Death at the Clinic Door

Around noon on Friday, March 4, 1994, police sharpshooters on the roof of the Escambia County courthouse put their binoculars on David Gunn Jr. and his family as they walked toward the Piccadilly restaurant in downtown Pensacola. The Gunn clan had been in court all week, watching and listening as Michael Griffin, a 32-year-old chemical plant worker, stood trial. The prosecution was trying to prove that, almost exactly a year before, Griffin had murdered Dr. David Gunn by shooting him three times in the back as he left his car to begin a Monday schedule of abortions in a Pensacola clinic called Women's Medical Services.

The Gunn family was barely half a block toward the restaurant when a blue LTD screeched to a stop near them. Four cops wearing black SWAT pajamas and carrying automatic weapons scrambled out of the unmarked car and hustled David Jr. away from his group to talk. You had better change your lunch plans, they told him. John Burt is having lunch at the Piccadilly. His number one lieutenant, Donnie Gratton, is with him.

It was no surprise that the network of police--rooftop marksmen, uniformed cops, plainclothes officers in unmarked cars, roving SWAT teams--knew where both sides in this drama were eating lunch, and wanted to keep them separate. Having the family of the murdered abortion doctor face-to-face with Burt and Gratton, the most frighteningly militant anti-abortionists in the Florida panhandle, was edgy enough, even within the tight security of the courtroom. Putting them together in a downtown restaurant would be tempting fate.

How poignant, I thought. There's nothing like the vigilance that guards the barn door after the horse is gone. Or dead.

•

During the week I spent in Pensacola for the Griffin trial, the local people seemed sad, embarrassed and deeply paranoid over the fact that this town of 60,000 had become the front line in the holy war over abortion in America.

"Why us?" one civic booster asked as he sat with reporters in a hotel bar.

"You might as well ask why there are earthquakes in Los Angeles," said a newsman.

"That's geology," said the local.

"Around here," said another native Pensacolan from his stool at the end of the bar, "it's theology that does the damage."

Pensacola's most notorious anti-abortion bombings, on Christmas Day in 1984, damaged two doctors' offices and a clinic called the Ladies Center. The four young Christians who were arrested for the crime called it "a present to Jesus on his birthday." When they went on trial the following year, Burt stood outside the courthouse holding a fetus in a jar and telling anyone who would listen that the bombers (continued on page 122) (continued from page 108) were pro-life prisoners of war and that he was their spiritual advisor. "I wouldn't do that myself," Burt said of the bombings. "But I don't feel that it's wrong, if that's the way God has spoken to someone."

From that day in 1985 to the day Dr. Gunn was shot, Burt was a focal point for the Pensacola anti-abortion movement. Connected, but rarely indicted. He had been arrested only twice on serious charges: once for a clinic burglary, and again two years later for breaking his probation by driving past the Ladies Center with a man who was later arrested for having a trunk full of explosives.

As regional director for the Houston-based Rescue America, Burt has made a specialty of talking out of both sides of his mouth. His van carried a bumper sticker that said Execute Murderers/Abortionists. Until Dr. Gunn was assassinated, that is, at which point the bumper sticker disappeared and Burt began claiming he could not condone the taking of life to save the lives of unborn babies.

When asked about his inspirational role in the violence and bloodshed, he did a little Pontius Pilate hand-washing. "We're in a battle of good and evil," he said. "Just as a commander in chief can't be held accountable for every death, neither can I."

About his association with Griffin, Burt said, "I can't help it if something that I do inspires someone to go off the deep end."

•

Michael Griffin met John Burt about two months before the shooting. Griffin's wife, Trish, had volunteered to help at Our Father's House, a shelter for pregnant and troubled girls run by Burt and his wife in Milton, Florida. The girls, mostly teenagers, live under strict house rules that include compulsory church attendance, occasional participation in demonstrations at the local abortion clinics and handing over half the welfare money that Burt has registered them for.

Griffin was already unstable and vulnerable by the time he began work at Burt's house as a handyman, fixing gutters, doing plumbing, installing a security system. He had spent six years in the Navy, including four years as a nuclear-power surpervisor on the USS Whale in Groton, Connecticut. He had been raised a Methodist, but joined the fundamentalist Brownsville Assembly of God around the time he mustered out of the Navy in 1987. He had two daughters by then, and a job at Monsanto. He also had a violent temper and his marriage was in trouble because of it.

