A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  Wichita was just over the next hill.

  On the Road

  XXXXIV

  Twelve days after Tiller’s death, Roeder wrote to his ex-wife from jail. He was no longer forced to wear the “skirt” that had restrained his movements inside the cell and was off suicide watch, but his mood wasn’t good. Reading his letter, Lindsey wondered if he’d been in a manic phase before and during the murder, but had then crashed, sitting by himself in solitary confinement with nothing but a mattress and a toilet. His confusion and bitterness about marriage and fatherhood were festering again, and he’d selected his target of blame.

  He’d heard “from secondhand sources” about Lindsey’s interviews with the media following the shooting and this had further angered him. If she was willing “to share with the world” her views about Tiller’s demise, Roeder wrote, would she let him know what she’d said? He surmised that he’d never hear back from her about this request—“because that would keep in character with being the grown up spoiled brat that you are,” the same character he accused her of displaying hundreds of times in the past when she’d hung up on him.

  But his real concern was with Nick, who’d also turned into a spoiled brat. During their marriage, he’d taught their son “basic things in life LIKE SAYING THANK YOU,” but Nicholas never thanked him for taking him out to dinner or to a movie or after Roeder had given him money. At the end of their evenings together, Nick would just say good-bye, and Roeder was particularly rankled that he’d lately given the young man “a fairly decent knife,” but received no gratitude in return.

  “I’m sorry to say,” he wrote Lindsey, “but it looks like you’ve done a very poor job of raising Nicholas after our divorce.”

  Along with the letter, Roeder had sent Lindsey and his son very graphic photos and some writings he’d received from Iowa’s Dan Holman, of the anti-abortion group Missionaries to the Preborn. The material included the infamous biblical passage from Genesis 9:6, “Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.” Following the killing in Wichita, Holman had told CNN that “all abortionists are deserving of death, and they are not the only ones. There are politicians and judges, and others who support this murder are also deserving of death.”

  When asked about the assassination of Dr. Tiller, Holman replied, “I was cheered by it.”

  Roeder fired off another angry letter to Troy Newman, after learning that the head of Operation Rescue had publicly stated that the inmate was “not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer” to OR. During a jailhouse interview, Roeder told The Kansas City Star what he’d been telling others since the shooting: he’d donated at least a thousand dollars to Operation Rescue and had the paperwork to prove it. To the Star, he claimed that he’d written Newman, “You better get your story straight because my lawyer said it’d be good for me to show that I was supporting a pro-life organization.”

  Operation Rescue had larger concerns than Roeder’s pointed remarks to Newman. For years it had thrived financially by having a visible enemy like Tiller to stir up passion and inspire its members to keep sending in money; with him gone, the impact was quick and severe. During the summer of 2009, the organization told supporters that it faced a “major financial crisis” and might shut down entirely unless help arrived soon. It also reported that since Tiller’s demise, it had received a number of death threats.

  While Operation Rescue, Kansans for Life, and other anti-abortion groups had immediately distanced themselves from Roeder, the extremists in the movement rallied around the inmate. They were still talking about pooling their funds and hiring a private attorney for the defendant to fight the first-degree murder charge with a legal strategy called the “necessity defense” or “defending those who cannot defend themselves.” One was justified in committing a murder, went this argument, in order to stop a greater evil. The tack had been tried before in the case of Paul Hill, and it had failed.

  Donald Spitz, the sponsor of the Army of God Web site, sent Roeder seven anti-abortion pamphlets, which the prisoner distributed to others through the mail. He got more support from two anti-abortionists in the Kansas City area, Anthony Leake and Eugene Frye, and Leake in particular saw him as a new hero of their movement. Roeder had the backing of the activist Michael Bray, author of A Time to Kill, and of Dave Leach of Des Moines, Iowa. In 1996, Leach had interviewed Roeder for his Uncle Ed Show on Des Moines’s public access cable, giving Roeder the chance to explain his Freeman philosophy. In the mid-1990s, Roeder had visited Shelley Shannon in a Topeka jail, and she now sent him money from her cell in Minnesota, where she was still serving time for her anti-abortion crimes. Bray, Leach, and Spitz had all signed the 1993 declaration advocating the use of force against abortion providers, distributed by Paul Hill before he’d killed Dr. John Britton. Following Tiller’s murder, Leach created a homemade video, available on the Internet. It featured two very young girls, one black and one white, who stood next to some stuffed animals and posed questions.

  “Can a pro-lifer,” the white girl asked, “shoot an abortionist and still get a trial…by jury?”

  Leach answered this by saying that “most lawyers” did not expect Roeder to get “what average citizens would call a trial by jury. I’m trying to help him get one.” To this end, Leach began composing a detailed and legally sophisticated motion that would run to more than a hundred pages and eventually be submitted to the judge in Roeder’s case. Leach would emerge as the defendant’s most significant anti-abortion ally and his document would play a role in the upcoming trial—a role that some found outrageous.

