A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  O’Reilly’s performance outraged Morrison, his supporters, and Dr. Tiller. The latter demanded that Kline be held in contempt for sharing the files with outsiders, while his lawyers asked the court to deposit “the records with a special prosecutor or master appointed to investigate any leak of information from, or the mishandling of, the records.”

  Morrison blasted Kline’s Inquisition and said that his opponent, if reelected, would go after other people’s confidential medical records. Kline reminded voters that in 1990 Morrison had faced allegations of drunkenly propositioning a DA employee in a bar. The woman, Kelly Summerlin, was a victim-witness coordinator, the same job later held by Linda Carter. Two federal lawsuits based on Summerlin’s claims against the DA were dismissed in the early nineties, but in the campaign’s final weeks, Kline trotted out the old charges, jolting Morrison’s wife into action. In a TV interview, Joyce said that Kline had “lost his moral compass” by delivering this “malicious attack on the integrity of our marriage.”

  Morrison had more pressing concerns. During a stump speech in Wichita, he’d been rushed by an anti-abortion protester who’d taken a swing at him, before security jumped in and separated the men. The near injury shook the DA and his campaign staff, who now had a firsthand taste of what Tiller and his employees had endured throughout the past three decades.

  On election night, November 7, Kline traveled to Wichita to conduct his final press conference in front of WHCS—Tiller and abortion were the centerpiece of his campaign to the very end. Morrison and his team were far away in the northeast corner of the state, huddling together in a Lawrence restaurant, the Free State Brewery, and waiting for the votes to be counted. The toasts were about to begin, as Kansans had had enough of Phill Kline.

  Morrison won an easy victory, by 17 percentage points, to the great relief of many. After four years of an Inquisition costing uncalculated amounts of time, energy, and money to all sides, WHCS and CHPP had not been found to be in violation of any laws. At the Democrats’ victory party that night in Lawrence, the winners could only hope that the election signaled the start of a new political environment in Kansas and especially in Wichita. Their opponents, of course, felt otherwise.

  “Right after Paul won,” says one of his staffers, “the anti-abortion groups put up awful things on their blogs. Like, ‘Morrison slithers into office on the backs of dead babies.’ It was truly disgusting.”

  Despite the blogs, there was much cause for optimism. Morrison’s supporters were certain that he’d drop the Inquisition and Tiller’s legal battles might at last be behind him. The grand strategy to get rid of Kline and take the attorney general’s office and Kansas in a new direction had worked.

  Or had it?

  Kline didn’t have to vacate the AG’s office until noon on January 8, 2007, and he intended to use every remaining minute to accomplish his unfulfilled goals. On December 20, he charged Tiller with thirty misdemeanors, many involving abortions the physician had allegedly performed on minors. Within hours of the unsealing of these charges in Wichita, a Sedgwick County judge tossed them out—after DA Nola Foulston had made this request and said that her office hadn’t been properly consulted by Kline about the matter. On December 28, Kline appointed a special prosecutor, the Wichita lawyer Don McKinney, to continue investigating Tiller. It was the most defiant and inflammatory (some said outrageous) thing Kline had done since taking office four years earlier, as McKinney made Kline look like a moderate.

  During the Summer of Mercy, Don “the Dingo” McKinney had demonstrated with Operation Rescue at Tiller’s clinic and was an associate and admirer of the late Paul “the Jackal” deParrie. The Jackal had been McKinney’s Wichita house guest in 2001, at the ten-year anniversary of the massive abortion protests. He was an Army of God supporter who’d publicly endorsed the killing of abortion providers in general and of Shelley Shannon’s 1993 attempted murder of Tiller. Papers filed with the Court of Appeals in Oregon in August 1997 read:

  “Respondent [deParrie] is a leader of Advocates for Life Ministries, a group that opposes abortion, and is also the editor of Life Advocate magazine. At various times, Life Advocate magazine has editorialized that the use of ‘godly force’ is ‘morally justified’ in defense of ‘innocent life.’ In addition, on two occasions, respondent signed declarations or manifestos of support for anti-abortionist activists who killed abortion providers. In 1993, respondent and 28 other activists signed the following statement concerning Michael Griffin, who shot and killed Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida: ‘We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child. We assert that if Michael Griffin did in fact kill David Gunn, his use of lethal force was justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children. Therefore, he ought to be acquitted of the charges against him.’

