by Jon Wells
* * *
Central Station
Hamilton, Ontario
Saturday, November 11, 1995
The detectives were soon made aware of a similar case from the year before in Vancouver—the sniper attack on Dr. Garson Romalis. Romalis performed abortions, too. In spite of the similarities, the link did not seem conclusive to a few of the Hamilton cops. What did a shooting on the west coast have to do with a shooting in Ancaster? The bizarre nature of the case raised so many questions. If the sniper in both cases was the same person, what was the intent? Murder? Detective Frank Harild thought that, in hitting Short’s arm, the sniper had simply missed. He had wanted to put a hole through Short that would kill. The sniper’s lousy aim saved the doctor’s life.
“It’s not a hard shot, hitting centre mass from 123 feet,” he said. “I mean, you can just about throw a baseball with accuracy from that distance.” Moreover, the sniper had put one bullet in the window frame. “If you’re such a great shot, so great that you are specifically intending to wound the doctor, trying to be that particular, wouldn’t you at least hit the windowpane? But the shot hits the frame.”
On the other hand, if anti-abortion was the motive, clearly the sniper did not have the mind-set of a typical criminal. Someone with a grandiose, ideologically driven mission could have all kinds of notions in his head. Also, military-style firearms like those used in the two attacks are designed to propel rounds through metal, wood, without losing much accuracy. The path of the bullet is unlikely to change dramatically. So maybe he had intended to hit the doctors in an extremity. It was an interesting debate. But the task at hand was not proving intent, it was building a list of suspects and finding the shooter.
Mike Campbell explored the abortion angle. There were no previous examples of anti-abortion violence in Hamilton. The city did have a vigorous pro-life movement, however, and that fact was common knowledge to pro-lifers in other parts of Canada. Hamilton typically had big turnouts for events such as the annual “Life Chain,” which drew 5,000 people a year in the early 1990s. Those silent protests were, however, a far cry from the abortion clinic rescues in the United States, or the raucous protests and arrests in Toronto in the late 1980s, or in nearby Buffalo. Hamilton Right to Life, its officials always stressed, was the “educational arm” of the movement. It wasn’t political, and confrontation wasn’t their game, they said. Out west, in Winnipeg, pro-lifers had drafted a list of doctors who provided abortions. Was it so activists could harass them? Or to let the public at large know what was going on? There was no evidence of any similar list in Hamilton.
Campbell started to make a list of local pro-lifers, activists, those who picketed at local hospitals. But once police identify a name in their investigation, the name has to be pursued completely. “Calm down with all the goddam anti-abortion suspects,” one cop warned Campbell. “You throw your net too wide, and we’ll have to clear them all.”
There was one name that needed to be checked—Randy Dyer, the man who had been angry at Dr. Short for performing an abortion on his girlfriend. Dyer had even cut a CD of his own songs soon before the Short shooting, and they included one number called “Daniel’s Song,” named for his aborted child. The doctor was referred to in the song as the executioner. Dyer was sorting through boxes of the new CD the day a police cruiser pulled in front of the house on Highcliffe Avenue in central Hamilton. It was about two weeks after the attack on Dr. Short.
Dyer lived alone in the basement apartment., used to drive a truck for a living but, after being injured in a traffic accident, had lived on a pension and was taking courses at Redeemer College in social work and religion. He was not surprised to see the police at his door. Surely he was a suspect. The detectives invited him to join them in the cruiser for a chat. Ever own firearms? No. Ever belong to a gun club? No. “Where were you, the night of Friday, November 10?” Much to his relief, Dyer had an alibi.
He didn’t drink, didn’t go out much. Most nights he would have been at home, alone, with no witness to corroborate his whereabouts. But as it happened, that night he had been in church, at Flamborough Christian Fellowship in nearby Millgrove. He worked the sound board that night for the pastor’s microphone and the musical instruments. In theory Dyer could have popped out, gone to Hugh Short’s place, shot him and returned to the church—except there was a woman at the church who could put Randy in the building, at nearly the exact time of the shooting.
