A Book of American Martyrs(77)
“YES. I WANT HIM TO DIE.”
Or was it: “I want him sentenced to death. I want everyone to know, he has been sentenced to death. That my husband’s death is a profound loss and the murderer must pay with his own life.” Whether she wanted the man actually to die was another issue.
Of course, Jenna wouldn’t have spoken this way to Gus. Such vindictive words in his wife’s mouth would have shocked and dismayed him.
They had always disapproved of capital punishment. This was barbaric, unworthy of a civilized society. They did not know a single person among their wide circle of friends and professional associates who might have supported capital punishment; as (they liked to say, with a smile) they didn’t know a single person who voted Republican.
In fact of course they did. But they did not acknowledge this possibility.
Did she want Luther Dunphy to die.
Or did she want Luther Dunphy to repent.
It was true, she felt for her husband’s murderer a sick sort of fascination. She could not have said if she was incensed or if she was relieved that the self-ordained “soldier of God” seemed oblivious of her presence in the courtroom, less than twenty feet from her, as he appeared to be oblivious of others in the courtroom who yearned to make eye contact with him, to smile their support of him, to call out to him quickly before one of the bailiffs intervened.
We are praying for you, Luther.
God won’t forget you, Luther! Jesus won’t forget.
Such individuals were escorted out of the courtroom. Their faces shone with righteousness. They were members of the Christian prayer vigil assembled in front of the dignified old granite courthouse who knelt on the sidewalk and on the stone steps each day of the trial taking care to leave just enough space for others to pass by. These were peaceful demonstrators, for the most part—their picket signs didn’t depict aborted infants but only words—RIGHT TO LIFE. NOBODY’S BABY CHOOSES TO DIE. FREE LUTHER DUNPHY.
When she saw these signs, Jenna looked quickly away. She felt that her heart would burst—her head would burst! It was unbearable, that Luther Dunphy should be so defended.
Yet, she understood. Of course.
What had Gus said—Never engage with the enemy.
In Muskegee Falls, entering and departing the Broome County Courthouse, Jenna was never allowed to be alone. Even going to a women’s restroom, she was not allowed to be alone; another woman would accompany her. Always there was someone with her from the prosecutor’s office, or from law enforcement, and there were friends, old friends from Ann Arbor and newer friends from Ohio, associated with the women’s center where Gus Voorhees had worked when he’d been shot down.
Often, the women took Jenna’s hand. Slipping fingers through her fingers, squeezing and gripping. One or two were widows, she’d been told. A widow will tell you, if you are a widow. For there is a sisterhood of sorts.
Don’t look at them. Just look at me, we can talk together. Don’t let them upset you, Jenna. Try to smile at me. Yes! Like that.
It was bizarre to her, that the anti-abortion protesters should hate her. Didn’t they consider that she’d been punished enough, having lost her husband?
Even now, a year after Gus’s death, Jenna continued to receive sporadic hate mail from the enemy, which was forwarded to her in Ann Arbor. She rarely saw such messages, for others intervened and hid them from her, or destroyed them. She dreaded her children being approached, receiving ugly threats—You will be next following the Baby Killer Doctor. You & yours, you will not be spared. (She had sent the children away to live with their grandparents in Birmingham, Michigan, for an indeterminate period of time; in Ann Arbor, the “Voorhees” children were too visible.)
But it wasn’t opponents of abortion solely, or mentally unstable persons raging at Gus Voorhees as if he were still alive, from whom Jenna had to be protected; it was also “media people”—journalists, TV camera crews. Most of these (she believed) were sympathetic with the prosecution’s case. Especially the women were staunch supporters of abortion, pro-choice. Still, Jenna declined all requests for interviews.
“Not now. Not yet! Sometime. Please understand.”
She’d begun refusing such requests even from publications with which she and Gus had been associated immediately after Gus’s death. She had understood the political value of addressing a shocked public after the assassination of a prominent abortion-provider—(and the assassination of an abortion center escort)—but she had been too exhausted, and too stricken with grief. She had hidden even (at times) from her oldest and most loyal friends; even from her parents, and her children. And later, when she’d been a little stronger, she had not wanted to squander her strength in such a way; she did not want to talk about her husband as if he were a political “issue.”
About the trial that had been so frequently, so maddeningly delayed, she felt fierce, self-protective. The trial was all-consuming and obsessive and therefore she had nothing to say about it to an interviewer; she did not even like to speak of it with friends and pro-choice associates, and when she called her children, each night, she said little of the trial, and wanted only to know how (in obsessive detail, that made the eldest children impatient) they were.
To Jenna the trial of Luther Dunphy was an endurance like swimming underwater, holding her breath for as long as she could, and then a little longer. She dared not draw breath too quickly for she would drown.