“I support the shooting of George Tiller as justifiable homicide,” he’d told the paper. “I only wish it had happened in 1973, before he was able to murder his first child.”
When Judge Warren Wilbert ordered the lunch recess, Leake took the elevator downstairs to the lobby.
With obvious pride, he talked of having edited Paul Hill’s book.
“I’ll get you a copy this afternoon,” he promised a journalist.
Wearing a menacing grin, Leake said, “Tiller had nine lives and he’d used them all up. I wasn’t sorry to see him stopped.”
After nearly a full day of testimony, Judge Wilbert bound Roeder over for trial on the first-degree murder charge and two counts of aggravated assault. Jury selection was set for less than two months away, on September 21, which satisfied the defendant’s desire to go to trial as soon as possible.
XXXXVII
That evening Roeder greeted me as exuberantly in the jail visiting area as when we’d first met, a few weeks earlier. His spirits were high following the hearing and his good mood lasted until I mentioned that portions of the letters he’d written to his son during the past fifteen years had appeared on the front page of that day’s Eagle. Glaring through the smudged glass wall between us, he dropped the receiver, shot out of his chair, and began pacing in the tiny, enclosed room, barely large enough to hold him.
“How did that happen?” he shouted. “Who did that?”
I shook my head, not telling him that Lindsey had recently given me copies of the same letters.
“Why did they put my private thoughts to my son in the paper? How can anyone do that?”
The good ol’ boy mask he usually wore was gone and anger radiated off him as he paced and asked more questions. He cared more about Nick than anyone else and had been reaching out to the young man ever since the murder, hoping to salvage a connection there. His son wanted nothing to do with him and Roeder still didn’t realize that he’d been an embarrassment to Nick for years and was now something far beyond that. The inmate had a kind of naïveté or ingrained innocence, even now, even after the murder, which made him all the more frightening. What had it been like for Nick to have him as a dad at Cub Scout meetings and elementary school gatherings, where he’d harangued other parents about abortion and bad government and not paying income taxes? What was it like for Nick today?
Roeder sat down and grabbed the phone. His cheeks, which incarceration had turned pale, were burning pink.
“Why did you come back to see me again?” he demanded. “Why are so you interested in this subject?”
I hesitated, uncertain how to respond. Like most reporters, I was much more comfortable interviewing others than being asked my own views.
I threw a question back at him about being in the courtroom at Dr. Tiller’s trial last March and he unleashed a broadside against the prosecutor Barry Disney.
“He did nothing to stop the steamroller that was happening every day at Tiller’s clinic,” Roeder replied. “Operation Rescue said we’d be able to get his license lifted through the courts, but I’d been hearing that for years. If they couldn’t convict him in court on these charges, how could they ever pull his license? That wasn’t going to happen.”
When asked about the conditions at the detention facility, he didn’t complain as much as before. His cell was warmer now, he’d settled into the routine of being a prisoner and had adjusted to the food. Lindsey had half-jokingly told me that he might actually like being locked up, because he didn’t have to hold down a job: “He has nothing to do all day but lie around, be served three meals, and have someone else do his laundry.”
Looking back, what did Roeder remember most vividly about last May 31?
“I had relief running out of that church, man,” he said. “Lots of relief. I’d gone in there with a pretty good idea of what Tiller looked like, but I had to pick him out from the other people and ushers. I was fairly sure it was him. After leaving the church, I got on those open roads to Kansas City and it was a really beautiful day for a drive. Sunny and warm and calm. I drove and drove and wondered what was going on back in Wichita. When the police finally pulled me over, I just sat there for a moment and thought, ‘This is it.’”
He paused and said softly, “I’ve never considered myself a murderer.”
