A Death in Wichita (31 page)

A major overnight storm was rolling into Wichita, and if the snow got deep enough, it could stop the trial and postpone it indefinitely. Nobody wanted a delay and everyone was relieved on Thursday after only four inches of snow and ice had landed on the city, instead of the predicted eight to twelve. That morning the jurors were able to make it to the courthouse by nine, and Kline entered the courtroom shortly thereafter, looking as confident as ever, although he’d brought two lawyers with him as backup. He was sworn in, laid out his credentials, and began his testimony, unleashing echoes of the Inquisition, the 2,600 pages of documents his investigation had left behind at the Kansas Supreme Court, and Bill O’Reilly. He told the judge, the lawyers, the media, and the gallery, but not the jury, that in his view 75 percent of the women coming to Kansas to see Dr. Tiller were having abortions on viable fetuses (a contention that Assistant DA Ann Swegle immediately took issue with, saying that Kline’s presentation was filled with “historical and factual inaccuracies”).

Kline said that criminal charges were filed against Tiller on December 21, 2006, once a judge had found probable cause to support this complaint.

“After we filed the complaint,” he said, “I got an e-mail from the DA…It said that I did not have jurisdiction to file this case and it was dismissed. The case never moved forward.”

The unnamed DA was Nola Foulston.

Kline wound up his testimony by stating that although he’d come to the conclusion that Tiller “was performing unlawful abortions,” killing the doctor was not justified or reasonable.

“Withering” is too soft a term to describe Jeanne Tiller’s expression as the witness left the stand and prepared to return to his teaching position at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Her day wasn’t going to get any easier.

The defense began its case with Steve Osburn delivering a modest opening statement, and then Mark Rudy called Roeder to the stand. The defendant, his face pasty after nearly eight months in prison, was remarkably composed under oath. This was his chance to explain himself to the jury and the world, via live television coverage, and he seemed to have been readying himself for this moment not just since the previous May 31, but for years prior to that. With unshakable calm and in a tone that was alarming because it was so matter-of-fact, he told the jury what he’d been telling reporters and other visitors to the jail since last June—how he’d thought about killing Tiller for as long as a decade and then carefully planned and carried out the execution. His clarity and absolute certainty about the rightness of what he’d done never wavered. If the DA didn’t want to hear about the why behind the homicide, or to give the defendant a nationwide audience and a legal platform from which to denounce abortion, she’d lost that battle.

“Did protests stop Dr. Tiller?” Rudy asked his client.

“No.”

“Did Shelley Shannon stop him?”

“No.”

“Did the 1986 bombing?”

“No.”

“Did you think the law would stop Dr. Tiller?”

“Yes…I followed this as close as I could and he—”

Foulston was out of her chair and in front of the judge.

“These answers are being fed to the witness,” she said.

Wilbert told Rudy to take another tack and he did, with Roeder now repeating many of the same points Kline had just made about unlawful abortions in Kansas. He remained on the stand throughout the morning, giving a step-by-step account of the crime, gaining momentum as he spoke and obviously proud of what he’d done. Of all the things revealed at the trial, one of the most unsettling for Lindsey and Nick, as they watched the proceedings in Kansas City, was a detail about the weekend leading up to the shooting. His first choice for his last Friday night of freedom was not to spend it with his son at dinner and a movie. Instead, he’d hoped to be at his brother’s home outside Topeka on May 29, taking target practice with his new gun, but this hadn’t worked out, because David Roeder had been busy. Seeing Nick that night was his back-up plan, but the young man and his mother hadn’t known that until now. Despite all they’d learned about their father and ex-husband, both Nick and Lindsey were further hurt and angered by this revelation.

Nick’s reaction to the piece of information, Lindsey wrote in an e-mail, “can be shared with anyone—I want people to know Scott was an uncaring *&%*%*$(#.”

During breaks in Roeder’s testimony, the anti-abortion group clustered together in one corner of the ninth-floor hallways or in the main-floor lobby or in the basement cafeteria, while the pro-choice forces gathered near the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Kathy Spillar and talked among themselves. The media drifted from one side to the other, looking for quotes on the unfolding trial. The two factions never spoke to one another.

