A Death in Wichita (28 page)

On November 11, two days after Roeder confessed, Lindsey went to work as usual and came home that evening to take care of her ailing father. In addition to keeping up with her regular duties at school and with her family, she had many other things to manage now. For worse and for better, Dr. Tiller’s death had opened up a new life for her, a more visible and outspoken life that was more in line with how she really thought and felt. She’d played a role in keeping eBay from auctioning items whose sale was intended to pay for her ex-husband’s expenses. She’d had extensive communication with Susan and Mark Archer of Pennsylvania, after the news broke that Mark had warned the FBI last April about Roeder, in an effort to keep him from boarding a plane and coming to visit his biological daughter, Olivia. Lindsey had been very distressed when someone satirically suggested on the Internet that Nick be tortured in front of his father by smashing his testicles, until Roeder told the police who else was involved in the murder.

NBC had aired an episode of its long-running hit series
Law and Order
with a plot about a man who went into a church in New York City and shot to death an abortion doctor. In this fictional story, the son of the killer tries to help his father after the crime. The program infuriated Nick, who’d never done anything to assist his dad since the crime, and Lindsey shared the sentiment.

“It was really quite outrageous,” she says. “It had everything Scott would have wanted, except for the verdict in the case. The only thing good about the show,” Lindsey grimly joked, “was that the killer’s ex-wife was depicted as skinny.”

Since Tiller’s death, Nick had been struggling with his feelings for his father and the effect of the murder on his own life. Those feelings got rawer after the nasty June 2009 letter Roeder wrote Lindsey and Nick from jail, calling them spoiled brats. When Nick was a boy, his dad had told him that he’d blow up an abortion clinic late at night because that wouldn’t hurt anyone, and the youngster had held on to this as something separating his father from a terrorist like Timothy McVeigh. As he’d gotten older, Nick had more and more strongly disagreed with his dad’s beliefs, but at least Roeder hadn’t shed anyone’s blood. That was no longer true and Nick could no longer remain silent.

On October 30, five months after Tiller was murdered, he sat down, composed an angry letter, and sent it to his father. Until now, he wrote, he’d kept an open mind about the existence of God, had thought about different religious paths, and had nurtured an idea of developing his own spiritual base as he came into adulthood. He’d wanted to connect with something larger within himself and beyond, but his father’s actions at Reformation Lutheran last May had ended his search. His dad was a killer and God was an illusion. There was no point in being a seeker. Of all the things he might have written to the prisoner, this was likely the most devastating.

“Given Scott’s religious convictions,” says Lindsey, “this had to be very, very hard for him to read.”

As Lindsey did chores around the house at 6:30 p.m. on November 11, the phone rang and she answered it.

“Will you accept a collect call,” the operator said, “from an inmate at the Sedgwick County Detention Facility?”

She was caught off guard, but understood that for the first time since Roeder’s arrest, he was calling her. Like Nick, she’d also been thinking since May 31 about what to tell Scott if she ever got another chance. She’d also been thinking about the ugly letter he’d written them after his arrest, but now that he was actually calling, she didn’t want to say anything, or wasn’t ready to, especially if she had to listen to him complain about being in jail and had to pay for this, so she hung up. A minute later, the phone rang again. The operator asked her the same question and she hung up once more.

As she stared at the receiver, the shock of what had just happened subsided a little and she reminded herself that two days ago her ex-husband had confessed to the Associated Press. Roeder was, in all likelihood, never going to get out of prison or pose a threat to her, Nick, or her father. He’d be locked up for the rest of his life, where he belonged, and the fear she’d felt in the man’s presence for nearly two decades was no longer necessary. Her family seemed safe for the first time in a very long time, yet there still
were
lingering fears working inside her. If she wanted to be truly free of Roeder, she needed to do something.

The phone rang again and she grabbed it, telling the operator that she’d put twenty-five dollars on her credit card for the next twenty minutes. Scott came on the line and they awkwardly mumbled hello. She said that three days after the murder his former girlfriend had come to her front stoop and knocked, but Lindsey had shut the door in her face. Throughout the past five months, she’d wondered if Scott had sent her there on a mission and what it might have been (one of the many rumors following the murder, which Lindsey and the Archers had kicked around together, was that the woman had aborted Roeder’s baby in the mid-1990s and that this had enraged him ever since, ultimately driving him to kill). She asked him about the visit and if he’d fathered a child with her. None of this was true, he insisted. She’d become pregnant with her husband’s baby and given birth to the child; and he’d had nothing to do with her visit to Lindsey’s home last June. By the time they’d hashed this out over the phone, the twenty minutes had all but disappeared.

She asked if he’d received Nick’s angry letter and he said he had, but didn’t want to talk about that with her. He was calling to speak with his son and to tell him he loved him, but Nick wasn’t available. Their time was up and the call abruptly ended, with Lindsey having more to say.

