Anyone who might have missed the implication of that could see it spelled out in the Gazette’s coverage of Bird’s arrest. “On July 17, Sandra Bird, Mr. Bird’s wife, was found dead near the wreckage of her car that went off the road at the Rocky Ford Bridge southeast of Emporia,” the Gazette said. “According to the accident report, Mrs. Bird had been driving northbound on the county road when the car apparently went off the roadway at the approach to the bridge and down a 65-foot embankment.
“An autopsy concluded that Mrs. Bird’s death was accidental, caused by severe abdominal and chest injuries.
“Mr. Symmonds declined to comment on whether he considered Mrs. Bird’s death to be accidental.
“ ‘Whenever a person dies, it’s always subject to further investigation,’ he said.”
—
Members of Faith Lutheran offered to post Tom Bird’s bond. The church’s attitude was summed up by The Wichita Eagle with the headline CONGREGATION RALLIES AROUND PASTOR. There were people in the congregation who had been put out at Tom Bird at one time or another—he was known as someone who could be strong-willed about having things done his own way—but in general he was a popular figure. To people who might have expected a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor to be a severe man on the lookout for sin, Tom Bird had always seemed accessible and informal and concerned. “We’re going to stand behind him all the way,” one young woman in the congregation told the reporter from Wichita. Faith Lutheran people spoke of Christian love and the American principle that a man is innocent until proved guilty. A lot of them considered the charge against Tom Bird a horrible mistake that would be straightened out at his first hearing. There were some people in the congregation, however, who believed that it would be inappropriate for Bird to continue in his pastoral duties as if nothing had happened, and there were a few who thought he should resign. Bird said that he had no intention of resigning or asking for a leave of absence. In a congregational meeting, a compromise was reached: it was decided that as a way of easing the pressure on Pastor Bird while he dealt with his defense, he could be relieved of preparing and delivering sermons while retaining his other pastoral duties. That arrangement was supposed to last until Bird’s preliminary hearing. When the hearing was postponed for some weeks, Bird said that he would prefer to take the pulpit again, and the lay ministers, to the irritation of a few members who were outspokenly opposed to Pastor Bird’s continued presence, agreed. On the Sunday that he preached his first sermon after his arrest, the worshippers emerging from the church after the service were greeted not only by their pastor but also by a couple of television crews and some out-of-town reporters.
In Bird’s view, the presence of the press that Sunday effectively ended his ministry at Faith Lutheran by making it clear that the church would be no sanctuary from temporal concerns as long as Thomas Bird was its pastor. With or without television cameras at Sunday services, it was a hard time for Faith Lutheran. The atmosphere of relaxed fellowship that had attracted so many young families had turned tense. The effort of most members to withhold judgment meant that no one was quite certain of where anyone else stood. A few families had dropped out of the congregation, and some people came to church less often. “I didn’t feel comfortable going to church,” a member who was a strong supporter of Pastor Bird’s has said. “I felt people judging us as well as judging Tom.” Faith members also felt some pressure from outside the church. The questions and remarks they heard from outsiders often seemed to carry the implication that the attitude of the congregation toward its pastor was naïve or silly. In the view of one Faith Lutheran member, “It got to be socially unacceptable to go to our church.” In the days after Bird’s return to the pulpit, it was clear from the pressure within the church not simply that he would no longer deliver sermons on Sundays but that he would have to resign. He delayed the announcement by several weeks in order to avoid going into his preliminary hearing carrying the burden of having resigned under pressure.