  “The primary sponsor of that declaration was a group called ‘Defensive Action,’ whose director, Paul Hill, also signed the statement. In July 1994, Hill shot and killed Dr. John Britton and James Barrett, Britton’s escort, and wounded Barrett’s wife at another clinic in Pensacola. Respondent and 30 others subsequently signed a declaration that reiterated the earlier declaration and stated that Hill’s ‘actions are morally justified if they were necessary for the purpose of defending innocent human life.’

  “In 1994, respondent described Shelley Shannon, who had attempted to kill Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider, as ‘a hero.’ In January 1995, respondent publicly stated that John Salvi was ‘morally justified’ in killing two receptionists at a Boston abortion clinic.”

  Following deParrie’s death in 2006, McKinney praised the man online, calling him a true Christian warrior. Like Christ himself, deParrie was a genuine leader who went first into battle and inspired everyone by his example—the very best that pro-life has to offer.

  “We are each,” he wrote, “going to have to step up our own efforts to fill the gap in the wall left by Paul’s passing.”

  Signed, “Donald ‘The Dingo’ McKinney.”

  On December 29, 2006, the day after Kline appointed McKinney as Tiller’s special prosecutor, talk2.action.org, a Web site that monitored anti-abortion activists, posted the following message:

  “Frame it as he will, the Attorney General of Kansas has vested an overt associate of Operation Rescue, and of at least one member of the Army of God, with the full law enforcement power of the state.”

  As Kline planned further actions before leaving office, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue was considering another citizens’ petition drive against Tiller. If he could gather seven thousand more Kansas signatures, he could get a new grand jury to investigate WHCS and possibly subpoena two thousand of its medical records. He wanted the files of every woman who’d gone to the clinic, when at least twenty-two weeks pregnant, throughout the past five years.

  While Morrison prepared to depart the DA’s office in Olathe and start his new job sixty miles away in Topeka, he was about to be blindsided. And not for the last time.

  XXI

  On December 11, five weeks after Kline lost the election, Johnson County officials come together to select a DA to replace Morrison. Because Morrison had been voted into this position as a Republican, the GOP got to choose his successor and they picked Kline, sending waves of disbelief and indignation across Kansas, while shocking Morrison and Linda Carter. There was nothing Morrison could do to stop this, but he demanded that because Kline had never worked as a DA, he should get paid less than his predecessor. With Kline and Morrison flip-flopping jobs, Carter would now go to work for her lover’s archrival. Down in Wichita, Tiller immediately suspected the worst.

  Five days before Morrison would become the new Kansas AG and Kline become Johnson County DA, Tiller and his lawyers asked Judge Richard Anderson to make certain that t
he redacted medical files were kept in a secure location during the transition. Kline would be taking over an office 177 miles from Wichita, in suburban Kansas City, where he had no jurisdiction over Sedgwick County or WHCS medical files, but Tiller was still nervous, and with good reason. Despite the urgency of the situation, Judge Anderson did not rule on the matter immediately, giving Kline all the leeway he needed, as a court-ordered investigation later revealed.

  On Friday, January 5, his last full workday as AG, boxes of medical records were moved from his Topeka office and transferred into the car of Steve Maxwell, the assistant prosecutor who worked under Kline. They were driven to Maxwell’s residence, where he and Kline’s chief investigator, Tom Williams, sorted through the boxes. According to the investigation report, some records were then transferred again, into the trunk of Williams’s state-owned vehicle, but the critical WHCS and CHPP files stayed with Maxwell over the weekend.

