A Death in Wichita (16 page)

The prosecution rested and the defense called Dr. Tiller. He talked about his background, along with the 1986 bombing of his clinic and being shot in the arms by Shelley Shannon in 1993. Monnat asked about the protests going on today at WHCS.

“On Wednesday at noon,” Tiller said, “we have one or two or three men who come over and drag a kitchen table onto the sidewalk that’s outside of our elevated fence—a privacy, security fence. These one or two people stand up on a table with a bullhorn yelling…over the fence [and] describing the patients, ‘You, getting out of the red car. Don’t go in there. Don’t kill your baby.’ Intensive, unpleasant intimidation.”

Why, Monnat asked, don’t you just quit?

“Quit is not something that I like to do. Why have we continued? First, the strong support of…my wife, the strong support of my daughters, the strong support of my son. I remember one time during one of the protests, we were under a lot of pressure and…two of my daughters came into my study…and they said to me, ‘Daddy, if not now, when? If not you, who?’ And that means who is going to stand up for women with unexpected or badly damaged babies? Who was going to be their protector—if you won’t—and when was that going to happen?”

Tiller’s reference to his daughters and his wife, Jeanne, who was watching the proceedings, was part of a conscious strategy. With her short, stylish frosted hair, her understated but tasteful clothes, and a face that conveyed strength and suffering, compassion and endurance, Jeanne looked like someone who’d walked every step of his treacherous medical journey with her husband throughout the past three-plus decades. If she and her daughters felt that he had the best interests of women at heart, how could others, and especially other women serving on the jury, dispute that?

“Doctor,” Monnat said, “as you sit here today, do you feel the extreme pressure that you’re always under as a provider in this dangerous situation?”

He nodded and said, “Yes.”

On the trial’s final day, another defense lawyer, Laura Shaneyfelt, asked the Tiller attorney Rachel Pirner if the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts had ever found any wrongdoing by the physician.

“No,” Priner said.

“Were there any follow-up inquiries or any subpoenas issued by the Board of Healing Arts regarding any issue regarding any financial or legal affiliation between Dr. Neuhaus and Dr. Tiller?”

“No.”

“Did anyone from the board ever raise any concern to you…about any improper or unlawful affiliation with those two doctors?”

“Absolutely not.”

Early spring in Kansas can bring a rare blizzard, and one was brewing throughout Friday, March 27, as the lawyers made their closing arguments. By afternoon the storm had begun rolling in from the west, ice and snow covering downtown Wichita, emptying the streets and making everyone in the courthouse eager to get home for the weekend. Once the arguments were finished, the jury went into its deliberations, contacting the judge less than thirty minutes later to announce they’d reached a decision. As they walked back into the courtroom and prepared to deliver their verdict, security personnel in the courthouse was increased and put on high alert. Tiller’s enemies, as well as his supporters, had gathered in court to hear the outcome. But by then Roeder was back in Kansas City.

Members of the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department formed a wall between the doctor and his defense team, and the gallery of spectators sitting behind them; rumors had been circulating that if Tiller was acquitted, somebody planned to throw battery acid in his face. The moment both sides had been praying for had arrived. The anti-abortionists had waited nearly thirty-five years for Tiller to be found guilty of a crime and go on to lose his career. The defense hoped that if he were found not guilty, he could finally move away from his legal troubles and focus solely on practicing medicine.

With everyone in place, Judge Owens asked the jury for their verdict, which was followed by several moments of silence.

“Not guilty,” came the reply, again and again. Not guilty on count one and on all eighteen subsequent counts.

Relief seeped out from around the defense table, with smiles and quiet congratulations and a few tears. Tiller and his lawyers embraced with hugs and backslaps, certain that the Kline-Morrison saga was at an end and the doctor could relax this weekend and go back to work afresh on Monday morning. He might even be able to stop paying some of these attorneys’ fees and focus more resources on his clinic and staff.

The gallery disbanded without incident and rode the elevators down to the lobby, a few of them bitterly discussing the outcome. The jurors had finished their courtroom obligations, but for security reasons they’d have to be led to their cars by armed guards because protesters were lingering outside. Prior to putting on their coats, and despite their eagerness to leave before the snow got any deeper, they wanted to perform one more civic duty inside the courthouse—something beyond the normal boundaries of due process. The jury foreman asked the judge if they could write a note and have him pass it along to Tiller and his lawyers. Judge Owens agreed to this and the note was quickly composed and delivered. It pleased Dan Monnat about as much as the verdict had.

