Suspect in killing opposed abortion

"The man I married disappeared into this other person years ago," Roeder, shaken and puffy eyed, said of Scott Roeder, who was being held in a Wichita jail in the death of Dr. George Tiller, who was fatally shot at his Wichita church Sunday. The authorities said charges were expected soon against Roeder.

"He wanted a scapegoat," Lindsey Roeder said. "First it was taxes, he stopped paying, then he turned to the church and got involved in antiabortion."

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

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

Over 10 years, Roeder had been linked, at various times and in varyingly 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 could be justified by the abortions it prevented.

In 2007, someone identifying himself as Scott Roeder posted a message on the website of Operation Rescue, an antiabortion group based in Wichita that had devoted much of its effort to blocking Tiller from performing abortions late in pregnancy. 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 Tiller, said he never met Roeder, who was not a contributor, volunteer, or regular member. The head of the Kansas Coalition for Life, whose volunteers spent hours outside Tiller's clinic each week trying to sway patients from abortions, said he had never met Roeder, though he recalled receiving three calls out of the blue from him last August.

Years earlier, Roeder had been a member of 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," Wilson recalled, adding Roeder had outspoken views against abortion.

As Tiller admirers mourned his death yesterday, his clinic, in a beige building on an otherwise quiet street in Wichita, was closed. The future of the center, one of about three in the country to give abortions to women late in their second trimesters and into their third trimesters of pregnancy, appeared uncertain.