A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Ney was more than surprised by these developments.

  “I was not happy about this,” he says. “Almost as soon as we were told that we couldn’t see Roeder, reporters were suddenly able to speak with him—but not members in good standing with the bar.”

  What conclusions did the lawyer draw from all this?

  “You can draw whatever conclusions you want to. I have my own conclusions, but I’ll keep them to myself. The question in Wichita becomes: Is this how we’re supposed to operate in the future or is this just one very special case? If a prosecutor’s son or daughter got arrested, do you think they’d be able to get a lawyer of their choice into the jail to see them? The entire criminal bar in Wichita was taken aback by what happened. It’s hogwash. The right to counsel is guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment, so this isn’t how we’re supposed to do business.”

  For three days after his arrest, Roeder was kept wrapped inside the skirt, which brought on wretched memories of being in a mental hospital as a teenager and didn’t make sleeping any easier. Lying awake at night, he thought about the impact of the murder on his family members, especially on his son and aging mother, and hoped they hadn’t been affected too adversely. He wondered how those in the anti-abortion movement had received the news and why some of them weren’t trying to contact or visit him in jail. Hadn’t he done exactly what they’d wanted and prayed for somebody to do throughout the past three decades? Wasn’t this why they revered Paul Hill, the man who shot Dr. John Britton, as a hero? When were they going to step forward and support him?

  “He’s never been a member of KFL and I’ve never heard of him,” Mary Kay Culp, the Kansans for Life executive director, said about Roeder on June 1. “He’s not on our mailing list. He’s never given us money.”

  Two other anti-abortion groups, Operation Rescue and the Kansas Coalition for Life, not only immediately condemned the shooting, but tried to disassociate themselves from the suspect. The head of the KCL, Mark Gietzen, who’d repeatedly kneeled in the gutter in front of Tiller’s clinic to impede his entrance, said that if Roeder was connected to the pro-life movement, it would set their cause back twenty years.

  Troy Newman, director of Operation Rescue, personally denounced the killing and said he was in mourning like everybody else.

  “We are pro-life,” he told The New York Times, “and this act was antithetical to what we believe.”

  He went even further and said to the Times that Tiller had been a “worthy adversary.” And that the alleged murderer had “killed more babies than he has saved” because now it would be more difficult than ever to outlaw abortion.

  When Newman was informed that somebody named Scott Roeder had posted his thoughts on Operation Rescue’s blog, he responded that the man was “not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer.”

  Yet Roeder had told numerous people that he’d contributed at least $1,000 to the organization and had the receipts to prove it. On the day of the murder, an envelope reading “Cheryl Op Rescue,” with Cheryl Sullenger’s phone number scribbled on it, had been found in the Ford Taurus. Sullenger wasn’t just a member of Operation Rescue, but its senior policy adviser. In 1988, she’d pled guilty to conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic and served nearly two years in prison. After the Kansas City TV station KMBC reported on the discovery of the envelope in Roeder’s car, a local alternative newspaper, The Pitch, phoned Sullenger to ask about her connection to the alleged killer.

  “He hasn’t called me recently,” she told them.

  Then she altered her story and admitted to having had multiple phone conversations with Roeder before Tiller was murdered. Both she and Newman eventually acknowledged that the suspect had contacted Operation Rescue to find out the time and location for Tiller’s 2009 trial.

  As these comments and developments filtered back into the detention facility, Roeder became angrily disappointed with the people he’d thought were his allies. How could they turn their backs on him now?

  Sleep-deprived and upset, confused by the actions of those he’d admired, he began to carp to his jailers. It was still too cold in his cell, he’d been denied phone privileges, the food was inedible, the guards were dealing with him like a common thug, and he needed his sleep apnea machine so he could get more rest. Why were they showing him so little respect? The only positive thing was that Tiller’s clinic had been closed since last Monday, while his family and employees mourned and made preparations for the funeral.

  Roeder then did what no attorney would have ever advised him to do and took his complaints outside of the jail. On June 4, his fourth full day in custody, he phoned the Associated Press and stated that he wasn’t anti-government, as the press had wrongly been reporting, but “anti-corrupt government…I haven’t been convicted of anything and I am being treated as a criminal…”

  Increasingly worried about his elderly mother, Doris, in Topeka, he made a collect call to a woman in Kansas City whom he’d once worked with and befriended. In years past, they’d gone out to dinner and had many intense discussions about the Bible. He’d mowed her grass, and she viewed him as a “very kind man,” but she was pro-choice and his intensity on this subject disturbed her, so they’d agreed not to talk about abortion. She was stunned to hear that he’d been accused of murdering Dr. Tiller and far more stunned when he called her from jail to ask her for a favor. Could she contact his mother and tell her that he loved her and hoped to be in communication with her soon? The friend fulfilled this request, but Doris replied that she never wanted to hear from or see her son again.

