Anti-Abortion Zealot’s Gun May Have Wounded Allies : Protest: Shelly Shannon shot a doctor, then she shot off her mouth. Her case helped spur racketeering probes.

Rachelle Renee Shannon, a quiet, disheveled housewife from rural Oregon charged with shooting a doctor as he drove away from his Wichita abortion clinic last August, could hardly have made her attorney’s job any harder.

Within hours of the shooting, Shannon was arrested, had confessed to police and had written a jailhouse letter to her daughter detailing her crime. As she was led away by police in the early morning hours, she turned to the waiting media and asked, on camera: “Did I get him?” She added to a police officer: “If ever there was a justifiable homicide, this was it.”

Only later did she discover, to her dismay, that she had only wounded Dr. George Tiller in both arms and that he was back at work at his clinic the following day.

But Shelly Shannon, a self-described “puny wimp” and 38-year-old mother of two, simply couldn’t keep her mouth shut, even when her court-appointed attorney told her to stop talking.

To her attorney’s chagrin, she refused to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. No, she insisted, her mind had been clear. She knew what she was doing when she shot Tiller: She was a Christian attempting to stop a man who had made a career of murdering unborn babies. Shannon entered a plea of not guilty; in her mind, trying to kill a murderer is justifiable. And she wanted to get on the witness stand and tell the world what she had done. She was convicted March 25 and awaits sentencing on April 29.

She used the months before her trial to tell anyone who would listen about her life as an anti-abortion zealot and her earlier, previously unknown involvement in a string of abortion clinic bombings across the country. Later she admitted that she hoped to make bail before her trial so she could “blow up Tiller’s clinic.”

Shannon’s willingness to talk has done more than call attention to her cause and clinch her conviction. She inadvertently triggered the first serious federal investigation into the question of whether an organized underground network of extremists is responsible for the wave of anti-abortion violence that has swept the nation in recent years.

For years, anti-abortion leaders have denied that they are behind the growing violence.

“There has never been a link between the violence and any responsible pro-life leader at all,” said Patrick Mahoney, national spokesman for Operation Rescue.

Even those who openly support anti-abortion violence stress that they have had no involvement in any of it. “Violence is not my calling; I use the weapon of the spirit and pray for people like Shelly Shannon,” said Paul Hill, founder of Defensive Action, a group that endorses anti-abortion violence.

With little hard evidence, officials at the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms generally tried to avoid the conspiracy issue for fear of getting caught in the political cross-fire.

Despite years of prodding from feminist groups and abortion-rights advocates, federal authorities have tended to view each new incident of violence as an isolated crime.

But the treasure trove of information provided by Shannon changed the equation. Although the ATF does not officially discuss ongoing investigations, prosecutors in Wichita and officials on both sides of the abortion battle said ATF agents are actively investigating Shannon’s ties to anti-abortion groups.

Moreover, they are said to be looking for evidence of a possible conspiracy behind past bombings, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Agents from ATF’s Portland, Ore., field office have interviewed officials of anti-abortion groups in which Shannon was an active member and others affiliated with groups to which Shannon contributed money.

Her possible involvement in clinic attacks and other forms of anti-abortion violence could lead to federal racketeering charges against her and others under a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the use of such statutes to prosecute abortion opponents.

Indeed, the Shannon case appears to offer investigators much more insight into the militant anti-abortion movement than did the more celebrated case of Michael Griffin, convicted earlier this year in the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Fla. Shannon, by all accounts, had far more extensive ties to anti-abortion extremist groups than did Griffin.

“This is the case with the most documented evidence of a conspiracy we have ever seen,” said Gina Shaw, a spokeswoman for the National Abortion Federation in Washington.

Shannon’s diaries and other evidence dug up from the back yard of her home in Grants Pass, Ore., seem to lend credence to such suspicions.

Her diaries reveal that just days before she shot Tiller, she traveled to Ohio to visit two militant anti-abortion leaders being held in different prisons on charges stemming from clinic bombings and related vandalism. Both leaders openly advocate anti-abortion violence, and Shannon was an editor of a newsletter for one of their organizations. Her diary entries described each prison meeting as “awesome.”

Meanwhile, a search of her home found paraphernalia, including bomb-making materials and manuals, that seemed to provide a road map to her secret past.

What makes Shannon’s emergence as a violent extremist so intriguing is that her background is typical of the thousands of evangelical Christians who began to flock to anti-abortion groups during the late 1980s.

Unlike other grass-roots volunteers, however, Shannon gradually let her life become consumed by the anti-abortion cause, testimony in her trial shows. And, like the deeply committed anti-war protesters of the 1960s who ended up in violent organizations such as the Weather Underground, Shannon ultimately moved from groups that merely wanted to protest and block access to abortion clinics to those advocating far more desperate measures.

Shannon, a Wisconsin native, was a single mother while still in high school and said she experimented with LSD as a teen-ager before becoming a born-again Christian while her husband was in the Marines in the 1970s.

Her life in the anti-abortion movement began in 1988, when she began attending meetings in southern Oregon of the local chapter of Right to Life, a mainstream anti-abortion group that frowns upon civil disobedience and militant acts of protest or violence.