Funny how things work out. That night, the woman had gone into labor right in the church. She had walked gingerly down the aisle, helped by someone else, and she had recalled seeing Randy at the back of the room, at the sound board. Then, after church that night, Dyer had gone to Tim Hortons, met a buddy there for coffee. He made a call on his cell phone. The police checked out phone records to confirm the story. After he talked to police, he went back to Hortons and saw the waitress who had served him. She remembered getting his order wrong.
“Hey, if the police come and talk to you, make sure you tell them I was here,” he said to her with a smile. Dyer got the feeling, though, that the detectives knew pretty quickly that he was a dead end. Although, as it happened, it was not the last he would hear from Hamilton police about the case.
* * *
The black balaclava that Hamilton police recovered from Dr. Hugh Short’s driveway was delivered to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Technicians found fibers from a carpet, and from an animal, perhaps a cat or a dog. And there was human hair. They also tested for saliva and mucus around the mouth and nose hole of the mask. November 10 had been a cold and wet night, and the shooter was under pressure. Perhaps he drooled, or maybe his nose ran. Testing for saliva and mucus was relatively straightforward. In order to find nuclear DNA on human hair fibers, however, the hair root must be present. Hair is essentially dead material, but the root contains the blueprint of life.
In the final test results, the balaclava produced a DNA profile for an individual. But it meant little at that point. A DNA profile, in isolation, means nothing when there is nothing to compare it to. Whoever wore the balaclava was still merely a chart of colorcoded numbers.
Detectives Mike Campbell and Frank Harild chased the ballistics angle. No rifle was recovered. But there were the bullets and casings. The two rounds fired at Dr. Short had been found—the one that shattered the doctor’s arm, and the one that had landed in the den. Both were taken to CFS. Bullets from a shooting scene are often crushed, looking like fillings that have been knocked out of someone’s mouth. Empty shells, however, indicate the type of weapon used. Two shell casings had been found behind Short’s house on the small slope down towards the woods. Curious that the shooter wouldn’t have used a brass-catcher to prevent the casings from ending up in police hands. They were from ammunition for an M-14 rifle.
Even though the bullets had been mangled, it still was useful to examine them. The police had caught a break. Even though the bullets had passed through a wooden window frame, they were sufficiently intact to be examined. Under a microscope, scratches and grooves were visible; the bullets were a four-groove with a right-hand twist. A technician got on the phone to Harild. The barrel markings suggested that the bullets were fired from either an AK-47 or SKS rifle, he said.
“What?!” Harild exclaimed. It didn’t add up. What about the casings from an M-14? They didn’t match the bullets. It was a nice little diversion, getting police to look for the wrong weapon. “The sneaky bastard left different casings on purpose—he’s dropping phony ammunition.”
Harild phoned Detective George Kristenson in Vancouver for a comparison with the live ammunition Vancouver police found in the composter behind Dr. Garson Romalis’s house the day he was shot. “You better double-check the rounds you found in the house against the unused live rounds you found in the alley,” Harild advised Kristenson. Sure enough, the hard-point military rounds found in the composter were different from the soft-point rounds that had blown a hole in the doctor’s thigh.
> Detective Mike Campbell tried to use the ballistics information they had to trace the firearm. Ballistics fingerprinting was a relatively new technology, used at that time in the United States, but not Canada. He sent the bullets for testing to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Best-case scenario, the ballistics fingerprint would come back saying that the bullet came from a weapon within a probable serial number range, which could then be traced to one of several possible firearms purchases at specific stores. Campbell got a return call from the ATF. The round was, as CFS had said, a four-groove with a right-hand twist. Yes, but were the markings unusual, or traceable to a particular weapon? The ATF gave Campbell his answer: Those particular bullets could have come from any one of 30 to 40 million AK or SKS weapons purchased in the United States. A needle in a haystack, in a field of haystacks, Campbell reflected.
