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

by Jon Wells

  On May 2 1974, she died. Three months away from his 20th birthday, it was the first time Jim could say that death had truly affected him. The family gathered for the burial in a town just north of Greenbrae called Novato, where Nancy’s Lutheran Church was located. It is a beautiful spot, lush green grass of the cemetery set against the parched foothills in the background. On top of the main stone is a concrete cast of her small hands, with “Mary” written freehand with a finger above it. She was buried next to her grandmother, Kathryn Leonard. Jim wept along with Mary’s friends from the neighborhood, the ones who had understood her and had cared about her.

  Grave marker for Jim Kopp’s sister, Mary, in Novato, California.

  * * *

  Guadalajara, Mexico

  1974

  “OK, so I ask to borrow the book. Borrow, you understand.”

  Bart was at it again, holding court. Could anyone tell an anecdote better? He had that delivery, that Bill Cosby thing going. He picked out things in everyday life, little absurdities, ironies. It was a Sunday night, and Bart was hanging out with the guys, Rick, Lawson, John. None of the others could match his jokes, his knack for telling a story, apocryphal or not, to highlight an absurdity, and just be damn funny. Maybe it was the setting that gave him so much material. What he and the others were engaged in was a serious enterprise, to be sure, but here they were, in their mid-20s, studying medicine in Mexico for Chrissakes. They were attending med school at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara (UAG) with its more liberal admission standards.

  “Borrow. A book. Just—a book. From Brian,” continued Bart. “I needed to borrow it, you understand. It was mainly for this one chapter.”

  The guys grinned and listened. Bart Slepian shared an apartment with a married couple who were also in the med school. The husband’s name was Brian. He was pleasant enough, but Bart did not get along at all with Brian’s wife.

  “And so Brian says, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and he turns to his wife. ‘Can Bart borrow the book?’ And she says, ‘Well, you know, we, ah, paid for that book.’”

  Pause.

  “And the husband said, ‘Well, he’s just going to read it. He’s just going to read a chapter. Just the one chapter.’” Pause. “And she says, ‘Well what if he reads the whole thing?’”

  The guys roared.

  UAG was a strange place to be back then. Most of the students were local, but there were also about 2,500 Americans down there. The Americans didn’t really associate with the Mexicans, who were mostly kids, right out of high school. Bart made the most of life there. He always caught the Sunday American movie carried on a local TV station. Sometimes it was a classic western, like High Noon with Gary Cooper. His favorite was The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance.

  Rick became the mouthpiece for their group, because Bart’s Spanish was, to put it charitably, a work in progress. Bart was 28, not quite six feet tall, maybe 170 pounds. He wore big round glasses, had unruly hair that was receding, and did not yet have the beard he would grow in his thirties. Jogging kept him slim, but he did not have a particularly athletic build. Still, Bart had a sharp mind, the sense of humor. He could be very charming with women and he dated American students here and there. Bart also used his modest appearance to his own benefit, turned it into a strength, a game. His exterior masked sinewy strength.

  He was also a bit of a con. Actually, a lot of a con. A hustler. He took his act to a local pool hall. Bart did not look especially hip or cool. He wore schleppy T-shirts, jeans. He’d linger around the tables until challenged to a game.

  “Well, O.K. I guess.”

  Bart would toy with the opponent, just hold his own, let the bets grow, and grow—then run the table and send the other guy home with an empty wallet. His buddies took it all in, stifling their laughter. He played backgammon with friends like Lee and Brian, for high stakes. For a time, arm wrestling, of all things, became his best con of all. Early days at the school, he challenged Rick to a match. They set up at the table, locked hands.

  “You ready?” said Bart.

  “Yep.” Someone yelled, “Go!”

  It was over. Bart’s first move was lightning, so quick and sneaky that Rick had barely felt his arm tense with anticipation before the back of his right hand was flat on the table. They tried again, and again Bart won. He was the best arm wrestler any of them had ever seen. He beat all comers, took some money in side bets, too. In second year, after beating some of the local Mexican students, national pride came into play. A hulking guy was brought forward by the Mexicans, his arm the size of a man’s leg. Even cocky Bart looked taken aback by the ringer.

