scott roeder woke up in the motel room in Wichita on Sunday morning. It was past nine, and he was still in his pajamas under the bedspread. He had packed a small suitcase and brought his sleep-apnea machine. He never went a night without that. It was part of the reason he’d slept well. Plus, he hadn’t felt at all speedy or preoccupied last night, like he sometimes did. If he was nervous, it was only that the thing wouldn’t go off as planned. He lazed about in the room for a while, just kind of zoning. It wasn’t until nine thirty that he realized: The service at Reformation Lutheran starts at ten! Not ten thirty! He’d been there half a dozen times. He’d been there just last Sunday. But still, for some reason, he had it in his head that it was ten thirty. He could get distracted, and he wasn’t always good with details, last names, that kind of thing. Besides, even if he planned everything perfectly, there was no guarantee that today, Sunday, May 31, would be the day. He’d been out to Wichita to kill Dr. George Tiller last Sunday, too, and Dr. Tiller wasn’t even there.

The motel he’d picked—probably the Starlight, he couldn’t remember the name—was just ten minutes from the church, but he’d still have to hurry. He put on a wrinkled white dress shirt, some dark slacks, and black shoes. He didn’t have to check out, because he’d paid in cash for his room the night before. For a long time he was philosophically opposed to having a credit card, because of the vapor trails of data it attached to you, all part of the government/corporate apparatus that bled you dry. And now, since he hadn’t paid taxes in seventeen years and never held a job for very long, getting approved for one was difficult, anyway. He packed his toothbrush and jogged out to the parking lot in incredible sunlight, carrying his apnea machine, got in the ’93 Ford Taurus his brother had given him a few years back, and pulled out onto the street. It was the nicest day of the year so far. The air was weightless and warm, and the sun had lost the paleness of early spring. He rolled down the window as he drove on the Wichita grid and thought about the fact that he could very well be in jail by tonight.

Scott had thought about killing Dr. Tiller for a long time, probably since 1993, if he had to put a date on it. The woman who’d shot George Tiller in both arms that year was in the prison up in Topeka for a while, and Scott had been to visit her at least twenty-five times. Sometimes the idea of killing him would be more powerful and motivating than others. In 1996 he was pulled over for having “sovereign” license plates he’d installed instead of plates the state issued, and the police found bomb-making materials in his car, which he later told his son were meant for an abortion clinic, though he never said which one. In the past few years he’d come up with a few brainstorms on how to kill Tiller. He had one idea where he wouldn’t actually kill him, just cut off his hands with a sword or machete or something, but that was problematic.1 He’d also considered murdering him at his house. He’d driven by the Tillers’, but they lived in a gated community, with a high wall. Probably the most involved plan was this scenario where Scott would buy a high-powered sniper’s rifle, climb onto the roof of the office at the abandoned car lot across the street from the clinic, and shoot George Tiller as he drove into his parking lot.2 In the end, though, he decided the simplest thing was to do it at Dr. Tiller’s church.

1. Scott Roeder: "There was the thought about possibly just, as weird as it sounds, cutting his hands off. Ha ha. Just bizarre stuff. Now, here's the thing. The man was very educated in what he did. Even if he had his hands cut off, he could teach others. And so that was a problem."

2. Scott Roeder: "Check this one out. Well, it had to do with a firearm. Have you ever heard of an M50? It's like a super-super-powerful rifle. If you want to get on the Internet and look it up, you'll see how powerful it is. See, his Jeep was bulletproof. But I guarantee you an M50 would go through bulletproof glass. Then you could be more like a sniper. You may not get caught, so to speak."

It was easy enough for Scott to get down to Wichita without bringing too much attention to himself. He was alone a lot, anyway. Scott was living with Kamran then, one of the guys he’d met at Mike Clayman’s Messianic Jewish Bible-study group. Scott told Kamran he was going out to Lawrence to buy some organic goat’s milk from a woman who raised goats out there. They tried to eat organic as much as possible. Our food was being turned into poison. It was an instrument of decay like everything else. As Kamran put it, we were living in a culture of death. The ecosystem, our very bodies, the unborn, all of it was being decimated at nauseating rates in what you had to call a holocaust. Everything good was being destroyed. And it was being done to us, while we did nothing—while we actually worked toward our own deaths, like draft horses with bits locked into our mouths. The country was turning into some kind of perverse carnival, a place where abortion doctors were heroes, and terrorists were brought to America to sit in court and incite violence against us,3 and soldiers on a frigging U.S. Army base were banned from having their own weapons so they could stop a killing spree.4 Scott was on the side of the people who wanted to see the truth. Kamran talked about it in terms of The Matrix. They’d decided to take the red pill, to see the horrible reality that lay just under the cosmetic veneer of America. They’d have to give up some comforts, sure, but in return they got the thrill of seeing all the connections, and also what you could call fellowship. There was a network of like-minded folks around Kansas City—Tim Parks, a woman named Tammy,5 David Lloyd out in Missouri, Mike Clayman, and a guy called Wolfgang, who’d been in a militia and lived in a tent for two weeks at the farmhouse Scott used to share with Tim Parks. They formed a sort of ad hoc community, sharing cars or cell phones if you happened to have one, surrounded by the latticework of society but not of it. Scott could not abide being tangled up in a life that didn’t give him the freedom to spend his time addressing these major issues.

