A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Anti-abortion activists were undeterred by President Clinton, the federal investigation, or the FACE Act. They issued “Wanted” or “Unwanted” posters of Tiller and other physicians, offering $5,000 for information leading to their arrest and the loss of their medical license. Dr. John Britton had replaced the murdered David Gunn at the Ladies Center in Pensacola, Florida. Just two weeks after Clinton signed the FACE Act, Paul Hill stood outside the center, yelling again and again, “Mommy, Mommy, don’t murder me!” The center called the police and they came to the clinic, but didn’t arrest Hill. A few days later, Hill repeated his performance and was busted for disorderly conduct, but soon released. He bought a shotgun and began taking target practice.

  On July 29, 1994, he came to the clinic just before seven a.m. and planted twenty-two white wooden crosses in the ground nearby, each one meant to signify the death of a child. Standing near the clinic’s front door, he tried to distribute anti-abortion pamphlets and talk to women entering the building, until a policeman arrived and ordered him to remove the crosses. Hill complied, but the officer didn’t force him to leave the premises. At 7:27, Dr. Britton arrived in a blue Nissan pickup driven by James Barrett. Sitting behind Britton was Barrett’s wife, Jane. All three froze as Hill approached with a 12-gauge shotgun and fired at Britton before quickly reloading and firing again at Britton and then Barrett, killing them both, but not at Jane. Hill trotted away and was arrested within a few blocks.

  Those running the Ladies Center contacted the FBI and demanded to know if now was the time for them to start enforcing the FACE Act—before more physicians were killed. President Clinton called Britton’s death domestic terrorism and asked for a full investigation of Paul Hill. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered U.S. marshals to provide security for clinics across the country and the feds created a task force on violence connected to abortion. That autumn, Hill was the first person tried in federal court under the FACE Act, and his legal strategy was the so-called “necessity defense,” contending that he’d killed Dr. Britton to protect the unborn because they could not defend themselves, and to stop the greater evil of abortion. He was convicted in October 1994 and received two life sentences in federal prison. In November 1994, he was tried on state murder charges and the jury took just twenty minutes to convict him. During his sentencing hearing, as the judge ordered him to die in the electric chair, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist, Regina Dinwiddie, leaped up in the courtroom.

  “This man is innocent,” she shouted at the judge, “and his blood will be on your hands and the hands of the people of the state of Florida and on the jury!”

  Dinwiddie was arrested for her outburst.

  In 1984, after a series of abortion clinic bombings, the FBI had considered investigating the acts as part of a domestic terrorism conspiracy, but the idea had stalled out. In late 1994, a federal grand jury in Virginia, working with the Justice Department to investigate linkages behind the anti-abortion killings, issued subpoenas to Michael Bray, Don Spitz, and Anthony Leake, a Kansas City–area activist. When the feds were unable to establish these criminal links, the grand jury disbanded in 1996.

  The violent year of 1994 was not yet over. On December 30, an apprentice hairdresser named John C. Salvi III charged into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, and opened fire with a .22-caliber rifle, killing a receptionist and wounding two others. He fled the clinic and drove on to Brookline’s Preterm Health Services, killing another receptionist and wounding two more. He left Massachusetts and fired two dozen shots into an abortion office in Norfolk, Virginia, before he was arrested. Following his conviction, Salvi committed suicide in prison. Despite these murders, and the rising bomb threats and clinic arsons during the mid-’90s, the FBI did not find a conspiracy tying any specific groups or individuals to the spreading bloodshed.

  On October 23, 1998, the New York abortion doctor Barnett Slepian was murdered in his kitchen by James “Atomic Dog” Kopp, who then bolted the country. He was caught in 2001, convicted in 2003, and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

  A week after Dr. Slepian was killed, Tiller’s clinic received a letter threatening to contaminate his employees with anthrax. Similar letters went out to five other clinics in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but the FBI said they were all hoaxes. Clayton Waagner, who was convicted of sending more than 550 fake anthrax letters to clinics in 2001, signed many of them “Army of God.”