  “Uh, Bart,” said Rick. “Sure you want to do this?”

  “Not a problem,” said Bart.

  “Bart, this guy’s gonna break your friggin’ arm.”

  It was a raucous scene in the cafeteria, the air of a championship fight, gringos lined up behind their unlikely-looking-butundefeated champion, Mexicans behind their mountainous local boy (who may or may not have been an actual student). Bets were down. John, Lawson and Rick all knew that Bart surely didn’t stand a chance. But they bet on him anyway. The two combatants locked hands, Bart’s hand swallowed by his opponent’s, the roar from the spectators grew. At “go,” Bart was already on top, accelerating as he always did. This time, he was overmatched, even the quick start wasn’t enough. He lost.

  Chapter 4 ~ Silent Scream

  Walter Kopp attended Berkeley after graduating from Redwood, en route to the University of Colorado for his master’s in hospital administration. What would Jim do? His roots required that it be something special. His father had once told him that one day Jim would be a small part of something very big.

  Jim was convinced that his forefathers’ experiences were indicators of his own destiny. A great-grandmother on his mother’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, “a strikingly beautiful woman.” His maternal grandfather, Walter Leonard, was a physician who counted Hollywood stars such as John Wayne among his patients.

  He believed his was a family of survivors in a country founded by survivors—the disenfranchised, mavericks who had either fled or been kicked out of the Old World. His mother, Nancy, had Irish heritage—but Jim liked to stress that her background was “Black Irish” (Irish who had dark hair and eyes as descendants, according to legend, of Spaniards who landed on the Western seaboard of Ireland in 1588, after surviving the defeat of the Spanish Armada.). He would talk of how a grandmother on his mother’s side survived the great earthquake of 1906 as an eight-year-old. His paternal grandfather, Charles Sr., survived a gas attack in France during the First World War. He had come to America from Austria to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and, upon arrival at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, he shortened the family name from Koppensteiner to Kopp. Jim liked to claim that his grandfather spoke “every continental language” and worked as a translator in Alsace-Lorraine interrogating POWs for the allies during the war. He died young, at 42, from chronic health defects due to the gas attack.

  Jim admired his father greatly—the doctor of laws, corporate lawyer, former Marine. Chuck Kopp had won the Award of Merit from the San Francisco Bar Association, was a leader of the Boy Scouts of America. With his political connections and influence, Jim believed his dad to be a “maker of kings.”

  Politically he had conservative roots. His parents were solid Nixon people. Jim said that his father had worked to help put Richard Nixon in the White House and, later, helped Ronald Reagan get elected governor of California. In the living room hung a photo of Chuck Kopp with Reagan at a reception. Jim said his dad was offered a post as a cabinet aide in the first Nixon administration, but turned down the offer because moving the family from California to Washington was too big a move. Later in his life Jim believed that he could contact former Nixon administration officials for advice, or to vet potential enemies.

  It was a fact that in December 1969 Nixon appointed a man named Jesse Steinfeld as his surgeon general, and that Steinfeld had live
d across the street from the Kopps back in South Pasadena when Jim was a boy. Jim told the story that his dad helped smooth the way for Jesse to land the surgeon general’s position by putting in a good word for his old neighbor. Many years later, reached on the telephone, 76-year-old Jesse Steinfeld said that the story was possible, but he could not remember it specifically.

  Jim’s mother was active in her church and also with work, a home care service she founded called Nancy’s Nurses, running it out of the house on Via Lerida. She was also active in politics, working for local Republicans, and a member of the John Birch Society, a fiercely anticommunist organization led by Robert Welch, inaugurated in 1958. It became known as a looney-right movement, most often cited for its contention that Dwight Eisenhower, five-star American general, D-Day commander, and two-term president, was himself a communist.

