A Death in Wichita (11 page)

Sitting behind bars in the late 1990s, he’d prayed over whether to pay child support to his son, Nicholas, after he was freed. While turning to God and his political cohorts for advice, Roeder sent a letter to his ex-wife in January 1998, stating that he intended to pay back child support, but didn’t want this held over his head when he got out. Once again, he expressed concern about how his beliefs and actions were affecting the boy. Was Nick feeling better now that Roeder’s conviction had been overturned because evidence had been illegally seized from his car? Did the youngster miss him?

If Nick still didn’t want to come visit him, the inmate wrote plaintively, “I’ll understand, but I hope you’ll help him to see that it wasn’t my fault, being sent to prison.”

He all but begged Lindsey to let him know if Nick’s attitude toward him had softened.

After leaving prison, Roeder went from one low-paying job to another, from one address in Topeka or suburban Kansas City to the next, and from one set of extremists—people adamantly opposed to abortion or paying taxes, or those convinced they were the descendants of the biblical Jews—to another. No longer tied down by the responsibilities of a family, he dropped into and out of whatever organization he’d latched on to at the moment. The Kansas City area had a small band of anti-abortion activists whom Roeder had become aware of. Anthony Leake had helped edit
Mix My Blood with the Blood of the Unborn
, the book Paul Hill had written in prison leading up to his 2003 execution for murdering Dr. John Britton. In 1995, Leake had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Virginia investigating violence against abortion clinics and doctors.

A local activist, Regina Dinwiddie, had signed an Army of God “justifiable homicide” petition following the murders of Drs. David Gunn and John Britton. In Kansas City in 1995, a federal judge had ordered Dinwiddie to stop using a bullhorn within five hundred feet of any abortion clinic. She met Roeder the next year when they picketed together outside the Kansas City office of Planned Parenthood. Roeder had walked into that clinic and asked to see Dr. Robert Crist, and after coming back outside he hugged Dinwiddie and told her that he loved what she was doing. She was one of his heroes, like Shelley Shannon. Another Leake associate, Eugene Frye, led a victorious civil rights lawsuit against police officers trying to break up a 2001 anti-abortion demonstration in Kansas City, Missouri.

Roeder was moving further toward the edges, forging an identity in the far-right underground. In January 1999, he wrote to Lindsey that he’d been offered a job in Kansas City and was relocating there February 1. He wouldn’t say where he was working or the type of employment he’d found because of his “politically incorrect views” on taxation. If the state wanted to find him and punish him for those views, he didn’t want to give them any help. He’d spoken with a woman at the Johnson County Courthouse about their divorce arrangement and promised Lindsey that there “will be no interruptions of my child support payments…I’m looking forward to being able to visit Nicholas more often.”

But neither his ex-wife nor Nick wanted to see him, so he wrote her a snappish letter, refusing to talk to her anymore and declaring that the only page he’d respond to from her was a 444-4444 emergency call. If she violated this rule, he’d hang up on her.

Then his mood changed again, this time to remorse. He wrote Lindsey and apologized for bringing a girlfriend to their home years ago and kissing the woman in front of her and his young child.

During another mood swing, he decided not to support his son financially, after all.

In July 1999, he mailed Nick a letter saying he hoped the boy wasn’t angry at him for not making child support payments. Roeder wasn’t doing this because he didn’t love his son, he explained, but because he’d studied the issue in depth and realized he shouldn’t pay anything until Lindsey agreed to take him back. He badly missed his child:

“Would you still like to visit with me? If you would, please page me at…I’ll call you back as soon as possible.”

But Nick didn’t call.

By 2001, Roeder was asking for unsupervised visits with his fifteen-year-old son, but Lindsey didn’t want to give him that privilege, fearful that he’d run off with Nick to another state. She needed money for a special Boy Scout camp and for dental work on the teenager, and asked her ex to help her financially with both things. When he refused, she found it profoundly ironic that his goal in life was to save the million or so unborn children aborted in America each year, but he wouldn’t support the one child he’d fathered. Her sense of betrayal went deeper than dollars and cents.

