A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Upset that he’d driven to Wichita and spent a night in a motel for nothing, Roeder decided to stay for the service and settled into his pew, checking out the congregation. These weren’t the kind of real Christians engaged in the in-depth religious study he was accustomed to. These were Sunday Christians who dropped by the sanctuary once a week to sing a few hymns and put a few dollars into the collection plate, but they didn’t think much about Yahweh or Yahshua on the other six days. His old Bible, he was certain, had been thumbed far more than theirs. What did these people really stand for, if they weren’t willing to stop the evil unfolding just a couple of miles away at Tiller’s clinic? Why would they let such a man be a member of their church? Did they have any Christian convictions at all?

  When the collection plate came around, he showed them his attitude by placing a handwritten note on top of the money.

  “Do you believe in taxes?” it read.

  A pair of ushers noticed the foreign object in the plate, and that the bald stranger hadn’t mingled with the other worshippers, and that his Sunday morning clothes were shabby and didn’t fit on his large frame, but nobody commented much about it. The church, like so many others in Wichita and other locales, was a friendly and welcoming place, despite the anti-abortion protesters who’d gathered outside in years past and come inside to disrupt a communion service or yell at the children attending Sunday school. Maybe the man was down on his luck and had needed the comfort of church today. Folks at Reformation Lutheran wanted to think the best of others and gave him the benefit of their doubts. And because Dr. Tiller had convinced church authorities that they didn’t need a security system, Roeder’s gun went undetected. When the service was over, he retraced his route to Kansas City, stopping for kefir near Lawrence and reporting to his job at the Quicksilver airport shuttle service.

  The following week, Roeder called Eddie Ebecher, an activist in the Kansas City area who went by the name “Wolfgang Anacon.” Ebecher had protested with Roeder at anti-abortion rallies, including one at Tiller’s clinic, and the men had once lived together. When Roeder phoned him in late May, he seemed out of sorts and edgy, complaining about the movement’s inability to stop abortion in Kansas and the rest of America. He mentioned a few of his regrets and casually hinted that he was going to miss certain people. Roeder called his brother, David, who lived in a rural area west of Topeka, a perfect spot for what Scott had in mind. He asked if he could come over and see David that Friday afternoon, the twenty-ninth, but the man was busy so they rescheduled. Roeder then made plans for an evening out with his now-twenty-two-year-old son, Nicholas.

  Roeder rigorously observed Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, as a day of rest extending from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, but tonight he was making an exception because he wanted to be with Nick. The young man often dodged his father’s calls or failed to respond to his messages, but Scott was insistent about getting together on this particular Friday; he’d offered an extra enticement by inviting Nick to a movie he was eager to see. Throughout the day, Roeder contacted his son several times to make certain they were still on and also called Lindsey, telling her to get home as fast as possible and take over the care of her ninety-year-old father, so Nick could leave the house sooner.

  The two of them went to an inexpensive restaurant, watched Star Trek, and then lingered over ice cream, Nick noticing that his dad wasn’t in any hurry to part tonight. Roeder had always wanted his son to know who he was and why he had such strong political and religious convictions. Nick had his own questions about God, but kept a lot of things to himself, not entirely sure yet what he believed about faith and not ready to speak his mind openly to his father. There was no rush; they had time for those discussions. Nick still thought of his dad as a nonviolent man who wouldn’t hurt a bird or a bug. Mostly he let his companion talk and Roeder again shared his thoughts on the issues critical to him, as he’d been doing ever since Nick was a small child. Scott wished his son were different in some ways, and more like him. The young man hurt his feelings on occasion by refusing to take his calls or being ungrateful. He wished he wasn’t so influenced by his mother and had more of his own values and showed more appreciation for the things Roeder had done for him over the years, but this wasn’t the moment to dwell on that. He’d always wanted to be close to his son, especially now.

  As they sat together talking in the falling darkness, Nick didn’t observe anything out of the ordinary about his father, not until later on, when he looked back on this Friday evening and scoured every corner of his mind for clues. Something unspoken had passed between the two of them over their ice cream, conveyed with a gesture or a glance or a pause in the conversation—Roeder seemed to be saying good-bye.

