Sniper: The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp

by Wells, Jon

  Bart Slepian did not shrink into the background, he did not have it in him. He gave a speech to health care officials called “It’s Not Over Yet: The Rising Tide of Anti-Choice Violence and What You Can Do About It.” Bart was a physician, he had no intention of becoming a pro-choice activist. But, intentionally or not, he had become a visible personality in the pro-choice camp.

  At the end of the year, in December, for the first time a doctor who provided abortions was shot. Dr. Douglas Karpen was wounded in a parking garage in Houston. Two weeks before that attack, two clinic staffers in Springfield, Missouri, had been wounded by a man wearing a ski mask and wielding a sawed-off shotgun. The shooter in both incidents was never caught.

  Fifteen months later marked the first time a physician who provided abortion services was murdered. It happened on March 10, 1993, outside a Pensacola, Florida, clinic. Dr. David Gunn was shot three times in the back and killed by a man named Michael Griffin. Most pro-lifers decried the violence. One man, a Presbyterian minister named Paul Hill, went on the Donahue talk show and defended the shooting, comparing it to killing a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Two weeks after the shooting, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy introduced a bill to enforce protection of abortion clinics.

  On August 19, in Wichita, Kansas, a 38-year-old woman named Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon walked up to Dr. George Tiller—a physician reviled by pro-lifers as “killer Tiller”—and shot him outside his office. The .25-caliber handgun she fired was never recovered. Shannon was arrested when returning her rental car. Investigators found The Army of God handbook buried in her backyard. Federal agents hooked her up to a lie detector and asked her about the manual.

  “Who is The Mad Gluer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is The Mad Gluer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is Atomic Dog?”

  “I don’t know. His first name is Steve.”

  “Is Reverend Michael Bray teaching people how to blow up

  clinics?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shannon failed the polygraph test and was later convicted of

  attempted murder and sentenced to 11 years in prison. The day before the Tiller shooting, meanwhile, Jim Kopp was arrested in San Jose for trespassing and damaging property, then went north to be with old friends, spent some time in Delaware with his sister, Anne. He would sometimes drop in like that, usually in desperate need of a shower, with just the clothes on his back. On occasion he took Anne’s son, Jeff, to a local shooting range for target practice. “I’m thinking about writing a book about my experiences in pro-life,” Jim told Anne.

  On February 22, 1994, Nancy Kopp, at 72, died from cancer, the same disease that had claimed Jim’s sisters Mary and Marty at a young age. Jim had always revered his mother. He compared her capacity for love and healing others to that of Mother Teresa. Her death severed whatever emotional ties that remained for Jim with his boyhood home in the Bay Area. He helped clean out the family home in Marin, but kept little for himself. One of the others (probably Walt, he figured) took the photo of Chuck Kopp with Governor Ronald Reagan. Nancy was buried in Marin Memorial Gardens, in Novato, north of San Francisco, where one of the churches she attended was located. A beautiful spot, the flat stone that covered Nancy’s grave lay not far from the markers for Mary and Nancy’s mother.

  The grave stone for Jim Kopp’s mother, Nancy. The day before Nancy Kopp died, the trial of doctor-killer Michael Griffin began in Pensacola. Pro-lifers demonstrated on a street corner near the courthouse. Among them was Paul Hill, an apologist for Griffin, struggling to keep aloft his sign which read: “Execute Abortionists.” Beside him stood Michael Bray, whose profile in the radical pro-life fringe continued to grow. An activist walked up to Hill and chastised him for the violent message on the sign. Hill was “spewing false teaching.”

  Bray chided Hill’s detractor. “So why aren’t you out blocking doors?” he said.

  Paul Hill drafted and circulated a document pledging support for Griffin and the philosophy of justifiable homicide against abortion providers. It was called the Defensive Action Statement: “We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all Godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child.”

  The list of 31 signatures included Bray and his wife, several other clergy and evangelists, a lawyer, a priest who was at the time in prison. The name of James Charles Kopp did not appear on the petition. Romanita.

