Word: gunn
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...friend can recall Gunn's wanting to be a doctor from childhood, but that was what he became. For a while he practiced obstetrics, until malpractice premiums rose so high that he was forced to restrict his work to gynecology. And that was when the folks in Benton began to lose touch with what he was doing. Last week the members of his family -- including his parents, his older brother Peter, his twin sister Diane and younger sister Lilith -- heard that he had been killed and learned for the first time that he had made his living performing abortions...
...this reticence a matter of residual shame -- retained from his religious childhood -- or considerate tact? People who were close to Gunn are sure they know the answer. Says Vanessa Caldwell, his assistant at the Montgomery (Alabama) Women's Medical Clinic: "He was a very open, honest man. I think that's why it bothered him that his family didn't know the kind of work he did, exactly. He knew it would hurt them if they found...
...Gunn's work was no secret in the circuit he traveled -- a pine-forested area radiating north, east and west from the Florida panhandle -- and it made him both notorious and revered. Antiabortion groups harassed him, listing his itinerary, phone numbers and addresses and issuing WANTED posters bearing his name or photograph or both. One of them concluded, "To defenseless unborn babies, Gunn is heavily armed and very dangerous...
...women he treated and worked with saw a different figure. Says Linda Taggart, director of the Ladies Center, another Pensacola clinic where Gunn worked: "In recent years, there haven't been enough doctors. But he was never too busy for the women. He was a very sweet, caring man, who was very much devoted to seeing that women kept all their rights." When he finished his clinic work in Pensacola, Gunn would drop in on the Slim Concept Weight Control center and give free counseling on diets and fitness. Says Paula Leonard: "All he wanted was to help women...
...says she and Gunn had been tailed "for months" by a blue van that then parked on her street when they were home. Two weeks before Gunn's murder, she had moved; her address had begun appearing in pro-life pamphlets. "I told the police this was going to happen," she said, shivering in the cold during a candlelight vigil outside the Ladies Center. "Last Friday when I was leaving work, that man was beating on my car window and wouldn't let me go. They were stalking us, the antiabortionists, but the police wouldn't believe...