Santorum also said that John F. Kennedy’s promise, when he was running for president as a Catholic in 1960, to maintain an absolute separation between church and state, “makes me throw up.”
If a handful of comments could sum up the new civil war Americans had been fighting against one another throughout the past few decades, Santorum had delivered them from the highest perch of our political life. His words spelled out that the battle over abortion (or other social issues) wasn’t simply a matter of one side being pro-choice and the other anti-choice. Rather, it went to the foundation of the United States being constructed on the concept of keeping religion and politics separate. The Founding Fathers had been adamant about having government involved in the public policy arena, but staying out of people’s private lives and their faith. The first sentence of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…. ”
Rick Santorum felt otherwise about America and to his credit he did not try to hide his convictions or soft-pedal them. He was the full flowering of all the efforts of many of his fellow citizens over the past 40 years to alter the basis of our government. He wanted to bring religion into the realm of public life in the United States, and ending legalized abortion was just one way of doing this.
In Kansas during the first decade of the new millennium, Attorney General Phill Kline had attempted to do a similar thing while harassing and investigating Dr. Tiller and his medical practice. As the state’s head legal official, Kline felt that he could impose his Christian beliefs on the Tiller situation and that these beliefs trumped the rule of law. For years Kline was allowed to operate in this way, but in October 2011 a Kansas disciplinary panel recommended that he be indefinitely suspended from practicing law because of ethical misconduct in his pursuit of abortion clinics. The end result of Kline’s behavior speaks for itself, and investigating his time in office was the main reason I felt compelled to write this book. What other recent American story so clearly demonstrates the danger of supplanting our legal system with an individual’s religious convictions?
Placing one’s faith above the Constitution and the laws of the United States was precisely what the Founding Fathers were trying to prevent (because they’d lived under a king and wanted something better). Disregarding the rule of law was troubling enough in Kansas, but encouraging people like Scott Roeder, who’d been mentally unstable from adolescence, to think this way was beyond troubling. The story of Dr. Tiller graphically shows what happens when “respectable” and powerful people place themselves above the governmental system we’ve agreed to live by. A Death in Wichita does not chronicle the theory of what can happen when religious dogma becomes the driving force behind a society built on a multitude of faiths, races, beliefs, and creeds. The book documents the danger firsthand—and underscores what those who created America and its rights were hoping to avoid.
Instead of absorbing the consequences and lessons of what Kline’s time in office represented in Kansas, segments of the Republican Party have lately run headlong toward mimicking the former attorney general. They too want their religion to pervade our politics, no matter the cost. The divisions in our country are now wider than ever, and the intrusions into the private lives of Americans have only grown more personal and painful. Who knows where all of this will lead? In 2012, nearly a century after women won the right to vote and decades after the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, it’s astonishing and disheartening to watch the country rip itself further apart over the issue of women’s health.
Fanatical beliefs and convictions have now become part of the mainstream, and people have been paid and promoted exceptionally well to hammer these cultural and religious wedges between our citizens. No one should any longer be naïve about what this can mean for our future.
As Dr. Warren Hern has said in these pages, “Wake up, America.” Now.
Also By Stephen Singular
When Men Become Gods
Unholy Messenger
By Their Works
Catch This (with Terrell Owens)
Anyone You Want Me to Be (with John Douglas)
Relentless
The Uncivil War
Joe Lieberman
The Heart of Change
A Season on the Reservation (with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
Presumed Guilty
The Rise and Rise of David Geffen
Power to Burn
Legacy of Deception
Charmed to Death
Sweet Evil
Notre Dame’s Greatest Coaches
A Killing in the Family
Talked to Death
Acknowledgments
Several hours after Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in Wichita on May 31, 2009, I began the process of making contact with Charlie Spicer at St. Martin’s Press. I knew that Charlie, like me, had a deep interest in books about crimes, especially ones with large social implications. The murder had occurred in Kansas, where I grew up, and I knew people involved in the situation unfolding that day in Wichita, as the police hunted for the killer. Beyond that, I’d begun writing about domestic terrorism twenty-five years earlier and instinctively felt that this story would lead in that direction. In recent years, nothing had struck me as more important than how fear, rage, and a sense of being victimized by the outside world had moved from the edges of our culture into the mainstream. What used to be clearly on the margins was now packaged and sold as prime-time entertainment. I was very pleased that Charlie was interested in this subject, and a few weeks later I was sitting in a Wichita jail cell with Dr. Tiller’s assassin, Scott Roeder. His Kansas roots were just a few miles from mine and he was more than willing to share with me the thinking behind his own brand of terrorism. In a way that was almost eerie, his crime led me straight back to my first book, Talked to Death, about the 1984 neo-Nazi murder of the Denver talk-show host Alan Berg. The death of Dr. Tiller seemed like a natural sequel to that story. All the elements were in place, but I’d yet to meet the most important figure, from my perspective, in the building of the book.
