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The story so far: In September 1999, Clayton Lee Waagner was arrested while traveling with his wife and children in a stolen Winnebago. Facing theft and firearms charges, Waagner pleaded insanity, claiming he was on a mission from God to kill abortion doctors. The jury didn't buy it. In February 2001, Waagner escaped from jail. Four months later the fugitive posted an Internet message threatening to kill clinic workers. Planned Parenthood wanted Attorney General John Ashcroft to proclaim the urgency of Waagner's capture. Ashcroft did not respond, but federal marshals were already hot on his trail. • • •
By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff Writer
The bank robberies. The stolen cars. The casino gambling. The nice clothes Waagner was buying and the executive-style hotels in which he lodged. His increasingly upscale tastes seemed at odds with the guerrilla-style holy war he claimed to be waging against abortion providers. The guy certainly had flair, and his case would have been rather amusing, if not for one thing. Waagner's family.
Neither could the kids find a haven at school. Mary taught them at home, upset that God had been removed from the public school classroom. Shank, who was leading the Waagner manhunt, did not understand it. Mary, 48, was the second of three children from a solidly middle-class family in Ohio. Her father was one of the nicest people Shank had ever met. Shank wondered how she could stay with Waagner. Some law enforcement authorities feared Waagner, 44, was becoming a folk hero to militant antiabortion activists. He had escaped from the DeWitt County Jail in Illinois in February 2001, claiming God had showed him how to pick the lock on a utility door in his cell. The door led to a crawl space over the ceiling of the jail. Waagner found a water drain, unbolted it, and pulled himself up onto the roof to freedom. But if you asked Shank, the God stuff was an act. One of Shank's own men had popped that same lock in about four seconds. It lacked a dead bolt and motion sensors. And it wasn't the Lord who kept the guards from noticing the sprung lock while Waagner explored the crawl space; it was Waagner's dirty underwear, hung strategically over the keyhole. Moreover, when Waagner had been on trial in December 2000, his former accomplice, a young man from his church named Jason Miller, testified they had never been on any mission from God. The crime spree that had landed both of them in jail, Miller said, was conducted in the hope of finding a gold coin dealer to rob. Waagner believed the world as they knew it would end on Jan. 1, 2000, and feared paper money would be worthless in the new millennium, Miller said. Still, Waagner had given accurate descriptions of abortion clinics and their surroundings that suggested something more malevolent. And police had found a list of clinics in a stolen Chevrolet Tahoe he abandoned in the Allegheny National Forest in 1999. Shank's explanation was that Waagner was looking ahead to his defense, thinking perhaps to frame his crime spree as a political act of conscience. Waagner would later insist he made no such calculation. Whatever the truth, it was unlikely he would have confided the nuances of his thinking to Miller. Because as Miller conceded in court of his former mentor: "He is way smarter than I am. I am like a three, he is like an 11."
* * * Throughout last summer, sophisticated electronic surveillance allowed the marshals to track Waagner as he traveled like a pinball around the country. But the fugitive knew not to linger. He would pop up at this hotel, or that bar, or that Kinko's copy center, where he would use public Internet access to check the Army of God and the Nuremberg Files Web sites, with their exhortations for baby-killing sinners to repent. But when local law enforcement authorities arrived to make the arrest, Waagner would have slipped away. He had a pattern, the marshals say. He would rob a bank. Steal a car. Drive hundreds of miles, find a nice hotel, and head straight for the bar. He drank Crown Royal whisky and Coke. He would find people with empty lives to soak up his outlandish stories. He was a bounty hunter. Or an Alaskan pilot. He was an archaeologist. He shot bears. He was a member of the U.S. Marshals Service. He had conned a copy of a special computer ribbon that makes holographic images for ID cards. He created dozens of fake identities. Waagner denies he picked up women, but the marshals say the evidence is unequivocal. Once, he apparently ended up with a transvestite. It was unclear how that encounter ended. All Shank knows is how hard he laughed when, following up on the lead in Tennessee, he knocked on the door and was greeted by a burly man with his wig askance. Shank is a gregarious farm boy from Maryland. He