A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  By mid-2007, like so many others with his political and religious leanings, Roeder felt alarmed and even more motivated to speak out because of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency of the United States. There was a chance he might even win. During the past eight years, Roeder and his cohorts had had someone in the White House with whom they’d shared certain core beliefs: the anti-abortion, born-again Christian George W. Bush, who’d opposed stem cell research for use in scientific labs. His administration had been lax in enforcing the FACE Act, which made it a crime to block access to medical facilities and to deny women the opportunity to get abortions. Obama was a pro-choice, liberal Democrat and, in Roeder’s view, “a man without any character.” Whatever respect he might have had for the candidate went away during the campaign, when Obama avoided directly answering a question about when life begins, saying that that kind of knowledge was above his pay grade.

  “What kind of a response is that?” Roeder asked people.

  Adding to his discomfort was that his ex-wife and son were big Obama supporters. One time they put an “Obama” magnet on his car, just to annoy him.

  “Scott had very negative feelings about Obama,” says Lindsey. “He believed that if he got to be president, Obama would strongly back abortion rights and just be horrible and ruin the country. Scott’s feelings were really racial.”

  All the more reason that the legal case to bring down Dr. Tiller had to succeed.

  XXV

  As the 2008 election approached, the charges against Tiller made their way through the Kansas court system. In the 1990s, he’d paid a team of lawyers to help him comply with the statute requiring a second physician to sign off on the necessity of a late-term abortion. During the Inquisition, he’d employed more attorneys to represent him against the new allegations. Now, in the fall of 2008, he’d engaged still more to combat the latest charges. At a November hearing, held right after Barack Obama’s election, Tiller’s side argued to have the case dismissed. His lead lawyer, Wichita’s Dan Monnat, relished the role of defending the doctor and took this opportunity to express himself about what had been happening lately at the highest levels of Kansas law enforcement.

  “Your Honor,” he told Judge Clark Owens, in his sixth-floor courtroom in the Eighteenth Judicial District, “when former Attorney General Paul Morrison filed these charges, he all but apologized for them, calling them technical violations, and the evidence in this case…will establish that these technical violations are really the product of politics and personal problems of at least two former attorney generals…This prosecution is the product of outrageous government conduct in violation of both the [state and federal] constitutions…with total disregard for the privacy rights of women…

  “The Kansas Supreme Court, speaking of the behavior of Phill Kline, found…the unauthorized scattering of the private medical files of women to a national conservative talk show host, to an Internet DVD, and to the car trunks, kitchens, and apartments of the abettors of former Attorney General Phill Kline…Special prosecutors have been appointed to investigate Attorney General Morrison’s illicit relationship with Linda Carter, a Kline employee for some of the time, and her role in influencing his decision to charge Dr. Tiller. Is that outrageous? Is it outrageous that Dr. Tiller, an innocent man, and the rights of innocent women and the people’s system of justice are just the pawns of those politicians?”

  Monnat was determined not just to defend Tiller, but to put his inquisitors on trial. When he called Kline as a witness at the November hearing, the former attorney general was nonresponsive to the questions. Then Monnat called Kline’s chief investigator, Tom Williams, whom Carter had flirted with in the DA’s office. Monnat pointed out that when Williams was supposedly trying to learn about child sex abuse going unreported in Kansas, he’d focused on abortion providers.

  “That’s where the record sort of led,” Williams said.

  “Well, hospital records and birth records are a pretty obvious record to think of in the first place, aren’t they?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “And what about dentists, optometrists, psychologists, nurses, teachers, school employees, marriage therapists, family therapists, alcohol and drug abuse counselors, licensed child care providers, social workers, firefighters, EMS personnel, juvenile intake assessment workers, and law enforcement officers?”

  “That’s a long list.”

  “Any of them wrong?”

