A Death in Wichita (7 page)

In 1954, a Mississippian named Fred Phelps was driving through Topeka when his car had a flat tire. As Phelps later told the story, this occurred right as the Supreme Court’s landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
decision was being handed down, leading to the racial integration of American schools. Because the board of education in this case was located in Topeka, Phelps felt this was his sort of town, and he decided to stay. In 1962, he earned a law degree from Topeka’s Washburn University, and his first major cases were based on supporting civil rights for African-Americans. He won enough of these to earn an award from the NAACP branch of Bonner Springs, Missouri.

Though Phelps fought for the cause of civil rights, his tolerance didn’t extend to homosexuals. In November 1955, dissatisfied with the other religious services he’d found in Topeka and eager to express his own views from the pulpit, he founded the Westboro Baptist Church in the Kansas state capital. At Westboro Baptist, he’d eventually begin promoting slogans such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”—after the U.S. Army had adopted its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military. He was also brutally anti-Semitic, and the Anti-Defamation League cited him for numerous comments, including something he’d once said about General Wesley Clark:

“Clark is a Jew…Beware! Jews killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men…”

In July 1979, Phelps had been permanently disbarred from practicing law in Kansas, but continued working as an attorney in federal court and spreading his message. His church was made up mostly of extended family, and he sent them out to protest the funerals of U.S. soldiers who’d died in combat—another way of denouncing gays who’d served in the military. Today, a sign above Westboro Baptist Church reads, “God Hates America.” Most of the local population tried to ignore Phelps and his church, tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood a few miles from downtown. But not everyone.

Suzanne James was an Iowa native who moved to Topeka and joined a pharmaceutical company. After her parents were killed in one of the biggest murder cases in the city’s history, she began learning about victims’ rights, or the lack of them, and was hired as the Shawnee County director of victims’ services. In the mid-1990s, she began tracking militia groups and other extremists who lived or passed through Topeka, eastern Kansas, and Missouri. After identifying leaders and members of hate groups, she gave their names to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mobile, Alabama, which monitored these organizations nationwide. James was convinced that Topeka’s decades-long tolerance of—or indifference to—Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church hadn’t just altered the Kansas capital, or the atmosphere of eastern Kansas, but had made this landscape more attractive to dangerous people associated with fringe groups that demonized gays, minorities, and abortion doctors.

“Phelps desensitized the whole community to hatred and hateful activities,” says James, “and that’s part of the backdrop of Dr. Tiller’s story in Kansas. Topeka has been far too tolerant of hate speech for far too long. For years, I believed that the local cops had a no-arrest policy toward the Phelps family because they were afraid of being sued by them. Phelps and his people are bullies and they enjoy making you a public target and then watching you squirm. The way to deal with them is to not allow yourself to be bullied, but to bully them right back. Topekans are way too polite and too reluctant to stand up against the Phelpses, but I’m not.”

As director of victims’ services, James openly criticized the Phelps family and its church. They retaliated by sending out faxes to offices across Topeka denouncing her as the Shawnee County district attorney’s “whore.”

“I filed charges against one of their teenagers for harassment,” she says, “after he started yelling at me on the street, ‘There goes the DA’s whore!’ I went straight to the police and the Phelpses stopped bothering me. Some places in America would have run Fred Phelps out of town a long time ago, but not here. Not Kansas. Not Topeka. Go over to the state capitol building and take a good look at that picture of John Brown. That’s the image they’re promoting. The fanatic with the gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.”

In 1996, after Roeder was arrested, James attended one of his court appearances to get a sense of who he was:

“Red flags were everywhere. He was a big imposing guy and I was struck by his manner. He didn’t rant and rave in court, the way some people do, but was very insistent and intense. His intensity was scary.