Roeder had a gentleness that went in and out of focus almost minute by minute. His political and religious rage wasn’t obvious and he wasn’t a stereotypically angry white man, like the neo-Nazis I’d met earlier in my life. He wasn’t macho and didn’t subtly threaten me or try to test me. He seemed genuinely happy to have a visitor and genuinely pleased with what he’d done; he wanted me to be too. Tiller’s death, it was obvious, meant nothing to him; he’d never mentioned anything about the doctor’s family or what Jeanne Tiller and her children had been experiencing since the murder. It was the opposite of remorse; he saw himself as a modern-day Saint Paul, locked up for fighting a society gone wrong.
As with Randall Terry and other anti-abortion leaders, women simply did not figure into his equations. If all the abortion providers were dead, the problem would be solved, and he’d never have to think about those who sought to end their pregnancies through illegal or dangerous means.
Before coming to Kansas, I’d contacted a local clinical psychologist. In 1975, Dr. Howard Brodsky had moved to Wichita and for the next decade was chief psychologist for Sedgwick County Mental Health, before going into private practice. With a special interest in forensics, he’d been an expert witness at legal proceedings throughout the state, often testifying about a defendant’s competency to stand trial. Following BTK’s arrest, he’d become a national media commentator and was known for being incisive and somewhat irreverent.
“For a long time,” he liked to say, “I’ve been the go-to guy in town for analyzing all the weird and disgusting stuff that people do.”
Dr. Tiller’s murder had occurred a few miles from Brodsky’s office and when I brought up the alleged killer, he immediately said, “Roeder’s a loser. He couldn’t hold on to anything—not his wife or his son or even a place to live. He drove a fifteen-year-old Taurus. He couldn’t stay employed at a McDonald’s.”
I’d always disliked terms like “loser” because they told me nothing that I wanted to know about a person. Yet when reading about the history of the anti-abortion movement, I’d kept running into one thing: many of the men who’d spearheaded it had never gone out into the world and learned a skill, a craft, or a profession, something that took years of effort and discipline, something based on actual experience and an accumulation of hard-earned knowledge. They’d had intense religious conversions, emerged from these events “born again,” and declared their passionate desire to improve the world or rid it of evil. They’d desperately wanted to do something good for their country and given themselves the job of altering the course of American political, legal, and medical history, without anything approaching expertise in these fields.
What was the most significant change Dr. Brodsky had seen in his patients during the past thirty or forty years?
“That’s easy,” he said at once. “The incredible growth of narcissism. This wasn’t a big problem or trend when I started working. Now it’s all I see in my practice. It’s everywhere, not just in criminals but throughout the entire culture. It’s affected everything and is the underlying condition of our time. Several decades ago, Roeder would have stood out more in his community because of his narcissism, but now he doesn’t. He blends in because there are so many other people who share some of these same traits. He thinks that he—and he alone—can very simplistically fight and stop evil. He can end abortion in America by killing Dr. Tiller. The murder will be a hugely transformative event for the country.
“Guess what? There are no transformative events in the sense that he’s thinking about. Social change happens, but slowly and gradually. Murdering an abortion doctor is an act of extreme self-indulgence and narcissism on his part. It must have b
een a great shock for him to realize in the weeks after the murder that not only did everything not change, but that those people he believed were his close allies turned their backs on him. And tens of thousands of women are going to keep getting abortions.”
How did Dr. Brodsky define narcissism?
“We all have a choice. We can either try to change ourselves emotionally, which takes real effort, or we can tell ourselves that we’re changing the world. This is the fundamental narcissism of our age. People will do anything to avoid confronting and changing themselves. So what happens to others when they try to change the world doesn’t really matter. Those people don’t count. Roeder doesn’t even see what he’s done as a criminal act.”
During his sixth day of incarceration, the inmate had phoned the Associated Press and told a reporter to expect more attacks like the one that had just happened in Wichita, prompting the state to raise his bail from $5 million to $20 million.
Sitting face-to-face with Roeder now, I asked him if he could be more specific. He wanted to open up, he said, but believed that the lines we were talking on were not secure, so he couldn’t go into detail. Once he’d been tried, convicted, and transferred to a state prison, we’d be able to speak without using telephones and he’d be freer to divulge what he knew. More acts of terrorism were coming, he implied, and he was in on the plans.
