This was a new chapter in my life. Unlike anything I had ever done before. Different on many levels. Though I had led a full life and experienced many terrible and interesting things, the journey I had just begun would put everything else in the shadow of what would come. Before this chapter in my life ran its course I will be hated by entire segments of our population and loved by others. I will have come close to death from exposure to freezing temperatures and I will experience loneliness as I never imagined. I will also become the most wanted man in America, with my name on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, the ATF's Most Wanted List, and the United States Marshals Most Wanted List. I'll have become the only person in history to make all three most wanted lists. I will also have been featured on the America's Most Wanted television show numerous times and the subject of two press confesses by the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the FBI.

This new chapter in my life will have made me infamous in ways I never wanted. It all started by believing I was doing the right thing.

I'm going to start with an explanation so the informed reader doesn't think I am trying to hide something. When all of these events began I had a helper. Someone who joined with me a few months after I started. He was a friend who shared my grief. It has been widely reported that this friend was with me in the event that first brought what I was doing to light. After a high-speed police chase I managed to get away, but he was arrested. I haven't talked about him before, nor shall I now because of my personal code. However, as my friend died a year ago (natural causes) I will say this. When he was arrested he gave them my name and put everything on me. He even testified against me at trial. He did these things because I told him to. He had never been arrested before so I knew that when we were caught he could get off easy if he turned against me. In the end I was the one the authorities would want to hang, so I saw no reason for him to suffer more than he had to. My friend didn't turn against me, he followed the plan.

That is the last I will mention him other than to give the point he was arrested. Some of the times before that point he was with me and some he was not. I will not distinguish which is which. This is not to hide anything on my account, but to protect the name of my friend. Even though he has passed on, I will not betray his trust.

From the beginning I deceived everyone about what I was doing. While I worked on building a database of abortion clinics I told my wife I was working on the tool and die customer's software. I told the customer the same thing that I was working on their software. Every week I would drive to Erie to pick up my $1,000-dollar check and give them a fake status report. I felt so bad about doing this that every time I returned for a visit to my customer I would try to work on their software, but it was a waste of time. Where I'd been struggling with the job before, it was impossible now. I could not focus on anything other than the abortion stuff. Nothing else mattered to me.

I have almost no memories of anything other than "The Cause" during the first part of 1998 as it was my complete focus. However, I do remember one day that I drove Rebecca to gymnastics practice. She was fifteen and there had been a lively discussion around the house about who would teach her to drive; Mary or me. Rebecca was leaning towards Mary as her mom was a responsible driver where as I always drove fast and aggressively. Mary wanted to teach her for the same reason. I wanted to teach her because, well, because I was her dad and I wanted to do it. Plus, I felt like I was a better defensive driver than anyone. The matter was settled on this trip to the gymnastics studio. As a bit of background, Rebecca had been in a bad accident a few years earlier when riding to a different gymnastics studio with a girlfriend's mom, so she was leery of traffic accidents.

We were almost to the studio when a guy turned in front of us. There was a green light that I was going through when he made a turn directly in my path leaving me no time to stop. If I had hit my breaks we would have crashed before my car had a chance to decelerate. So rather than try to brake I cut my wheel to the right and hit the accelerator. We jumped a curb at the corner of the intersection, went between two telephone poles missing both by inches, then skidded to a stop before hitting a building. Amazingly we didn't touch a thing. In the silence that followed Rebecca said, "I want you to teach me to drive."

I looked back to see the car that had nearly harmed us turned into a gas station across the street. Without a second thought I turned around and followed. The guy had pulled up to the gas pumps and was trying to get the gas pump nozzle out of its holder when I reached him. It was immediately obvious that the guy was too drunk to stand, much less drive a car. I had a lot to say to him, but knew my words would be wasted. His car was still running so I opened his driver's door reached in, turned the engine off and took the keys. I never said a word to him and he never noticed me. A few blocks away I threw his keys into an empty lot. After tossing the keys I looked at Rebecca. Her mouth was open. I'd either impressed her or scared her. Either way, I'd won the driving lesson rights.

I told that story to stall. I really don't want to write this next part.

After spending a month compiling data on abortion clinics off the Internet I realized there was nothing more to be learned online. To learn more I would have to go out and take a look. I didn't want to do this because it would represent a next step towards something I didn't want to do. The elephant in the room was what I was going to do once I had compiled all the data I was collecting. That elephant of course was violence. I had yet to face up to this fact myself, but deep down I knew that when I deleted the web site devoted to legally changing abortion laws that I planned to work outside of the law. Though I had operated outside of the law much of my life, this was different. I had never physically harmed anyone in my life, yet this was the path I was now on. I didn't want to hurt anyone; I didn't even want to think about hurting anyone. So I stalled by building a database. Now I would stall further by gathering real-world data.