likes sports. And kicking in doors. And carrying a gun. And last summer, he liked reviewing the bank surveillance tapes that showed Waagner's left hand disabled by frostbite from the two nights he spent hiding out in a frozen Illinois corn field after escaping from jail. The tapes were all similar: Waagner scuttles into the bank, a satchel over his left arm. In his right hand is a gun. He puts the gun on the counter, sweeps the cash into the bag, then picks the weapon back up for the getaway. His pot belly and thin little legs made Shank chuckle. Shank's caseload at any given time is about 60 fugitives. In all, the marshals capture more than 30,000 outlaws a year. Most bag easily. But Shank could corner Waagner only in his dreams. In his sleep, the pursuer would come face to face with his quarry. Shank would envision himself tightening his hands around Waagner's neck. He would be looking into his eyes. It felt personal. Even worse was the professional pressure. Shank's supervisor wanted Waagner reeled in, now! Politics, he explained. He began chiding Shank by silently holding up one finger when he passed Shank's office. The message was clear: one man. One man out of thousands of fugitives. And you can't catch him. * * * On Sept. 7, Waagner crashed a Crown Victoria into the back of a truck on a highway outside of Memphis, Tenn. He ran away. In the car, Memphis police discovered a rifle, shotgun, 54 rounds of live ammunition, a blue police car light, plastic handcuffs, a thin white rope, a novel called "Free Fall" and a copy of Numismatic News, a weekly publication for coin collectors. Most significantly, they also found a pipe bomb. It was an alarming development. While Waagner had threatened to kill abortion clinic workers, so far, he had done nothing. Now, the authorities worried, he might be prepared to act. Waagner quickly hitched a ride to Tunica, Miss. At Bally's Casino, a surveillance tape shows him pacing the sidewalk outside the casino, pausing with arms akimbo, then sprinting toward a van in the parking lot. He stuck a pistol into Harold Wayne Baker's ribs. "Get in," he said. Climbing into his van, the 60-year-old cosmetics factory worker thought, "So this is how my life ends." As Waagner drove north toward Memphis, he told his petrified victim about his mission to kill abortion doctors. He asked if Baker believed in abortion. "No, sir!" Baker said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Waagner told Baker he had been featured several times on the television show America's Most Wanted. He asked if Baker had seen him. Baker had not. Waagner laughed. "Well, I am America's most wanted," he said, appearing quite proud of the distinction, inflated though it was: Waagner was on the marshals' most wanted list but was still two weeks from being added to the FBI's. Then Waagner slapped his forehead. "What am I going to do with you?" he asked. He mused about tying his victim up and leaving him in a hotel room, or perhaps a field. But as they neared Memphis, Waagner became paranoid. He thought the cops had set up roadblocks, Baker says. He turned back toward Tunica and thrust his hand out, as if to silence Baker, although it was Waagner, not the kidnapped man, who had been talking nonstop. "I've got to think!" Waagner said. He drove to a gas station to fill the tank, making Baker come with him to pay at the counter, where a surveillance camera caught them together on videotape. They got back in the van and drove toward Tunica, Waagner telling Baker about his wife and nine kids. He said he didn't think he could ever go home again. He pulled a wad of $20 bills from his right pocket. He told Baker to peel off $500. That would compensate him for his trouble, Waagner said. The wad was so thick Baker could barely hold it in one hand. He was a bank robber, Waagner explained. "I have money all over me," he bragged. He reached to his left and extracted another, bigger wad of cash. He gave the money to Baker and told him to take $1,000 more. This wad didn't fit in Baker's hand, and he had to cradle it in his lap. There looked to be about $60,000 there. They settled on a plan: Waagner would drop Baker at another casino in Tunica, where he would catch a shuttle bus back to Bally's. Baker asked if he could retrieve his luggage from the van, and Waagner agreed. In the parking lot, Baker did not look back. He fixed his eyes on the shuttle bus up ahead, walking with his bags held awkwardly behind his back. He could hear the van's motor running. With each step he expected a shot to ring out, followed by the piercing pain of a bullet in his spine. His only hope was the bags. He clutched them to his back, praying they would absorb the bullet. But there was no bang. Only the clammy terror. Baker's legs went weak as he reached the shuttle bus. "Longest walk of my life," he says.
