Dr. Carhart began Christin’s operation with the standard procedure of injecting the fetus with digoxin. He induced labor after the heart had stopped and sent the young woman back to her motel room at La Quinta Inn, also standard procedure. The following morning, she was riding to the clinic in her family’s van when she expelled the dead fetus. At WHCS, doctors discovered a tear in Christin’s uterus, which was sutured, and she was diagnosed with dehydration, given intravenous fluids, and driven back to the motel. That evening, she began vomiting, cramping, and passing out. After midnight, her family phoned Tiller’s employee Cathy Reavis, who was on call at the motel. Reavis put Christin in a warm bath and then to bed. In the morning, she fainted and her family couldn’t revive her. They rushed her to WHCS about 8:00 a.m., where her heartbeat stopped.
At 8:48, the clinic called 911 and emergency responders arrived nine minutes later. Entering WHCS, the paramedics saw Dr. Carhart lying on top of Christin, trying to force liquids from her stomach. A responder ordered Carhart to step away from the patient and the ambulance crew spent the next quarter hour trying to revive her. At 9:14, she was transported to Wesley Medical Center’s Emergency Room (throughout this crisis, anti-abortion protesters were at WHCS snapping pictures of the action and of Tiller’s arrival at Wesley). The ER team worked to save Christin but could not, and she died from systemic organ failure.
Neither Christin’s family nor WHCS wanted to call attention to the tragedy, so it didn’t immediately become public. Operation Rescue wasn’t certain what had taken place after Christin had been transported to the ER, and several days after her death, Troy Newman was at Wesley looking for answers when someone in law enforcement told him that the young woman had not survived.
Anti-abortionists immediately blamed her death on WHCS and on the procedure the clinic had used to induce Christin’s abortion. Within days, Newman and his Operation Rescue colleagues were at the Topeka office of Governor Kathleen Sebelius, speaking with Vicki Buening, the state’s director of constituent services. After Newman had shared his views, Buening gave him the standard answer that if patients were unsatisfied with their care at WHCS, they could file a complaint with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts (KSBHA). As those in Operation Rescue were well aware, Vicki Buening was the wife of Larry Buening, executive director of the KSBHA. Several years earlier, he’d recommended to Tiller that Kristin Neuhaus become his second consulting physician on abortions.
Operation Rescue’s senior policy adviser, Cheryl Sullenger, a veteran abortion protester, was present. In 1988, she’d pled guilty to conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in California, serving nearly two years in prison. She now pointed out to Vicki Buening that a patient could file a complaint only if she were alive.
“Certainly, that is true,” Buening said.
“If they are dead,” Sullenger said, “they can’t file a complaint, can they?”
“I don’t have an answer to that question.”
On January 25, Operation Rescue issued a press release stating that Christin had died from her abortion. Sullenger filed a complaint against Tiller with the KSBHA and received a letter from Shelly Wakeman, KSBHA’s disciplinary counsel, advising her that an investigation had been opened.
The people most affected by Christin’s death, her grieving family, were nowhere to be found in this legal and political battle. They didn’t publicly blame anyone for the loss of their daughter and sister.
When Christin died, a bill had just been introduced in the Kansas House of Representatives, HB 2503, designed to place more regulations on doctors performing abortions. It was strongly opposed by Governor Sebelius and by Tiller’s political action committee, ProKanDo, which had conducted fund-raising on the governor’s behalf. As Phill Kline had campaigned for the attorney general’s job in 2002 as an archconservative Republican, Sebelius had won the governor’s office as a liberal Democrat. From Cincinnati and raised a Roman Catholic, she was the daughter of the former Ohio governor John Gilligan and became part of the first father-daughter governor duo in U.S. history. Sebelius was strongly pro-choice, yet her office claimed that abortions had declined 8.5 percent during her tenure as governor, and the numbers backed her up. According to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment statistics, induced abortions in the state fell by 1,568, or 12.6 percent, from 2001 to 2007. Her administration attributed this to health care programs Sebelius had initiated, including “adoption incentives, extended health services for pregnant women…sex education and…a variety of support services for families.” As governor, she’d vetoed anti-abortion legislation in 2003 and 2005, and would repeat this pattern in 2006 and 2008.
