A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Had Morrison, she pressed, taken campaign contributions from Tiller when he was running for AG?

  He lied and said no.

  When she continued interrogating him, he erupted and stomped out of her apartment.

  She dumped all of his possessions into a pile by the door so he could pick them up when he came back and get out of her life for good. She also decided to sell her engagement ring, but first hid it in her apartment. When her husband, John, stumbled onto the ring and an appraisal document holding Morrison’s name, he sold the $16,000 piece of jewelry for $4,750, depositing the money in a joint account with his wife.

  Ten days after Morrison stormed out, he called Carter and said that he’d left his wife and taken an apartment in Topeka, where they could now be together. And he was ready to go to St. Louis and have his vasectomy reversed, so he and Linda could have children. He gave her the key to his new apartment and she saw him there in April and May. By now, Joyce Morrison had learned of the affair and she called Carter, demanding that Linda stop seeing her husband.

  What neither Carter nor Morrison knew was that Kline had also been tipped off. In March 2007, two months after he became Johnson County DA, a staff supervisor wrote Kline detailing Carter’s inappropriate behavior at work. It mentioned her “flirtatious manner with defense attorneys, law enforcement officers and other individuals.” One man she’d flirted with was Tom Williams, the former chief AG investigator who now had a similar job in the DA’s office. The supervisor’s allegations were passed along to the Johnson County Board of Commissioners and to the DA’s new chief deputy, Eric Rucker, who’d also worked for Kline back in Topeka.

  On March 19, Kline received another letter, this one anonymous, outlining Morrison’s affair with Carter. On two occasions, it stated, employees had heard Morrison and Carter having sex in the DA’s office. Kline gave the letter to Steve Maxwell, who’d tangled with Morrison on the day Kline had moved into his new job. The DA, who was still involved in his own legal battles at the Kansas Supreme Court, decided to sit on the explosive information. Several months went by as his contempt case moved forward and he pushed on with his plans as DA, doing what Morrison had never done in nineteen years of running the Johnson County office. Using the women’s medical records he’d gathered as attorney general, Kline filed 107 criminal charges against Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (CHPP) for its abortion practices. For all practical purposes, the Inquisition was back on.

  As Kline went after CHPP, the attorney general made a move that baffled and angered his supporters. It may have been because he was under the influence of his lover. Whatever the reason, he asked a lawyer in his employ, Veronica Dersch, to look at the WHCS files Kline had earlier gotten his hands on. Did they, he charged Dersch with finding out, show that Dr. Tiller had had a financial relationship with Dr. Kristin Neuhaus, who’d given him so many of the second medical opinions needed to perform late-term abortions? Had Tiller violated the legal statute that read, “No person shall perform or induce an abortion when the fetus is viable unless such person is a physician and has a documented referral from another physician not legally or financially affiliated with the physician performing or inducing the abortion…”?

  Both CHPP and WHCS were again under investigation.

  On June 22, 2007, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered Kline to explain to its seven justices why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for violating a judge’s orders and distributing the medical records to outsiders, including perhaps Fox News. Five days after the court issued this directive, Kline had a subordinate make a copy of CHPP patient records and give them to yet a fourth medical expert. Then Morrison jumped into the case, writing a legal memorandum stating that “CHPP patient records and other materials had been taken without authorization from the Attorney General’s office when Kline’s term was over; that patient records had been mishandled; and that copies of the records had been disseminated improperly.”

  On June 28, with his relationship with Carter as volatile as ever, Morrison filed nineteen misdemeanor charges against Tiller. By late July, he and Carter were again discussing their marital options and Morrison kept pushing her to reveal the activities taking place inside the DA’s office. What was Kline doing with the medical files still in his possession? How much money had the DA’s staff spent hiring expert witnesses to prosecute CHPP? When Kline became DA, he’d fired seven lawyers and an investigator who’d worked for Morrison. The “Olathe Eight” had then banded together and sued the new district attorney in a wrongful-termination lawsuit. Morrison insisted that Carter keep him informed about the suit and wanted her to write letters of support to staff members who’d joined the case against Kline. Carter balked, feeling divided between her loyalties to her old boss and her new one, who was paying her $90,001 a year. When she refused to write the letters, her relationship with Morrison again went to the brink.

  On September 18, he called her and said the moment had arrived to prove his love for her once and for all. He drove the couple to a Kansas City parlor, where a tattoo artist inked a heart into his pelvis, and inside the heart were two initials: “L.C.” She was supposed to get a similar tattoo with “P.M.” engraved in her flesh, but backed out and ten days later told him she wanted Morrison out of her life forever. The quarrel escalated, over the tattoo but also why she wasn’t keeping him informed about Kline’s investigation into Planned Parenthood.

  She feared that if she left the DA’s office to hunt for a new job in Arkansas, Morrison would sabotage her efforts. In late October, he tried to reconcile with her by saying that if she’d have him as a husband, he’d make peace with Kline and get an emergency divorce from his wife.

  She told him never to call back.

