A Death in Wichita (18 page)

“It’s like the 1990s, except that the media commentators who aid and abet
these
groups, like Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, are in the mainstream. In the 1990s, radio personalities sympathetic to the militias might reach fifty thousand listeners. Michael Savage now speaks to eight million people a week. There’s a lot going on out there. The militias are back in the woods training again, carrying their guns and doing maneuvers. We’ve just had a whole new security makeover at our office because we’re getting a lot more threats.”

In early April 2009, the Kansas City FBI office received an anonymous letter warning that a Scott Roeder “would do physical harm” to Dr. George Tiller, or any other abortion provider. The letter’s author was Mark Archer, the husband of Sue Archer, with whom Roeder had fathered a child back in 2001. The couple lived in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, and was raising the young girl, Olivia. Before writing the letter, Mark had created what he called a “psychological profile” of the suspect based upon Roeder’s blog postings, arrest history, and some things he’d said to Sue in Pennsylvania in 2008 when he’d come out to see his daughter. The couple was still involved in a custody battle with Roeder over Olivia, and the purpose of Mark’s letter was to get the FBI to place Roeder on a domestic terrorist “no-fly” list so that he couldn’t travel to Pennsylvania that spring and visit the seven-year-old girl. According to the FBI, the anonymous letter did not contain a specific or credible threat, so the feds didn’t conduct surveillance on Roeder and he made the trip east. Word of the letter was passed along to the clinic in Wichita, but it wasn’t unusual enough to draw much attention.

In early May 2009, about a month after Dr. Tiller’s acquittal, WHCS was vandalized once again, as it had been numerous times since the 1970s. Somebody snipped the wires to the security cameras and outdoor lights. They cut holes in the roof and plugged the building’s downspouts—rain poured in through the openings and caused thousands of dollars of damage to the office. Tiller reported the incident to the FBI and asked the feds to investigate, but no arrests were made. According to a 2008 National Clinic Violence survey conducted by the Feminist Majority Foundation, when federal laws were not applied strenuously in these circumstances, and when death threats were ignored and protesters were allowed to photograph or videotape patients arriving at women’s health clinics, the reported rate of violence tripled.

In mid-May, Tiller called Dr. Susan Hill of North Carolina, the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation, which operated reproductive health clinics in areas where abortion services were scarce or nonexistent. For many years, Hill and Tiller had provided long-distance support for each other, and he also communicated regularly with Warren Hern in Boulder. The three of them, along with Dr. LeRoy Carhart of Nebraska, made up the remaining old-guard physicians still willing to face the dangers of their profession. Once, when Dr. Hill had been desperate to assist a patient, she’d phoned the “doctor of last resort” in Wichita. A nine-year-old girl from a small Southern town had been raped by her father and was eighteen weeks pregnant. Birthing the baby would severely damage her small body. No area doctor or hospital would help the girl, but Tiller told Hill he’d take the patient for free. After performing the abortion, he kept her in Wichita for three days until she was able to return home safely.

When he called Dr. Hill that May, she told him that she’d recently been threatened by an abortion protester who’d shown up on her doorstep late at night. An image of the man could be found on the Internet, kissing an AK-47. She’d reported this to the feds and local police, but hadn’t heard back from them. Tiller asked her to send him pictures of those who’d been harassing her. New waves of demonstrators had been showing up at WHCS, and to him this signaled a general uptick in anti-abortion activity. Hill agreed and wondered aloud why Tiller didn’t retire while he still had time to enjoy his good health and family. He gave her the same answer he’d given a few weeks earlier in the courtroom: he wasn’t a quitter and couldn’t stop serving the women who came to him, because many had nowhere else to go. Drs. Hill and Tiller weren’t the only ones thinking about the abortion issue. On Sunday, May 17, President Obama delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame University, with some at the Catholic school protesting his appearance and pro-choice beliefs. On the campus, the president addressed head-on the underlying war that had separated Americans for so long.