  At eight o’clock on Monday morning, January 8, four hours before the job switch, Williams and another investigator, Jared Reed, left five boxes of medical records at Judge Anderson’s chambers in the Shawnee County Courthouse, including the WHCS and CHPP files. That morning Kline had told Eric Rucker, chief deputy attorney general for Kansas, to make certain that these records would be available to him as the Johnson County DA. Rucker then told Williams to get them back from Shawnee County. The order surprised Williams, who didn’t understand why the files should be taken into Johnson County’s jurisdiction, so he asked for a written confirmation of Kline’s request. At 3:43 p.m., nearly four hours after Morrison had been sworn in as the new attorney general, Rucker e-mailed Williams. He said to “copy all medical files” and that Kline had directed them to be “delivered to the District Attorney for the 10th Judicial District,” in Johnson County. Williams and Reed copied the records at a Kinko’s and put them in Reed’s car. Reed took them to his apartment and stored the women’s private medical files in a Rubbermaid container, where they sat for more than a month.

  Before leaving the AG’s office on January 8, Kline had left three boxes of Inquisition materials for Morrison, but they held no copies of the WHCS and CHPP records.

  “When we moved into the office that first day,” says a Morrison staffer, “we looked around and couldn’t find any of these files. We were absolutely stunned and couldn’t believe that Kline had actually taken all the records from Tiller’s clinic and Planned Parenthood.”

  Morrison’s staff wasn’t the only ones who were stunned. Over in Olathe, the new attorney general was present during the transition at the DA’s office, where he learned that the medical files hadn’t been left behind in Topeka. He got into a verbal scuffle with Maxwell, whom Kline had just hired to work for him as an assistant prosecutor.

  The following day, Judge Anderson sent Morrison a letter asking if Kline’s just-named special prosecutor for Dr. Tiller, Don McKinney, had any of these files in his possession. It was a moot point; one of Morrison’s first acts as AG was to fire “The Dingo.” He also ended Kline’s Inquisition, and a new era seemed to be coming to the Kansas attorney general’s office and its relationship with George Tiller.

  Three months passed before the matter of the copied medical files made its way through the court system and came before Judge Anderson. Not until April 9 did he learn that Kline had taken the WHCS and CHPP records with him to Johnson County. Judge Anderson was mightily disturbed and would eventually testify about the records, Fox News, and Kline’s appearance on the November 3, 2006, O’Reilly Factor.

  The talk show host, Judge Anderson said, had asked Kline “softball questions,” while O’Reilly himself was “claiming that he had inside information about this or that…I viewed Bill O’Reilly as, frankly, quite a windbag…I was very upset with Kline, because he had put himself in a position where O’Reilly could claim he had stuff. And whether it was driven purely by the pressure of that political campaign or not…I didn’t think he should have put himself in that position as the attorney general because it looked bad.”

  Judge Anderson ordered Kline to return all the records to the AG’s office or face contempt charges. Kline turned the files over to the judge, telling him that no copies of the materials were left in his possession. Only later did he admit that his staff had “created summaries of at least three WHCS patient records” and would use the summaries in their work in Johnson County.

  According to Kline’s own criminal investigator, Jared Reed, both Kline and Chief Deputy Attorney General Rucker were “willing do to whatever is necessary to get charges filed or to get abortion stopped. Whatever is necessary up to and including going above the law.”

  As this played out in the Kansas court system, O’Reilly continued to hound Tiller on the air. In one video clip, Fox’s Jesse Waters followed around Governor Kathleen Sebelius and unsuccessfully tried to ask her about Tiller. In another clip, Fox’s Porter Barry confronted the physician himself on the streets of Wichita.

  “They call you ‘Tiller the baby killer,’” Porter said. “Is that appropriate?”

  Tiller took out a phone and dialed 911, telling a police dispatcher that he was being accosted by a TV producer.

  “No matter what you think about the abortion issue,” O’Reilly said on his program in the spring of 2007, “you should be very disturbed by what continues to happen in Kansas. This man, Dr. George Tiller, known as ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ is performing late-term abortions without defining the specific medical reasons why. Let’s be more blunt: Tiller is executing fetuses in his Wichita clinic for five thousand dollars. And records show he’ll do it for vague medical reasons. That is, he’ll kill the fetus, viable outside the womb, if the mother wants it dead. No danger to the mother’s life, no catastrophic damage if the woman delivers.

