Chapter 32

It excited Norma to be where Dorothy had found Oz. Norma arrived in Kansas in the last week of 2007, and settled into the cottage of plywood and tin that Troy Newman had built in his backyard.

Newman had moved to Kansas in 2002 to harass George Tiller. He was still in that fight, living with his wife and five kids on acres of pastureland and hedge apple in the town of Towanda. They were twenty-five miles from Tiller’s Wichita clinic. And twenty-five yards from Newman’s front door, Norma had all she needed: a bathroom, a bed, a mini-fridge, a hotplate. Still, within days, she was depressed—“because it’s January,” she told Newman. She had to return to DC for another Roe anniversary. And back in the capital, she endorsed Ron Paul for president, appeared in a documentary titled American Holocaust and marched once again in protest of Roe, this time on the arm of Wiggins, her Mississippi friend.

It was a thrill for Wiggins to see up close the leaders of a movement she venerated. Here were Pavone and Parker, Terry and Schenck. But Wiggins soon wished to be back in her local crisis pregnancy center. “Seeing the famous folks was a bit disillusioning,” she says. To know these men was to be subject to their egos and agendas. Watching Pavone try to get Norma to attend a PFL retreat for former providers of abortion, it struck Wiggins that the movement was using Norma. “Norma was never given time to mature in her faith before she was paraded around like a prize,” she says. “She was never just allowed to be Norma McCorvey, saved by grace.”

There were those who had never wanted anything more for Norma than grace: pro-lifers like Wiggins and Sheree Havlik and Daniel Vinzant, pro-choicers like Herbert Croner and Barbara Ellis and Charlotte Taft. Still, Norma remained drawn to the movement leaders. Says Wiggins: “She really wanted that paycheck and she wanted the notoriety.” Norma returned to Newman.

Newman had made good use of Norma. He’d flown her to Wichita for a vigil outside Tiller’s clinic, and put her on the back of his book. (“The former Jane Roe” called Their Blood Cries Out, “an excellent exposition of justice and mercy.”) But now that Norma was in his backyard, Newman asked little more of her than to sign a letter to South Dakota politicians in advance of a proposed state ban on abortion.

Norma whiled the winter away—on a barstool in the Newman kitchen, in her cottage with her cat, at a local pub, at the wheel of her rented compact in south-central Kansas. “I was just trying to keep her together,” says Newman. “Fed, housed.” He tried to get her money, too; he sent out a solicitation letter with instruction to mail Norma checks at a Kansas P.O. box. Still, Norma wanted more. “She was very jealous that Troy had other obligations—such as his wife,” recalls Wiggins. Three months after Norma’s arrival in Kansas, that upset turned to anger when her cat darted from her cottage and wound up dead.

Norma wished to leave, and Newman resettled her in an apartment his extended family owned in Wichita. There, on a ground floor off Main Street, Norma had only to pay for electricity. All through spring, she was content. But Newman had not heard from her in several weeks when, one summer day, he went to the apartment to find that she had returned to Texas. The air was stale and Newman opened a window. Someone then stole Norma’s TV and Norma cut Newman off, another friend let go. Says Wiggins: “She just went through people.”

TO BE WITH NORMA WAS, inevitably, to be in her crosshairs. She possessed little empathy and less guilt. She could be cruel to those who sustained her. Only Connie, imperturbable and submissive, had managed to remain at her side, her partner for thirty-seven years. But when, that summer of 2008, Norma returned to her, even Connie was exasperated. “If you brought [Norma] up,” says Havlik, “she would get kind of angry.”

In the months since Norma had driven off to Waco, Connie had cared for herself. But she could no longer care for Norma. Now that the women were back together, that fact continued to pull them apart. Utah Foster, seated on his porch one house over, would never forget when Norma kicked over a grill, furious that Connie had not made her steak big enough. “Even after she had her stroke,” says Foster, “she still tried to cook for Norma.” Connie began to cry and Norma drove off.

Norma drove off a lot over the coming months—to events in Kentucky, DC, Louisiana. She was happier away. The money helped, too. And in November, the big check she was hoping for arrived, the filmmaker Di Bugnara wiring $50,000 from a Bank of America in downtown Phoenix. “It was reckless,” he says. “I closed my eyes and I jumped.” Norma bought a new Honda Fit.

Di Bugnara, meantime, had bought himself five years in which to make his film. He hired a researcher and then a screenwriter. Together, they worked all through spring to write and rewrite his script.

