A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  A plane flew over the stadium, with a trailing banner that read, “Go home! Wichita is pro-choice!”

  The crowd looked up at the sky, rose together as one, and began to chant, “We are home! We are home!”

  In the weeks following the Summer of Mercy, the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life saw its mailing list grow by ten thousand names. A grassroots uprising was emerging from the protests, as those who’d gone to jail for their beliefs now entered mainstream politics. In 1992 in Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, 19 percent of the new precinct committee members had arrest records from the Summer of Mercy. That year Republicans won the state legislature, and their victory in 1994 would be larger still. Many of the new legislators began to agitate and organize for changing the state’s abortion laws. Since Roe v. Wade twenty years earlier, Kansas had made no alterations to its abortion statute. That was about to change, presenting Tiller with problems he’d never faced before.

  Nobody knew, but the Summer of Mercy was the crescendo for the anti-abortion movement in terms of organized protests. No future demonstration would be nearly as big, as unified, or as successful at focusing the public and media on this single issue. The Democrat Bill Clinton, who strongly supported abortion rights, was about to win the White House, and the conservative Supreme Court justices David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O’Connor had not sided with the anti-abortion forces in the relevant cases that came before them. Roe v. Wade had not been overturned. States could try to modify their own laws regarding late-term abortion, but for those who opposed all abortions, like Randall Terry, hope was vanishing that they could end the practice by lobbying politicians or lying down in the streets. It was time to consider alternatives.

  For Dr. Tiller, a certain kind of hope was also disappearing. He’d spent his adult life in the Republican Party, committed to the economic and political values it had once represented. But it wasn’t the same party he’d known in the past. In the summer of 1992, the former President Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan had used the Republican Convention in Houston to deliver a prime-time televised address on his favorite subject: America’s “cultural war.” Buchanan spoke heatedly about the moral battle being waged in the country and the critical need to win it. Both moderate Republicans and Democrats watched Buchanan in Houston, shocked at his vitriol and at the importance he’d assumed within his party. He was anything but a fringe player inside the GOP.

  Gary Bauer had been President Reagan’s undersecretary of education from 1982 to 1987. He defined the battle for the nation’s soul this way: “We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.”

  One year after the Summer of Mercy, Tiller dropped his politeness, and his feelings about the new GOP finally erupted, when four protesters came to his clinic and chained themselves to a gate. Sprinting out from his office in a white lab coat, he rushed up to the gate and jerked a microphone from the hand of a startled TV camera operator covering the event.

  “This right here,” he said, pointing at a protester, “represents what the Republican Party is all about now. They have been taken over by religious fanatics like this man right here who wants to deprive citizens of the United States of their religious freedoms.”

  As he headed back toward his office, a demonstrator jammed an anti-abortion poster in his face.

  “Why don’t you stick that,” Tiller said, “someplace where the sun doesn’t shine?”

  He had far more to worry about than protesters’ signs.

  Six weeks into Bill Clinton’s presidency, a young man named Michael Griffin spotted David Gunn, an abortion doctor in Pensacola, Florida, pulling into a gas station and approached him at a pump. Early in 1993, someone in Pensacola had created an effigy of Dr. Gunn with Genesis 9:6—“Whosoever shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”—hanging from its neck. When Griffin asked Gunn to identify himself, the physician stared back and told him to leave. Before walking off, Griffin announced that the Lord was giving Dr. Gunn one more chance to change his ways. Griffin then stood up during a service at his church, Whitfield Assembly of God, and asked if the congregation agreed with him that David Gunn should get saved and stop killing babies. Worshippers nodded and prayed for Dr. Gunn’s soul.

  Three days later, as Gunn stepped from his car at Pensacola’s Women’s Medical Services clinic, Griffin shot and killed the doctor with three .38-caliber bullets in his back. The next morning, Congress asked the FBI to launch an investigation into the murder, while anti-abortionists celebrated the death. One celebrant was the Floridian Paul Hill, who at seventeen had assaulted his father and caused his parents, who hoped he’d get treatment for his drug abuse, to file charges against him. The young man soon had a born-again Christian experience, but held such virulent anti-abortion views that his own Presbyterian church excommunicated him. Hill attended Michael Griffin’s murder trial as a show of support for the assassin, and protested the verdict when Griffin got life without parole.

  Dr. John Britton, who replaced Gunn at the Pensacola clinic, wore a bulletproof vest and carried a pistol to work. Abortion protesters made an “Unwanted” poster of him and left a pamphlet on his front stoop with a headline reading, “What Would You Do if You Had Five Minutes to Live?”

  Some in the anti-abortion movement had moved far beyond civil disobedience, and Scott Roeder was moving with them.