The pastor of the Brownsville Assembly, the Reverend John Kilpatrick, described him as "real hard on his family ... abusing all of them ... slapping them around." Kilpatrick tried for two years to curb what he saw as Griffin's growing religious radicalism. When he couldn't, he asked him to leave the congregation. Shortly after that, Trish moved out with the children, saying that Michael was controlling, jealous and dogmatic in the family relationship. A year later, they reconciled and began attending Charity Chapel, the church through which Trish began her volunteer work at Burt's shelter.

Though Michael Griffin had not been an abortion protester before, his zealotry was naturally and powerfully attracted to the inflammatory message that was everywhere in Our Father's House: in bottles full of dismembered fetuses, on posters with Dr. Gunn's photo above the words Wanted for Murder and even in the garage where an effigy of Gunn was hanging by a noose, with red paint on its hands and a Bible verse across its chest--"If man sheds man's blood, by man shall his be shed."

Trish Griffin cried miserably when Burt played a grisly video called The Hard Truth on a big-screen television. Michael watched intently but showed no emotion. Nor was he emotional a week later when Burt and 60 or so others held a burial service for two fetuses on a small plot of land that abuts the Ladies Center clinic.

On Sunday, March 7, 1993, Michael Griffin showed up without his wife at the Whitfield Assembly of God, a church where Burt was a lay preacher. During the service, Griffin stood from his front row pew to offer a public prayer that Dr. Gunn would stop killing babies and give his life to Jesus. After the service, Burt took him back to Our Father's House for pizza and reminded him that on Wednesday, March 10, a demonstration was planned at Pensacola Women's Medical Services, a recently opened abortion clinic in the Cordova Square complex. Griffin said he would be there.

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During a break on Tuesday, the second day of the trial, David Gunn Jr. found himself in the rest room with Gene Presley, Griffin's father-in-law. The two had seen each other across the aisle in the courtroom. Gunn, 23 years old, had straight brown hair hanging to the middle of his back. The balding Presley, in his early 60s, was wearing a suit and had spectacles on his kind face.

"I want you to know that I am sorry about what happened to your father," said Presley as the two of them washed their hands.

"Sometimes things happen. You just have to deal with them," said Gunn.

"I'll tell you this," said Presley of his daughter's husband. "I don't know if he did it or if he didn't. I just know he isn't the only one who should be on trial."

"Amen to that," said Gunn.

•

Friday morning, the defense called John Burt as a hostile witness, a description he lived up to from the moment he raised his right hand to take the oath. "I do," he said in a voice that is big and Southern and full of the gravel left behind by years of hard drinking and smoking. An intense silence fell over the courtroom as he took the stand, adjusted the microphone and surveyed the room. He is a large man with slick hair, a close-cropped graying beard and a permanent frown--the angry face of an Old Testament prophet.

In fact, Burt likes to portray his life in the biblically melodramatic terms of the sinner turned by the power of the Lord toward redemption, or perhaps martyrdom. He grew up the son of a lawyer in Palatka, Florida and did time in the Marine Corps. He became a Ku Klux Klansman, and an admitted "drinker and doper," which caused his first marriage to founder. Then, sometime in the early Eighties, "Jesus suddenly touched me," he says. After his rebirth he redirected his anger and hatred toward anyone who did not believe that abortion was murder.

He says he quit the Klan, though something he told Pensacola journalist Richard Shackelford makes it sound as if he may merely be on a leave of absence from the night-riding brotherhood. "Fundamental Christians and those people are pretty close," he said. "Scary close, fighting for God and country. Someday we may all be in the (continued on page 158)Death at the clini door(continued from page 122) trenches together in the fight against the slaughter of unborn children."

"Life begins at conception. Abortion is murder," said Burt early in his testimony. "If this were a Christian country, David Gunn would have stood trial and been executed." Asked how far he would go to stop abortions, he said, "I would take saving the lives of innocent babies to any extent short of taking a life."

He spent most of the rest of his two hours on the stand denying the testimony of witnesses who had preceded him. He had not said to Dr. Gunn, "Don't you know how dangerous it is for you to be traveling these roads alone?" He had not stalked Gunn's girlfriend, Paula Leonard. He had not followed her and photographed her as she delivered her kids to school. He admitted that he had once picketed her house when Gunn was staying there. And yes, he had yelled at her, "Why don't you find a real daddy for your kids instead of a butcher?"

Burt did his best to downplay his relationship with Griffin: They had spent a total of ten minutes in conversation in the four or five times they were together, he said.

As Burt offered his testimony, Griffin watched him from his place at the defense table. Griffin's face betrayed an intensity he had directed toward no other witness. His hands were folded piously in front of him, as they had been throughout the trial. But now he was leaning slightly forward, fixing Burt in a gaze that for the first time revealed some of what was smoldering beneath the pale anonymity of his unremarkable face. Burt rarely glanced in his direction.