Norma was impatient to see it. Di Bugnara placated his subject with phone calls and a Christmas basket and hundreds of dollars, payments the lawyer Allan Parker negotiated against the check Di Bugnara was to write when his film actually started shooting. The payments left him uncomfortable. But to Norma, it was just business.

That same spring, in May 2009, Norma received an invitation from Randall Terry, the pro-life provocateur who had told her, he says, to “make money while you can.”

TERRY HAD ONCE been the face of the war on abortion. Operation Rescue was his baby. But after government regulation crippled O.R. in 1994, he was no longer able to mobilize thousands to blockade abortion clinics. Terry turned instead to Christian radio, preaching against abortion and of the coming Christian America, which would subject women to men with “righteous testosterone flowing through their veins.”

Terry himself had been all but neutered. Legal judgments against Operation Rescue had left him bankrupt, a run for Congress badly defeated. He had also lost his claim on righteousness; having written of those “pathetic males” who abandon their wives for younger women, Terry was censured by his church in 1999 for having left his wife, Cindy, after “repeated sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women.” (Terry responded that he had “only had sex with his wife.”)

In 2001, Terry was forty-two when he married a woman sixteen years his junior. ‘‘Now you see the unfortunate demise of one who was used so powerfully by God and is now on a back burner,’’ Benham told the New York Times. (There was additional snickering when one of Terry’s children declared himself gay, another Muslim.)

Terry moved to Nashville in a failed attempt to write gospel and country songs. He was back in upstate New York selling cars when, a month after his marriage, he alerted former supporters that he had “resumed ministry.” A move in 2008 to a DC suburb did little to reestablish his political bona fides. “The movement has gone by him,” Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition told the Washington Post. And so, in 2009, Terry reached out to the surest bet there was in the pro-life world: Norma McCorvey.

Terry knew Norma. Back in 1997, he’d paid her a few thousand dollars and flown her north to Binghamton to stump for him in his bid for Congress. He brought her back the next year to sign two thousand bookplates to slip into copies of Norma’s book Won by Love; he signed them too and sold more than five hundred at $100 apiece.

Money aside, Norma liked Terry. He was coarse and anti-establishment. He was also an antidote to Benham—someone to sin with. After almost every March for Life, the two would meet up at the Dubliner bar in DC, Norma complaining over Guinness, says Terry, “about the pro-life leaders who took advantage of her.”

A decade later, in May 2009, Terry had fallen out with those same men. Wanting to protest an upcoming speech by President Obama, he turned back to Norma, paying her $1,000 to walk with him (and some blood-splattered dolls) across the campus of Notre Dame.

Terry had a good thing in Norma. Like the fake blood he bought by the gallon, Jane Roe demanded attention; the Indiana press covered their arrests. Norma, in turn, had no beef with Terry. He paid her. She was thankful for the escape from Connie, too, and told Terry about Connie’s stroke and the stress it had caused. After Norma returned home, Terry invited her to stay with him in the brick colonial his few remaining supporters were renting him and his family in Virginia. That July, Norma flew northeast.

Terry asked Norma to join a few protests he was staging in DC. Norma obliged, heckling the judge Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearing, and dumping pink plastic fetuses onto the desk of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in advance of a vote in Congress on healthcare reform. After a week of rest, Norma flew on August 6 to Arizona, where a movie script awaited her input.

Many had come to know the futility of trying to extract from Norma her story. Asked by Di Bugnara to recount the sixty-two years that had led her to a screenwriter’s couch in Phoenix, Norma cut their sessions short, overcome by traumas she’d only imagined: the abuse of a husband, the physical wresting away of the Roe baby. Di Bugnara felt responsible for her pain. When Norma flew home, he wondered, he says, if it was wise to work with someone “so unstable.”

Norma touched down in Dallas. She had phoned Connie to tell her to leave the screen door open. But she arrived home on Cactus Lane to find it locked.

Connie was approaching eighty. She had known Norma exactly half her life. In those forty years, she had endured much, above all her abandonment, Norma having left her for long stretches in California, Mississippi and Kansas. Still, Norma had always returned. But, unable now to open her door, Norma grew furious. She had explicitly told Connie to leave it open.

Norma did not ring the bell. She did not knock. She loaded her bags into her Honda. Then, on that hot summer night, she drove off, leaving Connie forever.