Crestwood Village Retirement Community
Whiting, N.J.
He was a pretty high-strung guy, Alex. He shared an apartment with easygoing Jim Gannon. Alex, who was not a pro-life activist, worked as a security guard. Anyone stepped onto Gannon’s property, Alex heard alarms go off in his head. And so, that day when he was at the kitchen table and saw the red and blue lights flashing through the window, he leapt to his feet. What’s going on? A knock. Jim Gannon, sweet old man, cool as a cucumber, stayed at his seat. Alex, his heart pumping, was at the door. He opened it. And saw the barrel pointing at the middle of his chest. The Glock was out, the FBI agent on the porch staring into Alex’s eyes. Uniformed police backed up the FBI outside, guns drawn.
“Sit down.” The agent motioned to a chair. Alex obeyed. “Are you James C. Kopp?”
“No,” Alex said.
Five agents entered the house, Gannon stood to meet them. “Come on in!” he said, gentle blue eyes twinkling. Alex was in shock, but Gannon was not frightened. Not much rattled him. Heck, he came from a large family, six boys, six girls, he was used to commotion; Mom used to invite strangers in off the street for tea all the time. That’s how worried James Gannon was about the FBI showing up at his door.
He was told the FBI was investigating the shooting of a doctor in Amherst. Special Agent Daniel McKenna asked Gannon if he knew James Charles Kopp. Sure, sure, Gannon knew Jim. Stayed there sometimes. Gannon knew there was no way Jim could be involved, although it seemed a lot of folks were entertaining a different point of view. Lordy Pete, he thought. Lordy Pete! They were acting like Jim was a terrorist or something.
The FBI interview lasted more than two hours. Gannon told agents that he forwarded Kopp’s nonbanking mail to one of two addresses: Ark Sales, P.O. Box 61, Essex Junction, Vermont 05452, or Nazareth Farms, 1073 Buck Hollow Road, Fairfax, Vermont 05454, Attn: Jen—Jen, as in Jennifer Rock.
“Can I take Mr. Kopp’s items?” asked Agent McKenna.
“Go right ahead.” Agents gave him receipts for the items. They asked for permission to search the attic.
“Go right ahead,” Gannon said. He had nothing to hide, and neither, he was certain, did Jim Kopp.
Four agents went upstairs and returned with a blue knapsack containing a toothbrush, envelopes addressed to Kopp c/o a post office box under the name “Before Dawn.” The agents questioned Gannon again. What was “Before Dawn?” Jim produced the newsletter, Gannon explained, which was aimed at seeking donations for the Pro-life cause. The post office box was Gannon’s mailing address, he collected donations and deposited them in an account at Sovereign Bank, gave copies of bank statements to a woman named Elizabeth Lewis, who lived in the same retirement community.
Betty had a powder-white, crinkled face, silver hair and kind eyes. She had been arrested with Kopp at a protest in Atlanta back in 1988. She was shocked to see all the police. Oh dear. The agents came into her house and looked up in her attic. “Jim was very pleasant, he just came and went,” she said. “A drifter, really. Didn’t talk much. He spent a lot of time on the porch, mostly reading, working on the computer. And walking, a great walker. He would be up at six, before dawn, and go walking.”
When Betty heard that Jim Kopp was a suspect in the shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian, she didn’t believe it. Jim had once told her that he was as concerned for the spiritual welfare of the abortionists as he was for the babies. She believed him. Such a soft-spoken, nice man. Jim slept in the corner room and spent most of his time on the couch, on the computer, job hunting.
The FBI did not make James Charles Kopp’s name public immediately. They intended to keep Kopp in the dark, wherever he was, while they gathered information, found more friends of his who wouldn’t see them coming. On Sunday, October 26, three days after Bart’s murder, the Bureau collected 13 videotapes of protests outside the downtown Buffalo clinic where Dr. Slepian worked.