  “No, not that I’m aware of…”

  Despite Monnat’s efforts to have the case dismissed, Judge Owens disagreed and scheduled Tiller’s trial for late March 2009. On the twenty-third of that month, the parties assembled at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in downtown Wichita for opening arguments. As anti-abortion demonstrators gathered on the streets outside and Operation Rescue members came into the courtroom to protest Tiller in silence during the proceedings, six jurors had to decide if the doctor had had an unlawful financial or legal relationship with Dr. Kristin Neuhaus.

  One of those inside the courtroom watching the trial was Scott Roeder. For a decade he’d been hearing from moderate anti-abortionists that the legal system could bring Tiller down and throughout that time he’d hoped and prayed they were right. Now was its chance.

  Roeder had been spending more time in Wichita lately, driving down from Kansas City and checking in to one of the cheap motels on East Kellogg Street, just up the road from Tiller’s clinic. He didn’t have much money, but spent what he had on this pilgrimage to the heart of the war over abortion. He rode by Tiller’s church and parked in front of it, staring at the stately red brick structure in the northeast part of Wichita, the money side of town. He stood with his allies on the sidewalk outside the clinic in the late winter cold, continuing the “sidewalk counseling” that he’d been doing for years, talking to women going inside and trying to change their minds, holding his worn Bible and reading certain passages again and again, closing his eyes and beseeching God with all the intensity he could muster for Tiller to come to his senses and give up his medical practice. In years past, he’d visited WHCS, but usually held himself apart from the other demonstrators, carrying a cross and a bundle of red roses, a symbol of the anti-abortion movement. Because of the flowers, the protesters had nicknamed him “the prom queen.”

  He no longer had the roses or stood away from the others at the clinic, but joined with them and their prayers. He believed that if he prayed hard enough, if he found just the right words and feelings, if he was sincere enough in his beliefs, Tiller would change his mind and stop performing abortions forever. Wichita would no longer be the abortion capital of the world and an evil would have been removed from Roeder’s home state. That’s what so many abortion foes had wanted during the last three decades, but now they had something much more to hope for, everything building toward this climactic moment.

  They’d been frantically texting and twittering one another, calling and e-mailing about this pivotal moment in their history. They’d been trading information about Tiller—his clinic, his residence, his place of worship, and his daily routine—about how he got around town or to and from work. Operation Rescue had an online “Tiller Watch” that posted his home and church address. Demonstrators sent pictures of him on their cell phones, as he traveled from one location to the next, stopping for a bite to eat or to pick up his clothes at the dry cleaner’s, each technological advance adding to their surveillance. On February 20, 2009, Operation Rescue’s senior policy adviser Cheryl Sullenger twittered her cohorts, “Meanwhile, bloody business as usual at Tiller’s shop of horrors.”

  On March 5, as the legalities were about to begin, she sent out another message, “Inviting all to Tiller trial in Wichita March 16.”

  XXVI

  When he wasn’t in Wichita, Roeder returned home to his new apartment. He now shared a few rooms in Westport, a bar-and-restaurant district on the Missouri side of Kansas City, with a man he’d known for years through their common interest in Messianic Christia
nity. Kamran Tehrani was born in Iran and his father had worked in the shah’s regime, but after the 1979 overthrow of the Iranian government and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, Kamran’s family moved to America. He was raised a Muslim, but became an atheist living in Washington State and California. In 1988, he had a personal crisis and asked God to reveal Himself.

  “I had a dream and saw Christ’s deity,” Kamran says, “and this presence nearly killed me. He shrouded his glory so that I could look right at him, and that started my Christian journey.”

  Kamran, who’d earned a master’s in business administration, came to Kansas in 1991 and worked as a mortgage broker. In the late 1990s, he met Roeder through the Prophecy Club, a religious group in Topeka, led by Pastor Stan Johnson. To Kamran, the Prophecy Club was a “cutting-edge, national ministry.” It embraced many of the same anti-tax, anti-immigration, and anti-gay-rights convictions held by the far right. In a quiet and polite Midwestern tone, Pastor Johnson could be heard on the Internet asking the faithful for money and decrying the state of modern America, while delivering a broad-based attack on those he felt were outside the Christian fold. His delivery was much softer than that of Fred Phelps, who preached savagely against gay people at Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, but their messages overlapped.