Like countless other teenagers, Nick had begun experimenting with marijuana and alcohol. The first time he drank, he consumed so much that he got alcohol poisoning and passed out, and his friends had to call 911. When Lindsey tried to reach Scott during this episode, she couldn’t because he was asleep; he had sleep apnea, and he slept more soundly than most people. After she learned that drinking was occurring at the home of one of Nick’s young buddies, with the approval of the parents inside the house, she confronted the couple and told them exactly what she thought of their behavior. They were indifferent to anything she had to say. Maybe, she told herself, they’d listen to a man instead of a woman, a large man who could look intimidating, a man who’d been accused by the state of Kansas of being a potential bomber and domestic terrorist, even if his conviction on those charges was later overturned.

At the time, Scott was living in the Kansas City area with a friend, in what they called a “farmhouse.” Chickens crowed and skittered around in the yard, the structure was heated by a wood stove, and the kitchen was filled with water jugs holding the liquid that Roeder drank because of his belief that unpurified tap water was dangerous, if not lethal. The place was filthy, with grunge and grime on every surface, and the only thing that brought Lindsey out to the farmhouse was her great concern about her son and the people he was now hanging around. Even if Roeder wouldn’t support Nick financially, would he stand up for him and try to get him out of a situation that could be physically threatening? Lindsey asked her ex to go to the parents who were allowing teenagers to drink booze at their home and tell them this was placing the kids at risk.

It was a just a phase Nick was going through, Scott told her, kind of like when he’d done drugs back in Topeka as a teenager. A lot of kids went through things like that and it would pass…She kept pushing him to speak to the parents and he eventually did talk with one of Nick’s friends about the matter, but not the man and wife, and Lindsey could never quite forgive him.

“I really, really struggled with this one,” she says.

In the summer of 2001, Roeder announced that he was moving to Illinois and marrying a woman named Sue Archer. He invited Nick to accompany him to the wedding, but Lindsey wouldn’t let her son go. Scott and his bride-to-be held similar religious beliefs and had talked about having a full Jewish wedding, with a rabbi, kosher food, and the couple standing under a chupah, or four-poled canopy. The groom would smash a glass with his foot, symbolizing that the marriage would last as long as the glass remained broken—forever—but some of the plans got cancelled and they were joined together instead in front of a few friends. Sue became pregnant with Scott’s child, and in June 2002 she gave birth to a girl named Olivia.

“Sue called me that summer after Olivia arrived,” Lindsey says, “and I was shocked to hear that Scott had had a little girl with her. Things weren’t going well for them. She already had five children and lived on a farm where there were a lot of chores to do. She was just learning how much Scott liked to sleep. She began asking me how to get sole custody of Olivia and keep her away from Scott. I told her, ‘Good luck with that,’ but our talk was cordial. It was like we had our own little support group because another woman now felt about Scott the same way I did. I worried that if Nick had gone to their wedding ceremony in Illinois, Scott was planning on keeping him there.”

After Sue asked Lindsey how to keep Roeder away from her family, Lindsey told her about his arrest for having bomb-making materials and how this had helped her win sole custody of Nick. Sue said that Scott had given one of her young sons a gun, and Lindsey suggested she call the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to report the incident. The two women communicated off and on about how to protect their children from Roeder, who wanted to see his daughter as much as his son.

In 2003, Roeder sued for visitation rights with Olivia, and in a Pennsylvania court, Archer and her new husband, Mark, argued against this. Two years later, the court ruling stated that Roeder had much earlier been diagnosed with schizophrenia “for which he takes no medication, which may pose a clear and present danger to the female minor child.” The Archers mentioned Roeder’s political affiliations, stating that “past conduct and association with anti-government organizations is ongoing and poses a risk to her daughter.” They “feared that [Roeder] would kidnap and hide their daughter since he threatened to do so with his son.” The court awarded Roeder supervised visitation rights with Olivia and he could be with her for an hour at social services, with a social worker and her mother or stepfather present, but Roeder wasn’t allowed to take pictures of the girl or tell her who he was. In the next few years, he saw his daughter several times in Pennsylvania, but the legal battle between himself and the Archers was not finished.

With the protesters in Wichita continuing their 1,846-day vigil at Tiller’s clinic, Phill Kline’s Inquisition ground forward, month by month and year by year. In May 2006, Judge Richard Anderson ruled that the AG could have access to women’s medical records from WHCS and Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, but absolutely no copies of these files could be made without his approval. Kline’s efforts to get at these records and prosecute Tiller had generated widespread opposition, but at no place more strongly than in Governor Sebelius’s office in the state capitol building. Through her vetoes, she’d kept the legislature from tightening Kansas abortion laws, but the Democratic Party needed a broader strategy if it wanted to stop the AG’s assault. It needed to get rid of Phill Kline.

