Thou Shalt Not Kill

By Paul Gray

On what was to be his last morning, Dr. David Gunn, 47, woke up in a good mood. "He was happier than I'd seen him in a long time," says Paula Leonard, his girlfriend, in whose apartment he stayed when he came to Pensacola. He did so regularly, another stop on his 1,000-mile, six-day-a-week schedule of performing abortions at seven clinics in Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Gunn had reason to feel depressed: in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, he virtually lived out of his white Buick Skylark and encountered antiabortion protests and threats nearly everywhere he practiced. Paula remembers marveling at his high spirits as he set off with a limp -- the trace of his childhood polio -- last Wednesday at about 9:10. He drove to the Pensacola Women's Medical Services in Cordova Square, a suburban shopping center tending toward dress stores, doctors' offices, delis and weight-loss clinics.

Michael Griffin, 31, had not awakened that morning at all -- he had just come off a 12-hr. shift at the local Monsanto chemical plant -- but he too seemed in high spirits. He arrived at the same complex that morning to pay a neurology bill for the treatment of his older daughter's headaches. "He was just fine," says receptionist Dee Slack, who told him that that day was her 34th birthday. "We joked because I had forgotten, not my birthday, but the date of it." Griffin then picked up a drink at the Circle K and walked toward the site of a planned pro-life demonstration in front of the clinic where David Gunn was expected. The night before, Griffin had called John Burt, regional director of Rescue America, an activist antiabortion group, to say he would take part.

He never joined the people gathering in front of the clinic. Instead, he made his way to a small parking lot behind the building. After Gunn drove up, parked and walked slowly away from his car, Griffin shot him three times in the back with a .38-cal. pistol. He then dropped his weapon, approached a police officer and said, "I just shot someone, and he's laying behind the building." Gunn died roughly two hours later.

With these three pops of a handgun, a new chapter ripped open in America's excruciating abortion saga. A complex conflict involving totems, taboos, theology, medicine, politics and judicial rulings had suddenly dropped to the level of a shoot-out. At the center were two hardworking fathers with firm convictions that they willingly put into practice. Both had experienced marital problems; both gave generously of their scarce free time to volunteer work. What separated them -- what kept them apart until it fused them in violence -- was a profound disagreement, a glitch in the moral geography that permits parallel lives not only to meet but to explode.

Neither man seemed destined or even inclined to star in a national morality play. Gunn grew up in Benton (pop. 3,800), Kentucky, where his family was active in the Church of Christ. Old classmates remember him as funny, convivial, not at all self-pitying about the brace on his withered right leg, and smart. Beverly Beasley, now an insurance agent in Benton, says, "I remember once when we were in the fifth grade, the history teacher started talking about the Constitution. David stood up and said he could recite the Bill of Rights from memory, and he proceeded to do it verbatim."

No friend can recall Gunn's wanting to be a doctor from childhood, but that was what he became. For a while he practiced obstetrics, until malpractice premiums rose so high that he was forced to restrict his work to gynecology. And that was when the folks in Benton began to lose touch with what he was doing. Last week the members of his family -- including his parents, his older brother Peter, his twin sister Diane and younger sister Lilith -- heard that he had been killed and learned for the first time that he had made his living performing abortions. "We were totally unaware," says Peter, "that he was involved in such a volatile issue."

Was this reticence a matter of residual shame -- retained from his religious childhood -- or considerate tact? People who were close to Gunn are sure they know the answer. Says Vanessa Caldwell, his assistant at the Montgomery (Alabama) Women's Medical Clinic: "He was a very open, honest man. I think that's why it bothered him that his family didn't know the kind of work he did, exactly. He knew it would hurt them if they found out."

But Gunn's work was no secret in the circuit he traveled -- a pine-forested area radiating north, east and west from the Florida panhandle -- and it made him both notorious and revered. Antiabortion groups harassed him, listing his itinerary, phone numbers and addresses and issuing WANTED posters bearing his name or photograph or both. One of them concluded, "To defenseless unborn babies, Gunn is heavily armed and very dangerous."

The women he treated and worked with saw a different figure. Says Linda Taggart, director of the Ladies Center, another Pensacola clinic where Gunn worked: "In recent years, there haven't been enough doctors. But he was never too busy for the women. He was a very sweet, caring man, who was very much devoted to seeing that women kept all their rights." When he finished his clinic work in Pensacola, Gunn would drop in on the Slim Concept Weight Control center and give free counseling on diets and fitness. Says Paula Leonard: "All he wanted was to help women. He wanted women to have a choice, and he died for it."

She says she and Gunn had been tailed "for months" by a blue van that then parked on her street when they were home. Two weeks before Gunn's murder, she had moved; her address had begun appearing in pro-life pamphlets. "I told the police this was going to happen," she said, shivering in the cold during a candlelight vigil outside the Ladies Center. "Last Friday when I was leaving work, that man was beating on my car window and wouldn't let me go. They were stalking us, the antiabortionists, but the police wouldn't believe me."

The man who did the shooting seemed equally ill-suited for his performance. Born and raised in Pensacola, Michael Griffin graduated from high school and enlisted in the Navy without anyone thinking he was anything but well-spoken and quiet. After serving five years as an electrician, he returned home and later married Patricia Ann Presley on June 10, 1981, in Brewton, Alabama. (A few years earlier, David Gunn had worked in the local hospital there, delivering babies.) The Griffins had two daughters and moved back to Pensacola in 1987; he got a job as a chemical operator on a polymer-casting line with Monsanto in 1990 and at the time of his arrest was earning slightly more than $30,000 annually.

In 1991 his wife filed for divorce, charging in court documents that her husband was "verbally and emotionally abusive to both our minor daughters and myself." A year later the suit was withdrawn, and the couple reconciled. For a time the Griffins kept their children out of school and educated them at home, although both enrolled in a private academy last September. Griffin had no known private or public involvement with Pensacola's strident antiabortion factions until a month or so before he murdered Gunn.

During that time, though, he had drawn close to John Burt of Rescue America and Burt's wife Linda, who, with her husband, runs a halfway house just outside Pensacola for unwed mothers, called Our Father's House. Griffin volunteered to do work around the place, fixing a leaky faucet, repairing a doorjamb, installing a security system. He was gentle with the babies of visitors and told the Burts of his hope that his wife could have her tubal ligature undone so that they could have more children. He also, according to Linda, complained about his long shifts at work: "He said he'd had 12 hours of sleep in the past three days." That was on the Sunday preceding the fatal Wednesday.

That morning he went to church with the Burts at the Whitfield Assembly of God in nearby Berrydale. During the service, Griffin offered a prayer. "He just offered his hope that David Gunn would meet Jesus Christ and stop killing babies," recalls Burt.

It was a weekly ritual that Andy Watson and David Gunn had cherished for 11 years. Every Sunday, Gunn's one day off, he and Watson would head to Alabama's Lake Eufaula and spend anywhere from two to six hours in a boat, sometimes swapping stories, sometimes in companionable silence. Six years ago, Gunn and Watson entered a local bass tournament and, thanks to the eight bass they caught, beat a field of 333 other anglers for the $10,200 prize. Watson, 72, recalls with delight how he and Gunn "got right down on my living room floor, counted the cash and split it fifty-fifty." The pair was looking forward to another tournament, the first of the season, and had already paid the $100 entrance fee. It was to be last Sunday.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Pensacola, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Lisa Towle/Montgomery