By Justin Kendall
There isn't an address on the paint-chipped farmhouse in Nortonville, about 30 miles north of Lawrence. Across from it on this country road, the mailbox hangs limp. A muddy driveway leads past a beat-up pickup truck to a garage. An approaching car sends cats scattering.
It's the only place that Ann Kristin Neuhaus and Mike Caddell have ever owned. She describes the place as something out of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Caddell calls it "a money pit."
"Do we look rich?" Neuhaus asks. "We're very broke all of the time. Our house is falling down."
She turns on the water each time she wants to flush the toilet, but this is home for Neuhaus and Caddell. They've been married 26 years, and they have a 14-year-old son, Tristan. Six chickens, five cats, four dogs, three horses, two roosters and a goat roam the family's 10 acres.
Neuhaus and Caddell bought the place 15 years ago, when she was making a little money. Now they're struggling to survive. About a year ago, the house nearly faced foreclosure. During an interview with The Pitch in September, Neuhaus was on her way to apply for a payday loan. Then in October, the utilities were almost shut off.
"It's just literally month by month that we're holding onto the place," says Caddell, host of the Radio Free Kansas online radio show. "We've been living on $30,000 a year for about two and a half years now." That money came from a research stipend that has since expired. Neuhaus is now working as a research instructor at the University of Kansas Medical Center's Department of Family Medicine.
Out here, they say, the neighbors are protective. One, fearing for Neuhaus' safety, offered to loan her an AK-47. That's life on the front line of Kansas' abortion war.
Neuhaus is one of the last links to Wichita abortion provider George Tiller, who was murdered in May 2009 while attending a Sunday church service. From 1999 to 2006, Neuhaus provided second-opinion mental-health exams to determine whether the late-term abortions that some women sought at Tiller's clinic were medically necessary. That step was required by Kansas law.
Three Kansas attorneys general tried to prosecute Tiller for his arrangement with Neuhaus. Tiller eventually was charged with having an improper financial relationship with Neuhaus. He was acquitted of the misdemeanor in March 2009. The doctor was assassinated two months later by Scott Roeder, who had attended Tiller's trial and was seen sitting next to Operation Rescue president Troy Newman.
The Kansas Board of Healing Arts is now considering whether to sanction Neuhaus and possibly revoke her medical license...