The war that had divided Wichita and America for nearly four decades was alive inside the courthouse—in every chance encounter between enemies during an elevator ride and every trip to the small restrooms. It was on the faces and in the furtive eyes of those who could not quite bring themselves to look at their opponents. It was in the sorrow embedded in Jeanne Tiller’s face, in the silent glee that some in the courtroom took from her husband’s death, and in the haunting feeling that the doctor’s career should have ended some other way. An ineffable pain had filtered into the halls and the courtroom, getting stronger as the trial unwound.

Randall Terry let no opportunity pass to call an impromptu press conference and surround himself with journalists, telling them and passersby that Roeder could not get a fair trial and that George Tiller had been a mass murderer. Terry was a natural-born entertainer who loved the spotlight, as outgoing and boisterous as Dave Leach was quiet, polite, and meek. Usually accompanied by two gray-haired women, Leach liked to hang back from the crowd, lean against a wall, and let others come to him. One of the women usually carried a copy of Sarah Palin’s book
Going Rogue
.

Asked during a break in Roeder’s testimony whether the shooting of Tiller was justified, he said “Yes,” without hesitation.

Were the lives of the people who’d died in Vietnam or Iraq as sacred as the lives of the unborn? Did he ever protest the violence of war as he did abortion? He shook his head and gave a patronizing smile, his eyes twinkling, saying that those two things had nothing to do with each other.

“If we hadn’t invaded Vietnam,” he added, “many more lives would have been lost.”

When the trial resumed, Roeder told the jurors why he’d gone into Reformation Lutheran Church last May 31 with a loaded .22 handgun.

“There was nothing being done,” he said, “and the legal process had been exhausted and these babies were dying every day. If someone didn’t do something, he was going to continue aborting children and I needed to act for these children…The lives of these children were in imminent danger if someone did not stop him.”

“Do you regret this?” Rudy asked.

“No, I don’t.”

The defense attorney nodded at his client and sat down.

For her cross-examination, Foulston walked to a lectern positioned near the jury, faced the witness, and began peppering him with one clipped question after another, revealing more of her contempt.

If the defendant had never wanted to hurt anyone except Dr. Tiller, why hadn’t he told law enforcement right after his arrest that he’d left a loaded handgun in a dirt pile in a parking lot in Burlington, Kansas?

Unfazed, Roeder replied that because he’d hid it in a remote, safe location it wasn’t a danger to anyone.

What had happened in the foyer the morning of the shooting?

Tiller had never seen him coming, Roeder said, so he’d been able to get very close. After he’d fired the gun, the doctor seemed to have stood in front of him for quite some time without moving, perhaps for several seconds, before toppling over onto the floor.

Was he nervous pulling the trigger?

“I was a little nervous. I wasn’t overly excited.”

How did he feel afterward?

“I got gas and pizza. I was hungry.”

The DA appeared disgusted.

Unable to look at the defendant as he testified, Jeanne Tiller had dropped her forehead all the way down to her knees, her fingers gripping a Kleenex, her shoulders heaving.

“If he was gonna be stopped,” Roeder told Foulston, “someone had to do it.”

“Do you feel,” the DA asked, “that you’ve successfully completed your mission?”

“He’s been stopped.”

Foulston glanced at the jury, took her seat, and the defense rested. The jurors left the courtroom, the gallery emptied out, and now that the testimony was finished the judge was left alone to decide the most important question of the trial—whether or not to give the jury the option of convicting Roeder of voluntary manslaughter. For the next several hours, the issue remained unresolved as Judge Wilbert gave the matter due diligence and other legal duties were being pursued elsewhere.

That morning, for the first time ever, Mark Rudy had told the DA and the WPD what had become of the gun Roeder had used. Two Wichita police officers immediately took off for Burlington in the hope of retrieving the firearm where it had been buried. They questioned the town’s police department and the local newspaper, but the lot had long since been paved over and the dirt hauled away.

By nightfall, the judge had made his decision: the voluntary-manslaughter option was dead. The defendant was either going to be found guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault—or set free.

