by Jon Wells
Sniper: The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp
Jon Wells
Sniper opens in October 1998 near Buffalo, NY. A man is alone in the dark in a forest. He clutches an assault rifle and is thinking about his mission. “You can cut holes in the fences around the death camps,” he thinks. “A trickle of relief in the abortion holocaust. It is your duty to do it.” He nestles the rifle into his shoulder and shoots at his target through the back window of a house, then flees. Barnett Sepia, a doctor who provides abortions, is fatally wounded.
The shooter is James Kopp, the son of a Marine, who came to embrace the pro-life cause and ultimately the notion of “justifiable homicide”: against abortion providers. Kopp fancies himself a lone wolf in the movement; a celibate man driven to “defend the unborn.” He is nicknamed “Atomic Dog” in the movement and helps orchestrate assaults on abortion clinics. As the story unfolds, he becomes the central figure in an international manhunt for multiple shootings in Canada. On the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list, Kopp flees to Mexico, Ireland, and France. Award-winning journalist Jon wells followed Kopp’s footsteps, traveled to his hometown, and interviewed investigators in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and France to tell this gripping detective story and dark psychological drama.
Jon Wells
SNIPER
The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp
To Dana Robbins,
with gratitude for his encouragement, guidance and friendship
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Dana Robbins and Roger Gillespie for their support and suggestions when I worked on the original “Sniper” story for the Hamilton Spectator; also lead editor Dan Kislenko, and Douglas Haggo. Special thanks to Scott Gardner who photographed the story and was an indispensable colleague and friend on the road. I thank Kirk LaPointe for giving me my first big career break and my first crack at long-form journalism.
I appreciate the support of the book undertaking from current Spectator editor-in-chief David Estok, publisher Ian Oliver, and especially managing editor Jim Poling, who stickhandled the contract. Thanks to Carmelina Prete, Pete Reintjes, and Scott Petepiece for suggestions and feedback. And of course I thank the people at John Wiley & Sons.
Most of all, I note the contributions of those who provided information that helped me craft the story. Chief among these were the Hamilton detectives who investigated the sniper attack on Dr. Hugh Short and who are referenced in the piece. The case, like all of the attacks, is a disturbing one. I thank them for their participation and candor. I also want to single out assistance from FBI profiler James Fitzgerald at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, and special agents Bernie Tolbert and Michael Osborn. Finally, I take advantage of this opportunity to thank my family for their love and inspiration. You mean everything.
Jon Wells Hamilton, Ontario
Introduction
Dark, early evening in Dublin. Wet cobblestone glistens under streetlights, a damp, bracing nip in the air. The writer checked his watch. Six o’clock. It had been 72 hours since he met the sniper for the first time, back in the United States. James Charles Kopp. “What was… the weather like, this morning, where you live?” was the first thing Kopp had said, quietly, deliberately, as though expecting some kind of code phrase in reply. And now, across the Atlantic, the writer ducked into a crowded Dublin cybercafe and checked email. Finally, the message was in. Subject: From Jim.
That was how I led the opening chapter of an early draft of Sniper. I showed it to my editor Roger Gillespie and he asked why was I inserting myself into the story? I got the message, and Roger was correct, as usual. The true story of anti-abortion doctor killer James Kopp ran every day in the Hamilton Spectator over the course of seven weeks in 2004. I have now polished, updated and edited the narrative for this book. Looking back, my writer-in-Dublin theme no doubt reflected my fascination as I chased Kopp’s shadow far and wide. Research over a tenmonth period took me from crime scenes in Hamilton, Ontario, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Amherst, New York, to New York City, San Francisco, Ireland and France.
Sniper’s length and narrative voice were, and remain, unusual in the world of print journalism, but it was not my first project of that nature—that was Poison, a series which won a National Newspaper Award in Canada. I note that while Poison, Sniper, and my other serials to date are written in a novelistic style, all of the detail, dialogue, and thoughts of the characters are true, based entirely on reportage.