  VIII

  In the early 1990s, after Roeder came back home to live with his wife and son, he decided to take over the family’s finances as “the man of the house.” Like many other anti-abortionists, he was familiar with and greatly admired the writings of Saint Paul. One New Testament Epistle written by Saint Paul read, “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.” For Roeder, being the man of the house did not mean holding a steady job, but learning more about how to evade paying taxes. The more of this information he absorbed, the more stressed he became, and the more verbally and emotionally abusive he was toward Lindsey and his young son. When he spanked Nick, he held him up in the air by the arms, and one time when he was finished, he dropped the boy on the floor.

  “If you ever do that again,” Lindsey told him, “I’m calling the police.”

  Despite this behavior, Roeder’s relationship with the child was complex and poignant, no doubt the deepest emotional connection in his life. It’s too simple to say that he loved Nicholas and more accurate to say that he tried to love him in the only way he knew how. Roeder desperately wanted his son to understand who he was and why he believed what he did. It never seemed to occur to him that a six-or seven-year-old didn’t see the world in adult terms and looked to him for other kinds of support.

  Lindsey ran the family and tried not to be overwhelmed. She had a serious heart condition, which prevented her from having another child and required expensive medication, and she diligently navigated her son through boyhood with a troubled father. They still lived in the same small house with her aging dad—a volatile mix. She’d used her elementary education degree to become a teacher and then director of a child care center at Knox Presbyterian Church in Overland Park. Things hadn’t turned out at all as she’d hoped when marrying Scott, but she was determined to make the best of it and protect Nicholas, which meant avoiding political or religious discussions with her husband. Like most Kansans, and most Americans, she believed that a woman had the right to decide what to do with her own body, but was careful not to say this directly to her husband. One day she was teaching preschoolers when an enraged mother stormed into her classroom, picked up her child, and threw the youngster against a metal cabinet.

  “I should have had an abortion when I could have!” t
he woman shouted.

  Lindsey recoiled.

  “Later on,” she says, “when I’d had a chance to think about it, I felt that the woman was probably right. I told Scott about what I’d seen and said that not everyone was cut out to be a parent, but that only made him angrier.”

  His anger was evolving into action. In the spring of 1994, he began associating with members of local militia movements who were stockpiling firearms. The year before, the FBI had entered the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to end a standoff between the sect’s leader, David Koresh, and the authorities. The buildings erupted into flames, killing seventy-six people inside the compound and spreading paranoia among the anti-government groups. That paranoia reached into the Roeder household and came out in Scott’s ramblings and other behaviors. He wouldn’t drink tap water anymore, because it was laced with fluoride that would give him cancer; he insisted on buying bottled water instead. He had to have pricey vitamin B tablets and garlic pills, which smelled bad, to ward off other diseases being spread by the government. And he had to be prepared if his enemies came after him. As the man of the house, he’d recently forgotten to pay the bill for Lindsey’s heart medicine, putting her health at risk. After getting her next paycheck, she gave him some money and told him to go pick up her drugs. He came back with a gun instead.

  She thought about kicking him out again, but faced the same dilemma as before: while her husband was clearly becoming more radical, he hadn’t broken any laws or physically abused his family members, at least not to the point of criminal activity. Despite his verbal assaults on Lindsey and his tirades about abortion, he had a gentler side. He made a point of taking bugs out of the house and letting them live in a natural environment, rather than killing them. Many who worked with or befriended Roeder were struck by his kindness and willingness to help. He may have been associated with people on the far right holding viciously racist views, but he didn’t feel he was racist and was sensitive about being perceived that way. Violence was wrong, he often told people, no matter how deeply one felt about an issue. Still, if the couple divorced, he’d get a joint custody arrangement with Nicholas, and Scott was no longer just potentially dangerous, but armed. Wasn’t it safer to have him inside the house, where she could keep an eye on him?

  He had an old, flimsy-looking Bible he carried around and quoted from. One day he and Lindsey got into an argument because he didn’t think she was obeying him as much as she should—or as much as he thought the Scriptures instructed her to. He liked to tell their friends that she was an atheist, even though she regularly attended church services at Knox Presbyterian. There were a lot of things she wanted to say to him about women’s rights and her own political convictions, but she’d held back for the sake of her marriage and son. As the argument heated up, she grabbed the old Bible and hurled it at him.

  “Stop twisting the word of God!” she shouted.

  “You could have hurt me,” he said, shocked at what his wife had done.

  The couple moved to the brink of another separation, but once again she let him stay.

  Scott was convinced that the FBI or ATF had tapped their phones and was monitoring his words and movements. Lindsey doubted this was true, but hoped it was. Sometimes, she picked up the receiver, imagined that someone really was listening, and said aloud that her husband was out of control and needed to be stopped before it was too late. Nobody responded to her pleas. Instead, she received calls from Scott’s political and religious allies at all hours of the day.

  “After speaking with me,” she says, “most of these people realized that I wasn’t the person my husband had told them I was. I wasn’t a monster. They were calling because they were worried that he might try to kill me. They said that he was upset with me for not believing as he did or allowing him to be the head of household or man of the house. I was warned repeatedly that he had a rifle with a long-range sight on it. I tried to talk about this with some of his family members, but they didn’t want to hear it.”