  The John Birch Society became, one of the most powerful post-war groups in America, with 100,000 members. One-quarter of those members lived in California. Charitably, Birchers were mostly conservatives holding Washington accountable for defending freedom in the face of Soviet expansion. Less charitably, the society capitalized on a McCarthyist ethos of conspiracy, grand schemes and secret government plots that appealed to base paranoia. This sense of mission, fighting a moral battle against a powerful, ubiquitous, left-wing enemy allied to the federal government, harmonized well with Jim Kopp’s sense of personal destiny. ***

  Given his background it was an odd choice for Jim to enroll at the ultra-liberal University of California at Santa Cruz, which was just 10 years old, an invention of the sixties. The campus was gorgeous but unconventional. UC Santa Cruz sprawled, laid out over farmland and forests of redwoods. It looked more like a nature retreat than a university. There were courses like “The Chicken in History,” which critics relished invoking as representative of all you needed to know about UC Santa Cruz and its brand of pop-intellectualism. It represented everything Jim Kopp would ultimately disdain: left wing orthodoxy, a godless peace-and-love doctrine that was morally blind to the real world—an anythinggoes ethos.

  He could have gone to any school. His family had the resources and he was intelligent, especially in science. The reason he went to this school was because he followed his heart. Her name was Jenny. His girlfriend. They lived together for a time, he said, in an offcampus apartment. He could focus on Jenny at school, and study a world you could fit on the head of a pin, the microscopic world of biology, and embryology. They lived together his senior year.

  At that time, he was not actively engaged in the abortion debate, although he did hold a position. It had been in January 1973 when the verdict was issued in the case of Roe v. Wade, in which the United States Supreme Court essentially legalized abortion, ruling that the termination of an unwanted pregnancy is up to a woman and her doctor. The court ruled that state criminal abortion laws violate a constitutional “right of privacy” and must therefore be struck down. The issue had made its way to the dinner table debate in the Kopp household. Jim was instinctively opposed to the decision, following his mother’s lead.

  Did Jenny really get pregnant? Accounts got muddy over the years. He told some friends that Jenny had had an abortion and did not tell him about it. He said that her abortion crushed him, brought him to tears. A transforming experience. Later he denied the story. He admitted that he had offered to drive her to an abortion clinic, but said it turned out she was not pregnant. The fact he had found himself willing to help her get an abortion upset him.

  In 1976, he graduated from Santa Cruz with an honors degree in biology. “By and large,” wrote his college evaluator, Jim’s work “has been superior from the outset, particularly in the sciences.” Jim succeeded academically, and failed in his personal life. Jenny left him to pursue studies at the University of Texas. Broke Jim’s heart, some said. He didn’t want to give up on her, though. The story went that he followed her to Texas for a time, spent a semester there working at the University of Texas in a laboratory. He returned to California and the Bay Area, moved south to pursue postgraduate studies in embryology at Cal State Fullerton.

  As for abortion, the young Jim questioned it, but it was still an intellectual exercise; the act itself did not yet register with him as something singularly evil.

  * * *

  Lewisburg, Tennessee

  Joan Andrews was raised on a farm in Lewisburg. Her family claimed to be the first Catholics to settle in that part of the state and she grew up feeling part of an embattled religious minority. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the neighboring town of Pulaski. The KKK, haters of blacks and many others, including Catholics, burned a cross right in the front yard of her Catholic girls’ school.

  Young Joan had a particularly inquisitive mind. She was unafraid, even at a young age, to reflect upon darkness. She heard about the Holocaust, and, not long after she was first able to read, she went to the library and read books about it. She felt it inside, not just sympathy or intellectual curiosity, but a burning need to protect the weak. It can’t be left to the law, the politicians, the democratic process. Leave it to the establishment, trust the state, the wisdom of the people, and you end up with Auschwitz. Her older brother served in Vietnam. As a teenager, Joan begged her parents: “Let me go, let me just volunteer to go over.” It’s not that she was hungry for combat. Her family had a pacifist bent. But you must protect the victimized. And sometimes that requires force. Gandhi was a pacifist, the kids were told, but far worse than engaging in violence when faced with a moral crisis is to do nothing at all.

