"I could not drop the hammer," Clayton Lee Waagner said. "The problem was I couldn't hate these people enough to kill them."

Waagner, 45, of Kennerdell, spoke a day after a U.S. District Court jury in Cincinnati convicted him of all six firearms and theft charges against him.

Waagner, who at one time lived in Sharon and attended a Grove City area church, could be sentenced to 15 years to life without parole in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on each count. Authorities said they expect Waagner to be taken to Philadelphia for questioning about the anthrax letters.

Waagner made the FBI's most-wanted list last year after at least 550 threatening letters were sent to clinics in October and November. He has not been charged with sending the letters, but on FBI tapes played at Waagner's request during his trial, he said he sent the letters hoping to shut down the clinics. He also threatened to kill abortion providers.

In the telephone interview from jail in Cincinnati, he said he could not pull the trigger when he had the opportunity to kill abortion doctors in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Charleston, W.Va.

His statements could not be immediately verified. Ed Boldt, spokesman for the FBI in Cincinnati, said he could not confirm or deny specific threats.

Carole Rogers, director of public policy for Planned Parenthood of Ohio, said she was not aware of specific threats made by Waagner.

"We were aware that we had to be particularly guarded in Ohio and Kentucky," she said, based on advice provided by the agency's security staff.

Waagner said he realized when he was walking the Appalachian Trial during the terrorist attack on Sept. 11 that he could not kill anyone. He said that is when he got the idea of mailing the letters.

He said the letters showed him he could be effective in his cause without hurting anyone. He believes that the letters interrupted 9,000 abortions and, of that number, at least 25 percent of the women chose to keep their babies.

"Would you sacrifice yourself for 2,000 babies? That's what I've done," he said.

Rogers disputes Waagner's contention that his letters disrupted services, at least in Ohio.

She noted that letters were received at Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio that don't provide abortions. Three of the agency's 50 clinics in the state provide abortion services.

Rogers said it is possible that clinics might have been closed for an hour or so but the letters did not stop any services.

She said the agency took anthrax threats seriously before Sept. 11, but probably considered it more of a bluff.

"We have been with these kinds of terrorist threats for a number of years and I think that we now certainly take it a lot more seriously after Sept. 11," Rogers said.

Waagner said he was always opposed to abortion, but did not begin his fight until January 1999 when his daughter had a miscarriage. He said while he had the 24-week-old fetus in his arms, God told him, "How can you grieve this one when millions are killed every year and you do nothing?"