  When Scott asked if he could bring home a couple of his buddies to live with them, Lindsey said no. He was increasingly manic—not sleeping or eating much, and reading more about the coming End Times, when the earth would reach a devastating climax and only those saved by Jesus would escape into heaven. The fire at Waco had put the far-right extremists on alert and convinced many that the Apocalypse was at hand. Roeder was expanding his contacts inside that underground, associating with Mark Koernke, a prominent Michigan militia activist who in 2001 would be sentenced to three to seven years for resisting arrest and assaulting the police. Roeder had hooked up with the Unorganized Kansas Militia, led by Morris Wilson and now conducting maneuvers in the woods. Some of its members were connected with Terry Nichols, who’d joined forces with Timothy McVeigh, and in the spring of 1995, the word moving through the Midwest’s radical circles was that “Timmy V was gonna go smoke some Okies.”

  McVeigh and Nichols had met in the late 1980s in army basic training. Both were angered by the 1992 FBI standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, which had left Weaver’s son, Sammy, dead. They were further outraged the next year by the siege at Waco. McVeigh had visited the Branch Davidian compound during the standoff and after seventy-six people had lost their lives. Like the men who’d murdered Alan Berg, McVeigh was very familiar with the violent fantasy novel The Turner Diaries, peddling it at gun shows. One chapter outlined how a truck holding a homemade bomb was detonated in front of FBI headquarters in Washington at 9:15 on a weekday morning. Seven hundred people died in the fictional carnage.

  “It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear,” said the book’s protagonist, Earl Turner, “since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns who were no more committed to the sick philosophy or the racially destructive goals of the System than we are. But there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people…. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us…our whole race will die.”

  On September 30, 1994, Nichols went to the Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson and bought forty 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a vast amount by the standards of local famers. He bought one more bag for good measure. On April 14, 1995, McVeigh paid for a room at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City in eastern Kansas. Using the alias Robert D. Kling he rented a Ryder truck, and on April 16 he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City and planted a getaway car a few blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They went back to Herington, Kansas, and loaded the Ryder truck with fertilizer, fuses, and other bomb-making materials. On April 19, McVeigh exploded the truck outside the Murrah building and killed 168 men, women, and children.

  At McVeigh’s 1997 federal trial in Denver, the witness Charles Farley testified that he saw several men near the loaded Ryder truck outside Junction City on April 18, 1995. Farley confirmed a photo of one man, later identified as Morris Wilson, the Kansas militia leader and acquaintance of Scott Roeder.

  “I remember watching the Oklahoma City bombing that morning on TV,” says Lindsey. “When I realized it was connected to Waco, I was scared to death. Scott was always ranting and raving about what had happened there.”

  By the time of the bombing, Roeder had moved out again and was living with an anti-government couple in Kansas City. He’d taken everything with him: the family car, their money, and any hope of reconciliation. One day a woman called Lindsey and said she was going to steal Roeder away from his wife.

  “You can have him,” Lindsey replied.

  It had been increasingly painful for her to watch him suffer the past few years, to see his alienation and paranoia growing, and not be able to stop this. One night in February 1995, two months before the Oklahoma City bombing, Lindsey, Nick, and Scott attended a “Blue and Gold” Cub Scout banquet. Scott stared at the other couples, watching the fathers interacting with their young sons, laughing and enjoying each other. Wasn’t that what he wanted? What was more important than being close to the boy in the
years when he was small and just learning about life and needed a father’s guidance? The men and women in the room looked happy to be married and raising kids together. He’d had this once, but thrown it away because of his religious and political convictions. The banquet left him shaken.

  “Afterwards,” says Lindsey, “he was very despondent. I heard how depressed he was from the wife of the couple he’d been living with. She told me that he had a girlfriend who was pregnant and this woman wanted to get an abortion. The baby wasn’t Scott’s, but had been fathered by the woman’s husband, who wanted her to get an abortion. Scott was so down about this that he was thinking of committing suicide.”

  The girlfriend had made three separate appointments with doctors to get an abortion, and later told Lindsey that one of them was George Tiller. Three times Roeder had talked her out of going through with this, and she eventually had the child.

  “The day after the banquet,” says Lindsey, “Scott called and told me, ‘I can’t believe I’ve messed things up so badly. Look at what I’ve done to our marriage,’ and then he quoted something from the Bible.”

  Worried about what Scott might do to himself, Lindsey called his sister, Denise, in Topeka, and explained that he was coming out of a manic phase and crashing into a depression. He needed help. Denise drove to Kansas City, took him back to Topeka, and checked him into a hospital. Doctors put him on medication and wanted to treat him, but he bolted the next morning, threw away his meds, and never returned to the hospital.

  “The medication,” Lindsey says, “made him feel weird, just as it had in high school. After this episode, he went back to Kansas City, ignored his depression, and got more involved with the militia.”