Using a few clues she’d gathered from Roeder during their conversation, she spent the next day tracking down the woman, determined to know why she’d come to her house following the murder. After hours of legwork, Lindsey finally located her. The ex-girlfriend had shown up on Lindsey’s doorstep because she’d wanted to apologize for her behavior all those years ago in front of the five-year-old Nick. She spoke frankly and Lindsey accepted her apology, giving her one piece of closure—but she needed another. It was a small thing perhaps in the eyes of the world, but not for her. Her marriage would never really be finished until she’d gotten something out.

That evening, the phone rang and she told the operator that she’d accept the charges. Roeder began grilling her about what she’d said about him to the media. Had she ever described him as racist? Had she told any reporters that he’d had a copy of the anti-Semitic novel
The Turner Diaries
in his possession? He was concerned with his public image, especially around the issue of race, and it was important to him that she hadn’t.

When he’d finished and there was a pause, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and mustered all of her resolve. She was never going to take another call from him, so as far as she was concerned this was the last interaction they’d ever have. She’d rehearsed this speech many times before in the privacy of her mind, and once she started it, the words came tumbling out.

“I just want you to understand,” she said, “that I’m a card-carrying, pro-choice, Obama Democrat.”

No response.

“And a member of the Feminist Majority Foundation.”

Still nothing.

“And I don’t believe in anything you’ve done, Scott. I think it’s totally wrong.”

The line remained silent.

“And that’s who I am.”

Very quietly, and to her surprise, he said, “I know.”

This had to be a lie—he didn’t know who she was or what she believed or how she felt about his assassination of Dr. Tiller, or so many other things, because he’d never bothered to ask, but had labeled her ignorant. He hadn’t just terrorized doctors or women seeking abortions, but her own family.

“If you ever need anything from me,” he said, “just let me know.”

“I don’t need anything from you, ever again.”

She hung up, with a growing sense of relief. Walking around the house that evening, reliving their discussion and thinking about his silence on the phone, she’d never felt so powerful or so free.

On December 22, Judge Wilbert scheduled arguments on the defense’s change-of-venue motion and several other matters, as the courtroom battle Roeder had been waiting for was about to commence. Half a continent away, a different kind of struggle was unfolding in the nation’s capital.

Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, December 21, following an interminable debate and with Washington snowbound from a weekend blizzard, Senate Democrats held a procedural vote on the 2,700-page health care reform bill. The Senate voted strictly along party lines, and by a count of 60–40 the majority party ended Republican filibustering efforts, seeming to lock in the margin needed to overhaul the nation’s health care system and cover 30 million Americans previously without such care. Costing an estimated $871 billion over the next decade, the bill was expected to reshape one-sixth of the national economy. Democrats hailed the vote as a step closer to completing a reform process that had begun with President Truman nearly six decades earlier. Republicans bitterly denounced it, declaring that the bill had been fashioned in secret and rammed through the Senate in a snowstorm in the middle of the night in the days leading up to Christmas, when Congress was normally out of town. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee called it “a historic mistake,” while others labeled it a historic compromise.

The last Democratic senator to vote for the bill was the abortion opponent Ben Nelson of Nebraska. He accepted the legislation only after the Democratic leadership agreed to permit individual states to prohibit abortion coverage in the insurance markets where most new health plans would be sold. Subscribers to these plans would have to make two separate monthly premium payments: one for all insurance coverage except abortion, the other for abortion coverage. Planned Parenthood, NOW, Pro-Choice America, and the National Women’s Law Center instantly denounced the compromise. It was just as aggressively decried, for exactly the opposite reasons, by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Right to Life Committee. The president, however, was pleased.

“The United States Senate…” he said, “scored a big victory for the American people.”

Nelson’s deciding vote had come with a significant—some said corrupt—price tag. While the Senate bill imposed tough new restrictions on referrals of Medicare patients by doctors to hospitals in which the physicians had financial interests, the bill provided an exemption to a few such hospitals, including the Bellevue Medical Center in Bellevue, Nebraska. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of this provision benefiting Massachusetts, Vermont, and Nebraska was “approximately $1.2 billion over the 2010–2019 period.” And in Nebraska, the federal government would indefinitely pay the full cost of covering low-income people added to Medicaid rolls. The Republicans called this the “Cornhusker kickback.” The outgoing California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, went further, urging his state’s national representatives to vote against the health care reform legislation—unless California could wrangle the same benefits Senator Nelson had just won for Nebraska.

Schwarzenegger called the bill a “trough of bribes, deals and loopholes…While I enthusiastically supported health care reform, it is not reform to push more costs onto states that are already struggling while other states are getting sweetheart deals. California’s congressional delegation should either vote against this bill that is a disaster for California or get in there and fight for the same sweetheart deal that Senator Nelson of Nebraska got for the Cornhusker State.”

Nebraska, the governor said, “got the corn and we got the husk.”

The American Medical Association quickly endorsed the bill, and unexpectedly the Catholic Health Association (CHA) and an umbrella group for nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), also backed the legislation. The CHA represented hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, which stood to gain financially by reducing their number of uninsured patients. The LCWR said that it was “increasingly confident” that the new bill “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion,” while the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the bill “morally unacceptable” and Catholic scholars said the bishops had reached this conclusion by applying the Church’s teaching against “cooperation with evil.”