On February 2, 2005, Sebelius sent a letter to Larry Buening asking him to look into Christin’s death. Six weeks later, Operation Rescue held a press conference at the capitol rotunda in Topeka, where a former Tiller patient spoke about her inability to bear children since having her abortion and Cheryl Sullenger talked about the demise of Christin Gilbert. On March 25, Buening sent a letter to Governor Sebelius indicating that Christin had received care that “met the standard of accepted medical practices…” Later that day, the Kansas Senate passed HB 2503 by a two-thirds majority, but Sebelius vetoed the measure and an attempt to override her veto failed.
Seven months passed before Christin’s autopsy report was released, concluding that she’d “died as a result of complications of a therapeutic abortion.” The day before Thanksgiving 2005, the KSBHA issued its final report on the case, absolving Tiller and his staff of any wrongdoing, but his opponents were hardly satisfied. They’d been studying an 1887 Kansas law that allowed citizens to impanel grand juries and issue criminal indictments. Operation Rescue and Kansans for Life launched such a petition in Wichita and Sedgwick County, calling for a grand jury to investigate Tiller’s role in the death. They collected signatures—7,700 in all—and on April 19, 2006, the petitions were certified, and a month later the grand jury went to work. That July, Nola Foulston, the Sedgwick County DA, announced that the grand jury had been dismissed without issuing an indictment. It wasn’t the last time she’d take action to prevent Dr. Tiller from being prosecuted.
The DA’s dismissal further angered Operation Rescue. Grand jury proceedings were supposed to be secret, but Troy Newman claimed to have had an anonymous source inside this one. The jurors, according to the source, were given the runaround by KSBHA witnesses and told that what had happened at WHCS was “standard protocol.”
Cheryl Sullenger claimed that the board’s behavior was putting “all Kansans” at risk.
In April 2006, at the height of the conflict over Christin Gilbert’s death, a protester kneeled down in the gutter running alongside Tiller’s clinic and began to pray. As a WHCS nurse steered her car into the driveway, the demonstrator refused to move. She honked her horn for so long that a clinic guard intervened and told the praying man that he’d be reported to the police. The following morning, Mark Gietzen was in the same gutter when Tiller drove up in his armored SUV. In a report Gietzen filed with the authorities, he said, “Tiller floored the accelerator, and aimed his Jeep directly at us!”
Gietzen claimed that the car hit and bruised him, so he demanded a $4,000 settlement from the physician. When that failed, he asked Nola Foulston to charge the doctor with attempted murder, which also went nowhere. Gietzen kept protesting by kneeling in the gutter, and when Tiller passed by him in his car, he held up an editorial cartoon depicting Gietzen as a madman. The fringes and the mainstream had joined forces over abortion.
Phill Kline, Bill O’Reilly, Operation Rescue, and Kansans for Life had all clearly identified their target, as Scott Roeder continued to drift.
XVII
Sitting behind bars in the late 1990s, he’d prayed over whether to pay child support to his son, Nicholas, after he was freed. While turning to God and his political cohorts for advice, Roeder sent a letter to his ex-wife in January 1998, stating that he intended to pay back child support, but didn’t want this held over his
head when he got out. Once again, he expressed concern about how his beliefs and actions were affecting the boy. Was Nick feeling better now that Roeder’s conviction had been overturned because evidence had been illegally seized from his car? Did the youngster miss him?
If Nick still didn’t want to come visit him, the inmate wrote plaintively, “I’ll understand, but I hope you’ll help him to see that it wasn’t my fault, being sent to prison.”
He all but begged Lindsey to let him know if Nick’s attitude toward him had softened.
After leaving prison, Roeder went from one low-paying job to another, from one address in Topeka or suburban Kansas City to the next, and from one set of extremists—people adamantly opposed to abortion or paying taxes, or those convinced they were the descendants of the biblical Jews—to another. No longer tied down by the responsibilities of a family, he dropped into and out of whatever organization he’d latched on to at the moment. The Kansas City area had a small band of anti-abortion activists whom Roeder had become aware of. Anthony Leake had helped edit Mix My Blood with the Blood of the Unborn, the book Paul Hill had written in prison leading up to his 2003 execution for murdering Dr. John Britton. In 1995, Leake had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Virginia investigating violence against abortion clinics and doctors.