On Friday morning, the snowfall had nearly stopped, the constant clouds that had hung over Wichita for the two weeks of the trial were thinning, and the fog had dissipated. For her closing argument, Ann Swegle dispassionately reiterated the state’s case. Mark Rudy then did about everything he could think of to try to help his client, alluding in his final argument to the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, the relocation of Native Americans, and Martin Luther King. It was a noble effort, delivered with grace and grit, but had a ring of desperation.

“Scott,” he told the jury in summation, “proved that he killed Dr. Tiller, but only you can determine if he murdered Dr. Tiller. We’ll ask you to acquit Scott Roeder of first-degree murder.”

Kim Parker then crossed the courtroom, stood behind the lectern, and spoke last for the DA’s office.

“On May 31, 2009,” she said, “Wichita changed from a community celebrating the Sabbath to a terrorized city. Scott Roeder said he had the right to invade that church and hide behind its welcoming arms…While [the usher] Charles Scott greeted him at the open door of the sanctuary with an open heart and mind…Roeder was calculating his intent [with] feigned piousness and a murderous heart…While Jeanne Tiller sang in the choir, Scott Roeder put a bullet in the head of her husband…”

Grouped closer together and holding hands and arms, the Tiller family looked on, wearing “Attitude Is Everything” buttons today in honor of the victim, as they had at his funeral.

“While Dr. Ryding,” Parker said, “tried to suck the blood out of Dr. Tiller’s mouth and save his life, Roeder wondered if he’d shot the right man…As WPD responded to the church, he was eating a pizza…He claims justification but these are not the acts of a justified man. These acts are cowardly. A justified man does not have to hide inside a church…or hide his gun…or take his victim unawares…or need to run. Roeder is not justified. He is only and simply guilty of the crimes he’s been charged with. I ask you as citizens of this community and this state and the United States of America to hold him fully accountable and find him guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault.”

By ten a.m., the judge had instructed the jurors about the charges and sent them off to deliberate. In the lobby, crowded with cops and full of activity, Dave Leach stood by himself taking in the movement around him, as the spectators clustered in their usual groups and talked on cell phones. He was joined by Randall Terry, who’d been loitering nearby. Throughout the morning, Terry had been passing out a three-page flyer about what was wrong with the anti-abortion movement and how it needed to make a stronger commitment to its goals and take bolder steps. Seizing the opportunity to talk with Leach, because he was now accompanied by a journalist, Terry strode up in his striking alligator boots and introduced himself to the reporter. The conversation had only begun when a uniformed deputy approached.

“You better get up to the ninth floor,” he said.

“The verdict is already in?”

He nodded. “Get up there.”

The trio went to the bay of elevators and stepped into an open one, Terry complaining that he couldn’t believe that less than forty-five minutes (thirty-seven, actually) had passed since the judge had given the case to the jury. Leach was silent, but a little smile played around the corner of his mouth, as it often did, his purpose never as obvious as Terry’s. The day before, Leach had said that bringing national attention to the Roeder trial, and getting the public to think about violence being justified to stop an abortion doctor, and motivating a judge to consider the necessity defense and the voluntary-manslaughter charge in these circumstances were all victories. He didn’t seem to take the situation nearly as personally as Terry.

“This case can be the start of a new process,” he had said. “And no matter what anyone says, the trial was about abortion.”

Within minutes, the jury and the legal parties had all gathered in the courtroom and the judge called the proceedings to order. As the Tiller family looked on, one or two of them were clearly praying. The gallery fell still, the scene echoing the Tiller trial ten months earlier, when on March 27, 2009, with a blizzard about to slam into Wichita, six jurors had taken roughly twenty-five minutes to reach their conclusion and acquit the physician.

While he sat at the defense table and glanced around the room, Roeder’s face colored just slightly, no longer looking quite so calm. He’d set himself up for martyrdom but then tried to find a legal way out of that fate. Maybe he was questioning his decisions or maybe, as Lindsey had suggested throughout the trial, he was having trouble sleeping. No one knew him better than she did or cared more about his health, even now. She and Nick had watched every moment of the trial and were awaiting the denouement, as Lindsey offered up her own hope that Roeder would never again be free to show up at their front door.