  Picture Joan Andrews one afternoon around Christmastime 1958. She is all of nine years old, holding the lifeless body of the newborn baby boy:

  The baby limp, a pale, broken doll. The pain in Joan’s small face, the tears, as she cuts off a piece of her hair to bury with little Joel. Mom had delivered the baby at home. Joel had lived, but briefly. Mom had phoned dad at the school where he was principal, and Joan came right home. They immerse the baby in baptismal water. The family speaks in whispers. He was perfect, so perfect. They put him in a small box, then each of them cuts a lock from their hair to make a bed for him inside. The vigil complete, they bury him in the backyard. Stillborn? Fetus? No. Joel is a baby. A child of God. Joan’s brother.

  Fast-forward to 1973, and a 24-year-old woman from Tennessee stands on a sidewalk outside a women’s health clinic in Chicago. Joan Andrews is at the abortion clinic—the mill, the death camp itself. That’s where they were killing the babies, she thought. She could all but feel the devil’s presence. She was a meek-looking woman, her eyes didn’t look directly at you when she spoke, but angled away, as though avoiding any hint of confrontation, as if she were staring at images that only she could see. What should she do? She wasn’t exactly sure. Disarm them? In 1973 there was no active anti-abortion counterrevolution to speak of. She felt alone. Joan turned and walked away from the clinic. She would start with some little things, small protests, until she heard a louder calling from God.

  * * *

  Science did much to fuel the growing pro-life movement in the 1970s. The field of fetology was a new frontier, unveiling some of the mystery of what was developing inside a woman’s uterus, using new technologies like electronic fetal heart monitoring, hysteroscopy, radio-immuno chemistry, and, most of all, ultrasound, in 1976.

  The visual, and emotional, impact of ultrasound was enormous. Not only was it a revolutionary technology for monitoring the fetus from a medical standpoint, it was also a new weapon for the pro-life side of the debate. The ultrasound used sound waves to outline and project the image of the fetus. Now doctors and patients could watch the movements of the fetus, consider its shape, size, gender, watch it swallow, urinate. The ultrasound humanized the fetus. In 1984, a movie called The Silent Scream radicalized some who watched the grainy images of a fetus being terminated.

  “The child is extremely agitated,” intoned the narrator. “Even though the suction tip has not touched it. We see the child’s mouth open in a s
ilent scream, a child threatened with extinction. The heart rate has sped up, it does sense aggression in its sanctuary. It is moving away, in a pathetic attempt to escape. The body is now being torn, systematically, from the head.”

  The figurative slap in the face for Jim Kopp on abortion came in 1980. As part of his research at Cal State Fullerton, he worked on a project at Stanford Hospital involving nerve reconnection for Vietnam veterans with spinal-cord injuries. He would one day tell a court of law how the incident had been the turning point for him. He said he knew a doctor:

  She takes him down to visit the morgue, in the bowels of the hospital. Jim stands by a long metal table with a paper bucket at one end. He looks inside the bucket at the aborted fetus. Birth defects, six fingers on one hand, genitalia not properly developed. Sees the doctor, instrument in hand, flipping this fetus—this baby—back and forth. She’s doing it so casually, like a rag doll. This nice, intelligent woman probably feels she’s doing nothing wrong, seems proud, because she has detected some of these defects. Recommended the abortion.

  “Glad we found the defects in time, in-utero,” the doctor observes. “When you see stuff like this it reminds you why you believe in abortion.”

  His gray-blue eyes focus, Jim’s face freezes in an intense stare, taking it all in, processing the information.

  The scientist in him—and that’s how he thought of himself, as a scientist—could look at it dispassionately, perhaps, but something else was speaking to him. He had never seen a baby that had been—killed—before. His mind spun. He was stunned. At conception, 23 chromosomes from the sperm meet 23 chromosomes from the egg. A blueprint of a unique individual is formed, right there. And, now, destroyed. It was coming together for him, had been for some time. His research on embryos helped support what he was feeling in his heart, that abortion killed an innocent human life. And if this is so, what is the abortionist engaged in? Murder? How could it be otherwise?