A Death in Wichita (25 page)

On a July Sunday afternoon, Lindsey drove around suburban Kansas City, retracing her ex-husband’s steps leading up to the murder.

“I feared Scott for a period of time,” she’d once written, “and was constantly afraid he would kidnap Nick—but down deep inside him somewhere was that funny sweet carefree guy I married. Scott not only killed Dr. Tiller. He killed Nick’s dad and any remnants of the man I knew.”

Both Lindsey and Jeanne Tiller had lost their spouses in this new American war, with one man facing possible life imprisonment and the other dead. Neither woman had been able to keep her husband from pursuing the things that moved him most passionately, but each had reacted very differently to the tragedy, at least in public. Lindsey wanted and needed to talk; she had decades of backed-up feelings, and the more she confronted them, the more she was able to give expression to her anger and hurt. It seemed to have a cathartic effect. She’d never bargained for marrying or living with a terrorist.

Jeanne Tiller had apparently turned down all interview requests, withdrawing within her family and closest friends, while preparing for the legal ordeal that lay ahead. Nick Roeder had done the same thing, despite Lindsey’s encouraging him to open up about his dad. He wasn’t yet able to say anything to his father, let alone to the rest of the world.

What was Jeanne Tiller’s life like now, as a mother of four and grandmother of ten, with no one to send off to work in the morning and worry about until he was safely home at night inside their gated community? She and her family were survivors of a battle that hadn’t existed when she’d married the promising young doctor; she also hadn’t bargained for marrying a man who became a pariah in his own home-town. How had
she
coped since the mid-1970s being intimately connected to the target of people’s rage and hatred? What had this cost her, even before Tiller had died? In March 2009, she’d sat in a courtroom next to Scott Roeder, not knowing who he was or how he felt about her husband. Now she’d be in court with him again, just a few feet away from the man who’d killed the love of her life. How would she cope with that?

And what about the nameless and faceless thousands of mothers, daughters, and sisters, the unknown brothers, sons, and fathers, the cousins and extended families and friends of those who’d been shot to death at work or inside a church, a school, a hospital, or a business because they’d walked into the wrong location on the wrong day? And then there were the shamed families of the killers who were living with a different kind of pain. More than a decade passed before Susan Klebold, the mother of the Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, offered a few public comments about what her son had done in April 1999. When had we turned into a society so filled with “random violence” that it hardly seemed random at all?

The overwhelming difference in the United States between 1984, when Alan Berg was shot in an act of domestic terrorism, and 2009 was that extremism was no longer extreme. The sense of victimization that had once fueled the Order was now broadcast twenty-four hours a day on talk radio, on cable television, and was encouraged in countless other respectable venues. Public outrage was still all the rage, and still just as unexamined. Why were highly successful adults behaving in ways children on playgrounds were commanded not to? What were we fighting about? When had the need to be right overriden every other concern? How could such an unhealthy environment
not
produce violence? What if the problems were less political than behavioral?

Roeder’s preliminary hearing was set for July 28, as the country heated up with “tea parties,” town hall meetings, and other demonstrations against the Obama administration, a steadily rising volume of anger and inflamed rhetoric. At one gathering, a speaker said that the Democratic Party’s proposed health care reform would bring about waves of physician-assisted suicide.

“Adolf Hitler,” another protester declared, “issued six million end-of-life orders—he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.”

Five years earlier, Americans for Prosperity, the organization founded by the Wichita native David Koch, had debuted as a conservative activist organization. Its critics saw it as a front for the petroleum and petrochemical industries, after it had circulated a pledge to federal, state, and local officials asking them to oppose any climate change legislation leading to an increase in government revenue. Nearly 150 lawmakers and candidates signed the pledge. By 2009, AFP had evolved into a leading anti-health-care-reform group. In the past few years, millions of Americans had seen their health insurance premiums double or triple, and for many families the cost of basic medical care was becoming prohibitive, but these were not issues for David Koch. He lived in Manhattan and was reportedly New York City’s second-wealthiest resident, behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In 2008, Koch had pledged $110 million to renovate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, renamed the David H. Koch Theater. Two years earlier, he’d given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History, creating the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

Americans for Prosperity received funding from a Koch family foundation, and its opposition to health care reform was uncompromising. One of its projects was called “Patients First,” and 220,000 Americans quickly signed its online petition.