The judge cleared his throat and Jeanne Tiller held her hands over her eyes. Wilbert thanked the jury and asked them for their verdict, which came in swiftly and without fanfare, surrounded by near-total silence: guilty on one count of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. No one in the gallery made a sound. Roeder would be sentenced in two months, but before the judge could adjourn one last time and everyone dispersed, Nola Foulston stood and made a point of saying that she was going to ask the court for the maximum sentence of a “Hard 50.” If the judge agreed with this, the fifty-one-year-old Roeder could not become eligible for parole for five more decades—the DA’s parting shot at the convicted murderer, as he lowered his eyes and walked out of the room with two guards, his steps a little uncertain as he made his way back to his cell. He’d soon be headed up the road thirty miles to the state correctional facility at El Dorado, the most dangerous prison in Kansas.

From her own cell in Minnesota, Shelley Shannon commented on the jury’s decision in an e-mail to Dave Leach. Her message, which found its way to the Associated Press, was that because of the trial’s outcome, America could expect more violence.

“Abortionists are killed,” she wrote, “because they are serial murderers of innocent children who must be stopped, and they will continue to be stopped, even though Scott didn’t get a fair trial. May God bless Scott for his faithfulness and brave actions and stand.”

“Other doctors,” said Kathy Spillar in the courthouse lobby right after the verdict, “remain under threat. There are substantial questions left to answer about other people’s involvement in this case and with Scott Roeder. We’ve given information about these matters to the Justice Department and all of it needs to be investigated further.”

“My son and I,” Lindsey said, “are relieved and gratified that a verdict of guilty was decided. We are anxious to put this behind us and move forward. Our prayers are with the Tiller family, who showed great strength and also show my son and I what unity of a family truly means. We do not expect or ask that the Tiller family find closure. We pray that they feel a sense of justice.

“We understand that the gaping hole where their husband, father, and grandfather once was will never close but we hope and pray that over time with love of family, church, and community those jagged edges will heal. We humbly ask their forgiveness for any part we may have played to increase their pain and suffering. Sincerely, Lindsey and Nicholas Roeder.”

Outside the courthouse, Randall Terry protested the verdict and said, “The blood of these babies slain by Tiller is crying for vengeance.”

A few miles east of downtown, Reformation Lutheran Church issued its own statement, wishing to thank people for their “many prayers and thoughts of encouragement during these difficult months following the murder of Reformation member Dr. George Tiller…As a guilty verdict was handed down today in the case against Scott Roeder, we are grateful that the state presented the facts clearly, the witnesses boldly told what they knew to be true, the judge led with clarity, and the jury discerned and acted in regard to the law.

“While these proceedings will obviously not bring George back, we trust in the promise of the resurrection and move forward in that hope. We pray that all places of worship will be sanctuaries—places of reconciliation, peace, and hope, setting the pace for a fractured world that so desperately seeks unity with God and one another…Pastor Lowell Michelson and Pastor Kristin Neitzel.”

Donald Spitz, who ran the Army of God Web site, ominously told the Associated Press that “there is not a lot of good feeling out there. Everybody is pretty angry…Times change. People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”

The National Organization for Women responded to the verdict by urging “the Department of Justice to investigate this network of anti-abortion terrorists. NOW leadership and our dedicated grassroots activists across the country have been tracking these terrorists at work for decades. Some of our own members have survived harassment and assault. NOW would be happy to share with the Justice Department any relevant evidence we might have that would help shut down this conspiracy to deny women their fundamental right to abortion through violence and the threat of violence.”

“Once again,” wrote the Tiller family, “a Sedgwick County jury has reached a just verdict. We also want to thank George’s countless friends and supporters in Wichita and around the country who have offered their comfort. At this time we hope that George can be remembered for his legacy of service to women, the help he provided for those who needed it and the love and happiness he provided us as a husband, father and grandfather.”

A few days later, Dave Leach recorded a long prison interview with Roeder via telephone and put it up on YouTube. He gave the inmate the time and opportunity to say for the public all the graphic things about abortion that the judge had not allowed him to say in court. He reemphasized his lack of sympathy for Jeanne Tiller and again compared her to a woman who’d been married to a hit man.