Hamilton, Ontario
Monday, January 24, 2000
The Canadian arm of the international joint sniper task force held a press conference—with spokesman Keith McCaskill from Winnipeg, Hamilton police chief Ken Robertson, and Dennis McGillis from the Ontario Provincial Police. There was an announcement. The OPP had officially issued an arrest warrant for James Charles Kopp in the attempted murder of Ancaster’s Dr. Hugh Short in 1995. No charges were announced in the attacks on Dr. Jack Fainman in 1997 or Dr. Garson Romalis in 1994. McCaskill added that the investigation would continue across the country, but refused to point the finger at Kopp in connection to the Winnipeg and Vancouver attacks. “We certainly know that Mr. Kopp may be a key to the investigations in Winnipeg and Vancouver,” McCaskill said, describing Kopp as “a person the police want to interview.”
What was going on? It had been seven months since the Erie County grand jury had indicted Kopp for Dr. Slepian’s murder. Why had the OPP waited to file its charge? There was no new evidence, no break in the case. Investigators in Vancouver, Hamilton and Winnipeg had done all they could.
They had even pursued a possible link between Kopp and a fundamentalist Catholic sect called St. Pius X, which catered to Kopp’s known preference for attending mass in the traditional Latin. There were St. Pius X churches in Vancouver, Winnipeg and St. Catharines—a city 40 minutes east of Ancaster. A story making the rounds in the Winnipeg congregation had Kopp attending Our Lady of the Rosary. It was even suggested that he had helped organize the mass, but no one could confirm it.
Hamilton police had scoured the woods behind Dr. Hugh Short’s home several times looking for the weapon. They returned and searched again after the rifle was discovered behind Slepian’s house, three years after the Ancaster shooting—but found nothing. Hamilton police had found the hair fibers in the ski hat at the scene, and developed DNA from it, but could not confirm whose DNA it was. The decision to finally issue an arrest warrant for Kopp seemed more of an attempt to rekindle media interest and encourage tips. Chief Robertson would only say to gathered media that Hamilton police had reviewed the evidence with the OPP, discussed the case with Hamilton’s crown attorney, and decided to issue the arrest warrant.
The effectiveness of the task force had been called into question. In Winnipeg, McCaskill had publicly defended their work. He suggested FBI had caught a big break when Joan Dorn had called the police with Kopp’s license-plate number in Amherst—it “was not exceptional police work,” he was quoted saying in the Winnipeg Free Press. But the reality, despite the big announcement, pointed out columnist Susan Clairmont in the Hamilton Spectator, was that little was happening in the Canadian sniper hunt. At the same time the arrest warrant was issued, two of the three OPP officers who had been working with the task force were given new assignments. “We’re not going to have these guys traveling the country searching for him,” said one OPP official.
The Slepian murder had altered the nature of the Canadian investigation, the FBI had the resources—not to mention direction from the White House—to lead the effort to catch him. The Canadian police were primarily on the sidelines, the evidence they had gathered a reference for the American investigation. But for all that the FBI had learned about Kopp, for all the searches and forensic evidence and surveillance, 15 months after Bart Slepian was killed, they still had no clue where he was.
Dublin, Ireland
Spring 2000
The slender man with thick glasses and bleached hair moved among the crowd on Grafton Street. He loved Grafton, the redbrick street reserved for pedestrians. Shoppers, tourists, professionals, lawyers dressed in black robes taking a break from the nearby courthouse, schoolgirls at lunch, teenage boys on guitar singing John Lennon’s “Come Together” to earn loose change.
Jim Kopp loved to blend in and walk the street, up and down, taking in every detail, thoughts swirling in his head. He worked on the local accent, but was still far from being good enough to fool a native Dubliner. He loved languages, the dialects running within each. He considered his spoken French, for example, to have a Caribbean lilt to it. No, he reflected, he would not speak Irish until he got it down perfect. Do not abuse the language, he mused, it would offend the people. Ireland was the right place for him to be, this country where God’s law still transcended man’s law—they hadn’t legalized baby killing here.
He ducked into Bewleys, his favorite coffee shop off Grafton, climbed the wooden stairs to the second level and the James Joyce room, named for the city’s favorite son. Jim Kopp had been on the run from the FBI for 17 months. Yet he frequented a place like Bewleys, which was a popular meeting place in the city. It was hardly the kind of dark corner where a fugitive would be expected to lurk. Despite his professed rejection of material things, Jim gravitated towards the trendy. Bewleys had energy, felt so alive. Had he not come this far? Was God not with him? The FBI tentacles were everywhere, he knew, but they had not found him. As he climbed the stairs, Jim could see the quotations stenciled onto the peach-colored walls, written in Gaelic, the language the Irish tried to preserve.
Is friotal aindéthe, Is bri na nadana. (I am the true word of the hidden gods, I am a word of poetry.)
Mise an ghaois/ Mise an deal bhadoir/ Mise gaoth ar muir. (I am the wisdom of the mind/ I am the conjuring sage/ I am the wind over the sea.)
Nurse a coffee, chat with a few of the regulars who knew him as Timothy, people like Peter, who was sacristan at a nearby church. And there was Terry, who had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. Everyone on the street knew Terry.
Timothy rose, left his friends, walked to the end of Grafton. There is a war monument there—like a miniature Arc de Triomphe, it occurred to him—listing the death casualties for the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. He could read the scroll: Third Battalion: L. Murphy. Murphy. His grandmother’s maiden name. He walked under the arch into St. Stephen’s Green. A pond, fountains, lush green grass, palm trees—not an uncommon sight in Ireland—rows of tall elms. He thought of the place as a Garden of Eden. Do not linger long. Yellow reflective jackets. The Gardai—Irish police, on foot patrol.