  XXXIII

  On Saturday morning, May 30, Roeder arose very early and at 5:45 drove back to the Central Family Medicine clinic, but this time he wasn’t alone at the office. As he stood in the parking lot and prepared to glue shut the locks, a female employee awaited him inside. When he approached the back door, she ran out and chased after him. Lumbering to his car, he glanced over his shoulder and echoed the words of Bill O’Reilly and many others in the anti-abortion movement, calling the woman a “baby killer.” She got a close look at him, his car, and his license plate.

  Since the clinic had been vandalized last Saturday, her boss, Jeffrey Pederson, had upgraded the video surveillance equipment and this time it had captured clearer pictures of the man. The woman went into the office and called Pederson at home. He phoned the FBI with the car’s make and number: a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus, Kansas plate 225 BAB. The feds said they’d set up a time to come in and interview his staff about the vandal.

  As the sun rose over Kansas City, Roeder drove out of town west and headed for Lawrence, laying out his plans for the rest of the day. At 8:45, he parked next to Jayhawk Pawn & Jewelry and stood in front of the locked door, determined to be first in line when the store opened at nine. A few other men showed up and they all traded small talk and jokes on this beautiful late spring morning, before Roeder stepped into the shop and began looking at boxes of ammunition. He told the manager, Jeff Neal, that he used his gun for target practice, and Neal explained that the five-inch-long PT .22 could take either high-velocity or low-velocity ammo. Low-velocity bullets were quieter and less likely to disturb neighbors, but the firearm couldn’t be used in semiautomatic mode without high-velocity ammunition, in case he wanted to shoot multiple rounds without reloading. Roeder bought a box of each.

  Leaving Lawrence, he drove across the modest hills of the Kansas countryside, its acres in full bloom by late May, its fertile bottomland filled with stands of cottonwood and rows of grain. Pulling into Topeka, he drove to his old neighborhood, passing up and down the streets of his youth and remembering the people in each of the houses, thinking about the mother of one of his childhood friends, and the father of another. He paused in front of the home of a former Cub Scout leader, recalling the boys in his pack and the good times they’d had together when he was small, before he was sent off to that mental hospital and forced to take drugs. A few people were out on their lawns doing yard work, stirring more memories. He wanted to stay here longer and keep reminiscing, but he was on a schedule.

  His brother, David, lived on the western outskirts of Topeka. The two of them didn’t spend that much time together anymore, but Scott had to see him today. David knew that his brother had very strong religious views and opinions about abortion, so in recent years the family had tried to bypass those subjects with him. It just led to arguments and strain, and no one ever changed his or her mind. When Scott arrived at David’s, he seemed a bit hyperactive or manic. He hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before—it was best not to rile him up and to talk about other things.

  David and his wife, Karen, had a home on an impressive country spread set back 150 yards from the nearest county road and protected by a gate. David’s living conditions were strikingly different from the cramped apartments and hovels h
is brother had occasionally plopped down in, when he could hardly make ends meet. The brothers were different in many ways, but shared a common interest in firearms. In recent months, Scott had pawned the 9-millimeter handgun he’d taken into Tiller’s church the summer before, but David had bought it out of pawn to keep for himself. When Scott arrived, he showed off his new PT .22 and suggested going into the surrounding woods to shoot some rounds. The two men walked out to the tall grass and forest, where Scott fired thirty or forty bullets into the ground and a streambed and a rotting old log, before the .22 jammed.

