On a Sunday morning in Wichita, Kansas, George Richard Tiller, a 67-year-old White/Caucasian male, was attending services at his church, the Reformation Lutheran Church. It was May 31, 2009, and he was serving as an usher, greeting fellow congregants in the church's lobby. The sense of peace within the house of worship was abruptly shattered when a gunman approached Tiller, placed a gun to his head, and fired at point-blank range.
Tiller, who often wore body armor due to past threats, was struck in the head and died. The assailant, after threatening two individuals who attempted to intervene, fled the scene in a powder-blue Ford Taurus.
The brazen act of violence inside a church sparked a swift law enforcement response. Witnesses provided a description of the getaway car, and an alert was issued. Approximately three hours later and 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City, authorities located the vehicle and arrested the suspect without incident. The man taken into custody was identified as Scott Philip Roeder, then 51 years old, from Merriam, Kansas. A search of Roeder's vehicle revealed a post-it note on the dashboard with the name and phone number of an anti-abortion activist, with whom it was later discovered he had been in contact.
In the days following the shooting, Roeder was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. The motive behind the killing quickly became clear. Roeder was an anti-abortion extremist who had a history of anti-government activities and had been tracking Tiller, one of the few physicians in the country who performed late-term abortions. Roeder had previously been acquitted on charges related to possessing bomb-making materials and had been observed vandalizing a women's clinic in the days leading up to the murder. He later confessed to killing Tiller, telling the press he did it because 'preborn children's lives were in imminent danger.' In January 2010, a jury found Scott Roeder guilty of murder, and he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.
