A Death in Wichita

by Stephen Singular

  During Stupak’s speech on the House floor leading up to the vote, Representative Randy Neugebauer, a third-term Texas Republican, cried out “baby killer.”

  Congress approved health care reform by a vote of 219–212 and the president signed the legislation into law two days later. At least ten Democrats who’d voted for the bill, including Stupak, had their offices vandalized or received death threats.

  Between January and June 2010, eleven states passed laws regulating or restricting abortion, while four other states put forth similar bills that had made it through at least one legislative house. Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi signed a bill barring insurers from covering abortion under the new health care reform act, and the Oklahoma legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill requiring abortion doctors to answer thirty-eight questions about each procedure. Thirteen other states had now introduced or passed similar legislation.

  On April 1, 2010, Judge Wilbert held a sentencing hearing for the convicted man, the last opportunity for Roeder to address the court, the media covering the event, and the national viewing public. The proceeding, which many expected to take an hour or two, ran from nine a.m. until six p.m. before the judge exhaustedly brought it to a conclusion. At one point, he threatened to toss Roeder from the courtroom for the killer’s outbursts against the legal system that had tried and found him guilty. The only issue before the judge was whether he’d make Roeder eligible for parole after serving twenty-five years or give him the Hard 50 and prevent the fifty-two-year-old from coming before the Kansas parole board for half a century—a certain life sentence. The prosecution, led by Nola Foulston and Ann Swegle, and the Tiller family, represented by their attorney Lee Thompson, both delivered statements that echoed each other. Their words were clearly intended to place the murder in a larger context by repeatedly using the terms “hate crime,” “domestic terrorism,” “anarchist,” and “political assassination.”

  “The impact of this crime,” said Thompson, “is felt on the medical profession far beyond Wichita. He [Dr. Tiller] gave his life for the rights of women…His legacy cannot be diminished by the act of a single terrorist.”

  Stalking was one of the aggravating factors in ruling on the Hard 50 sentence, and Foulston emphasized just how long Roeder had tracked the physician before murdering him. He’d first gone to Reformation Lutheran Church in 2002 to develop a strategy to kill the man at his place of worship.

  The defense presented four character witnesses, including Eugene Frye, Dave Leach, and Regina Dinwiddie, who testified about how religiously committed and well mannered Roeder had been around them. The psychologist George Hough, who’d examined the defendant for ten hours in the summer of 2009, told the court that Roeder had chosen to obey God’s laws, not man’s, but he was mentally competent to stand trial.

  The judge spoke at length for the first time since the case had started and part of his decision today depended on whether he felt that this crime was especially “heinous, atrocious, and cruel.” Roeder’s actions fell into that category, Wilbert said, because he’d shot Dr. Tiller not at his home or office or even in the parking lot of Reformation Lutheran but inside the church itself—designed to provide “asylum or sanctuary in our society…the very place that abhors violence.”

  In late afternoon, Roeder himself addressed the court and read extensively from the writings of Paul Hill, who’d killed Dr. John Britton and James Barrett in July 1994. As most everyone who’d spoken with Roeder had discovered, he could appear quite normal for the first ten minutes or so of a conversation, but then his fanaticism over abortion surfaced, along with his rage against government, a feeling that was spreading across America. Four days before the hearing, a federal grand jury in Detroit had indicted nine suspected members of a Christian militia group, the Hutaree, and charged them with plotting to kill local, state, and national law enforcement officials. Three days later, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that another outfit, the Guardians of the Free Republics, wanted to “restore America” by dismantling parts of the government. They’d sent more than thirty governors letters saying that if they didn’t leave office within three days, they’d be “removed.”

  “How is it,” Roeder asked the judge, while complaining about his treatment since his arrest, “that a man can speak openly and freely at his sentencing, but not at his trial? This court stifled my testimony…The blame for George Tiller’s death lies more with the state of Kansas than with me. You may sentence me to twenty-five or fifty years in prison but it does not serve justice in any way…I agree with Paul Hill wholeheartedly. God will avenge every drop of blood that stains Kansas grass…Give me liberty to defend the unborn or give me death.”

  For more than half an hour, the judge let him ramble without interruption, until he began attacking the district attorney, sitting a few feet from Roeder. Then Wilbert stepped in.

  “You killed Dr. Tiller,” he said. “You’re not going to politically assassinate Nola Foulston. I’m going to draw the line there.”

  Roeder was undeterred.

  “If you would follow a higher power,” he told the judge, “you would acquit me.”

  “If you think,” Wilbert replied, “you’re going to convince me with some last-minute plea, you’re wasting your time…I’m not going to provide you with an all-night political forum.”

  After forty-five minutes of listening to Roeder speechify, the judge delivered his ruling, giving the killer fifty years plus two more for threatening Gary Hoepner and Keith Martin at the church on the day of the murder.

  The proceeding was finished, but not Scott Roeder.

  As he was being ushered out of the courtroom by the beefy guards for the final time, he tried to turn back toward the prosecutors’ table, but was restrained.