“Dr. Tiller,” he says, “was confident throughout the process that led up to the trial and throughout the trial itself. He liked to say ‘Attitude Is Everything’ and his confidence never wavered. He believed in the goodness of the people of Wichita and in their awareness and decency. He felt that if he took the witness stand, he could explain to them the integrity and legality of what he did. In the middle of all these fractured personalities who were involved in Kansas politics, he followed a moral compass and remained confident of his own innocence.

“The six jurors who heard the evidence in this trial showed us a lot about the greatness of our jury system and its continuing viability. That system still does what it was designed to do five hundred years ago, when it was used to protect people against monarchs. It gives defendants the right to counsel, to trial by jury, and the chance to confront your accuser through cross-examination. In this case, it showed that the jury felt that the charges were absolutely without basis.

“A twenty-five-minute verdict in Kansas of not guilty on nineteen counts of performing illegal abortions is very clear evidence of a jury’s belief in the rightness of what Dr. Tiller was doing. In the note they gave him after the verdict, they wanted him to know they were happy to do this for him, and they were proud that a safe, secure, and sanitary clinic existed for these operations, as opposed to the back alleys and motel rooms women had once used to get abortions.”

Not everyone, of course, felt this way about the verdict. The Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of Washington’s Christian Defense Coalition, told
The New York Times
that it was “a setback.” Both Phill Kline and Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, publicly expressed disappointment in how the state had presented its case, but showed restraint. One prominent figure did not and spoke out against the jurors’ decision with the loudest voice of all, as he’d been doing for the past several years on the most-watched cable talk show on evening television. On the day of the verdict, Bill O’Reilly said on the air, “Now, we have bad news to report, that Tiller the baby killer out in Kansas—acquitted. Acquitted today of murdering babies. I wasn’t in the courtroom. I didn’t sit on the jury. But there’s got to be a special place in hell for this guy.”

Seven days later, O’Reilly reiterated on Fox, “Tiller got acquitted in Kansas, Tiller the baby killer.”

Then a few weeks after that O’Reilly said that Governor Sebelius “recently vetoed a bill that placed restrictions on late-term abortions in Kansas. The bill was introduced because of the notorious Tiller the baby killer case, where Dr. George Tiller destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for five thousand dollars.”

The afternoon of the verdict, as the wind picked up and the sky turned grayer and the blizzard descended on Wichita, George and Jeanne Tiller prepared to leave the courthouse and go home. One attorney who’d been practicing law in the city for twenty-five years saw them standing off by themselves, smiling and quietly celebrating their victory. Like so many others in Wichita, he was aware of the Tiller family and their legal ordeals, and this image stayed with him.

“They looked so relieved and happy that day, with the trial behind them,” he said months later. “As I watched them in that moment, I tried to imagine what their lives had been like for the past several decades and what they’d lived through as a couple. I thought about the threats and their fears. The truth is that I really couldn’t imagine it.”

With the case over and Dr. Tiller acquitted, Kamran Tehrani once again heard his roommate talking angrily on the phone in their Westport apartment. Speaking with the woman from Operation Rescue, Roeder was more upset than ever. Why hadn’t Disney called more witnesses? Why hadn’t he been more aggressive with Neuhaus? If this was the best the state of Kansas could do…

“Scott just felt that Tiller’s lawyer,” says Kamran, “had just shredded the Operation Rescue argument.”

For the anti-abortionists, only one more hope existed. Immediately after the verdict, the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, no longer headed by Larry Buening, announced that it disagreed with the Wichita jurors, so the board itself might take steps to revoke Tiller’s license. Some in the anti-abortion movement took solace in this possibility, but Roeder wasn’t one of them. He’d been hearing such things for the past two or three years and nothing had changed. How long would it take for this process to unfold, and what if Tiller’s legal team crushed the KSBHA as easily as they had the attorney general’s office?

For his part, Dan Monnat questioned both the merits and the timing of the KSBHA pronouncement.

“The board’s case,” he says, “was based on eleven of the nineteen alleged incidents that the Wichita jury had just swiftly and resoundingly acquitted Dr. Tiller of. The timing of this announcement might well be perceived as something done to blunt the thumping the state of Kansas had just taken by the jury.”