On November 4, Amherst police continued their search in the woods behind the home. An officer found trace bits of hair and fibers on the bark of the tree the sniper had leaned against. The hair might produce a DNA profile—but that meant nothing without a match to compare it with. There was no DNA profile for James Kopp on file. But the prospect was there, at least, for Amherst police to compare their DNA sample with the one Hamilton police had retrieved three years earlier from the ski mask discovered in Dr. Hugh Short’s driveway. If the two samples matched, they could make the case that the sniper was the same person in both attacks—even though the owner of the DNA profiles would still be unknown.
That same day, the FBI went public. FBI special agent Bernie Tolbert stood at the lectern at the press conference and announced there was a federal material witness warrant for apprehending James Charles Kopp. Joel Mercer, a young red-haired FBI agent, was doing the legwork, co-ordinating searches and other aspects of the investigation. He had only been with the bureau for a year; this case was a big step up. His superiors felt he could handle it. The supervisor of the investigation, and the more visible presence, was Tolbert, 55 years old, charismatic.
Bernie Tolbert had been on the job the morning after the shooting, looking over the crime scene. He lived only minutes away from the Slepians. The shooting got to him. He stood in the Slepians’ den, saw the photos of Bart, Lynne and the boys. He had a couple of young boys himself. Bart’s sons had just lost their father. So tragic. He took Lynne aside. “We’ll find whoever did this, I promise you that, Lynne,” he vowed. “Hey, this is my neighborhood, my town. We will find him.”
“I’d just like 15 minutes alone with him,” Lynne said.
Tolbert had been a star athlete in high school and university. He held high jump and triple jump records but then knee injuries slowed him down. He became a social worker. Then one day he met an aggressive recruiter from the FBI. There weren’t a lot of black men in the bureau back in the mid-seventies. Most blacks only came in contact with the FBI when agents arrived to arrest someone in the neighborhood. Bernie was dubious, but he applied.
He was rejected. The examiner said the knee injuries disqualified the 30-year-old. He predicted Bernie would be in a wheelchair at 50.
That did it. Now Bernie wanted in. He wrote a letter to the top, to the director: “I will see any doctor, any time, at my own expense. I will pit myself against any agent.” The bureau gave him another chance. This time, he made it. In the 22 years since, Tolbert had worked out of offices in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Now he was posted back in Buffalo and standing before the TV cameras, the national media, backed by a huge Justice Department logo. He was acutely aware that the case was attracting enormous attention. It was his biggest show ever. He held up a photo of Kopp.
“This is a picture of the individual we are looking for,” he said. “We have no idea where he is. We’re looking everywhere for him. “He appears to be committed to the anti-abortion movement. The problem is, I don’t think you can kill someone to show your commitment.”
The photo Tolbert held became the public, iconic, “most wanted” image of James Charles Kopp. The ill-trimmed goatee, the short unkempt hair, the glower he directed at the camera. He looked like a killer. Some of Jim Kopp’s supporters were so struck by how different he looked, they believed the photo was a fake. But it was a mug shot from his most recent arrest, in New Jersey, on January 23, 1997. The photo did, in fact, look far different from the way Kopp appeared in person. It was as though he had affected the look on purpose, scowling, changing his look, to distort his constantly shifting identity.
On one level, Bernie Tolbert could try to think of the Slepian murder as just another case. A federal law had been broken, so the FBI was automatically involved. But he also knew there was special interest in this show that went as high as the White House. Tolbert soon found himself in conference calls with Washington, talking directly to Attorney General Janet Reno—who herself frequently talked to President Clinton about the case and about anti-abortion violence in general.
Shortly after Tolbert’s announcement that James Kopp was wanted as a material witness, a $500,000 reward was offered by the Justice Department for information. The police and FBI were careful not to publicly call Kopp a suspect. They did, however, tell reporters they believed he might hold the key to the investigation.
Tolbert cursed the zeal with which reporters chased the story. Reporters didn’t have to play by the same rules as agents, could talk to anyone they pleased without regard for the legalities or nuances of criminal investigation. There were times FBI agents showed up at the home of someone connected to Kopp to find journalists already there. Reporters were all over the place in Vermont. Agents were losing the element of surprise and the media attention was helping Kopp.