  In separate cars, they drove to the High Plains Gun Shop in Topeka and spoke with employee Rex Campbell. Scott asked about buying some steel bullets, but Campbell said they didn’t make them for this particular weapon and the gun had malfunctioned because Roeder was using the wrong ammunition. While recommending a longer Winchester rifle cartridge, he closely examined the PT .22. It was dirty and “dry,” badly in need of oil. He gave it a few squirts, pulled the tape off the grip so it fit better in the hand, and made a few other adjustments, tightening up a few parts parts of the firearm. As David stood in the background, Scott meticulously questioned Campbell about the ammunition that was compatible with the .22, while keeping a running total of every penny he was spending. He bought a small can of oil and a couple of boxes of bullets, including some hollow-point Winchesters. In the parking lot of the gun store, he said good-bye to his brother and drove off alone.

  Scott had told several people that he was returning to Westport this evening for a five o’clock meeting with his cohorts, but when he left Topeka he didn’t head east back toward Kansas City, but south on Highway 75, wending his way over the two-lane roads leading down to Wichita. During the past week, he’d thought about changing his license plate, or obscuring the letters and numbers, but in the end he hadn’t bothered doing that. Once or twice this afternoon, he stopped alongside the isolated road and got out and fired a few rounds into a ditch, to make sure that the gun was working smoothly and wouldn’t jam again.

  Arriving in Wichita, he went to Reformation Lutheran for the 5:30 p.m. Saturday service, pulling into the uncrowded church lot, holding his Bible in one hand and stuffing the PT .22 into his pocket. In the foyer, he looked around for Dr. Tiller, searching the hallways and the bathroom and then the sanctuary, feeling a rush of frustration, doubt. Was Tiller sick or just on a very long vacation? Was he even a member of the congregation anymore?

  This evening, the church was holding a special ceremony, conducted in Swahili to celebrate Pentecostal weekend. Pastor Kristin Neitzel, one of two ministers at Reformation Lutheran, was in charge of the service and only about fifty people were in attendance, all of them sitting together in just a few pews. Any stranger was bound to stand out more now than on Sunday mornings, when hundreds showed up. Roeder walked into the sanctuary and scanned the rows for the mop of short brown hair and the bespectacled face he’d seen so many times before on wanted posters, on anti-abortion material, and on the Internet. Kansans for Life had recently published a spring 2009 pamphlet with Tiller’s picture on the cover, and the lead story had complained about how he’d been acquitted at his trial with the help of “traveling abortionist” Kristin Neuhaus.

  Pastor Neitzel noticed the tall, balding stranger, his presence setting off a dim memory. In the late summer or early fall of 2008, ushers had spotted this same man sitting in their church off by himself, and they’d brought him to the pastor’s attention. He didn’t seem to fit in and might be trouble or cause the kinds of disruptions Reformation Lutheran had seen inside its sanctuary in years past. Pastor Neitzel had never forgotten about him.

  Not finding Tiller among the congregation, Roeder stayed only briefly before standing and walking out through the foyer. Pastor Neitzel went over to the pew where he’d been and sat down. She saw an offering envelope with scribbling on it—something about whether Reformation Lutheran was organized under the 5013C tax code. She left the sanctuary and went out into the foyer, staring through a window at the man, who was crossing the parking lot and getting into a light blue Ford with a front license plate featuring the purple wildcat logo of Kansas State University, up the road a few hours in Manhattan. On the car’s rear end was the evangelical fish symbol that in recent decades had become so popular.

  Roeder cruised around the east side of Wichita before checking into the Garden Inn and Suites on the Kellogg corridor, just a few blocks from the Starlite Motel, where he’d stayed the week before. He paid in cash, because he didn’t believe in credit cards and the computerized trail of numbers they left behind. Using a coupon that dropped the price from $56.14 to $39.29, he also paid the clerk the mandatory $25 overnight deposit for his room. After settling in and trying out the king-size bed, he got back in his car and rode through the streets, thinking about tomorrow and the fastest routes through the city. He ate a cheap dinner and returned to the Garden Inn, waiting for darkness. He put on his pajamas, lay down, and switched on the television, moving through the stations and looking for something to hold his attention, stopping on the History Channel because he liked stories about real people who’d done difficult and important things—things that had altered the direction of history and echoed through generations and made a difference.