Bird had often expressed gratitude for the congregation’s support, but even before his arrest he had written in a church newsletter that his reputation was being “sullied by the local gossips.” Some of the people who thought the congregation had not been strong enough in its support believed that in the strained atmosphere that followed his arrest, the pastor had reason to feel “unwelcome and unloved” in his own church. When he finally resigned, two months after his arrest, his farewell speech to the congregation was partly about such subjects as authentic Christian love and the purposes of the church, but it also included some rather bitter remarks about his treatment. “When I remained silent, I was judged to be unfair for not informing people; when I have spoken, I was judged to be defensive,” he said. “When I looked depressed, I was judged to be full of self-pity; when I smiled and looked strong, I was judged to be failing to take matters seriously. When I acted timid, I was judged to be weak; when I acted boldly, I was judged to be manipulating. When I was indecisive, I was judged to have lost my leadership capacity; when I acted decisively, I was judged to be using my position to railroad matters. To multiply the anguish of my predicament, I only hear these judgments second or third hand, so that I cannot share directly what is in my heart and my intentions to my accusers within the congregation.”
—
By the time of Tom Bird’s resignation, a folklorist at Emporia State who is interested in the sorts of jokes people tell was collecting Tom-and-Lorna jokes. The folklorist, Thomas Isern, believes that the range of humor in the mass media these days has forced folk humor to be scurrilous in order to remain folk humor, and scurrilous jokes flowed easily from a situation that included a couple of stock folklore characters—the preacher and the loose woman. The relationship between Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson was not the only subject of intense speculation in Emporia. A lot of people were talking about whether Sandra Bird’s death had really been an accident. A couple of months after Bird’s arrest, the Gazette reported that Sandra Bird’s family, in Arkansas, had asked a Little Rock lawyer to supervise an investigation into the circumstances of her death. Once some doubt about the incident was made public, it became apparent that a number of people had at the time entertained doubts about whether Sandra Bird had simply missed a curve. A lot of people—neighbors, for instance, and people at Emporia State—had driven out to the Rocky Ford Bridge to have a look at the scene. What had given them pause was not any suspicion of Tom Bird but a feeling that the physical evidence didn’t make sense. If Sandra Bird liked to take late-night drives by herself to unwind, as her husband had reported, why would she drive on the distinctly unrelaxing gravel road that approached the Rocky Ford Bridge? If the car was going so fast that it missed the curve at the bridge, which is the second half of an S curve, how did it negotiate the first half? If the car was going that fast, how come it wasn’t more seriously damaged? It turned out that there were people in Emporia who for months had not actually believed the official version of how Sandra Bird died. They thought that she might have committed suicide or that she might have been abducted in the parking lot at Emporia State, where she sometimes went late at night to use the computers, and murdered by her abductor.
By far the most popular topic for speculation, though, was what people in Emporia began to call simply the list. The prosecution, it was said, had a list of Emporia men who had been involved with Lorna Anderson. In some versions of the story, the Gazette had the list. In some versions, it was not a list but a black book. In some versions, the men who were on a list of potential witnesses for Lorna Anderson’s trial had been informed of that by the prosecution so that they could break the news to their families themselves. The version of the list story some of the reporters on the Gazette liked best turned into one of the jokes that could be collected by Tom Isern:
A prominent businessman calls an acquaintance on the Gazette news staff and says nervously, “I have to know—does the Gazette have a list?”
“No,” the Gazette reporter says, in a soothing voice.
“But we’re compiling one.”
—
Those people in Emporia who were counting on Lorna Anderson’s trial to end the suspense were in for a long wait. The case against her got tangled in any number of delays and legal complications. As it turned out, the first person to come to trial for plotting to murder Martin Anderson was Tom Bird. The defense asked for a change of venue, providing the court with the results of a survey indicating that an overwhelming majority of Emporia residents were familiar with the case. The motion was denied. In Kansas, there is a strong tradition against granting changes of venue even when there is wide community awareness of a case, and, as it happened, the survey indicated that a relatively small percentage of those who were familiar with the charges and the rumors had already made up their minds. But among the ones who had, there was a strong indication of how Emporia opinion was running: out of thirty-nine people with firm opinions, thirty-two thought Tom Bird was guilty.