“Congress,” it read, “should oppose any legislation that imposes greater government control over my health care that would mean fewer choices for me and my family…”

In Wichita, Nola Foulston, the Sedgwick County district attorney, would be prosecuting Roeder herself, along with two assistant DAs, Kim Parker and Ann Swegle. The preliminary hearing was in the same downtown courthouse where Tiller had gone on trial last March, just three floors higher. Now Roeder was the defendant and facing both Gary Hoepner, who’d watched him shoot the doctor in the forehead in May, and Keith Martin, who’d chased him across the church parking lot and thrown coffee on him as he was speeding away. The two Reformation Lutheran ushers were still shaken by what they’d seen that Sunday morning, and Hoepner stopped his testimony several times to get himself under control.

In a white shirt and red tie, Roeder looked on from the defense table with his public defenders, Steve Osburn and Mark Rudy. The scuttlebutt around the courthouse was that while the anti-abortionists were still trying to find the defendant a private attorney, the best candidate had wanted a $60,000 retainer and the price tag was too high. Osburn and Rudy were experienced, dedicated lawyers, but their client had continued talking with the press and virtually admitted to certain reporters his role in the crime. His legal team didn’t appear to dispute that Roeder had killed Dr. Tiller, but were contesting the two aggravated-assault charges that came from the defendant pointing his gun at Hoepner and Martin. Roeder had said that if his lawyers could get the lesser charges dropped, he might come up for parole in twenty years or so and not die in prison.

His shackled feet never stopped jumping beneath the defense table. He was hyper, constantly on the edge of his chair, shifting around and glancing over his shoulder at three people in the gallery. One was the Kansas City activist Eugene Frye and another was Jennifer McCoy of Wichita, who’d done time for two abortion clinic arsons in Virginia. The other, a handsome, gray-haired, middle-aged man, conjured up an aging tennis pro or a fashion photographer, except for his worn-looking fingers and meaty forearms, which belonged on a farmer or a butcher. Dressed casually in blue jeans and loafers, he carried a worn Bible and kept it open to the New Testament Epistles that Paul had written to the Ephesians when he was imprisoned in Rome in A.D. 62 or 63. As the testimony unfolded, the man went over certain passages again and again, underlining them and then tracing the underline with the tip of a pen as he read the ancient words. He seemed far more interested in absorbing this two-thousand-year-old text than in anything taking place in the courtroom. If he did not convey the impression of being a radical, that impression was false.

He was Tony Leake, who for years, according to
The Kansas City Star
, had “vocally supported the killing of abortion doctors.”

Following Tiller’s death, reporters had sought him out and he’d been interviewed by the
The Wichita Eagle.

“I support the shooting of George Tiller as justifiable homicide,” he’d told the paper. “I only wish it had happened in 1973, before he was able to murder his first child.”

When Judge Warren Wilbert ordered the lunch recess, Leake took the elevator downstairs to the lobby.

With obvious pride, he talked of having edited Paul Hill’s book.

“I’ll get you a copy this afternoon,” he promised a journalist.

Wearing a menacing grin, Leake said, “Tiller had nine lives and he’d used them all up. I wasn’t sorry to see him stopped.”

After nearly a full day of testimony, Judge Wilbert bound Roeder over for trial on the first-degree murder charge and two counts of aggravated assault. Jury selection was set for less than two months away, on September 21, which satisfied the defendant’s desire to go to trial as soon as possible.

That evening Roeder greeted me as exuberantly in the jail visiting area as when we’d first met, a few weeks earlier. His spirits were high following the hearing and his good mood lasted until I mentioned that portions of the letters he’d written to his son during the past fifteen years had appeared on the front page of that day’s
Eagle.
Glaring through the smudged glass wall between us, he dropped the receiver, shot out of his chair, and began pacing in the tiny, enclosed room, barely large enough to hold him.