“What it all comes down to with a lot of these men is the issue of power and control. What really drives the abortion debate is that men feel they’ve lost control of women. And in fact, they have. Women are now free to make their own decisions about how they want to live their lives. Because of this, some white, heterosexual males in our society have a feeling of
false
disenfranchisement and alienation…

“I’ve tracked a number of these men with extreme views and they share certain characteristics. They’re overly aggressive, prone to physical violence, and have run-ins with the law. Some have domestic violence backgrounds or problems paying their bills. Others are not that stable to begin with. Schizophrenics, for example, tend to become obsessed with things and make them larger than they are. By associating with movements that are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-government, these men can rationalize their feelings by blaming everything on blacks, Jews, women, and the government. They’re angry to begin with, and these groups furnish them with an endless supply of scapegoats. The more they listen to the rhetoric, the more upset they get and the more they need an escape valve.”

While incarcerated, Roeder imitated his biblical hero Paul and began composing a series of letters. Many were written to his nine-year-old son, and they captured his affection for the boy and his desire to convey to him why he believed and acted as he did. The letters assumed that a child would not only understand the complex legal and religious issues the inmate was raising, but would agree with his point of view. It was the same style Roeder later used in virtually every conversation with adults, including strangers, almost as if he were talking to himself. On May 3, 1996, he wrote Nick how proud he was of him for helping his grandfather put new siding on their house and new caulking on the windows. After asking for a picture of the siding he acknowledged that he’d been stopped by the police for having a “perfectly legal” license plate.

“I’m in jail in Topeka now,” he told the youngster, “but that doesn’t mean I’ve done anything wrong.”

He’d studied common law, he explained, which said that for a crime to be committed there had to be a damaged party. Because none existed in his case, he hadn’t broken the law, but he had joined a long list of distinguished people who’d been unfairly locked up. Half of the New Testament had been written by Paul from prison, and it was now God’s purpose for Roeder to be behind bars:

“Romans 8:28 says ‘All things happen for the good of those that love the Lord, who are called according to His purpose.’ Sometimes we can’t see what God’s purpose is in our circumstances, or situations, but we just have to trust the Lord it is for the best.”

In closing, his tone shifted and became more fatherly and heartfelt. He said how much he missed his son, praised him for being such a good boy, and wanted to see him soon: “I LOVE YOU!!! Your Daddy.”

A few weeks later, he wrote Lindsey that his father had recently come to the jail for a visit and told him that Nick was confused by what had happened to Roeder:

“The way Dad put it, he might be afraid of me. He said that you said he doesn’t talk much about it.”

Nick’s confusion and silence about his dad were just beginning. In the future, as Roeder’s behavior became more challenging to everyone in his family, that silence would deepen as he tried to make sense of the man. Like others, Nick would eventually wonder what he could have done differently or better with his father.

In the letter, the inmate launched into a defense of himself, imploring Lindsey to make certain that the boy understood that Roeder had intended to hurt no one, desperately wanting his son to know he wasn’t violent. After admitting to Lindsey that she might not accept as true all the things he said about himself, he wanted her to “tell Nick what my intentions were, because I think he’d be more able to believe it if it were coming from you.”

He apologized for all the problems his arrest had created for her, their son, and her dad, but one day all of them would understand his choices, when he was finally able to tell the truth. In signing off, he didn’t tell Lindsey that he loved her.

The Kansas Court of Appeals overturned Roeder’s conviction, ruling that the police had conducted an illegal search when seizing evidence from his car. But while on probation, he’d disobeyed the judge’s orders and continued associating with anti-government groups. His probation was revoked and he was sent back to jail for failing to pay Social Security taxes.

With Roeder behind bars, Lindsey now filed for divorce, confident that she’d win sole custody of Nicholas and remove him from his father’s influence. She did, in fact, win, Scott was ordered to pay $134 a month in child support, and Lindsey had discretion over when Roeder saw the boy. She was present during many of their visits, but couldn’t always control what her ex-husband talked about on these occasions.

“When Nick was ten,” she says, “the three of us were shopping at a mall. We went into a Radio Shack and Scott came up to Nick and put his hand on his shoulder. He said that he’d plant a bomb at Planned Parenthood at night so that no one would get hurt. Nick looked up at him and reminded him that when he was a small child, his dad would never hurt a bird or a bug. He wouldn’t step on an ant or a spider. Nick didn’t understand why Scott wanted to blow up a building.