The motel was on Kellogg, less than a mile from the little white building, between a Mazda dealership and a chiropractor, that housed Dr. Tiller’s clinic. Scott turned left on Woodlawn for two miles and right on East 13th, where Reformation Lutheran6 sat at the edge of old Wichita, not far from Dr. Tiller’s country club. It was one of those angular churches that look like architectural models even after they’re built, with roof planes that sweep almost to the ground and walls placed so that light slants in through the stained glass at certain hours. It was about nine fifty when Scott got there, and the parking lot was almost full. He carefully backed the car into a space near the entrance to the church, left the doors unlocked and the window down, and walked inside to find George Tiller.

3. Scott Roeder: "If it's a civilian court, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] has all the rights of an American citizen. He can have a platform to spew his jihad philosophy, apparently. And it's like, what motive could they have to do this instead of going to a military tribunal?"
GQ: "Because the terrorists are using the fact that we don't try Guantánamo prisoners in court as a way to recruit people to kill Americans." Roeder: "Now, that is interesting. I'm glad to get that viewpoint. That makes good sense."

4. Scott Roeder: "Look at this Fort Hood incident. Well, I'll tell you what, it's amazing to me that you have these people who say let's get rid of all the guns. How many criminals do you know who are going to abide by the law? Ha ha. That's why they're criminals! And they don't even allow soldiers to carry firearms in that certain area where they were? What is this? What have we come to? What's wrong?"

5. I met Tammy in Kansas City. She was scared to talk to me, though I'm not sure even she could say why. We met in a Walgreens parking lot. She brought a guy in painter's pants and a knit cap. His cheeks were hollow, and his eyes were blue and sparkly and dead like quartz. I figured him for 50 or thereabouts, and I could tell that he had no idea people would look at him and feel a shiver at the back of their neck. He'd been in town for just a month and met Tammy at a Bible study; they'd been hanging out. He told me later that she'd asked him to come because she was nervous. We spoke through the window of his van, and I said, "Why don't we drive over to that McDonald's and talk there?"
Tammy, too, is interested in Messianic Judaism, but as clearly as she can remember, she and Scott had met at the Uptown Theater during a group discussion about the September 11 conspiracy or the truth about vaccines. She runs a business out of her home called Angel Organizing, where she'll come to your house and organize it, but she has no clients to speak of. She describes her situation as very, very unemployed. I bought her a crispy-chicken meal and a chocolate shake, but they brought out a strawberry one by mistake, and the man behind the counter apologized.
"I'll take it if you're just going to throw it away," she said, slightly embarrassed.
She wouldn't let me use the tape recorder during the interview. I asked her why, but she didn't say. The whole situation frightened her, and she behaved as if she were being interviewed by the FBI, as she had been earlier this summer.
Her friend said something like, "You know, not everything about Scott is as it seems."
"Be quiet," she said almost under her breath, looking at him over her crispy chicken. "You never even met him." She put on her public face again. "He never even met him."
She said she could hardly believe it when she'd heard what Scott had supposedly done. In fact, she didn't believe it. A lot of people had a hard time believing what Scott had done. He wouldn't even kill insects. When he was living at the farmhouse with Tim Parks, he wouldn't let Tim kill the mice that lived in the house. When I'd talked to Tim on the day Scott admitted to the AP that he'd killed Tiller, Tim still didn't think things were as they appeared. "You should look into the MK-Ultra program," he said to me, speaking about the CIA's secret mind-control program from the '60s.
Tammy said there was a bigger picture to think about.
"There are things occurring," she said. "It's my belief events are taking place that mean we're getting to the last days."
The man in the painter's pants gave a wry smile. "You ever seen V for Vendetta?" he said. He had his hat off now; his black-and-silver hair was cropped close to the scalp.
"Don't say that," Tammy said. "They blew up the Parliament building in that."
The man in the painter's pants raised his eyebrows at me as if to say: Women.
We got back on the end-time discussion.
"Yeshua will come back," she said. "And destroy the new world order. And set up his own government. And we'll be on the winning side of that."

6. George Tiller became a parishioner at Reformation Lutheran because he no longer felt welcome at his old church. There'd been some controversy within the Reformation congregation about whether or not to accept him. Over the years, as he showed up every Sunday, there had been some attrition. But everyone was now pretty galvanized. The ushers identified and dealt with any demonstrators who showed up. The thing I wondered, visiting the church on several occasions, was: What must it be like to be completely radioactive? To magnetize basically every human who comes near you, either attracting or repelling them?