  “In August of 1994,” Tiller once said, “I was the first on the anti-abortion hit list or assassination list. And Janet Reno and President Clinton assigned federal marshals to me for thirty months. They came to the house, got me, took me to the office, stayed at the clinic…But the good news is, we still live in the United States of America. The good news is that in Kansas, we are able to use the wide definition and the full implementation of the Roe v. Wade decision.”

  During the 1980s and early ’90s, Dr. Warren Hern had written extensively about the importance of whom America chose for its president—and how violence against abortion providers had risen dramatically with first Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush in the White House for a collective twelve years. In May 1997, after the Senate passed “partial birth abortion ban” legislation, Hern composed an editorial that appeared in The New York Times, saying, “As I watched the Senate debate on late-term abortions, I was struck by the surreal quality of the remarks. The oratory from both sides had nothing to do with the anguish faced by my patients and their families, yet the results will profoundly affect their lives. Families sometimes ask me to do things that might be illegal if the bill the Senate passed on Wednesday ever becomes law…The foes of abortion will keep sponsoring legislation that keeps doctors guessing about what they are allowed to do…President Clinton is right to object to this dangerous measure. And he would do well to be suspicious of all such attempts to limit later-term abortions…”

  That June, Hern sent a letter to every member of Congress outlining his position. In November 1997, Hern wrote President Clinton himself, thanking him for vetoing this bill for the second time:

  “As a physician providing late abortion services to families whose pregnancies have been tragically complicated by abnormalities and serious illness, I applaud your courage and leadership in this struggle…I see women and families each week who desperately need qualified medical assistance in terminating advanced pregnancies that are often complicated with medical, surgical and psychiatric problems. The health and privacy of these women and families are directly threatened by this legislation…”

  In March 1998, the president wrote back:

  “I’m grateful to have your insight on this deeply divisive issue. I vetoed H.R. 1833 because Congress would not include a limited exception in the bill for those few but tragic cases in which the procedure is necessary to save the life of a woman or to prevent serious harm to her health; I vetoed H.R. 1122 for the same reason. Like you, I believe the procedure should be available in the small number of compelling cases where its use, in the medical judgment of a woman’s physician, is necessary to preserve her life or to avert serious damage to her health. I remain firm in this belief, and I’m glad to know I have your continued support.

  “Thanks again for getting in touch with me on this sensitive issue. Best wishes, Sincerely,

  “Bill Clinton.”

  XI

  After his release from prison, Scott Roeder drifted further into obscure religions, some with ideas similar to the Identity Christianity church in Idaho that had recruited the men who’d killed Alan Berg. One tenet of these belief systems was that born-again Christians such as Roeder were the true descendants of the Old Testament Jews. Roeder kept a kosher diet and celebrated the Sabbath, or “Shabbat” in Hebrew, beginning on Friday sundown and ending on Saturday sundown. He used the Hebrew terms for God (Yahweh) and Jesus (Yahshua). As he practiced these rituals, his ex-wife kept a log of his activities and refused to let their son, Nick, see his father unless she was present. In the log,
she noted that the boy hadn’t spent any time alone with his father since Roeder had left in September 1994 and that Nick wasn’t comfortable with his dad, but fearful, insecure, and embarrassed:

  “Nick is too shy and passive and well-behaved and will not talk back or speak up for himself. He does not like to visit with his dad and it’s usually by my insistence that he sees Scott.”

  Occasionally, father and son talked on the phone, but that happened only when Nick picked up the receiver before he realized his dad was calling and he couldn’t easily hang up on him. Lindsey’s main concern was that if Nick were left alone with him, Scott would kidnap the boy, since one of the groups he was involved with had “kidnapped children from a father and kept them and his mother in a compound.”

  All the time Nick was growing up, Lindsey had an escape plan if Scott ever tried to take him away.

  “My sister,” she says, “has a relative on the Cherokee nation down in Texas and we were going to hide out there.”

