An Activist Who Flew Close to the Flame of Violence : Abortion: The Oregon mother was known as committed, soft-spoken and frustrated. Her crusade led her to help a jailed clinic fire-bomber.

SEATTLE —  Her friends, family and fellow anti-abortion activists in Oregon thought of Shelly Shannon as a determined crusader. It earned her a long police record, the association of a man some hold forth as a martyr in the cause and now the smear of accusatory headlines across America.

As long ago as 1991, her letter to a Chicago anti-abortion organization raised such unsettling questions about violent action that a staffer responded by sending her a chapter of a book counseling nonviolence.

One associate said she had been growing frustrated with her country.

On Friday, Rachelle Renae (Shelley) Shannon, 37, housewife and mother of two, was arrested on charges of attempted murder in the shooting of a well-known Kansas abortion doctor.

In her home state, Shannon gathered plenty of battle scars in the fight against abortion, including a judgment of $500,000 against her for violating a court order against trespassing at a Portland women’s clinic. According to one court document, the unpaid judgment has now grown to $692,829 “with interest.”

Shannon resides in Grants Pass, in southwestern Oregon, with her husband, David, an electronics technician, and 19-year-old daughter, Angi. A son was reported to be in Navy basic training in Southern California.

In her community, Shannon is thought of as one of the most committed of anti-abortion battlers, according to friends and local news reports. And in Grants Pass, that is saying something. The community newspaper calls the town a “hot bed” of such activity.

She is also known in the network of followers of civil disobedience around the country. She had served time in jail in Atlanta during Operation Rescue protests there in 1988. Police reported there are outstanding arrest warrants for her in San Francisco and Milwaukee.

For a small network of some 200 activists, she is known as the woman who prints and mails out periodic letters from a self-described “convicted abortion chamber bomber.” He is John Brockhoeft, a former mail handler, who is serving a seven-year sentence for the 1985 firebombing of Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Cincinnati. One activist said Brockhoeft is a celebrated figure among the most radical of those in the anti-abortion movement.

One of those on the mailing list provided The Times with three pages from one issue of a “Brockhoeft Report,” dated March, 1993. The source would not release the remainder because, he said, the letter is “real inflammatory.”

In the opening three pages, Brockhoeft described himself as “a little eccentric, a sort of complicated man, and I have to explain things. This is especially true about writing to folks who don’t know me very well. I’m a convicted abortion chamber bomber. See what I mean? You can’t just write a letter and say, ‘I’m a 42-year-old, divorced bomber, and father of five.’ You have to explain yourself.”

Brockhoeft’s letter, mailed with a Grants Pass postmark, says of his home: “We don’t hardly allow abortions in Kentucky . . . If a Kentuckian wants to go to an abortion chamber during the day and aggravate ‘em from the sidewalk, or go there at night, in a covert operation, under cover of darkness, with gasoline or explosives and really close that place, he pretty well has to go to another state.”

In a telephone interview from prison, Brockhoeft told the Associated Press that Shannon was his closest friend and had visited him 19 days ago.

They talked about protests against abortion, but Brockhoeft said he didn’t know whether Shannon wounded Dr. George Tiller on Thursday at his abortion clinic in Wichita, Kan.

“While violence is always wrong, the use of force is legitimate if it is being applied to opposing injustice or death or bodily harm towards an innocent person,” Brockhoeft said.

In spreading the word from Brockhoeft was Shannon drawn too closely to the flame of martyrdom?

One of her friends seemed to suggest that possibility in an interview with a reporter from the Grants Pass Daily Courier. Marilyn Matheny, an activist from Medford, said she spent a week in an Atlanta jail with Shannon in 1988 and knew her locally. She said Shannon was growing frustrated.

“I can only guess, but I would assume (the frustration is) with the doctors who continue to do this and the citizens of our country allowing it to continue when she has made such great sacrifices to try and stop it.”

Asked if Shannon had raised the issue of violence, Matheny replied: “No comment.”

Her husband spoke with reporters Friday and also gave a “no comment” to the question.

David Shannon, who reportedly is not involved with the anti-abortion movement, said his wife left home Monday and did not say where she was bound or why.

“She’s a free person. This country was founded on free people making political statements. With that kind of belief, how could I stop her?”

He said no guns were missing from the house.

In her own words, the accused woman spoke a familiar bravado of those who have taken to civil disobedience in support of a cause. In 1990, the Grants Pass newspaper asked about a court ruling against Operation Rescue.

Her reply: “If you see somebody killing another person and you step between them, you can expect to get hurt. Getting hurt isn’t going to stop us.”

Indeed, Shannon was roughed up plenty in her confrontations with police but always played her role nonviolently, according to Myrna Shaneyfelt, chairwoman of Josephine County Right to Life. “I have seen the police torture her, kick her, beat her. There has never been one response of violence in either word or action.”

Shaneyfelt held a press conference Friday to denounce violence in the cause, and one of those attending was Shannon’s daughter, Angi. The 19-year-old took questions from reporters and said she felt her mother talked to her family about her crusade but was not impatient. “She was never frustrated about it.”

When Shannon left home Monday, “she just said she was going to go up and do more pro-life work,” said the daughter, who was well-spoken and composed as she faced the press.

Glenn Diller, the chaplain for the local anti-abortion organization, spoke with reporters and said the cause “was a big part of her life.” Diller said he knew Shannon regarded Tiller “as a murderer.” And the chaplain added: “I just know what was on her heart.”

A picture released by the family showed Shannon with a plain face framed by long, dark hair. “Soft-spoken” was a description used several times to describe her demeanor.

But at the Chicago Pro-Life Action League, a letter was received from Shannon about two years ago, and it made staffer Tim Murphy nervous. So nervous that for the first and only time, he replied by sending the woman a chapter from a book written by the organization’s founder, Joseph M. Scheidler.

Murphy could not find the letter but recalled: “She was inquiring about the firebombing of clinics. She was extremely interested in clinics that had been bombed. She wanted articles about that . . .”

Murphy’s reply was to send a photocopy from the book “Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion.” The name of Chapter 81 is “Violence: Why It Won’t Work.”