Bird’s mother and his father, who is also a Lutheran minister, came up from Arkansas for the trial. So did Sandra Bird’s father and mother and stepfather—who, it was noted around town, seemed to keep their distance from their former son-in-law during the proceedings. Reporters and television crews from Wichita and Topeka were in town; despite objections from the defense, a fixed television camera was permitted in the courtroom for the first time in Lyon County. There were members of Faith Lutheran who had come to testify for the defense and members who had come to testify for the prosecution and members who had come merely because, like most residents of Emporia, they were attracted by the prospect of seeing witnesses under oath clear up—or perhaps improve on—the rumors that had been going around town for eight months. The courtroom was jammed every day. “I’ve never been to anything like this before,” one of the spectators told the Gazette. “I feel like I know them all; I’ve heard their names so many times.”
The prosecution’s case was based on the assumption that Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson had been lovers. According to the prosecutor, they wanted Marty Anderson out of the way, and they weren’t interested in a less violent means of accomplishing that—divorce, for instance—because they also wanted the four hundred thousand dollars his death would bring in insurance money. The prosecution’s witnesses included the Andersons’ insurance agent—he turned out to be the president of the Optimist Club—and a babysitter, who said that she once heard Lorna Anderson say on the telephone, “I cannot wait for Marty to die; I can’t wait to count the green stuff.” There was testimony from Faith Lutheran people who had been concerned that the pastor and his secretary were growing too close. “I saw a sparkle in their eyes when they talked to each other,” said the preschool teacher, a young woman who under cross-examination acknowledged that she herself had wrestled with a crush on the pastor. “I felt electricity in the air.” There was testimony from a development director of the Heart Association, who reduced the talk of electricity and eye-sparkling to more direct language; according to her testimony, Lorna Anderson had told her about having an affair with the pastor and had said that she was using Heart Association business as a cover for trysts in out-of-town motels. The Andersons’ nine-year-old daughter, Lori, testified that she had seen her mother and Tom Bird hugging; Marty Anderson’s brother and a KBI agent both testified that what Lori had said when she was first questioned was that she had seen her mother and Tom Bird kissing.
The prosecution’s star witness was, of course, Darrel Carter. He testified that the meeting at the church in the spring of 1983 was not the first time Lorna Anderson had asked for his help in killing her husband. She had first asked him a year or so before that, he said, at a time when the Andersons and the Carters knew each other casually from Beta Sigma Phi functions. “I was really kind of shocked to think that she would ask me that,” Carter testified, “ ’cause Martin Anderson was a friend of mine.” According to Carter’s testimony, that friendship hadn’t prevented him from having his own fling with Lorna some months later. To back up Carter’s story of the meeting at Faith Lutheran, the prosecution called a couple of people he had mentioned the scheme to at the time. “I was doing a little work there one evening in my garage on an old Corvette that I’m restoring,” one of them, a neighbor of Carter’s, said, in testimony that summoned up the traditional vision of summertime in Emporia. “We visited about several things, which I can’t tell you all they were, but the one that sticks in my mind right now is that he told me that someone had contacted him about killing someone.”
What the defense asked the jury to do was to view Darrel Carter’s testimony not as a story he had finally come forward with after his brother’s arrest but as a story he had concocted in order to win some leniency for his brother—who had, in fact, been given probation, while Gregory Curry, his confederate in the scheme, was sentenced to prison. From that angle, the details that Darrel Carter knew could be seen as coming from police reports available to the defense in his brother’s case. The similarity of the murder plan to the circumstances of Sandra Bird’s death could be explained by the fact that when Carter concocted the story, he knew how Sandra Bird had died. The meeting at Faith Lutheran had indeed taken place, the defense said; its purpose was not to plot murder, though, but to explore the possibility of Faith youth-group members’ working at Carter’s fireworks stand in order to raise money for a trip to see the Passion play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. After Marty Anderson’s death, Bird had indeed let it be known that he wanted to talk to Carter, the defense said, but that was because Susan Ewert, Lorna Anderson’s friend, had told Bird that Carter was spreading rumors about him, and Bird wanted to put a stop to that. “I’ve heard enough rumors for sure,” Bird could be heard saying to Carter on the tape. “Rumors are rampant.”
