A Death in Wichita (23 page)

America’s press corps was ramping up to come to Wichita for the biggest media event in the city since the February 2005 arrest of BTK. Members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other feminist groups, along with anti-abortion protesters from coast to coast, were phoning, e-mailing, and texting one another, offering their opinions or making plans to attend the funeral. South central Kansas would be a battleground once again, even as Dr. Tiller was being buried.

On the night of his death, Wichita held a vigil for him at the heavily guarded Reformation Lutheran, with his wife and family in attendance (in all, forty-five states would hold vigils for the slain man, while in Congress U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter of New York called for a resolution condemning the murder). On Friday, June 5, three hundred people came to an interfaith wake at Wichita’s First United Methodist Church, sponsored by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim organizations, but the largest event was the funeral the following morning. Under a sunlit sky fast becoming oppressive, the WPD and U.S. marshals started arriving at 7 a.m. for the ten o’clock service at College Hill United Methodist Church. By eight, the media had assembled along the side streets and neighbors were coming out to watch from their porches, a police chopper circling overhead. At 8:30, fifty American Legion members rolled in on their motorcycles to honor Tiller as a navy veteran and to provide a show of muscle if protesters tried to disrupt the memorial.

Worshippers from Reformation Lutheran stood by the front of the church giving out white carnations, as the Tiller family distributed a handout that read, “Family, friends and colleagues have come together to celebrate the life of a devoted humanitarian and loving father, grandfather and husband, George R. Tiller, M.D. People are here today from across the country to celebrate…a man who wholeheartedly dedicated his life to kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect.”

More than a dozen demonstrators showed up from Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka. Known mostly for picketing military funerals because of their opposition to U.S. Army policy regarding gays, the protesters were kept a block away from the church by police. They held up a sign reading, “God Sent the Shooter.” Phelps’s eldest daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, led them in singing “Killing children makes God angry” to the tune of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” When Reverend John Martin of College Hill United Methodist approached the group and tried to offer them carnations, they screamed in his face. A cop told him to back away, and he did.

Outside the church, one hundred people, including the civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred, formed a long line—a “Martyr Guard”—stretching down the block and designed to protect the Tiller family as they entered the service. The guard wore “National Organization for Women” T-shirts with “Attitude Is Everything” written across the back. Inside the sanctuary, seven hundred people found seats, with a video screen in the overflow room providing funeral coverage to the media and three hundred others, including some former Tiller patients. His casket was draped in a white shroud and to its left was a portrait of the doctor and a towering floral arrangement spelling out, “TRUST WOMEN.” Hundreds of mourners also wore “Attitude Is Everything” buttons. The crowd was estimated at a thousand, but no prominent Kansas politician, such as the former governor, Kathleen Sebelius, or the head of a major anti-abortion organization, such as Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, was present.

All four of Tiller’s grown children spoke. The oldest, Jennifer, said that her father had told her that “life is like an Impressionist painting. When you are up close to it, it can be confusing and not make any sense…Only when you stand back from it can you see the broad, masterful strokes of the artist…Maybe my dad wasn’t even aware of what he painted because he was so close to it…As I look out on you today—all of you, in many colors—I see all the brushstrokes…all the dots. I see all the people, the color, the canvas of my dad’s life…He really did paint an incredible masterpiece, and it’s…all of you. You are my dad’s living masterpiece.”

Throughout the service, the word “abortion” was avoided and only Tiller’s son, Maury, referred to the shooting: “I struggle with the manner in which he was welcomed into heaven.”

The family announced the establishment of the George R. Tiller Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Women’s Health, and Larry Borcherding, a Tiller friend since college, delivered the twenty-two-minute eulogy:

“Dear God, get heaven ready because Mr. Enthusiasm is coming. Heaven will never be the same…”

The emotional crescendo of the morning came when Jeanne Tiller stood to sing and dedicated her performance to “my best buddy and the love of my life.” With her head erect and her back straight, in a voice that didn’t waver and over the sounds of weeping, she belted out the Lord’s Prayer and received a standing ovation. Even some journalists in attendance had difficulty holding back tears and were talking about the performance months later. As the funeral came to a close, mourners walked out into the burning sunshine and a few pro-choice activists talked to the press.

“First we cry,” said Gloria Allred, “and then we fight.”

