A Death in Wichita (21 page)

That Sunday morning Dan Monnat had been in his law office in downtown Wichita, just a few blocks from the Eighteenth Judicial District Courthouse, where Tiller had been tried and acquitted two months earlier. Monnat was working on a case when he got a call from Tim Potter, a crime reporter for
The Wichita Eagle.

“What have you heard?” the journalist asked him.

“What are you talking about?” the attorney said.

“I’m sorry,” Potter replied, “but Dr. Tiller has been shot—again.”

Monnat was shocked, but in the next instant he told himself that it must have been another failed attempt on the physician’s life. George might be wounded, the way he was before, but he’d be back at his clinic tomorrow or later in the week. Then Monnat learned the grim news: this time Dr. Tiller was dead.

The lawyer knew that his wife, Grace, was at home working outside on a ladder, without her cell phone handy. He drove to the house to tell her in person and both of them returned to his place of business, located inside a secure building not far from WPD headquarters. Monnat was worried about the safety of not just himself and his family, but of everyone on Tiller’s staff and all those who’d been on their defense team at the March trial. He phoned everybody from that team and said to come down to his office, now serving as an impromptu operations site for the press calls pouring in from around the nation. Through people close to Jeanne Tiller, he conveyed to her that his legal staff would handle all media matters and shield the grieving family from the coming onrush of attention—the hundreds of e-mails and phone messages with requests for interviews. Monnat and the other lawyers decided, with Jeanne’s approval, that this was no time for passivity or silence, no matter how much they were hurting. They needed to begin speaking out now for Dr. Tiller, so that not just the anti-abortionists and their view of the slain man would be represented on the airwaves.

Monnat stayed at his office until midnight on May 31, talking with National Public Radio and other press. He was back four hours later to go on the air with CBS’s
Early Show
, and then MSNBC and CNN. For days that stretched into weeks, he’d be much too busy dealing with the media, funeral issues, the Tiller family, and inquiries about the future of the clinic to reflect on his own personal loss.

“We didn’t want to make Dr. Tiller’s death a political occasion,” he says, “but beginning on the afternoon of May thirty-first we felt that his life should be honored, all of it, not just his work. His life as a husband of forty-five years, a father of four, a grandfather of ten, a navy flight surgeon, a man with a great sense of humor, and an individual committed to his church, his community, and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was our job to let the public know that he wasn’t just a human being, but a heroic human being, because we knew that other people were going to be saying a lot of terrible things about him.”

That morning Lindsey and Nick Roeder had taken her father to Knox Presbyterian in Overland Park for the Sunday service. At the church, Nick had helped his ninety-year-old granddad get around in his wheelchair, and then he brought him back home, made him lunch, and gave him an insulin shot. Lindsey had to stay longer at Knox because today was kindergarten graduation and she was director of the child care center in the basement. About 1:45 p.m., Nick returned to the church to pick up his mother, and they stopped by McDonald’s. A long waiting line held them up, so they didn’t get to the house till after 2:15.

At 2:30, someone pounded on the front door, an unusually aggressive knock.

“It must be your dad,” Lindsey called out.

Nick’s response was reflexive. “Don’t answer it.”

She opened the door a few inches and a huge man was standing there with a raised fist. He jammed it through the crack and Lindsey wasn’t strong enough to shut the door. After identifying himself as a federal agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, he said that he needed to talk to her. Panicking but trying not to show it, she told Nick to take his grandfather to the back of the house. Lindsey stepped outside.

“Is Scott Roeder in there?” the man asked.

She said that for years he hadn’t been allowed inside her residence.

“We don’t know this for sure, but we think he’s murdered someone.”

As the words filtered through her, Lindsey didn’t seem able to make sense of them. She swayed as if she might faint, but the agent reached out and caught her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Dr. George Tiller has been murdered.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s a late-term abortion doctor in Wichita and…”

Inside the house, the phone was ringing. She ignored it, steadying herself on her feet and slowly absorbing what she was being told.

“Scott,” she said, “was really against abortion.”

Who, the agent asked, had left her house forty-five minutes ago in her car?

That was Nick, her son, she explained, realizing that the ATF had been sitting on her street for quite a while this afternoon, watching her residence and everyone who went into and came out of it.

“We need to speak with him,” the agent said.

The phone was ringing again, but she made no move to answer it.

If the agent wanted to talk to Nick, he’d have to come outside, because the stranger wasn’t going inside her home.

“All right,” he said.

She went in and returned shortly with her son, who was telling Lindsey that his grandfather could hear all the activity around their house and was upset by it. Nick turned to the agent and tried to convince him that the only other person left in the house was his ninety-year-old granddad. The phone rang again, so Lindsey unplugged it.

A TV crew from Kansas City, the ABC affiliate, was pulling up in front of the residence. More media trucks were on their way.

