What if I told you that a Wyoming native played a key role in taking down America’s worst serial killer? Beginning in the 1980s he killed more victims than the any other serial killer in U.S. history and he almost got away with it.
His victims mostly went unnoticed until 2010 when authorities raided his business looking for evidence of an illegal drug operation. What they found was an office filled with corpses—more than thirty of them. They also found evidence of hundreds, perhaps thousands, more.
One industrial-strength garbage disposal had been completely worn out. Evidently it was used to grind up bodies for disposal into the Philadelphia sewer system. A waste-disposal company unknowingly had hauled off countless more for incineration. Still others had been taken to his vacation home and used as bait in his crab cages. So much evidence was lost that we will never know the full count.
Kermit Gosnell is serving life without parole. A movie about his murder trial opens in Fort Collins and nationwide this Friday, October 12: Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.
It is a riveting story on several levels. Perhaps uppermost is the question: how was he able to commit so many murders without getting caught? He had numerous witnesses with evidence literally piled up in the hallways. How could all of this go unnoticed for decades?
Answer: he was hiding his murders in plain sight. This was made possible because they took place in an abortion clinic, giving him an almost impenetrable layer of protection. Nobody wants to look at abortion clinics or think too carefully about them. Scrutiny of abortion practices is America’s last taboo.
Consider your own reaction to the paragraph above. Did the sudden appearance of the word “abortion” made you hesitate? Words do powerful things to us, but none greater than this one.
It does powerful things to politicians, too. While nail salons receive health department inspections every year, Gosnell’s clinic had not been inspected by Pennsylvania’s Department of Health for over 17 years—not once. Grand jury testimony stated that the governor’s office quashed these inspections because it was an inner-city abortion clinic.
Gosnell was charged with hundreds of violations of Pennsylvania’s abortion law. But these charges had nothing to do with his murders. He was convicted of multiple murders because of his practice of having his nurses deliver alive-and-healthy babies who were later killed by cutting their spinal cord with a pair of scissors.
Defense attorneys sought to portray him as merely a sloppy practitioner of partial-birth abortion. That procedure kills the baby after it is mostly, but not completely, delivered. Gosnell couldn’t be bothered to observe that fine distinction. After all, if it is legal to kill a baby a few centimeters and a few seconds before birth, what magically makes it illegal a few feet and a few minutes farther away?
This defense strategy cast a spotlight on a plainly indefensible idea: that humanity and the protection of law are bestowed on a person by his passage through space and time. This logic inevitably leads to blurring the line between medicine and murder. Those unable to see that a fetus is a baby find it equally difficult to see that baby as a murder victim.
America’s press corps went into vapor-lock. The most sensational trial of a serial killer in the history of America had virtually no reporters in the court room. It could not be covered because the reporters could not say why it was wrong.
One who noticed their absence was Mollie Ziegler Hemingway who spent her earliest years in Kemmerer. As a reporter for GetReligion.org she watched local coverage on Gosnell’s trial for three weeks waiting for any national coverage. On April 7, 2013 she published a story about the media blackout and followed up with six more in the next week.
Meanwhile, J.D. Mullane, a reporter for Calkins Media, snapped a photo that went viral. It showed rows of empty seats that had been reserved for the press. The picture and the stories prompted Kiersten Powers of USA Today to break the media silence with a column subtitled: “We’ve forgotten what belongs on Page One.”
Once the dam broke, all the major networks and newspapers dispatched reporters to Philadelphia to cover the trial. The national attention had a significant impact both on the trial and on public opinion.
In the movie, the role of Mollie Hemingway and J.D. Mullane are woven together into a fictional character named Mollie Mullaney, a heroine of the story. Her character reminds us of the vital need for an unflinching press corps that will cover, and not cover-up stories that challenge the status quo. By reporting what we don’t want to know the press can help us come to our senses and regain our humanity.
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