  XXIII

  The Kansas Judicial Center on Tenth Avenue in Topeka, right across from the state capitol and attorney general’s office, was as quiet and sober as the affair between Carter and Morrison was heated and tempestuous. Its exterior was made of cottonwood limestone and its lobby was cavernous—sixty feet high and featuring Vermont marble and South Dakota granite, with the minerals symbolizing the permanence of the law in the face of constant cultural, social, and political change. In the middle of this large open space rose an off-white, graceful-looking sculpture of a half-kneeling woman holding aloft a prairie falcon. The bird was native to Kansas and the sculptor, Bernard Frazier, intended it to represent swift and dynamic justice. While politicians came and went and justice was rarely swift or dynamic, the seven Supreme Court justices working inside the Judicial Center were the last bulwark against chaos and lawlessness, even when it involved the state’s highest legal officials.

  In the fall of 2007, District Judge David King conducted a fact-finding mission into Kline’s behavior with the medical files and turned his findings over to the justices, letting the court decide whether or not to find the former AG in contempt. In his sworn testimony, Kline told Judge King that he had “no knowledge of any ‘inquisition’ records and/or documents transferred by me in my position as Attorney General to myself in my position as District Attorney.” In his opinion, he was both the AG of Kansas and the DA of Johnson County for one hour on January 8, 2007, but “performed no acts in that capacity.” Judge King told the Supreme Court that Kline had not handled patient records in a manner that “stood up to the highest scrutiny. Such scrutiny surely should have been expected.” The High Court didn’t hold Kline in contempt, but showed far less restraint toward him than Judge King had.

  “The record before us,” they wrote in their final report, “discloses numerous instances in which Kline and/or his subordinates seriously interfered with the performance of his successors as Attorney General and seriously interfered with this court’s effort to determine the facts underlying this action and the legal merits of the parties’ positions. Kline was demonstrably ignorant, evasive and incomplete in his sworn written responses to Judge King…Kline’s responses…showed consistent disregard for Kline’s role as a leader in state law enf
orcement; and they delayed and disrupted this court’s inquiry…He was thorough only when digressing from the point.”

  The justices chastened Kline for violating women’s “constitutional privacy rights” and said that he’d “hustled to deflect responsibility and any attendant blame. We are deeply disappointed by Kline’s casual treatment of the WHCS patient records…Kline exhibits little, if any respect, for the authority of this court and for his responsibility to it and to the rule of law it husbands. His attitude and behavior are inexcusable, particularly for someone who purports to be a professional prosecutor…He is interested in the pursuit of justice only as he chooses to define it.”

  On October 23, 2007, Linda Carter, exasperated with Morrison and convinced their relationship was finished, went to Kline and Steve Maxwell and told them about her affair with the AG (she didn’t know that they already knew about it). Within days, Morrison learned about this and began calling her frantically. On October 31, he phoned her twenty-two times between 11:58 a.m. and 12:47 p.m. According to Carter, he threatened to tell her prospective employer in Arkansas that Linda was “a monster, fucking sociopath, liar, bitch, and a bad manager.” Maxwell and a DA employee, Shawna Chambless, a former Rose Club member, listened in on four of these calls. They reported back to Kline, who now launched a sexual-harassment investigation into Morrison. The first step was Tom Williams sitting down with Carter and taking her sworn statement.

  “On November 1, 2007,” Williams’s record of the interview began, “Linda Carter was contacted at a discreet location [Shawna Chambless’s apartment] in Johnson County, Kansas, for the purpose of providing an interview concerning a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Complaint that Carter had filed against the Johnson County District Attorney’s office and former Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison.”

  For her revelations, Carter would be given full immunity from any prosecution. On November 2, her complaint was faxed to the EEOC, and her interview with Williams made its way to The Topeka Capital-Journal newspaper. On November 14, Carter delivered an affidavit supporting Kline’s sexual-harassment case and in it she said that Morrison had made “derogatory references” to the new DA. When referring to Kline’s incoming staff in Olathe in early 2007, Morrison had told her to “give the fuckers what they want.”

  Morrison, Carter concluded, “led me to believe that whether I agreed with his position on the investigation and prosecution of the Tiller clinic would affect the status of our personal relationship.”

  On November 21, Kline e-mailed his staff a message entitled, “Wishing Linda Carter success in her future endeavors.”

  “I am sorry to announce,” he wrote, “that Linda Carter has submitted her resignation as Director of Administration effective November 30. Linda is pursuing other opportunities and we wish every success…”

  Carter took off for her family home in Western Grove, Arkansas, anxious to get out of Kansas before the fallout started. On December 8, the Capital-Journal broke the story, which was widely read across the state, including by the shell-shocked staff in Morrison’s Topeka office.

  “We had absolutely no idea this was coming,” an aide to the attorney general later said. “Everybody who worked for Paul loved him and thought he had a great future as a prosecutor and a public servant. So much for him becoming the governor of Kansas.”

  On December 14, Morrison held a press conference by himself. Neither his wife nor other family members were present as he resigned and was replaced by the new attorney general, Steve Six.

  “I’ve made mistakes in my personal life,” Morrison said to the media, “but I’ve always obeyed our laws and done the right things as a professional. My actions caused pain and sadness to many people I love. I have been working for some time to get right with God, get right with my family, and get right with friends and address my personal problems—and I will continue to do so.”