*****

george tiller hadn’t been in church last week, because he had taken his grandchildren to Disney World. The people at his clinic found it funny to think of him at Disney World. It’s hard to imagine a place where George Tiller could be a regular, unremarkable 67-year-old man.7 He was the most famous person in Wichita. He was the only famous person in Wichita. Barry Sanders was from here, but he didn’t live here anymore. While Tiller was on vacation, his clinic had gone on functioning just as he’d set it up to do. Three other doctors were rotated in weekly from remote locations. He’d barely missed Dr. Shelley Sella at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport when he’d flown back into town from Orlando that Saturday, the thirtieth, and she was catching her flight back to Oakland. The visiting doctors slept on the pullout sofa in one of the clinic’s waiting rooms. Dr. Tiller had installed a shower for them in the basement; they hardly ever had to leave the premises. The clinic, which looked like it could house an insurance agency or be converted into a Subway franchise, was its own world, sealed off from the rest of Wichita. The storefront windows had been removed and bricked in. The parking lot had been walled and topped with fencing. Floodlights had been installed, security cameras and alarms. George had told his friend only Lloyd’s of London would insure it.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were what they called clinic days. These were first-trimester abortions, about fifty a week, no complications. If these had been Tiller’s only patients, Scott Roeder would never have heard of him. George Tiller would still have run the only abortion clinic in Wichita, but he wouldn’t have been identified and publicized as the most terrible face of what the movement called “the abortion industry.” It was the clinic’s other patients who made George Tiller who he was: conspicuously pregnant women who on this very Sunday were readying themselves for the trip to Wichita from Michigan or Arkansas or England or South America, traveling here because there were only three clinics in the United States that openly provided abortions for women in their third trimester. Of all these clinicians, George Tiller was widely acknowledged as the most skilled. Warren Hearn in Colorado and LeRoy Carhart in Nebraska may have been fine doctors, but people said they were both a little wonky as humans. George Tiller did around 300 of these abortions every year and marketed himself aggressively, and he had a reputation for a kind of saintly bedside manner, for deep patience and the ability to make women feel listened to.

Sunday was a travel day for the late-term patients, and at ten in the morning on the thirty-first, none of them had yet left home. They wouldn’t get into Wichita until that night. The office staff had their itineraries and their hotel information. In the beginning, there was hardly a protocol for these cases. Dr. Tiller said he had to work slowly and deliberately, for more than three decades, to refine the techniques and protocols in late-term care. There were different types of cases. There were women whose health was at risk if the pregnancies were to be carried out; they are called maternal-indication patients. And there were women who’d discovered that the fetus was so compromised, malformed, that it could not survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical intervention; these were called fetal-indication patients. For women who were at risk themselves, Kansas law dictated that in order to have an abortion past twenty-one weeks, a major bodily function had to be at risk. Dr. Tiller had been instrumental in Kansas in fighting to make sure a woman’s mental health was legally considered a major bodily function. For example, if a physician declared that a woman suffered acutely from depression—that the birth would profoundly debilitate her—she could be cleared for an abortion.8

On Monday morning, the late-term patients arrived at the clinic. They were scared; some of them were inconsolable. They were shown to a room where they watched a video. Dr. Tiller came on-screen and explained what would be happening to them over the next three or four days. The videos had been translated into Mandarin and French and German. Early on,9 Dr. Tiller did almost all the procedures, but now he focused almost exclusively on the fetal-indication patients. They were special. Dr. Tiller led them, with Cathy, in a group-therapy session that he’d modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Everyone was required to sit in but not to talk if they didn’t want to. When did you find out something was wrong with your baby? Were you angry? Did you find out you were pregnant only after you’d started chemo?

Tuesday was the most difficult. The women would leave their hotel rooms knowing that today they were going to kill their fetuses. At the clinic, they would lie on an exam table, Dr. Tiller would inject the fetus with digoxin, and in two to four hours its heart would stop beating. The women felt like monsters. Dr. Tiller told them it wasn’t their fault. There was a protocol for talking to them about what they had done. You’ve saved your baby from a short life of pain. You have made a terribly difficult decision for the sake of this child. He hugged them. A device was inserted to begin opening the cervix. And then they would go back to their hotels and wait. At some point over the next three or four days, they would miscarry. When they went into labor, they’d go back to the clinic. Supplies were there to take footprints of the fetuses. Provisions were made for the parents to take photographs with their fetuses, if that’s what they desired. A chaplain was on retainer, and he would come baptize the fetuses and name them if it was requested. Some of the bodies were flown back with the mothers in small caskets and buried in cemeteries. Others were taken to the crematorium.

The fetal-indication patients thought only about their babies. The other women, those who were in such emotional anguish that they thought they would kill themselves if their babies were born—these women wanted nothing to do with the fetuses. These two groups were kept apart. Their states of mind were toxic to each other. It’s not hard to see how the separate filaments of morality—honoring the fetus as a human life for some women, honoring the belief of others that there was no life there—were thin and easily tangled. In the end, the ethos was that the fetus was what the mother imagined it to be. The women dreamed their babies into or out of existence, and Dr. Tiller and his staff responded accordingly.

Over time, the entire antiabortion movement coalesced in opposition to him. In 1986, the clinic was bombed. And then, in 1991, Operation Rescue organized the so-called Summer of Mercy. Ten thousand people descended on Wichita for six weeks, chaining themselves to his gate and weeping in the streets. Twenty-seven hundred people were arrested. Two years later, a woman from

Oregon traveled to Wichita and shot Dr. Tiller in both arms. In 2002, a charismatic, telegenic new leader for Operation Rescue named Troy Newman moved himself and his organization to Wichita to finish what they’d started and has lived there ever since, overseeing the strategy from the office he set up for symbolic reasons in a former abortion clinic. They’ve taken high-resolution pictures of everyone who worked at the clinic. They’ve followed them to their houses, plastered their neighborhoods with signs and postcards calling them murderers. One night, only a few weeks before the incident at Reformation, someone cut power to the security cameras, then to the outside lights, then drilled holes in the clinic’s roof and stopped up the drainspouts just before a rainstorm.