In order to craft the story of James Kopp’s life and crimes I interviewed nearly 100 people, ranging from those he went to high school with, to prosecutors and defense lawyers at home and abroad, more than a dozen law enforcement officers ranging from FBI agents to city detectives, and individuals on the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement. I studied hundreds of pages of court transcripts and FBI search warrant documents—and loaded and fired an SKS assault rifle at a shooting range. In large measure what made Sniper such a compelling and at times disturbing creative journey for me was the access I gained to James Charles Kopp. To my knowledge, while the paranoid Kopp has been sought by print and TV journalists in Canada and the United States over the years, he has never engaged in any in-depth contact with any of them. As it happened, I was able to exchange many letters with him and meet for several hours of face-to-face interviews. This access allowed me to better retrace his early life in the San Francisco area, and his steps while on the lam from police and the FBI overseas. It also provided opportunity to get inside his head, understand the way he talked and thought. Immersing myself in his world was at times difficult to take, but it did help me write Sniper with more authority and color than otherwise would have been possible. I have told this story using different voices—Kopp’s most notably, but also those of law enforcement and anti-abortion activists all along the spectrum. A note to the reader: I don’t always telegraph when the voice changes, and the language used when visiting the fringe of the anti-abortion/pro-life movement is often quite graphic.
I have told colleagues the story of my unprecedented experience interviewing Kopp in person. He agreed to talk but also refused to let me record him or even take notes. It was no doubt his way of trying to provide deniability for whatever I would write. (I can hear him now: “Jon Wells? Never heard of him. Knew a Wells in the Bay Area once but that’s another story…”) When I left each of our interview sessions I immediately turned on my tape recorder and dictated. While Kopp rambled on many tangents, much of what he said stuck with me—indeed, probably for longer than I would have liked. Eventually Kopp stopped contacting me altogether, just as he told me he would one day without warning, and just as he vowed to others he knew over the years. As the story illustrates, this was at his core. Unpredictability, deception—what he called “Romanita”—even towards his friends and family, was by his reckoning essential for everyone’s own good, and the good of a movement for which he ultimately deemed it a moral necessity to shoot doctors under cover of darkness.
The letters he did mail my way were unusual to say the least, peppered with code phrases and references that were difficult to decipher. He listed names of friends for me to try and visit. I was, he assured me, all along being “vetted” by allies of his. There were times when Kopp’s friends were less than anxious to admit their affiliation with him, however. I found a priest at a hermitage high atop breathtaking Big Sur who would have nothing to do with me when I told him the story I was writing, and an elderly woman named Beatrice in San Francisco shut the door in my face when I mentioned Jim Kopp’s name. As for the emails he forwarded through a third party when I w
as in Ireland and France, some of the tips were so cryptic I never did figure them out while others panned out quite nicely—like the one I quoted in that early draft, when a writer hungrily retrieved a message in Dublin containing advice on where to go and who to meet, all while warning of traps lying in wait.
Subject: From Jim
Be careful. Interpol could retrace your steps… Please do not ask first or last names. Do not ask or write down first names. Do not attribute. These are my close friends. They saved my life. They know nothing. I am Timothy.
As this book relates, the sniper himself did not sufficiently heed his own warnings.
Chapter 1 ~ A Burning Cross
Amherst, N.Y.
October 23, 1998
9:55 p.m.
A gray-blue eye boring through the rifle scope into the window of the doctor’s home 100 feet away, meeting a turquoise electric glow in the white kitchen. Must be the microwave, he thought. The target standing, raising his left arm, the mass of the shoulder in the crosshairs—and disappearing. The sniper waiting, bracing himself against a tree in the woods. The doctor—the abortionist—must have pressed the numbers on the microwave, he thought, and left the room. The sniper calculated that the abortionist would return, to that very spot, in 35, maybe 40 seconds. You can cut a few holes in the fences around the death camps. Derail some trains. Let a few babies crawl to freedom. A mere trickle of relief in the abortion Holocaust. But you do it. It is your duty to do it.
