Robert Lewis Dear, the man who has confessed to killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic last fall, admired a man who murdered an abortion doctor in Florida in the 1990s, according to court documents that were unsealed this week.
The documents — which were unsealed only after several news organizations petitioned the Colorado Supreme Court for their release — reveal that Dear told police he “thought highly” of Paul Hill, an anti-abortion activist who killed two people outside a Pensacola, Florida women’s health clinic in 1994.
Hill’s bullets ultimately killed abortion provider Dr. John Bayard Britton and his bodyguard, a retired U.S. Air Force officer named James Herman Barrett. He was executed by the state of Florida for this crime. At Hill’s execution in 2003, his supporters “declared him a martyr and warned that his actions might be replicated,” according to the New York Times report from the time.
Even before Hill killed Britton and Barrett, he frequently advocated for violence against abortion providers. Hill himself said that he was inspired by another murder of a doctor who performed abortions, Dr. David Gunn, who was killed just one year before in Pensacola.
The newly unsealed court documents provide the best evidence yet that 57-year-old Dear was passionately opposed to abortion providers.
According to the documents, Dear told police that he dreamed he would be “met by all the aborted fetuses at the gates of heaven and they would thank him for what he did because his actions saved lives of other unborn fetuses.” He also indicated “he was happy with what he had done because his actions… ensured that no more abortions would be conducted at the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs.”
Dear was also hoping to make a more serious attack against the women’s health clinic. The documents reveal that he set up multiple propane tanks outside the Planned Parenthood building and believed they would explode if he shot them. He told authorities that he did shoot them during the attack, but they didn’t blow up.
Since his arrest for the shooting, Dear has made several allusions to his anti-abortion views. He described himself as a “warrior for the babies” and told investigators “no more baby parts” — an apparent reference to inflammatory videos released this summer that accuse Planned Parenthood of illegally selling fetal tissue. Nonetheless, there’s been a lot of speculation about his motives, and disagreement over whether he should be defined as a domestic terrorist.
The Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic has been rebuilding ever since the November shooting. In mid-February, the clinic re-opened to the public.
Dear’s crime fits into a larger pattern that’s chillingly familiar to the people who work in the field of reproductive health. At least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion providers since 1993, according to statistics from the National Abortion Federation. Violence and harassment against abortion providers has spiked dramatically since the video campaign targeting Planned Parenthood was released last summer.