Anyone associated with the clinic has been targeted. Residents from Wesley Medical Center looking to get training and earn extra money used to assist with the procedures, but they’d been pressured to stop. The late-term patients used to stay at the La Quinta Inn, but the hotel was targeted, so now the patients are spread among several hotels, their whereabouts kept secret. Off-duty police officers who used to provide security at the clinic declined to do it any longer. The company that hauled the garbage quit. Suppliers ceased doing business with the clinic. Certain taxi companies won’t drop off at that address.

7. It is much easier to know the thoughts and motives of Scott Roeder than those of George Tiller. Over the course of a few months, I ended up talking to Scott Roeder many times in twenty-minute segments over the telephone. Sometimes he wanted to talk only about the unborn, and sometimes he'd consent to talking about that day speciffically. I also spoke with most of his friends, either over the phone or in Kansas City, and there was no message discipline there. Finding someone to animate the interior life of George Tiller was more difficult. Jeanne, his wife, and their four kids kept Dr. Tiller's two lawyers as a cordon between them and all media. Jeanne did give special dispensation for me to speak with Cathy Reavis, who worked at the clinic for thirty-two years, almost from the beginning, and Joan Armentrout, the office manager for the past fourteen years, as well as Don Arnold, George's best friend, who'd helped him recover from alcoholism; Dwight Wallace, a taciturn midwestern lawyer; several witnesses in the church; and others. But George Tiller is dead, and speaking of the dead makes people careful. But also because by now the small community of people around George Tiller knew the first rule was to deny the enemy any source material. Once they got their hands on something, they could do anything they wanted with it. They could isolate a quote like a strand of DNA and then make up a whole new organism around it. George Tiller's friends knew that one of their jobs was to protect him, in death as in life.

8. GQ: "Is there a cutoff for you, as far as when you wouldn't do an abortion?"
Dr. Shelley Sella: "No."
GQ: "So any time until the baby is born, you would perform an abortion if it were legal?"
Dr. Sella: "If some woman came up to me on the street and said, 'Oh, I really don't feel like having this baby—will you get rid of it?' I wouldn't do that. But that would never happen. You have to understand the kind of duress you have to be under to be that pregnant and want to abort."

9. Certain parts of George Tiller's biography have become mythical. The story people tell to explain how George Tiller became who he was goes like this: He was a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy. He liked the Navy. It appealed greatly to his sensibilities—the chain of command, the discipline—and he thought he looked good in uniform. When his enlistment was up, he planned to become a dermatologist. But in 1970, the plane his father was piloting near Yellowstone National Park crashed, killing everyone on board: father, mother, sister, brother-in-law. George came back to Kansas to adopt his sister's child and to eventually take over his father's practice—whereby he discovered that his father had been providing abortions before it had become legal. This disturbed George greatly. It was only through the course of meeting these women and having them tell him that his father had saved their lives that George came to believe that the right to have an abortion was crucial.

George Tiller, too, saw this as a war. He paid his staff what he called combat pay when it was appropriate. He gave a gold watch to anyone loyal enough to work at the clinic for ten years, and a Pontiac to a woman who’d made it to twenty. The day after he was shot in 1993, he came to work in bandages and left a sign outside that said women need abortions, and i’m going to provide them. Dwight Wallace—Dr. Tiller’s friend and a fellow recovering alcoholic—gave him his old flak jacket. The Jeep with so-called armor plating and bombproof glass and undercarriage was ordered. He hired a bodyguard. For ten, twenty, thirty years, this is how George Tiller lived.

*****

when scott roeder arrived at Reformation Lutheran, he was unable to find George Tiller. Inside, some high school girl was setting up a table with her mother to raise money for the youth group. Another table was laid out with church bulletins, plus doughnuts and coffee for the congregants filing in through the foyer. Scott went to the last pew on the left, one of the places he preferred, and sat in the sanctuary and waited. That’s what it’s called, the sanctuary. It rankled him. Scott called Reformation Lutheran a so-called church, because to him it couldn’t be a church if it allowed George Tiller to take communion.10

Scott had brought his own Bible with him, and it was sitting on his lap.11 One of the ushers had already taken note of him, sitting quietly in his white shirt buttoned up without a tie like he was Amish or something. In photographs he has a faraway gaze, a kind of windblown look to him. His eyes are small and blue and buttoned deep into the bunting of his face, and his white hair is sparse and looks vulnerable to even the slightest static charge. He’d appeared at Reformation Lutheran several times in the past year. In the fall, Dr. Paul Ryding, a horse veterinarian and longtime parishioner, had seen him in the sanctuary and kept an eye on him. He introduced himself to Scott and, in his friendly but somehow stern Kansan drawl, said, What brings you to Reformation Lutheran? Roeder told him he was traveling the country to get the word out to churches: Don’t register with the IRS as a nonprofit, because then the government could control you. That was his cover story, though it was also something he believed. At the end of the service, Ryding followed him out to the parking lot and wrote down his license-plate number. When someone like Roeder appeared at Reformation Lutheran, the congregants knew he was there for Dr. Tiller.

