A Death in Wichita (8 page)

After his release from prison, Scott Roeder drifted further into obscure religions, some with ideas similar to the Identity Christianity church in Idaho that had recruited the men who’d killed Alan Berg. One tenet of these belief systems was that born-again Christians such as Roeder were the true descendants of the Old Testament Jews. Roeder kept a kosher diet and celebrated the Sabbath, or “Shabbat” in Hebrew, beginning on Friday sundown and ending on Saturday sundown. He used the Hebrew terms for God (Yahweh) and Jesus (Yahshua). As he practiced these rituals, his ex-wife kept a log of his activities and refused to let their son, Nick, see his father unless she was present. In the log, she noted that the boy hadn’t spent any time alone with his father since Roeder had left in September 1994 and that Nick wasn’t comfortable with his dad, but fearful, insecure, and embarrassed:

“Nick is too shy and passive and well-behaved and will not talk back or speak up for himself. He does not like to visit with his dad and it’s usually by my insistence that he sees Scott.”

Occasionally, father and son talked on the phone, but that happened only when Nick picked up the receiver before he realized his dad was calling and he couldn’t easily hang up on him. Lindsey’s main concern was that if Nick were left alone with him, Scott would kidnap the boy, since one of the groups he was involved with had “kidnapped children from a father and kept them and his mother in a compound.”

All the time Nick was growing up, Lindsey had an escape plan if Scott ever tried to take him away.

“My sister,” she says, “has a relative on the Cherokee nation down in Texas and we were going to hide out there.”

Roeder had recently become involved with the “Embassy of Heaven Church,” which was located, according to its return address, in “Stayton, Oregon…Kingdom of Heaven.” Church members got to pick their names, and the pastor’s was Paul Revere. When Lindsey and Scott were still married and he’d received materials in the mail from Revere, she’d hidden them or thrown them away (she’d heard Roeder talk about the violently anti-Semitic novel
The Turner Diaries
, and wondered if he had a copy of it stashed somewhere). During their divorce proceedings, the Embassy of Heaven offered to handle Roeder’s finances and sent a request to Lindsey’s house asking for the title to their car. She was appalled.

On July 9, 1999, the Embassy of Heaven intervened on Roeder’s behalf with a letter to the legal authorities in Johnson County, where Lindsey and Scott were divorced. Pastor Revere described Roeder as a missionary assigned to Kansas and told the Olathe District Court that the church was managing Scott’s financial affairs. Revere wanted copies of Roeder’s original agreement to pay child support and contended that the court hadn’t provided evidence such an agreement existed:

“Scott P. Roeder tells us that he desires to faithfully support his wife and child, but she divorced him and sought the care and protection of strangers. He is willing to again support his family, but only if they will return to his covering.

Separated unto the Gospel,
Embassy of Heaven Church
Paul Revere, Pastor.”

Closer to home, Roeder began meeting in suburban Kansas City residences on Saturdays for potluck and Bible study. At the gatherings, worshippers talked about their own Hebrew roots and the “secret societies” that they believed were trying to control the U.S. government. The attendees called themselves “Messianic Jews” and were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. For a while, Roeder joined a local synagogue, Or HaOlam, led by Rabbi Shmuel Wolkenfeld, but was asked to leave for being too argumentative.

As Roeder moved into and out of these groups and considered paying child support, he kept writing letters to his son, filled with his growing disillusionment with American society. In one, he encouraged the boy not to participate in Halloween with his friends because it was a “high holiday for the devil.” In another, he said that because the Bible didn’t mention honoring the birth of Jesus, Nicholas shouldn’t take part in Christmas. A thirteen-page letter to Nick vividly described his father’s 1991 conversion to evangelical Christianity: for some time Yahshua (Jesus) had been working in his life to teach him that he was a sinner in need of a savior, until one day in August Roeder kneeled down in the front room of their home and asked Yahshua to forgive his sins and to help him live his life for the savior. Roeder’s prayers were answered, he told Nick, and this wasn’t just a religious turning point, but also a political one, and a turning point for the entire family.