An orange flash in the darkness, the full metal jacket exploding out of the barrel, spiraling like a football, spinning, stabilizing, 2,300 feet per second, popping through double-pane glass and wire screen as though puncturing tissue paper. The hot copper-coated lead knifing into the doctor’s back and, by design, the soft tip of the round mushrooming on contact, ripping through cartilage, vertebrae, right lung, two ribs, exiting out the armpit, blood bursting onto the clean white floor. How severe were the doctor’s injuries? The sniper was certain of just one thing: he would not be killing any babies tomorrow, perhaps not for a very long time.
The smell of smoke from the Russian-made SKS rifle lingering in the air, leaves and branches cracking outside, he was on the move, disappearing into the night. Martyrdom was definitely not part of the plan. What, he mused, you think a soldier engages the enemy under cover of darkness and sticks around? Puts out his hands for cuffing, awaits his appointment with a firing squad? Does the CIA ask its agents to embark upon a mission—correction, a morally licit mission—and suggest they undertake some kind of quixotic gesture, some act of schoolboy chivalry? A difficult way to spend one’s life, shooting abortionists, he reflected, but as it happened he was good at it.
Police in Amherst, near Buffalo, arrived in minutes at the home of Dr. Barnett Slepian, a gynecologist who provided abortions as part of his practice. But they had nothing. The shooter was gone. No weapon. No suspects. The FBI was alerted—this was no typical shooting in a nation of shootings. What the sniper had done was as conspicuous as a burning cross. Within hours a statement was issued from Washington. The attempt on Dr. Slepian’s life was called “an act of brutal terrorism.” Two visitors came to Buffalo to meet the Slepians in person. The visitors are Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The view of Dr. Barnett Slepian’s home from the wooded area behind his house.
* * *
Ancaster, Ontario
November 1995
It had been the wettest fall anyone could remember. Rain came hard, every day it seemed. But the season had also been unusually warm, and so the smell of damp leaves and grass and bark hung in the air, masking the reality that, any day, any hour now, the air would turn cold with winter’s first gasp. The days grew shorter, darkness closed in.
While the caricature is not entirely accurate, Ancaster is known as the wellheeled, leafy suburb of rugged Hamilton—a steel town and port city on Lake Ontario, an hour west from where the Peace Bridge crosses the Canada–U.S. border at Buffalo. On Sulphur Springs Road in Ancaster, large homes intrude on the forested parkland of the Dundas Valley Conservation Area that dominates the area. You can park your car along the road, take one of the trails and lose yourself among the sugar maples and red oaks, maybe spot an endangered Louisiana waterthrush or hooded warbler overhead. No sound except dead leaves dancing precariously in the fall wind.
Dr. Hugh Alexander Short. Sixty-two years old. Practised at Hamilton’s Henderson Hospital. His house on Sulphur Springs backed onto the woods. Inside his den on the second floor, his favorite chair was turned on a 45-degree angle facing the television and positioned near the low-slung window, exposing both the right side of the chair, and the doctor. From outside, in the dark, the light shining through the window silhouetted the target perfectly.
What was the sniper’s mission? To kill the doctor—or wound him? “Just War” theory outlined by theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas says: The cause must be just, force must be a last resort, and the level of force must be proportionate to the goal. Stopping a doctor from killing babies snug in a mother’s womb. That certainly justified a war. Didn’t it? Wounding would keep the doctor away from work for quite some time.
Sulphur Springs Road, near Dr. Hugh Short’s home in Ancaster, Ontario.
The view looking into the barrel of an SKS rifle.
But if wounding was the sniper’s goal, there was the practical matter of actions matching intent. Hitting the center mass of a human target, aiming for the torso, was difficult enough. But hitting an extremity? The sniper knew the variables. He would be at relatively close range, but it would be under pressure, in the dark. Quite a challenge.