  For more than thirty years, starting in the mid-1970s, Wichita had been at the heart of America’s battle over abortion, but nothing had ever been resolved or really changed. People from across the nation had come here and clashed in the streets and the courtrooms, lying flat on the sidewalks, going off to jail and making speech after speech, fighting one another through the media and then on the Internet. Bombing Tiller’s clinic, shooting him in the arms, sending him death threats—none of these had had any effect on the man. He was still going to work all week and doing what he’d always done, in the safety of his walled-in office. Everyone in the movement knew about his armored car and bulletproof vest. Everyone knew that he was the most prominent and busiest abortion doctor in the country, if not the world. In 2008, 10,642 abortions had been performed in Kansas and 5,131 of the pregnant women had come there from out of state, most of them to Wichita.

  Nothing had stopped them from making these choices, despite the tireless efforts of Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups. Roeder had given these organizations his money, his time and energy, his emotional support and patience and hope. He’d consulted with people enough and sought their opinions, he’d had enough inner debates. He’d talked it over with the woman from Operation Rescue until he didn’t want to talk anymore. Ending abortion was a matter of being in accordance with God’s law, not man’s, and this was what God and those in the movement wanted him to do.

  Lying in bed, he was certain that if he completed the mission, the anti-abortion groups would step up and support him the way he’d supported them. They’d regard him as a hero, someone who’d changed the course of history. Then he drifted off and slept so soundly that he overslept. By the time he’d awakened, cleaned up, dressed, and gone to the front desk to collect his $25 deposit, it was nearly 9:30. He wasn’t that concerned. The woman behind the desk, Sandy Michael, was standing outside smoking a cigarette, but he told her to finish it before taking care of him.

  She was struck by how relaxed and happy-go-lucky the man seemed. A lot of people these days were pushy.

  “Take your time,” Roeder told her. “I can wait.”

  It wasn’t until he was in his car that he remembered that church started at 10:00, not 10:30, and he barely had time to get over to Reformation Lutheran before the ushers dimmed the lights for the opening of the service.

  XXXIV

  For the past half hour, traffic had been steadily turning into the church parking lot, but as ten approached it was winding down. Nearly all the worshippers had entered the foyer, received a program from an usher, and taken a seat on the red pews. At the front of the sanctuary was a lectern from where sermons were delivered, and behind the lectern rose a high brick wall featuring red peace banners
and a large golden cross. To one side, the choir loft was elevated above the pews. Jeanne Tiller had come to church early today for choir practice, while her husband had driven another car. On this perfect May morning on the last day of the month, people exchanged nods and hellos, smiles and handshakes. In some ways, they came to church for this feeling as much as anything else, this sense of community and belonging to something larger than themselves, and being able to look forward to an hour of peace and worship before starting a new week.

  No one paid much attention to the tall, bald man sitting on the aisle in a rear pew and holding a worn Bible, with a distant air that was neither open nor friendly. He wore a tattered white shirt, dark slacks, and black shoes. On previous Sundays a couple of ushers had unsuccessfully tried to start up conversations with him, but he only wanted to talk about the relationship among churches, taxes, and the federal government. One congregant, Dr. Paul Ryding, a local veterinarian who specialized in caring for horses, thought that the man wasn’t there to join in the singing and the prayer. He never put money in the collection plate or signed the guest book. He wore “high-water pants” and he’d once given off a very strong, unpleasant odor. At the same time, he hadn’t caused any disruptions inside the church, so why not leave him alone? He might eventually warm up and become a Reformation Lutheran member.

  A few minutes earlier, Roeder had parked in the crowded lot—backing into the space, so his rear wheels were up against the curb. He’d entered the foyer and searched for Tiller, who was supposed to be handing out programs but once again wasn’t there. Roeder eyed the hallways, before going into the sanctuary and taking a seat. Turning his neck and shifting around, his gaze moved along the rows of pews and up toward the choir loft—Jeanne Tiller was present, but where was her husband? This was the third service in a row Roeder had come to and not found him. Had someone tipped off the physician that Roeder would be in the church this morning?