  Roeder had recently become involved with the “Embassy of Heaven Church,” which was located, according to its return address, in “Stayton, Oregon…Kingdom of Heaven.” Church members got to pick their names, and the pastor’s was Paul Revere. When Lindsey and Scott were still married and he’d received materials in the mail from Revere, she’d hidden them or thrown them away (she’d heard Roeder talk about the violently anti-Semitic novel The Turner Diaries, and wondered if he had a copy of it stashed somewhere). During their divorce proceedings, the Embassy of Heaven offered to handle Roeder’s finances and sent a request to Lindsey’s house asking for the title to their car. She was appalled.

  On July 9, 1999, the Embassy of Heaven intervened on Roeder’s behalf with a letter to the legal authorities in Johnson County, where Lindsey and Scott were divorced. Pastor Revere described Roeder as a missionary assigned to Kansas and told the Olathe District Court that the church was managing Scott’s financial affairs. Revere wanted copies of Roeder’s original agreement to pay child support and contended that the court hadn’t provided evidence such an agreement existed:

  “Scott P. Roeder tells us that he desires to faithfully support his wife and child, but she divorced him and sought the care and protection of strangers. He is willing to again support his family, but only if they will return to his covering.

  Separated unto the Gospel,

  Embassy of Heaven Church

  Paul Revere, Pastor.”

  Closer to home, Roeder began meeting in suburban Kansas City residences on Saturdays for potluck and Bible study. At the gatherings, worshippers talked about their own Hebrew roots and the “secret societies” that they believed were trying to control the U.S. government. The attendees called themselves “Messianic Jews” and were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. For a while, Roeder joined a local synagogue, Or HaOlam, led by Rabbi Shmuel Wolkenfeld, but was asked to leave for being too argumentative.

  As Roeder moved into and out of these groups and considered paying child support, he kept writing letters to his son, filled with his growing disillusionment with American society. In one, he encouraged the boy not to participate in Halloween with his friends because it was a “high holiday for the devil.” In another, he said that because the Bible didn’t mention honoring the birth of Jesus, Nicholas shouldn’t take part in Christmas. A thirteen-page letter to Nick vividly described his father’s 1991 conversion to evangelical Christianity: for some time Yahshua (Jesus) had been working in his life to teach him that he was a sinner in need of a savior, until one day in August Roeder kneeled down in the front room of their home and asked Yahshua to forgive his sins and to help him live his life for the savior. Roeder’s prayers were answered, he told Nick, and this wasn’t just a religious turning point, but also a political one, and a turning point for the entire family.

  When creating the United States, the Founding Fathers had been determined to separate religion and politics, both in institutions and for individuals. Religion was for the private realm, while politics was played out in public. Mixing them, they reasoned, generated too much confusion and too much opportunity for abuse or intolerance. They were now bound together inside Roeder, and the fundamentalist Christian teachings and anti-government rhetoric he’d been absorbing for years came tumbling out to his son.

  “Ever since giving my life to Yahshua,” he wrote, “and asking Him to be my Savior, His Holy Spirit has been guiding and leading me into certain things that I had not realized before. One of the things the Holy Spirit was showing me concerned the deception there has been over the subject of income taxes…”

  America had gradually turned away from a government that upheld “godly principles” of truth and justice and embraced an “ungodly system” of socialism and communism, which denied the existence of Yahweh and Yahshua. The United States now “allowed the murder of unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs”—just the opposite of what the Bible promoted. He ranted against a political and legal structure that protected abortion doctors, but punished those who picketed in front of abortion clinics. The country had strayed from its biblical foundations and the time was coming when this had to change.

  “Whenever a Christian,” he wrote, “is shown by the Holy Spirit what is true and rightous [sic], that Christian must decide to stand for what is right, no matter what the cost!…That Christian must also realize there could be a price to pay for standing for what is right…”

  It was as if he were telling his son that he was considering new options for stopping abortion, before he told anyone else.

