WICHITA, Kan. — An activist abortion opponent was charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the death of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.
Scott Roeder, 51, was shown via a video link from the Sedgwick County Jail. He fiddled with the charging documents on a podium in front of him, and said, “OK,” when Judge Ben Burgess read the charges.
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Burgess ordered Roeder held without bond and said he was not allowed to communicate with Tiller’s family.
The judge told Roeder that he would be assigned a public defender, to which the suspect responded:
“And I’ll obviously be hearing from one of those lawyers between now — or do you know how long it will be before I hear from one of those lawyers?”
Within two days, the judge answered in response to Roeder’s only question during the brief appearance.
A preliminary hearing is set for June 16.
Roeder is accused of shooting Tiller to death Sunday at the doctor’s Lutheran church in Wichita, where the victim was serving as an usher.
Roeder also was charged with aggravated assault for allegedly threatening two people who tried to stop him.
He was arrested about three hours after the shooting near Gardner, about 170 miles northeast of Wichita. His last known address is in Kansas City, Mo.
Roeder’s family life began unraveling more than a decade ago when he got involved with anti-government groups, and then became “very religious in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way,” his former wife, Lindsey Roeder, told The Associated Press.
“The anti-tax stuff came first, and then it grew and grew. He became very anti-abortion,” said Lindsey Roeder, who was married to Scott Roeder for 10 years.
“That’s all he cared about is anti-abortion,” she said.
Before the murder, someone using the name Scott Roeder posted comments about Tiller on anti-abortion Web sites, including one that referred to the doctor as the “concentration camp Mengele of our day” — a reference to the Nazi doctor who performed ghastly medical experiments on Jews and others at Auschwitz.