On the other hand, the FBI counted on media coverage to spread images of Kopp’s face to encourage public tips. One of those tips came from Daniel Lenard, a Buffalo high school teacher. He told police he had seen a jogger on October 18, five days before the murder, hunched over and running slowly along a road near Dr. Slepian’s house. Saw him for maybe 10, 15 seconds. He had glasses and a reddish goatee, wore a black hooded sweatshirt and black biker shorts. Ruddy complexion. Pronounced jawline. Looked stressed. And he held his hands up as though he were training for a boxing match, strange compared to other joggers you’d see around there, hardly the picture of health or fitness. Lenard later met with a detective who placed a page of head shots in front of him. There were photos of six men who had brownish-red beards or goatees. The photos were numbered 1 to 6.
“Do you recognize any of them?” the detective asked.
“Yes. Number four. That’s him. No question that’s the jogger, and the same guy I saw on TV. ”
It was a photo of James Charles Kopp. Later, FBI special agent Joel Mercer visited the home of another witness who claimed to have seen the mysterious jogger. “His beard was about the color of your hair,” the witness told the redheaded Mercer. He showed the witness the same photo array that had been placed before Lenard. The witness paused.
“There—number four,” he said. Kopp. Later, a third witness signed his initials beside photo number four as well.
The search in the woods behind the Slepians’ house continued. On November 5, a police officer noticed a sliver of plastic sticking from the ground. It was a buried garbage bag. Contents they found inside included a green baseball cap with the inscriptions “New York” and “NY,” a silver men’s wristwatch, an empty rifle ammunition box, binoculars, two green earplugs, black fanny pack, flashlight, protective gun muffler earmuffs and two plastic shopping bags. Amherst police sent the evidence to the FBI’s Washington lab. One latent fingerprint was eventually lifted from the evidence—but the print did not match prints on file from Kopp’s criminal records. The bag was a good find, suggesting the level of planning used by the sniper. But the key piece was still missing—the weapon.
Members of the joint U.S.–Canadian police task force on the five sniper attacks continued to share information and discuss strategy. A joint management meeting was held in Hamilton. Senior Hamilton police officials discussed the investigation with task force members from the FBI, RCMP, and Winnipeg and Vancouver police forces. Amherst police chief John Askey burst into the meeting, angry. The chief had learned there had been an RCMP officer in Amherst, conducting surveillance, in the days before the murder of Bart Slepian. How could the RCMP have not told him about the suspect they were tailing? “You’re following the guy, and you let him shoot one of my citizens!” he charged.
RCMP officials at the meeting said there had in fact been an agent in the Buffalo area, but it was for surveillance concerning a matter unrelated to the doctor shootings. And no one knew Kopp was a suspect prior to the shooting, so how could they be following him at the time? One man dead, three seriously injured, another barely escaping injury, and the sniper still at large. Pressure was mounting on all of the law enforcement agencies.
Phone ringing, before dawn, Wednesday morning, November 4. Jennifer Rock picks up.
“Jen. I’m in trouble. Can you call me back?”
Jennifer Rock had an office job with IBM in Vermont. She had known Jim Kopp for several years, met him through protests several years before when she was in her early twenties, he had once stayed at her parents’ home. Rock’s Vermont address had been one of several to which Kopp had his mail sent, she had deposited money in banks for him. She phoned him back at 6:30 a.m.
“Close the account, bring the money and meet me,” Jim told her.
The next day, Rock left home. She told her parents she’d be in New York for a while. Looking for some work, visiting friends. She arrived at a mall in White Plains, New York. She had the money and a false West Virginia driver’s license she had made at Jim’s request. She tried to look inconspicuous, browse for shoes. She stopped at the newsstand and saw the headline: “James Charles Kopp Wanted by the FBI as a Material Witness.” She saw the murky photo of Jim’s grimacing face. Where did they get that photo? Didn’t look like him at all. The FBI had obviously pointed the finger at him. But he could never have shot someone. She spotted her friend.
“Jim, your face is everywhere. You have to get out of here.”
They got in her car and headed for Newark, New Jersey. (Jim had changed plates again on his car, but he knew he could no longer use the wanted black Cavalier anywhere in the country.) He should get on a plane and leave the country, now, he said, until his name could be cleared. No, argued Jennifer. Had he seen the papers, the news on TV? His face was everywhere. Not to Newark airport. They should drive, in her car, south.
