A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Inside the national Democratic power structure, Governor Sebelius was a rising star and everything the party was looking for: an accomplished and gifted politician, fresh and strong, articulate and attractive, but not too liberal and without the baggage of a Hillary Clinton. Sebelius held office in a conservative red state, but because of her influence and many supporters Kansas was turning toward blue. She was surrounded by speculation that one day she’d be in a presidential cabinet or become the vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Grooming her successor in Topeka had become important and she needed her own overall plan. That plan involved removing Phill Kline as attorney general and replacing him with a Democrat who could become the next governor of Kansas. Sebelius had her eye on one man, and most agreed he was the right person for the job. There were just two problems.

  I’d met Paul Morrison, the district attorney for Johnson County (in the Kansas City, Kansas, suburbs), while writing a book about the first known serial killer in the history of the Internet. Before his arrest in June 2000, John E. Robinson had been running financial scams and luring women to Olathe, Kansas, for several years, then murdering them. His case was high-profile and Morrison decided to prosecute it himself. In the spring of 2001, we met in his office in the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe. Morrison was a natural-born prosecutor who was learning to become a good politician, folksy and shrewd, with a good sense of humor and a common touch in the courtroom. Bald-headed and blue-eyed, he wasn’t exactly handsome but he was smart and forceful and tuned in to the local population. Addressing a jury, he didn’t add a “g” to his gerunds (talkin’ or thinkin’), which complemented his down-home demeanor. He came across well on television, when laying out for the people of greater Kansas City how successful his office was at rounding up the most dangerous people in the area and putting them away for good.

  He’d gotten convictions against the serial killer Richard Grissom, Jr., and Dr. Debra Green, who’d burned down her mansion and killed two of her three children. He was going to convict John Robinson, and when I visited Morrison, he was riding about as high as a prosecutor can—admired by his constituents and adored by his staff. Born in Dodge City, Kansas, home of the legendary lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, Morrison conjured up those who’d once brought cattle rustlers and Old West killers to justice. On his desk he kept a coffee mug featuring Earp’s face.

  The first problem was that Morrison was not a Democrat, but a lifelong Republican. He was married with three children, and the DA made a point of telling me that he and his wife were instructors at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas. He and his wife, Joyce, a tallish brunette, taught young couples about what to expect after their wedding.

  “It’s all about marriage,” Morrison said, “and it’s not really very religious. It’s about living together and getting along. People who have been married a long time tell you what to expect—and you’re not going to get this from your parents.”

  Morrison kept his religion out of his job. He was pro-choice but not, he once told me, “all that pro-choice.” In his work as a big-city prosecutor, he focused on major crimes, like felony theft and murder. By 2006, he’d been running the Johnson County DA’s office for nearly two decades and had never paid any legal attention to the activities at CHPP, the Planned Parenthood office of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, whose records Kline was now pursuing. In Morrison’s view, the U.S. Supreme Court had long ago ruled that abortion was legal in America, so he focused on people who were breaking the law.

  Could he be persuaded by Kansas Democrats to switch parties? With a little arm-twisting that was accomplished and he was groomed to run against Kline in 2006. The second problem was something Governor Sebelius and her party knew nothing about—because the surface of Morrison’s life was anything but the whole truth. And that truth would eventually spill over onto Wichita and George Tiller in devastating ways. The bizarre was about to become business as usual.

  XIX

  Linda Carter first surfaced in Kansas politics in 1987 as the executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in the town of Marysville and the head of the Marysville Travel and Tourism Bureau. Her husband, John Carter, was the Marysville city administrator, and the couple had three children. Within two years, Linda had resigned both positions because, according to the Marysville Advocate, of “controversies and criticisms.” In her resignation letter, she wrote that her jobs had been “terribly incompatible” with her husband’s.

  “People,” she added, somewhat vaguely, “expect you to be so perfect.”

  After a few years in McCook, Nebraska, the Carters resettled in Johnson County and John found work as city administrator of the town of Roeland Park. In 1996, Linda became a part-time secretary for the Johnson County DA, at $8.19 an hour. She had a nose for office politics and a thing for her boss, Paul Morrison, confessing to several other women in the courthouse that the DA was the sexiest man she’d ever met. By late 1997, Carter had been promoted to part-time victims’ advocate in the property crime unit. Two years later, Morrison hired her full-time as a victim-witness coordinator, and they began working more closely together. She had big blond hair, a Southern drawl, large expressive eyes, and a face suggesting both determination and experience. If she’d been a few pounds overweight when entering the DA’s office, she was shedding them now and wearing tighter clothes.

  Halfway through 2000, the director of administration left the office and Carter wanted the empty post. She’d gotten to know her boss’s wife, Joyce, and called up Mrs. Morrison, hoping she’d put in a good word for Linda with her husband. Joyce was happy to because everyone liked Carter and felt that she’d blossom in this new position. On January 21, 2001, the DA gave her the job and bumped her salary up to $49,004. Morrison had thirty-three lawyers under him and countless cases to keep track of—he needed to hand off some authority and decision-making to a trusted subordinate, and Linda was always there to handle the extra duties. Putting in long hours without complaining, she was soon running seven staff supervisors and the DA’s fiscal coordinator.