“The question, then, is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort?…How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side? Nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion…

“A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that’s not what was preventing him from voting for me. What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my Web site—an entry that said I would fight ‘right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.’ The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, ‘I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.’ Fair-minded words.

“After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn’t change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my Web site. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that…that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. That’s when we begin to say, ‘Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.’

“So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.

“Understand—I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it—indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory—the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.”

In mid-May, as Obama went to Notre Dame, Phill Kline sent out a brochure mentioning Dr. Tiller and asking the former attorney general’s supporters to help pay off his $200,000 in personal legal debt. The money would also assist the Life Issues Institute in Cincinnati in launching more aggressive anti-abortion “battles on the national front.” While contending that he’d acted in good faith to his duty and oath of office, his opponents “must silence the truth by silencing the messenger; and to date, I am the only one who has been willing to speak the truth.”

On May 21, Ann Coulter responded to the president’s South Bend speech by unleashing a rant on
AnnCoulter.com
. Instead of having a constitutional lawyer (like Obama) drone on and on about the “purported constitutional right [to an abortion],” Coulter suggested, why not enact an abortion itself? Why not have the Notre Dame marching band form “a giant skull-piercing fork” and end the life of an infant? Or have the president throw the “ceremonial first fetus,” instead of the ball chief executives toss out on opening day of the baseball season? Or maybe Notre Dame could get “famed partial-birth abortion practitioner George Tiller to do the demonstration at next year’s graduation.” And the Obama administration could give him a hand with the procedure, since Tiller was such a close friend of the Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

“This,” Coulter concluded, “is a ‘constitutional right’ like no other.”

On Monday, May 18, Roeder drove the roughly forty miles from Kansas City to Lawrence and went into Jayhawk Pawn & Jewelry, where he said that he needed a gun for self-defense. He picked out a semiautomatic PT .22-caliber pistol, worth $229.99, but couldn’t take it with him because the store, in conjunction with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had to follow standard procedure and run a background check on the buyer. In 1996, Roeder had been arrested in Topeka for the criminal use of explosives, but the Kansas Court of Appeals had overturned his conviction, ruling that the police had conducted an illegal search when seizing evidence from his car. In mid-May 2009, the ATF’s examination of Roeder uncovered no red flags from his past, but he had to wait a day for this process to be completed. He didn’t immediately go back to Lawrence to pick up his new gun, but on May 20 he stopped by the Bullet Hole in Overland Park to buy two boxes of ammunition.

On Saturday, May 23, a tall, balding, middle-aged man was caught on videotape vandalizing the Central Family Medicine office, where abortions were performed, near downtown Kansas City. With the clinic closed for the weekend, he’d glued shut the locks on the doors, a violation of federal law. Following the 1993 murder of the Florida doctor David Gunn, President Clinton had urged Congress to pass the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinics) Act, making it a crime to block access to medical facilities. Congress had complied and the Clinton administration had prosecuted thirty-six individuals under this law, which was used on only about half as many suspects during the presidency of George W. Bush. Central Family Medicine had captured a blurred image of the vandal on tape and passed it along to the authorities. Clinic workers could see enough of the man’s features to identify him as somebody named “Scott,” who’d been coming there for years to meet with others and protest.

Back in 2000, he’d twice glued the locks shut with superglue and the clinic had also gotten his picture back then, but the FBI said it was too fuzzy to make a positive identification. On that occasion, the Central Family Medicine office manager Jeffrey Pederson had jotted down the man’s license plate number and given it to the feds, who’d promised to speak with him. For several years the man had left the clinic alone, before showing up in 2006, standing around on the sidewalk and talking with others. By then, the authorities had lost interest in him. After the May 23, 2009, incident, Pederson filed another report with the Kansas City, Kansas, police and again contacted the FBI.

