Suspect in murder of abortion doctor had bouts of mental illness, family says

From The New York Times:

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — From the one-story house she once shared in this Kansas City suburb with her former husband, now suspected in the death of a doctor who performed late-term abortions, Lindsey Roeder recalled on June 1 how he seemed to undergo a drastic personality shift more than a decade ago.

“The man I married disappeared into this other person,” Ms. Roeder, shaken and puffy eyed, said of Scott Roeder, who was being held in a Wichita jail in the death of Dr. George R. Tiller, (pictured) who was fatally shot at his Wichita church on May 31. The authorities said charges were expected soon against Mr. Roeder.

“He wanted a scapegoat,” Ms. Roeder said. “First it was taxes — he stopped paying. Then he turned to the church and got involved in anti-abortion.”

But Mr. Roeder, 51, had not been among the people considered most worrisome to some abortion rights groups, some of which keep a close eye on anti-abortion groups and their Web sites to monitor what they consider threats, leaders here said. “Nobody recognizes his name,” said Marla Patrick, a state coordinator for the National Organization for Women in Kansas.

One frequent demonstrator, Eugene Frye, 64, said Mr. Roeder told him at a protest about two weeks ago outside a clinic in Kansas City, Kan., that he had attended the trial this year in which Dr. Tiller was acquitted of violating state abortion laws.

Mr. Roeder called the trial “a sham,” Mr. Frye said. “He felt the system had bitterly let down justice and let Tiller go free.”

A worker at the Kansas City clinic said that Mr. Roeder was suspected of gluing the clinic’s locks years ago and that he had been seen trying to do the same thing before dawn on Saturday, the day before Dr. Tiller’s death.

The worker, who would not give his name out of concern for his safety, said he called the Federal Bureau of Investigation about Saturday’s incident and about a similar incident involving Mr. Roeder a week earlier.

Law enforcement officials here and in Wichita, a conservative town that has been a focal point of tense abortion debate in large part because of Dr. Tiller’s clinic, gave little sense of whether they had previously viewed Mr. Roeder as a concern. After he was taken into custody, they indicated that they were only beginning to delve into his past and his associations.

Still, as Mr. Roeder’s relatives and others who had come into contact with him over the years began looking backward, they said they now saw some signs that might have hinted at more serious trouble ahead. For more than 10 years, Mr. Roeder had been linked, at various times and in varying degrees, to the Freemen, a group that rejected federal authority and the banking system, and to people who believe that the killing of abortion providers was justified by the abortions it prevented.

In 2007, someone identifying himself as Scott Roeder posted a message on the Web site of Operation Rescue, a group based in Wichita that had devoted much of its effort to blocking Dr. Tiller from performing late-term abortions. The posting read, in part: “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

The leader of Operation Rescue, who denounced the shooting of Dr. Tiller, said he had never met Mr. Roeder, who was not a contributor, volunteer or regular member. And the head of the Kansas Coalition for Life, whose volunteers spent hours outside Dr. Tiller’s clinic each week trying to sway patients from abortions, said he had never met Mr. Roeder, though he recalled receiving three phone calls out of the blue from him last August.

Years earlier, Mr. Roeder belonged to a Kansas group known as the Patriot Movement, a citizens’ militia which, according to a fellow member, Morris Wilson, 70, aimed to “kick Uncle Sam in the shins” by bucking rules like mounting license plates on cars. “He didn’t like taxation and overregulation,” Mr. Wilson recalled, adding that Mr. Roeder had outspoken views against abortion.

“He was trying to get people aware of what was going on, and put these guys out of business,” he said. “But I never seen a temper.”

Mr. Roeder also encountered Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines whose publication, Prayer and Action News, had received articles from Mr. Roeder. Mr. Leach said Mr. Roeder had presented strong anti-government views (he believed the government tracked money, Mr. Leach recalled, and offered his own method to “remove the magnetic strip from a five-dollar bill”) and views similar to Mr. Leach’s own on abortion. “To call this a crime is too simplistic,” Mr. Leach said of Dr. Tiller’s death.

As admirers of Dr. Tiller mourned his death on Monday, his clinic, in a beige, squat building in Wichita, was closed. Clusters of flowers had been left on a wall outside, and the police monitored the facility. The future of the center, one of about three in the country to provide abortions to women late in their second trimesters and into their third trimesters of pregnancy, appeared uncertain.

Some representatives of Dr. Tiller said they did not know if the clinic would reopen, given the skills required and the safety issues now clear. But a Nebraska doctor who had worked with Dr. Tiller at his clinic told a local newspaper that the place would reopen for patients on Monday — a notion anti-abortion forces said they were preparing for with the usual protesters.

At some other clinics around the country, federal authorities ordered increased security from the United States Marshals Service, which had provided protection for Dr. Tiller in 1991, 1994 and 2001. “In each instance the protective details ended once a decision had been made that the threat had been mitigated or was no longer present,” a spokesman for the Marshals Service said.

Dr. Tiller, who had previously been shot in both arms and had seen the clinic bombed and vandalized, was known for taking security precautions, his friends said Monday. At times, he wore a bulletproof vest and traveled with a burly, private guard. As recently as May, Dr. Tiller reported to the F.B.I. that wires to surveillance cameras had been cut at the clinic and that a hole had been sliced in the roof. The F.B.I. said Monday that the case was unsolved.

But Dr. Tiller had never been cowed by threats, said Lee Thompson, a lawyer who represented him. He always wore a pin that read, “Attitude Is Everything,” Mr. Thompson said.

In Overland Park, Ms. Roeder, a teacher, said Mr. Roeder had seemed ambivalent on matters of abortion, politics and religion when they first met and married in 1986. He had worked a steady manufacturing job at an envelope company, she said, until he seemed unable to pay the bills.

David Roeder, Mr. Roeder’s brother, issued a statement on behalf of the family expressing shock and sadness over Dr. Tiller’s death, and suggesting that Mr. Roeder had “suffered from mental illness at various times in his life.”

In 1996, the Roeders divorced, and Mr. Roeder worked odd jobs, moving from place to place and living most recently in Kansas City, Mo.

In April 1996, the police stopped Mr. Roeder near Topeka for a traffic violation. Inside the car, they found a pound of gunpowder and a homemade fuse, according to published reports. Mr. Roeder was found guilty of charges including one connected to the explosives and served jail time, though an appeals court later dismissed the explosives charges after Mr. Roeder’s lawyers argued that the search of his car had been improper.

At his sentencing in the case, The Topeka Capital-Journal noted, Judge James Buchele of Shawnee County District Court said Mr. Roeder presented a “threat of danger to the public.”

Mr. Roeder’s 22-year-old son has been tormented, his mother said, by all that has occurred. “He keeps asking,” she said, “ ‘Could I have seen something, stopped something?”