A Death in Wichita (9 page)

On January 31, 1996, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced that he’d be launching the Fox News Channel, a twenty-four-hour news service airing on both cable and satellite.

“The appetite for news—particularly news that explains to people how it affects them—is expanding enormously,” Murdoch said at the time.

Fox News premiered on October 7, 1996, and after a few fits and starts was soon reaching about 10 million American homes. As the network developed, it was usually described as a “conservative” alternative to the rest of the media—an imprecise term. Some Fox commentators held the traditionally conservative belief of opposing big, intrusive governance, but they also supported spending vast amounts of money on domestic surveillance. Others at Fox were all for individual freedoms, but not ones that extended to gays or women’s reproductive rights. What Murdoch was selling was something bigger and vaguer than a strict political point of view. Seeing a void in the media marketplace, he was there with a compelling strategy, reaching out to a large, discontented, and mostly neglected TV audience (on talk radio, Rush Limbaugh had been working the same demographic for years, on the way to becoming the most successful radio personality in American history). At Fox, the feelings of viewers mattered more than their party affiliation.

Those feelings represented the unspecified anxiety, the anger and fear, the underlying discomfort, of our time. It was everywhere, it was easy to aim it at the imperfect and cumbersome institutions that formed the basis of our society, and it had not yet been fully exploited as a TV business opportunity. Putting aside what Fox’s strategy might mean in terms of public policy or journalism, it was a great vehicle for generating attention and dollars.

I paid little attention to Fox or to its most popular host, Bill O’Reilly, until the fall of 1999. The previous June I’d published a book,
Presumed Guilty
, about the six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, murdered in Boulder in December 1996. For the past three years, I’d been driving the thirty miles from Denver to Boulder and interacting with many of the principals in the case. One was the veteran Boulder district attorney Alex Hunter, who was open-minded, a good listener, and deeply curious about the girl’s death (hard qualities to find in such an experienced DA in the middle of a major homicide investigation). He was willing to speak with a journalist, and many other outsiders, to see if he could learn something new about this confounding criminal mystery. It was the only homicide in American and perhaps world history in which a ransom note and a body had been found in the same location. The child had incriminating DNA samples in her underwear and beneath her fingernails, all belonging to a single unknown male.

Faced with such complexity, Hunter quickly brought in the nation’s top forensic scientists, starting with Dr. Henry Lee, the director of the Connecticut State Forensic Laboratory, and assembled a first-rate legal team around him. In October 1999, after presenting the evidence to a grand jury for more than a year—unheard of in a murder case—Hunter decided not to indict the Ramsey parents for the crime of killing their daughter.

It was then that I turned on the TV and saw Bill O’Reilly launch into a personal attack on Hunter and Boulder itself (in his view the town was run by far-left secular progressives). Because O’Reilly was angry and personally hurt that the criminal justice system had let him down in the Ramsey matter, the evidence in the case had become irrelevant. Audiences responded to his outrage; he was a rising star in the new media and
The O’Reilly Factor
was on its way to reaching 102 million American homes and more than 3.3 million viewers each week-night.

O’Reilly wasn’t merely assaulting Hunter, which many other commentators from both sides of the political spectrum had done. Long before the evidence in the case was known, the generally liberal Geraldo Rivera had held a mock trial of the Ramseys on his program—and found the parents guilty. The issue was deeper than politics and had more to do with the absolute need to be right, at the expense of everything else. Both O’Reilly and Rivera were attacking the legal system itself and the very thin veneer of social agreements that Americans live by. Expressing their feelings was more important than due process, constitutional rights, courtroom evidence, or forensic analysis. For his efforts, NBC offered Geraldo a reported $30 million contract. He and O’Reilly were succeeding on a grand scale precisely because they didn’t care about any of these bigger issues and were encouraging viewers to demean, if not hate, the people who did.

No journalist, or even journalism itself, could compete with the spectacle unfolding on Fox and elsewhere. The new wave of megastar commentators were not reporters, nor were they accountable—their only job was to generate listeners and ad sales. They were entertainers, people like Michael Savage and Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and Anne Coulter, and they were excellent at what they did, representing a new form of mass popular entertainment. They amused audiences by demonizing individuals, but more important, by demonizing legal rules and systems of government—the handful of words on paper that bound together the American social and political experiment. The contempt for those rules and systems, once isolated on the fringes, was becoming a very hot commodity. Another upcoming Fox commentator, Glenn Beck, addressed the larger problem succinctly in his best-selling book
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense
. Americans, he wrote, “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT, but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” And they were rarely encouraged by the media to examine the roots of these feelings or how to manage them better. Venting was the new game, the only thing that mattered in this new emotional reality.

