His voice struck me as scary.
It was my job, listening to this man. I never met him. He never, thank God, met me. But night after night, I listened to him. His voice was calm, his tone was even. And he left me slightly nauseous and afraid, consistently.
I worked for a small, weekly newspaper. My first job at this paper, in fact, for quite awhile, my only job, was to transcribe the answering machine that took calls from our readers that would be published in that weeks Sound Off! column. We went through, maybe five or six 90-minute tapes per week. We had an avid readership and a staggering amount of repeat callers to our column. He was one of the more repetitious of our callers.
I worked at night, usually alone in the newsroom. And he was almost always one of the first three or four callers on every tape, leaving a minimum of approximately six calls per day. All pretty much the same. Over the course of, I would guess, two years, I got to know quite a bit about this man, or at least quite a bit that he claimed about himself.
He said he worked in the juvenile justice system, and he used to drive an armored truck before that. He was divorced, the father of three, if I recall correctly. He lived somewhere in the same city where my paper was located, in a private home. He was vehemently anti-abortion.
I tended to give nicknames to some of my callers, based on their repetitive riffs, like the Logo Lady, who called in eight or nine times a night to decry the presence of television station logos in the lower right-hand corner of her tv screen. But this man never received a nickname. He scared me too badly.
I did speak to my editor about him, more than once. But my editor pointed out that my job was not to pass judgment on the callers, just to transcribe their calls, word for word. He would decide on what was published. And he generally came down in favor of the callers.
In most cases, this didn’t bother me, but in the case of this particular caller, it bothered me more than a little. I felt that publishing his rants merely encouraged him in his insanity. And I felt that there was no real way my editor could understand my fear.
The words themselves were unsettling enough, but it was the calm, implacable tone, the voice my editor never heard, that frightened me so much. This man was not sane. It was something you could tell from his voice, I think, more than anything else. But the only thing my editor ever saw was the transcription of his calls, he never listened to the tapes themselves, and each tape was erased and reused, so there was never any record to refer back to.
In the beginning, the caller started out relatively mildly, as most do, objecting to abortion on moral and theological grounds. The fact that he called in over and over to make this argument said little about him, really. Because calls were published without attribution, most of our callers with an agenda called in over and over, so that their words would be published in various permutations, over and over, making it seem as if many people were calling about the same thing. These days we would call it Astroturfing, but back then it didn’t have a name. It was merely annoying.
He began to personalize things fairly early on, mentioning a laundry list of “abortion doctors” across the nation that were being targeted by various anti-abortion groups. This was during the early days of violent, even deadly attacks on physicians who provided abortion services, and this man was very much in favor of this practice. He began carefully justifying the murder of physicians in order to “save the unborn”. He did this in call after call after call. Night after night. Week after week.
By this time, at least a year had gone by and I noticed something new creeping into his calls. More personal information was being shared. The business about being a divorced father, concerned with what his children would think of him, hoping they’d “understand” his views “some day”. His former career as a security guard on an armored truck. The fact that he owned guns, a lot of guns.
And then the insistence that he had a large amount of money, stolen from one of his trucks during his last days with the company. His truck made bank deliveries and he described this robbery as being almost sinfully easy. He claimed he hadn’t spent the money. It wasn’t meant to make him rich. It was meant to further the cause.
That’s when he got really scary. He talked about his guns, and how he’d secreted them in large caches, buried in his backyard, ready for The Day and how, come The Day, he hoped his children would understand, because he wasn’t sure he’d be allowed or able to explain his actions to them.
And then he began actively recruiting those who might feel the way he did. It was only a matter of a few weeks before he began inviting people to borrow his guns to kill “abortion doctors”, finally even offering to pay them to do so. How they were to reach him was never discussed. He seemed to feel they’d find him through osmosis, I suppose.
By this time I almost wasn’t typing him anymore. I typed in a few of his milder comments each day, but he flat scared me too badly to type every call he made. I skipped over most of his calls, his rants. He was the only caller I ever did this to, and I still don’t think I was entirely wrong.
One day, in frustration, he called the paper and talked to my editor. Without actually identifying himself, he complained that his calls weren’t being published anymore and wanted to know why he was being censored. My editor, naturally, brought the complaint to me. I swore he wasn’t being censored, that I was typing up every single call. And I had his milder calls to point to. My editor didn’t believe me, but contented himself with reminding me that it wasn’t my job to censor the callers, just to type them.
Despite the fact that I knew my editor was right, somehow I still couldn’t bring myself to do this. If anything, he was more frightening than ever, with his soft, implacable tone. By this time, he was calling up to a dozen times a night. But I did transcribe more of his calls, even a few of the worst ones. I noticed that the worst ones weren’t being published, which made me feel a lot better about my editor and a bit foolish about my own fears. I resolved to make myself type all of his calls, no matter how uneasy it made me. And I did. For awhile.
Because one day, he stopped calling. No slow tapering off, he just stopped.
It had been my fervent hope that, if he weren’t being published, he’d stop calling. But that never seemed to happen. Published or not, he called every day. Until, suddenly, he simply wasn’t there. His voice no longer sent chills down my spine on a near-hourly basis. I wasn’t sure why he’d stopped, I was just grateful not to have to listen to him anymore.
About three days after this, I was leafing through the daily paper we were associated with when I came across an article that froze my blood cold. A man had been arrested because he’d attempted to solicit an undercover policeman to kill someone. In the course of the investigation, the robbery of an armored truck on which he had once worked was discovered and he was charged with the robbery. After interrogating him, officers went to his home and found most of the money from the truck robbery along with a cache of literally dozens of weapons buried in his backyard.
He had been working at the local juvenile detention facility, but had been let go some months prior to his arrest. He was the divorced father of three.
He was also quite possibly psychotic, though the article never said so.
Everything he’d said about himself was true, including that he was ready, willing and able to hire someone to kill a physician. Because he felt it was the right thing to do. After all, life was sacred and must be protected at all costs.
He was on the side of the angels.
We ignore people like this at our own peril. We turn a blind eye, secure that their excesses will never happen, that somehow reason will prevail and we won’t have to actually do anything about it. It’ll all just go away.
But if this man is any example, it won’t. And his target of choice was doctors, still a relatively popular profession with most people, unlike, say, lawyers or judges.
So when members of Congress or the Senate start talking about abolishing the separation of powers, neutering the judiciary branch and vesting sole authority in the executive branch, don’t be so sure it can’t happen here.
And when someone suggests, mockingly of course, that killing a few judges wouldn’t be so bad…be afraid.
Because they believe they’re on the side of the angels as well, don’t they?
9:28:31 PM 
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