The FBI hit the places where Kopp had been, retracing his steps, interviewing people he had stayed with, even questioning a mailman who confirmed he had delivered mail to a “Jack Crotty,” one of Kopp’s aliases. They searched a Laurel Avenue residence in Newark, Delaware, and seized computer disks containing eight Texas driver’s licenses under various names. They searched room 148 at the Travel Inn, 8920 Gulf Freeway, Houston, Texas, and seized a telephone book. On Thursday, November 6, agents visited TV station WOWK in Huntington, West Virginia. Kopp had once been arrested at a protest outside a clinic in nearby Charleston. The station provided video from coverage of the scene. He was on the tape. For the FBI, finding contacts of Kopp’s was not the problem. He had fleeting pro-life acquaintances all over the country, people like Gannon, Betty, Anthony Kenny. But these were not the type of contacts who held the key to catching him, they knew nothing of his movements. It seemed as if he had no intimate friends, no trusted allies he would turn to at a time like this. Even his sister didn’t know much about him. It was as if James Kopp had planned it that way: “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.” ***
From his office in Quantico, Virginia, FBI profiler James Fitzgerald advised agents in the field on what kinds of questions to ask James Kopp’s friends and family, about his background, personal history. Ask the right questions, in the right order. Did he change his appearance much over the years? What about his relationships?
Fitzgerald studied the information coming in. The subject knew many people, had traveled the country, and the world, extensively. His emerging analysis suggested James Charles Kopp was a conflicted individual. He was well educated, holding a master’s degree, but had held mostly menial jobs. He was deeply religious—yet apparently a killer. Kopp clearly belonged to an extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement. But even within that wing he was a bit of a loner, marched to his own drummer, did his own thing. Nonviolent, his friends said, but Fitzgerald sensed an escalation in Kopp’s thinking about how he should combat abortion. The profiler believed that Kopp had been the one who pulled the trigger in all three of the Canadian attacks, in addition to the Rochester shooting, and the Slepian murder.
Question: Would Kopp try again?
Surely not, thought Fitzgerald, now that he was a wanted man, now that his cover was blown. He would try to disappear. It would be too risky to try again in the foreseeable future. Kopp fitted the sniper mentality: calculating, careful, nonconfrontational. He would not attack again, not unless he was motivated to simply taunt the FBI. And that was highly unlikely. He was too smart for that, his mission too strictly defined.
Among the first people agents interviewed was Jim’s stepmother, Lynn Kopp, in Texas. She talked about the family: Chuck Kopp, ex-Marine, disciplinarian; Nancy Kopp, devout mother; the twin brother; three sisters, two of whom had died young. Jim’s past relationships? There was Jenny, the girlfriend at UC Santa Cruz. At least, that’s what Lynn had heard. She had never met Jenny, had never seen Jim with any girl, actually. From what she heard, the relationship with Jenny didn’t last long, and Jim went berserk when he learned she’d had an abortion.
Fitzgerald examined the interview transcripts. Interesting. Kopp had been extremely close to his mother. And over the years, on the road, protesting, he had had strong associations with women. Yet he never married, and there was no evidence of a long-term relationship with a female. Most of the relationships, if not all, appeared to have been platonic. Women were the key to James Kopp’s future, Fitzgerald was convinced that if he were to communicate with anyone while on the run, either for shelter or to resume his sniper campaign, it would definitely be a woman, somewhere.
There was a list of activists who had joined Kopp at protests in Vermont. An FBI agent had titled one document, “Vermont Rescuers—February 21, 1990 to May 9, 1990,” and included addresses. There were several women on the list. Agents had already located a few of them. But there was one who had not yet been found. Her name was Loretta Marra. Agents had discovered, among Kopp’s possessions in James Gannon’s attic, a magazine with abortion clinic bomber Dennis Malvasi’s mailing address on it. Malvasi was known by the authorities to be married to Loretta. She had been photographed under surveillance at Malvasi’s Brooklyn apartment back in October 1997. But she had since fallen off the radar. Perhaps Kopp would try to contact her.