7 #AnOrdinaryLife

While Bryce Horrigan burnt the candle at both ends, Geoffrey Schroeder lived a largely uneventful life until a week before his thirtieth birthday. In the months leading up till then, he had been working overtime in a local tyre factory, doing double shifts for time-and-a-half pay, which just about made the money bearable.

When Geoffrey arrived back at his mobile home late on the Thursday before his Big Three-Oh, exhausted after a long day, he wasn’t surprised to find his fiancée, Carol-Ann, not there. She’d said she was spending the weekend with her folks, so he didn’t expect to see her until the following Monday.

Geoffrey and Carol-Ann lived on Bunker Down trailer park, seven miles from the centre of Kansas City in the Midwestern state of Missouri. It was the type of place where dogs roamed wild and the owner had once been cautioned for shooting cats for fun. The couple dreamed of a time when they could move out to a proper home, made of bricks and mortar.

The first inkling Geoffrey had that there was something wrong was when the local sheriff pulled up outside his home just after 7am the next morning.

‘Are you Geoffrey Schroeder?’ the sheriff asked in a slow drawl.

‘Yeah, what appears to be the problem, sir?’ Geoffrey replied respectfully, as he had never been in trouble with the law before nor ever intended to be.

‘You mind if I come inside, Geoffrey?’ the cop said in his most soothing manner.

The sheriff had remained standing as he delivered the news: Carol-Ann was dead. But there was more, she had died in mysterious circumstances in a motel room.

‘Was ma girl having an affair?’ he asked the cop.

‘No, Geoffrey, she was having an abortion,’ the sheriff replied grimly.

Geoffrey felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant and that he was to be a first-time dad. He’d thought she was just putting on weight and used to gently tease her about it. He slumped down on the couch, his head spinning, before vomiting on the floor.

‘There’s more, Geoffrey. The procedure was carried out by a doctor. You may or may not know that late-term abortions are illegal in the state of Missouri – and she was very late.’

‘How late?’ Geoffrey asked in a daze.

‘Almost eight months,’ the cop said, lowering his eyes to the ground.

‘What was the “procedure”?’ Geoffrey asked, drawing out the word as if it was poison.

‘I don’t know if you should hear this part,’ the sheriff replied, before Geoffrey urged him to continue. ‘The doctor had stuck a needle into Carol-Ann’s belly to inject a drug directly into the baby’s heart to stop it beating. After that, she was supposed to give a stillbirth delivery over the weekend. But something went wrong, Geoffrey. Very wrong.’

The cop kept talking, but Geoffrey could barely concentrate, hearing only the odd key word like, ‘morgue’, ‘autopsy’ and ‘identification’.

Eventually the sheriff drove off, leaving Geoffrey with only grief that soon turned to anger. That had been just over a decade ago. Over the years, Geoffrey had joined various pro-life protest groups. He had picketed the abortion clinic where the doctor worked and harassed the man he considered had murdered his wife-to-be and unborn son.

Under Missouri law, aborting a viable foetus – i.e. one that is capable of surviving outside the womb – is only permissible when two independent medical experts agree that the mother’s health could be impaired. The doctor had escaped all charges relating to Carol-Ann’s death and the illegal abortion after another complicit medic, who happened to be a fellow director at the same practice, had countersigned all the necessary forms.

While the doctor walked free, Geoffrey was left to brandish gruesome placards outside the clinic depicting dissected foetuses. He would sometimes vandalise staff cars or glue the locks on gates and doors. But it all seemed so futile. For every day the clinic would continue to operate its business of mass infanticide no matter how uncomfortable he made life for the medics. Geoffrey began to drift away from the pro-life groups. He became tired of their constant chanting and talking. He had never been much of a talker. He was more of a doer.

However, one man would become the new focus of Geoffrey’s obsessions – Bryce Horrigan. Geoffrey would watch the TV host with the plummy British accent talking about his pro-choice views – how all women should have the right for late terminations. Well, Carol-Ann had made her choice. She chose to get rid of his unborn child without telling him. It turned out she planned to leave him for another man. Her ‘choice’ had cost Carol-Ann her life. People needed to know that with choice came great responsibilities. Or repercussions.

Geoffrey had already caught the attention of law enforcement agencies. Then there were the explosives that had once been found in his car. He had dodged that rap on a legal technicality. But intelligence reports branded him as a dangerous loner, and ‘one to watch’.

The authorities had kept tabs on him. But three weeks before Bryce Horrigan was shot dead, Geoffrey Schroeder went completely off the radar.