The governor worked in downtown Topeka on Tenth Avenue. Just to the north was the attorney general’s office, and a few yards north of that was the headquarters of Kansans for Life, whose front window was filled with pictures of healthy babies and a photo exhibit of the developmental stages of a fetus. Inside the office were many more images of babies and handouts featuring articles and statistics designed to underscore the evils of abortion. In very polite tones, those who worked at KFL patiently explained to visitors why Tiller’s clinic should be closed. Kline and KFL were as committed to shutting down WHCS as the governor was to keeping it open. Right across the street from the state capitol and the AG’s office was the Judicial Center, home to the Kansas Supreme Court and its seven justices. Most of the major players were within a block of one another for the next round of political warfare, whose implications would reach far beyond Kansas.

Inside the national Democratic power structure, Governor Sebelius was a rising star and everything the party was looking for: an accomplished and gifted politician, fresh and strong, articulate and attractive, but not too liberal and without the baggage of a Hillary Clinton. Sebelius held office in a conservative red state, but because of her influence and many supporters Kansas was turning toward blue. She was surrounded by speculation that one day she’d be in a presidential cabinet or become the vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Grooming her successor in Topeka had become important and she needed her own overall plan. That plan involved removing Phill Kline as attorney general and replacing him with a Democrat who could become the next governor of Kansas. Sebelius had her eye on one man, and most agreed he was the right person for the job. There were just two problems.

I’d met Paul Morrison, the district attorney for Johnson County (in the Kansas City, Kansas, suburbs), while writing a book about the first known serial killer in the history of the Internet. Before his arrest in June 2000, John E. Robinson had been running financial scams and luring women to Olathe, Kansas, for several years, then murdering them. His case was high-profile and Morrison decided to prosecute it himself. In the spring of 2001, we met in his office in the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe. Morrison was a natural-born prosecutor who was learning to become a good politician, folksy and shrewd, with a good sense of humor and a common touch in the courtroom. Bald-headed and blue-eyed, he wasn’t exactly handsome but he was smart and forceful and tuned in to the local population. Addressing a jury, he didn’t add a “g” to his gerunds (talkin’ or thinkin’), which complemented his down-home demeanor. He came across well on television, when laying out for the people of greater Kansas City how successful his office was at rounding up the most dangerous people in the area and putting them away for good.

He’d gotten convictions against the serial killer Richard Grissom, Jr., and Dr. Debra Green, who’d burned down her mansion and killed two of her three children. He was going to convict John Robinson, and when I visited Morrison, he was riding about as high as a prosecutor can—admired by his constituents and adored by his staff. Born in Dodge City, Kansas, home of the legendary lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, Morrison conjured up those who’d once brought cattle rustlers and Old West killers to justice. On his desk he kept a coffee mug featuring Earp’s face.

The first problem was that Morrison was not a Democrat, but a lifelong Republican. He was married with three children, and the DA made a point of telling me that he and his wife were instructors at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas. He and his wife, Joyce, a tallish brunette, taught young couples about what to expect after their wedding.

“It’s all about marriage,” Morrison said, “and it’s not really very religious. It’s about living together and getting along. People who have been married a long time tell you what to expect—and you’re not going to get this from your parents.”

Morrison kept his religion out of his job. He was pro-choice but not, he once told me, “all that pro-choice.” In his work as a big-city prosecutor, he focused on major crimes, like felony theft and murder. By 2006, he’d been running the Johnson County DA’s office for nearly two decades and had never paid any legal attention to the activities at CHPP, the Planned Parenthood office of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, whose records Kline was now pursuing. In Morrison’s view, the U.S. Supreme Court had long ago ruled that abortion was legal in America, so he focused on people who were breaking the law.

Could he be persuaded by Kansas Democrats to switch parties? With a little arm-twisting that was accomplished and he was groomed to run against Kline in 2006. The second problem was something Governor Sebelius and her party knew nothing about—because the surface of Morrison’s life was anything but the whole truth. And that truth would eventually spill over onto Wichita and George Tiller in devastating ways. The bizarre was about to become business as usual.