  He went back home to Olathe to look for a job, where more fallout awaited him.

  Kline disagreed that the ex-DA and ex–attorney general had “always obeyed our laws” and opened a criminal probe into Morrison for telephone harassment for his twenty-two late October calls to Carter—and for possible blackmail. Morrison dropped his contrite tone and called the investigation the “politics of sewage.” Kline chose two people outside the DA’s office to handle the matter, in an effort to demonstrate that he had no bias toward Morrison. Yet one man, Tom Keck, had been an assistant DA under Kline until recently and the other, Robert Arnold, had contributed money to his last political campaign. Nine months later, on December 17, 2008, the pair cleared Morrison of any criminal wrongdoing. While trying to repair his broken marriage and salvage his career, he went into private practice as a defense attorney, his office just across the street from the Johnson County Courthouse, where he’d once ruled over the entire scene.

  In November 2008, Kline was defeated in the election for Johnson County DA and the Kansas Supreme Court admonished him, once again, to give up all copies of the WHCS and CHPP medical records before leaving office. Clearly no longer trusting him, the court gave Kline a hard deadline for completing this task: December 12, 2008, at exactly 5:00 p.m. The court thought about ordering him to reimburse the thousands of dollars in “personnel expenses” his behavior had cost the legal system, but chose not to. Johnson County taxpayers would have had to pay some of these expenses and “they didn’t elect him in the first place and have now shown him the door,” said the court. During the Inquisition, Kline had racked up around $200,000 in other legal fees, now personal debt. He needed a job and soon found one as a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, the fundamentalist Baptist college Reverend Jerry Falwell had started in 1971 in Lynchburg, Virginia.

  Early in 2009, The Wichita Eagle reported that when departing the DA’s office in Olathe for the last time and leaving Kansas behind, Kline attempted to mail the Tiller clinic medical records to himself in Virginia, but they were returned because of a faulty address.

  If he wasn’t finished with Tiller, neither were Troy Newman and the members of his Operation Rescue. In 2008, they succeeded in getting a second grand jury to investigate the doctor and hoped to subpoena thousands of WHCS medical records for the jurors’ examination. Many former Tiller patients, aided by the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City, came forward and offered their support to WHCS in an effort to protect these files. CRR succeeded in keeping the great majority of patient records from reaching the grand jury and no names or other identifying information were revealed. Jurors had access to the files of 150 randomly selected patients who’d had late-term abortions, and after studying these records they, like the earlier grand jury, refused to indict Dr. Tiller. It was another defeat for Newman and the anti-abortionists, who continued showing up at WHCS with their “Truth Trucks,” featuring aborted fetuses and their new message, “Abortion is an ObamaNation.”

  Tiller faced one more legal battle, and if he won it, the seemingly endless Inquisition launched by Phill Kline in 2003 would at last be at an end. Under the new attorney general, Steve Six, the nineteen-count misdemeanor case against the physician for allegedly having an illegal financial relationship with Kristin Neuhaus was moving forward. Across the state and around the nation, abortion foes held out the hope that finally, after so many years of frustration, Tiller would be taken to court and convicted of these charges. He could lose his medical license and abortion practice.

  One man watching these developments closely had higher hopes than almost anybody else.

  The Rule of Law

  XXIV

  In 2004, Scott Roeder had invited his son, Nick, to go with him to Worldview Weekend, a Christian gathering in Branson, Missouri. Nick was eighteen and could now make his own decisions about being with his father. This group was far more in the mainstream than many of the religious activities Roeder had been involved with throughout the past decade, and his ex-wife felt that he might be leaving the fringes behind. He and Nick went to Bran
son and had a good time.

  “I thought he was moving away from the dark side,” Lindsey says, “but it didn’t last long. He went back to interacting with the same people he’d been around before, and we didn’t see as much of him. He’d call Nick, but Nick would usually try to avoid him, so he wouldn’t have to listen to his dad talk about conspiracies.”

  Roeder found people with his same beliefs online. The Internet linked him to many far-right organizations and let him vent with those who felt as he did about abortion, stem cell research, and Dr. Tiller. He posted his opinions on various Web sites under the name “ServantofMessiah.”

  On May 19, 2007, he brought up an Operation Rescue event held a few days earlier in Wichita, praying for the end of Tiller’s “death camp” and calling for all unborn babies to “once again come under the protection of law.” He hoped to organize as many people as possible to attend a service at the physician’s church to ask questions of the pastor and other leaders.

  “Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything,” he wrote, “but bring more attention to Tiller.”

  Three months later, Roeder posted on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called “chargetiller.com.” He compared what was happening in Kansas to “lawlessness” mentioned in the Bible.

  “Tiller,” he wrote, “is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

  On this site, another post read, “TILLER MUST DIE PUBLICLY, OBSERVED BY THE WORLD TO SEE, OPENLY, THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE INVOLVED WITH THIS PRACTICE MUST BE AWARE TO TURN ON THERE WICKED WAYS.”