sleep didn’t come, because his cell was cold and he was on suicide watch, with guards constantly walking by and monitoring him. So he couldn’t hurt himself, the staff had placed him in a tight-fitting, wraparound garment called a “skirt,” designed to limit his movements.

On Sunday afternoon, before Roeder had been booked and locked up, an unidentified friend of his had made a phone call to Ney, Adams & Sylvester, one of Wichita’s most prominent criminal-defense offices. Back in 1987, the firm’s Richard Ney had gained local notoriety as the key defense attorney for Bill Butterworth, charged with killing Phil Fager and his daughters, sixteen-year-old Kelli and nine-year-old Sherri. A well-respected contractor, Butterworth had been engaged in a construction project at the Fager home when the murders occurred inside this residence. Ney had been able to reach Butterworth before the police interviewed him, and to advise him on a legal strategy. The crime rattled Wichita, in part because it was thirteen years and numerous victims into the unsolved BTK case. Had the region’s best-known serial killer, who’d terrorized the city off and on since 1974, struck again?

At Butterworth’s trial, he claimed to have gone missing during four crucial days around the murders and couldn’t remember what had happened. After undergoing hypnosis, he testified that when he’d found two victims at the house and heard Kelli struggling against an unknown assailant, he’d bolted and fled to Florida. He was acquitted, sending more shock waves through Wichita, since most people had felt Butterworth would be convicted. Ney’s reputation as a tough, talented defense attorney had just expanded exponentially. And if Butterworth was innocent, who’d murdered the Fagers?

When BTK, Dennis Rader, confessed to some or all of his homicides in 2005, he didn’t bring up the Fager killings, but did admit sending a letter to Phil Fager’s widow, just to frighten her. Closing the BTK case in Wichita once and for all, and publicly confirming that Rader had committed “only” ten murders, had been extremely important to DA Nola Foulston, who’d taken great umbrage with media suggestions that there were any unsolved BTK killings in Kansas or elsewhere. It was time to put that nightmare behind the city and local law enforcement. Now, in the spring of 2009, Wichita’s legal establishment was about to reveal just how importantly it viewed the death of Dr. Tiller—and the conviction of his alleged assassin.

When the call from Roeder’s friend came into Ney, Adams & Sylvester on May 31, Ney was on vacation, but a secretary took down the information. Although it was Sunday, the attorney quickly got the message and phoned the person who’d contacted his office. He didn’t know this individual, but later described him as very “concerned and compassionate” toward the accused, and they discussed the possibility of Ney representing Roeder. Ney called his partner, Doug Adams, asking him to go over to the detention facility and set up an initial meeting with Roeder, standard operating procedure inside the criminal justice system.

“When somebody gets arrested,” says Ney, “a family member usually calls us and says they need a lawyer and then we go to the jail and talk to the person. It works like this because once you’ve been locked up you can’t just go to the Yellow Pages and look for a lawyer. Someone has to help you do this.”

On Monday, June 1, Adams went to the jail to speak with Roeder, but wasn’t allowed in. The official reason for this was that because the inmate hadn’t personally placed Adams or Ney on a visitors’ list, or specifically asked to see the attorneys, they’d been denied access. When Adams demanded that a judge change this policy, the request was turned down. In effect, this meant that Roeder would now be represented pro bono by public defenders instead of by a high-priced lawyer who’d made his name by winning difficult cases against the DA’s office (and there may well have been money available for a pricey Roeder defense team because some of those who most strongly supported the murder of Dr. Tiller had considerable financial assets). Since Adams and Ney couldn’t get to the defendant quickly and lay out a possible plan, they also weren’t able to instruct him that above all he should talk to no one, starting with the press.

Ney was more than surprised by these developments.

“I was not happy about this,” he says. “Almost as soon as we were told that we couldn’t see Roeder, reporters were suddenly able to speak with him—but not members in good standing with the bar.”

What conclusions did the lawyer draw from all this?

“You can draw whatever conclusions you want to. I have my own conclusions, but I’ll keep them to myself. The question in Wichita becomes: Is this how we’re supposed to operate in the future or is this just one very special case? If a prosecutor’s son or daughter got arrested, do you think they’d be able to get a lawyer of their choice into the jail to see them? The entire criminal bar in Wichita was taken aback by what happened. It’s hogwash. The right to counsel is guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment, so this isn’t how we’re supposed to do business.”

