A Death in Wichita (14 page)

The Kansas Judicial Center on Tenth Avenue in Topeka, right across from the state capitol and attorney general’s office, was as quiet and sober as the affair between Carter and Morrison was heated and tempestuous. Its exterior was made of cottonwood limestone and its lobby was cavernous—sixty feet high and featuring Vermont marble and South Dakota granite, with the minerals symbolizing the permanence of the law in the face of constant cultural, social, and political change. In the middle of this large open space rose an off-white, graceful-looking sculpture of a half-kneeling woman holding aloft a prairie falcon. The bird was native to Kansas and the sculptor, Bernard Frazier, intended it to represent swift and dynamic justice. While politicians came and went and justice was rarely swift or dynamic, the seven Supreme Court justices working inside the Judicial Center were the last bulwark against chaos and lawlessness, even when it involved the state’s highest legal officials.

In the fall of 2007, District Judge David King conducted a fact-finding mission into Kline’s behavior with the medical files and turned his findings over to the justices, letting the court decide whether or not to find the former AG in contempt. In his sworn testimony, Kline told Judge King that he had “no knowledge of any ‘inquisition’ records and/or documents transferred by me in my position as Attorney General to myself in my position as District Attorney.” In his opinion, he was
both
the AG of Kansas and the DA of Johnson County for one hour on January 8, 2007, but “performed no acts in that capacity.” Judge King told the Supreme Court that Kline had not handled patient records in a manner that “stood up to the highest scrutiny. Such scrutiny surely should have been expected.” The High Court didn’t hold Kline in contempt, but showed far less restraint toward him than Judge King had.

“The record before us,” they wrote in their final report, “discloses numerous instances in which Kline and/or his subordinates seriously interfered with the performance of his successors as Attorney General and seriously interfered with this court’s effort to determine the facts underlying this action and the legal merits of the parties’ positions. Kline was demonstrably ignorant, evasive and incomplete in his sworn written responses to Judge King…Kline’s responses…showed consistent disregard for Kline’s role as a leader in state law enforcement; and they delayed and disrupted this court’s inquiry…He was thorough only when digressing from the point.”

The justices chastened Kline for violating women’s “constitutional privacy rights” and said that he’d “hustled to deflect responsibility and any attendant blame. We are deeply disappointed by Kline’s casual treatment of the WHCS patient records…Kline exhibits little, if any respect, for the authority of this court and for his responsibility to it and to the rule of law it husbands. His attitude and behavior are inexcusable, particularly for someone who purports to be a professional prosecutor…He is interested in the pursuit of justice only as he chooses to define it.”

On October 23, 2007, Linda Carter, exasperated with Morrison and convinced their relationship was finished, went to Kline and Steve Maxwell and told them about her affair with the AG (she didn’t know that they already knew about it). Within days, Morrison learned about this and began calling her frantically. On October 31, he phoned her twenty-two times between 11:58 a.m. and 12:47 p.m. According to Carter, he threatened to tell her prospective employer in Arkansas that Linda was “a monster, fucking sociopath, liar, bitch, and a bad manager.” Maxwell and a DA employee, Shawna Chambless, a former Rose Club member, listened in on four of these calls. They reported back to Kline, who now launched a sexual-harassment investigation into Morrison. The first step was Tom Williams sitting down with Carter and taking her sworn statement.

“On November 1, 2007,” Williams’s record of the interview began, “Linda Carter was contacted at a discreet location [Shawna Chambless’s apartment] in Johnson County, Kansas, for the purpose of providing an interview concerning a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Complaint that Carter had filed against the Johnson County District Attorney’s office and former Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison.”

For her revelations, Carter would be given full immunity from any prosecution. On November 2, her complaint was faxed to the EEOC, and her interview with Williams made its way to
The Topeka Capital-Journal
newspaper. On November 14, Carter delivered an affidavit supporting Kline’s sexual-harassment case and in it she said that Morrison had made “derogatory references” to the new DA. When referring to Kline’s incoming staff in Olathe in early 2007, Morrison had told her to “give the fuckers what they want.”

Morrison, Carter concluded, “led me to believe that whether I agreed with his position on the investigation and prosecution of the Tiller clinic would affect the status of our personal relationship.”

