There is a special jolt to the headline EMPORIA MAN FATALLY SHOT. For many Americans, Emporia, Kansas, conjures up the vision of a typical American town in the era when people didn’t have to think about violent men bent on robbery—a town where neighbors drank lemonade on the front porch and kidded one another about their performances in the Fourth of July softball game. The vision grew out of the writings of William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia, who, as owner and editor of The Emporia Gazette, was widely thought of during the first forty years of this century as the national spokesman for the unadorned values of the American Midwest. The residents of Emporia in those days may have thought of their town as even more tranquil than its national reputation. What White had been looking for when he set out to buy a small-town newspaper, in 1895, was not a typical town but a college town—a place where his editorials could be understood and appreciated by “a considerable dependable minority of intelligent people, intellectually upper-middle class.” Emporia, the seat of Lyon County and a division point for the Santa Fe Railway and a trading center for the surrounding farmland, had two colleges—Kansas State Normal School and a small Presbyterian liberal-arts school called the College of Emporia. During the years that people across the country thought of Emporia as a typical Midwestern town, its boosters sometimes spoke of it as the Educational Center of the West, or even the Athens of Kansas.
In some ways, Emporia didn’t change much after William Allen White passed from the scene. The White family continued to own the Gazette. Even now, Mrs. William L. White—the widow of the Sage’s son, who was an author and a foreign correspondent known into his seventies around Emporia as Young Bill—comes in every day. Commercial Street still has the look of the main trading street in a Kansas farm town—two-story buildings separated by a slab of asphalt wide enough to accommodate angle parking on both sides and four lanes of traffic. The College of Emporia folded some years ago, though; its campus is now owned by a religious cult called The Way. Although the Santa Fe’s operation has been shrinking in recent years, Emporia has, on the whole, become more of what was called in White’s day a lunch-bucket town. The construction of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant, forty miles to the southeast, brought a few thousand construction workers to the area, and some of them remained after the plant was completed. Although Kansas State Normal expanded as it evolved first into Kansas State Teachers College and then into Emporia Kansas State College and then into Emporia State University, the largest employer in town these days is not a college but a big meatpacking plant, most of whose employees are not the sort of citizens who spend a lot of their time perusing the editorial page. There is less talk than there once was about Emporia’s being the Athens of Kansas.
Still, a lot of people in Emporia lead an updated version of the peaceful front-porch life that White portrayed—a life revolving around family and church and school and service club and neighbors. The Andersons seemed to lead that sort of life. When they walked into Faith Lutheran Church every Sunday, the little girls wearing immaculate dresses that Lorna Anderson had made herself, they presented the picture of the wholesome, attractive American family that a lot of people still have in mind when they think of Emporia. Marty Anderson, a medical technologist, ran the laboratory at Newman Memorial County Hospital. He was on the board of directors of the Optimist Club. His wife was working part-time as the secretary of Faith Lutheran. She was a member of a social and service sorority called Beta Sigma Phi, which used its annual Valentine’s Day dance as a benefit for the local hospitals. The Andersons were among the young couples who saw one another at Optimist basketball games or church fellowship meetings or Beta Sigma Phi socials—people who tended to recall dates by saying something like “Let’s see, that was the year Jenny started nursery school” or “I remember I was pregnant with Bobby.”
Faith Lutheran Church is dominated by such families. It’s a young church, in a former Assembly of God building on the west side of Emporia—an area filled with split-level houses along blocks so recently developed that most of the trees are still not much higher than the basketball goals. Faith Lutheran was founded in 1982, when the one Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Emporia, Messiah Lutheran, decided that the way to expand was to ask for volunteers to form what was thought of as a “daughter congregation” on the west side. Faith Lutheran grew so quickly that in October of 1982, just eight months after its founding, it was chartered as a separate congregation. The church—a pale brick building on a corner lot across the street from a school—turned out to have been well placed, but the congregation had other advantages besides a fortunate location. The people who had volunteered to move from Messiah tended to be active young families with a strong interest in a range of church activities—what was sometimes called at Messiah “the early-service crowd.” Thomas Bird, the minister who had been called from Arkansas to Messiah to lead the new undertaking, turned out to be a dynamic young pastor who fitted right in with his congregation. Tom Bird had been a long-distance runner at the University of Arkansas. He was married to his high school sweetheart, an astonishingly energetic young woman who had a master’s degree in mathematics and managed to combine the responsibilities of a pastor’s wife with some teaching at Emporia State. Like a lot of couples in the congregation, they had three small children and a small split-level and a swing set in the backyard.