  As Roeder communicated with the fringes, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. The recent killings in Wichita, at the Holocaust Museum, and elsewhere in America, he said, showed the need for a tougher U.S. hate crimes law to stop “violence masquerading as political activism…Over the last several weeks, we have witnessed brazen acts of violence, committed in places that many would have considered unthinkable.” He urged Congress to pass an updated version of the current hate crimes legislation, allowing for more effective prosecution of those who attacked people based on gender, disability, or sexual orientation. Holder also issued a directive to all U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to coordinate with the FBI, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, ATF, local law enforcement officials, and reproductive health care service providers to assess the current level of threats and take any and all measures to ensure that criminal conduct would be prosecuted.

  The most intriguing official question following the death in Wichita was whether or not the Department of Justice would take Dr. Hern’s suggestion and open a larger probe into those who for years had openly called for the murder of abortion doctors. Did Roeder’s activist friends have any culpability in Tiller’s murder? Did they come under the umbrella of abetting a hate crime? Had they supported Roeder financially in a way that might have aided the shooting? And would the government go after suspects who’d advocated this kind of domestic terrorism, as they had in the Alan Berg case? That investigation had focused on all twenty-four members of the Order who’d either pled guilty or were successfully prosecuted under the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute. Would the feds employ it again, or conclude that Roeder was a “lone wolf” who’d acted by himself?

  The murder of Dr. Tiller was the most publicized hate crime in years, and the first of its magnitude since President Obama had taken office. How the government responded would help define the new administration.

  In June 2009, Dr. Hern became the target of an anti-abortionist and three months later a Denver grand jury indicted Donald Hertz, a seventy-year-old retired real estate broker from Spokane, Washington. He was charged with calling Hern’s Boulder office and threatening to kill his family.

  Over the summer, The O’Reilly Factor contacted Hern, as he’d anticipated, and asked him to appear on the show. He expressed interest in doing this—if he could fly t
o New York and go on the program with his lawyer, and if his interview would be aired as it had been recorded and not subjected to a lot of editing. In the aftermath of Tiller’s murder and his own recent threat, Hern was ready for Fox.

  “O’Reilly,” he says, “is a bully and a paid thug. I wasn’t going to duck him or to take any of his shit on the air. I wanted to do this for George because he never wanted to defend himself against these people. We have to confront them and call them what they are.”

  According to Hern, he gave an O’Reilly producer several conditions under which he would be on the program and several dates that worked for him to make an appearance. He didn’t hear back with a confirmation.

  “Mr. O’Reilly,” Hern says, “knew that he was not going to have a very pleasant experience with me. So they backed down. I guess they want to wait and have me on their show after another abortion doctor gets murdered.”

  XXXXV

  On a July Sunday afternoon, Lindsey drove around suburban Kansas City, retracing her ex-husband’s steps leading up to the murder.

  “I feared Scott for a period of time,” she’d once written, “and was constantly afraid he would kidnap Nick—but down deep inside him somewhere was that funny sweet carefree guy I married. Scott not only killed Dr. Tiller. He killed Nick’s dad and any remnants of the man I knew.”

  Both Lindsey and Jeanne Tiller had lost their spouses in this new American war, with one man facing possible life imprisonment and the other dead. Neither woman had been able to keep her husband from pursuing the things that moved him most passionately, but each had reacted very differently to the tragedy, at least in public. Lindsey wanted and needed to talk; she had decades of backed-up feelings, and the more she confronted them, the more she was able to give expression to her anger and hurt. It seemed to have a cathartic effect. She’d never bargained for marrying or living with a terrorist.

  Jeanne Tiller had apparently turned down all interview requests, withdrawing within her family and closest friends, while preparing for the legal ordeal that lay ahead. Nick Roeder had done the same thing, despite Lindsey’s encouraging him to open up about his dad. He wasn’t yet able to say anything to his father, let alone to the rest of the world.

  What was Jeanne Tiller’s life like now, as a mother of four and grandmother of ten, with no one to send off to work in the morning and worry about until he was safely home at night inside their gated community? She and her family were survivors of a battle that hadn’t existed when she’d married the promising young doctor; she also hadn’t bargained for marrying a man who became a pariah in his own hometown. How had she coped since the mid-1970s being intimately connected to the target of people’s rage and hatred? What had this cost her, even before Tiller had died? In March 2009, she’d sat in a courtroom next to Scott Roeder, not knowing who he was or how he felt about her husband. Now she’d be in court with him again, just a few feet away from the man who’d killed the love of her life. How would she cope with that?

  And what about the nameless and faceless thousands of mothers, daughters, and sisters, the unknown brothers, sons, and fathers, the cousins and extended families and friends of those who’d been shot to death at work or inside a church, a school, a hospital, or a business because they’d walked into the wrong location on the wrong day? And then there were the shamed families of the killers who were living with a different kind of pain. More than a decade passed before Susan Klebold, the mother of the Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, offered a few public comments about what her son had done in April 1999. When had we turned into a society so filled with “random violence” that it hardly seemed random at all?