For three days after his arrest, Roeder was kept wrapped inside the skirt, which brought on wretched memories of being in a mental hospital as a teenager and didn’t make sleeping any easier. Lying awake at night, he thought about the impact of the murder on his family members, especially on his son and aging mother, and hoped they hadn’t been affected too adversely. He wondered how those in the anti-abortion movement had received the news and why some of them weren’t trying to contact or visit him in jail. Hadn’t he done exactly what they’d wanted and prayed for somebody to do throughout the past three decades? Wasn’t this why they revered Paul Hill, the man who shot Dr. John Britton, as a hero? When were they going to step forward and support him?

“He’s never been a member of KFL and I’ve never heard of him,” Mary Kay Culp, the Kansans for Life executive director, said about Roeder on June 1. “He’s not on our mailing list. He’s never given us money.”

Two other anti-abortion groups, Operation Rescue and the Kansas Coalition for Life, not only immediately condemned the shooting, but tried to disassociate themselves from the suspect. The head of the KCL, Mark Gietzen, who’d repeatedly kneeled in the gutter in front of Tiller’s clinic to impede his entrance, said that if Roeder was connected to the pro-life movement, it would set their cause back twenty years.

Troy Newman, director of Operation Rescue, personally denounced the killing and said he was in mourning like everybody else.

“We are pro-life,” he told
The New York Times
, “and this act was antithetical to what we believe.”

He went even further and said to the
Times
that Tiller had been a “worthy adversary.” And that the alleged murderer had “killed more babies than he has saved” because now it would be more difficult than ever to outlaw abortion.

When Newman was informed that somebody named Scott Roeder had posted his thoughts on Operation Rescue’s blog, he responded that the man was “not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer.”

Yet Roeder had told numerous people that he’d contributed at least $1,000 to the organization and had the receipts to prove it. On the day of the murder, an envelope reading “Cheryl Op Rescue,” with Cheryl Sullenger’s phone number scribbled on it, had been found in the Ford Taurus. Sullenger wasn’t just a member of Operation Rescue, but its senior policy adviser. In 1988, she’d pled guilty to conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic and served nearly two years in prison. After the Kansas City TV station KMBC reported on the discovery of the envelope in Roeder’s car, a local alternative newspaper,
The Pitch
, phoned Sullenger to ask about her connection to the alleged killer.

“He hasn’t called me recently,” she told them.

Then she altered her story and admitted to having had multiple phone conversations with Roeder before Tiller was murdered. Both she and Newman eventually acknowledged that the suspect had contacted Operation Rescue to find out the time and location for Tiller’s 2009 trial.

As these comments and developments filtered back into the detention facility, Roeder became angrily disappointed with the people he’d thought were his allies. How could they turn their backs on him now?

Sleep-deprived and upset, confused by the actions of those he’d admired, he began to carp to his jailers. It was still too cold in his cell, he’d been denied phone privileges, the food was inedible, the guards were dealing with him like a common thug, and he needed his sleep apnea machine so he could get more rest. Why were they showing him so little respect? The only positive thing was that Tiller’s clinic had been closed since last Monday, while his family and employees mourned and made preparations for the funeral.

Roeder then did what no attorney would have ever advised him to do and took his complaints outside of the jail. On June 4, his fourth full day in custody, he phoned the Associated Press and stated that he wasn’t anti-government, as the press had wrongly been reporting, but “anti-corrupt government…I haven’t been convicted of anything and I am being treated as a criminal…”

Increasingly worried about his elderly mother, Doris, in Topeka, he made a collect call to a woman in Kansas City whom he’d once worked with and befriended. In years past, they’d gone out to dinner and had many intense discussions about the Bible. He’d mowed her grass, and she viewed him as a “very kind man,” but she was pro-choice and his intensity on this subject disturbed her, so they’d agreed not to talk about abortion. She was stunned to hear that he’d been accused of murdering Dr. Tiller and far more stunned when he called her from jail to ask her for a favor. Could she contact his mother and tell her that he loved her and hoped to be in communication with her soon? The friend fulfilled this request, but Doris replied that she never wanted to hear from or see her son again.

Following his incarceration, Roeder began receiving copies of extreme anti-abortion pamphlets, featuring graphic pictures, from the fringes of the movement. When he mailed one of these to this same friend in Kansas City, she said she never wanted to speak with him again, either. Yet those on the far edges of the anti-abortion flank
were
contacting him and thanking him for what he’d done.