Everyone in the network knew where Tiller lived, where his country club was, the make and model of his armored car. They’d been here to disrupt the service, stood outside with posters of mutilated fetuses for the gentry at Reformation Lutheran to look at while they filed out and drove home in their family cars. George Tiller himself had taken a photograph of Troy Newman in one of his typical dramatic poses, kneeling with a look of suffering on his face, pleading with Dr. Tiller to quit, to repent, working himself up to tears. It was one of the many fronts they fought George Tiller on. Roeder had had enough of all that. He wasn’t part of the movement. What those people did was always about the movement. What about the babies? If you call yourself Operation Rescue and Tiller is still here running his murder mill, who are you really saving by kneeling in a beatific pose on the driveway of his church?

At almost ten, Scott looked out into the aisle and saw him. George Tiller had forgotten that he was serving as an usher today and had only just arrived. He was supposed to give Don Arnold a ride to church but had called and told Don he’d have to find his own way. Don had come from Saskatchewan forty years ago to start the first substance-abuse-treatment program in rural Kansas, and he’d guided George through recovery. Don had looked after George and helped him save himself, and now that he was 83 years old and suffering from cancer and congestive heart failure, George was looking after him.

Dr. Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, had come to church earlier, because she was in the choir—they were already singing when he walked into the sanctuary and stood for a moment and watched her. He was six feet two, just about the same height as Scott Roeder. He stood there in the aisle in his dark suit, looking the same as he had his whole life: erect, pale, a kind and placid but serious mien, a lot of dark hair that had only barely begun to gray at the sides though he was 67 years old. He had on a pair of western boots he’d had made in Wichita, with bald eagles stitched into the tube and vamp in what he liked to call a patriotic pattern. He was a don’t-tread-on-me Republican, and he had an American flag waving at the clinic at all times.

Scott watched him survey the choir for a minute, comfortable there in his church, and then turn and head back out to the foyer. Scott felt no sense of hesitation. He wouldn’t even say he felt nervous. He watched the doors close behind Dr. Tiller, and a minute or so later he got up and followed him out.

*****

when he was younger, George Tiller had been difficult to work with. He could be vain. He wore a floor-length mink coat sometimes. He was never mean, but—he was a fan of Star Trek—he could seem slightly Vulcan, confused by certain human characteristics but also fascinated by them. For a while there was a sign in his office that read golden rule: the one with the gold makes the rules, and he didn’t consider how that might seem, a man who made his income by providing abortions. He was demanding and unforgiving of mistakes. It was worse when he was still drinking. He was more temperamental and unreliable. He drove a red Corvette then that he called Igor, and sometimes he would call Cathy at the clinic and say, Igor and I will be a little late. Even after he became sober, in the ’80s, for a long time he was still headstrong, authoritarian. He fired his entire office staff once because he’d become obsessed with efficiency systems and they wouldn’t consent to having their phone calls recorded. Even at the end, when he was a changed man, he was still very serious about maintaining and respecting a clear chain of command. Staff were never to call him by his first name. Cathy and Joan still referred to him simply as Doctor, even after he’d been murdered.

Over time he underwent some kind of strenuous transformation. He had done work on himself—that is what impressed Dr. Sella above all else. He practiced what the Buddhists would call living with intention—each action an intended action. Be still and see anger coming. Make the decision to be compassionate. One of his phrases was What else can I do to help you? When the phone would ring late at night and he had to go down to the clinic, he’d say to Jeanne, Well, here’s another opportunity to help someone.12 He created the space he lived in. Leave the protesters at the gate, he said. Do not allow the enemy to take up camp in your head. At one point, during the relentless waves of legal action against him, Dr. Sella said, You have got to be angry. And Dr. Tiller recited something: Anger is not my friend. Sometimes Cathy could see the effort in his face, and that affected her. To see someone struggling to listen to his better angels, you could identify with that; you could be inspired by that.

*****

people came and went in Scott’s life. He was with one group and then drifted to another. No single person knew where he was all the time. It wasn’t odd for local abortion protesters to see him at a clinic one day and then not see him again for six years. Everyone knew Scott had lots of interests. Messianic Judaism, the IRS and its illegal nature, the Illuminati, protection of the Constitution. Lindsey Roeder, the woman who was married to him for ten years and gave birth to their son, Nick, was maybe the single consistent witness to his life. That Scott wanted to keep seeing Nick helped tie them together. Even though she was pro-choice and an Obama supporter, if you asked her she’d still say she and Scott were soul mates, and that she’d always believed there was a chance Scott would change back to the person she’d met and they’d be together again.

The marriage started falling apart in the ’90s. Scott spent too much time sleeping. Lindsey said that if Nick woke up at night, Scott was ruined the next day for work and wouldn’t go. They didn’t have any money, and Scott spent more and more time alone in the house while Lindsey was out teaching in a Montessori school. He started watching The 700 Club with Pat Robertson. At the end of the show, Pat Robertson would ask you to accept Jesus. And one morning when Pat Robertson asked, Scott got down on the floor and tried to pray, though he wasn’t sure he knew how. That was how he was born again. For the first time in a long, long while, he felt some hope, saw some light, and it was easy to move toward that from where he was.