On November 21, Kline e-mailed his staff a message entitled, “Wishing Linda Carter success in her future endeavors.”

“I am sorry to announce,” he wrote, “that Linda Carter has submitted her resignation as Director of Administration effective November 30. Linda is pursuing other opportunities and we wish every success…”

Carter took off for her family home in Western Grove, Arkansas, anxious to get out of Kansas before the fallout started. On December 8, the
Capital-Journal
broke the story, which was widely read across the state, including by the shell-shocked staff in Morrison’s Topeka office.

“We had absolutely no idea this was coming,” an aide to the attorney general later said. “Everybody who worked for Paul loved him and thought he had a great future as a prosecutor and a public servant. So much for him becoming the governor of Kansas.”

On December 14, Morrison held a press conference by himself. Neither his wife nor other family members were present as he resigned and was replaced by the new attorney general, Steve Six.

“I’ve made mistakes in my personal life,” Morrison said to the media, “but I’ve always obeyed our laws and done the right things as a professional. My actions caused pain and sadness to many people I love. I have been working for some time to get right with God, get right with my family, and get right with friends and address my personal problems—and I will continue to do so.”

He went back home to Olathe to look for a job, where more fallout awaited him.

Kline disagreed that the ex-DA and ex–attorney general had “always obeyed our laws” and opened a criminal probe into Morrison for telephone harassment for his twenty-two late October calls to Carter—and for possible blackmail. Morrison dropped his contrite tone and called the investigation the “politics of sewage.” Kline chose two people outside the DA’s office to handle the matter, in an effort to demonstrate that he had no bias toward Morrison. Yet one man, Tom Keck, had been an assistant DA under Kline until recently and the other, Robert Arnold, had contributed money to his last political campaign. Nine months later, on December 17, 2008, the pair cleared Morrison of any criminal wrongdoing. While trying to repair his broken marriage and salvage his career, he went into private practice as a defense attorney, his office just across the street from the Johnson County Courthouse, where he’d once ruled over the entire scene.

In November 2008, Kline was defeated in the election for Johnson County DA and the Kansas Supreme Court admonished him, once again, to give up
all
copies of the WHCS and CHPP medical records before leaving office. Clearly no longer trusting him, the court gave Kline a hard deadline for completing this task: December 12, 2008, at exactly 5:00 p.m. The court thought about ordering him to reimburse the thousands of dollars in “personnel expenses” his behavior had cost the legal system, but chose not to. Johnson County taxpayers would have had to pay some of these expenses and “they didn’t elect him in the first place and have now shown him the door,” said the court. During the Inquisition, Kline had racked up around $200,000 in other legal fees, now personal debt. He needed a job and soon found one as a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, the fundamentalist Baptist college Reverend Jerry Falwell had started in 1971 in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Early in 2009,
The Wichita Eagle
reported that when departing the DA’s office in Olathe for the last time and leaving Kansas behind, Kline attempted to mail the Tiller clinic medical records to himself in Virginia, but they were returned because of a faulty address.

If he wasn’t finished with Tiller, neither were Troy Newman and the members of his Operation Rescue. In 2008, they succeeded in getting a second grand jury to investigate the doctor and hoped to subpoena thousands of WHCS medical records for the jurors’ examination. Many former Tiller patients, aided by the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City, came forward and offered their support to WHCS in an effort to protect these files. CRR succeeded in keeping the great majority of patient records from reaching the grand jury and no names or other identifying information were revealed. Jurors had access to the files of 150 randomly selected patients who’d had late-term abortions, and after studying these records they, like the earlier grand jury, refused to indict Dr. Tiller. It was another defeat for Newman and the anti-abortionists, who continued showing up at WHCS with their “Truth Trucks,” featuring aborted fetuses and their new message, “Abortion is an ObamaNation.”

Tiller faced one more legal battle, and if he won it, the seemingly endless Inquisition launched by Phill Kline in 2003 would at last be at an end. Under the new attorney general, Steve Six, the nineteen-count misdemeanor case against the physician for allegedly having an illegal financial relationship with Kristin Neuhaus was moving forward. Across the state and around the nation, abortion foes held out the hope that finally, after so many years of frustration, Tiller would be taken to court and convicted of these charges. He could lose his medical license and abortion practice.

