LVII
By nightfall, the judge had made his decision: the voluntary-manslaughter option was dead. The defendant was either going to be found guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault—or set free.
On Friday morning, the snowfall had nearly stopped, the constant clouds that had hung over Wichita for the two weeks of the trial were thinning, and the fog had dissipated. For her closing argument, Ann Swegle dispassionately reiterated the state’s case. Mark Rudy then did about everything he could think of to try to help his client, alluding in his final argument to the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, the relocation of Native Americans, and Martin Luther King. It was a noble effort, delivered with grace and grit, but had a ring of desperation.
“Scott,” he told the jury in summation, “proved that he killed Dr. Tiller, but only you can determine if he murdered Dr. Tiller. We’ll ask you to acquit Scott Roeder of first-degree murder.”
Kim Parker then crossed the courtroom, stood behind the lectern, and spoke last for the DA’s office.
“On May 31, 2009,” she said, “Wichita changed from a community celebrating the Sabbath to a terrorized city. Scott Roeder said he had the right to invade that church and hide behind its welcoming arms…While [the usher] Charles Scott greeted him at the open door of the sanctuary with an open heart and mind…Roeder was calculating his intent [with] feigned piousness and a murderous heart…While Jeanne Tiller sang in the choir, Scott Roeder put a bullet in the head of her husband…”
Grouped closer together and holding hands and arms, the Tiller family looked on, wearing “Attitude Is Everything” buttons today in honor of the victim, as they had at his funeral.
“While Dr. Ryding,” Parker said, “tried to suck the blood out of Dr. Tiller’s mouth and save his life, Roeder wondered if he’d shot the right man…As WPD responded to the church, he was eating a pizza…He claims justification but these are not the acts of a justified man. These acts are cowardly. A justified man does not have to hide inside a church…or hide his gun…or take his victim unawares…or need to run. Roeder is not justified. He is only and simply guilty of the crimes he’s been charged with. I ask you as citizens of this community and this state and the United States of America to hold him fully accountable and find him guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault.”
By ten a.m., the judge had instructed the jurors about the charges and sent them off to deliberate. In the lobby, crowded with cops and full of activity, Dave Leach stood by himself taking in the movement around him, as the spectators clustered in their usual groups and talked on cell phones. He was joined by Randall Terry, who’d been loitering nearby. Throughout the morning, Terry had been passing out a three-page flyer about what was wrong with the anti-abortion movement and how it needed to make a stronger commitment to its goals and take bolder steps. Seizing the opportunity to talk with Leach, because he was now accompanied by a journalist, Terry strode up in his striking alligator boots and introduced himself to the reporter. The conversation had only begun when a uniformed deputy approached.
“You better get up to the ninth floor,” he said.
“The verdict is already in?”
He nodded. “Get up there.”
The trio went to the bay of elevators and stepped into an open one, Terry complaining that he couldn’t believe that less than forty-five minutes (thirty-seven, actually) had passed since the judge had given the case to the jury. Leach was silent, but a little smile played around the corner of his mouth, as it often did, his purpose never as obvious as Terry’s. The day before, Leach had said that bringing national attention to the Roeder trial, and getting the public to think about violence being justified to stop an abortion doctor, and motivating a judge to consider the necessity defense and the voluntary-manslaughter charge in these circumstances were all victories. He didn’t seem to take the situation nearly as personally as Terry.
“This case can be the start of a new process,” he had said. “And no matter what anyone says, the trial was about abortion.”
Within minutes, the jury and the legal parties had all gathered in the courtroom and the judge called the proceedings to order. As the Tiller family looked on, one or two of them were clearly praying. The gallery fell still, the scene echoing the Tiller trial ten months earlier, when on March 27, 2009, with a blizzard about to slam into Wichita, six jurors had taken roughly twenty-five minutes to reach their conclusion and acquit the physician.
While he sat at the defense table and glanced around the room, Roeder’s face colored just slightly, no longer looking quite so calm. He’d set himself up for martyrdom but then tried to find a legal way out of that fate. Maybe he was questioning his decisions or maybe, as Lindsey had suggested throughout the trial, he was having trouble sleeping. No one knew him better than she did or cared more about his health, even now. She and Nick had watched every moment of the trial and were awaiting the denouement, as Lindsey offered up her own hope that Roeder would never again be free to show up at their front door.