That Saturday afternoon, Roeder drove to Lawrence in his powder blue 1993 Ford Taurus and returned to Jayhawk Pawn & Jewelry to pick up his new gun and some Remington hollow-point cartridges. From Lawrence he took back roads south through farm country because he preferred the scenery and dealing with less traffic—and was committed to avoiding paying the $3.50 toll on the Kansas Turnpike. He headed to Wichita and found a cheap motel, the Starlite, located on the business artery known as both Highway 54 and Kellogg Street, just a few blocks from Tiller’s clinic and a few miles from the doctor’s church.

The next morning, Roeder attended the 10 a.m. service at Reformation Lutheran, a modern-looking redbrick structure made up of various angles and many windows, positioned to create a sense of open space and to let a maximum amount of sunlight into the sanctuary. Entering the foyer, he carried a worn Bible and a concealed handgun inside his shopworn clothes, the slacks a touch short and the shirt collar frayed. In the foyer, he glanced around at the ushers handing out programs to worshippers. A long table near one wall offered juice and coffee, and several members of the congregation were gathered beside it, chatting among themselves. Not seeing who he was looking for, he walked on through the foyer and into the sanctuary. Toward the rear, he sat down by himself on an aisle and searched the pews, studying the faces, up one row and down the next, confused and disappointed, not quite ready to give up. He stood, returned to the foyer, and went on to the restroom, before going back into the sanctuary.

His contacts in the anti-abortion movement had spent years tracking Tiller and his family and then passing the information along to others. They knew the doctor’s weekly schedule and where he attended church, knew the Reformation Lutheran address and when the services were held. Roeder had scouted out the nearby streets and the asphalt parking lot next to the house of worship, which sat in a large undeveloped field in northeast Wichita, surrounded by untouched acres of grass. Because of its isolation, the church had a calm and peaceful aura, almost a rural feeling, especially when the trees and flowers and grass were in full bloom, as they were on this late May morning. The church seemed more than just a few blocks away from the exclusive Wichita Country Club, the clothing boutiques and pricey restaurants along Rock Road.

Adjacent to the church was a property owned by Charles Koch, whose father had founded Wichita’s Koch Industries, the oil-refining empire that had become America’s second-largest privately held company. Its annual revenues were estimated at $110 billion and, according to
Forbes
magazine, Charles and his brother David had a combined fortune worth $24 billion. The four Koch sons had tangled over ownership of the business, but the family as a whole was known for its archconservative politics. In 1980, David had run for vice president, alongside the Libertarian presidential candidate Ed Clark. Their ticket won 921,299 votes (or 1.06 percent), the most ever for that party.

In 2004, David Koch had started Americans for Prosperity, a Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group promoting the long-time mantra of the GOP’s conservative wing: limited government, free markets, and less regulation on business. The organization was headed by Tim Phillips, a former partner in Century Strategies, which became well known after a Senate investigation suggested financial connections among the convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Century Strategies, and Americans for Tax Reform. With the coming of the Obama administration, David Koch and Americans for Prosperity were gearing up to fight the new president and the Democratic agenda, particularly health care reform. Koch had virtually unlimited funds for such activities.

By early 2009, AFP had become the guiding hand behind the “Tea Party” protests about to sweep across the nation. On February 27, AFP launched its opposition to Obama by sponsoring a tea party in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. In May, AFP started Patients United Now, whose purpose was to resist government involvement in the American health care system, including public funding for abortion.

From previous surveillance, Roeder understood that people entering Reformation Lutheran on Sunday mornings didn’t use the large double doors at the main entrance but came in through the smaller foyer. He knew that throughout May 2009 Dr. Tiller was scheduled to be one of six ushers handing out programs in the foyer between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. The service began at ten sharp, but the ushers tended to linger in the foyer before coming into the sanctuary, as a few people usually wandered in late and needed a program. What Roeder didn’t know was that on this Sunday, May 24, Tiller was on vacation at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, doing what Susan Hill had suggested he do and getting away from the clinic for a week, spending time with wife and children and grandchildren, taking in the sun, and reading escapist novels.