  With her power consolidated, Linda formed a women’s group inside the office, the Rose Club, where she began expressing parts of herself hidden throughout the past half decade. She liked taking the ladies out for dinner and collecting gossip about other employees, including members of the Rose Club. Over drinks, Carter invariably turned the conversation toward sex. She was insatiable, wanting to know what the women liked and didn’t like, whom they found attractive in the workplace, and if they had fantasies about that person. Most of hers centered on the DA—“the sexiest man alive.” Rose Club members were disturbed by Carter’s erotic chatter, but what could they do? She was their supervisor now, and challenging her could place their jobs in jeopardy. Better to order more drinks, keep laughing at her outlandish stories, throw in a few tidbits of gossip yourself, and hope for the best.

  As the director of administration, Carter got as much pleasure bossing around the female employees as she did talking with them about sex. When reports of her heavy-handed behavior filtered back to Morrison, he dismissed them. Linda was an excellent worker who got things done, both for the office and the DA himself. It was important to keep her happy so the system would continue running smoothly, yet Carter was becoming increasingly prickly. When she suspected one member of the Rose Club was having an affair with a lawyer in the office, she confronted the woman, who quit and wrote a sharp critique of her supervisor. Carter disbanded the group and cultivated a new set of female workers, the Doll Club. The name came from a local theater production of Valley of the Dolls, based on the racy 1960s Jacqueline Susann novel.

  Instead of business outfits, Carter began coming to the DA’s office dressed in leopard-print miniskirts and matching shoes. She once commanded the Doll Club to gather in her fifth-floor office, where she locked the door, dropped her skirt, and showed off a new pink thong. She liked to think of herself as the real “Wonder Woman,” as opposed to the fictional Wonder Woman made famous on te
levision by that other Lynda Carter. Linda showed up at the DA’s office one day wearing a shiny blue dress, a red neck-scarf, knee-length golden boots, a golden bustier, and a red cape—Wonder Woman in the flesh.

  For years, she and Morrison had been trading glances and smiles in the office and courthouse hallways. Finally, in June 2005, they traveled together to New York City for an event at the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank conducting a study of racial profiling. In their hotel lobby, Morrison approached her and confessed that he wanted a romantic relationship. She didn’t discourage him. By September, they were sneaking into an empty space at the courthouse and having oral sex. They made love in the same office where a few years earlier Morrison had told me that he and his wife Joyce offered counseling to young church couples about the challenges of a long marriage.

  In October 2005, Morrison announced he was leaving the Republican Party to run for Kansas attorney general against Phill Kline. Nowhere was the news more welcome than in Wichita. Back in 2002, when Kline had first sought the AG’s office, Dr. Tiller decided that he needed his own political action committee. He contacted Julie Burkhart, a local pro-choice activist during the Summer of Mercy, now working as an administrator and counselor at a nearby abortion clinic.

  “With Kline running for office,” Tiller told Burkhart, when offering her the job of overseeing his PAC, “there’s a lot to lose.”

  She took the position, and Tiller spent $153,000 to help defeat Kline, sponsoring a last-minute radio ad blitz questioning the candidate’s qualifications and potential violations of his law license. The effort failed.

  “Dr. Tiller didn’t realize soon enough,” says Burkhart, “that if Kline was elected, he’d be nothing but a pain in the neck. When we finally got involved in the race, it was too little, too late. It was a wake-up call for Kansas Democrats who thought they could run and easily win against real right wingers.”

  In November 2002, Kline had defeated a relatively weak candidate, Chris Biggs, and then launched his Inquisition. Governor Sebelius had watched with dismay as the AG had gone after women’s private medical records in order to shut down WHCS. Four years later, Sebelius put her hopes behind Morrison, and Tiller donated more money to the cause. Abortion would be the key issue in a nasty race, with Morrison’s team referring to Inquisitor Kline as “Snoop Dog.”

  After joining the Democratic Party, Morrison began talking up Linda Carter at the governor’s mansion. In July 2006, Sebelius selected Carter to be on the state’s new Interagency Council on Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation. After she attended council meetings in Topeka, Morrison drove over from Olathe and the couple rendezvoused at a local hotel. During one tryst in the DA’s office in the middle of the campaign, Morrison gazed out the courthouse window and wondered aloud if Kline had a spy watching them through a telescope.