The judge cleared his throat and Jeanne Tiller held her hands over her eyes. Wilbert thanked the jury and asked them for their verdict, which came in swiftly and without fanfare, surrounded by near-total silence: guilty on one count of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. No one in the gallery made a sound. Roeder would be sentenced in two months, but before the judge could adjourn one last time and everyone dispersed, Nola Foulston stood and made a point of saying that she was going to ask the court for the maximum sentence of a “Hard 50.” If the judge agreed with this, the fifty-one-year-old Roeder could not become eligible for parole for five more decades—the DA’s parting shot at the convicted murderer, as he lowered his eyes and walked out of the room with two guards, his steps a little uncertain as he made his way back to his cell. He’d soon be headed up the road thirty miles to the state correctional facility at El Dorado, the most dangerous prison in Kansas.
From her own cell in Minnesota, Shelley Shannon commented on the jury’s decision in an e-mail to Dave Leach. Her message, which found its way to the Associated Press, was that because of the trial’s outcome, America could expect more violence.
“Abortionists are killed,” she wrote, “because they are serial murderers of innocent children who must be stopped, and they will continue to be stopped, even though Scott didn’t get a fair trial. May God bless Scott for his faithfulness and brave actions and stand.”
“Other doctors,” said Kathy Spillar in the courthouse lobby right after the verdict, “remain under threat. There are substantial questions left to answer about other people’s involvement in this case and with Scott Roeder. We’ve given information about these matters to the Justice Department and all of it needs to be investigated further.”
“My son and I,” Lindsey said, “are relieved and gratified that a verdict of guilty was decided. We are anxious to put this behind us and move forward. Our prayers are with the Tiller family, who showed great strength and also show my son and I what unity of a family truly means. We do not expect or ask that the Tiller family find closure. We pray that they feel a sense of justice.
“We understand that the gaping hole where their husband, father, and grandfather once was will never close but we hope and pray that over time with love of family, church, and community those jagged edges will heal. We humbly ask their forgiveness for any part we may have played to increase their pain and suffering. Sincerely, Lindsey and Nicholas Roeder.”
Outside the courthouse, Randall Terry protested the verdict and said, “The blood of these babies slain by Tiller is crying for vengeance.”
A few miles east of downtown, Reformation Lutheran Church issued its own statement, wishing to thank people for their “many prayers and thoughts of encouragement during these difficult months following the murder of Reformation member Dr. George Tiller…As a guilty verdict was handed down today in the case against Scott Roeder, we are gr
ateful that the state presented the facts clearly, the witnesses boldly told what they knew to be true, the judge led with clarity, and the jury discerned and acted in regard to the law.
“While these proceedings will obviously not bring George back, we trust in the promise of the resurrection and move forward in that hope. We pray that all places of worship will be sanctuaries—places of reconciliation, peace, and hope, setting the pace for a fractured world that so desperately seeks unity with God and one another…Pastor Lowell Michelson and Pastor Kristin Neitzel.”
Donald Spitz, who ran the Army of God Web site, ominously told the Associated Press that “there is not a lot of good feeling out there. Everybody is pretty angry…Times change. People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”
The National Organization for Women responded to the verdict by urging “the Department of Justice to investigate this network of anti-abortion terrorists. NOW leadership and our dedicated grassroots activists across the country have been tracking these terrorists at work for decades. Some of our own members have survived harassment and assault. NOW would be happy to share with the Justice Department any relevant evidence we might have that would help shut down this conspiracy to deny women their fundamental right to abortion through violence and the threat of violence.”
“Once again,” wrote the Tiller family, “a Sedgwick County jury has reached a just verdict. We also want to thank George’s countless friends and supporters in Wichita and around the country who have offered their comfort. At this time we hope that George can be remembered for his legacy of service to women, the help he provided for those who needed it and the love and happiness he provided us as a husband, father and grandfather.”
A few days later, Dave Leach recorded a long prison interview with Roeder via telephone and put it up on YouTube. He gave the inmate the time and opportunity to say for the public all the graphic things about abortion that the judge had not allowed him to say in court. He reemphasized his lack of sympathy for Jeanne Tiller and again compared her to a woman who’d been married to a hit man.
Epilogue
With my own courtroom vigil now over and the sun attempting to break through the clouds on Friday afternoon, I turned away from the courthouse and began walking in the snow back to my downtown hotel, my final image of the event being Randall Terry standing outside in the bitter cold hunting for one more reporter to speak to. I was eager to be alone with my thoughts and to feel the peculiar emptiness that comes at the end of a murder trial, especially one that had generated this much anticipation and attention. The media would move on to a new story, the Sedgwick County Courthouse would become less crowded, and the bomb-sniffing dogs would be given another mission at another venue, but this verdict signified a larger ending than that. The life and death of Dr. Tiller had not concluded until the jury had heard the facts of the case and reached its own judgment about Scott Roeder.
The national abortion wars would continue, but for thirty-five years they’d been centered in Wichita, on a street corner in a modest-looking neighborhood, around one figure who’d never given an inch to those who hated him the most. Kansas had once again played a crucial role in a divided America, but the battle would have to find a new focal point and other targets in other places, because there was no one left in Wichita to demonstrate against. The streets felt emptier than ever, but the pain and uncertainty were still in the air. Things had ended, but nothing had been resolved.