One man watching these developments closely had higher hopes than almost anybody else.

In 2004, Scott Roeder had invited his son, Nick, to go with him to Worldview Weekend, a Christian gathering in Branson, Missouri. Nick was eighteen and could now make his own decisions about being with his father. This group was far more in the mainstream than many of the religious activities Roeder had been involved with throughout the past decade, and his ex-wife felt that he might be leaving the fringes behind. He and Nick went to Branson and had a good time.

“I thought he was moving away from the dark side,” Lindsey says, “but it didn’t last long. He went back to interacting with the same people he’d been around before, and we didn’t see as much of him. He’d call Nick, but Nick would usually try to avoid him, so he wouldn’t have to listen to his dad talk about conspiracies.”

Roeder found people with his same beliefs online. The Internet linked him to many far-right organizations and let him vent with those who felt as he did about abortion, stem cell research, and Dr. Tiller. He posted his opinions on various Web sites under the name “ServantofMessiah.”

On May 19, 2007, he brought up an Operation Rescue event held a few days earlier in Wichita, praying for the end of Tiller’s “death camp” and calling for all unborn babies to “once again come under the protection of law.” He hoped to organize as many people as possible to attend a service at the physician’s church to ask questions of the pastor and other leaders.

“Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything,” he wrote, “but bring more attention to Tiller.”

Three months later, Roeder posted on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called “
chargetiller.com
.” He compared what was happening in Kansas to “lawlessness” mentioned in the Bible.

“Tiller,” he wrote, “is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

On this site, another post read, “
TILLER MUST DIE
PUBLICLY, OBSERVED BY THE WORLD TO SEE, OPENLY, THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE INVOLVED WITH THIS PRACTICE MUST BE AWARE TO TURN ON THERE WICKED WAYS.”

By mid-2007, like so many others with his political and religious leanings, Roeder felt alarmed and even more motivated to speak out because of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency of the United States. There was a chance he might even win. During the past eight years, Roeder and his cohorts had had someone in the White House with whom they’d shared certain core beliefs: the anti-abortion, born-again Christian George W. Bush, who’d opposed stem cell research for use in scientific labs. His administration had been lax in enforcing the FACE Act, which made it a crime to block access to medical facilities and to deny women the opportunity to get abortions. Obama was a pro-choice, liberal Democrat and, in Roeder’s view, “a man without any character.” Whatever respect he might have had for the candidate went away during the campaign, when Obama avoided directly answering a question about when life begins, saying that that kind of knowledge was above his pay grade.

“What kind of a response is that?” Roeder asked people.

Adding to his discomfort was that his ex-wife and son were big Obama supporters. One time they put an “Obama” magnet on his car, just to annoy him.

“Scott had very negative feelings about Obama,” says Lindsey. “He believed that if he got to be president, Obama would strongly back abortion rights and just be horrible and ruin the country. Scott’s feelings were really racial.”

All the more reason that the legal case to bring down Dr. Tiller had to succeed.

As the 2008 election approached, the charges against Tiller made their way through the Kansas court system. In the 1990s, he’d paid a team of lawyers to help him comply with the statute requiring a second physician to sign off on the necessity of a late-term abortion. During the Inquisition, he’d employed more attorneys to represent him against the new allegations. Now, in the fall of 2008, he’d engaged still more to combat the latest charges. At a November hearing, held right after Barack Obama’s election, Tiller’s side argued to have the case dismissed. His lead lawyer, Wichita’s Dan Monnat, relished the role of defending the doctor and took this opportunity to express himself about what had been happening lately at the highest levels of Kansas law enforcement.

“Your Honor,” he told Judge Clark Owens, in his sixth-floor courtroom in the Eighteenth Judicial District, “when former Attorney General Paul Morrison filed these charges, he all but apologized for them, calling them technical violations, and the evidence in this case…will establish that these technical violations are really the product of politics and personal problems of at least two former attorney generals…This prosecution is the product of outrageous government conduct in violation of both the [state and federal] constitutions…with total disregard for the privacy rights of women…

“The Kansas Supreme Court, speaking of the behavior of Phill Kline, found…the unauthorized scattering of the private medical files of women to a national conservative talk show host, to an Internet DVD, and to the car trunks, kitchens, and apartments of the abettors of former Attorney General Phill Kline…Special prosecutors have been appointed to investigate Attorney General Morrison’s illicit relationship with Linda Carter, a Kline employee for some of the time, and her role in influencing his decision to charge Dr. Tiller. Is that outrageous? Is it outrageous that Dr. Tiller, an innocent man, and the rights of innocent women and the people’s system of justice are just the pawns of those politicians?”