While adjusting to his jail routine, he was examined by a psychiatrist to see if he was mentally competent to stand trial. The doctor concluded that he was not legally insane and could be a participant in the courtroom. Because he was basically indigent, Roeder had been appointed two public defenders: Steve Osburn, who’d represented BTK during his confessions, and Mark Rudy. They wanted him to stop talking to the media, but it was too late for that and he wasn’t going to listen to their advice anyway.

By dawn of June 1, Lindsey had been contacted by CBS’s
Early Morning
, ABC’s
Good Morning, America
, and
Inside Edition
. A
New York Times
reporter was camped outside her home and the local press were coming and going on her street. She’d received a call from the
Los Angeles Times
and from a journalist in London, while others were trying to reach her at the church day care center. She said no to most of them, but when she turned down
Good Morning, America
, a producer of the show showed up at her door with a bag of food. CBS countered by sending flowers, while CNN was demanding an exclusive arrangement that she speak only with them. Adjusting to the fact that her ex-husband was in jail for the murder of Dr. Tiller was only one of her challenges.

“Meeting all these media people,” she says, “was like having an out-of-body experience.”

She and Nick were big fans of cable TV’s MSNBC and particularly of Rachel Maddow, the Air America radio talk show host who’d ascended to nightly appearances on the network during the 2008 election cycle. By May 2009, she had her own evening program and was an established star in the progressive wing of American politics. Funny, brilliant, and to the left of most of MSNBC’s on-air talent, Maddow was about as far removed from
The O’Reilly Factor
and the abortion views of Scott Roeder as you could get—one reason that Lindsey and her son liked her so much. Right after the murder, Maddow had Tiller’s colleague Dr. Susan Hill, of North Carolina, on to talk about violence against abortion providers.

“We’re still here,” Dr. Hill said, “and we’re going to be here.”

Maddow invited Lindsey to be on her show, but the appearance didn’t take place, yet Lindsey did go on CNN. Nick gave no interviews, and ever since hearing about Dr. Tiller’s death and his father’s arrest, he’d repeatedly asked himself if he’d observed anything unusual about his dad last Friday during their final evening together, any clues that might have caused him to intervene and prevent this tragedy. The truth was that he hadn’t, but that didn’t make the killing any easier to understand or accept.

By Wednesday afternoon, June 3, most of the reporters had left Lindsey alone, including the one who’d kept jumping out of the bushes whenever she’d walked outside. She handwrote a sign—“Family Sleeping Please Respect Our Wishes”—and put it by the front stoop, then lay down to rest for the first time since last Saturday night. She hadn’t really had any time alone for almost four days, or any time to feel what she’d just been through, and was about to doze off when she heard a soft tapping at the door. It was probably the FBI or the ATF or the WPD. Glancing outside, she saw a middle-aged woman in shorts, who announced that she was a friend of Scott’s.

Opening the door, Lindsey was perplexed and a little frightened.

“Tell me who you are,” she said.

She was the girlfriend Roeder had brought to the house more than fifteen years earlier, when Nick was five. Lindsey remembered the couple kissing and fondling each other in front of the boy, before Scott took him aside and showed him images of aborted fetuses.

Lindsey slammed the door shut, suddenly filled with memories and fears—the old fear from Nick’s childhood that Scott would take the boy away and they’d never come back, the deepest fear that she couldn’t protect her son from the man she’d chosen as her husband. Walking back inside the house, she sat down and began to tremble and then to cry, and this time, unlike every other time she’d felt like crying since last Sunday afternoon, she gave in to it. As she sobbed, all the pain she’d pushed aside through all the years came rushing up, the pain of marrying someone who had disappointed and hurt her and failed to stand up for his son; the pain of living with somebody who was unreliable and unstable and verbally abusive, wasting their money and refusing to support their child; the pain of having contacted law enforcement again and again—the FBI and the Kansas City police—and trying to tell them that Scott was dangerous and had to be stopped, but nobody had listened or taken action; the pain of reaching out to Scott’s family, but they hadn’t wanted to hear about his extremism and hoped it was just a temporary phase.

She cried because she’d wondered for the past two decades what she could have done better as a wife, a mother, and a daughter to help her ex-husband, her son, and her aging father. And because she believed that Scott should have received psychiatric treatment long ago, but he’d refused every opportunity to help himself. And now she couldn’t help him and it was clear to everyone just how dangerous he was, and she was afraid that he’d send somebody to her home to harm her or Nick.

She wept for all the times her ex had called her ignorant and demeaned her and she’d endured this, trying to keep the peace, but one day her silence would end and then he’d hear her truth.