“How did that happen?” he shouted. “Who did that?”

I shook my head, not telling him that Lindsey had recently given me copies of the same letters.

“Why did they put my private thoughts to my son in the paper? How can anyone do that?”

The good ol’ boy mask he usually wore was gone and anger radiated off him as he paced and asked more questions. He cared more about Nick than anyone else and had been reaching out to the young man ever since the murder, hoping to salvage a connection there. His son wanted nothing to do with him and Roeder still didn’t realize that he’d been an embarrassment to Nick for years and was now something far beyond that. The inmate had a kind of naïveté or ingrained innocence, even now, even after the murder, which made him all the more frightening. What had it been like for Nick to have him as a dad at Cub Scout meetings and elementary school gatherings, where he’d harangued other parents about abortion and bad government and not paying income taxes? What was it like for Nick today?

Roeder sat down and grabbed the phone. His cheeks, which incarceration had turned pale, were burning pink.

“Why did you come back to see me again?” he demanded. “Why are so you interested in this subject?”

I hesitated, uncertain how to respond. Like most reporters, I was much more comfortable interviewing others than being asked my own views.

I threw a question back at him about being in the courtroom at Dr. Tiller’s trial last March and he unleashed a broadside against the prosecutor Barry Disney.

“He did nothing to stop the steamroller that was happening every day at Tiller’s clinic,” Roeder replied. “Operation Rescue said we’d be able to get his license lifted through the courts, but I’d been hearing that for years. If they couldn’t convict him in court on these charges, how could they ever pull his license? That wasn’t going to happen.”

When asked about the conditions at the detention facility, he didn’t complain as much as before. His cell was warmer now, he’d settled into the routine of being a prisoner and had adjusted to the food. Lindsey had half-jokingly told me that he might actually like being locked up, because he didn’t have to hold down a job: “He has nothing to do all day but lie around, be served three meals, and have someone else do his laundry.”

Looking back, what did Roeder remember most vividly about last May 31?

“I had relief running out of that church, man,” he said. “Lots of relief. I’d gone in there with a pretty good idea of what Tiller looked like, but I had to pick him out from the other people and ushers. I was fairly sure it was him. After leaving the church, I got on those open roads to Kansas City and it was a really beautiful day for a drive. Sunny and warm and calm. I drove and drove and wondered what was going on back in Wichita. When the police finally pulled me over, I just sat there for a moment and thought, ‘This is it.’”

He paused and said softly, “I’ve never considered myself a murderer.”

Roeder had a gentleness that went in and out of focus almost minute by minute. His political and religious rage wasn’t obvious and he wasn’t a stereotypically angry white man, like the neo-Nazis I’d met earlier in my life. He wasn’t macho and didn’t subtly threaten me or try to test me. He seemed genuinely happy to have a visitor and genuinely pleased with what he’d done; he wanted me to be too. Tiller’s death, it was obvious, meant nothing to him; he’d never mentioned anything about the doctor’s family or what Jeanne Tiller and her children had been experiencing since the murder. It was the opposite of remorse; he saw himself as a modern-day Saint Paul, locked up for fighting a society gone wrong.

As with Randall Terry and other anti-abortion leaders, women simply did not figure into his equations. If all the abortion providers were dead, the problem would be solved, and he’d never have to think about those who sought to end their pregnancies through illegal or dangerous means.

Before coming to Kansas, I’d contacted a local clinical psychologist. In 1975, Dr. Howard Brodsky had moved to Wichita and for the next decade was chief psychologist for Sedgwick County Mental Health, before going into private practice. With a special interest in forensics, he’d been an expert witness at legal proceedings throughout the state, often testifying about a defendant’s competency to stand trial. Following BTK’s arrest, he’d become a national media commentator and was known for being incisive and somewhat irreverent.