  “The blood of babies,” he yelled, “is on your hands, Nola Foulston and Ann Swegle!”

  Later, outside the courthouse, the DA summed up her experience by saying, “This was a difficult case [and] the difficulty was apparent from the emotion that rang across the courtroom…across our community, and across the world.” A few weeks later, as the one-year anniversary of the murder approached, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, spoke about the physician on the floor of Congress: “He was murdered by an unrepentant assassin who took a life in the name of protecting life. It was an indefensible crime and an incomprehensible excuse.”

  The Reverend Dr. Carlton Veazey, president of Washington, D.C.’s Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which had held a memorial for Dr. Tiller in June 2009, also honored the occasion. “Today,” Reverend Veazey said: “we call on all who value life to join with us in recommitting ourselves to creating the kind of society that George Tiller sought—in his words, where ‘every pregnancy is an invited guest in the woman’s body and a welcome addition to her family.’ In such a society, women would be trusted to make decisions about pregnancy, doctors would provide health care without fear, and conscience and religious beliefs about reproductive choice would be respected. We pray that the compassion, wisdom, and courage of Dr. George Tiller will be carried forward in creating this world.”

  Around the first anniversary of Dr. Tiller’s murder, Lindsey drove down to Wichita for the first time since the killing, determined to visit the sites her ex-husband had made famous and notorious. The FBI had been speaking with her lately, indicating that the federal investigation of Roeder was not finished. Pulling up in front of Reformation Lutheran Church and staring at the large redbrick structure, she couldn’t make herself go inside and look at the foyer where the physician had died. Leaving the crime scene, she found the office building that had long been Dr. Tiller’s clinic and stepped out of her car, walking up to the fence surrounding the structure and tucking a bouquet of white silk lilies above a “No Trespassing” sign, her belated tribute to the man. She went by the cheap motel where Scott had stayed the night before the shooting and felt something she’d felt at the other locations: everything was sma
ller than it had appeared on television, yet being here in person added an emotional dimension to the tragedy that TV couldn’t convey.

  She’d come nearer to a sense of closure than before, but that would remain elusive as long as her former husband kept sending letters to her son. Nick refused to read them but asked his mother to, and one that had arrived on May 27, 2010, tried to justify Roeder’s actions through what Lindsey called “Scott’s usual blackmail.”

  If you don’t respond to this letter, the inmate had written the young man, “Then I will know that you agree with me.”

  In an e-mail she sent out after receiving the letter, Lindsey said, “I would think he would learn that does not work on us anymore—we are safe from him.”

  That evening in June 2009 in my hometown, I drove out into the countryside, turning up the car’s CD player and letting out the music of Muddy Waters and B.B. King, so loud that it rattled the dashboard and flushed some crows from the branches of a cottonwood tree. I stuck my head out the window and felt the breeze on my cheeks—shivering with the memory of what I’d seen a few hours earlier at the swimming pool, an everyday event but also a reminder of the progress our country had witnessed in the past half century. The acceptance of a new skin color in my hometown was as significant, in the context of my upbringing, as the arrival of a black face in charge of the White House.

  As the music blared and the sun went down and the western horizon became golden pink, I allowed myself to feel that my generation—despite the talk show madness, the endless narcissism, and the constant violence against ourselves and our children—had accomplished something in my lifetime. Our job, unlike my father’s, had never been to go abroad and defeat an enemy as obvious as the Nazis, or to bring down the Vietnamese or the Soviet Union with our unlimited bullets and bombs. It had always been to confront ourselves and our deepest prejudices and angers, our terror of change and our most secret and damaging ghosts. And to find a new way to live with them or to let them go.

  America had survived its first civil war, and we’d come a distance in the second one, still searching for that more perfect union. This afternoon I’d glimpsed where we were going and what we were capable of, and it had constricted my throat and lifted my heart once more. Riding over the dusty gravel roads of my birthplace, returning to the blue notes and steady 4/4 beat that had always given me the greatest joy and deepest hope, and always pushed away the fear and ignorance, I sensed that despite our current troubles we were never turning back.

  In recent times a lot had been written about what was the matter with Kansas, and that subject didn’t resound any deeper with anyone than it did with me. A lot had also been written about what had been lost since the good old days in the Sunflower State, but I’d just seen and felt what had been gained—and there was no comparison. Both Kansas and America were more creative and more unpredictable than any nostalgia could suggest. We’d survived historical messes and tragedies before and might just do so now, if we leaned on the foundation of law, equality, and self-rule we were given at birth. These had been won through blood, worth every drop, and we undermined or attacked them at our peril. It was indeed time to wake up. So I rolled down all the windows and plunged farther into the countryside, cranking up the music again, letting it ride the wind and shake the darkening sky.