  “The Prophecy Club didn’t meet at a church but a motel,” Kamran says. “We had discussions about a wide range of subjects, including our Hebrew roots.”

  He ran into Roeder at the motel and at similar events held by the International House of Prayer (IHOP).

  “The Lord,” reads the IHOP Web site, “has called us to be a community of believers committed to God, each other and to establishing a 24/7 house of prayer in Kansas City—a perpetual solemn assembly gathering corporately to fast and pray in the spirit of the tabernacle of David.”

  Small clusters of Prophecy Club or IHOP followers got together at their homes and held Bible study sessions, with an emphasis on carrying on Old Testament traditions. For a while, Kamran lived at the Merriam, Kansas, home of the lawyer Michael Clayman, but he moved out and Roeder moved in. In mid-decade at Clayman’s, Kamran led a course called the “Four Quadrants,” about what had become of the Bible’s Lost Tribes of Israel. Kamran’s teachings echoed those given to the men in the Order back in the early 1980s, when they were hearing sermons at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho: these lost tribes had formed the countries of Europe and eventually came to America. At Clayman’s, they also studied what Kamran called the “Synagogue of Satan,” made up of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews.

  “People today,” says Kamran, “call themselves Jews, but they’re not. They’re really the Synagogue of Satan. We’re going to be revealing all this in the Last Days.”

  After both men had left Clayman’s and Kamran took an apartment in Westport, Roeder settled in with him. They continued studying these subjects in their new living room, but abortion wasn’t really a part of their discussions. Nor was it a large part of Kamran’s belief system or interests. The men kept the Sabbath on Saturdays, when students got together and pored over the Bible. Kamran was born Persian, and a Persian proverb says that if you want to get to know someone well, either live or travel with that individual. Sharing an apartment with Roeder, watching his habits and listening to his rants, Kamran got to know the hulking, balding, fifty-one-year-old man with the light-colored, wispy mustache much more intimately.

  “He was just very dogmatic in his feelings about the unborn,” Kamran says. “He had a real strong passion on this issue. I tried to tell him that my calling is for the born versus the unborn, and that you cannot force women to not abort their children. Not even Operation Rescue can do that. He talked a lot about Operation Rescue and I’d hear him in the apartment speaking with one of their leaders on the phone. It was a woman. They were talking about Tiller and his trial.

  “He also talked about Tiller with me and one time he went to Topeka for an anti-abortion demonstration. Scott was very tight with his money, so that really impressed me. It was a long way for him to drive to protest. He told me that Tiller had become a multimillionaire as an abortion doctor and had aborted seventy thousand children. He once asked me my opinion about shooting abortion doctors. I said if you want to go to prison for life that is your decision and nobody can stop anybody from what they choose to do.”

  What Kamran didn’t know was that over the years Roeder, by his own claims, had donated at least a thousand dollars to Operation Rescue—a large amount for someone beyond frugal, who held minimum-wage jobs and was occasionally out of work. He also didn’t know that in August 2008, Roeder had driven to Wichita one weekend and attended a Sunday service at Dr. Tiller’s Reformation Lutheran Church, concealing a 9-millimeter handgun in a shoulder holster.

  “Scott once asked me,” Kamran says, “what I thought, biblically, about killing an abortion doctor. I told him that if you act it out, you’ll pay for it with prison time. I didn’t say, ‘No, don’t do it,’ because in America people have guns and people get shot all the time. They just do what they do.”

  As someone born and raised in another country, Kamran was often struck by how well armed Americans were, with ninety guns for every hundred citizens. It further impressed him that the United States is believed to be the most heavily armed society on earth, owning 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms. Between 1980 and 2006, firearm death rates in America averaged 32,300 annually, well over twice that of the next highest country among industrialized nations.

