A Death in Wichita (6 page)

In the early 1990s, after Roeder came back home to live with his wife and son, he decided to take over the family’s finances as “the man of the house.” Like many other anti-abortionists, he was familiar with and greatly admired the writings of Saint Paul. One New Testament Epistle written by Saint Paul read, “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.” For Roeder, being the man of the house did not mean holding a steady job, but learning more about how to evade paying taxes. The more of this information he absorbed, the more stressed he became, and the more verbally and emotionally abusive he was toward Lindsey and his young son. When he spanked Nick, he held him up in the air by the arms, and one time when he was finished, he dropped the boy on the floor.

“If you ever do that again,” Lindsey told him, “I’m calling the police.”

Despite this behavior, Roeder’s relationship with the child was complex and poignant, no doubt the deepest emotional connection in his life. It’s too simple to say that he loved Nicholas and more accurate to say that he tried to love him in the only way he knew how. Roeder desperately wanted his son to understand who he was and why he believed what he did. It never seemed to occur to him that a six- or seven-year-old didn’t see the world in adult terms and looked to him for other kinds of support.

Lindsey ran the family and tried not to be overwhelmed. She had a serious heart condition, which prevented her from having another child and required expensive medication, and she diligently navigated her son through boyhood with a troubled father. They still lived in the same small house with her aging dad—a volatile mix. She’d used her elementary education degree to become a teacher and then director of a child care center at Knox Presbyterian Church in Overland Park. Things hadn’t turned out at all as she’d hoped when marrying Scott, but she was determined to make the best of it and protect Nicholas, which meant avoiding political or religious discussions with her husband. Like most Kansans, and most Americans, she believed that a woman had the right to decide what to do with her own body, but was careful not to say this directly to her husband. One day she was teaching preschoolers when an enraged mother stormed into her classroom, picked up her child, and threw the youngster against a metal cabinet.

“I should have had an abortion when I could have!” the woman shouted.

Lindsey recoiled.

“Later on,” she says, “when I’d had a chance to think about it, I felt that the woman was probably right. I told Scott about what I’d seen and said that not everyone was cut out to be a parent, but that only made him angrier.”

His anger was evolving into action. In the spring of 1994, he began associating with members of local militia movements who were stockpiling firearms. The year before, the FBI had entered the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to end a standoff between the sect’s leader, David Koresh, and the authorities. The buildings erupted into flames, killing seventy-six people inside the compound and spreading paranoia among the anti-government groups. That paranoia reached into the Roeder household and came out in Scott’s ramblings and other behaviors. He wouldn’t drink tap water anymore, because it was laced with fluoride that would give him cancer; he insisted on buying bottled water instead. He had to have pricey vitamin B tablets and garlic pills, which smelled bad, to ward off other diseases being spread by the government. And he had to be prepared if his enemies came after him. As the man of the house, he’d recently forgotten to pay the bill for Lindsey’s heart medicine, putting her health at risk. After getting her next paycheck, she gave him some money and told him to go pick up her drugs. He came back with a gun instead.

She thought about kicking him out again, but faced the same dilemma as before: while her husband was clearly becoming more radical, he hadn’t broken any laws or physically abused his family members, at least not to the point of criminal activity. Despite his verbal assaults on Lindsey and his tirades about abortion, he had a gentler side. He made a point of taking bugs out of the house and letting them live in a natural environment, rather than killing them. Many who worked with or befriended Roeder were struck by his kindness and willingness to help. He may have been associated with people on the far right holding viciously racist views, but he didn’t feel he was racist and was sensitive about being perceived that way. Violence was wrong, he often told people, no matter how deeply one felt about an issue. Still, if the couple divorced, he’d get a joint custody arrangement with Nicholas, and Scott was no longer just potentially dangerous, but armed. Wasn’t it safer to have him inside the house, where she could keep an eye on him?