The Missouri Synod is a particularly conservative branch of American Lutheranism. Tom Bird thought of himself as conservative in doctrinal and liturgical matters but flexible in dealing with the concerns of his congregation. Distinguishing Faith Lutheran from Missouri Synod churches more set in their ways—Messiah, for instance—he has said that he wanted his church to be more interested in people than in policies. Faith Lutheran lacked the stern, Germanic atmosphere sometimes associated with Missouri Synod churches. The attachment of some of the young west-side couples who soon joined the founders from Messiah was more demographic than liturgical. A lot of them were attracted by a friendly, almost familial bond among contemporaries who tended to be interested in the church volleyball team as well as the Bible classes. The Andersons, who had been active at First Presbyterian, were introduced to Faith when Lorna Anderson decided that its preschool, the Lord’s Lambs, might be a convenient place for their two youngest children, twin girls. Eventually, Martin and Lorna Anderson found Faith Lutheran a comfortable place for the entire family. Lorna Anderson went to work half days as the church secretary. Marty Anderson put the pastor up for the Optimists.
A memorial service for Marty Anderson was held at Faith Lutheran. Tom Bird, Lorna Anderson’s boss and friend as well as her pastor, was by her side. He could have been assumed to have sad cause for empathy. Only four months before, his own wife had died—killed, from what the authorities could ascertain by reconstructing the event, when her car missed a nasty curve next to the Rocky Ford Bridge, southeast of town, and plunged over an embankment into the Cottonwood River. On the day of Martin Anderson’s memorial service, the sanctuary of Faith Lutheran Church was full. Tom Bird delivered the eulogy. The Optimists sat in the first few rows.
The day before the memorial service, Susan Ewert, a friend of Lorna Anderson’s from the Andersons’ days at First Presbyterian, walked into the office of The Emporia Gazette first thing in the morning with an angry complaint. She said that the Gazette article reporting Martin Anderson’s murder—a short Saturday-afternoon item that had been written near deadline on the strength of telephone conversations—implied that Lorna Anderson wasn’t telling the truth about what had happened. The Gazette’s implication, according to Mrs. Ewert, had so disturbed Mrs. Anderson that her pastor, who was trying to console her, had found her nearly suicidal. The managing editor of the Gazette, Ray Call, said that the paper would be happy to give Mrs. Anderson the opportunity to tell her story in detail, and when the Gazette came out that afternoon, it carried a story headlined MURDERED EMPORIAN’S WIFE RECALLS TERROR ON HIGHWAY.
Lorna Anderson’s story was this: She was at the w
heel of the family’s van as it headed down 177 from Manhattan toward Emporia that evening. Apparently having eaten something in Manhattan that disagreed with her, she felt that she was about to be ill, so she stopped the car. As she got out, she took the keys with her—her husband had always insisted that she remove the keys any time she left the van—and then accidentally dropped them in the field at the side of the road. When her husband came out to help her look for them, he told her to return to the van and shine the headlights in his direction. While she was doing that, she heard someone say, “Where’s your wallet?” She turned to see her husband hand his wallet to a masked man, who started shooting. Her husband fell to the ground. Then the man grabbed her, held the gun to her head, and pulled the trigger. The gun failed to fire. He fled into the darkness.
