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.
An explosion, glass breaking. The kitchen chair jerked out from underneath him as the bullet tore through the back of it. The round had missed him. He jumped to his feet, and then he felt a blow to his leg, his thigh, the impact of the second shot like a cannonball, his body falling, crashing to the floor, facedown. 7:10 a.m. The time on his watch glared at him as he lay there, the numbers burning into his memory. He looked down at his left leg. He saw a hole the size of a grapefruit, and a geyser of blood as thick as his finger pouring out. I am—going to die, he thought. Blood everywhere, coating the floor. Where did the shot come from? He didn’t know. He felt at his left leg, the wound. “I’ve been shot, bleeding heavily call 911!” he shouted. He knew there wasn’t much time. His thighbone was shattered, a major artery, the femoral artery severed. Stop the blood flow, or die, he would bleed out in minutes. “Stay upstairs!” he shouted to his wife and daughter. The shooter might come into the house to finish him off. The shooter was an abortion sniper, he had felt it instantly. He reached for his bathrobe belt, yanked it out, began tying it tight around the thigh above the gushing wound. He dragged himself across the floor to get out of the room, blood painting the tiles. His daughter called 911. “Someone’s shot at my house and my dad. Can you please come?”
“What?” asked the operator.
“I think someone’s been shot in my house!” the young woman repeated.
“Possible shot fired,” relayed a dispatcher. “Victim just yelled that he’s been shot.”
Dr. Romalis felt his consciousness fading, his tight grip on the tourniquet weakening. Outside the house, the shooter was on the move. He had been there in a laneway behind West 46th Street, a narrow, hidden roadway where the garbage was collected. The rain started falling again. The wind picked up. Two hours and 45 minutes after the shooting, 72 kilometers from Vancouver, just before 10 p.m., the tan Datsun, license plate 330JLL, crossed back into the United States at the Peace Arch Crossing.
The ambulance and police reached the Romalis house within five minutes. The doctor was placed on the stretcher, unconscious, his skin gray. The attendants were doing all they could to keep him alive. A nine-hour operation followed. Eight units of blood. The lead story on local TV news that night: gynecologist Dr. Garson Romalis in critical condition, unconscious, images of his daughter, Lisa, pacing the ER.
Local pro-choice activists and clinic workers were shocked. They had thought of the pro-lifers as noisy and pushy and obnoxious. But shooting someone? By the time the evening news rolled around, the media were already reflecting on the abortion battle:
TV Anchorwoman (wearing a Remembrance Day poppy): No one knows for sure what provoked the attack on Dr. Romalis, but tonight police throughout the Lower Mainland are stepping up protection for people who work in Vancouver’s abortion clinics. If this shooting is related, it’s the most serious act of anti-abortion violence in Canada.
(Visual: A woman, face darkened.)
Narrator: We can’t identify her. She’s afraid she and her family are in danger, too.
Woman: I’ve frequently said that in Canada we are safe. We have crazy people after us, but they don’t carry guns.
Narrator: Today she realizes she may have been wrong. (Quick cut to pro-life firebrand Gord Watson’s bearded face, a camcorder date on the screen reading August 3, 1994, 11:44 a.m. He’s shown lecturing a woman about to enter an abortion clinic in Vancouver.)
Watson: If you kill this baby, you will be murdering your own child… Do you believe there is a God? (He glowers into the lens.) Get that stupid camera out of my face. (Picture scrambles as he shoves the camera away.) You get out of my way, lady, or you’re going to get it.
(Cut to mainstream, nonviolent pro-lifer Will Johnston, a member of Physicians for Life.)
Johnston: We feel revulsion at this cowardly and murderous attack on Dr. Romalis.
(Cut back to Gord Watson.)
Watson: This country has perpetrated violence for a generation against unborn children and that violence is now coming against the people who perpetrated it.
Police searched in the laneway behind the Romalis home, piecing together what happened. It had been dark when the shooter crept silently up the alley, past one backyard, two, three, four, five—about 110 paces to the spot. He would have seen the top quarter of the house over the fence, the upstairs windows. There was a Beware of Dog sign, but no dog. The Romalis family had just returned from a week-long vacation. The dog was still in a kennel in Langley. There were two battered silver-gray metal garbage cans in the square cubby.
The sniper had taped the lids down with silver duct tape—better stability, less noise when taking up a position. He rested the rifle on top of the cans and cleared dead leaves from inside the cubby, which was elevated off the ground a few inches. It was big enough for him to kneel inside on his right knee, left elbow steady on the lids, hand cradling the forestock of the AK rifle, his right hand and trigger finger free. He pointed through a missing panel in the fence, toward the sliding glass door of the kitchen. And waited.
It was a well-planned attack. The first bullet neatly punctured the glass of the sliding door, creating a spiders web of cracks; the second shot, the one that shattered the doctor’s thigh, hit lower, splitting the glass above it in a V-shape, shards of glass flying from the impact.
The two bullets were mangled—the one from Romalis’s thigh and the one that went through his chair and lodged in a closet door in the kitchen. Difficult to get a make on their type. Bullets only hold their shape in the movies. But these could still be useful in determining what kind of firearm had been used. When a round is fired, the barrel makes identifiable markings on the bullet. Those markings tie the bullet to a particular firearm. Under a microscope the bullets from the Romalis shooting seemed to have rifling marks known in ballistics terminology as “four barrel markings with a right-handed twist”—four “lands” and “grooves” with a right-hand twist to them. The marks were characteristic of an assault rifle such as an AK-47.
Police searched up and down the laneway, looking in composters and other garbage cans for clues.
“Got one.”
The uniformed cop bent over a wooden enclosure. He reached into a composter several houses down and picked out the object with his gloved hand. It was a cartridge, a live round. And another. And another—20 unused cartridges in all, all of them AK-47 military hard-points. An important clue. Or was it? It didn’t add up. Why would the sniper have carried so much ammunition? Surely he had no intention of showering the house with bullets? And having fired and fled, why leave the cartridges? Another question: was the sniper trying to kill? A Vancouver detective named George Kristensen was assigned to the case. He heard a theory making the rounds that the sniper was trying to wound the doctor, end a medical career but not a life. Not a chance, thought the detective. It was just his opinion, but there was no way on God’s green earth you could tell where a bullet would end up after it was fired through a window like that.