  *** The White House Washington, D.C. May 26, 1994

  President Bill Clinton took his seat at the long table in the Roosevelt Room. Media and politicians gathered for the announcement that he had signed a bill into law.

  “I’d like to acknowledge the presence here today of David and Wendy Gunn, the children of Dr. David Gunn, from Florida.”

  He had taken office 16 months earlier, the first pro-choice president since Jimmy Carter, although, as with many things, Bill Clinton took a “nuanced” position on the issue. Abortion, he said, should be “safe, legal and rare.”

  The new bill was called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, and was intended to bring federal law enforcement into play to stop the “rescues” and intimidation at clinics where women obtained abortion services.

  Two months later, on Friday morning, July 22, Paul Hill joined protesters in front of the Pensacola Ladies Center, as he usually did. No rescuing anymore, Clinton had made the stakes too high for most pro-lifers, effectively killing the tactic.

  Hill had a lot on his mind. Michael Griffin had apologized for shooting and killing the abortionist. Hill found that morally inconsistent. If given the opportunity, he would not make the same error. There was a new doctor named John Britton replacing Gunn at the clinic.

  The next day, Saturday afternoon, Paul Hill, his wife Karen, and their three young children went to the beach. He played in the surf with the kids, his thoughts swirling, heart pounding, his eyes nearly tearing up. He prayed for strength. He held each child in the deep water, over their heads, briefly, as they clung to him. “Here, Lord,” he thought. “I offer you my children, as Abraham offered you his son.”

  His inaction to date gnawed at him. Here he had defended use of force on TV, but never taken action himself. On Wednesday he bought a 12-gauge Mosberg pump-action shotgun from Mike’s Gun Shop. The firearm was called The Defender, used for close-range shooting. At another gun shop, Hill bought 12-gauge, 2 ¾-inch shells containing buckshot. Later that day he signed in at a shooting range and practiced, and returned the next day as well.

  On Friday, Hill planted white crosses in the grass just outside the Ladies Center clinic. He was ordered by police to pull them out. He obeyed. At 7:20 a.m. a Nissan pickup carrying Dr. Britton and a security guard pulled up. Paul Hill pulled out The Defender, which had been hidden in a rolled-up pro-life sign he was carrying. Aim, fire. Reload. Aim, fire. In seconds he pumped out seven shells, spraying the truck with 90 buckshot pellets, shattering windows, killing the doctor and security guard. Then he set the shotgun down on the ground, walked over to the policemen at the scene who were running toward him.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Hill said aloud as he was cuffed. “No babies will be killed here today.”

  Radical pro-lifers who supported any means to stop abortion admired Hill for taking action. But Paul—Lord keep and nurture his soul—got caught, didn’t he? Just like Griffin. The shootings had sent a chill through the abortion industry, but were clumsy, executed in broad daylight. No chance the pro-lifer could get away. Neither Hill nor Griffin had been a soldier. The soldier trains and plans in order to fight, escape, and engage the enemy another day. It would take someone with a razor-sharp mind, a tactician, someone smarter than the police and the FBI, with a military mind-set and a secret agent’s discretion, to operate ruthlessly yet in the shadows, to take the battle
to a new level.

  Chapter 8 ~ Remembrance Day

  The most visible and violent fronts in the abortion war were in the United States. Across the border in Canada, doctors were not being shot. The most serious act of anti-abortion violence in the country had been the 1992 firebombing of the Morgentaler clinic in Toronto. To the extent the pro-life fringe existed in Canada, Vancouver, British Columbia, was the most fertile ground for it. The roots of that lay in peculiarities of the “Left Coast” political culture. It was a province where politics was a contact sport, passions running high, as though those arriving from back east took one whiff of the cedar in the air and suddenly became high on it. This extreme political climate gave the province a hardcore religious right that was a Canadian anomaly.

