Shooting Suspect Has Advocated Clinic Violence

As he stood vigil outside a Wichita, Kan., courtroom this spring in support of a fellow anti-abortion extremist on trial for shooting an abortion doctor, Paul Hill explained that he believed he had been called by God to pray for those who commit violence, but did not believe that God wanted him to shoot doctors himself.

As the leader of his tiny, self-styled group, Defensive Action, he has traveled the country over the past year encouraging anti-abortion violence, telling fundamentalist church groups that murdering abortion providers was tantamount to “justifiable homicide.” He even appeared on “Donahue” endorsing last year’s killing of Pensacola, Fla., abortion physician Dr. David Gunn.

“We all have different callings, and my calling is to minister” to those who kill doctors, Hill, 40, said in an interview in March. “It’s largely a matter of calling. I’ve taken up the weapon I’m most comfortable with. I’ve taken up the weapon of the spirit.”

But on Friday, after Hill was arrested and charged with the shotgun slayings of a Pensacola abortion doctor and his male escort and the wounding of a woman, it appeared that Hill had finally begun to practice what he preached.

Friday’s brutal murders mark the first time that a leader of a militant anti-abortion group has been charged with an abortion-related killing.

As a result, the case will almost certainly make it far more difficult for anti-abortion leaders to dismiss such crimes as isolated incidents, as they have with earlier shootings. And it could intensify scrutiny of the militant subculture of the anti-abortion movement by federal investigators. Congressional leaders on Friday urged the Clinton Administration and the FBI to mount a major undercover investigation of anti-abortion groups to prevent further violence. On Friday, the FBI joined the investigation into the Pensacola murders.

“The federal government has the tools and the resources to deal with such reprehensible terrorist attacks and the organizations responsible for perpetrating the attacks,” said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the sponsor of legislation just signed into law by President Clinton that makes it a federal crime to commit acts of violence against abortion providers and clinics. “The FBI must begin to infiltrate anti-abortion groups that advocate the use of violence, and the members of these groups who conspire to commit violent acts should be prosecuted,” Schumer said.

Hill’s arrest could put dozens of leaders of anti-abortion groups on the spot, since many of them have signed petitions circulated in recent months by Hill endorsing acts of murder.

“This is not an isolated incident, and it was not committed by an isolated nut,” Eleanor Smeal, president of The Fund for the Feminist Majority, charged at a Washington news conference Friday. “Paul Hill is a leader of a group advocating what he calls ‘justifiable homicide,’ and many people in this movement have signed his petitions.”

Over the past year, Hill has become a well-known figure in the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement, and has increasingly drawn the attention of abortion-rights advocacy groups and of local law enforcement officials in Florida for his inflammatory public statements. Officials of abortion-rights groups said they have been told that state law enforcement officials have periodically had Hill under surveillance in recent months, but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement refused to comment Friday.

Hill first gained public attention following the shooting death in March, 1993, of Gunn in Pensacola; he created Defensive Action largely to provide support for Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion protester who was convicted in Gunn’s murder earlier this year.

Since then, Hill has appeared on several television and radio talk shows to debate the morality of violence against doctors and abortion clinics. He also developed close ties to other radicals who have formed anti-abortion splinter groups around the country. Hill and other extremists argue that abortion doctors are guilty of murdering unborn babies, and thus killing an abortion doctor is a justifiable way of preventing such killing.

Those groups, including Defensive Action, have broken off from the mainstream of the anti-abortion movement out of frustration with the refusal of groups such as the National Right to Life and Operation Rescue to endorse the bombing of abortion clinics and violence against doctors.

Operation Rescue, in particular, has been riven with internal division over the issue of whether to endorse violence. While founder Randall Terry and other leaders publicly call doctors “child killers” and the organization now targets doctors and their families for protest and harassment, Operation Rescue has not endorsed the violence when it occurs. Abortion-rights advocates charge that the group tacitly supports the violence, while the more extreme anti-abortion leaders have formed their own groups and charge that Operation Rescue has lost its way.

Hill has been in the forefront of that splinter movement, and has close ties to other leaders. He has often written for a publication published by another extremist group, Advocates for Life, which also endorses targeting doctors. In addition, Hill writes his own Defensive Action newsletter, which he has used to generate support throughout the anti-abortion underground, pleading with supporters for cash to support his travels while calling for help in militant activity.

Hill, who has most recently been “self-employed” doing automotive restoration in Pensacola, describes himself as a former Presbyterian minister who was excommunicated in 1993 for his support for Griffin’s murder of Gunn. He has said that he received a master’s of divinity degree in 1983 and later worked as a Presbyterian minister in the Pensacola area from 1984 to 1991.

He was clearly bitter over the way he was treated by his church, however, and appeared to become increasingly isolated even within the fundamentalist Christian church network that provides most of the foot soldiers in the anti-abortion movement. In July, 1993, he wrote in the Advocates for Life newsletter that the effects of his excommunication was like being “treated like a non-Christian visitor” to his own church. “I am not allowed to take the Lord’s supper,” he lamented.

But his religious isolation only drove him further to the fringe. On his own, he published a 16-page tract last year called “Was the Killing of Dr. Gunn Just?” which argued that Gunn’s murder was righteous retribution for abortion.

In their publications, Hill and other militants often target individual doctors by name, and doctors in the Pensacola area had been high on those lists.

Dr. John Bayard Britton, 69, who was killed Friday with a shotgun blast to the head, had been the target of a heavy harassment campaign from anti-abortion protesters; he was a close colleague of David Gunn, who was murdered at another Pensacola clinic, and the facility where Britton was gunned down Friday had been bombed in 1984.

On Friday, Britton was wearing a bulletproof vest because of repeated threats. He was so fearful for his life that he had an escort driving him; that escort, 74-year-old abortion-rights advocate James Barrett, was also killed, and his wife, June, 68, was wounded.