The detectives kept in close touch with the Shorts. One day Katherine Short, a small woman, with a plainspoken manner, looked up at big Frank Harild. “Honestly,” she said. “Do you think you will ever identify the person who did this?” Harild paused, and looked into the eyes of the woman who had wrapped her husband’s bloody wounds.
“The fact is,” he said, “he may well act again, and the more times he does this, with every shot, there are more clues.”
“But will you catch him?”
“Not unless we get international resources behind this.”
Chapter 10 ~ “I’m hemorrhaging here”
Old Hickory, Tennessee
July 16, 1997
They sold about 50 SKS rifles a year at the A-Z Pawnshop in Old Hickory. Eventually they’d stop selling firearms altogether, too much hassle, paperwork, especially when federal laws started mandating background checks on not only handguns, but rifles and shotguns as well. But in the summer of 1997 the pawnshop sold maybe five or six guns a week. Not too many, thought Patricia Osborne, the store manager.
She did not remember much about the man who walked in that day though, Lord knows, she got asked about him enough after the fact. He came in on July 16 looking to buy a rifle. Interested in the SKS 7.62 x 39 millimeter model. His ID said his name was B. James Milton from Virginia. He filled out a firearms registration form. White male, 5’10,” 180 pounds. Lived at 5674 Washington Street, Ettrick, Virginia. B. James Milton was also interested in purchasing a brass catcher and a stock extension—a brass catcher prevents expended shell casings from falling to the ground. A stock extension is often used to lengthen a rifle, making it more accurate, extending the weapon farther away from the face, particularly helpful if the shooter is tall, or wears glasses. A-Z didn’t carry those accessories, however. B. James Milton paid for the rifle and left.
* * *
That summer Jim Kopp worked for Good Counsel Homes in Hoboken, New Jersey, a group helping single mothers. Longtime pro-life activist Joan Andrews ran the home. Another activist, Amy Boissonneault, also worked there. She had been arrested several times, sometimes used the alias “Emma Bossano.” The authorities had put her name on a list of 30 pro-lifers who were considered an “ongoing threat” to a New Jersey clinic. Jim had developed a deep affection for Amy, who was 12 years his junior. He wasn’t the only one, she was popular among all the prolifers. One of the other men had proposed to her once, but she had turned him down.
Loretta Marra was still married to Dennis Malvasi and, in 1996, at age 33, she had gone to Canada to give birth to a son, Louis. She used the alias “Jane White” while traveling and stayed with a physician friend of her father’s near a town called Beechburg, in eastern Ontario near the Quebec border. Loretta wouldn’t say precisely why she had elected to go to Canada to have her first child.
Jim continued to take part in protests in the United States and in rescues overseas. He traveled throughout Malaysia, the Philippines. Abortion was technically illegal in the Philippines, a strongly Catholic nation, so the protesters were treated well by local police at a rescue in the Manila area. He felt an “angel” helped him that day, leading him to the right door in the clinic where the killing took place. Jim turned to thank the angel for his help, and he was gone. Back in the United States, on January 23, 1997, he was arrested at a protest in Englewood, New Jersey. As was the pattern for years, he was not held in custody long. In the spring he acquired a new car, paying $400 for a 1987 black Cavalier.
* * *
Wawa, Northern Ontario
September 5, 1997
It wasn’t long after 8 a.m. when a local trucker named Luke Amelotte came upon the tractor trailer parked alongside of Highway 17. Odd. He regularly traveled Highway 17 between Dubreuilville and Wawa and the same rig had been sitting there for almost two days. Amelotte pulled over. What was going on? It had been warm the night before. The mystery truck’s engine was still running, the windows shut, doors locked. He drove to the Wawa police station to report it. A police officer drove to the scene. The officer found a dead man inside the cabin. His name was Maurice Lewis—the pro-life activist from Vancouver who had befriended Jim Kopp, protesting with him in Italy and England.