He had an old, flimsy-looking Bible he carried around and quoted from. One day he and Lindsey got into an argument because he didn’t think she was obeying him as much as she should—or as much as he thought the Scriptures instructed her to. He liked to tell their friends that she was an atheist, even though she regularly attended church services at Knox Presbyterian. There were a lot of things she wanted to say to him about women’s rights and her own political convictions, but she’d held back for the sake of her marriage and son. As the argument heated up, she grabbed the old Bible and hurled it at him.

“Stop twisting the word of God!” she shouted.

“You could have hurt me,” he said, shocked at what his wife had done.

The couple moved to the brink of another separation, but once again she let him stay.

Scott was convinced that the FBI or ATF had tapped their phones and was monitoring his words and movements. Lindsey doubted this was true, but hoped it was. Sometimes, she picked up the receiver, imagined that someone really was listening, and said aloud that her husband was out of control and needed to be stopped before it was too late. Nobody responded to her pleas. Instead, she received calls from Scott’s political and religious allies at all hours of the day.

“After speaking with me,” she says, “most of these people realized that I wasn’t the person my husband had told them I was. I wasn’t a monster. They were calling because they were worried that he might try to kill me. They said that he was upset with me for not believing as he did or allowing him to be the head of household or man of the house. I was warned repeatedly that he had a rifle with a long-range sight on it. I tried to talk about this with some of his family members, but they didn’t want to hear it.”

When Scott asked if he could bring home a couple of his buddies to live with them, Lindsey said no. He was increasingly manic—not sleeping or eating much, and reading more about the coming End Times, when the earth would reach a devastating climax and only those saved by Jesus would escape into heaven. The fire at Waco had put the far-right extremists on alert and convinced many that the Apocalypse was at hand. Roeder was expanding his contacts inside that underground, associating with Mark Koernke, a prominent Michigan militia activist who in 2001 would be sentenced to three to seven years for resisting arrest and assaulting the police. Roeder had hooked up with the Unorganized Kansas Militia, led by Morris Wilson and now conducting maneuvers in the woods. Some of its members were connected with Terry Nichols, who’d joined forces with Timothy McVeigh, and in the spring of 1995, the word moving through the Midwest’s radical circles was that “Timmy V was gonna go smoke some Okies.”

McVeigh and Nichols had met in the late 1980s in army basic training. Both were angered by the 1992 FBI standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, which had left Weaver’s son, Sammy, dead. They were further outraged the next year by the siege at Waco. McVeigh had visited the Branch Davidian compound during the standoff and after seventy-six people had lost their lives. Like the men who’d murdered Alan Berg, McVeigh was very familiar with the violent fantasy novel
The Turner Diaries
, peddling it at gun shows. One chapter outlined how a truck holding a homemade bomb was detonated in front of FBI headquarters in Washington at 9:15 on a weekday morning. Seven hundred people died in the fictional carnage.

“It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear,” said the book’s protagonist, Earl Turner, “since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns who were no more committed to the sick philosophy or the racially destructive goals of the System than we are. But there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people…. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us…our whole race will die.”

On September 30, 1994, Nichols went to the Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson and bought forty 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a vast amount by the standards of local famers. He bought one more bag for good measure. On April 14, 1995, McVeigh paid for a room at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City in eastern Kansas. Using the alias Robert D. Kling he rented a Ryder truck, and on April 16 he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City and planted a getaway car a few blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They went back to Herington, Kansas, and loaded the Ryder truck with fertilizer, fuses, and other bomb-making materials. On April 19, McVeigh exploded the truck outside the Murrah building and killed 168 men, women, and children.

At McVeigh’s 1997 federal trial in Denver, the witness Charles Farley testified that he saw several men near the loaded Ryder truck outside Junction City on April 18, 1995. Farley confirmed a photo of one man, later identified as Morris Wilson, the Kansas militia leader and acquaintance of Scott Roeder.