  Roeder had thought about running Tiller over with his car, but that might not work. If he was able to get close enough, he could chop off the doctor’s hands (his ex-father-in-law kept a sword in a cedar chest in Lindsey’s home, left over from World War Two, and Roeder himself had a long, nasty-looking serrated knife under the seat of his car). But even if he removed Tiller’s hands, the physician could teach others how to perform abortions. Roeder considered climbing onto a rooftop across the street from the clinic and using a high-powered M50 sniper’s rifle as Tiller came to work in the morning, but it would be extremely difficult to get a clean shot at the man inside the armored car or after he’d entered WHCS through a security fence and parked in a locked garage. The Tillers lived in a gated community that was virtually impenetrable, so Roeder couldn’t do it at his home. That really left only a single option, and wasn’t it the best one of all? Where were people more trusting and open than at a Sunday church service? He’d walked right into Reformation Lutheran carrying a Bible and a hidden handgun and nobody had suspected a thing. Several people had welcomed him that day and all they’d wanted to talk about was bringing him into their fold.

  XXVII

  Deputy Attorney General Barry Disney was the prosecutor in the Tiller trial, which opened on March 23, 2009, with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling the courthouse for explosives. Disney didn’t seem to have nearly as much fire for his job as Dan Monnat had for defending the doctor against the nineteen misdemeanor charges. Some spectators in the gallery, including Roeder, noticed this, and he talked about it angrily on the phone with the woman from Operation Rescue. Couldn’t the attorney general’s office have come up with somebody more forceful? How did the prosecution expect to win if its leader conducted himself like this? Didn’t law enforcement in Kansas understand how important it was to convict Tiller? And why did things move so slowly in the courtroom when it was so obvious that Tiller was guilty? Anti-abortion protesters had parked a “Truth Truck” near the courthouse for the trial, so the media and public would see it as they came and went. In their eyes, this was an effective strategy for spreading their message, far more effective than Barry Disney himself.

  On the twenty-third, following the prosecutor’s limited opening remarks, Monnat stood and delivered a much lengthier statement, reminding the six Wichita jurors what most of them already knew from years of living in the city. Every patient who came to WHCS from across town or around Kansas or from a distant state or foreig
n country was “heckled and discouraged and approached by the protesters…[who] will pursue her to her motel…[bringing] more fear and inconvenience to an already bewildered and frightened pregnant woman…”

  Monnat then laid out the fundamental questions and full substance of the defense’s case, a moment that Tiller and his attorney had been building up to throughout the past decade. This was their chance to establish the physician’s innocence once and for all, in a court of law, by a jury of the doctor’s peers, in his own hometown. As he was about to reveal in the courtroom and in front of the national media in Wichita for the trial, Monnat was more than prepared for this occasion.

  Inside his well-appointed office a few blocks south of the courthouse, the attorney kept a row of thick law books in neatly aligned rows behind his desk. Nothing was even a fraction out of place. He was punctual, dressed nattily, had pointed features that seemed to define his highly focused personality, and spoke in measured, clipped tones, as if offering a summation to a jury when he was only meeting with a journalist. With virtually no prompting, he spoke with conviction and passion about the value of the American Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, and you couldn’t help thinking that if you ever got into serious trouble with the police, you’d want him at your side. One had to look a little deeper into his life to learn that he was known around town as a pretty fair rock ’n’ roll drummer who liked to jam in nightclubs on the weekend.

  If his opening statement seemed exhaustive, it was because he was determined to lay the entire Phill Kline Inquisition and pursuit of Dr. Tiller by the state of Kansas to rest for good. According to the prosecution’s own brief, Monnat began, the term “legally affiliated simply means…a formal business association that would include physicians who are part of the same corporation or who practice together in a partnership or a limited liability company. But the evidence will show that Dr. Tiller and Dr. Neuhaus are not associated as employer and employee, are not associated as business partners, are not associated as joint venturers, are not associated as separate stockholders in the same corporation. They’re not even associated as landlord and tenant. More importantly, Dr. Tiller never has had any sort of written, oral or implied contract with Dr. Neuhaus.