  XII

  By the mid-1990s, a revolution was coming to American culture. Cable TV, the Internet, and political talk radio were just starting to break through and become an amplifier for the emotional forces building in the society. New technology was about to collide with the feelings of anger and fear that had been growing for decades on the fringes, but were seeping into the mainstream. Something new, something vast, disruptive, and undefined, was about to be unleashed on the airwaves and online, packaged and presented to a mass audience as entertainment. Those who were already enraged or frightened would be encouraged to feel more so now. Those who were paranoid would be pushed further in that direction. Whatever, or whoever, was unstable was going to be nurtured in its instability. What mattered in the new media wasn’t so much political philosophy but how deeply one felt about a government, a group, a crime, sexuality, or, as here, about abortion. A bull market had arrived for accusation, blame, even hatred, and it was driven far less by traditional ideology than by pure emotion.

  The 1990s saw a series of spectacular mass shootings at churches, schools, and other public venues. They all had one thing in common: none of these acts was committed for any personal advantage or gain, such as money. Workers at offices, worshippers inside sanctuaries, or teenagers at their schools felt so threatened and challenged by those around them, or by those who held a different viewpoint, that they took up arms in an institutional setting, killing as many people as they could.

  My wife, Joyce, and I raised a young son throughout the 1990s, and the eruptions of violence within schools, leading to 263 deaths, were especially difficult for us to watch. Before 1995, such deaths were very rare, but that began to change on November 15, 1995, in Giles County, Tennessee, when seventeen-year-old Jamie Rouse, dressed all in black, went to school and shot two teachers in the head, killing one. While trying to murder the school’s football coach, Rouse left another student dead. On February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis walked into a math class wearing a long Western coat that concealed a high-powered rifle, two pistols, and ammunition. While taking the entire class hostage, Loukaitis killed two classmates and a teacher. That same day, a sixteen-year-old in Atlanta, Georgia, shot and killed a teacher.

  In late April 1999, Joyce and I drove out to Columbine High School in southwestern Denver, ten miles from our home, and stood outside a chain-link fence, installed to keep us and others away from the crime scene. We w
atched as hundreds upon hundreds of teenagers and adults knelt down in the spring mud and burst into tears, grabbing on to one another for support or clutching at the fence and swaying in anguish. A couple days earlier, two Columbine students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had walked into the suburban school and opened fire with shotguns and semiautomatic weapons, wounding twenty-three students and killing twelve teenagers, one teacher, and themselves. Nobody at Columbine this evening said anything or made eye contact, the shame of what had happened here too deep to be put into words. Our kids had done this, the silence was saying, the boys we thought we knew.

  Before Columbine, the country had seen numerous school shootings—in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oregon—but this one was especially horrifying. Harris and Klebold had built ninety-five bombs and planted most of them around the school. Some of the explosives were supposed to detonate inside the school cafeteria at 11:20 a.m., during the height of lunch hour, killing hundreds of kids as they ate. When the survivors ran outside to escape the mayhem, Harris and Klebold would gun them down. They intended to kill at least five hundred people, dwarfing the Oklahoma City bombing, but when the explosives failed to go off, the young men entered the school and began shooting. The purpose of the bloodbath, revealed on a home video discovered after the killers’ deaths, paralleled that of the neo-Nazis’ before they’d killed Alan Berg. Harris and Klebold wanted to “kick-start a revolution” against their enemies: “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, fucking whites…humanity.” They were motivated by extreme hatred, and Adolf Hitler was one of their heroes. Their day of infamy at Columbine—April 20, 1999—was the 110th anniversary of the Fuhrer’s birth.

  Those who’d killed Berg were tucked away in the Idaho woods and held obviously fanatical beliefs. They were young, angry, uneducated, and unsuccessful working-class white men, without good prospects in front of them. Harris and Klebold (who drove a BMW) had every privilege one could want: money, family support, friends, and opportunities to attend good colleges. But they also had bottomless reservoirs of hurt and anger. Their act of terrorism had evolved inside Eric Harris’s well-furnished suburban bedroom, and they were not alone in their feelings. In the weeks following the massacre, the National Safety Center reported that three thousand other high school students across the country concocted bomb threats or other schemes meant to result in death.