“I think he is a carpenter, or a roofer. He has a demanding job. He may have been working part-time . . . None of this I knew at the time, but I have read in the paper since his arrest. I’ve tried to explain, I did not know the schedule of any of my fellow protesters.”
“Did you speak often to Luther Dunphy, though you claim not to have known his name?”
“No. I did not speak often to him.”
“And why did you speak with him on this particular occasion?”
“I think he spoke to me . . . He just fell to talking, as people do. We are bound by a common interest for which we feel strongly—‘defending the defenseless.’”
“Can you elaborate, Mr. Stockard, what you told Luther Dunphy?”
“I might have told him—in reply to his question—that it did seem to be, lately, that Voorhees was arriving earlier than the police guards. I mean, I agreed with his observation. I think that was how it was . . .”
“And what else did you say?”
“What else did I say? I—I don’t know—maybe I mentioned that Voorhees sometimes drove the van himself, and his escort took the passenger’s seat. They came to the Center together most days. But I think that Voorhees didn’t feel the need for an escort—a kind of bodyguard. That’s what we’d heard.”
“And why would anyone on the staff at the Women’s Center require a ‘bodyguard’?”
“They would not. It was all exaggerated, for publicity—that right-to-life protesters were intrusive and violent and that they, the abortionists, had to be protected from them—from us.”
“There is no need for bodyguards? Or law enforcement?”
“Not usually. There is not.”
“But sometimes?”
“Not—often.”
“Really, Mr. Stockard? Since two individuals were killed who’d turned up for work at the Center, by one of your Right-to-Life protesters, it doesn’t seem to you that there is any need?”
“But not usually. Not often . . .”
“Will you answer a little more clearly, whether Luther Dunphy asked you specifically about the time of arrival of Dr. Voorhees, in relationship to the arrival of the police officers?”
“I don’t know what you mean . . .”
“Did Luther Dunphy ask you, or did you volunteer the information?”
Stockard hesitated. His long somber face was damp with perspiration. He was blinking rapidly as if he could not bear to look at the prosecutor; and he could not bring himself to look at Luther Dunphy who was seated only a few yards away.
“I think that it was me—it was I—who asked him. And Luther Dunphy who volunteered the information.”
“But why did he tell you this, if indeed he told you?”
“Why? I don’t know why . . . We talked about Voorhees, and the Center, and abortions, and the need to stop legalized infanticide, an abomination . . . We talked about many things.”
“But you’ve just said, you rarely talked.”
“Except this one time . . .”
“And what did Luther Dunphy say, after he’d volunteered the information about Voorhees’s arrival?”
“I—I do not recall that he said anything further.”
“He did not say anything further?”
“He did not. Not that I recall.”
“He did not say—‘Voorhees is unprotected then. He could be killed then. There are a few minutes when he is vulnerable—he could be killed.’ But Luther Dunphy did not say that?”
“No! Of course not.”
“And you did not say that?”
“Of course not.”
“And when was this exchange, Mr. Stockard?”
“When? I—I’m not sure—maybe a week, ten days before . . .”
“Before the shooting?”
Stockard sat very still and did not speak until the prosecutor repeated his question and he said, in his halting voice, that trembled with indignation and anger, “Y-Yes. Before the shooting.”
Next, the prosecutor asked Stockard if he’d noticed that following the exchange Luther Dunphy began to arrive early each morning at the Women’s Center and he replied nervously that he didn’t know—he had never taken “much particular notice” of his fellow protesters for there were many protesters, as he’d tried to explain; they came to the Center, they participated in the demonstrations, then they weren’t seen again for a while—but then, they might show up again. He didn’t know any names, or if he did, they were just first names—“Not surnames.”
“Was it, on the whole, an orderly demonstration?”
“Yes! Our demonstrations are fundamentally prayer.”
“But there are some disruptions, at times?”
“When there are new protesters. Sometimes a new protester is more vocal.”
“Do protesters become upset?”
“Of course. When women seek to ‘terminate’ their pregnancies, to murder their babies in their wombs, it is certainly upsetting—it should be upsetting.”
“And so, there are ‘encounters’ at the Center? Routinely?”
“Not routinely . . .”
“But ‘encounters’ are not uncommon?”
“I would have to say—yes, not uncommon.”
“Protesters are forbidden by Ohio state law to approach the young women entering such clinics too closely, isn’t that correct?”
“That is correct. That is state law.”
“Do you abide by this ‘state law,’ Mr. Stockard?”
“It is a secular law . . .”
“As distinct from—?”
“A sacred law.”