by Stephen J. Hedges; David Bowermaster; Susan Headden
Shelley Shannon hardly looks like a terrorist. Her hair hangs down in clumps. Big glasses obscure her face. At 38, Shannon, whose given name is Rachelle, might easily be mistaken for a schoolteacher, a dime store cashier or a clerk. Instead, according to a new federal indictment, Shelley Shannon was a one- woman crime wave. In just two years, federal investigators say, Shannon managed to torch or inject noxious acid into nine buildings in four states; she also found time to shoot a man.
The crimes that have been charged to Shannon could be written off as just a few more violent acts in a randomly violent America, except for one thing: Shannon's targets were not chosen at random. Every building she is accused of damaging housed an abortion clinic. The man she shot performed abortions.
In the eyes of some Americans, violent acts of the type espoused by Shannon make her a hero. Her defenders say Shannon didn't just target buildings and try to take a man's life; she was trying to save the lives of unborn children.
Shannon is not alone. When a jury took just 20 minutes last week to convict Paul Hill of the murders of a Florida abortionist and his aide, the verdict capped a wave of antiabortion violence that includes 153 actual or attempted arsons and bombings over the past decade. The violence has taken a toll of nearly $13 million. Beyond that, the radical antiabortion movement has engaged in dozens of illegal acts such as violent blockades, assaults on clinic workers, trespassing and destruction of property. Clinic workers have also been harassed at home and on the phone. One caller phoned the mother of a clinic doctor in the middle of the night and told her, falsely, that her son was dead. Wanted posters bearing doctors' names and photos have been plastered on street corners. In Minnesota, Ohio, California and Oregon, abortion clinics have been bombed or set ablaze repeatedly -- some three or four times.
"Fringe people." Not all Americans who oppose abortion see people like Shelley Shannon and Paul Hill as heroes. "We are a pro-life organization, and we are concerned to protect life," says Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, which has 3,000 chapters in all 50 states. "We are opposed to having our members engage in any kind of illegal activity. This is just one ... peripheral issue that involves a very small proportion of fringe people who have nothing to do with the mainstream pro-life movement."
After years of neglect by the FBI and nearly every other federal law enforcement agency, the "fringe people" who practice violence against proponents of abortion are now the subject of a high-level government investigation. Attorney General Janet Reno has ordered FBI Director Louis Freeh to determine whether some antiabortion activists have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to shut down or block access to clinics and drive doctors who perform abortions out of business. That investigation, joined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, is continuing.
An inquiry by U.S. News documented an extensive pattern of meetings and organizational links, which suggests that some acts of violence perpetrated against abortion clinics may not be the acts of loners. Some violent opponents of abortion appear to have been inspired, if not supported, by more "moderate" antiabortion activists. Records show that some prominent abortion opponents who denounce violence have a pattern of contacts and meetings with the very criminals they claim to reject. Still other records reveal movements of large amounts of money raised by antiabortion groups. In some cases, antiabortion activists who face huge government fines have been able to conceal their financial assets from law enforcement authorities acting to restrain their activities. The magazine found that many of the most violent opponents of abortion began as members of more moderate organizations before gravitating toward radical groups. Though the number of violent activists is small, their impact has been disproportionately large. Their activities suggest a higher level of coordination than had previously been thought.
"Heroes" and felons. The links among violent antiabortion activists appear significant. Not long before she shot Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kan., in August 1993, Shelley Shannon visited John Brockhoeft, a Kentucky man incarcerated for burning an abortion clinic in the Cincinnati area. Shannon also paid a call on Curtis Beseda, now in jail in New Mexico for setting fire to four abortion clinics in Washington State. Those visits occurred around the same time some of Shannon's alleged clinic attacks took place.
The meetings might be explained away as coincidence, but the ties between Shannon and other violent antiabortion activists go deeper. For a time, Shannon edited an antiabortion newsletter that Brockhoeft distributes from prison. Brockhoeft has ties to still other radical antiabortion activists. He says he spoke at length to Paul Hill several times from prison in the months before Hill shot and killed Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who had survived two wars. The shootings occurred in Pensacola, Fla., this July.
A recent book entitled A Time To Kill portrays Brockhoeft, Beseda and Don Benny Anderson, who kidnapped an abortion doctor and his wife and held them for eight days in 1984, as "heroes of recent memory." The book was written by Michael Bray, a Bowie, Md., preacher who did four years in prison for conspiring to bomb 10 abortion clinics and related facilities in the Washington, D.C., area. The bombings caused more than $1 million in damage to the facilities and nearby businesses. The book was published by Andrew Burnett, who puts out a monthly magazine, Life Advocate, which sympathizers regard as the voice of the militant antiabortion movement. Burnett also runs an organization called Advocates for Life Ministries Inc., a Portland, Ore., group with which Shelley Shannon participated in several clinic blockades. Burnett's Life Advocate magazine profiles doctors who perform abortions, lists the addresses of those in prison for bombing clinics and runs articles by opponents of abortion, including one by Paul Hill in the August 1993 issue defending the murder five months earlier of a Pensacola abortion doctor named David Gunn.
A month after the Paul Hill article appeared in Life Advocate, the magazine carried another article that described in dramatic detail how John Burt, a regional director of an antiabortion group called Rescue America, and Paul Hill tracked and identified Dr. Britton in Pensacola. Britton had replaced Gunn. An antiabortion activist named Michael Griffin was charged with Gunn's murder. At trial, Burt testified that he had shown Griffin gory videos of bloody fetuses and an effigy of Gunn with a noose around his neck. Burt, who was leading a demonstration at the clinic when Gunn was shot, denies any involvement in the murder and was not charged with any crime. He did not return phone calls from a reporter. Don Treshman, the head of Rescue America, issued a press release after the shooting that sought donations to aid Griffin's family.
Among this small group of activists, nearly all members express friendship or admiration for one another. Michael Bray, whose wife, Jayne, was once a board member of Randall Terry's Operation Rescue, named one of his daughters Beseda, after Curtis Beseda, the arsonist now imprisoned in New Mexico. Bray states the credo of himself and his fellow activists simply: "I defend the termination by private citizens of practicing abortionists to defend innocent children." Other activists disavow violence but refuse to condemn it. Joseph Foreman, a former member of Operation Rescue, recently formed the American Coalition of Life Activists with other antiabortion activists who defend the use of violence.
Steakhouse meeting. Abortion has been at the center of American political li