“I remember watching the Oklahoma City bombing that morning on TV,” says Lindsey. “When I realized it was connected to Waco, I was scared to death. Scott was always ranting and raving about what had happened there.”

By the time of the bombing, Roeder had moved out again and was living with an anti-government couple in Kansas City. He’d taken everything with him: the family car, their money, and any hope of reconciliation. One day a woman called Lindsey and said she was going to steal Roeder away from his wife.

“You can have him,” Lindsey replied.

It had been increasingly painful for her to watch him suffer the past few years, to see his alienation and paranoia growing, and not be able to stop this. One night in February 1995, two months before the Oklahoma City bombing, Lindsey, Nick, and Scott attended a “Blue and Gold” Cub Scout banquet. Scott stared at the other couples, watching the fathers interacting with their young sons, laughing and enjoying each other. Wasn’t that what he wanted? What was more important than being close to the boy in the years when he was small and just learning about life and needed a father’s guidance? The men and women in the room looked happy to be married and raising kids together. He’d had this once, but thrown it away because of his religious and political convictions. The banquet left him shaken.

“Afterwards,” says Lindsey, “he was very despondent. I heard how depressed he was from the wife of the couple he’d been living with. She told me that he had a girlfriend who was pregnant and this woman wanted to get an abortion. The baby wasn’t Scott’s, but had been fathered by the woman’s husband, who wanted her to get an abortion. Scott was so down about this that he was thinking of committing suicide.”

The girlfriend had made three separate appointments with doctors to get an abortion, and later told Lindsey that one of them was George Tiller. Three times Roeder had talked her out of going through with this, and she eventually had the child.

“The day after the banquet,” says Lindsey, “Scott called and told me, ‘I can’t believe I’ve messed things up so badly. Look at what I’ve done to our marriage,’ and then he quoted something from the Bible.”

Worried about what Scott might do to himself, Lindsey called his sister, Denise, in Topeka, and explained that he was coming out of a manic phase and crashing into a depression. He needed help. Denise drove to Kansas City, took him back to Topeka, and checked him into a hospital. Doctors put him on medication and wanted to treat him, but he bolted the next morning, threw away his meds, and never returned to the hospital.

“The medication,” Lindsey says, “made him feel weird, just as it had in high school. After this episode, he went back to Kansas City, ignored his depression, and got more involved with the militia.”

This time he gravitated toward the “Freemen” movement based in eastern Montana, which claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction, laws, regulations, and taxes. The Freemen were an ideological offshoot of the Posse Comitatus, which had arisen in the Midwest during the mid-1980s farm depression (and from the earlier Minutemen). They believed that God had given them—as white sovereign property owners in Montana—this western land, which they had to defend from other races coming across the border from Mexico. In March 1996, FBI agents and local law enforcement surrounded their 960-acre “Justus Township” compound. After an eighty-one-day standoff, the Freemen peacefully surrendered, with fourteen of them facing criminal charges relating to financial scams and threatening the life of a federal judge.

In April 1996, Roeder was stopped in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff’s deputies pulled him over for driving with an improper license plate. It read, “Sovereign private property. Immunity declared by law. Non-commercial American,” and it connected him with the Freemen. In his car, officers found a fuse cord, a blasting cap, ammunition, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries wired to trigger a bomb, which he’d intended to detonate at night at an empty abortion clinic. He was charged with one count of criminal use of explosives, failure to carry a Kansas registration or liability insurance, and driving on a suspended license. After his arrest, no one in his family offered to bail him out, as his father was convinced that jail would finally give Scott a chance to learn from his mistakes.

Following his conviction, Roeder was sentenced to twenty-four months of probation and ordered to dissociate himself from all anti-government groups advocating violence. Because of his arrest, he’d become visible to those who monitor groups on the extreme right, like Topeka’s Suzanne James. She tracked right-wing radicals moving around eastern Kansas, and felt that for decades the state had been far too friendly to such activists—one in particular.