“For a long time,” he liked to say, “I’ve been the go-to guy in town for analyzing all the weird and disgusting stuff that people do.”

Dr. Tiller’s murder had occurred a few miles from Brodsky’s office and when I brought up the alleged killer, he immediately said, “Roeder’s a loser. He couldn’t hold on to anything—not his wife or his son or even a place to live. He drove a fifteen-year-old Taurus. He couldn’t stay employed at a McDonald’s.”

I’d always disliked terms like “loser” because they told me nothing that I wanted to know about a person. Yet when reading about the history of the anti-abortion movement, I’d kept running into one thing: many of the men who’d spearheaded it had never gone out into the world and learned a skill, a craft, or a profession, something that took years of effort and discipline, something based on actual experience and an accumulation of hard-earned knowledge. They’d had intense religious conversions, emerged from these events “born again,” and declared their passionate desire to improve the world or rid it of evil. They’d desperately wanted to do something good for their country and given themselves the job of altering the course of American political, legal, and medical history, without anything approaching expertise in these fields.

What was the most significant change Dr. Brodsky had seen in his patients during the past thirty or forty years?

“That’s easy,” he said at once. “The incredible growth of narcissism. This wasn’t a big problem or trend when I started working. Now it’s all I see in my practice. It’s everywhere, not just in criminals but throughout the entire culture. It’s affected everything and is the underlying condition of our time. Several decades ago, Roeder would have stood out more in his community because of his narcissism, but now he doesn’t. He blends in because there are so many other people who share some of these same traits. He thinks that he—and he alone—can very simplistically fight and stop evil. He can end abortion in America by killing Dr. Tiller. The murder will be a hugely transformative event for the country.

“Guess what? There are no transformative events in the sense that he’s thinking about. Social change happens, but slowly and gradually. Murdering an abortion doctor is an act of extreme self-indulgence and narcissism on his part. It must have been a great shock for him to realize in the weeks after the murder that not only did everything not change, but that those people he believed were his close allies turned their backs on him. And tens of thousands of women are going to keep getting abortions.”

How did Dr. Brodsky define narcissism?

“We all have a choice. We can either try to change ourselves emotionally, which takes real effort, or we can tell ourselves that we’re changing the world. This is the fundamental narcissism of our age. People will do
anything
to avoid confronting and changing themselves. So what happens to others when they try to change the world doesn’t really matter. Those people don’t count. Roeder doesn’t even see what he’s done as a criminal act.”

During his sixth day of incarceration, the inmate had phoned the Associated Press and told a reporter to expect more attacks like the one that had just happened in Wichita, prompting the state to raise his bail from $5 million to $20 million.

Sitting face-to-face with Roeder now, I asked him if he could be more specific. He wanted to open up, he said, but believed that the lines we were talking on were not secure, so he couldn’t go into detail. Once he’d been tried, convicted, and transferred to a state prison, we’d be able to speak without using telephones and he’d be freer to divulge what he knew. More acts of terrorism were coming, he implied, and he was in on the plans.

As he’d done in my earlier visit, he bragged about stopping abortion in Wichita, but of course that wasn’t the same thing as stopping abortion. According to state health statistics, roughly eighty thousand abortions were done annually in New York City alone. Closer to Kansas, Dr. LeRoy Carhart of Bellevue, Nebraska, had recently hired two people from Tiller’s closed office and was using them to train his staff to perform late-term abortions. The sixty-eight-year-old physician had rechristened his business the Abortion and Contraception Clinic of Nebraska, and its new brochure featured a photo of Tiller, stating that “our services to women” were in honor of the slain man.

It wasn’t long before Troy Newman showed up in Bellevue to launch Operation Rescue protests against Dr. Carhart and to submit a complaint about the physician to Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s attorney general. “We’re trying,” Newman told
The New York Times
, “to get criminal charges against him, to get his license revoked, and to get legislators there to look at the law.”

Dr. Carhart, a former air force officer, had responded to Operation Rescue by installing a metal detector and security cameras, and bringing in a full-time security consultant. The physician had altered his route to and from work, given up eating in public, and when his daughter got married in the fall of 2009, the ceremony was held at a nearby military base because of the protection it offered.