During that conversation with Carter, in a bowling-alley parking lot, Bird made what the prosecution presented as incriminating remarks about the meeting at his church (“I just wanted to touch the bases and make sure that we just talked about possibly my youth group sellin’ firecrackers for you”), and about the murder of Martin Anderson (“Well, maybe we ought to be glad that we didn’t follow through”), and about how he felt about Anderson’s death (“I ain’t celebratin’, but I ain’t mournin’, either”). Still, nothing on the tape was absolutely explicit, and Bird took the stand to provide a benign explanation for every remark—mostly based on the contention that what he and Carter hadn’t followed through on was a plan to refer Lorna Anderson to an agency that assists battered wives. When the prosecution managed to bring into evidence two notes from Tom Bird that the police said they had found in Lorna Anderson’s lingerie drawer, Bird said that they were meant simply to buck up Lorna’s spirits and that such sentiments as “I love you so very much and that’s forever” were expressions not of romantic attachment but of “authentic Christian love.”
In describing his efforts to counsel Lorna Anderson, Bird admitted that, emotionally drained by his wife’s death, he might have used bad judgment in providing the gossips with even the appearance of something worth gossiping about. In explaining why he had arranged the parking lot meeting through a go-between, a woman he knew from an inquiry she had made about the Lord’s Lambs Preschool, he admitted a pressure tactic that some jurors might have considered un-Christian: he happened to know that the woman and Darrel Carter were having an affair, he testified, and he figured that making Carter aware of that knowledge might send “the message that everybody is capable of being a victim of rumors.” But that was about all he admitted. Bird said that people who saw him hugging Lorna Anderson while comforting her might not have understood that standing across the room with consoling words would not have been “full communication.” She had a “self-esteem problem” that required a lot of comforting, he said, and he had provided it as her pastor and her employer and her friend, but not as her lover.
“If only he had admitted the affair,” a remarkable number of people in Emporia said when talking about Tom Bird’s trial for criminal solicitation. The defense ha
d insisted that the case amounted to a simple choice of whether to believe Tom Bird or Darrel Carter. In some ways, it was an unequal contest. Darrel Carter was nobody’s idea of a model citizen. He did not claim that his response to having been asked to help murder a friend of his had included outrage or a telephone call to the authorities. He acknowledged—boasted about, the defense might have said—two affairs with married women while he was married himself. Someone who had hired him to build a house took the stand to say that he was “the biggest liar in ten counties.” In contrast, several character witnesses testified that Tom Bird was a trustworthy, God-fearing man. “He is very conscious of the Word of God,” the chairman of Faith Lutheran’s board of lay ministers said, “and he is very deliberate in his close attention and following of the Word of God.”
But practically nobody in Emporia believed Tom Bird when he said he had not had an affair with Lorna Anderson. If only he had admitted the affair, people in Emporia said, the jury might have believed the rest of the story—or might at least have been understanding about what passion could have led him to do. The defense that Emporia people thought might have worked for Tom Bird amounted to a sort of Garden of Eden defense—a tragic twist on the jokes about the preacher and the loose woman. To some people in Emporia, it seemed that Tom Bird could have been presented as a vulnerable man who, at a particularly stressful time in his life, had been led by his passion for a temptress to do some things he came to regret, but who would never have conspired to break God’s commandment against murder. A lot of people in Emporia, in other words, thought that Tom Bird’s only hope was to repent. The people from Faith Lutheran who continued to believe in Pastor Bird right through the trial found that approach enraging. He could not repent, they said, for the simple reason that he had done nothing that required repentance. That, apparently, was not the view of the jury. Bird was found guilty of soliciting murder. He was sentenced to a term of two and a half to seven years in the Kansas State Penitentiary.
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