A Death in Wichita (24 page)

One day before Von Brunn’s attack, the Tiller family surprised many on both sides of the abortion issue by announcing that it was permanently closing WHCS.

“It was,” said Julie Burkhart, “the right thing to do. It had to happen.”

“We are thankful,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, “that Tiller’s clinic will not reopen and thankful that Wichita is now abortion-free.”

Nancy Northup, president of New York City’s Center for Reproductive Rights, stated that the end of WHCS “illustrates the ongoing harassment endured by abortion providers [and]…leaves an immediate and immense void in the availability of abortion.”

That “void” had now spread to most parts of the United States. According to 2005 statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank focused on sexual and reproductive health, about 87 percent of American counties had no abortion providers. In Kansas it had been 96 percent before the Tiller homicide.

Following the pronouncement, Roeder called the CNN reporter Ted Rowlands and declared the WHCS closing “a victory for all the unborn children.” While not admitting to killing Dr. Tiller, he said that if he was tried and convicted of the crime, “the entire motive was the defense of the unborn.”

With Tiller dead, his clinic gone, and a turbulent era in Kansas politics finished, I decided to contact someone I’d been thinking about since the physician’s demise. Paul Morrison’s law office was in Olathe, where he now worked as a defense attorney, and I was curious about his views on the murder and the shutting down of WHCS. Who could say what would have happened if he’d never met Linda Carter? Or if Dr. Tiller had never gone on trial because of the Inquisition? Since the sex scandal that had led to Morrison’s resignation as attorney general in late 2007, he’d tried to keep a low profile and seemed taken aback by my call, making it very clear very fast that he didn’t want to discuss any of these matters.

“My opponents,” he said in a weary voice, “always painted me as a big pro-choice supporter, but that really isn’t true.”

When I attempted to pose a question about what had happened to Tiller, the former DA cut me off.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “all I’m trying to do right now is make some money.”

Then he hung up.

I dialed another lawyer, Dan Monnat in Wichita, who’d had several weeks to absorb the recent events.

“It’s a real shame,” he said, “that the history of the world is so much about the loss of our human champions, particularly in the arena of civil rights. That’s what this fight is really all about—the right of a woman to choose is a civil right and the slaying of a doctor who allows a woman to make those choices and enjoy that civil right is a political assassination. How do self-serving politicians like Phill Kline and his minions not take some responsibility for the death of someone they unfairly and repeatedly demonized in the press by name-calling and frivolous prosecutions?”

How had the loss of Dr. Tiller affected him personally?

He didn’t respond immediately, but sounded as if he were shuffling some papers on his desk, in an attempt to maintain his composure.

“It’s our duty as lawyers to help a family in crisis,” he said, “but then the emergency subsides and things eventually settle down. The media attention starts to fade away. Time passes and the quiet moments set in when you’re alone with your thoughts and it dawns on you that someone’s energy and life and vitality are not in your life anymore. You feel that—you feel the absence of it. You realize that you’re never going to experience somebody’s sense of humor and humanity again. Ever.”

He was silent for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “People are free to speak their mind against abortion and to protest against it, but it’s illegal to block a woman’s access to a clinic or to kill a doctor. These criminal acts are nothing but terrorism. If your goal is to change the abortion law, change it through legal channels.”

As Tiller’s death continued to resonate and spring became summer in 2009, something building beneath the country’s surface for years and intensifying since the Obamas moved into the White House was fully unleashed. Widespread rage erupted against the new president as he tried to go forward with his administration and his plans to reform health care. From coast to coast, people organized protests against him and carried signs comparing him to Adolf Hitler. One racially unsettling poster showed him wearing pancake makeup and a splash of red lipstick, like the Joker in a Batman movie. The “Tea Party” demonstrations against the president and his plan to change health care were just coming into vogue. A nationwide movement of citizens calling themselves “birthers” constantly questioned Obama for not having a proper birth certificate, even though this issue had been resolved to the satisfaction of the American public and U.S. voting laws long before the 2008 election. In Denver, for example, the talk show host Peter Boyles put up on his Web page this headline above an image of American schoolchildren honoring the new chief executive: “BARACK OBAMA KIDS AND HITLER YOUTH SING FOR THEIR LEADER.”

Not to be outdone, State Senator Dave Schultheis of Colorado compared the president to the September 11 terrorists.

“Don’t for a second,” he tweeted, “think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.”

Fox’s Glenn Beck, meanwhile, homed in on the issue that had shaped so much of American history and driven the first Civil War.

The president, Beck stated, had “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. This guy is, I believe, a racist…The Manchurian Candidate couldn’t destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it.”