  Following his incarceration, Roeder began receiving copies of extreme anti-abortion pamphlets, featuring graphic pictures, from the fringes of the movement. When he mailed one of these to this same friend in Kansas City, she said she never wanted to speak with him again, either. Yet those on the far edges of the anti-abortion flank were contacting him and thanking him for what he’d done.

  While adjusting to his jail routine, he was examined by a psychiatrist to see if he was mentally competent to stand trial. The doctor concluded that he was not legally insane and could be a participant in the courtroom. Because he was basically indigent, Roeder had been appointed two public defenders: Steve Osburn, who’d represented BTK during his confessions, and Mark Rudy. They wanted him to stop talking to the media, but it was too late for that and he wasn’t going to listen to their advice anyway.

  XXXX

  By dawn of June 1, Lindsey had been contacted by CBS’s Early Morning, ABC’s Good Morning, America, and Inside Edition. A New York Times reporter was camped outside her home and the local press were coming and going on her street. She’d received a call from the Los Angeles Times and from a journalist in London, while others were trying to reach her at the church day care center. She said no to most of them, but when she turned down Good Morning, America, a producer of the show showed up at her door with a bag of food. CBS countered by sending flowers, while CNN was demanding an exclusive arrangement that she speak only with them. Adjusting to the fact that her ex-husband was in jail for the murder of Dr. Tiller was only one of her challenges.

  “Meeting all these media people,” she says, “was like having an out-of-body experience.”

  She and Nick were big fans of cable TV’s MSNBC and particularly of Rachel Maddow, the Air America radio talk show host who’d ascended to nightly appearances on the network during the 2008 election cycle. By May 2009, she had her own evening program and was an established star in the progressive wing of American politics. Funny, brilliant, and to the left of most of MSNBC’s on-air talent, Maddow was about as far removed from The O’Reilly Factor and the abortion views of Scott Roeder as you could get—one reason that Lindsey and her son liked her so much. Right after the murder, Maddow had Tiller’s colleague Dr. Susan Hill, of North Carolina, on to talk about violence against abortion providers.

  “We’re still here,” Dr. Hill said, “and we’re going to be here.”

  Maddow invited Lindsey to
be on her show, but the appearance didn’t take place, yet Lindsey did go on CNN. Nick gave no interviews, and ever since hearing about Dr. Tiller’s death and his father’s arrest, he’d repeatedly asked himself if he’d observed anything unusual about his dad last Friday during their final evening together, any clues that might have caused him to intervene and prevent this tragedy. The truth was that he hadn’t, but that didn’t make the killing any easier to understand or accept.

  By Wednesday afternoon, June 3, most of the reporters had left Lindsey alone, including the one who’d kept jumping out of the bushes whenever she’d walked outside. She handwrote a sign—“Family Sleeping Please Respect Our Wishes”—and put it by the front stoop, then lay down to rest for the first time since last Saturday night. She hadn’t really had any time alone for almost four days, or any time to feel what she’d just been through, and was about to doze off when she heard a soft tapping at the door. It was probably the FBI or the ATF or the WPD. Glancing outside, she saw a middle-aged woman in shorts, who announced that she was a friend of Scott’s.

  Opening the door, Lindsey was perplexed and a little frightened.

  “Tell me who you are,” she said.

  She was the girlfriend Roeder had brought to the house more than fifteen years earlier, when Nick was five. Lindsey remembered the couple kissing and fondling each other in front of the boy, before Scott took him aside and showed him images of aborted fetuses.

  Lindsey slammed the door shut, suddenly filled with memories and fears—the old fear from Nick’s childhood that Scott would take the boy away and they’d never come back, the deepest fear that she couldn’t protect her son from the man she’d chosen as her husband. Walking back inside the house, she sat down and began to tremble and then to cry, and this time, unlike every other time she’d felt like crying since last Sunday afternoon, she gave in to it. As she sobbed, all the pain she’d pushed aside through all the years came rushing up, the pain of marrying someone who had disappointed and hurt her and failed to stand up for his son; the pain of living with somebody who was unreliable and unstable and verbally abusive, wasting their money and refusing to support their child; the pain of having contacted law enforcement again and again—the FBI and the Kansas City police—and trying to tell them that Scott was dangerous and had to be stopped, but nobody had listened or taken action; the pain of reaching out to Scott’s family, but they hadn’t wanted to hear about his extremism and hoped it was just a temporary phase.

  She cried because she’d wondered for the past two decades what she could have done better as a wife, a mother, and a daughter to help her ex-husband, her son, and her aging father. And because she believed that Scott should have received psychiatric treatment long ago, but he’d refused every opportunity to help himself. And now she couldn’t help him and it was clear to everyone just how dangerous he was, and she was afraid that he’d send somebody to her home to harm her or Nick.

  She wept for all the times her ex had called her ignorant and demeaned her and she’d endured this, trying to keep the peace, but one day her silence would end and then he’d hear her truth.

  XXXXI

  America’s press corps was ramping up to come to Wichita for the biggest media event in the city since the February 2005 arrest of BTK. Members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other feminist groups, along with anti-abortion protesters from coast to coast, were phoning, e-mailing, and texting one another, offering their opinions or making plans to attend the funeral. South central Kansas would be a battleground once again, even as Dr. Tiller was being buried.