Monnat was determined not just to defend Tiller, but to put his inquisitors on trial. When he called Kline as a witness at the November hearing, the former attorney general was nonresponsive to the questions. Then Monnat called Kline’s chief investigator, Tom Williams, whom Carter had flirted with in the DA’s office. Monnat pointed out that when Williams was supposedly trying to learn about child sex abuse going unreported in Kansas, he’d focused on abortion providers.

“That’s where the record sort of led,” Williams said.

“Well, hospital records and birth records are a pretty obvious record to think of in the first place, aren’t they?”

“Well, maybe.”

“And what about dentists, optometrists, psychologists, nurses, teachers, school employees, marriage therapists, family therapists, alcohol and drug abuse counselors, licensed child care providers, social workers, firefighters, EMS personnel, juvenile intake assessment workers, and law enforcement officers?”

“That’s a long list.”

“Any of them wrong?”

“No, not that I’m aware of…”

Despite Monnat’s efforts to have the case dismissed, Judge Owens disagreed and scheduled Tiller’s trial for late March 2009. On the twenty-third of that month, the parties assembled at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in downtown Wichita for opening arguments. As anti-abortion demonstrators gathered on the streets outside and Operation Rescue members came into the courtroom to protest Tiller in silence during the proceedings, six jurors had to decide if the doctor had had an unlawful financial or legal relationship with Dr. Kristin Neuhaus.

One of those inside the courtroom watching the trial was Scott Roeder. For a decade he’d been hearing from moderate anti-abortionists that the legal system could bring Tiller down and throughout that time he’d hoped and prayed they were right. Now was its chance.

Roeder had been spending more time in Wichita lately, driving down from Kansas City and checking in to one of the cheap motels on East Kellogg Street, just up the road from Tiller’s clinic. He didn’t have much money, but spent what he had on this pilgrimage to the heart of the war over abortion. He rode by Tiller’s church and parked in front of it, staring at the stately red brick structure in the northeast part of Wichita, the money side of town. He stood with his allies on the sidewalk outside the clinic in the late winter cold, continuing the “sidewalk counseling” that he’d been doing for years, talking to women going inside and trying to change their minds, holding his worn Bible and reading certain passages again and again, closing his eyes and beseeching God with all the intensity he could muster for Tiller to come to his senses and give up his medical practice. In years past, he’d visited WHCS, but usually held himself apart from the other demonstrators, carrying a cross and a bundle of red roses, a symbol of the anti-abortion movement. Because of the flowers, the protesters had nicknamed him “the prom queen.”

He no longer had the roses or stood away from the others at the clinic, but joined with them and their prayers. He believed that if he prayed hard enough, if he found just the right words and feelings, if he was sincere enough in his beliefs, Tiller would change his mind and stop performing abortions forever. Wichita would no longer be the abortion capital of the world and an evil would have been removed from Roeder’s home state. That’s what so many abortion foes had wanted during the last three decades, but now they had something much more to hope for, everything building toward this climactic moment.

They’d been frantically texting and twittering one another, calling and e-mailing about this pivotal moment in their history. They’d been trading information about Tiller—his clinic, his residence, his place of worship, and his daily routine—about how he got around town or to and from work. Operation Rescue had an online “Tiller Watch” that posted his home and church address. Demonstrators sent pictures of him on their cell phones, as he traveled from one location to the next, stopping for a bite to eat or to pick up his clothes at the dry cleaner’s, each technological advance adding to their surveillance. On February 20, 2009, Operation Rescue’s senior policy adviser Cheryl Sullenger twittered her cohorts, “Meanwhile, bloody business as usual at Tiller’s shop of horrors.”

On March 5, as the legalities were about to begin, she sent out another message, “Inviting all to Tiller trial in Wichita March 16.”