A Death in Wichita Read Online Free PDF Page A

money than her husband. At times he seemed manic—hyperactive and not eating or sleeping at all, then crashing and nodding off on the couch. He had sleep apnea and might doze off in the middle of the afternoon. One day she came home to find him passed out in the living room, as their toddler was about to walk out the front door, toward the traffic outside their house. He wasn’t the same man he’d been when they’d gotten married—especially after his born-again Christian conversion.
    Lindsey watched him sit hour after hour before the TV and stare at Pat Robertson’s 700 Club or at a Texas televangelist named Robert Tilton, who sold believers a “miracle link” piece of cloth that would bring them miracles if they’d mail the cloth back to him to display on his altar. Lindsey felt dismay and anger when her husband sent an entire paycheck to Tilton, who was later exposed by Diane Sawyer as a fraud. At first, the only thing the couple fought about was finances. When things got tough, Scott’s father, John, slipped Lindsey some money behind his son’s back so she could buy necessary things for the family, and for Nicholas in particular. He was smitten by his grandson. One day in 1991, Scott learned of a seminar in the Kansas City area about how to avoid paying federal and state income taxes because (those running the seminar contended) the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was never actually ratified. He went to the event and was told that collecting these taxes was illegal in America. He drove home and informed Lindsey that he’d found the solution to all their troubles: from now on, they wouldn’t be handing any more money over to the state or federal government.
    “Things,” says Lindsey, “were never the same.”
    When she tried to talk to her husband about this strategy and to steer him away from the anti-tax movement, he had a favorite word for her.
    “He always called me ignorant,” she says. “‘You’re ignorant about what the government is doing to us,’ he’d tell me, ‘and ignorant about the tax situation in America. You should read up on it. You should study the Constitution. I’ll give you some material to educate you. You should watch some videos about this and listen to certain radio programs. You should find out what’s really going on. Then you wouldn’t be so ignorant.’”
    All of this was hard for Lindsey to hear, she says, “Because I was the one with the college degree.”
    She didn’t like fighting, especially in front of others, and tried to keep the peace inside their small house. When she spoke with members of Scott’s family in Topeka about the direction his life was taking, they didn’t know what to say or do. He was just going through a phase that would soon end, they’d suggest; he’d always been high-strung and would straighten himself out. He needed to find a job and stick with it. These responses didn’t satisfy Lindsey, who wondered if the current troubles were related to Scott’s mental health diagnosis as a teenager. Was he schizophrenic? Should he be seeing a psychiatrist? Or be on medication? He’d hated those meds and made that very clear to her every time the subject came up. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, he said, Lindsey was just “ignorant” of what was happening to America. No matter what he did with his income, she fired back, she was going to keep paying federal and state taxes on her earnings.
    Scott wasn’t the only one she was concerned about. If her husband got into legal trouble, she’d have to raise their son alone. All of this conflict was already starting to have an impact on Nicholas. At school activities and Cub Scout meetings, Scott approached other parents and talked to them about taxes and religion. Lindsey was a Scout den mother and it was embarrassing to bring Nick to these public functions, where the boy watched his father harangue others about the evils of the American government. Why was his dad acting that