A local activist, Regina Dinwiddie, had signed an Army of God “justifiable homicide” petition following the murders of Drs. David Gunn and John Britton. In Kansas City in 1995, a federal judge had ordered Dinwiddie to stop using a bullhorn within five hundred feet of any abortion clinic. She met Roeder the next year when they picketed together outside the Kansas City office of Planned Parenthood. Roeder had walked into that clinic and asked to see Dr. Robert Crist, and after coming back outside he hugged Dinwiddie and told her that he loved what she was doing. She was one of his heroes, like Shelley Shannon. Another Leake associate, Eugene Frye, led a victorious civil rights lawsuit against police officers trying to break up a 2001 anti-abortion demonstration in Kansas City, Missouri.
Roeder was moving further toward the edges, forging an identity in the far-right underground. In January 1999, he wrote to Lindsey that he’d been offered a job in Kansas City and was relocating there February 1. He wouldn’t say where he was working or the type of employment he’d found because of his “politically incorrect views” on taxation. If the state wanted to find him and punish him for those views, he didn’t want to give them any help. He’d spoken with a woman at the Johnson County Courthouse about their divorce arrangement and promised Lindsey that there “will be no interruptions of my child support payments…I’m looking forward to being able to visit Nicholas more often.”
But neither his ex-wife nor Nick wanted to see him, so he wrote her a snappish letter, refusing to talk to her anymore and declaring that the only page he’d respond to from her was a 444-4444 emergency call. If she violated this rule, he’d hang up on her.
Then his mood changed again, this time to remorse. He wrote Lindsey and apologized for bringing a girlfriend to their home years ago and kissing the woman in front of her and his young child.
During another mood swing, he decided not to support his son financially, after all.
In July 1999, he mailed Nick a letter saying he hoped the boy wasn’t angry at him for not making child support payments. Roeder wasn’t doing this because he didn’t love his son, he explained, but because he’d studied the issue in depth and realized he shouldn’t pay anything until Lindsey agreed to take him back. He badly missed his child:
“Would you still like to visit with me? If you would, please page me at…I’ll call you back as soon as possible.”
But Nick didn’t call.
By 2001, Roeder was asking for unsupervised visits with his fifteen-year-old son, but Lindsey didn’t want to give him that privilege, fearful that he’d run off with Nick to another state. She needed money for a special Boy Scout camp and for dental work on the teenager, and asked her ex to help her financially with both things. When he refused, she found it profoundly ironic that his goal in life was to save the million or so unborn children aborted in America each year, but he wouldn’t support the one child he’d fathered. Her sense of betrayal went deeper than dollars and cents.
Like countless other teenagers, Nick had begun experimenting with marijuana and alcohol. The first time he drank, he consumed so much that he got alcohol poisoning and passed out, and his friends had to call 911. When Lindsey tried to reach Scott during this episode, she couldn’t because he was asleep; he had sleep apnea, and he slept more soundly than most people. After she learned that drinking was occurring at the home of one of Nick’s young buddies, with the approval of the parents inside the house, she confronted the couple and told them exactly what she thought of their behavior. They were indifferent to anything she had to say. Maybe, she told herself, they’d listen to a man instead of a woman, a large man who could look intimidating, a man who’d been accused by the state of Kansas of being a potential bomber and domestic terrorist, even if his conviction on those charges was later overturned.
At the time, Scott was living in the Kansas City area with a friend, in what they called a “farmhouse.” Chickens crowed and skittered around in the yard, the structure was heated by a wood stove, and the kitchen was filled with water jugs holding the liquid that Roeder drank because of his belief that unpurified tap water was dangerous, if not lethal. The place was filthy, with grunge and grime on every surface, and the only thing that brought Lindsey out to the farmhouse was her great concern about her son and the people he was now hanging around. Even if Roeder wouldn’t support Nick financially, would he stand up for him and try to get him out of a situation that could be physically threatening? Lindsey asked her ex to go to the parents who were allowing teenagers to drink booze at their home and tell them this was placing the kids at risk.