He found the truth in lots of places. There was a period he sent money to a preacher down in Texas who would sell you a “miracle link” cloth that would connect you up with a miracle if you sent it back to him to put on his altar. He was exposed on TV as a fraud by Diane Sawyer. Scott listened to various people on right-wing radio programs, preaching about the New World Order and what not.13 He was interested in joining a church called the Embassy of Heaven, whose adherents severed ties to Worldly Governments and became citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven and therefore paid no taxes. Scott wanted to sign the deed to the car over to them. He and Lindsey fought more and more. Lindsey remembers that Scott told her all their problems would be solved if they only stopped paying taxes. He wanted Nick to be homeschooled. They separated. In the early ’90s, he joined a patriot group out of Missouri founded for the purpose of preserving the sanctity of the most important document in the world, the Constitution, from the likes of Bill Clinton et al.

10. Church was basically the last public refuge for George Tiller besides the Wichita Country Club, which is hardly public. Aside from the occasional dinner out or movie, which is less dangerous because you don't go at regularly scheduled times, he kept mostly to his clinic and his home. He'd moved to that house from a place in Andover, Kansas, because the Andover place was just way too open; people would congregate around the house with signs and yell at his children from the street. It's hard enough to live under threat of death, but imagine living under threat of death in a solitary, defenseless house on the plains. Physically and politically speaking, he lived exposed, and yet still he continued to advertise his services and go about his business in a way those opposed to him called flaunting and prideful.

11. It may have been a prop to help him blend in, though it seems just as likely that it was a kind of statement of contempt: I'm not praying with any Bible you can get at this church.

12. He was famous for his expressions. He printed them on buttons and wrote them on stones he gave out at conferences. Attitude Is Everything. Trust the Woman. Nobody Cares How Much You Know Until They Know How Much You Care. And when things got diffcult around the once or at home, he would say: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go to Dairy Queen.

13. Since the incident at Reformation, Lindsey's been on some of her favorite TV programs: Anderson Cooper, Alan Colmes. But she also almost called Bill O'Reilly to tell him that this whole thing wasn't O'Reilly's fault. Scott listened to O'Reilly on the radio, since he didn't have cable, but it was a different body of information that convinced Scott about the justice of murdering George Tiller. There were really two George Tillers: the identity safeguarded by Tiller himself and the one created by the movement, published in leaflets and on Web sites (like dr-tiller.com). Scott quotes from the narrative found there, which includes tales of the purposeful torture of fetuses, the hidden deaths (most gruesomely, that he'd snapped the neck of a live baby when a woman delivered during a late-term procedure), the craven desire of the people there to do as many abortions for as much money as possible, etc.

For a while, when Nick was a teenager and she was having trouble with him, Lindsey would go out to talk to Scott at the house he was sharing with Tim Parks. Even though she thought he was crazy, she also knew how to reach a part of him that wanted to be a father to Nick and a protector to her. The house was squalid. They called it a farmhouse, but it was just at the edge of the suburbs of Kansas City. They heated the place with a wood fire. They raised chickens. She never wanted to touch anything inside—there were clothes and grimy water jugs everywhere; Scott didn’t drink tap water because of the fluoride, which after careful research he’d discovered had been designed by corporations and added by municipalities to make the populace more docile.

They found some common ground when they talked about Nick. Scott told her not to worry, that he’d had his rebellious period, too, that it was a phase. But that moment always dissolved. Scott began talking about the tax code and the unborn again, and soon he drifted out to some further orbit, calling only occasionally from phone numbers she didn’t recognize.

*****

two months ago, at the end of March, Scott had been up in Wichita. Dr. Tiller was on trial, and Scott made it to the courthouse as often as he could. He wouldn’t say it was the straw that broke the camel’s back or that a lightbulb went off or anything, but watching that trial14 did not help. He felt chills being in the same room as George Tiller, a mass murderer under protection from the state, watching him sitting there with his sterling legal team in their perfect suits. If you had enough money, you could protect yourself from anything. That’s how he’d gotten Governor Sebelius in his pocket. There were photographs of George Tiller visiting the governor’s mansion. And did you know Tiller had the largest PAC in the state?15 The gallery was full, mostly with people who’d come to see George Tiller convicted of a crime. Operation Rescue had organized the whole thing. You just called them and they gave you the details. Troy had this special deal where a trooper they were friendly with would save them seats before the gallery filled up.

The trial lasted four days. In the morning and after the lunch recess they brought in bomb-sniffing dogs. Dr. Tiller was escorted in by police through the basement. They wouldn’t let you come back in if you left to go to the bathroom. Scott thought: What kind of country is this? This guy gets special treatment because he murders babies? On the afternoon of the fourth day, the jury deliberated a whole twenty-eight minutes, and then an announcement went out that a verdict had been reached. The sheriff’s office had intelligence that someone was planning to throw battery acid if the jury found Dr. Tiller not guilty. A cordon of deputies stood shoulder to shoulder facing the gallery when the verdict was read. Not guilty. Afterward, Scott started wondering if George Tiller hadn’t somehow gotten to the jury. There was a blizzard coming, the sky was darkening, and snow began to appear in the air. Everyone was eager to clear the court and start for home. The jurors were escorted to their cars. Unbelievable.