  AFTERWORD

  What happened with women’s reproductive rights following the initial publication of A Death in Wichita was unexpected and monumental. The 2009 assassination of Dr. Tiller seemed to unleash a new boldness in the anti-choice forces across America. In 2010, state legislatures introduced more than 600 measures designed to limit access to abortion and 23 of them passed. That year’s midterm elections saw 45 new anti-choice candidates win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania) announced that Congress was now “more pro-life than it’s ever been.” In 2011, 49 state legislatures wrote more than 900 bills seeking to curtail abortion. Eighty of them became law.

  With the steady reduction of abortion providers around the nation, Planned Parenthood had begun playing an increasingly significant role in women’s lives. The organization offered nearly 2.5 million low-income women family-planning counseling as well as screening for sexually transmitted diseases, diabetes, and various cancers. Planned Parenthood received no taxpayer money for abortions, but did fund its own abortion services. In April 2011, the GOP pushed the federal government to the edge of a total shutdown in an effort to cut the entire $317-million Planned Parenthood program of family planning aid. In response, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) called the latest wave of anti-choice activities the biggest assault on women’s rights “in our lifetime.”

  In South Dakota, GOP state representative Phil Jensen sponsored a bill expanding the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include a murder done to prevent harm to a fetus—a piece of legislation that some interpreted as legalizing the killing of doctors who performed abortions. House Bill 1171 passed out of committee on a 9–3 vote, but hasn’t yet become law.

  In October 2011, I was invited to talk to a Houston women’s group about A Death in Wichita. Also speaking that evening was Texas State Representative Carol Alvarado, whose own legislature had recently introduced a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to get a vaginal probe ultrasound. Because Rep. Alvarado did not think that her male colleagues understood what this measure physically entailed for women, she decided to demonstrate the probe on the Texas House floor. The men were shocked to learn that this was not the “jelly on the belly” ultrasound that many pregnant women had experienced—and many expectant husbands had witnessed—but a highly invasive procedure. Other states introduced bills similar to the one in Texas, and by early 2012, pundits and politicians were calling all of these anti-choice measures a “War on Women.”

  When legislators from nearly every state in the nation became focused on—or obsessed with—women’s reproductive organs, something new was unfolding in America, something that went beyond a recitation of the above statistics. Nearly 30 years earlier, with the Denver assassination of Alan Berg in 1984, I’d begun studying the link between extreme religious convictions and domestic terrorism. Since first venturing into this subject, I’d found myself returning to one thought again and again, and the same thing happened during the flood of anti-choice activities in 2011 and the 2012 presidential election cycle. Those who opposed women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and the expansion of fundamental liberties on the grounds of their religious beliefs reflected a very real discomfort with the recent speed and amount of change in our society. Their reaction to this change often came out in political or religious rhetoric and manifested as racism or sexism or other forms of bigotry, but it struck me as something deeper: an almost biological response to so much new stimuli in their environment. Their real message was that they didn’t want to adapt to this new world or didn’t know how to or didn’t think they could (and of course many well-known commentators were strongly encouraging them not to). What better way to push back against all of this change than to attack women who were striving to manage their own biological destiny?

  In March 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped into this issue when addressing a global audience: “Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe but even here at home we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”

  The “even here at home” reference was to Rush Limbaugh who’d just called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, a “slut” and “a prostitute” because she’d testified to Congress that contraceptive coverage in health care programs was important to women. On the radio, Li
mbaugh claimed that Fluke “wanted you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex…as many times and as often as they want, with as many partners as they want.”

  Following Limbaugh’s outburst, for the first time ever women (and men) throughout the nation vehemently protested his remarks—until advertisers started fleeing his show. Another round of protests had erupted when the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure had decided to stop providing grant money for breast exams to Planned Parenthood because of its connection to abortion services. The outcry over this was so harsh that the Foundation quickly dropped this policy and continued the grants, but the organization’s reputation had been damaged. Then Mitt Romney, the leading GOP presidential candidate in 2012, stated that he wanted to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. The “War on Women” had reached the highest level of American politics.

  The most provocative and revealing statements of all came from former U.S. Senator and current GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum. On March 6, after winning primaries that evening in Tennessee and Oklahoma, he addressed his supporters on national television, stating that the rights of human beings came from “the Creator” and not from government. It was more or less a throwaway line from Santorum. He said these kinds of things all the time on the stump now, but it took a while for the magnitude of what he was claiming to sink in. Had anyone in his position ever made a comment that was so blindly ahistorical? The rights of African Americans, of women to be able to vote, of gay people to be treated as equal to other U.S. citizens, had all been won not through divine intervention, but through concrete political struggle.

  No Creator had handed any of these people their rights, and in the case of African Americans, they’d been secured through bloodshed and years of warfare. Human courage and sacrifice and conscious moral choices made by later-assassinated figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King had brought about these changes and pushed the U.S. closer to providing its people with “liberty and justice for all.” Santorum’s remarks were not simply unfactual. They were a denial of the American experiment in self-governance and of what we’ve collectively achieved by moving past the notion that human beings had to live under the divine rule of kings or dictators.