In the wake of such rhetoric, the same thing began happening to the Obama family that had earlier happened to Alan Berg and George Tiller, once they’d repeatedly been identified as targets of hatred. A man standing on a street corner in Maryland held up a placard reading “Death to Obama” and “Death to Michelle and Her Two Stupid Kids.” In New Hampshire, a protester brought a holstered gun to a political gathering, and a North Carolina man pled guilty to threatening Obama, after calling 911 twice from his trailer south of the Virginia border and declaring that he was going to assassinate the president. The Alan Berg story was back with a vengeance, reaching into the top levels of the American government and affecting the new president in ways none of the rest of us could really imagine. What conversations did he and the First Lady now have about the safety of their family? And how did this impact his thinking or acting on public policy issues?

The story I’d personally tried to avoid since the late 1980s no longer seemed avoidable. About an hour after Dr. Tiller was killed, I was contacted by a woman I’d grown up with who told me about the crime before this news had been released to the media. Then I learned that a nurse who’d worked on one of Tiller’s last operations at Wesley Medical Center was from my hometown, along with a police officer who’d been assigned to the case minutes after the shooting. My sister’s first-grade teacher was Scott Roeder’s grandmother and the Kansas militia had an outpost in my native county.

In mid-June, I packed a bag, rented a car, turned up the satellite radio, and headed for Wichita, moving toward a reality I’d been pursuing, in one form or another, for at least twenty-five years. Or maybe it had been pursuing me. Hate groups across the country were up more than 50 percent and white supremacists were reuniting with a renewed sense of purpose. The new American civil war, which appeared to have faded for a few weeks after Barack Obama had become president, was in full force.

Driving through western Kansas, I saw a billboard showing a huge image of Jesus rising out of a wheat field, holding stalks of grain in his hand and trying to recruit for Christianity. Numerous signs along I-70 held messages like “Abortion Kills What God Created.” The billboard and signs made me uncomfortable, as they had every previous time I’d driven this road back to my hometown. They were a part of where I was from, a part of me I couldn’t escape, a part of the war that was affecting countless Americans. With the Grateful Dead playing in the background, I drove and thought about President Obama, whose African father was black and whose white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, came from just outside Wichita. Racial discomfort and racism itself were things the president had known intimately since birth. I wondered if he, like so many of his countrymen, had learned to live with a divided heart—with love for his homeland and family, but with shame for the sins that lay very close to his bones and his blood.

Wichita was just over the next hill.

Twelve days after Tiller’s death, Roeder wrote to his ex-wife from jail. He was no longer forced to wear the “skirt” that had restrained his movements inside the cell and was off suicide watch, but his mood wasn’t good. Reading his letter, Lindsey wondered if he’d been in a manic phase before and during the murder, but had then crashed, sitting by himself in solitary confinement with nothing but a mattress and a toilet. His confusion and bitterness about marriage and fatherhood were festering again, and he’d selected his target of blame.

He’d heard “from secondhand sources” about Lindsey’s interviews with the media following the shooting and this had further angered him. If she was willing “to share with the world” her views about Tiller’s demise, Roeder wrote, would she let him know what she’d said? He surmised that he’d never hear back from her about this request—“because that would keep in character with being the grown up spoiled brat that you are,” the same character he accused her of displaying hundreds of times in the past when she’d hung up on him.

But his real concern was with Nick, who’d also turned into a spoiled brat. During their marriage, he’d taught their son “basic things in life LIKE SAYING THANK YOU,” but Nicholas never thanked him for taking him out to dinner or to a movie or after Roeder had given him money. At the end of their evenings together, Nick would just say good-bye, and Roeder was particularly rankled that he’d lately given the young man “a fairly decent knife,” but received no gratitude in return.

“I’m sorry to say,” he wrote Lindsey, “but it looks like you’ve done a very poor job of raising Nicholas after our divorce.”

Along with the letter, Roeder had sent Lindsey and his son very graphic photos and some writings he’d received from Iowa’s Dan Holman, of the anti-abortion group Missionaries to the Preborn. The material included the infamous biblical passage from Genesis 9:6, “Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.” Following the killing in Wichita, Holman had told CNN that “all abortionists are deserving of death, and they are not the only ones. There are politicians and judges, and others who support this murder are also deserving of death.”

When asked about the assassination of Dr. Tiller, Holman replied, “I was cheered by it.”

Roeder fired off another angry letter to Troy Newman, after learning that the head of Operation Rescue had publicly stated that the inmate was “not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer” to OR. During a jailhouse interview, Roeder told
The Kansas City Star
what he’d been telling others since the shooting: he’d donated at least a thousand dollars to Operation Rescue and had the paperwork to prove it. To the
Star
, he claimed that he’d written Newman, “You better get your story straight because my lawyer said it’d be good for me to show that I was supporting a pro-life organization.”

Operation Rescue had larger concerns than Roeder’s pointed remarks to Newman. For years it had thrived financially by having a visible enemy like Tiller to stir up passion and inspire its members to keep sending in money; with him gone, the impact was quick and severe. During the summer of 2009, the organization told supporters that it faced a “major financial crisis” and might shut down entirely unless help arrived soon. It also reported that since Tiller’s demise, it had received a number of death threats.