As he’d done in my earlier visit, he bragged about stopping abortion in Wichita, but of course that wasn’t the same thing as stopping abortion. According to state health statistics, roughly eighty thousand abortions were done annually in New York City alone. Closer to Kansas, Dr. LeRoy Carhart of Bellevue, Nebraska, had recently hired two people from Tiller’s closed office and was using them to train his staff to perform late-term abortions. The sixty-eight-year-old physician had rechristened his business the Abortion and Contraception Clinic of Nebraska, and its new brochure featured a photo of Tiller, stating that “our services to women” were in honor of the slain man.
It wasn’t long before Troy Newman showed up in Bellevue to launch Operation Rescue protests against Dr. Carhart and to submit a complaint about the physician to Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s attorney general. “We’re trying,” Newman told The New York Times, “to get criminal charges against him, to get his license revoked, and to get legislators there to look at the law.”
Dr. Carhart, a former air force officer, had responded to Operation Rescue by installing a metal detector and security cameras, and bringing in a full-time security consultant. The physician had altered his route to and from work, given up eating in public, and when his daughter got married in the fall of 2009, the ceremony was held at a nearby military base because of the protection it offered.
Others besides Dr. Carhart were stepping in to replace Dr. Tiller and the services he’d provided in Wichita. In early 2010, Curtis Boyd, an Albuquerque physician, announced on his Web site that in response to Tiller’s death he’d begun performing third-trimester abortions. The seventy-two-year-old Boyd had also hired two California doctors, Susan Robinson and Shelley Sella, who had worked with Tiller on a rotating basis. An ordained Baptist minister, Boyd explained in a 2008 speech his motives for becoming an abortion provider:
“In my generation, many of the doctors of conscience who chose to provide abortions were moved by the horrors of botched illegal abortions. But that was not what drove me to risk my career and sometimes my life. I was moved by the certain knowledge that women’s lives could be ruined when they could not abort a pregnancy.”
On the July evening Roeder and I spoke at the jail, Lindsey appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 and blitzed the inmate in front of a worldwide audience—after the CNN reporter Gary Tuchman asked her what she’d like to say to her ex-husband.
“Scott,” she answered, “you had no right to take another person’s life. You’re not God. You’re not a judge. You’re not a jury. You say that you are protecting the unborn, that you did it for the children, that you were justified. If you did it for the children, why did I have to fight for years to get child support to care for Nicholas? If you did it for the children—if you did it for the children—why wouldn’t you pay for a dentist for Nicholas?”
She began to cry.
Lindsay and Nick both were on the prosecution’s witness list, which meant they could be compelled to testify, but that wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Roeder’s September 21 trial date did not hold and jury selection was rescheduled for January 11, 2010. Since that was nearly six months away, the defendant continued thinking about hiring a private attorney, but he needed funds. His supporters, led by Regina Dinwiddie and Dave Leach, wanted to raise money by holding an eBay auction and selling memorabilia from the anti-abortion movement: an Army of God manual, videotapes of Paul Hill praying, a cookbook written in prison by Shelley Shannon, a copy of Michael Bray’s A Time to Kill, and a bullhorn autographed by Dinwiddie herself, like the kind she’d used to protest abortion clinics (the originals had all been confiscated by the police). An inmate whom Roeder had befriended at the jail had done some drawings that the alleged killer had autographed and all these products were to be auctioned off—if eBay would permit it.
In a statement after this issue arose, the company said “eBay does not allow listings that promote or glorify violence, hate, racial or religious intolerance, or items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”
When the Tiller family learned about the auction, it was appalled, and in a very rare public move, Jeanne Tiller had her attorney Lee Thompson send a letter to eBay asking its executives to halt the sale.