•

The morning of the shooting, Burt, Donnie Gratton and several others were picketing in front of Women's Medical Services. While Burt and his people marched back and forth in front of the two-story clinic, Griffin was lurking among parked cars in an area behind the building. In the right-hand pocket of his blue suit coat he was carrying a .38-caliber pistol loaded with five hollow-point bullets.

About 9:30, Dr. Gunn arrived and parked at the back of the clinic. He was locking the car door when Griffin swept up behind him and fired three times at close range. The first shot hit Dr. Gunn in the right shoulder. The second hit him in the left shoulder blade as he staggered. The third and fatal shot entered below the left shoulder and exited through the right breastbone.

Moments later, Griffin walked calmly up to two cops monitoring the demonstration in front of the clinic and told them, "I just shot someone, and he's lying behind the building."

A half-dozen witnesses testified that they saw Griffin just before or just after the shooting, and one said she saw him fire the final two shots. Two witnesses heard him confess to the ambush. All of which would have made it a clean, open-and-shut lone-gunman case if it hadn't been for the single spookiest piece of testimony of the trial. A witness who worked in the clinic said that immediately after she heard the shots, she looked out the front window of the building and saw John Burt and Donnie Gratton shaking hands.

"That's a lie," barked Burt from the witness stand. Asked about a fax that went out an hour after the shooting, soliciting donations for a Griffin defense fund, Burt said he didn't remember much about it.

Several days after the shooting, the state's attorney had attempted to interrogate Burt. He refused to answer questions until, finally, he was offered immunity for what he would say in that interview and on the witness stand at Griffin's trial.

Meanwhile, Griffin had decided to represent himself using the Bible as his law book. Finally, Robert Kerrigan, a friend of Griffin's father, took the case on a pro bono basis.

In his opening argument, Kerrigan outlined a confusing two-headed theory of innocence. In theory number one, the defense would prove that Griffin had not been the triggerman, that Griffin was a patsy who had taken the rap out of zealous loyalty to the fundamentalist leaders of his cause. The second theory was hung like a safety net below the first, and said that even if Griffin had been the shooter, it was only because he had become deranged under Burt's powerful sway. It was a desperate gambit with too many witnesses and too much physical evidence against it, and finally, all it accomplished was the weakening of Burt's support for Griffin.

Just before the lunch recess on Friday, Burt described showing a bottled fetus to the Griffins: "It was kind of cloudy, so I held it up to the light." At that moment, Griffin, who had shown no reaction to any other testimony, grabbed his head in his hands, slumped over the defense table and began to weep uncontrollably.

Judge John Parnham, who had been adamant in his warnings about melodrama or emotional displays, called a recess as quickly as if he were emptying a burning building. Griffin's first sobs were barely out of his throat when plain-clothes officers hustled him to his feet and out a near by doorway. Bailiffs ushered the jurors into the jury room while uniformed officers stood to face the spectators, many of whom were asking each other what had happened.

Following a 20-minute break, Burt responded to a gentle cross-examination by the prosecutor and was dismissed. That's when he and Gratton headed for lunch at the Piccadilly.

David Gunn Jr. and his family took a long table at a restaurant called the Seville Quarter. Gunn, an English major at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, has become a spokesman for the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. He is also working with the Feminist Majority and others toward passage of a federal bill called Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances.

Despite Burt's denials, Gunn is convinced that the murder of his father was the product of a conspiracy. "Donald Treshman, the national director of Rescue America, came out two hours after the shooting to say that Griffin was just a lone protester, that Rescue America didn't know anything about him, had no idea who he was--but hey, we have a legal defense fund organized for him, so if you want to send him some money you can send it to us. I think it needs to be investigated at the federal level."

In fact, most local and national pro-life organizations condemned the shooting and saw it as a setback for their movement. As a result, the protests expected around the courthouse during the trial did not materialize. There was, however, one man who each day carried a sign, sat in the courtroom and pursued the press with a message that made Burt look like a moderate.

Asked about the lone protester, Gunn named him immediately. "Paul Hill. I know him. He's as crazy as the rest of them, if not crazier. Actually, calling them crazy isn't right. It misses the point. There's something quite logical about what they do. They draw their righteousness from the Bible. If you believe abortion is murder, then are you not a hero for doing something truly violent to stop it? It's the logic of it that's scary."