“Later on, when Nick was in the bathtub, he said to me, ‘My dad is just like the bomber at Oklahoma City.’ I didn’t know what to tell him.”

As Lindsey raised her son alone, Scott bounced back and forth among his contacts in various movements in Topeka and Kansas City, about to meet someone he regarded as a hero and possibly a love interest.

Shelley Shannon was thirteen and living in Wisconsin in 1969 when her parents got divorced. A few years later, as a high school junior, she became pregnant and gave birth to a girl named Angela. The two moved to Washington State, where Shelley had a born-again experience and began receiving apocalyptic literature from the “Last Days Ministries” in Texas. She came across a manual published by the Army of God, the most extreme and secretive anti-abortion group in the country. The booklet had bomb-making instructions of the kind McVeigh and Nichols had employed in Oklahoma City. During the Summer of Mercy, an AOG manual had surfaced in Wichita and echoed Genesis 9:6:

“We, the remnant of God-fearing men and women of the United States of Amerika, do officially declare war on the entire child-killing industry…and our most Dread Sovereign Lord God requires that whosoever shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

Shannon was one of the many who had joined the protests in Wichita that summer, and she began editing the anonymously written AOG manuals. Using the lessons learned from these writings, she traveled up and down the West Coast, setting fires at abortion clinics in Portland and Ashland, Oregon, and in Sacramento and Redding, California. She was no longer Shelley Shannon, mother and housewife, but “Shaggy West AOG” and on a mission she was committed to fulfill.

In August 1993, she rode a bus from the West Coast to Oklahoma City, where she rented a car and headed north to Kansas, pausing at rest stops before moving on to Wichita. Early on the morning of August 19, she drove to Dr. Tiller’s clinic, a loaded gun in her purse. With a friendly manner, she walked into the WHCS office and told the receptionist that she was a patient looking to consult with Tiller, but once inside she wasn’t able to find him. She left and went to a park, rethinking her strategy. Returning to the clinic, she fell in with the other anti-abortion demonstrators on the sidewalk and all of them shared stories about the Summer of Mercy. She introduced herself as “Ann from Sacramento,” and the other protesters were thrilled to have her support. At seven p.m., Tiller emerged from his office and stepped into his 1989 Chevy Suburban. When Shannon came toward him, he thought she was going to hand him some anti-abortion literature so he flipped her off.

She quickly fired six shots from a .32-caliber handgun, hitting him in each arm, blood and glass flying all over the car’s interior. He raced the engine and aimed the Chevy right at her, but stopped when she raised the gun as if to shoot again. Bleeding badly, he staggered into the clinic, where his wounds were treated by his staff, who insisted that he take as much time off as he needed to heal. He was back at work the next day, helping perform an abortion. He’d put on a flak jacket and stuck a sign outside the clinic reading, “WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS AND I’M GOING TO PROVIDE THEM.” With grim humor, Dr. Tiller once described the aftermath of being shot:

“The first time I drove my car back into the [clinic] parking lot…I thought, ‘This won’t bother me.’ I was wrong. It did bother me…For six weeks, I hired a Brink’s armored truck to pick me up at 7:00 in the morning and take me home at 5:00…As you know, that was the only time in my life I’ve been able to leave the clinic on time…”

As Shannon drove away from WHCS following the attempted murder, a Tiller employee jotted down her license plate. That evening when she returned the rental car to Oklahoma City, the police took her into custody. In her possession was a 1991
Life Advocate
magazine featuring an article about Tiller entitled “The Wichita Killer.” Shannon was transferred to a jail in Topeka, where one of her visitors was Scott Roeder, who came to see her every chance he could and now thought of himself as a member of the Army of God. In the backyard of Shannon’s home in Oregon, Wichita officials literally dug up an AOG manual. Each new edition of the manual had called for escalating acts of violence, with the third edition advocating the murder of abortion providers. It began with a “Declaration” to doctors:

“After praying, fasting, and making continual supplication to God for your pagan, heathen, infidel souls, we then peacefully, passively presented our bodies in front of your death camps, begging you to stop the mass murdering of infants. Yet you hardened your already blackened, jaded hearts. We quietly accepted the resulting imprisonment and suffering of our passive resistance. Yet you mocked God and continued the Holocaust. No longer! All of the options have expired…

“Not out of hatred of you, but out of love for the persons you exterminate, we are forced to take arms against you. Our life for yours—a simple equation…You shall not be tortured at our hands. Vengeance belongs to God only.”