The succinct floral arrangement beside Tiller’s casket resonated beyond any of the songs or speeches. The phrase “Trust Women” was deceptively simple and went to the heart of the war over abortion—the two words implying that it wasn’t for government, religion, men, or other social institutions to decide what was right for the individual female when confronting one of life’s most wrenching moments. Women were ultimately responsible for dealing with the consequences, good and bad, of their choices, and real freedom, real equality, and real responsibility included the right to make a wrong or harmful decision. Some women who’d had abortions weren’t haunted by them, but others were and the haunting could live on for decades. I’d spent considerable time at a Denver women’s prison visiting an inmate serving a life sentence for killing a young wife and mother, just like herself. She blamed the murder in part on the residue of her teenage abortion. She may have been using this argument to dull some of her guilt and shame over gunning down another woman, but whenever we spoke about this one thing became clear: she’d taken me into an intensely female realm that was outside of my own experience. There were parts of her life as a woman that I could not enter into.

Dr. Tiller could have easily taken a different career path and avoided danger, but he became, as he once put it, “a willing participant” in the abortion war, committing himself to it until death. The flowers by his casket made a fitting final statement about his beliefs: you can’t really protect women or men from their choices, so let them have their own lives and trust the process. Given the history of society’s efforts to control women’s sexuality and reproduction, this remained a revolutionary idea. No wonder it disturbed and frightened some people so deeply.

One pallbearer in Wichita was Dr. Warren Hern. Four days after the service, the Boulder physician wrote a letter to President Obama, calling on the chief executive to look at Tiller’s death in the larger context of investigating and stopping domestic terrorism. Over the years, Hern had received “thousands of death threats” and it was “past time for this continuing anti-abortion terrorism and violence to end…We need your help—now.”

The following day, Hern expanded on this theme during an address at Denver’s Temple Emmanuel, the same synagogue where almost twenty-five years earlier to the day, Alan Berg had been memorialized. The speakers at Tiller’s funeral had tried to avoid controversy, but that had never been Hern’s style. He didn’t narrow his focus on Tiller’s assassination, but described the environment that had surrounded and supported it, an environment about to explode across America into more racial and religious violence.

“In the highly specialized world of late-term abortion for women with desperate needs,” he said, “George and I were each other’s only peers. Within two weeks after starting to do abortions at Colorado’s first freestanding, nonprofit abortion clinic in Boulder in 1973, I started getting obscene death threats in the middle of the night. I slept with a rifle by my bed at my house in the mountains, and I expected someone to try to kill me…

“After two dozen clinic bombings in 1984, FBI Director William Webster said that the incidents weren’t terrorism because ‘we don’t know who’s doing it.’ Since those times, the anti-abortion rhetoric has been filled with descriptions of doctors as ‘baby killers,’ ‘mass murderers,’ and ‘child killers.’ The anti-abortion fanatics call themselves ‘pro-life’ while they are killing doctors and other health workers who help women…‘Pro-life’ is not a neutral, descriptive term. It is a dagger of psychological warfare that is backed by hate and terror…a profound libel and insult to those who help women. Words kill, and the phrase ‘pro-life’ is an obscene and grotesque sophistry…

“Fox News TV host Bill O’Reilly, who calls himself ‘pro-life,’ made an obsession of obscenely referring to Dr. Tiller as ‘George Tiller, the baby killer.’ He repeated this epithet dozens of times. He demonized and vilified Dr. Tiller on the public airwaves. This is called ‘target identification.’ This is electronic fascism…”

Because of his outspoken response to Tiller’s murder, Hern would soon get a call from an O’Reilly producer in New York, asking him to appear on the show to debate the abortion issue. Hern had been on Fox before, with the talk show host Sean Hannity, who’d angered the physician by referring to him as “Mr.” instead of “Dr.” Following Tiller’s death, Hern was expecting a call from Fox and was prepared for it. He had his own ideas about how to conduct an on-air interview between himself and O’Reilly, and when the call came in, he would give the producer an earful.

Hern said at the synagogue, “We don’t have to invade other countries to find terrorists. They are right here, killing abortion doctors…

“[Dr. Tiller] represented the value of the individual adult human being as opposed to state control of individual lives. He represented a thought. The man who killed Dr. Tiller tried to kill a thought. The idea that an embryo or fetus is equal to, or more important than, the life of a cantankerous adult doctor is no longer a sick private delusion. It is a collective psychosis masquerading as religion that has become a political force threatening democratic society…The main difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about eight thousand miles…

“I am now, once again, under the twenty-four-hour protection of heavily armed U.S. marshals. They risk their lives for me…The American anti-abortion movement is opposed to the rule of law, a secular society, the American Constitution, representative government, personal freedom, democracy and thought. The spirit of true freedom, the security of its citizens, the peace of civil society, and the soul of America is at stake here. Dr. Tiller’s assassination is the latest blow to that freedom.