* * * On the morning of Sept. 11, Shank was in a hotel room in Memphis, preparing to follow up leads on Waagner, when he switched on the TV. Usually, he watches ESPN in the morning. The news first thing is too heavy. But for some reason he chose CNN. The north tower of the World Trade Center was burning. Shank watched in disbelief as the second plane hit. Then the fireball at the Pentagon. It wasn't anger he felt. It was overwhelming sadness. The man Shank sought was far from Memphis that day, trying to disappear into the woods. Waagner says he was watching the same scenes of destruction on a small battery-powered television as he hiked along the Appalachian Trail in southeastern Pennsylvania near the Maryland border. Another hiker, coming from the opposite direction, told him Marines were patrolling the woods ahead. Waagner asked why and learned he had wandered near the presidential retreat Camp David, which was on high alert. He immediately turned back. As the nation grappled with the tragedy, prominent evangelicals began issuing statements describing the attacks as God's wrath over legalized abortion. "Because we have not hated bloodshed, bloodshed is now pursuing us," Flip Benham, head of the antiabortion groups Operation Save America and Operation Rescue, said in a news release. Added Pat Robertson: "We have permitted somewhere in the neighborhood of 35- to 40-million unborn babies to be slaughtered by our society. . . . Then we say, 'Why does this happen?' It is happening because God almighty is lifting his protection from us." In Pennsylvania, Mary Waagner was horrified by the deaths, but she would reach the same conclusion: "It was a wakeup call from the Lord, because he is not pleased by what this country has done." In a way, Sept. 11 consoled her. Yes, she had lost Clay to his mission. But it was clear now that God would destroy America if the slaughter of the unborn was not stopped. In that light, her husband was a patriot, not a criminal. "I am proud of him for trying to save those babies," Mary says. * * * On Sept. 21, two weeks after the discovery of the pipe bomb in Memphis, FBI officials did what the Marshals had been urging for some time. They put Waagner on the bureau's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. On Sept. 22, America's Most Wanted aired a special program devoted to terrorism.
Then, an announcer's voice intoned: "They're fighting their own kind of holy war. When we come back, we're going after some home-grown terrorists." On the screen, photos of Rudolph and Waagner morphed into one. Host John Walsh told viewers: "Now, so far in our show we've been profiling terrorists from the Middle East. But now, we're going to show you one from right here at home." A reenactment of Waagner's jail break and video footage depicting the Memphis car wreck were next. "He escaped from an Illinois jail in February and declared his own jihad, a holy war, in which he vows to kill abortion providers," said the voice-over. "An American madman, Clayton Lee Waagner." * * * On Oct. 5, a photo editor at a Boca Raton-based supermarket tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., died of inhalation anthrax. The anthrax mail attacks eventually killed two Washington, D.C.-area postal workers, a woman in New York and another in Connecticut. Anthrax hoaxes were a serious problem. In the first two weeks of October, the FBI received more than 2,000 reports of them. Attorney General John Ashcroft vowed to prosecute. "False terrorist threats tax the resources of an already overburdened enforcement system and the public health system," Ashcroft said in a news conference. He called hoaxes the "destructive acts of cowards." Midmorning on Oct. 15, Megan Merritt, an assistant at the Planned Parenthood clinic in downtown St. Petersburg, sat down to sort through mail. One envelope had a return address of the U.S. Marshals Service and advised, "Time Sensitive." Merritt thought it was strange and set the envelope aside. Nurse practitioner Michelle Beckerman walked by and picked the envelope up. "Oh my, there's powder in it," she said. "You're kidding!" said LaWanda Walker, the public affairs coordinator.
A hazardous materials team from St. Petersburg Fire & Rescue put the letter in a plastic bag. They assured the women it was probably a hoax. The St. Petersburg letter was one of some 285 anthrax hoax letters that arrived at abortion clinics across the country between Oct. 15 and Oct. 24. In early November, another wave of 269 hoax anthrax letters overwhelmed abortion clinics. Inside were notes telling clinic workers they were going to die. They were signed, "Army of God." * * * On Nov. 14, Mary was in her van about 7 a.m., preparing to head out to drive the Amish to work, when a train of law enforcement vehicles headed down her long dirt driveway. Because of Waagner's ties to the Army of God, he was a prime suspect in the anthrax hoaxes, and the feds meant business. According to Mary, the officers came in with their hands on their holsters, as if ready to draw their guns, and dragged the kids out of bed. They divided them and told them lies. They told Luke that Becky had admitted her father was in contact and so he should 'fess up, too. Or they told Kelly that Janey had admitted it. Or they