In the fall of 1999, the issue was not whether O’Reilly was right or wrong about the Ramsey case, although time showed him to be wrong. (During the summer of 2008, two samples of “touch DNA” from JonBenet’s underwear were found to be consistent with the other genetic material at the crime scene. As a result, the new Boulder DA, Mary Lacy, finally cleared the Ramsey parents—Patsy had died in 2006—of murdering their daughter and the case remained wide open.) O’Reilly had long since gone on to attack other processes and people, as his fame—and fortune—continued to spread. Some nights he reached 3.5 million viewers and his message never wavered. The surface of things, he implied from his bully pulpit on the nation’s airwaves, was the truth of things. There are no facts that aren’t immediately obvious.

If thirty years of reporting had taught me anything, it was that the surface of things was exactly that—just the surface. Journalism was and always had been covered with scars and warts. Like the legal profession, it was often not as pure or as noble as reporters and attorneys wanted it to be, but it remained an important piece of what insulated a society from the most dangerous forms of manipulation and control.

Watching O’Reilly, I felt that the professional world I’d come of age in was near its death. In the Ramsey case, he’d dismissed the legal system. Now he was ready to take on the world of science and Dr. Tiller. What the fringe abortion opponents had failed to do to the physician, the mainstream was about to attempt—with voices that had become not just respectable, but paragons of success.

By middle age, George Tiller was a far different man from the one who’d been raised a conservative Republican, in a state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932. Nothing in his professional life had turned out quite the way he’d envisioned it, and he’d had to adapt constantly to the upheaval around him. Ensnared inside a battle he could never have imagined, he could only hope for a new era and a nation less divided.

“We have given war, pestilence, hate, greed, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try, and have failed,” he once said. “We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love, and respect in all our relationships.”

He tried to implement his own new paradigm, speaking to his staff about reconciliation and healing, and inviting Reverend George Gardner into his clinic to provide counseling to his employees. How could they cope with the constant stress of working at WHCS and rise above the verbal attacks and ongoing abuse at the front gate? How could they learn not to hate the people screaming at them each day, but to forgive and even love them? The employees needed all the help they could get.

Abortion foes parked a “Truth Truck” at WHCS, its side panels depicting large color photographs of dismembered fetuses. On the gates leading into the parking lot, demonstrators hung a large banner reading, “Please Do Not Kill Your Baby.” Scores of small white crosses stood in the grass along the sidewalk, showing the average number of abortions protesters believed were performed at WHCS each month. When patients left the clinic after an appointment, they were followed to their homes or hotels and anti-abortion literature and pictures were slipped under their doors. Tiller’s enemies took long-range, telephoto-lens images of some of these patients and posted their faces online. People searched through the trash behind the houses of his staff, looking for any scrap of information to use against him. When pregnant women arrived at WHCS, demonstrators approached them with baby blankets and told them to walk next door, where they’d set up their own office. Choices Medical Clinic had opened in 1999, after six years of fighting city zoning rulings. Its sign faced into Tiller’s parking lot and offered a “Free 4-D Sonogram” to women who could come in and discuss their options without an appointment.

While these tactics did little to change the actual number of abortions being performed in Kansas or the United States, the number of abortion providers was steadily falling. In 1992, Kansas had had 15; by 2005, it was down to 7. Nationwide, the decline was from 2,400 to fewer than 1,800. Several factors were causing this, including tightened regulations making abortions more costly; public protest and social pressure; and the medical industry trend to consolidate into bigger, more specialized practices. Not long ago, Wichita had had four abortion clinics. Only Tiller’s was now left, with Operation Rescue having bought the next-to-last local office to shut it down, and turning it into its headquarters. The great majority of young doctors weren’t learning to perform abortions, because this field wasn’t just controversial, but dangerous.

In 2001, Operation Rescue celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the Summer of Mercy with another wave of dissent in Wichita. While not nearly as disruptive as the first event, putting Tiller out of business remained one of its major goals. In 2002, the organization, now led by Troy Newman, moved its headquarters from Southern California to Wichita, in order to target Tiller at closer range (the same year, Scott Roeder first stalked the doctor at Reformation Lutheran Church). Demonstrators began their longest vigil ever at WHCS, coming there for the next 1,846 days. With the clinic under siege, Tiller gave pep talks to his staff, constantly repeated “Attitude is everything,” and tried to boost office morale by handing out a dozen roses to his employees and a T-shirt depicting Rosie the Riveter.

“We can do it Team Tiller,” it read.

Dr. Tiller had no intention of giving up his practice or caving to the pressures surrounding him. The struggle between the anti-abortion forces and WHCS had become permanent fixtures in the local landscape.

“One night I was working very late,” says the Wichita author Robert Beattie, “and I needed to go to Kinko’s at three a.m. I got in my car and drove past Tiller’s clinic. There were several protesters out there walking around. At three a.m.—in pitch darkness! If you were ever lonely in Wichita in the middle of the night, you could go over there and find some company.”