  The overwhelming difference in the United States between 1984, when Alan Berg was shot in an act of domestic terrorism, and 2009 was that extremism was no longer extreme. The sense of victimization that had once fueled the Order was now broadcast twenty-four hours a day on talk radio, on cable television, and was encouraged in countless other respectable venues. Public outrage was still all the rage, and still just as unexamined. Why were highly successful adults behaving in ways children on playgrounds were commanded not to? What were we fighting about? When had the need to be right overriden every other concern? How could such an unhealthy environment not produce violence? What if the problems were less political than behavioral?

  XXXXVI

  Roeder’s preliminary hearing was set for July 28, as the country heated up with “tea parties,” town hall meetings, and other demonstrations against the Obama administration, a steadily rising volume of anger and inflamed rhetoric. At one gathering, a speaker said that the Democratic Party’s proposed health care reform would bring about waves of physician-assisted suicide.

  “Adolf Hitler,” another protester declared, “issued six million end-of-life orders—he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.”

  Five years earlier, Americans for Prosperity, the organization founded by the Wichita native David Koch, had debuted as a conservative activist organization. Its critics saw it as a front for the petroleum and petrochemical industries, after it had circulated a pledge to federal, state, and local officials asking them to oppose any climate change legislation leading to an increase in government revenue. Nearly 150 lawmakers and candidates signed the pledge. By 2009, AFP had evolved into a leading anti-health-care-reform group. In the past few years, millions of Americans had seen their health insurance premiums double or triple, and for many families the cost of basic medical care was becoming prohibitive, but these were not issues for David Koch. He lived in Manhattan and was reportedly New York City’s second-wealthiest resident, behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In 2008, Koch had pledged $110 million to renovate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, renamed the David H. Koch Theater. Two years earlier, he’d given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History, creating the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

  Americans for Prosperity received funding from a Koch family foundation, and its opposition to health care reform was uncompromising. One of its projects was called “Patients First,” and 220,000 Americans quickly signed its online petition.

  “Congress,” it read, “should oppose any legislation that imposes greater government control over my health care that would mean fewer choices for me and my family…”

  In Wichita, Nola Foulston, the Sedgwick County district attorney, would be prosecuting Roeder herself, along with two assistant DAs, Kim Parker and Ann Swegle. The preliminary hearing was in the same downtown courthouse where Tiller had gone on trial last March, just three floors higher. Now Roeder was the defendant and facing both Gary Hoepner, who’d watched him shoot the doctor in the forehead in May, and Keith Martin, who’d chased him across the church parking lot and thrown coffee on him as he was speeding away. The two Reformation Lutheran ushers were still shaken by what they’d seen that Sunday morning, and Hoepner stopped his testimony several times to get himself under control.

  In a white shirt and red tie, Roeder looked on from the defense table with his public defenders, Steve Osburn and Mark Rudy. The scuttlebutt around the courthouse was that while the anti-abortionists were still trying to find the defendant a private attorney, the best candidate had wanted a $60,000 retainer and the price tag was too high. Osburn and Rudy were experienced, dedicated lawyers, but their client had continued talking with the press and virtually admitted to certain reporters his role in the crime. His legal team didn’t appear to dispute that Roeder had killed Dr. Tiller, but were contesting the two aggravated-assault charges that came from the defendant pointing his gun at Hoepner and Martin. Roeder had said that if his lawyers could get the lesser charges dropped, he might come up for parole in twenty years or so and not die in prison.

  His shackled feet never stopped jumping beneath the defense table. He was hyper, constantly on the edge of his chair, shifting around and glancing over his shoulder at three people in the gallery. One was the Kansas City activist Eugene Frye and another was Jennifer Mc
Coy of Wichita, who’d done time for two abortion clinic arsons in Virginia. The other, a handsome, gray-haired, middle-aged man, conjured up an aging tennis pro or a fashion photographer, except for his worn-looking fingers and meaty forearms, which belonged on a farmer or a butcher. Dressed casually in blue jeans and loafers, he carried a worn Bible and kept it open to the New Testament Epistles that Paul had written to the Ephesians when he was imprisoned in Rome in A.D. 62 or 63. As the testimony unfolded, the man went over certain passages again and again, underlining them and then tracing the underline with the tip of a pen as he read the ancient words. He seemed far more interested in absorbing this two-thousand-year-old text than in anything taking place in the courtroom. If he did not convey the impression of being a radical, that impression was false.

  He was Tony Leake, who for years, according to The Kansas City Star, had “vocally supported the killing of abortion doctors.”

  Following Tiller’s death, reporters had sought him out and he’d been interviewed by the The Wichita Eagle.