Free A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular

an effigy of Dr. Gunn with Genesis 9:6—“Whosoever shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed”—hanging from its neck. When Griffin asked Gunn to identify himself, the physician stared back and told him to leave. Before walking off, Griffin announced that the Lord was giving Dr. Gunn one more chance to change his ways. Griffin then stood up during a service at his church, Whitfield Assembly of God, and asked if the congregation agreed with him that David Gunn should get saved and stop killing babies. Worshippers nodded and prayed for Dr. Gunn’s soul.
    Three days later, as Gunn stepped from his car at Pensacola’s Women’s Medical Services clinic, Griffin shot and killed the doctor with three .38-caliber bullets in his back. The next morning, Congress asked the FBI to launch an investigation into the murder, while anti-abortionists celebrated the death. One celebrant was the Floridian Paul Hill, who at seventeen had assaulted his father and caused his parents, who hoped he’d get treatment for his drug abuse, to file charges against him. The young man soon had a born-again Christian experience, but held such virulent anti-abortion views that his own Presbyterian church excommunicated him. Hill attended Michael Griffin’s murder trial as a show of support for the assassin, and protested the verdict when Griffin got life without parole.
    Dr. John Britton, who replaced Gunn at the Pensacola clinic, wore a bulletproof vest and carried a pistol to work. Abortion protesters made an “Unwanted” poster of him and left a pamphlet on his front stoop with a headline reading, “What Would You Do if You Had Five Minutes to Live?”
    Some in the anti-abortion movement had moved far beyond civil disobedience, and Scott Roeder was moving with them.

VIII
    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