The first time I sat down with the killer’s ex-wife, Lindsey, we were in the basement of her church and she talked for three hours straight, describing how she’d met Roeder and married him in 1986, and how their union had gradually disintegrated and ended in 1996. As I got to know her and we spoke on other occasions, I realized that I was hearing what it was like to fall in love with a man, have a child with him, and then watch him turn into an American terrorist. In recent decades, as I’d observed the normalization of hatred and demonization in our politics, media, and religion, this was the subject I most wanted to write about, but I hoped to find the human side, and the human cost, of this evolution. Lindsey had lived it.
When I got together with her in June 2009, it was as if she’d been waiting for years to tell someone about her wrenching experience with Scott Roeder. She knew the timeline of events and the people involved, and could recall details of the distant past. Learning that her ex-husband had gunned down Dr. Tiller unleashed her own need and desire to tell her family’s story, and her courage and honesty are at the core of this book. I’ve often been asked about writing long pieces of nonfiction and my answer is always the same: in order to do this kind of book justice, you need at least one person who’s critically important to the events, is ready to talk, and is willing to tell the truth. In this instance, it was Lindsey, which is why I’ve dedicated the book to her.
I’d like to thank Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder for speaking with me on numerous occasions and sharing his writings about the abortion conflict. This extremely busy physician always found the time to help make this a better and more complete story. Photos were provided by Dr. Hern, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and Marjorie Signer, by Georgia Cole of Wichita’s Eighteenth Judicial District, the Kansas attorney general’s office, Lindsey Roeder, and the Kan
sas Historical Society. Thanks to all of them. My understanding of this topic was assisted throughout the past year by studying The Wrath of Angels, the excellent history of America’s abortion wars written by Judy L. Thomas and James Risen. I also want to thank my agent, Mel Berger of William Morris, for working with Charlie Spicer to make this book a reality.
A special note of gratitude goes out to my mother, Mary, my wife, Joyce, and to my lifelong friend Bob Haight for his inspiration and stream of provocative questions and thoughts during the course of researching and writing A Death in Wichita. He was there when it counted. Last, and perhaps most important, my editor, Yaniv Soha, deserves praise for his distinct gift for focusing a story and moving it forward. His critical eye, his deft touch with handling a first-person narrative, and his understanding that every word should serve the story and nothing but the story are behind all of these pages.
The best part of covering any nonfiction subject is when you get in your car for the first time, fill up the gas tank, and begin driving in search of something new, uncertain where you’re headed but sensing that a story out there is ready to be told. Then the right people seem to show up and start talking and take you into realities that are richer than you could have imagined—as if everything had been prepared for your arrival and all you really needed to do was trust your instincts and start the engine.
DEATH IN WICHITA. Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Singular. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Singular, Stephen.
Death in Wichita: the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the battle over abortion / Stephen Singular. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-250-02961-4
1. Abortion—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. 2. Tiller, George, 1941–2009. 3. Physicians—Kansas—Wichita. 4. Murder victims—Kansas—Wichita. 5. Roeder, Scott. 6. Pro-life movement—United States—Case studies. 7. Pro-choice movement—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HQ767.5.U5S545 2011
364.152‘3092—dc22
2010042132
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