The Republican U.S. representative Todd Tiahrt, whose congressional district included Wichita, endorsed a move by local lawmakers to exempt Kansas from national health care. Tiahrt believed it was unconstitutional for the federal government to tax citizens or threaten to send them to jail for not buying health insurance. In Topeka, a group of state legislators began their latest and strongest push to tighten restrictions on late-term abortion procedures, the same legislation that Governor Sebelius had vetoed the year before. The group wanted doctors carrying out late-term procedures to be forced to report more information to the medical authorities—and to face the possibilities of more lawsuits—even though no physicians were left in Kansas to perform these kinds of abortions.

On December 22, Judge Wilbert rejected a change of venue for Roeder’s trial and jury selection remained on schedule for January 11. That same day Steve Osburn and Mark Rudy fought for the necessity defense and told the judge that under certain conditions the taking of human life could be justified. They wanted Judge Wilbert to allow them to present this argument to the jury.

“This is certainly not a position I want to be in,” Wilbert told the attorneys, “because I am not God.”

The judge, after due consideration, ruled against the necessity defense, since neither Roeder nor anyone else had been in “imminent danger” when he’d killed Dr. Tiller. Using this rationalization for murder, the judge added, would be to “sanction anarchy.”

Some defense lawyers responded to this by wondering if Roeder would have had a much better legal argument if he’d shot Tiller not at his church, but on his way into his clinic to perform an abortion. The defense might have then been able to say that an unborn baby’s life was, in fact, in imminent danger.

“I recognize,” Judge Wilbert said on the twenty-second, “that we all have our own individual personal views, religious views, moral and ethical views. But the United States Supreme Court has come down many, many years ago in
Roe v. Wade
that an abortion is a legal and constitutionally protected decision by the mother and…the health care providers.”

The matter was not yet settled. Surprisingly—and shockingly to abortion rights supporters and DA Nola Foulston—Wilbert decided to “leave the door open” for the defense to present evidence that Roeder had shot Dr. Tiller because of his conviction that the murder was justified to stop a greater evil. If this was not the necessity defense per se, it was a close relative. The judge’s decision created the possibility that Roeder’s lawyers could ask the jury to convict him not of first-degree murder but of voluntary manslaughter, defined under Kansas law as the “unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.” A voluntary-manslaughter conviction carried a four-to-six-year sentence. Roeder could be back on the street by 2015.

The DA’s office, led by Foulston, was apoplectic. She and her two assistant DAs quickly launched a counterargument against this so-called “imperfect self-defense.” It could not apply in this case because Tiller had been gunned down at his church, where he was a threat to no one. The only question the jury had to answer, prosecutors said, was if the shooting was premeditated, and they felt confident they could prove this at trial. These issues, the judge now made clear, wouldn’t be fully resolved until the jury and His Honor had heard all the testimony, but before the lawyers presented their closing statements. The DA wasn’t mollified.

Following the December 22 hearing, Mark Rudy sharply criticized the judge, saying that Wilbert was trying to muzzle the defense—an obvious attempt to influence potential jurors before the trial got started. By early January, three hundred Sedgwick County citizens had been mailed summonses to appear at the courthouse on the eleventh of the month. An initial pool of forty-two women and men would be selected and the lawyers would whittle them down to the final fourteen: twelve jurors and two alternates. People could not be eliminated from serving because of their feelings about abortion. The judge took the unusual step of closing the jury selection process to the press, so those being questioned would, he hoped, be more candid (after media lawyers appealed this decision to the Kansas Supreme Court, Wilbert relented and made the final part of jury selection public).

“Potential jurors,” he said about this process, “were asked very personal and sensitive questions regarding their religious beliefs…their knowledge of George Tiller and any pretrial publicity regarding the defendant, Scott Roeder.”

One example of the jury inquiry was question number 86: “What are your personal opinions on abortion?”

For Wilbert and the fourteen jurors ultimately selected, the case would not unfold in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of their own experience in Wichita and thirty-five years of anti-abortion demonstrations in the city. Jurors would be expected to ignore the 1986 bombing at Tiller’s clinic and Shelley Shannon’s wounding of the physician at WHCS seven years later. They were supposed to set aside their views of the mass arrests and chaos that had filled the streets during the Summer of Mercy in 1991; to dismiss the 1,846 straight days abortion foes had gathered at the clinic leading up to the murder; to disregard the trial and acquittal of the doctor in March 2009; and to forget about the closing of his office after he was killed. The jury’s job, according to the prosecution, was simply to focus on the testimony of the ushers in Tiller’s church last May 31 and on the state’s other evidence. The DA had a witness list holding 230 names, including Lindsey and Nick Roeder, while the defense had subpoenaed, among others, Phill Kline.

Wichita law enforcement was on heightened alert and courthouse security was about to get beefed up by bomb-sniffing dogs provided by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They were preparing for the worst.