Roeder was disturbed by more than the recent verdict. Two months earlier, President Obama had moved into the White House and was in the process of overturning the Bush administration policy preventing nearly seven hundred embryonic stem cell lines from being used to study various illnesses and develop cures. The new president had reached out to Kansas and nominated Governor Kathleen Sebelius to be his secretary of health and human services. Obama couldn’t, in Roeder’s mind, have chosen a worse candidate; early in 2009, she’d vetoed a bill requiring doctors to provide more details to the Kansas Health Department when justifying late-term abortions.

He was hardly alone in his opinion of Sebelius.

“Sebelius,” Troy Newman once told Christian Newswire, “is a radical supporter of abortion and is not above misleading the public as to the militant nature of her abortion support.”

In March of 2009, Archbishop Raymond F. Burke, prefect for the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s highest court, declared that Sebelius should not approach the altar for Communion within the United States because “she obstinately persists in serious sin.”

Sean Hannity said of the governor, “I think it speaks to the character of somebody who says they are ‘personally opposed to abortion’ and yet they accept money from somebody like George Tiller. Absolutely disgraceful.”

On his Fox News program, Bill O’Reilly echoed Hannity, saying that Sebelius “is pro-abortion. She wants the babies done for…She supported Tiller the baby killer out there.”

During Sebelius’s confirmation process in Washington, she came under attack from congressional Republicans because Tiller and his staff had attended a 2007 reception at the governor’s mansion, and because she’d initially failed to account for donations from the doctor. In response to the Senate Finance Committee, Sebelius revealed that she’d received $12,450 from Tiller between 1994 and 2001, but the Senate eventually learned that Tiller had given at least $23,000 more to her political action committee between 2000 and 2002.

In the conservative publication
Human Events
, Marjorie Dannenfelser wrote that Sebelius’s record revealed that she’d support the abortion industry “even if it means abandoning the needs of women.” While calling on pro-life senators to fight the nomination, Dannenfelser said that if such opposition was ever needed, “that day is today.” But the governor was confirmed and the only good news for Kansas anti-abortionists was that she was no longer running their state.

On May 15, as Roeder absorbed this development, O’Reilly said on Fox that Sebelius was the “most pro-abortion governor in the United States. Based upon Dr. Tiller—the baby killer in her state—and all of that. All right? So there’s no doubt.”

Roeder had had six weeks for the impact of the verdict to settle into him, and that impact was only expanding.

“I did not know what Scott was thinking about that spring,” says Kamran, “but he did talk about buying a gun. One time he said he was going to an auction to get a gun, but I’m not sure if he bought one. He said he needed it for protection. Jesus said to get swords for his followers for their self-defense, and that’s how Scott justified it.

“If he’d been doing something really questionable inside our apartment, I’d have asked him to move out. You have to understand. I’m a foreign national in the United States, from Iran, and in my position I cannot be involved in certain things.”

Throughout that winter and early spring, Roeder told Kamran that he was going to Topeka fairly often to visit his aging mother, Doris. On his way back to Westport, he liked to stop at a farm near Lawrence and buy goat’s milk, a special treat, a rare indulgence, as both he and Kamran enjoyed this “kefir.” Roeder saved a few dollars each week from his work as a driver for an airport shuttle service, so he could buy kefir and put aside a few more dollars for a night out with his son. He didn’t have that much contact with Lindsey anymore, but called Nick with some regularity, hoping to meet him on the weekends and perhaps share a meal. Nick often had other things to do or made up excuses not to see his father.

Because Kamran and Roeder kept different schedules, they didn’t see a lot of each other during the week. Kamran wasn’t aware that at odd hours of the night or very early in the morning Roeder had been going to the Central Family Medicine clinic, an abortion office near downtown Kansas City, and conducting his own one-man protests. Or that instead of being in Topeka with his mother, he drove down to Wichita to protest at WHCS, or to meet with anti-abortion demonstrators outside the Sedgwick County Courthouse and to drop in on Tiller’s trial. He traveled alone and quietly, keeping much to himself. Like others who knew Roeder from his involvement in religious groups, Kamran saw him as a devoted student of the Bible more than a man of action. Yet he was a large figure and a menacing presence—especially when he was in a manic phase and hadn’t slept much—lingering in front of Tiller’s church or standing on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic.

Kamran worked late and might not get home until midnight. He usually went into his room, closed the door, and watched television before drifting off to sleep, uncertain if Roeder was even in the other bedroom or had disappeared for a few days. Months later, Roeder would say that in the weeks following Tiller’s trial he’d begun consulting with “numerous people” about what he should do, before “things had come together.”