His father, Nick told the agent, didn’t live in Merriam, Kansas, anymore, but shared an apartment with someone in Westport.

“Can you take me there?” the man said.

They got in an ATF car and drove across the state line into Missouri, to the apartment rented by Roeder and Kamran Tehrani.

Lindsey had gone back inside to try to calm down her father, but more people were knocking on her front door.

Using her cell phone, she called Knox Presbyterian and asked to speak with her pastor, briefly laying out for him what had happened and saying that she wouldn’t be coming in tomorrow. Hanging up, she looked out the window and saw a young man approaching her house, thinking it was a TV journalist. When she opened the door, he said he was an FBI agent and needed to talk with her. Before she could respond, a woman jumped out from the side of her house and landed in front of her, frightening Lindsey. It was a reporter, and the agent shooed her away.

When he asked if any other government agencies had contacted her, Lindsey told him that the ATF had been lurking outside her home at least since her son had left to pick her up from church about 1:45. An ATF agent had just left with Nick, headed to Roeder’s apartment.

This information clearly agitated the FBI man, who said that he had to talk with her son—at once.

From inside the house, Lindsey’s father was watching TV and yelling.

“Scott’s been arrested!” he shouted. “Picked up!”

“Scott’s been arrested?” she called over her shoulder.

“Yes!”

“He’s been arrested,” Lindsey told the agent, and the news agitated him even more.

“No way,” he said, asking for Nick’s cell phone number.

She gave it to him and he dialed, while Lindsey listened to the conversation and looked on in amazement. A U.S. government law enforcement turf war between the ATF and the FBI was unfolding on her front stoop. The ATF agent with Nick wouldn’t let the FBI agent communicate with her son or reveal Scott’s address in Westport. These people, Lindsey told herself, really don’t talk to one another in the middle of a crisis, just like on those TV police shows.

The FBI man walked off and disappeared.

Reporters and TV producers kept coming all afternoon and into the evening, from Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita. Then they began calling Lindsey from New York and Los Angeles.

“We had press,” she says, “out the wazoo.”

A journalist asked her to deliver a statement on behalf of her and Nick about the death of Dr. Tiller. As best she could under the circumstances, she put together a few words expressing their sympathy for the physician’s family, and it went out across America. Deep into the night, Nick searched Google for information about the crime and his father’s role in it. The name Scott Roeder had generated tens of thousands of hits and somebody had already written a song about him, recorded it, and uploaded it to YouTube.

The next morning, after learning that his brother had been arrested for the murder of George Tiller, David Roeder called the local FBI office and told them how Scott had come to his home on Saturday afternoon and taken target practice with a .22 handgun in the woods behind it. He explained that the weapon had jammed and they’d had to take it into a gun shop for repairs and while there his brother had bought more ammunition. David was most interested in telling the feds that his fingerprints might be on the .22, but that he’d had nothing to do with the killing of Dr. Tiller. Later that day, the feds came to his property to retrieve the empty shell casings from the rounds that Scott had left in the ground.

Like the shots fired at South Carolina’s Fort Sumter in January 1861, opening the War Between the States, the single shot at Reformation Lutheran unleashed the emotions behind the cultural battle the country had been fighting for decades—Americans began either mourning or celebrating Dr. Tiller’s death. Some laid the blame on the religious right and conservative commentators such as Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. Others blamed the physician himself. An Operation Rescue Web site,
chargetiller.com
, was immediately taken down and the Internet was afire with speculation. What did the murder mean for the anti-abortion movement, with its greatest enemy now dead? What would happen to Tiller’s clinic? What about his Kansas patients and the five thousand out-of-state women who came to Wichita each year seeking counseling or an abortion? Were his co-workers, friends, and family under threat?

By Sunday afternoon, the news out of Wichita was affecting the highest levels of government. U.S. marshals were mobilized nationwide to offer more protection to abortion clinics, and Attorney General Eric Holder was preparing to order the Department of Justice to launch a federal investigation into the killing. President Obama issued a statement from the White House:

“I was shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller, as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences over difficult issues, such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

Warren Hern of Boulder, one of the last doctors left to perform late-term abortions, delivered his own public statement about the murder:

“I think it’s the inevitable consequence of more than 35 years of constant anti-abortion terrorism, harassment, and violence.”

Because President Obama supported legalized abortion, Hern said, abortion foes “have lost ground…. They want the doctors dead, and they invite people to assassinate us. No wonder that this happens. I am next on the list.”

On its Web site, Operation Rescue posted: “We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

Kansans for Life, said its executive director, Mary Kay Culp, “deplores the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and we wish to express our deep and sincere sympathy to his family and friends. Our organization has a board of directors, and a 35-year history of bringing citizens together to achieve thoughtful education and legislation on the life issues here in Kansas. We value life, completely deplore violence, and are shocked and very upset by what happened in Wichita today.”