Others besides Dr. Carhart were stepping in to replace Dr. Tiller and the services he’d provided in Wichita. In early 2010, Curtis Boyd, an Albuquerque physician, announced on his Web site that in response to Tiller’s death he’d begun performing third-trimester abortions. The seventy-two-year-old Boyd had also hired two California doctors, Susan Robinson and Shelley Sella, who had worked with Tiller on a rotating basis. An ordained Baptist minister, Boyd explained in a 2008 speech his motives for becoming an abortion provider:

“In my generation, many of the doctors of conscience who chose to provide abortions were moved by the horrors of botched illegal abortions. But that was not what drove me to risk my career and sometimes my life. I was moved by the certain knowledge that women’s lives could be ruined when they could not abort a pregnancy.”

On the July evening Roeder and I spoke at the jail, Lindsey appeared on
Anderson Cooper 360
and blitzed the inmate in front of a worldwide audience—after the CNN reporter Gary Tuchman asked her what she’d like to say to her ex-husband.

“Scott,” she answered, “you had no right to take another person’s life. You’re not God. You’re not a judge. You’re not a jury. You say that you are protecting the unborn, that you did it for the children, that you were justified. If you did it for the children, why did I have to fight for years to get child support to care for Nicholas? If you did it for the children—if you did it for the children—why wouldn’t you pay for a dentist for Nicholas?”

She began to cry.

Lindsay and Nick both were on the prosecution’s witness list, which meant they could be compelled to testify, but that wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Roeder’s September 21 trial date did not hold and jury selection was rescheduled for January 11, 2010. Since that was nearly six months away, the defendant continued thinking about hiring a private attorney, but he needed funds. His supporters, led by Regina Dinwiddie and Dave Leach, wanted to raise money by holding an eBay auction and selling memorabilia from the anti-abortion movement: an Army of God manual, videotapes of Paul Hill praying, a cookbook written in prison by Shelley Shannon, a copy of Michael Bray’s
A Time to Kill
, and a bullhorn autographed by Dinwiddie herself, like the kind she’d used to protest abortion clinics (the originals had all been confiscated by the police). An inmate whom Roeder had befriended at the jail had done some drawings that the alleged killer had autographed and all these products were to be auctioned off—if eBay would permit it.

In a statement after this issue arose, the company said “eBay does not allow listings that promote or glorify violence, hate, racial or religious intolerance, or items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

When the Tiller family learned about the auction, it was appalled, and in a very rare public move, Jeanne Tiller had her attorney Lee Thompson send a letter to eBay asking its executives to halt the sale.

“These materials contain hate messages,” Thompson wrote, “that glorify violence against abortion doctors who provide constitutionally protected medical services, and instruct on means of violence, including bombing, of abortion clinics. We urge you to deny access to the resources of eBay for this reprehensible and vile ‘auction.’”

Lindsey also contacted eBay and asked the company to stop the event.

“I believe that this auction,” she wrote in an e-mail, “could incite more violence on abortion doctors and clinics. I do not believe that cancelling this auction will in any way hinder Scott’s right to an adequate defense, as he has a good team of public defenders.”

The protests worked and eBay denied the auction, telling
The Kansas City Star
that these listings “would violate our policy regarding offensive material.”

While this controversy played out on the local stage, the subject of abortion found itself at the heart of the most ambitious political reform in recent American history.

By September 2009, James Pouillon had regularly stood outside a local public high school in Owosso, Michigan, holding up a sign with one side depicting a chubby baby and the word “LIFE,” while the other side displayed an image of an aborted fetus and the word “ABORTION.” On September 11, the day before the nation’s largest anti-Obama demonstration to date, a pickup stopped in front of the school and Harlan James Drake, a thirty-three-year-old local trucker, allegedly opened fire, killing Pouillon before driving on to a gravel pit business and murdering its owner. His motives were not revealed.