  “Now, some Kansas politicians want to stop the madness. But incredibly, Governor Kathleen Sebelius is protecting Tiller, citing privacy. The governor vetoed a bill a few weeks ago that would have forced Tiller to provide a specific medical reason for destroying a viable fetus. Now, America is a great country, but this kind of barbaric display in Kansas diminishes our entire nation.

  “Tiller has killed thousands, thousands of late-term fetuses without explanation. And Governor Sebelius is allowing him to continue the slaughter. How the governor sleeps at night is beyond me.”

  On May 14, 2007, CHPP filed a motion asking Judge Anderson to hold Kline in contempt and for him “to surrender all copies of all patient records he had obtained through the Inquisition.” The judge denied the motion. On June 6, CHPP filed a “writ of mandamus” seeking for the court to compel Kline to return the medical records to the AG’s office. The legal wrangling over the women’s records would generate nearly 2,600 pages of testimony and other documentation, which in time would make their way to the Kansas Supreme Court.

  While the case against Kline edged forward, Morrison ran the AG’s office, parking his car each morning near the back door of the Kansans for Life headquarters. Those associated with the anti-abortion group constantly put up signs near his vehicle saying “Charge Tiller” or other messages that chided Morrison for being both Catholic and pro-choice, in their minds an irreconcilable position. Morrison ignored the taunts because he had so many other things to think about, starting with Linda Carter, who now worked for Phill Kline.

  XXII

  The last time the couple had had sex in the Johnson County Courthouse, according to a sworn statement from Carter, was on Sunday, January 7, 2007, the day before Morrison became AG. With the campaign behind them and Morrison settling into his new job, Carter announced that she was ready to divorce her husband and backed this up by driving down to Western Grove, Arkansas, and bringing back some furniture. She put it in an apartment she’d just rented in Lawrence, about halfway between Kansas City and Topeka, where the lovers could meet in secret. During one stretch that winter, they spent four nights in a row at their new home. They’d begun discussing a tentative wedding date of April 5, though the attorney general h
adn’t even left his wife.

  On Valentine’s Day, Morrison told Carter that he’d changed his mind and decided to stay with Joyce. That set off an eruption, until he changed his mind again. In March, he moved some personal items into the Lawrence apartment and began going there more often. Things were smooth for a while, but then the two began arguing about a highly divisive subject they just couldn’t agree on: Dr. George Tiller. Morrison had never prosecuted an abortion doctor or shown any intention of doing so. Right after becoming AG, he’d dismissed the thirty last-minute charges Kline had filed against Tiller in late December 2006.

  “It was clear, after looking at the case,” Morrison said when announcing this decision, “Kline’s investigation of Dr. Tiller was not about enforcing the law. It was about pushing a political agenda.”

  When visiting Carter’s Lawrence apartment, Morrison was intensely interested in finding out from Linda if Kline was investigating the Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas City and, if so, what tactics he was using. As the director of administration for the Johnson County DA, Carter had inside information about the Olathe office, but she wasn’t very forthcoming with her lover. Abortion was a serious point of contention between them. Morrison had made clear to her that he thought Kline’s Inquisition had been unethical, if not illegal, and that he’d manufactured evidence against Tiller. Carter was strongly opposed to late-term abortion, especially after Kline had taken her into his confidence and shown her some of the WHCS medical files. She felt that Morrison, with his statewide powers of prosecution as AG, should take action against the Wichita physician.

  “Are you going to do the right thing and charge Tiller?” she demanded of Morrison during one of their fights in her apartment.

  With two decades of great success as a high-profile prosecutor, he bristled at anyone telling him how to do his job, and he tried to deflect the question by encouraging Carter to look for work in another field and get away from Kline. She wasn’t easily put off. The conflict over abortion, which had affected many American families during the past several decades, had angrily come to life between the lovers.