  Gynecologists and obstetricians generally are not high-profile physicians. But in Vancouver, Dr. Gary Romalis was becoming known, at least in some circles. He provided abortion services as part of his practice, and had been quoted in the press speaking on medical issues related to abortion. To a few pro-life activists in B.C. who looked out for such things—such as Betty Green, known as the godmother of all things pro-life in the province—an article in a scholarly journal was proof that Dr. Romalis was a busy terminator of preborn babies:

  “Abortion Experience At The Vancouver General Hospital”

  By Garson Romalis, MD, FRCSC Journal of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada The article noted that Vancouver General Hospital performed about 5,000 abortions a year. Of those, 89 percent were at 13 weeks or less. But the remaining 11 percent was the key to pro-lifers—550 abortions were performed in the second trimester. Bottom line to the activists was that Dr. Romalis was doing late-term abortions.

  The pro-life movement flowered in B.C. but so too did the pro-choice response, which came back just as hard, working with police, taking videotapes of demonstrations. One of the regulars seen on those videos was a man named Gordon Watson. Gord had worked at a sawmill at one time. His father had fought in Korea as a Provost captain, his grandfather had been gassed at Ypres in the First World War. And Gord Watson?

  “A full-tilt Bible-thumper,” he said. “That’s me. I’m it.” He was there on the street preaching the gospel of life. Mainstream pro-life types didn’t do that. Gord felt they were happy just to sit around and talk about it over coffee.

  He used to tag along with his father to political meetings. Dad was a bit of a hell-raiser on that front, enjoyed the battle. Gord would go further than that—he would be nastier.

  It’s the B.C. election of 1991 and there’s Gord Watson on TV, tearing a strip off a candidate. Someone lunges at him, a full-out brawl begins, and Gord manages to get the mike, his shirt torn, yet appearing collected as can be—this is great stuff—and he politely asks, “Can I address the chair, please?” The TV journalists there take to him like moths to a flame, cameras rolling, and: “Abortion is murder, and I think British Columbians deserve the right to have a referendum on it.”

  The pro-lifers loved it, this 42-year-old firecracker who stood up and said what they all believed, fearless.

  “Betty,” he later said to veteran pro-lifer Betty Green, “I’ll make you look like sweetness and light.”

  Others in the movement couldn’t quite figure him out. He ended up in and out of jail, alternately the darling and pariah of the movement, constantly writing letters, getting in a war with a Vancouver Sun reporter whom he called an “abortion promoter.” Once, Gord Watson went south to attend a pro-life conference in San Antonio, a big event. Joe Scheidler, the Chicago pro-life leader, put it on. Great guy, thought Gord. At one of the big sessions, a fellow stood up and spoke about pro-lifers being condemned for violent acts. “We are moderates, the speaker insisted. We don’t lynch abortionists, we don’t blow up abortion mills.” Pause. Grin. “Not that we have any moral problem with that!”

  Gord thought about it. If you have a belief, don’t you have to back it up? What is the line between belief and action? He could feel the tension between pro-life camps on the issue. One night he was pulled aside and asked to attend a private meeting at a motel off the freeway. Why not? The motel had its own steakhouse. My kinda place, he said to himself.

  He went to the assigned room. A man asked him questions. How long you been active? Where you from? Family? Gord told him about his dad’s service in Korea.

  “You know anything about firearms?”

  Gord looked at his interrogator, puzzled. Bit of an odd question, wasn’t it?

  “Ever had any sort of military training?” His mind raced. This guy’s assessing whether I’ll take up arms for the movement, he thought. He reflected later that it was probably fifty-fifty that he was being assessed as either someone they hoped would shoot, or feared would shoot.

  Gord wasn’t sure where he stood on the violence option. The moral logic was unavoidable: Hey, you kill babies, you set yourself up for bad things to happen to you. But could he bring himself to hurt a doctor, attack him, shoot him, even? He wasn’t against it in principle, but no. He was a loose cannon, but not stupid. He did not want to go to prison for good. The interview spooked Gordon Watson. He stopped going to the States after that.

  *** In the summer of 1994 a man stopped at a post office-box in Maryland. He’d been living in a trailer in Delaware of late, but it was a short drive across the state line. He opened the box he had obtained under the name “Kevin James Gavin,” date of birth June 8, 1951. The papers had finally arrived, from the sportsman club in Maryland. A membership application. The club had a shooting range. The man wrote on the form that he wished to join the club in order to use the range for “personal practice.” The man’s real name was James Charles Kopp.