told Clay Jr. that Cody had confessed. That sort of thing, Mary says. For hours they sat around without food, the younger kids still in their pajamas, Mary says. The feds carted away boxes of documents, including her appointment calendar and the kids' home school writing assignments. They dumped their clean clothes out of drawers, Mary says, then dumped trash from the cans onto the clean clothes. She cried. She felt helpless. There were FBI and marshals and a U.S. Postal Service agent trooping through her home. She doesn't remember their names. The only face she recalls is that of a younger guy with dark brown hair, very cute. He seemed to be in charge. Her girls were saying it was too bad he was a U.S. marshal. * * * Geoff Shank was disgusted. He could not believe how this family lived. On the way up the porch steps to execute the warrant, he and a deputy marshal had nearly crashed through a rotten step. Inside, dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, and a hose was run through the window to provide water. The bedrooms were strewn with clothes that Shank says he picked up so his deputies would not trample them. He was appalled to see that the younger kids slept in the living room around a dangerous wood-burning stove. He found chamber pots of human waste and buckets of water and rags -- what they used to wash themselves, he supposed. At one point, he took Mary aside. The marshals had been monitoring suspicious packages arriving at her home. Packages with the return addresses of church groups. Soon after, the marshals noticed Mary had some money. Blue insulation panels went up over her home's plywood exterior. She got her van fixed. At a local diner, she paid for a purchase with a large bill. Later, Shank would find that the arrival of the packages coincided with the dates of various bank robberies in which Waagner was suspected. Shank and Mary went into a storage building beside the house. Mary called it the "guest house." She told Shank what a wonderful hideaway it was, a place where she and Clay used to get away from the kids. In her mind, it was a beautiful little cottage. She didn't seem to see the mounds of clothes everywhere, the dust, the old boards piled up. Shank asked if she had been receiving money lately. She told him that church groups had been helping her out, that she figured they were sending her cash to support her while Clay carried out his antiabortion mission. "Mary, that wasn't from a church," Shank said. He asked if the money had come in crisp new stacks. She nodded. "Who do you really think that money was from?" he prodded gently. It took a moment for the truth to sink in, Shank says. Then she began to cry. The raid was one Shank says he will never forget, mainly because of the kids. They were flowers growing in a dump. He had to read their home-school compositions for any mention of Waagner's whereabouts. Though filled with grammatical and spelling errors, they showed real intelligence, Shank thought. And the youngest, 9-year-old Hope, had seen Shank petting their puppy and walked over to join him. She had long brown hair and large brown eyes. A little angel, Shank thought. It was so painful to watch her, he had to turn away. Shank was the one who called child protective services. "I was so angry. All they did was take the kids to a neighbor to shower," he says. Or at least, that's what he was told. Mary says no one took her children anywhere. "Fortunately, the lady they sent out here was very wise. She could look around and see what was going on. My house was not unfit to live in, until they trashed it." * * * Eleanor Smeal began studying extremist movements in the early 1980s, after getting death threats as president of the National Organization for Women. In 1987, after she formed the Feminist Majority, she began lobbying for laws to protect access to abortion clinics, and her interest deepened, particularly in militant Christian fundamentalism. It was people invoking religion who were shooting abortion doctors. In 1996, when the Taliban movement seized control of most of Afghanistan, Smeal also began to study Islamic fundamentalism. It seemed a mirror image of militant Christian fundamentalism, down to the belief that ordinary pleasures like music and dancing were sinful. Suspecting Waagner in the anthrax hoax letters case, Smeal and her counterparts at Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation met Oct. 24 with FBI officials Bob Jordan, chief of the corruption/civil rights section, and Ruben Garcia, assistant director of the criminal investigative division. The FBI had already put Waagner on its Most Wanted List, but the activists wanted to keep the pressure on for his capture. At the meeting, Smeal laid a piece of paper on the table. It was a chart her staff had prepared outlining similarities between Islamic and Christian extremists. One side has the Army of God, Smeal told the FBI officials. The other has the mujahedeen, or soldiers of God. And what do they hate? The U.S. government -- for allowing abortion, as the Christian extremists say, or defiling Muslim holy places, as the Islamists charge. Both sides, she told the FBI officials, are fighting for a theocracy: one based on the literal word of the Bible, the other on the literal word