“Wake up, America.”

On the day of Tiller’s funeral, Roeder called the Associated Press from jail and spoke about the crime. His comments quickly became public, and one was provocative enough to change his legal status.

“I know,” he told the AP reporter, “there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.”

Hearing this, Judge Warren Wilbert bumped the inmate’s bond from $5 million to $20 million.

But this did not keep “similar events” from happening across America.

Within twenty-four hours of Tiller’s death, a father and his nine-year-old daughter were gunned down in southern Arizona. The police arrested Shawna Forde, leader of the anti-illegal-immigration group Minutemen American Defense, as the key suspect in the murder of Brisenia and Raul Flores. The day after Tiller was killed, Private William Andrew Long of the U.S. Army had just completed basic training and was volunteering at the west Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting office before taking an assignment in South Korea. While smoking a cigarette outside the building, he was shot dead and an eighteen-year-old fellow soldier, Private Quinton I. Ezeagwula, eighteen, was seriously wounded. The alleged gunman, Abdulhakim Muhammad, age twenty-three, told investigators that he wanted to kill as many army personnel as he could “because of what they had done to Muslims in the past.”

Echoing Roeder, Muhammad then made a collect call to the Associated Press from the Pulaski County jail.

“I do feel I’m not guilty,” he told the AP. “I don’t think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason.”

Muhammad’s actions were multiplied several months later when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist and a Muslim, allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty others. Hit by return fire, he survived the worst mass shooting ever at an American military base. Hasan was about to be deployed to an Afghanistan war zone and was enraged over how U.S. military personnel treated Muslims and the racial and religious slurs he’d heard at the base. The United States was conducting a “war on Islam” and he wanted “to do good work for God.”

On June 10, the day Dr. Hern wrote President Obama asking for help with domestic terrorism directed at abortion doctors, eighty-eight-year-old James von Brunn charged into the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., armed with a rifle. The museum draws about 1.7 million visitors a year and sits across from the National Mall and within sight of the Washington Monument. It houses exhibits and records from the Holocaust, and that evening it planned to debut a play about the Nazis’ victim Anne Frank and the American civil rights martyr Emmett Till. In 2002, two white supremacists had plotted to build a fertilizer bomb, like the one Timothy McVeigh had used in Oklahoma City, to level this museum.

A few days before Von Brunn came to the museum, President Obama had visited the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany.

“There are those who insist the Holocaust never happened,” he’d said at Buchenwald. “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”

James von Brunn had an anti-Semitic Web site and was the author of
Kill the Best Gentiles
. Internet writings attributed to him said that the Holocaust was a hoax and decried a Jewish conspiracy to “destroy the white gene pool…At Auschwitz, the ‘Holocaust’ myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations.” Back in 1981, while carrying a revolver, a knife, and a sawed-off shotgun, Von Brunn had entered the room next to where the Federal Reserve Board was meeting. Because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties, he hoped to take board members hostage, but his actions ended in a conviction for attempted kidnapping. In 2004 and ’05, he’d lived briefly in Hayden Lake, Idaho, for many years home to the Aryan Nations compound that recruited the men in the Order who killed Alan Berg.

When Von Brunn burst into the Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, several thousand people were looking at exhibits. He emptied his rifle, killing an African-American security guard, thirty-nine-year-old Stephen T. Johns, before being shot and hospitalized in critical condition (he died in early January 2010).

“This outrageous act,” President Obama said after the assault, “reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

The Secret Service reported that death threats against Obama himself were up 400 percent since he’d taken office, the highest level ever for an American president. Two preachers, Wiley Drake in Buena Park, California, and Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, made no secret of their prayers for Obama’s death. On the Internet, the president’s enemies were gearing up to sell T-shirts, teddy bears, bumper stickers, framed tiles, and notepads carrying a biblical quotation from Psalms 109:8: “Let his days be few…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”

Three days after the shooting by Von Brunn, the longtime Republican activist Rusty DePass added to the racially charged atmosphere spreading across the country by making a reference to First Lady Michelle Obama on Facebook. A gorilla that had escaped from a zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, he said, was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors—probably harmless.”