“These materials contain hate messages,” Thompson wrote, “that glorify violence against abortion doctors who provide constitutionally protected medical services, and instruct on means of violence, including bombing, of abortion clinics. We urge you to deny access to the resources of eBay for this reprehensible and vile ‘auction.’”
Lindsey also contacted eBay and asked the company to stop the event.
“I believe that this auction,” she wrote in an e-mail, “could incite more violence on abortion doctors and clinics. I do not believe that cancelling this auction will in any way hinder Scott’s right to an adequate defense, as he has a good team of public defenders.”
The protests worked and eBay denied the auction, telling The Kansas City Star that these listings “would violate our policy regarding offensive material.”
While this controversy played out on the local stage, the subject of abortion found itself at the heart of the most ambitious political reform in recent American history.
By September 2009, James Pouillon had regularly stood outside a local public high school in Owosso, Michigan, holding up a sign with one side depicting a chubby baby and the word “LIFE,” while the other side displayed an image of an aborted fetus and the word “ABORTION.” On September 11, the day before the nation’s largest anti-Obama demonstration to date, a pickup stopped in front of the school and Harlan James Drake, a thirty-three-year-old local trucker, allegedly opened fire, killing Pouillon before driving on to a gravel pit business and murdering its owner. His motives were not revealed.
The next morning, tens of thousands of people marched to the U.S. Capitol carrying placards that read, “Obamacare Makes Me Sick,” and denouncing illegal immigrants, increased taxes, restricted gun rights, and big government. Glenn Beck, whose annual earnings were now estimated at $23 million, had sponsored the rally and it had been organized by Freedomworks, a group headed by the former House Republican leader Dick Armey. Beck had chosen September 12 because it was one day after the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States. He’d started the “9/12 Project” in order to “bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001” when “we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” In almost the exact spot where President Obama had been sworn in eight month
s earlier, Beck and Armey addressed the angry crowd, which waved posters calling Obama the “parasite in chief” and once again compared him to Hitler. Some of the demonstrators had come out dressed in costume—as Betsy Ross, Patrick Henry, and Death.
“Pelosi has to go!” they chanted, referring to the California representative and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“You lie! You lie!” they shouted, echoing what Representative Joe Wilson (Republican of South Carolina) had yelled out three days earlier when interrupting President Obama’s congressional address.
America had seen such populist uprisings before, going back to the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson in 1829, when hordes of protesters had stood on the White House lawn and railed against the money interests; in the 1850s, when the Know Nothing movement had sprung up over fears that German and Irish Catholic immigrants were destroying the country’s traditional values and religious beliefs, opening the way for the pope to dictate to U.S. politicians; again with the 1890s People’s Party, led by Western and Southern farmers ruined by the Panic of 1893; and more recently, in the efforts of the perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche, who in 1988 was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations. At the first national Tea Party convention in Nashville in early 2010, Sarah Palin declared that America was ripe for revolution. Mocking Obama’s 2008 campaign slogans, she said, “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for you?”
Populism, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Palin received $100,000 for this nonprofit event.
XXXXVIII
President Obama had staked his young presidency on health care reform, and by late 2009 abortion was the key issue in this battle. Democratic members of the House, led by Nancy Pelosi, supported a compromise allowing Americans to buy government-subsidized insurance plans covering abortion (as many as 87 percent of employer-based insurance policies currently offered their subscribers similar coverage). If this passed, families of four earning less than $88,000 a year would be eligible for federally subsidized insurance. A large majority of those expected to buy the new policies would pay part of the premium and receive government tax credits for the rest. Abortion foes, not just Republicans but conservative Democrats, vehemently opposed this policy and supported existing law, known as the Hyde amendment, under which government funds could be used for abortions only in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. These restrictions also applied to Medicaid, military health care, and the federal employee health plan. In a letter signed by 183 lawmakers and sent to Speaker Pelosi, they wrote, “The U.S. government should not be in the business of promoting abortion as health care. Real health care is about saving and nurturing life, not about taking life.”
A Death in Wichita Page 26