Lewis was a big name in both pro-life and pro-choice circles, the kind of guy who inspired devotion in friends and supporters, and earned the animosity of opponents. Jim and the others loved Maurice, loved his commitment, his personality. He was born in England and his activism began there. When he moved to Vancouver he became famous among pro-lifers after being arrested for violating B.C.’s “bubble zone” law that was intended to protect a perimeter around clinics. He wanted to use his case to challenge the constitutionality of the law. The case was still pending, a trial scheduled for October—and now Lewis was dead at 52. What happened on that stretch of highway?
Jim heard the news and took it hard. Murder. Had to be. Is that the game the pro-aborts were playing? Revenge on Maurice for his activism? How could it be otherwise? Lewis did have a habit of picking up hitchhikers in that part of Ontario and friends had warned him about that. Lewis’s lawyer in B.C., Paul Formby, wondered about foul play, thought about traveling to Wawa to investigate for himself. What was the truth?
The police officer who answered the call that morning was Constable Scott Walker. Exhaust fumes enveloped the rig when he arrived at 9:11 a.m. He noted the interior curtains of the cabin were pulled. Walker smashed the passenger door window, opened the door. There was a strong smell. And a naked man, hanging. The body was decomposing. There was no one else in the rig. The coroner attended, the body was removed. The police constable returned to the office and wrote out his report:
INCIDENT FROM 05 SEP 97
CLASSIFICATION: SUDDEN DEATH
PRONOUNCED DEAD BY DR. GASPARELLI.
NEXT OF KIN: SISTER-IN-LAW, NOTIFIED ON 06 SEPT 97 18:00
CAUSE OF DEATH: ASPHYXIA.
Maurice’s brother, Richard, flew in from England. The police told him there were rumors about the death, conspiracy theories. Maurice was an active anti-abortionist, some people were suggesting that his pending court challenge motivated someone to kill him. It wasn’t true, Richard was convinced of that. He was satisfied with the job police had done. He took his brother’s ashes back to England, to be buried in the town of Malvern, beside their parents. A memorial service was held for Maurice in London. Richard was amazed at the outpouring of affection from people who had worked with his brother in the pro-life movement. The case, as far as Richard was concerned, was over.
It wasn’t over for Jim Kopp. He launched his own “investigation.” He heard rumors that the crime scene had been “cleaned up” before police arrived. The police report, for such an unusual death, was brief. Too brief. Had there been any investigation into possible murder suspects? Later, in a letter to pro-life friends, he said Maurice had been “poisoned.” He cited “the RCMP report” listing “no apparent cause” for the death. Kopp even went so far as to claim the report proved that someone had tampered with the crime scene before the arrival of police, because it made no reference to the food wrappings that would litter the cab of a p
rolife driver. He said pro-lifers like Maurice always bag their food, preferring to save money that might have been spent in diners to help support pregnant women.
The letter was wrong on several counts. The report was not an RCMP report, it was an OPP report. It contained no reference to cleaning up the scene, and the cause of death was not listed as “no apparent cause.” Jim was either being fed false information, or was lying, trying to stir up a conspiracy theory. Did he really believe that Maurice Lewis was murdered and Canadian police were engaged in a cover-up, all because Lewis was a visible pro-life protester? Or was he just playing games again, pulling strings—Romanita—telling people what he felt they needed to hear? If he truly believed Lewis was set up, then Jim Kopp had clearly learned a lesson from his friend’s death. Once you are on the radar of the FBI, RCMP, Interpol, you never turn your back. Trust no one. And do not get caught.
* * *
Just past midnight on July 5, 1997, a black 1987 Chevrolet Cavalier bearing Vermont license plate BPE 216 and registered to James Charles Kopp, crossed the Peace Bridge at Fort Erie into Canada. Back then, the Canadian side of the border was more diligent about recording plates of cars passing through than the American side. Two months later, on October 10, the same vehicle again crossed the border into Canada at 4:33 p.m.