The Kansas chapter of NOW was “deeply saddened at the cowardly act of violence committed against Dr. George Tiller, a champion for women’s reproductive freedom—an act that ultimately took his life. Dr. Tiller, although previously surviving many acts of terrorism and violence directed at him and his clinic, did not allow it to stop him from standing up for the rights of all women. Kansas NOW grieves not only the loss of Dr. Tiller, but also the loss that all women needing access to safe abortions have suffered due to this act of violence…”

Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said, “I am saddened to hear of the killing of George Tiller this morning. At this point, we do not know the motives of this act, or who is behind it, whether an angry post-abortive man or woman, or a misguided activist, or an enemy within the abortion industry, or a political enemy frustrated with the way Tiller has escaped prosecution. We should not jump to conclusions or rush to judgment. But whatever the motives, we at Priests for Life continue to insist on a culture in which violence is never seen as the solution to any problem. Every life has to be protected, without regard to their age or views or actions.”

“Some of us who worked at Wesley Medical Center,” said a nurse employed at this Wichita hospital, “felt that Tiller’s death was about what goes around comes around. But others couldn’t understand why crazies would kill him. I believe in choice and felt that his murder could send us back to the days of coat-hanger abortions.”

From Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Phill Kline said that he was “stunned by this lawless and violent act which must be condemned and should be met with the full force of law. We join in lifting prayer that God’s grace and presence rest with Dr. Tiller’s family and friends.”

“Dr. Tiller’s murder,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, “will send a chill down the spines of the brave and courageous providers and other professionals who are part of reproductive-health centers that serve women across this country…We also call on opponents of a woman’s right to choose to condemn this action completely and absolutely. What happened today in Wichita cannot become the beginning of a more aggressive wave of violence targeting abortion providers and the women for whom they provide care…”

Operation Rescue’s founder, Randall Terry, was unconcerned with being diplomatic.

“George Tiller,” he said, “was a mass murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”

In an extensive videotaped speech running more than six minutes, Terry said that Tiller “had blood all over his hands” and was “every bit as evil as Nazi war criminals.” The anti-abortion movement should not stop showing people pictures of dead babies: “our best weapons of rhetoric…and our most effective images.” In the background as Terry spoke were arrayed Christian symbols, including a cross, several angels, and other religious figurines.

Since 2002, Julie Burkhart had run Tiller’s political action committee, ProKanDo, which came to an end on May 31, 2009.

“I was in a meeting that day in Washington, D.C., at the Embassy Row Hilton hotel,” she recalls, “and my husband sent me a text message. Then another friend sent me a text, saying Dr. Tiller was dead. There was just this feeling of heaviness that was almost paralyzing, and it’s still there.

“When you work every day in this kind of environment—I saw the bulletproof vest in Dr. Tiller’s office and rode in his car with the bullet-proof windows—you start to think that you’re immune to the violence. It’s not going to happen to you or someone you work with. I thought he’d eventually retire and spend his time with his grandchildren.”

On its Web site’s home page, the Army of God depicted flames burning under Tiller’s body as it was being carried out of his church on a gurney.

“Large numbers of innocent children scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller,” the site read, “are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder…George Tiller, Babykiller, reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell…Psalm 55:15, Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.”

“After getting the news,” says Julie Burkhart, “I caught the first plane out of D.C. for Wichita. I felt just shock and utter disbelief, and all this anger. It was a life-altering experience for me. All I could think about on the flight was, ‘The fuckers got him,’ and all the work we’d done together and all the work he’d done before I’d met him had been taken away in an instant. Dr. Tiller always said that until you understand the heart of a woman, abortion doesn’t make sense. It’s only when you get to know the heart that you can understand. This is not a cerebral or medical issue.”

In the spring of 2009 following Tiller’s acquittal, Bill O’Reilly had increasingly referred to “Tiller the baby killer.” On his first show after the murder, the talk show host declared that “quick-thinking Americans” should condemn his violent death.

“Anarchy and vigilantism will assure the collapse of any society,” he said. “Once the rule of law breaks down a country is finished.”

Speaking of O’Reilly in
Salon
, Gabriel Winant wrote that no other person bore as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller “as a savage on the loose, killing babies.” Winant cited how Tiller’s name had first appeared on the
Factor
in February 2005 and since then O’Reilly and his guest hosts had brought up the doctor on twenty-eight more episodes, including April 27 of this year.

“Almost invariably,” Winant wrote, “Tiller is described as ‘Tiller the Baby Killer.’”

On June 1, the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted online, “Prepare for collective demonization of pro-lifers and Christians—and more gratuitous attempts to tar talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party movement as responsible for the heinous crime.”

A few weeks after the homicide, Ann Coulter came on
The O’Reilly Factor
and, while indicating that she was personally against the shooting of abortion doctors, said she didn’t want to impose her values on others.

“I don’t really like to think of it as a murder,” she stated. “It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.”