  On August 2, Jim Kopp turned 40. His parents were dead. The rescue movement was finished. He had no possessions, little money. He was a legend in the movement, Atomic Dog had pro-life friends across the country—but few connections of any depth. The one person Jim respected above all others was Loretta Marra. He would never talk about it with anyone, but those who knew him, and saw the two of them together, knew that Jim loved her. They had been through so much, arrested together far and wide, including in Italy (“Eleven Rescuers Blitz Abortuary in Bologna,” a headline had screamed in Life Advocate magazine.) They connected on many levels—except one. Loretta had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t Jim.

  It was Dennis Malvasi. In the spring of 1994, Loretta turned 31, Malvasi was 44. Loretta married him in a ceremony performed by a Catholic priest. They did not register the marriage with the state. One of the conditions of Malvasi’s parole was that he not associate with pro-life activists, and Loretta was in the hardcore of the movement. In choosing Dennis, she had married a man with a fiercer reputation within the radical fringe than Jim’s, a former Marine who bombed abortion clinics.

  On October 17, 1994, just before 10 p.m., an old tan-colored Datsun bearing the license plate 330JLL crossed the AmericanCanadian border at the Peace Arch crossing at Blaine, Washington, into from British Columbia. The car was legally registered to Lorretta Marra.

  ***

  Vancouver, B.C.

  Monday, November 7, 1994 Early morning, cold and damp, raining, like just about every November day in Vancouver. Phone ringing at the house on West 46th Avenue.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. Sheila had picked up the phone. She hung up. A short time passed. Breakfast time. It rang again. Again the caller hung up. And shortly after that, Sheila’s husband, Dr. Gary Romalis, finished his breakfast and went to work. He had a serious, reserved demeanor, spoke in a deliberate, scholarly manner. He lived with Sheila and their daughter, Lisa, in a residential area, a ten-minute drive in good traffic across the Granville Street bridge to downtown Vancouver. The house was Tudor style but not nearly as palatial as some of the newer ones on the street.

  Dr. Garson Romalis was one of about 25 physicians in the Vancouver area who performed abortions, although few of them let that be known. He had been a second-year medical student
at the University of British Columbia in 1960 when he was asked to conduct a pathological study on a woman who had died after inducing an abortion on herself with a piece of elm bark. He learned that the bark was meant to expand upon entry and encourage infection that would abort the fetus. A postmortem revealed overwhelming sepsis—widespread infection—causing multiple abscesses in the patient’s brain, lungs, liver and abdominal cavity. He never forgot her, nor did he forget his experiences on the front line in the mid-sixties, when he served his obstetrics/gynecology residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Each day, he would recall in presentations and an interview with the Canadian Medical Association Journal years later, there were patients admitted with infections from self-performed abortion.

  Chicago became legendary in pro-choice circles in the years before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. It was the home of “The Jane Collective,” or simply “Jane,” an underground abortion service. Women were quietly referred to Jane nurses by police, social workers, clergy and hospital staff. Operating out of apartments in the city, Jane provided abortions for an estimated 11,000 women. When Dr. Romalis returned to Vancouver in the 1970s, abortions became a part of his practice—even though the operation still bore a stigma to many people, even among his colleagues. Some would leave the doctor’s lounge when he entered. Ultimately, while Romalis said he did not plan to be a crusader on the issue, and did not intend to become a poster boy of the pro-choice movement, that’s what he became. Pro-life protesters scattered nails on his driveway, picketed his house, passed flyers to his neighbors with the message “Do you know who your neighbor is?”

  The night of Monday, November 7 it had rained steadily, and continued off and on overnight. Just past 6:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Dr, Romalis rose. By 7 a.m. he was downstairs in his bathrobe in the kitchen making breakfast, alone. As he did every morning, he walked over to the counter, placed bread in the toaster, and sat at the table. He opened some mail. Quiet. Waiting for the toast to pop. He leaned forward, just slightly, perhaps to reach for something or to look more closely at a letter, or for no reason at all.