*****

george tiller gave no sign that he was ever unsure about the act he was performing. If there was any doubt, it had never been exhibited. And for anyone who felt doubt on his staff, he handed down an intention to live with: Think about the woman. Because they saved people here. That’s what George Tiller was saying. They didn’t kill people; they saved them. All you had to do was to look at the walls. Framed letters from patients testifying to having been saved. That’s how they described what happened to them. Hearing that was addictive. Everyone admitted that—felt a little guilty about getting off on it, but not too. Cathy and Joan used to wonder what they’d do when they retired and didn’t get to feel that thing anymore. Even Roeder had heard about the letters, everyone in the network had; it blew their minds and filled their hearts with disappointment. The letters weren’t relegated to a single wall. There was room after room of them, thanking and thanking, overwhelming you the first time you walked into the clinic. Answering the tacit question: No, we save people here.

*****

when scott got up from his pew and walked into the foyer, he saw George Tiller standing with Gary Hoepner, who was manning the church-bulletin table. Dr. Tiller had his back to him, but Gary looked right at Scott. Gary is 61 years old, retired from Boeing. He looks as if he’s never said a mean thing to anyone in his life. It was about ten; the music was winding down. Soon the ushers would move into the sanctuary to help with the service. You going to eat a doughnut? George asked Gary. No, I already ate something at Bagatelle. George said, I like that place. Gary went for a doughnut anyway—what he calls a jelly roll. He looked at Roeder as if he recognized him. He’d seen him last Sunday, too, and he thought, There’s that odd guy from last week who went to the bathroom in the middle of the sermon. As Scott walked behind a pillar, Gary took a bite of the jelly roll. When Scott emerged from behind the pillar, he had a small gun in his hand, a gray .22-caliber pistol. Gary saw him walk up to George.16

14. There's more soap-operatic Kansas-politics backstory than is possible to explain here. But at the heart of the matter, at least for a while, were medical files from Tiller's clinic, which attorney general Phill Kline, elected on the promise to shut Tiller down, had subpoenaed.

15. This is true. He poured close to a million dollars over the past seven years into the PAC that he formed, ProKanDo.

16. GQ: "Did you look him in the eye when you shot him? Was that important to you?"
Roeder: "No. That wasn't important to me."

For what seemed a long time after the shot, Tiller stood upright, his body suspended as if the bullet had emptied it of weight. Gary looked at him standing there and wondered whether that had been a real gun. Maybe it was a cap gun. Then George fell, and that moment after he’d been shot shrank to nothing. The doctor was on his back, as far as Gary knows, but he would never look at Dr. Tiller’s face again. He had the thought: I can’t let that guy get away. He followed Roeder out the door. Roeder turned around and saw Gary following him. He yelled back at Gary and said, I’ve got a gun. Stay away from me or I’ll shoot you, too.17 Roeder started up the Taurus, but a parishioner named Keith Martin was right in front of the car in his suit and tie, holding a cup of coffee, blocking him in. There was some light traffic moving past on East 13th Street, mostly people coming from or going to different churches, none of them aware of what was happening in the parking lot. Scott leaned out and said, I have a gun. Keith moved, and Scott pulled quickly out. As he was driving past, Keith threw his coffee in the open window, into Scott’s lap. That’s not even that hot, Scott thought to himself. It’s not that bad!18

He started east, back toward Kansas City. He turned on the radio. He expected to hear any second that George Tiller had been killed, but there was nothing about it. He just listened to some talk radio. He kept off the I-35, the big highway that could get you to Kansas City in less than three hours. It wasn’t just that they’d be staking out the highway; he’d kept to the local roads on the way to Wichita, too. He didn’t like to pay the government its road-tax money. The coffee was getting cold and itchy in his lap. He drove east out of Wichita, the landscape giving itself over to the prairie, simplified down to grass and sky. He knew they’d identified him pretty good in the church. There were bound to be fleets of troopers looking for the Taurus. On the other hand, you never know. He was due to drive a shift at the Quicksilver Airport Shuttle service in the morning.

*****

don arnold heard the shot, and his heart sank. He’d been in the military, and he knew what the report of a gun sounded like. He also knew the only person who’d be shot at was his best friend. Paul Ryding heard it, too, and looked at his wife, and she said, Oh no, oh no. Some people thought someone had dropped something. But Dr. Ryding knew better. He was probably the first man into the foyer. He’d actually been the vet for George Tiller’s daughter’s horse, and he’d seen plenty of nasty scenes. This was simply part of his nature; it was easier to take some action than to watch.19 When he got there, he saw the high school girl who’d been setting up the charity table, standing with her hand over her mouth. He saw George Tiller on the ground, a wound above his right eye and a great deal of blood on the floor. Almost immediately he knew that George Tiller was dead. There was no pulse. There were some agonal breaths, a reflex of a dead body, but nothing else. He got to work anyway. There was so much blood. He was sucking the blood out of George’s mouth and nose so that he could try to breathe into his lungs. Bob Livingston was holding George’s hand, saying, Don’t give up, George. We’re here for you. They’re coming for you. Don’t give up, George. Behind him, Dr. Ryding heard some screaming, and he knew that Jeanne must have seen her husband there on the floor. Later he heard more screaming, and it was one of George’s daughters, who’d arrived in her running clothes. Then the paramedics came, and Dr. Ryding went to the bathroom to clean himself up.