“I’ve always known that abortion was wrong, and I believed that it was murder, but I didn’t see any pictures of the babies or see any picketers or know that people were even trying to save their lives or anything like that until 1988,” Shannon said during her trial. “I contacted Right to Life and told them I wanted to get involved, and the first thing I did was picket.”

But she said she quickly found Right to Life’s emphasis on peaceful picketing and political lobbying stultifying and that she was frustrated by its refusal to take direct action against abortion.

When members of a new anti-abortion group came to a meeting of her Right to Life chapter and asked for volunteers to blockade and shut down a clinic in Portland, Shannon quickly signed up. “I just kind of knew right away that I wanted to do that,” she said.

Shannon found herself on the ground floor of Operation Rescue.

Led by Randy Terry and a cadre of rebellious, deeply conservative evangelicals still in their 20s and 30s, Operation Rescue was committed to acts of civil disobedience outrageous enough to catch the media’s attention. Founded in 1986, the group by 1988 was beginning to have a nationwide impact.

Operation Rescue’s clinic blockades, called “rescues,” and the mass arrests that inevitably followed, offered a rush of excitement and danger to a woman whose uneventful life had been circumscribed by her early marriage to an electronics technician from a small town who didn’t share her religious beliefs or her outrage over abortion.

Soon, Shannon was leaving her home in Grants Pass at every opportunity to join Operation Rescue blockades in Oregon, Northern California and eventually throughout the country, from Atlanta, Ga., to Fargo, N.D.

Along with thousands of others, she rode in car caravans to join in the biggest campaign in Operation Rescue’s history, its “Summer of Mercy” in 1991, when the group poured all of its resources into Wichita in an effort to shut down Tiller’s clinic, one of the few in the nation that conducts late-term abortions.

“My kids were still at home, and the housework would pile up and stuff, and there was always a struggle trying to decide whether to go, but I went pretty much every chance I had,” Shannon testified.

As she and her husband grew more distant, Shannon said she increasingly identified with her new circle of fellow activists. Bonds of friendship were forged during frequent stints in jail following clinic blockades, and conversations revolved around radically conservative politics and evangelical religion.

Operation Rescue soon became wracked by internal disputes as its leadership fractured under the threat of ever-greater prison sentences and heavier financial penalties for the group’s practice of violating court injunctions against blocking access to clinics.

As Operation Rescue’s most radical leaders split off to form new ultra-rightist organizations that would not bend in the face of legal threats, Shannon followed them to the fringe of the anti-abortion movement.

She joined a group called the Lambs of Christ and became close to the leaders of another fringe group called Advocates for Life, led by defectors from Operation Rescue. Life Advocates, the magazine published by Advocates for Life, often focused on Tiller, who was dubbed “Tiller the Killer.”

Shannon said she still opposed the use of force after joining the splinter groups, even as more and more young anti-abortion demonstrators were arguing among themselves that it was time to change tactics.

In the midst of one such debate in a Seattle jail cell, Shannon recalled that “I spoke up against that kind of thing; I told them that this was a spiritual battle, and we were nonviolent and we were not going to do anything like that. I wanted to stay nonviolent.”

Her conversion came during a jail term in Fargo, following another clinic blockade. There, she said, she was given a book of letters from a German minister who became involved in an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler after realizing that prayer was not enough to stop the Nazis. She said reading the book persuaded her that her commitment to peaceable protest was a mistake and that violence was the only solution.

Her new views brought her in contact with John Brockhoeft, who had been convicted in connection with clinic bombings in Florida and Ohio. Shannon became so close to Brockhoeft that she began to edit his extremist newsletter while he was in prison.

By 1992, law enforcement authorities believe, Shannon was participating in clinic bombings and arson attacks. ATF agents reportedly consider Shannon the prime suspect in the April, 1992, arson that destroyed the Catalina Medical Center in Ashland, Ore. Last January, Shannon wrote to police in Chico, Calif., from her jail cell in Wichita to confess to vandalism at a clinic there in 1992.

In a letter she sent to a Wichita newspaper in February, Shannon said she was involved in a string of abortion clinic arsons across the nation and knows others who were involved in still more.

“I figure at least six different states, several places in some states,” Shannon wrote. “That’s what I get for traveling hither and yon, doing this, that and the other thing.”

In early 1993, Shannon said, she decided it was time to take action against the doctors performing abortions. After Griffin killed Gunn in Pensacola in March, 1993, Shannon decided that Griffin was her hero and eventually felt she had to emulate him.

Today, the anti-abortion movement is reeling from the damage wrought by Shannon and Griffin. Fearful of new federal investigations into possible conspiracies, leaders are increasingly cautious about what they say to each other in meetings or whom they talk to on the telephone, Mahoney said.

“There is especially a concern that the Clinton Administration will use the ATF and the FBI against us,” he said. “So now there is a reticence by those of us who don’t endorse violence to even talk or meet with those who do.”

The anti-abortion movement, was once a “closely knit family,” Mahoney said. “But this increased federal presence is severely testing those ties.”