When creating the United States, the Founding Fathers had been determined to separate religion and politics, both in institutions and for individuals. Religion was for the private realm, while politics was played out in public. Mixing them, they reasoned, generated too much confusion and too much opportunity for abuse or intolerance. They were now bound together inside Roeder, and the fundamentalist Christian teachings and anti-government rhetoric he’d been absorbing for years came tumbling out to his son.

“Ever since giving my life to Yahshua,” he wrote, “and asking Him to be my Savior, His Holy Spirit has been guiding and leading me into certain things that I had not realized before. One of the things the Holy Spirit was showing me concerned the deception there has been over the subject of income taxes…”

America had gradually turned away from a government that upheld “godly principles” of truth and justice and embraced an “ungodly system” of socialism and communism, which denied the existence of Yahweh and Yahshua. The United States now “allowed the murder of unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs”—just the opposite of what the Bible promoted. He ranted against a political and legal structure that protected abortion doctors, but punished those who picketed in front of abortion clinics. The country had strayed from its biblical foundations and the time was coming when this had to change.

“Whenever a Christian,” he wrote, “is shown by the Holy Spirit what is true and rightous [
sic
], that Christian must decide to stand for what is right,
no matter what the cost!
…That Christian must also realize there could be a price to pay for standing for what is right…”

It was as if he were telling his son that he was considering new options for stopping abortion, before he told anyone else.

By the mid-1990s, a revolution was coming to American culture. Cable TV, the Internet, and political talk radio were just starting to break through and become an amplifier for the emotional forces building in the society. New technology was about to collide with the feelings of anger and fear that had been growing for decades on the fringes, but were seeping into the mainstream. Something new, something vast, disruptive, and undefined, was about to be unleashed on the airwaves and online, packaged and presented to a mass audience as entertainment. Those who were already enraged or frightened would be encouraged to feel more so now. Those who were paranoid would be pushed further in that direction. Whatever, or whoever, was unstable was going to be nurtured in its instability. What mattered in the new media wasn’t so much political philosophy but how deeply one felt about a government, a group, a crime, sexuality, or, as here, about abortion. A bull market had arrived for accusation, blame, even hatred, and it was driven far less by traditional ideology than by pure emotion.

The 1990s saw a series of spectacular mass shootings at churches, schools, and other public venues. They all had one thing in common: none of these acts was committed for any personal advantage or gain, such as money. Workers at offices, worshippers inside sanctuaries, or teenagers at their schools felt so threatened and challenged by those around them, or by those who held a different viewpoint, that they took up arms in an institutional setting, killing as many people as they could.

My wife, Joyce, and I raised a young son throughout the 1990s, and the eruptions of violence within schools, leading to 263 deaths, were especially difficult for us to watch. Before 1995, such deaths were very rare, but that began to change on November 15, 1995, in Giles County, Tennessee, when seventeen-year-old Jamie Rouse, dressed all in black, went to school and shot two teachers in the head, killing one. While trying to murder the school’s football coach, Rouse left another student dead. On February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis walked into a math class wearing a long Western coat that concealed a high-powered rifle, two pistols, and ammunition. While taking the entire class hostage, Loukaitis killed two classmates and a teacher. That same day, a sixteen-year-old in Atlanta, Georgia, shot and killed a teacher.

In late April 1999, Joyce and I drove out to Columbine High School in southwestern Denver, ten miles from our home, and stood outside a chain-link fence, installed to keep us and others away from the crime scene. We watched as hundreds upon hundreds of teenagers and adults knelt down in the spring mud and burst into tears, grabbing on to one another for support or clutching at the fence and swaying in anguish. A couple days earlier, two Columbine students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had walked into the suburban school and opened fire with shotguns and semiautomatic weapons, wounding twenty-three students and killing twelve teenagers, one teacher, and themselves. Nobody at Columbine this evening said anything or made eye contact, the shame of what had happened here too deep to be put into words. Our kids had done this, the silence was saying, the boys we thought we knew.