One major player in AOG was Michael Bray, known as the “Chaplain” of the group and the author of
A Time to Kill
, which quoted biblical verse to justify force against abortion doctors. Another AOG member, Neal Horsley, posted the names and personal information of abortion providers on the Internet, along with photos and video of their patients, staff, and other physicians entering and exiting the clinics. A third AOG associate, Eric Robert Rudolph, later pled guilty to the nail-bomb murder of an off-duty police officer, Robert Sanderson, and the injuring of Nurse Emily Lyons at a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic. He was also found guilty of the murder of Alice Hawthorne and the bombing of 111 other people at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. Another AOG member, Donald Spitz, hosted the group’s Web site.

Shannon’s attack on Dr. Tiller inspired the Clinton administration to investigate anti-abortion organizations for evidence of a conspiracy to shut down clinics by murdering their physicians. Part of the probe centered on Paul Hill, who’d attended the trial of Michael Griffin after Griffin had killed Dr. David Gunn. In the spring of 1994, President Clinton convinced Congress to pass the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinics) Act, making it a crime to block access to medical facilities and deny women the opportunity to get abortions. When Shelley Shannon went on trial that March, Paul Hill was in the courtroom offering her support. After deliberating for eighty-two minutes, the jury convicted her and she was sentenced to prison for decades.

Anti-abortion activists were undeterred by President Clinton, the federal investigation, or the FACE Act. They issued “Wanted” or “Unwanted” posters of Tiller and other physicians, offering $5,000 for information leading to their arrest and the loss of their medical license. Dr. John Britton had replaced the murdered David Gunn at the Ladies Center in Pensacola, Florida. Just two weeks after Clinton signed the FACE Act, Paul Hill stood outside the center, yelling again and again, “Mommy, Mommy, don’t murder me!” The center called the police and they came to the clinic, but didn’t arrest Hill. A few days later, Hill repeated his performance and was busted for disorderly conduct, but soon released. He bought a shotgun and began taking target practice.

On July 29, 1994, he came to the clinic just before seven a.m. and planted twenty-two white wooden crosses in the ground nearby, each one meant to signify the death of a child. Standing near the clinic’s front door, he tried to distribute anti-abortion pamphlets and talk to women entering the building, until a policeman arrived and ordered him to remove the crosses. Hill complied, but the officer didn’t force him to leave the premises. At 7:27, Dr. Britton arrived in a blue Nissan pickup driven by James Barrett. Sitting behind Britton was Barrett’s wife, Jane. All three froze as Hill approached with a 12-gauge shotgun and fired at Britton before quickly reloading and firing again at Britton and then Barrett, killing them both, but not at Jane. Hill trotted away and was arrested within a few blocks.

Those running the Ladies Center contacted the FBI and demanded to know if
now
was the time for them to start enforcing the FACE Act—before more physicians were killed. President Clinton called Britton’s death domestic terrorism and asked for a full investigation of Paul Hill. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered U.S. marshals to provide security for clinics across the country and the feds created a task force on violence connected to abortion. That autumn, Hill was the first person tried in federal court under the FACE Act, and his legal strategy was the so-called “necessity defense,” contending that he’d killed Dr. Britton to protect the unborn because they could not defend themselves, and to stop the greater evil of abortion. He was convicted in October 1994 and received two life sentences in federal prison. In November 1994, he was tried on state murder charges and the jury took just twenty minutes to convict him. During his sentencing hearing, as the judge ordered him to die in the electric chair, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist, Regina Dinwiddie, leaped up in the courtroom.

“This man is innocent,” she shouted at the judge, “and his blood will be on your hands and the hands of the people of the state of Florida and on the jury!”