Even for police officers, “shooting for the knees” is a fiction. Most cops aren’t expert shots. They take target practice maybe two or three times a year. Compare that to someone who spends day after day at a rifle range, clustering rounds in a tight circle, wearing earmuffs to block the echo of rifle shots bouncing off steel-plated walls—Pop! Pop! Pop!
Then again, he would be employing a military-style assault rifle, not a high-precision sniper’s weapon. Of course, an Italian army Mannlicher-Carcano rifle isn’t a high-precision weapon either, but it took out JFK, didn’t it? Oswald was shooting to kill, though. An experienced marksman would say that shooting to wound with a high-powered rifle simply isn’t a rational proposition. Even if you manage to hit an extremity, the victim can quickly bleed out and die. But who needs the proposition to be rational? Maybe all you need is someone who truly believes he can pull it off. Or someone who has, in fact, pulled it off before.
* * *
Ancaster, Ontario
November 3, 1995 9:50 p.m.
The Ontario Provincial Police officer watched a car merge onto Highway 403 from Mohawk Road. Old beater. Vermont plate. The cop was 25-year-old Dwayne Frook. He lived in nearby Burlington. Had been a cop four years but just joined the OPP the year before, and was posted to the local detachment. Once the car left Ancaster and merged onto the highway, the driver had left Hamilton city police jurisdiction and entered the OPP’s. Why did Frook pull the car over? Slight weaving of the car in its lane? Maybe the beater was also moving too cautiously, as though driven by someone with a few drinks. Or maybe the cop felt a vibe in the rapidly cooling air, a presence, something that didn’t belong.
His eyes lingered on the vehicle. Wet snow continued to fall. Frook walked slowly up alongside the Vermont beater, shoes clicking on wet pavement. The driver rolled down his window. He wore glasses. Pale skin, pronounced jaw. Light blue eyes. Frook examined the driver’s I.D. Kopp, James Charles.
Jim was soft-spoken, respectful when speaking with police, lawyers. Others might ridicule the notion, given his record as a hard-core pro-lifer. But he liked to think he respected authority, really he did. It was part of who he was. It came from his father, he mused. Hey, he was a law and order guy—so long as the law and order didn’t fall on the side of people who favored killing babies. Now, on the other hand, authority didn’t always respect him. Not unless y
ou consider arm locks—arm locks that felt like your bones would snap—from cops at protests to be signs of respect.
* * *
For years he had taken part in anti-abortion rescues at women’s health clinics in the United States. It started in the 1980s, activists showing up early in the morning outside clinics “rescuing” the fetuses to be aborted that day. The operations grew bolder, resulting in arrests, protesters getting dragged away by police. Jim Kopp was at the center of it. His expertise was well known in pro-life circles. He took a welding course and designed intricate, kryptonite-style locks that enabled rescuers to blockade a clinic for hours, forcing police to cut them loose. He had it down to a science. First he would twist pieces of cardboard, wrapping them together in a Gordian knot, then copy the design in steel, heating it, bending it, molding it with his blowtorch. The locks meant you didn’t need an army of people on-site, just enough to lock down the door.
There was one rescue in Pittsburgh back in the late eighties that really pushed the envelope, a great scene. A Friday morning, and as usual the group gathered before dawn, about 20 of them. Jim loved the early morning, would say little at times like this. He was a planner, not the vocal leader. He let others do the talking.
He was smarter than the others. He had a knowledge of science, politics and religion that the others could not approach. He was apologetic about his intelligence, made a point of trying not to talk down to others, although his attempts not to condescend to them sometimes came off as condescension anyway. “Sorry about that. If I sound like I’m talking down to you, please, please, just say, ‘Jim, shut up, OK?’” He certainly didn’t look the part of a genius, not in clothes that looked like soup kitchen rejects, an appearance that belied his upper-middle-class upbringing. He dressed down to be like the rest, people who led simple lifestyles, regular folks who were devoted to the cause, a couple of whom came down from Canada to join in the rescues. Jim Kopp made sure he looked like he belonged. But he was not one of them.