Before Columbine, the country had seen numerous school shootings—in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oregon—but this one was especially horrifying. Harris and Klebold had built ninety-five bombs and planted most of them around the school. Some of the explosives were supposed to detonate inside the school cafeteria at 11:20 a.m., during the height of lunch hour, killing hundreds of kids as they ate. When the survivors ran outside to escape the mayhem, Harris and Klebold would gun them down. They intended to kill at least five hundred people, dwarfing the Oklahoma City bombing, but when the explosives failed to go off, the young men entered the school and began shooting. The purpose of the bloodbath, revealed on a home video discovered after the killers’ deaths, paralleled that of the neo-Nazis’ before they’d killed Alan Berg. Harris and Klebold wanted to “kick-start a revolution” against their enemies: “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, fucking whites…humanity.” They were motivated by extreme hatred, and Adolf Hitler was one of their heroes. Their day of infamy at Columbine—April 20, 1999—was the 110th anniversary of the Fuhrer’s birth.

Those who’d killed Berg were tucked away in the Idaho woods and held obviously fanatical beliefs. They were young, angry, uneducated, and unsuccessful working-class white men, without good prospects in front of them. Harris and Klebold (who drove a BMW) had every privilege one could want: money, family support, friends, and opportunities to attend good colleges. But they also had bottomless reservoirs of hurt and anger. Their act of terrorism had evolved inside Eric Harris’s well-furnished suburban bedroom, and they were not alone in their feelings. In the weeks following the massacre, the National Safety Center reported that three thousand other high school students across the country concocted bomb threats or other schemes meant to result in death.

“I’m sorry I have so much rage,” Klebold said on the videotape.

“I really am sorry about this,” Harris said, addressing his mother, “but war’s war.”

Both expressed their hatred toward different groups and individuals at Columbine, because of things like hair and clothing.

“You’ve given us shit for years,” Klebold said of his classmates. “You’re fucking going to pay for all the shit. We don’t give a shit because we’re going to die doing it.”

“We need to die, too,” Harris echoed.

Getting ready to leave Columbine that evening, my wife and I noticed a tall dirt mound to the south of the school, maybe a hundred feet in elevation. A large wooden cross rose above it in the fading sunlight, put there in the past few days, stark against the sky. Long lines of people were wending their way upward toward the cross, as if drawn by an invisible hand. A wet, cold wind blew over them, pounding their hair and clothes, but they lowered their heads and marched on through the dirt and mud, determined to reach the top. When they arrived, they reached out and grabbed the cross, holding on to it and gazing down onto Columbine, now surrounded by thousands of bouquets of flowers and handwritten messages to the dead. The scene was stunningly biblical, evoking the hill at Calvary outside of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified. This wasn’t a pilgrimage to an ancient holy site, but a shrine to human violence and hysteria, to our incomprehension of ourselves, and to our growing private and public rage.

On every side of us people were crying. For a few moments all the blame and hatred seemed to evaporate, and we were not strangers to one another anymore, or enemies, and had all been hurt and diminished by these deaths. There was no “us” or “them,” no left or right, at Columbine. Turning away from the park and moving slowly past the waves of incoming mourners, we wrapped our coats around us and leaned into the bitter wind, which hinted at worse things to come.

Six months after Columbine, President Clinton was now so disturbed by what was happening across America that he spoke publicly about a recent rash of murders: twelve office deaths in Atlanta; eleven hate crime shootings over the Fourth of July weekend against Asians, Jews, and African-Americans in Indiana and Illinois; a church massacre that killed seven in Fort Worth; the shooting of Jewish children at a Southern California daycare center; and the neo-Nazi murder of a minority postal employee. These were no longer aberrant events, but almost predictable eruptions of violence. What distinguished the president’s comments was not that he offered any solutions or hope, but that he understood that something fundamental had changed inside the culture.

“All you think about is the new millennium,” he said at a Los Angeles fund-raiser in October 1999. “Isn’t it ironic that the thing that’s holding us back most…is our inability to form a community around our common humanity because of our vulnerability to mankind’s most ancient fear—the fear of the other?

“I see people in this so-called modern world, where we’re celebrating all of your modern ideas and your modern achievements and what is the biggest problem? We are dragged down by the most primitive of hatreds. It’s bizarre.”

And it was just beginning.