John Casserly had it right, the retired Brooklyn, NY firefighter who stalked us during the last few months before closing the Lawrence, Ks. clinic in Jan. 2000, when he told me in absolute confidence that the “State of Kansas” is going to “destroy your family.”
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| Forget 2042 - it's happening now in Kansas. |
Dr. Kris by that time had been my sweetheart for over a dozen years and we decided to choose to have a child. Call it what-you-will, misery loves company, the loneliness of living years from rental house to rent a car, armed, watching the latest news of another clinic being burned, bombed or surrounded. Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, Eric Rudolph (for five years), Michael Kopp all these men we grew to know too well over the years.
Today our 16 yr. old son is thriving, alert and smart as a whip against class society. He read hundreds of pages of Howard Zinn’s “People's’ History of the United States” before he was nine years old. Two years ago, he wanted to be a lawyer, today he makes perfect scores in chemistry.
John and many others during those years regularly urged me, even shouted to me, to “go in there and pull your wife out of that killing chamber.”
Since that day I resent using the words, “husband” and “wife” preferring “sweetheart”, because that is all we are in loving embrace.
In Wichita our weekly clinic duty there had the local protesters routinely yelling to patients that, “Dr. Neuhaus will steal your child, or kill it.” We regularly brought our infant son with us, so Dr. Kris could breast feed him, until their furor made us use pumps to store and feed him her milk..
We couldn’t bring him with us anymore.
There was no child maternity leave, nurses needed jobs, clinic administrators needed to schedule patients, site landlords had to be paid rent. Billionaire Koch “capitalism” in a state of crazy Christians, Kansas.
I made it a point to know protesters; in Wichita, Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City, Ks. cataloging video clips, still camera photos, possible criminal backgrounds, license plates and known associates.
John was busted trying to start a fire at a Montana clinic. He refused bail, stood trial and spent his time proudly in a Montana prison. He once bragged to me that the wife of the governor of Montana visited with him in prison.
“She brought me some cake,” he said. “And wept with me while I described my life after my wife left me and the church wouldn’t excommunicate her,” he told me that day standing less than 3 feet from the entrance to the Lawrence clinic.
He did not tell me then but I discovered from my investigations that he visited regularly with Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon in prison.
“Shelley” Shannon was then at a Topeka holding facility, she was the woman who after conspiring with unknown others, burned down several abortion clinics in a rampage, before coming to Wichita, Ks. to shoot Dr. George Tiller. She was harbored for at least several days, if not weeks by “pro-life” Wichita supporters, and enabled to study Tiller’s work habits each day and night.
I think to this day that John in some twisted way loved, and I mean really loved Shelley Shannon.
I later learned from paid informants that she and others routinely traveled along a rock banked creek that ran behind Dr. Tiller’s clinic, studying places to shoot Dr. Tiller with sniper rifles.
Paid informants are notoriously slippery, easily bought, but there is a method to test their veracity. My informants never produced conclusive taped recordings of these activities, which might be suspicious are not technically criminal, merely 2nd person hearsay.
Years before Scott Roeder made his point blank gunshot into Dr. Tiller’s head that Sunday in church, we knew. The Lawrence clinic, our pride and joy, had to be shut down through a combination of endless investigations, insatiable landlords, constant protests and pickets and most of all the doctor was too tired, and most of all, a mother to a sick child.
There is a long and valuable Kansas history to the doctor who gave us the original Lawrence clinic. I will try to tell you it later.
Thank you for taking the time to read this during our campaign fund raiser.
Michael D. Caddell
Radio Free Kansas
"It's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart" - Ulysses Everett McGill "Oh Brother Where Art Thou"
Since that day I resent using the words, “husband” and “wife” preferring “sweetheart”, because that is all we are in loving embrace.
In Wichita our weekly clinic duty there had the local protesters routinely yelling to patients that, “Dr. Neuhaus will steal your child, or kill it.” We regularly brought our infant son with us, so Dr. Kris could breast feed him, until their furor made us use pumps to store and feed him her milk..
We couldn’t bring him with us anymore.
There was no child maternity leave, nurses needed jobs, clinic administrators needed to schedule patients, site landlords had to be paid rent. Billionaire Koch “capitalism” in a state of crazy Christians, Kansas.
I made it a point to know protesters; in Wichita, Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City, Ks. cataloging video clips, still camera photos, possible criminal backgrounds, license plates and known associates.
John was busted trying to start a fire at a Montana clinic. He refused bail, stood trial and spent his time proudly in a Montana prison. He once bragged to me that the wife of the governor of Montana visited with him in prison.
“She brought me some cake,” he said. “And wept with me while I described my life after my wife left me and the church wouldn’t excommunicate her,” he told me that day standing less than 3 feet from the entrance to the Lawrence clinic.
He did not tell me then but I discovered from my investigations that he visited regularly with Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon in prison.
“Shelley” Shannon was then at a Topeka holding facility, she was the woman who after conspiring with unknown others, burned down several abortion clinics in a rampage, before coming to Wichita, Ks. to shoot Dr. George Tiller. She was harbored for at least several days, if not weeks by “pro-life” Wichita supporters, and enabled to study Tiller’s work habits each day and night.
I think to this day that John in some twisted way loved, and I mean really loved Shelley Shannon.
I later learned from paid informants that she and others routinely traveled along a rock banked creek that ran behind Dr. Tiller’s clinic, studying places to shoot Dr. Tiller with sniper rifles.
Paid informants are notoriously slippery, easily bought, but there is a method to test their veracity. My informants never produced conclusive taped recordings of these activities, which might be suspicious are not technically criminal, merely 2nd person hearsay.
Years before Scott Roeder made his point blank gunshot into Dr. Tiller’s head that Sunday in church, we knew. The Lawrence clinic, our pride and joy, had to be shut down through a combination of endless investigations, insatiable landlords, constant protests and pickets and most of all the doctor was too tired, and most of all, a mother to a sick child.
There is a long and valuable Kansas history to the doctor who gave us the original Lawrence clinic. I will try to tell you it later.
Thank you for taking the time to read this during our campaign fund raiser.
Michael D. Caddell
Radio Free Kansas
"It's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart" - Ulysses Everett McGill "Oh Brother Where Art Thou"
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