•

Paul Hill and I talked for an hour one afternoon in a small park adjacent to the courthouse. He's a choirboy blond, the perfect image of the Presbyterian minister he used to be until that denomination defrocked him for his fundamentalist thuggery. He and his anti-abortion ministry emerged in Pensacola shortly after Dr. Gunn was murdered. And while John Burt and most of the rest of the pro-life radicals were trying to distance themselves from the act, Hill saw Gunn's murder as the death of a guilty man carried out in defense of the innocent. That made it a righteous stroke, authorized by the Bible and perpetrated by a man of courage and holiness.

"We assert that if Michael Griffin did, in fact, kill David Gunn, his use of lethal force was justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children," Hill wrote in a statement that was signed by 30 other anti-abortion radicals. "Therefore, he ought to be acquitted of the charges against him."

As Hill and I talked, he swung through the Bible like a monkey through the trees, grabbing only those Old Testament branches that supported his wrathful fundamentalism. When I chased him into the New Testament and asked where Jesus had preached murder for any reason, he told me that not everything Jesus said was written down.

He said the only truth was in the Bible. He counted on the Holy Spirit to lead him to his own true and personal interpretation of what God wanted from his children. In this case, in this godless country, God wanted the killing of abortion doctors. Dr. Gunn's death was "long overdue," he told me. "Any force necessary to stop the killing of unborn children is justified. God's righteous indignation has been expressed."

When I asked him if that meant he would be assassinating abortion doctors, he said no. "I feel that I am much better equipped to preach than to take up the sword and the spear," he told me.

When I suggested that his sounded like a ministry of cowardice, he said, "I know in my heart I am not a coward. I honestly believe that I can save more children by not taking up a weapon, though it may be necessary for others to do as Michael Griffin has done."

In fact, at least one other Christian had already attempted to follow Griffin's example. On August 19, 1993, Shelley Shannon of Grants Pass, Oregon, shot Dr. George Tiller in both arms outside an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Shannon had sent several letters to Griffin as he awaited trial in the Escambia County Jail. "I know you did the right thing," she wrote. "It was not murder. You shot a murderer. It was more like antimurder."

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Closing arguments began Saturday morning. Assistant State's Attorney Jim Murray began by saying, "This is not a case about abortion. What this case is about is first-degree murder that involves assassination." He then recapped the facts, which he suggested were woven together like the fabric of Dr. Gunn's shirt: "There's one important difference," Murray said. "It doesn't have three holes in the back of it put there by the defendant who shot him." He then recalled the statement Griffin had made to his wife in front of a jail guard shortly after he was arrested: "I did not do this for notoriety. I did it out of my personal convictions. And if I have to spend the rest of my life in jail to save the life of one unborn child, it will be worth it."

The jury was out for two hours and 40 minutes before delivering a verdict of guilty in the first degree. Judge Parnham thanked the jurors and called a ten-minute recess. He then returned to the bench, looked straight at Griffin and sentenced him to spend the rest of his natural life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years.

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After Michael Griffin had been taken away and court was adjourned, a press conference came together before a thicket of cameras and microphones in the courthouse plaza.

David Gunn Jr. said that although it was in some ways the end of a year of suffering and doubt for his family, it was by no means the end of the danger. He called for the passage of Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances legislation and said he would remain a spokesman for choice as long as he was wanted.

Then Paul Hill invited himself to the microphones to deliver his warning. "What Michael Griffin has done stands," he said. "And the apparent justice of what he's done remains, regardless of the verdict, which was to be expected from a system that uses force to support the killing of unborn children."

He was asked if he thought the verdict would discourage violence against doctors. "Christ has always had numerous followers who would obey him regardless of the consequences. Mike will suffer consequences for what he has done, but it is just and godly nonetheless."

John Burt did not go before the network microphones. But he was there, as usual, with a plastic fetus in a bottle poking out of the pocket of his jeans. When I asked him if he thought the verdict would have an effect on anti-abortion violence he said, "No. But let me tell you this. Since Dr. Gunn's killing you have the government using racketeering laws against the pro-life movement. You have the FACE bill coming down that's going to create a buffer zone around clinics, and I think Michael's action caused both those things. So the final effect is that what Michael did is going to drive the moderates away. All you're going to have out there are the bombers and the shooters, and that's going to be a hell of a mess."

"Not only that," said Donnie Gratton, who was standing with several pregnant teenagers from Our Father's House. "It's not the pro-lifers or the loudmouths like me and John that you ought to be worrying about. It's the ones in the shadows like Mike Griffin and the kids who bombed the clinic in 1984. They come out of nowhere. Nobody knows who they are."

Nobody, that is, except perhaps their spiritual advisor, John Burt, whose ministry of hate casts the shadows out of which the assassins creep.

"'I wouldn't do that,' Burt said of the bombings. 'But said of the bombings. 'But I don't feel it's wrong, if that's the way God has spoken.'"