The story presented some problems. Would someone who was about to be ill really pull the keys out of a car parked on a deserted stretch of highway when her husband was sitting right in the front seat? What were the odds of a bandit’s being on that stretch of highway when the Andersons’ van stopped? The original item in the Gazette—an item that followed Lorna Anderson’s account with the sentence “Officers are investigating the story”—had, in fact, reflected the skepticism of the Geary County officers who listened to the account the night of the murder. The implication of that skepticism was clear in a headline run by The Junction City Daily Union the next day: VICTIM’S WIFE AMONG SUSPECTS IN KILLING. The Emporia Gazette was not as blunt, but that didn’t mean an absence of suspicion in Emporia. There were a lot of rumors around town.
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Emporia, with a population of twenty-five thousand, is about the right size for rumors. In a tiny town, people are likely to know firsthand what is true and what isn’t. In a large city, most of the population won’t have any connection at all with the people under discussion. In a place the size of Emporia, though, people tend to have an uncle who knows the cousin of someone through the Kiwanis, or a next-door neighbor who has the word through a lawyer who has a kid in the same Boy Scout troop. The Andersons had been in Emporia for only seven years—Marty Anderson was from a small town south of Wichita, and his wife had grown up in Hutchinson—but a lot of people knew someone who knew them. Just about everybody had something to say about them.
Marty Anderson sounded like a person who had been both easy to like and easy not to like. “He could be very aggravating, and the next minute he could get you laughing,” a fellow Optimist has said. The way Anderson tried to get people laughing was usually through needling or practical jokes, and in both forms he occasionally passed over the line from funny to mean. Sometimes the object of the needling was his wife. He was a big man, more than six feet tall, and not the sort of big man who slowed up coming into second base for fear of bowling over a smaller player. At Newman Hospital he sometimes employed an army-sergeant manner that irritated people in other departments, but the technologists who worked for him considered him an essentially fair man who tried to run a meticulous laboratory. Basically, they liked him. Outside the hospital he was known as a man who after quite a bit too much to drink at a party might decide to play a prank that turned out not to have been such a good idea after all. His wife was given to tearful recitals of how miserable life with Martin Anderson could be, and some of the people who tried to be of comfort were told that he beat her.
“Everybody was always comforting Lorna,” a female associate of Martin Anderson’s has said, putting a little twist on the word “comforting.” Lorna Anderson cried easily. Until a couple of years before her husband’s death, she had often phoned him at the lab, distraught and tearful, but she was better known for seeking her comfort elsewhere. The Emporians of William Allen White’s day could have described her with one sentence: she had a reputation. A trim, dark-haired, pleasant-looking woman of about thirty, she did not have the appearance of the town bombshell. But there were women in Emporia—women who worked at the hospital or were members of Beta Sigma Phi—who said that they avoided parties where the Andersons were likely to be present because they knew that before the evening was out, Lorna Anderson would make a play for their husbands. There were people in Emporia who said that a police investigation that included scrutiny of the Andersons’ marriage had the potential of embarrassing any number of prominent business and professional men—men who had met Lorna Anderson when she worked at one of the banks, or men who knew her through her work as local fundraiser for the American Heart Association, or men who had simply run into her late in the evening at a place like the Continental Club of the Ramada Inn. Some people in Emporia—people who, say, worked with someone who knew someone connected with Faith Lutheran Church—were saying that Lorna Anderson’s latest catch was Pastor Tom Bird. “Just after we got home from Marty’s funeral, the phone rang,” a colleague of Martin Anderson’s has said. “The person calling said there was a rumor that Lorna and Tom Bird had something to do with Marty’s death.”