Upset that he’d driven to Wichita and spent a night in a motel for nothing, Roeder decided to stay for the service and settled into his pew, checking out the congregation. These weren’t the kind of real Christians engaged in the in-depth religious study he was accustomed to. These were Sunday Christians who dropped by the sanctuary once a week to sing a few hymns and put a few dollars into the collection plate, but they didn’t think much about Yahweh or Yahshua on the other six days. His old Bible, he was certain, had been thumbed far more than theirs. What did these people really stand for, if they weren’t willing to stop the evil unfolding just a couple of miles away at Tiller’s clinic? Why would they let such a man be a member of their church? Did they have any Christian convictions at all?

When the collection plate came around, he showed them his attitude by placing a handwritten note on top of the money.

“Do you believe in taxes?” it read.

A pair of ushers noticed the foreign object in the plate, and that the bald stranger hadn’t mingled with the other worshippers, and that his Sunday morning clothes were shabby and didn’t fit on his large frame, but nobody commented much about it. The church, like so many others in Wichita and other locales, was a friendly and welcoming place, despite the anti-abortion protesters who’d gathered outside in years past and come inside to disrupt a communion service or yell at the children attending Sunday school. Maybe the man was down on his luck and had needed the comfort of church today. Folks at Reformation Lutheran wanted to think the best of others and gave him the benefit of their doubts. And because Dr. Tiller had convinced church authorities that they didn’t need a security system, Roeder’s gun went undetected. When the service was over, he retraced his route to Kansas City, stopping for kefir near Lawrence and reporting to his job at the Quicksilver airport shuttle service.

The following week, Roeder called Eddie Ebecher, an activist in the Kansas City area who went by the name “Wolfgang Anacon.” Ebecher had protested with Roeder at anti-abortion rallies, including one at Tiller’s clinic, and the men had once lived together. When Roeder phoned him in late May, he seemed out of sorts and edgy, complaining about the movement’s inability to stop abortion in Kansas and the rest of America. He mentioned a few of his regrets and casually hinted that he was going to miss certain people. Roeder called his brother, David, who lived in a rural area west of Topeka, a perfect spot for what Scott had in mind. He asked if he could come over and see David that Friday afternoon, the twenty-ninth, but the man was busy so they rescheduled. Roeder then made plans for an evening out with his now-twenty-two-year-old son, Nicholas.

Roeder rigorously observed Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, as a day of rest extending from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, but tonight he was making an exception because he wanted to be with Nick. The young man often dodged his father’s calls or failed to respond to his messages, but Scott was insistent about getting together on this particular Friday; he’d offered an extra enticement by inviting Nick to a movie he was eager to see. Throughout the day, Roeder contacted his son several times to make certain they were still on and also called Lindsey, telling her to get home as fast as possible and take over the care of her ninety-year-old father, so Nick could leave the house sooner.

The two of them went to an inexpensive restaurant, watched
Star Trek
, and then lingered over ice cream, Nick noticing that his dad wasn’t in any hurry to part tonight. Roeder had always wanted his son to know who he was and why he had such strong political and religious convictions. Nick had his own questions about God, but kept a lot of things to himself, not entirely sure yet what he believed about faith and not ready to speak his mind openly to his father. There was no rush; they had time for those discussions. Nick still thought of his dad as a nonviolent man who wouldn’t hurt a bird or a bug. Mostly he let his companion talk and Roeder again shared his thoughts on the issues critical to him, as he’d been doing ever since Nick was a small child. Scott wished his son were different in some ways, and more like him. The young man hurt his feelings on occasion by refusing to take his calls or being ungrateful. He wished he wasn’t so influenced by his mother and had more of his own values and showed more appreciation for the things Roeder had done for him over the years, but this wasn’t the moment to dwell on that. He’d always wanted to be close to his son, especially now.

As they sat together talking in the falling darkness, Nick didn’t observe anything out of the ordinary about his father, not until later on, when he looked back on this Friday evening and scoured every corner of his mind for clues. Something unspoken had passed between the two of them over their ice cream, conveyed with a gesture or a glance or a pause in the conversation—Roeder seemed to be saying good-bye.