Nineteen days after the verdict, on February 17, Joseph Stack of Texas sent his own anti-government message by flying a small plane into a federal building in Austin to protest the IRS and the tax laws of America. Before setting his house on fire, loading his plane with an extra gas tank, and slamming it into a structure holding IRS offices, killing the tax employee Vernon Hunter and Stack himself, he’d posted an online manifesto.
“I would only hope,” he wrote, “that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
His suicide mission generated numerous supporters in cyberspace, including Facebook groups such as “The Philosophy of Joe Stack,” which quickly had two thousand fans. Tributes to the dead man showed up on Web sites and then came a video game challenging players to burn down a house and fly a plane into a building.
Two weeks later, on March 4, John Patrick Bedell of California opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was fatally gunned down. Bedell had been diagnosed as bipolar and been in and out of treatment programs for years. His parents reported him missing on January 4, one day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. He returned to his parents’ home, but the next time he went missing he showed up with a 9-millimeter pistol in D.C. and began shooting outside the Pentagon.
As spring approached, with President Obama’s health care reform on hold and tragedies such as those in Austin and Washington dominating the news, the United States struck more people than Joseph Stack or John Patrick Bedell as not merely unmanageable, but ungovernable. According to a Pew Research poll conducted March 11–21, 2010, trust in the U.S. government had reached an all-time low. Only about one in five registered voters believed they could rely on the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or most of the time, while an overwhelming majority said it will do the right thing only some of the time—or never. The survey attributed this negative view to a “perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government—a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”
Heading back to Denver following the trial, I recalled the previous June, two weeks after Dr. Tiller had been murdered, when I’d visited my hometown. The summer heat had only begun to gather on the plains and build up throughout the long hours before dusk brought some relief. One sweltering afternoon I’d walked over to the small swimming pool near my old school—a form of recreation and escape from the scorching air that hadn’t existed in the community when I was a child. Standing outside the pool and looking in through a chain-link fence, I hoped that the water could steer local teens away from the drinking and drugs so rampant when I was their age. Watching the boys and girls swim, I saw a black youngster, maybe ten or eleven, paddling un-self-consciously next to the white children, all of them splashing around in the sunlight, grabbing each other’s arms and legs and laughing in the high-pitched squeals of kids everywhere having fun in a pool on a hot summer day.
When I was ten or eleven black people had been banned inside the city limits of our town after sundown. In those years, tens of millions of Americans had railed against integration, declaring that it would destroy the country and erode our democratic foundations. The mixing of the races was unnatural and against what God had intended—it would undermine the fabric of society and leave the United States vulnerable at home and abroad. Seeing beads of water slide off the black youngster’s shoulders and onto the skin of the white children beside him, I felt a knot rise in my throat and I lowered my head, turning away from the pool and continuing my walk. America had proven itself more resilient and flexible than some had ever imagined. The center had held during the Civil War, during integration, and again during the controversy surrounding the death of George Tiller. The country wasn’t yet finished with its evolving and its becoming, and something was about to be resolved through the processes of government.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, thousands of opponents of President Obama’s health care legislation encircled the Capitol in Washington, waving signs and chanting, “Kill the bill!” They threw racial slurs at three black Democratic lawmakers—Representatives André Carson of Indiana, Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, and John
Lewis of Georgia—and a protester spat at Cleaver as the trio walked toward the Capitol for a vote. Other demonstrators hurled anti-homosexual remarks at Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who’s openly gay. The man who spat at Congressman Cleaver was arrested, but Cleaver decided not to press charges.
The legislator’s office then released this statement:
“This is not the first time the Congressman has been called the ‘n’ word and certainly not the worst assault he has endured in his years fighting for equal rights for all Americans. That being said, he is disappointed that in the 21st century our national discourse has devolved to the point of name calling and spitting. He looks forward to taking a historic vote on health care reform legislation tomorrow…Our nation has a history of struggling each time we expand rights. Today’s protests are no different, but the Congressman believes this is worth fighting for.”
At eleven o’clock the following night, the House was finally ready to vote on the measure, which offered policies to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, covered others who had pre-existing medical conditions, and lowered the cost of drugs for senior citizens. The vote came after a compromise had been reached on the most difficult issue surrounding the new bill: President Obama had agreed to sign an executive order affirming that the legislation would prevent any federal monies from being used for abortions. Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, who’d vehemently opposed the reform bill last November, was satisfied with the order and decided to support the president.
“Make no doubt about it,” Stupak said that Sunday evening. “There will be no public funds for abortion.”
A Death in Wichita Page 32