While Operation Rescue, Kansans for Life, and other anti-abortion groups had immediately distanced themselves from Roeder, the extremists in the movement rallied around the inmate. They were still talking about pooling their funds and hiring a private attorney for the defendant to fight the first-degree murder charge with a legal strategy called the “necessity defense” or “defending those who cannot defend themselves.” One was justified in committing a murder, went this argument, in order to stop a greater evil. The tack had been tried before in the case of Paul Hill, and it had failed.

Donald Spitz, the sponsor of the Army of God Web site, sent Roeder seven anti-abortion pamphlets, which the prisoner distributed to others through the mail. He got more support from two anti-abortionists in the Kansas City area, Anthony Leake and Eugene Frye, and Leake in particular saw him as a new hero of their movement. Roeder had the backing of the activist Michael Bray, author of
A Time to Kill
, and of Dave Leach of Des Moines, Iowa. In 1996, Leach had interviewed Roeder for his
Uncle Ed Show
on Des Moines’s public access cable, giving Roeder the chance to explain his Freeman philosophy. In the mid-1990s, Roeder had visited Shelley Shannon in a Topeka jail, and she now sent him money from her cell in Minnesota, where she was still serving time for her anti-abortion crimes. Bray, Leach, and Spitz had all signed the 1993 declaration advocating the use of force against abortion providers, distributed by Paul Hill before he’d killed Dr. John Britton. Following Tiller’s murder, Leach created a homemade video, available on the Internet. It featured two very young girls, one black and one white, who stood next to some stuffed animals and posed questions.

“Can a pro-lifer,” the white girl asked, “shoot an abortionist and still get a trial…by jury?”

Leach answered this by saying that “most lawyers” did not expect Roeder to get “what average citizens would call a trial by jury. I’m trying to help him get one.” To this end, Leach began composing a detailed and legally sophisticated motion that would run to more than a hundred pages and eventually be submitted to the judge in Roeder’s case. Leach would emerge as the defendant’s most significant anti-abortion ally and his document would play a role in the upcoming trial—a role that some found outrageous.

As Roeder communicated with the fringes, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. The recent killings in Wichita, at the Holocaust Museum, and elsewhere in America, he said, showed the need for a tougher U.S. hate crimes law to stop “violence masquerading as political activism…Over the last several weeks, we have witnessed brazen acts of violence, committed in places that many would have considered unthinkable.” He urged Congress to pass an updated version of the current hate crimes legislation, allowing for more effective prosecution of those who attacked people based on gender, disability, or sexual orientation. Holder also issued a directive to all U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to coordinate with the FBI, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, ATF, local law enforcement officials, and reproductive health care service providers to assess the current level of threats and take any and all measures to ensure that criminal conduct would be prosecuted.

The most intriguing official question following the death in Wichita was whether or not the Department of Justice would take Dr. Hern’s suggestion and open a larger probe into those who for years had openly called for the murder of abortion doctors. Did Roeder’s activist friends have any culpability in Tiller’s murder? Did they come under the umbrella of abetting a hate crime? Had they supported Roeder financially in a way that might have aided the shooting? And would the government go after suspects who’d advocated this kind of domestic terrorism, as they had in the Alan Berg case? That investigation had focused on all twenty-four members of the Order who’d either pled guilty or were successfully prosecuted under the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute. Would the feds employ it again, or conclude that Roeder was a “lone wolf” who’d acted by himself?

The murder of Dr. Tiller was the most publicized hate crime in years, and the first of its magnitude since President Obama had taken office. How the government responded would help define the new administration.

In June 2009, Dr. Hern became the target of an anti-abortionist and three months later a Denver grand jury indicted Donald Hertz, a seventy-year-old retired real estate broker from Spokane, Washington. He was charged with calling Hern’s Boulder office and threatening to kill his family.

Over the summer,
The O’Reilly Factor
contacted Hern, as he’d anticipated, and asked him to appear on the show. He expressed interest in doing this—
if
he could fly to New York and go on the program with his lawyer, and
if
his interview would be aired as it had been recorded and not subjected to a lot of editing. In the aftermath of Tiller’s murder and his own recent threat, Hern was ready for Fox.

“O’Reilly,” he says, “is a bully and a paid thug. I wasn’t going to duck him or to take any of his shit on the air. I wanted to do this for George because he never wanted to defend himself against these people. We have to confront them and call them what they are.”

According to Hern, he gave an O’Reilly producer several conditions under which he would be on the program and several dates that worked for him to make an appearance. He didn’t hear back with a confirmation.

“Mr. O’Reilly,” Hern says, “knew that he was not going to have a very pleasant experience with me. So they backed down. I guess they want to wait and have me on their show after
another
abortion doctor gets murdered.”