of the Koran. Both have shown antipathy to homosexuals and women's rights. Could they one day get together? "We think it's something you should look into," Smeal said. (Police had in fact found a Koran in the Crown Victoria Waagner ditched in Memphis. Waagner later explained he was thinking of creating a fake Islamist group to implicate in his terrorism, but abandoned the idea after finding the unfamiliar religious text impenetrable.) The FBI men, Smeal says, "just sit there and listen. They never tell you what they think." The women asked the FBI to classify Waagner as a domestic terrorist and the Army of God as a terrorist conspiracy, designations that would raise public awareness and law enforcement commitment to the case. "There's an awful lot of malcontents out there who think they speak for God," Smeal says. * * * Neal Horsley, 58, is the picture of the Southern gentleman, with his drooping white mustache and neat Oxford shirts. His comfortable home in Carrollton, Ga., has a wide front porch where Horsley can sit at dusk and watch deer sip from his pond. Inside, his Oriental rug is worn to a genteel sheen, his computer screen saver reads, RESIST EVIL!, and a copy of Country Gardener Living magazine sits on a coffee table. Like Waagner, Horsley never knew his dad. Horsley was tucked snugly in his mother's womb when his dying father, he was told, cried out in delirium to the unborn son that everything would be okay. The son grew up to sell marijuana. He went to prison for three years in the 1970s for it. That's where he accepted Christ as his savior. When Horsley's wife could not get pregnant, he told her to beg God's forgiveness for a previous abortion. She did, and they had a son, Christian, the first of three children. Later, he started a Web site called the Nuremberg Files, which he adorned with graphics of dripping blood and mutilated fetus parts. He listed Dr. Barnett Slepian's name there, along with other abortion providers Horsley hoped one day to see tried for "crimes against humanity." When Slepian was shot and killed in his suburban Buffalo, N.Y., home in 1998, allegedly by an Army of God activist, Horsley put a slash through the doctor's name, as if celebrating the fatality. He was investigated for conspiring in the murder but was never charged. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pushed him out of his job as a computer programmer. Now, Horsley freelances. This was the man Clay Waagner chose to be his confessor. On Nov. 23, Horsley was working in his home office when his schnauzer, Kaiser, perked up his ears. Horsley turned to find a well-dressed man standing in the doorway. "The impression he gave was one of casual money. Everything he had on was nice. Understated, but nice," Horsley says. The man pulled his black coat back to reveal a gun in his waistband. "You don't know who I am, do you?" the man said. "No," Horsley replied. "I'm Clay Waagner." Waagner admitted to Horsley he had sent the more than 550 hoax anthrax letters to abortion clinics. He outlined a convoluted threat to kill 42 clinic workers that he asked Horsley to publicize. After a few hours of conversation, he bound his new friend with duct tape and left.
After unwinding the tape with his teeth, Horsley says, he immediately informed the authorities of Waagner's confession, which he had recorded on tape. The arrest of Clayton Lee Waagner, already a high priority, got bumped to the very top. * * * On Nov. 27, the abortion rights groups met with Ralph Boyd, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Again, they asked Ashcroft to make a public statement about Waagner. Boyd was noncommittal. Smeal, though, now says she never doubted Ashcroft would make the statement. "What choice did he have?" she says, especially after the attorney general vowed to give no quarter to terrorism. Indeed, two days later, Ashcroft held a nationally televised news conference. He pointed to a poster on his left. It was three enlarged photographs of Clayton Lee Waagner. "We are committed to identifying, tracking down, and prosecuting those domestic terrorists who threaten the lives and welfare of innocent Americans," Ashcroft said. There. In the eyes of the government, Clayton Lee Waagner was no longer just a common criminal. He was a domestic terrorist.
* * * Six days after Ashcroft's news conference, a clerk at a Kinko's copy center in suburban Cincinnati noticed a man sitting at a rental computer. She looked at the WANTED poster the marshals had sent to the store. She called police. Waagner did not resist. In the patdown, arresting officers found a semiautomatic pistol in Waagner's blue jeans, with a bullet loaded in the chamber, ready to fire. From his pockets they pulled wads of cash totaling nearly $9,000, around 20 ID cards with different names and addresses, and a gold bail bondsman's badge. Waagner was driving a sporty green 1999 Mercedes he had stolen and outfitted with new Tennessee plates. Inside the car, police found a computer processing unit, flat-panel monitor and keyboard. A rifle was in the trunk. On the way to the station, Waagner remarked on the officers' demeanor. They seemed mighty unconcerned, he said, with transporting a dangerous criminal who was on both the marshals' and FBI's most wanted lists.