Pastor Bird had been one of the people who were always comforting Lorna. Almost from the time she began working at the church, in early 1983, there were whispers in the congregation about the possibility that the pastor and his secretary had grown too close. After Sandra Bird’s death, in July of 1983, Lorna Anderson was just one of a number of women from the congregation who concentrated on providing whatever support they could for the young pastor, but she was the only one whose relationship with Tom Bird continued to cause uneasiness in the congregation. The pastor of Messiah had spoken confidentially to Bird about what people were saying, and so had Faith’s lay ministers—the equivalent of church elders in some Lutheran congregations. At one point, the lay ministers, intent on avoiding even the appearance of impropriety by the pastor, considered asking Lorna Anderson to resign. Finally, it was agreed that she would remain church secretary but would limit her presence at the church to the hours that her job called for. Bird had assured the lay ministers that there was, in fact, no impropriety in his relationship with his secretary. She had a troubled marriage and a tendency to “spiral down,” he told them, and he was only doing his best to counsel and support her. He continued to stand by her after Martin Anderson’s death and after suspicion was cast on her. He continued to stand by her when, only a couple of weeks after Anderson’s death, Daniel Carter, an Emporia man who had been picked up by the Geary County authorities on a tip, said she had given him five thousand dollars to see that her husband was killed. Pastor Bird’s support did not waver even when, shortly after Carter’s arrest, Lorna Anderson herself was arrested for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
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Lorna Anderson said she was innocent. Daniel Carter said he was guilty. He agreed to cooperate with the authorities investigating the role of Lorna Anderson and others in the plot.
“Do you recall when it was you first had occasion to meet her?” Steven Opat, the Geary County attorney, asked during one of the times Carter testified in court.
“Yes,” Carter said. “I used to cut her hair.”
That was at Mr. & Ms., on Commercial Street, in 1981. The relationship was strictly business for about a year, Carter testified, and then there was an affair, which lasted a few months, and then, in August of 1983, Lorna Anderson asked him to find someone to get rid of her husband. By that time, Carter was working on the construction crew at Wolf Creek, where he presumably had a better chance of finding a hit man among his co-workers than he would have had at the hairdresser’s. The Geary County authorities didn’t claim that Carter had concocted a scheme that actually resulted in the death of Martin Anderson. As they pieced the story together, Carter took five thousand dollars from Lorna Anderson and passed it on to Gregory Curry, his supervisor at Wolf Creek, who passed it on to a third man, in Mississippi, who, perhaps realizing that nobody was in a position to make a stink about having the money returned if services weren’t rendered, didn’t do anything.
That left the mystery of who killed Martin Anderson, which meant that a number of investigators from the Geary Coun
ty Sheriff’s Department and the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation were still asking questions around Emporia—scaring up a covey of rumors with each interview. When the next arrest came, though, it was not for murder but for another plot, which nobody claimed had gone any further than talk. On March 21, 1984, four and a half months after Martin Anderson’s death, the Lyon County attorney, Rodney H. Symmonds, filed charges against Thomas Bird for criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder. In an affidavit filed at the same time, a KBI agent said that the prosecution was acting largely on information it had received from an Emporia housebuilder named Darrel Carter, Daniel Carter’s older brother. Shortly after the arrest of Daniel Carter, the affidavit said, Darrel Carter had gone to the authorities to inform them that in May of 1983, three months before the plot his brother had described, he, too, had been asked to help get rid of Martin Anderson. According to the affidavit, Darrel Carter had gone to Faith Lutheran Church one weekday morning at Lorna Anderson’s request, and there had been asked by Tom Bird if he would help in a murder scheme that was already worked out. After Martin Anderson’s death, the affidavit said, Darrel Carter had got word that Tom Bird wanted to meet with him again in order to “reaffirm their trust,” but this time Carter had shown up wearing a hidden transmitter provided by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
“Who would have thought that little old Emporia would have two hit men?” a professor at Emporia State University has said. Even to people in Emporia who had spent the months since Martin Anderson’s death savoring the ironies or embellishing the rumors, though, the idea of a minister plotting a murder scheme right in his own church was shocking. There was an accompanying shock in what the affidavit said about one of the possible murder plans that Bird was accused of presenting to Darrel Carter: “Bird told Carter he found a place with a bend in a road and a bridge outside of Emporia, which had an approximately fifty-foot drop-off to the river and that a person could just miss the curve, especially if the person were drunk, and go off down the embankment. Bird told Carter they were going to drug Marty, take him out there, and run the car off into the river.”
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