The protesters brought their graphic Truth Trucks to Tiller’s church and parked them in front of Reformation Lutheran during Sunday services, loudly demonstrating out front or playing musical instruments. They demanded that church officials excommunicate the doctor and his family, while yelling at members of the congregation entering the sanctuary that a murderer worshipped with them. They came inside the church and interrupted communion with anti-Tiller chatter, grabbed the microphone from the pastor, pushed the organist away from the keyboard, and found the addresses of the congregants and mailed them postcards showing aborted fetuses. Roeder himself had visited the church and been questioned by a police officer patrolling the scene. A few people left Reformation Lutheran because of these incidents, but church leadership stood by the family. Tiller was in a Bible study group there and his wife, Jeanne, sang in the choir (his three daughters and one son were now grown and two of the young women were studying to become physicians). The church staff had talked with Tiller about bolstering security with a camera at the front entrance, but he said that wasn’t necessary. Despite all the protest and disruptions, surely no one would further violate the sanctity of Reformation Lutheran.

Abortion foes spread rumors about him and his patients throughout Wichita. An especially inflammatory one was that years ago he’d helped Nola Foulston, the DA of the Eighteenth Judicial District, adopt a baby. In 1989, Foulston had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the scuttlebutt was that Tiller had helped her become a mother as part of his ongoing political agenda; down the road she’d surely return a favor or two for him during his impending legal battles. When asked about this rumor by
The New York Times
, Foulston’s office would neither confirm nor deny it.

The anti-Tiller crowd accused the doctor of getting rich from performing abortions and of having a “decadent, lavish lifestyle.” WHCS was indeed a lucrative business and the physician lived in an 8,300-square-foot home. He charged $6,000 for a late-term abortion and did 250–300 per year, with a profit margin of around 35 percent, for an estimated income upward of half a million dollars. But he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on armored vehicles, lawyers, bullet-proof glass, video monitors, security systems, and an armed staff. He often paid his employees above the norm so they’d stay with him, making sure to hand out bonuses after a particularly bad stretch at the office. He urged them not to give up the fight and said that if a stake had to be driven through the heart of the anti-abortion movement, he wanted to have his “hand on the hammer.” Whether he admitted it or not, the environment at work took a toll.

“When I first met Dr. Tiller,” says Julie Burkhart, who helped establish his political action committee in 2002, “I was intimidated by him. He said, ‘I need to know that you’ll do whatever it takes to raise money or whatever else we need done here. This might mean taking out the trash one night, if that’s what necessary.’ He wanted to know right then that I was totally committed to this work. It wasn’t easy for him to trust people. I’m sure that came from being bombed and shot at and having his name dragged through the mud for so long. But as the years moved on, and he saw that I
was
committed, he had a level of affection and trust in me that really bubbled to the surface.

“He never liked talking about all the things going on right outside the clinic because that was a real energy sucker and took time away from the medical work going on inside the walls of his office. He believed there was a solution to every problem and our job was just to focus on that and make health care better for women.”

Out in Boulder, Dr. Warren Hern wasn’t so optimistic, or reticent, when it came to the protesters who also camped out at his clinic and distributed flyers around town about him. One began, “A baby killer lives in your neighborhood…”

In March 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California overturned a judgment against abortion opponents who’d targeted several doctors, including Hern, for assassination. Two years earlier, following the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, Hern and three other physicians had decided to take action
before
another doctor was killed. They sued those making the threats under a federal racketeering law and another law against inciting violence against abortion providers. For a month, the four doctors sat in a Portland courtroom next to their potential assassins. The physicians took the stand and described to the jurors how they’d been stalked and placed on the defendants’ “Wanted” posters and hit lists, which were then posted on the Internet. It was an opportunity for Hern to talk about the lethal process of “target identification”—a doctor’s face showed up on a poster, over and over again, and then he got killed. This process was continuing, Hern argued, and had to be stopped. After listening to the testimony, the federal jury decided for the doctors, but the judgment was later overturned on appeal.

Commenting in
The New York Times
following the second court ruling, Dr. Hern called the appellate decision “crushing.” He’d recently been sitting by a window in his office, speaking with a reporter, when he noticed that the Venetian blinds were slightly open. Without interrupting their discussion, he reached over and closed the blinds, as he always did at work or home now when near an open window.

“Whoever shot Dr. Slepian,” Dr. Hern wrote, “accomplished his purpose—to strike terror into my heart. It was an act of political terrorism, as have been the assassinations and attempted assassinations of 10 other abortions doctors…”

Hern described the view from his home of the renowned Flatirons Mountains rising above Boulder, but he no longer had the luxury of looking out at the reddish, vertical slabs of rock:

“My name, along with those of other doctors, is on an Internet abortion hate list—called the ‘Nuremberg Files’—now found to be acceptable free speech by the appellate court’s decision. Dr. Slepian’s name has had a line drawn through it. Who’s next?”