"Not really," an officer responded. At the Springdale, Ohio, police station, another officer asked Waagner for identification. Waagner laughed, saying he had plenty, but none with his real name. "Where are the big boys?" he asked, as if expecting John Ashcroft himself to step up any minute. He told police he didn't have any beef with them, only with abortion providers. In the stolen Mercedes, he said, they would find a herbicide that would give a false positive for anthrax in field tests. Such a herbicide was used in the second round of hoax anthrax letters to clinics, according to Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. U.S. Marshal Geoff Shank, meanwhile, was elated to hear Waagner was in custody. The nearly 10-month search for the antiabortion bandit had been one of the largest manhunts in marshals' history. Coincidentally, on the day of Waagner's arrest, the attorney general was at marshals headquarters in Arlington, Va., for the swearing-in ceremony of the service's new director, Benigno Reyna. Ashcroft asked the rank-and-file marshals in the audience to stand up so he could see them. It was a moment that made Shank swell with pride. "There is a firm that said, 'You're in good hands with...' Well, Clayton Lee Waagner is in the good hands, in the custody of the United States Marshals Service," Ashcroft said to laughter and applause. For Horsley, meanwhile, Waagner had became a cause celebre. The antiabortion Web site owner now displays Waagner's photograph and story prominently on his site. But other hard-core antiabortion activists debated whether Waagner was really one of them. Waagner is "an invention of his own warped-mind," Flip Benham of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America wrote on his Web site after Waagner's arrest. "None of us in the pro-life movement had ever heard of Mr. Waagner before his escape from a Clinton, Ill., jail. So where did anyone ever get the idea that Waagner was a pro-life Christian activist? The abortion industry spin-machine -- that's where!" Benham wrote. Likewise, it took some arm-twisting by Horsley and Army of God leader Don Spitz to get Waagner added to the "Prisoners of Christ" list, a roll call of people who are in prison for antiabortion activities. After Waagner let it be known he was hurt to be excluded, the activist who maintains the Web list, Steve Wetzel, relented, but with the disclaimer that Prisoners of Christ "does not endorse Waagner's conduct." As for Waagner, he has settled on the role of martyr for the unborn after a lifetime of muddled identity. He has admitted sending the hoax anthrax letters and expects to be charged at some point. From jail, he grants frequent interviews but gets angry when questions veer from abortion to his painful past. "I've been a screwup my entire life. I will stipulate to that," he says. But he vehemently disputes the marshals' account of carousing during his nearly 10 months on the lam. "I honestly think they said that to discredit me. I can't believe anyone would question my motivation." He says he never meant to kill, only terrorize. In January, a federal judge in Urbana, Ill., sentenced Waagner to 30 years in prison for the 1999 theft of the Winnebago, illegally possessing firearms and escaping from the DeWitt County Jail in February 2001. In April, Waagner acted as his own attorney in Cincinnati on trial for charges stemming from his arrest at the Kinko's, including stealing the Mercedes. He was convicted and now sits in the Boone County, Ky., jail awaiting sentencing on those counts. He also faces charges in Memphis for the pipe bomb, in Mississippi for the carjacking of Harold Baker and in Pennsylvania and West Virginia for bank robbery. While Waagner is prepared to spend the rest of his life behind bars, his wife is heartbroken. Mary finds some consolation in the belief that God was guiding him all the times he slipped away from authorities. "My husband is smart, but he's not invisible. Unless the Lord helped him, how in the world did he escape?" Horsley and Spitz were called before a federal grand jury in Philadelphia to say what they know about Waagner's anthrax hoaxes. Spitz says he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions because the FBI had previously been at his home, asking if he had been aiding Waagner. Spitz thinks he is now under investigation, too, although he says he had nothing to do with Waagner's decision to send the letters. And he is disappointed with Ashcroft. "It was a political move," he says of the attorney general's call for Waagner's arrest. Ashcroft "just caved into the pro-aborts." Horsley is equally critical of Ashcroft, calling him "a godless, apostate example of self-deceived people who collaborate with baby butchers." Yet Waagner has only praise for the controversial attorney general. There is nothing contradictory about Ashcroft's obligation to arrest lawbreakers, even when they are attempting to stop abortions, Waagner says. "This," he adds, "is not a black-and-white world." * * * On the day before Valentine's Day, Mary borrowed some money and drove six hours with Clay Jr. to the Hamilton County Justice Center in Cincinnati. The last time they had seen Waagner was 2 1/2 years ago, handcuffed and sobbing in the trooper's car on the side of the Illinois highway. Clay appeared behind security glass. He picked up the telephone to speak. To avoid looking at his orange jumpsuit, shackles and handcuffs, Mary kept focused on his eyes. "Things that are very painful for me, I block out. I look past them to what I know is good," she says. Clay told his son to be the man of the house. Mary didn't say much. She just wanted him to know she and the kids would always love him. She didn't ask for details of the last 30 months. As usual, she didn't really want to know. Neither did Clay inquire about what she had been through. She does plan to write him a letter about it one day, though. Later, when he has time to reflect. Because, Mary says, "I figure he'll have a little more time to spend in prayer than I will."
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