  On the night of his death, Wichita held a vigil for him at the heavily guarded Reformation Lutheran, with his wife and family in attendance (in all, forty-five states would hold vigils for the slain man, while in Congress U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter of New York called for a resolution condemning the murder). On Friday, June 5, three hundred people came to an interfaith wake at Wichita’s First United Methodist Church, sponsored by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim organizations, but the largest event was the funeral the following morning. Under a sunlit sky fast becoming oppressive, the WPD and U.S. marshals started arriving at 7 a.m. for the ten o’clock service at College Hill United Methodist Church. By eight, the media had assembled along the side streets and neighbors were coming out to watch from their porches, a police chopper circling overhead. At 8:30, fifty American Legion members rolled in on their motorcycles to honor Tiller as a navy veteran and to provide a show of muscle if protesters tried to disrupt the memorial.

  Worshippers from Reformation Lutheran stood by the front of the church giving out white carnations, as the Tiller family distributed a handout that read, “Family, friends and colleagues have come together to celebrate the life of a devoted humanitarian and loving father, grandfather and husband, George R. Tiller, M.D. People are here today from across the country to celebrate…a man who wholeheartedly dedicated his life to kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect.”

  More than a dozen demonstrators showed up from Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka. Known mostly for picketing military funerals because of their opposition to U.S. Army policy regarding gays, the protesters were kept a block away from the church by police. They held up a sign reading, “God Sent the Shooter.” Phelps’s eldest daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, led them in singing “Killing children makes God angry” to the tune of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” When Reverend John Martin of College Hill United Methodist approached the group and tried to offer them carnations, they screamed in his face. A cop told him to back away, and he did.

  Outside the church, one hundred people, including the civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred, formed a long line—a “Martyr Guard”—stretching down the block and designed to protect the Tiller family as they entered the service. The guard wore “National Organization for Women” T-shirts with “Attitude Is Everything” written across the back. Inside the sanctuary, seven hundred people found seats, with a video screen in the overflow room providing funeral coverage to the media and three hundred others, including some former Tiller patients. His casket was draped in a white shroud and to its left was a portrait of the doctor and a towering floral arrangement spelling out, “TRUST WOMEN.” Hundreds of mourners also wore “Attitude Is Everything” buttons. The crowd was estimated at a thousand, but no prominent Kansas politician, such as the former governor, Kathleen Sebelius, or the head of a major anti-abortion organization, such as Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, was present.

  All four of Tiller’s grown children spoke. The oldest, Jennifer, said that her father had told her that “life is like an Impressionist painting. When you are up close to it, it can be confusing and not make any sense…Only when you stand back from it can you see the broad, masterful strokes of the artist…Maybe my dad wasn’t even aware of what he painted because he was so close to it…As I look out on you today—all of you, in many colors—I see all the brushstrokes…all the dots. I see all the people, the color, the canvas of my dad’s life…He really did paint an incredible masterpiece, and it’s…all of you. You are my dad’s living masterpiece.”

  Throughout the service, the word “abortion” was avoided and only Tiller’s son, Maury, referred to the shooting: “I struggle with the manner in which he was welcomed into heaven.”

  The family announced the establishment of the George R. Tiller Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Women’s Health, and Larry Borcherding, a Tiller friend since college, delivered the twenty-two-minute eulogy:

  “Dear God, get heaven ready because Mr. Enthusiasm is coming. Heaven will never be the same…”

  The emotional crescendo of the morning came when Jeanne Tiller stood to sing and dedicated her performance to “my best buddy and the love of my life.” With her head erect and her back straight, in a voice that didn’t waver and over the sounds of weeping, she belted out the Lord’s Prayer and received a standing ovation. Even some journalists in attendance had difficulty holding back tears
and were talking about the performance months later. As the funeral came to a close, mourners walked out into the burning sunshine and a few pro-choice activists talked to the press.

  “First we cry,” said Gloria Allred, “and then we fight.”

  The succinct floral arrangement beside Tiller’s casket resonated beyond any of the songs or speeches. The phrase “Trust Women” was deceptively simple and went to the heart of the war over abortion—the two words implying that it wasn’t for government, religion, men, or other social institutions to decide what was right for the individual female when confronting one of life’s most wrenching moments. Women were ultimately responsible for dealing with the consequences, good and bad, of their choices, and real freedom, real equality, and real responsibility included the right to make a wrong or harmful decision. Some women who’d had abortions weren’t haunted by them, but others were and the haunting could live on for decades. I’d spent considerable time at a Denver women’s prison visiting an inmate serving a life sentence for killing a young wife and mother, just like herself. She blamed the murder in part on the residue of her teenage abortion. She may have been using this argument to dull some of her guilt and shame over gunning down another woman, but whenever we spoke about this one thing became clear: she’d taken me into an intensely female realm that was outside of my own experience. There were parts of her life as a woman that I could not enter into.