It's been 14 years since Dr. George Tiller was assassinated by anti-abortion extremists. Media was quick to call Tiller's killer Scott Roeder a 'lone wolf.' But for loners, these guys have a lot of friends. A lot of the same ones, in fact.
As soon as Scott Roeder was named the sole suspect in the point-blank shooting death of Wichita, Kan., abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in the vestibule of the Reformation Lutheran Church Tiller attended, a predictable story began to be told. Following the lead of a recent Department of Homeland Security report characterizing right-wing terrorists as lone wolves, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, NBC and FOX News all ran stories calling Roeder a “lone wolf” gunman.
Roeder told me that his first act as an anti-abortion activist was to protest outside a Kansas City women’s clinic. Among the protestors he came to know were Anthony Leake, a proponent of the “justifiable homicide”of abortion doctors, and Eugene Frye, the owner of a Kansas City construction company who, together with another anti-abortion activist, had been arrested in 1990 for attempting to reinsert the feeding tube of a Missouri woman in a persistent vegetative state.
murder, Roeder would see her some 25 times. As his marriage began disintegrating, he even considered asking the raven-haired Shannon about beginning a romance. But, he told me, he did not because of the obvious obstacles involved in dating an incarcerated woman. It is widely believed some of those jailed in Atlanta in 1988 were involved in the creation of “The Army of God Manual,” in which they receive “special thanks” under monikers such as “Shaggy West” , “Atomic Dog” , “Kansas City Big Guys,” the “Mad Gluer” and “Pensacola Cop Hugger,” among others.
Bray has obviously privately supported violence as a means to stop abortion since the mid-1980s, but by 1991, he and his wife Jayne were open enough to discuss his views with a reporter from The Washington Post. After her release, McCoy began protesting regularly with Operation Rescue in Wichita shortly after its president, Troy Newman, moved the headquarters there in 2002 for the sole purpose of tormenting Dr. Tiller into shuttering his clinic.
Roeder was sentenced to 24 months probation and ordered to stop his association with violence-advocating anti-government groups. He told his son, then nine years old, that everyone assumed he was going to bomb a federal building Letter from the Army of God claiming responsibility for two bombings, including one that killed a security guard.
“Bleass [sic] everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to bring as many people as possible to attend Tillers [sic] church …” “We’re like circles that overlap,” McCoy told me in an anteroom in the Sedgwick County Courthouse near where Scott Roeder was being sentenced on April 1, 2010. “We all don’t know each other—we may not agree on a lot of things, like religion, say—but we’re all completely committed to one purpose: stopping abortion.”
Police, prosecutors and the military define a cell as a circle of individuals— usually three to 10 people—who are joined in common unlawful purpose. A Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, a U.S. Army training manual, describes a cell as the “foundation” of most terrorist organizations. Most often, and most effectively, these cells are networked, “depend[ing] and even thriving on loose affiliation with groups or individuals from a variety of locations.
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