  They met in other hotels in Wichita, Overland Park, and Salina, Kansas, and in cities in at least three other states. Carter handled the details, making the reservations and paying cash for the rooms. The more they saw each other, the more heatedly they discussed their options. Should they leave their spouses and file for divorce? Who should go first? Shouldn’t they wait till the campaign was over? The pair had fallen into a volatile dance. When Morrison was at his most fervent, Carter had a tendency to cool off, which only made him more fervent—a tough spot for a man accustomed to commanding all the lawyers in his office and representing law and order to the outside world. And at work, Carter flirted with other men, blowing kisses at attorneys who walked into the DA’s office and talking with the Doll Club about bedding them. It was difficult enough to manage hundreds of criminal cases when things were going smoothly, but now the office was filled with anxiety and tension. The Morrison-Carter relationship was anything but stable when he decided to take it to the next level.

  He bought her an engagement ring, appraised at more than $16,000, and gave it to her during a visit to the Carter family home in Western Grove, Arkansas. But he didn’t propose, because the timing wasn’t right. How would it look to conservative Kansas voters, not to mention Morrison’s avowed enemies in the Kline camp, if he bolted from his wife and children on the eve of the biggest election of his career? They needed to be patient a while longer, and to keep their secrets intact.

  “When Paul was running for attorney general,” says one of his top campaign aides, “I was around him every day for days on end. We traveled together all over the state. I had no clue what was going on.”

  XX

  With only weeks left before the 2006 midterm elections, Kline and many other GOP candidates around the country were lagging in the polls (Democrats were about to win a majority of seats in Congress). The war in Iraq that President George W. Bush had started in March 2003 with the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was increasingly unpopular—especially after no such weapons were found. Just as disturbingly, reports had leaked out about the U.S. Army’s abuse of prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, would tell Congress that more than a hundred detainees had died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least twenty-seven of those deaths declared homicides by the military. The victims had allegedly been drowned, suffocated, shot, or kicked to death. The graphic photos coming out of the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad—images of American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners—made the reports unnervingly real. U.S. military personnel appeared to be in violation of international law.

  My father, and many like him, had never voted for a Democrat in his life, but by mid-2006, approaching eighty-three, he was changing his mind. It pained him greatly that as he’d become an old man and my son was nearing an age when he could be called into military service, American soldiers were engaging in torture in so-called “black sites” around the world. They’d disregarded the very rules concerning POWs that had protected him from the Nazis, and kept him alive. He was an unstoppable letter writer and began composing heartfelt messages to politicians, both locally and nationally, including President Bush. He urged Bush to go visit VA hospitals across America, and to talk with the men who’d been wounded in combat and find out how long their injuries and trauma lasted, once wars were declared over. He never heard back from anyone in Washington, and died two months before the 2006 election that provided a mandate against the Republican Party he’d supported so unwaveringly all his life.

  While Republicans struggled nationally, Kansans watched the growing combativeness of the attorney general’s race, with abortion as the main issue. On February 3, 2006, the state Supreme Court had finally ruled on Kline’s request to gain access to the WHCS and CHPP records. The AG would be allowed to see these medical files, but they’d be heavily redacted, with the patient names removed. Kline and his subordinates were ordered not to release these materials to anyone. The files “could hardly be more sensitive,” the court said, so everyone must “resist the impulse” to make them public.

  Kline didn’t resist. He took recommendations on finding medical experts sympathetic to his cause from anti-abortion groups such as Kansans for Life and Women Inflaming the Nation. Then he went out and tried to hire these experts to view the records. At first, he brought in the Kansas doctor Ronald Erken, who informed members of Kline’s staff that they had no case against Tiller. Then he went after Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a professor of psychiatry. Dr. McHugh looked at twenty-eight medical files and discussed them in a forty-four-minute videotaped interview put together by anti-abortion activists. The tape found its way to Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, and onto the Internet. Dr. McHugh contended that the medical reports held diagnoses such as anxiety, depression, and adjustment disorder—conditions that were not “substantial and irreversible,” and therefore did not warrant abortion to protect the health of the mother.

  “I can only tell you,” he stated in the interview, “that from these records, anybody could have gotten an ab
ortion if they wanted one.”

  The interview failed to mention the facts in many case files, including one that evoked the late Christin Gilbert. This patient was a ten-year-old girl, twenty-eight weeks pregnant, but unlike Christin, she’d been raped by an adult relative.

  By late October 2006, Kline was trailing Morrison in the polls and desperate to catch up. On the evening of November 3, four days before the election, Fox featured an “exclusive segment” on The O’Reilly Factor. Kline appeared on the show and O’Reilly created the clear impression that he’d had access to the redacted medical records. To an audience of millions, he declared that he had an “inside source” with documentation indicating that Dr. Tiller had performed late-term abortions to alleviate “temporary depression” in pregnant women.

  Jared Maag was the deputy solicitor general for the Kansas attorney general’s office. Under oath, he later said, “The words that he [O’Reilly] was using suggested that he had a record in front of him because of the statements that Dr. Tiller would perform an abortion because of depression…When you listen to his statement in full, the assumption that I came to was that it came from the office of the attorney general.”