It was a just a phase Nick was going through, Scott told her, kind of like when he’d done drugs back in Topeka as a teenager. A lot of kids went through things like that and it would pass…She kept pushing him to speak to the parents and he eventually did talk with one of Nick’s friends about the matter, but not the man and wife, and Lindsey could never quite forgive him.
“I really, really struggled with this one,” she says.
In the summer of 2001, Roeder announced that he was moving to Illinois and marrying a woman named Sue Archer. He invited Nick to accompany him to the wedding, but Lindsey wouldn’t let her son go. Scott and his bride-to-be held similar religious beliefs and had talked about having a full Jewish wedding, with a rabbi, kosher food, and the couple standing under a chupah, or four-poled canopy. The groom would smash a glass with his foot, symbolizing that the marriage would last as long as the glass remained broken—forever—but some of the plans got cancelled and they were joined together instead in front of a few friends. Sue became pregnant with Scott’s child, and in June 2002 she gave birth to a girl named Olivia.
“Sue called me that summer after Olivia arrived,” Lindsey says, “and I was shocked to hear that Scott had had a little girl with her. Things weren’t going well for them. She already had five children and lived on a farm where there were a lot of chores to do. She was just learning how much Scott liked to sleep. She began asking me how to get sole custody of Olivia and keep her away from Scott. I told her, ‘Good luck with that,’ but our talk was cordial. It was like we had our own little support group because another woman now felt about Scott the same way I did. I worried that if Nick had gone to their wedding ceremony in Illinois, Scott was planning on keeping him there.”
After Sue asked Lindsey how to keep Roeder away from her family, Lindsey told her about his arrest for having bomb-making materials and how this had helped her win sole custody of Nick. Sue said that Scott had given one of her young sons a gun, and Lindsey suggested she call the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to report the incident. The two women communicated off and on about how to protect their children from Roeder, who wanted to see his
daughter as much as his son.
In 2003, Roeder sued for visitation rights with Olivia, and in a Pennsylvania court, Archer and her new husband, Mark, argued against this. Two years later, the court ruling stated that Roeder had much earlier been diagnosed with schizophrenia “for which he takes no medication, which may pose a clear and present danger to the female minor child.” The Archers mentioned Roeder’s political affiliations, stating that “past conduct and association with anti-government organizations is ongoing and poses a risk to her daughter.” They “feared that [Roeder] would kidnap and hide their daughter since he threatened to do so with his son.” The court awarded Roeder supervised visitation rights with Olivia and he could be with her for an hour at social services, with a social worker and her mother or stepfather present, but Roeder wasn’t allowed to take pictures of the girl or tell her who he was. In the next few years, he saw his daughter several times in Pennsylvania, but the legal battle between himself and the Archers was not finished.
XVIII
With the protesters in Wichita continuing their 1,846-day vigil at Tiller’s clinic, Phill Kline’s Inquisition ground forward, month by month and year by year. In May 2006, Judge Richard Anderson ruled that the AG could have access to women’s medical records from WHCS and Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, but absolutely no copies of these files could be made without his approval. Kline’s efforts to get at these records and prosecute Tiller had generated widespread opposition, but at no place more strongly than in Governor Sebelius’s office in the state capitol building. Through her vetoes, she’d kept the legislature from tightening Kansas abortion laws, but the Democratic Party needed a broader strategy if it wanted to stop the AG’s assault. It needed to get rid of Phill Kline.
The governor worked in downtown Topeka on Tenth Avenue. Just to the north was the attorney general’s office, and a few yards north of that was the headquarters of Kansans for Life, whose front window was filled with pictures of healthy babies and a photo exhibit of the developmental stages of a fetus. Inside the office were many more images of babies and handouts featuring articles and statistics designed to underscore the evils of abortion. In very polite tones, those who worked at KFL patiently explained to visitors why Tiller’s clinic should be closed. Kline and KFL were as committed to shutting down WHCS as the governor was to keeping it open. Right across the street from the state capitol and the AG’s office was the Judicial Center, home to the Kansas Supreme Court and its seven justices. Most of the major players were within a block of one another for the next round of political warfare, whose implications would reach far beyond Kansas.
A Death in Wichita Page 11