17. He's charged with aggravated assault, but Roeder is adamant that he never threatened Gary or Keith. I don't think he's worried about the extra years on his sentence, but he realizes now that the purity of the crime is compromised if he committed trespasses against people who did not perform abortions.

18. I expected Scott to be full of righteous passion and rage, but he was often an affable, excited interviewee, and affable and excited at odd times. He spoke about the whole episode as if it were something kind of interesting that he saw when he was driving home from work one day. He often sounded more like an observer than a participant.

19. Paul Ryding: "I'm going to say something, and I don't care if you put it in or you don't put it in. [Scott Roeder] is a guy who's going to respond to anything that he thinks is going to get him some kudos. He's done rationalized this thing out. All it takes is somebody somewhere, some organization, to trip that trigger. But Fox—I'm going to call it Fox Opinion Network—precipitated this. They were totally irresponsible. And particularly O'Reilly. If they're going to demand this kind of commitment from a girl that's pregnant from whatever means, then someone needs to step up to the plate. If they're going to demand these women have this child, then the O'Reillys and all these other nitwits have to step up to the plate and say, 'Okay, I will be financially responsible for this person for the rest of their lives.' Otherwise keep quiet."

Somehow they got Jeanne into the fellowship hall that flanked the sanctuary. She kept trying to get back out to hold George’s hand, but by now the police wouldn’t let her. Don was with her; the way he saw things, it was now his job to protect her in whatever way he could. By noon, George Tiller had been driven to the hospital and declared dead.

Scott Roeder drove at exactly the speed limit and signaled all lane changes. He had a radar detector, too, so he’d know when the police were nearby. He stopped the Taurus at a Phillips station. He put gas in the car. There was a snack bar there, so he ordered a mini pizza. When he was finished, he got back into the car. At the Beto Junction, he got on I-35 for a stretch. He was only going to take it to Gardner and get off again. Not long after, he saw two sheriff’s deputies in vehicles straddling the median. They saw the Taurus and pulled Scott over to the shoulder just outside Gardner.

In jail, they began questioning him. That’s when they said that George Tiller was dead. Scott felt just tremendous relief.

*****

the next morning, Mark Gietzen showed up with his Truth Truck, which had an eight-by-fifteen-foot image of an aborted fetus on its side, as if it were any other day. George Tiller’s having been murdered didn’t have anything to do with his protesting against abortions at this facility. But he saw that the clinic was closed and there were some news cameras making a big deal, and Joan came out and yelled at him about the lack of respect, so he drove home again. Joan and some of the other clinic workers had called all the late-termers and told them not to board their flights. Some of them were directed to other clinics. Some of them they don’t know what happened to. The funeral was June 6 at the College Hill United Methodist Church, because they needed someplace bigger than Reformation Lutheran. Jennifer McCoy made a sign that said george tiller—murderer not martyr and brought it to the clinic. Other protesters showed up at the funeral with signs saying Roeder had been sent by God.

Lindsey has been impelled to find what she calls closure. There was a theory circulating that a woman Scott dated had gotten pregnant and had an abortion and that that was what had set Scott off. It was appealing to Lindsey that the event could be reduced to a reason. She tracked her down, but the woman had had the baby after all, and it was not Scott’s. Troy Newman is still in his office in the former abortion clinic, working every day. Mark Gietzen sends out his alerts to the database of Kansas Coalition for Life. But he admits to feeling a little lost. They’ve replaced the patch of carpet at Reformation Lutheran where George Tiller’s head lay as Paul Ryding worked on him. Gary Hoepner missed some work and still finds himself crying in bed sometimes. Jeanne attended church again the very next week. Don sits with her now.

The clinic never opened again. Jeanne wanted it shut down. The newspapers said Scott Roeder had accomplished what thirty years of protest never could. Over the next weeks, Joan and the rest of the staff cleaned everything out. George Tiller, and his father before him, had practiced medicine at the Kellogg address for fifty years. When everything was gone, Jeanne and the staff had a ceremony to take down the flag for the last time. The tech guy rented a limo, and all the staff went out one last time to dinner at the Old Chicago pizza place. Jeanne ordered the political-action committee shut down, destroyed all the videotapes George had made on the clinic’s procedures, and had the armored Cherokee broken down and sold for scrap to people who didn’t know where it came from. Dr. Tiller’s files, the ones that Phill Kline was after—the names and cases of the upwards of 10,000 women for whom George Tiller provided abortions—have been sealed in boxes and stored 650 feet belowground in an old salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas, where they keep the masters of The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Star Wars.

There are no more abortion clinics in Wichita, or for 200 miles around. You could say Wichita is more Wichita now than it was when George Tiller was alive, a conservative small city in the middle of Kansas, at least one connecting flight away from either coast. Maybe this is the way people want it. Keep abortion to the places where it makes sense. Divide the country up, and let people move to the parts they like. Leave everyone else in peace.

devin friedman is gq’s senior correspondent.