There are problems with gathering real-world data too. One being that I was on federal probation and couldn't leave the western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio area without travel permission from my probation officer. That wasn't much of an obstacle for me, but what was an obstacle was getting around Mary. The first thing I had to do was justify the travel, which I would do by claiming I was beginning to sell the tool and die software, so I would need to demo it to potential customers. Mary could believe this because I'd done just this for many years with other industry software. The problem was that the last time I got in trouble I'd used a similar lie to justify my travel. In the end my concern was not needed. Beyond all reason my wife still trusted me. When I told her I needed to travel to demo the software she believed me.

Yes, I am a jerk for betraying that precious trust.

The details don't really matter, but what I did was travel to cities reasonably close to home. I located the clinics I was interested in and took pictures of the facilities and made notes. I still wasn't sure what I was going to do to them. The only gun I owned was an antique black powder pistol, not exactly a combat weapon, and I had no idea how to build a bomb or even an incendiary device. At this point the actual damage I planned to do against this "enemy" was still very abstract in my mind. I'm not a guy who normally deceives himself, but in this case I was doing just that. I was planning on causing harm, but the thought of actually doing so was so repulsive to me that I couldn't even consider it in the privacy of my own mind.

After checking out a dozen or so clinics I learned a lesson in how good their security was. I knew they were security conscious as I had spotted many with cameras covering the building's exterior, armed guards and even police presence. For this reason, I was being careful myself. To check out a clinic in a poor area of a large inner-city I opted to drive by with a video camera discretely pointed at the building as I passed. The camera was hidden with just the lens exposed and I was careful to not even look in the direction of the building or property. I'd used a GPS map to locate the place and to know which side of the street it was on, so this would be my first actual time to be near the building. With all those precautions in place I assumed a single pass, which was all I had planned, would be safe. I was wrong.

As planned I drove by, just one car among many others. I didn't slow down and I didn't look in her direction of the building, yet somehow I was noticed. My guess is that they had someone watching the cars that passed and spotted the lens on my hidden camera. It was possible to see, but you really had to be looking to spot it. Regardless of what tipped them off, two blocks past the building a marked police car was behind me with his lights on. I'd done nothing else to look suspicious and he'd had to move another car out of his way to get behind me so I am sure he was after me.

As soon as the police car settled behind me and hit its lights I pressed my accelerator to the floor. I had taken the precaution of stealing a set of local plates so I'd be okay if I could out run the cop. I was confident that I could as I'd done so before, but I also knew some cops were easier to out run than others. This turned out to be one of the more difficult ones. Not knowing the area, I was in very well I made a turn down a one-way road, going the wrong way, of course. At first I thought this mistake would help me get away since few cops would chase a guy into oncoming traffic. Again, this guy was the exception as he kept coming. I was able to hit a cross street just before a light changed, which caused him to be slowed long enough for me to get out of his line of sight. After that a few quick turns and I was away from the immediate threat.

I still had to get out of the city, which wasn't going to be easy. The first thing I did was park behind a grocery store and change my plates back to normal. I threw away the stolen plates, even the screwdriver I used to change them. Then I changed my shirt and threw the one I'd been wearing away too. I pulled the tape out of my video camera and burned the tape. Then I threw the camera and all evidence of it in the dumpster away too. I drove a few blocks away from the dumpster and its evidence, then hid my car in an office building parking lot. There I deleted the GPS entry on my laptop's software and encrypted the file that held all my abortion clinic data. The safest bet would have been to delete that file in such a way that it couldn't be recovered, but I didn't want to lose the data. Besides, I figured if a search went that deep I'd have been caught anyway.

Satisfied I was as safe as I could be, I used my GPS map to plot a route out of the area that would allow me to avoid any choke points where the police might be looking for my car. Knowing they would likely all become stationary and wait for me to pass helped as long as I could anticipate the type of places they would set up to wait. The GPS map was a great tool for figuring this out if you didn't know the area. It was this way that I managed to get out of that city without being caught. Though it cost me an expensive camera I had learned a valuable lesson. I couldn't continue to drive around doing surveillance of clinics like I had been doing. The security was too good. Eventually I would be caught before I was able to accomplish anything. It was time to either quit what I was doing are go to the next level. I still didn't want to go to the next level, but wasn't going to quit.

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