Dinwiddie was arrested for her outburst.

In 1984, after a series of abortion clinic bombings, the FBI had considered investigating the acts as part of a domestic terrorism conspiracy, but the idea had stalled out. In late 1994, a federal grand jury in Virginia, working with the Justice Department to investigate linkages behind the anti-abortion killings, issued subpoenas to Michael Bray, Don Spitz, and Anthony Leake, a Kansas City–area activist. When the feds were unable to establish these criminal links, the grand jury disbanded in 1996.

The violent year of 1994 was not yet over. On December 30, an apprentice hairdresser named John C. Salvi III charged into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, and opened fire with a .22-caliber rifle, killing a receptionist and wounding two others. He fled the clinic and drove on to Brookline’s Preterm Health Services, killing another receptionist and wounding two more. He left Massachusetts and fired two dozen shots into an abortion office in Norfolk, Virginia, before he was arrested. Following his conviction, Salvi committed suicide in prison. Despite these murders, and the rising bomb threats and clinic arsons during the mid-’90s, the FBI did not find a conspiracy tying any specific groups or individuals to the spreading bloodshed.

On October 23, 1998, the New York abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was murdered in his kitchen by James “Atomic Dog” Kopp, who then bolted the country. He was caught in 2001, convicted in 2003, and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

A week after Dr. Slepian was killed, Tiller’s clinic received a letter threatening to contaminate his employees with anthrax. Similar letters went out to five other clinics in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but the FBI said they were all hoaxes. Clayton Waagner, who was convicted of sending more than 550 fake anthrax letters to clinics in 2001, signed many of them “Army of God.”

“In August of 1994,” Tiller once said, “I was the first on the anti-abortion hit list or assassination list. And Janet Reno and President Clinton assigned federal marshals to me for thirty months. They came to the house, got me, took me to the office, stayed at the clinic…But the good news is, we still live in the United States of America. The good news is that in Kansas, we are able to use the wide definition and the full implementation of the
Roe v. Wade
decision.”

During the 1980s and early ’90s, Dr. Warren Hern had written extensively about the importance of whom America chose for its president—and how violence against abortion providers had risen dramatically with first Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush in the White House for a collective twelve years. In May 1997, after the Senate passed “partial birth abortion ban” legislation, Hern composed an editorial that appeared in
The New York Times
, saying, “As I watched the Senate debate on late-term abortions, I was struck by the surreal quality of the remarks. The oratory from both sides had nothing to do with the anguish faced by my patients and their families, yet the results will profoundly affect their lives. Families sometimes ask me to do things that might be illegal if the bill the Senate passed on Wednesday ever becomes law…The foes of abortion will keep sponsoring legislation that keeps doctors guessing about what they are allowed to do…President Clinton is right to object to this dangerous measure. And he would do well to be suspicious of all such attempts to limit later-term abortions…”

That June, Hern sent a letter to every member of Congress outlining his position. In November 1997, Hern wrote President Clinton himself, thanking him for vetoing this bill for the second time:

“As a physician providing late abortion services to families whose pregnancies have been tragically complicated by abnormalities and serious illness, I applaud your courage and leadership in this struggle…I see women and families each week who desperately need qualified medical assistance in terminating advanced pregnancies that are often complicated with medical, surgical and psychiatric problems. The health and privacy of these women and families are directly threatened by this legislation…”

In March 1998, the president wrote back:

“I’m grateful to have your insight on this deeply divisive issue. I vetoed H.R. 1833 because Congress would not include a limited exception in the bill for those few but tragic cases in which the procedure is necessary to save the life of a woman or to prevent serious harm to her health; I vetoed H.R. 1122 for the same reason. Like you, I believe the procedure should be available in the small number of compelling cases where its use, in the medical judgment of a woman’s physician, is necessary to preserve her life or to avert serious damage to her health. I remain firm in this belief, and I’m glad to know I have your continued support.

“Thanks again for getting in touch with me on this sensitive issue. Best wishes, Sincerely,

“Bill Clinton.”