Jim Kopp loved the city but hated his life, the anguish of running, the fear. Exhilaration one moment, despondency the next. Such extremes. Having left the Morningstar hostel, he now lived at the Ivelagh Hostel on Bride Road, in the Christ Church area of Dublin. It was an old part of town crowded with apartments, row houses, markets. He lived on the top floor of the hostel, room 191, in a cramped dorm-style room with an armoire, some shelves, a bed, and barely enough room to turn around. From his window he could see the courtyard of a vocational school, and beyond that the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. On the main floor there was a kitchenette where tenants made toast and snacks, a common room, dining area, everything painted pistachio green. Compared to Morningstar, this was high living. He lived under the name Tim Guttler, came and went as he pleased, said hello to the manager, staffers. He worked odd jobs, earned about 74 Irish pounds weekly. Kevin Byrne managed the place, a burly man with gray hair and ruddy face who guarded the privacy of his tenants like a bulldog.
Jim Kopp was by now an expert at obtaining false identities. The names of the dead were perfect. He’d visit a cemetery, find the name of someone who would have been close to his own age. On July 4, 2000, he obtained a temporary driver’s license in the name of Sean O’Briain, date of birth January 2, 1960. He put together a new résumé and submitted it to an employment agency.
Jim Kopp made a good Catholic effort to mortify temptation, but drinking did not rank as high on his list of sins to resist as others, especially in Dublin. His weakness was Bulmers cider. Pubs are Dublin’s heart, places independent of time where the Irish take their worries out for the night and dance all over them. At pubs like O’Shea’s, walls shake from people clapping and stomping to
the sounds of Celtic Storm, the smoky room filled with faces that glow from the drink, heat, and uninhibited perfection of the evening. Young men and women, elderly, couples, singles, all joining as though part of a single body, feeding off the energy of one another. The mood peaks, incongruously, when the band launches into American standards like Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” and John Denver’s “Country Roads,” hitting the chorus hard: “Take me home, country roads, to the place, I BE-LONG!”
True to form, Jim also spent time in the trendy, cobblestoned Temple Bar area, where tourists and students flock. There was a sports bar boasting 100 TV screens he visited to watch American football, see if his hometown San Francisco 49ers were playing. (Did he mention that he had a connection—apologies if he sounds like a name-dropper, he hates doing that— with Joe Montana, the Niners legend? Not a direct connection, mind you, but he knew someone who knew Montana quite well. And he had once met Mark Bavaro, too, the former New York Giants tight end—a big pro-lifer.) He hung with his Irish friends, had a few drinks, perhaps more than a few drinks, walked the streets with them late at night, feeling like a regular guy at times. But could he feel anything for long? The friends who knew him as Timothy had no idea who he really was. Did Jim even know the answer to that question? He had been on the run for 20 months.
Early one morning, the pubs closed, the streets barren. He moved alone, briskly but cautiously, down the street, pulled his jacket pockets inside out. It was a trick he had learned to deter pickpockets, show them he had nothing to interest them, which was in fact pretty much true. With all his experience, Jim liked to think there wasn’t a city in the world he couldn’t walk through in the middle of the night. But then, he had never been wanted for murder before.
His internal radar had never been more sensitive. Footsteps clicking on the wet pavement behind him. Heavy steps. Perhaps two men? Gardai? Interpol? FBI? He walked faster, turned down an alley. Don’t think. Disappear. He felt his hands on cold metal as he pulled himself into the garbage Dumpster, sinking into the rot, the stench turning his stomach. Think about the shower, the inevitable glorious shower he could take in the morning. Suffer. Feel it. Be stronger from it.
Later, feeling secure again, he sat down to write, thoughts flooding his mind. His letters were a kaleidoscope of corny jokes, doodled happy faces, references to favorite movies and books, scattered Latin phrases, homilies attributed to his mother and father, Biblical passages. One letter, two, three, four, five. He wrote them all to the same person. He couldn’t help himself. He sealed the envelope. On the back, he wrote a return address in German. On the front, he wrote the destination in his looping handwriting:
Ted Barnes
385 Chestnut Street
Apt. 2D/Brooklyn, N.Y.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
June 2000
Loretta Marra looked at her friend as he drove. He was Dennis’s old friend, really, but over the last year or so she had grown to trust him, at least enough that he was driving Loretta and one of her sons to a walk-in clinic so the boy could get medical treatment. Loretta had kept a low profile but she wanted to quietly become active in the movement again. Federal law made old-style rescues too risky, but there were other ways to throw a wrench into the baby-killing business. One was to put industrial-strength glue into the locks at clinics.
“Would you be interested in scouting some clinics?” Loretta’s friend—the informant—agreed.
“Hear from Jim lately?” he asked.
“Yeah. He’s doing all right, but he said he needs money.” “We should get him some,” the friend replied. “How would you do that?”
“It has to go through me. He’ll certainly take it but he said he’ll only take it if I approve.”
Later they talked about morality and philosophy, Loretta’s favorite topics. New York bishop Austin Vaughan had recently died. He was a hero in the pro-life movement, had been arrested many times. He had once warned pro-choice New York governor Mario Cuomo that he was risking the fires of hell for his support of the killing of unborn children. When was violence justified in the war to save babies? The sniper who had killed Dr. Barnett Slepian, intentionally or not, had taken a definite position on the moral spectrum. “I think I’d be capable of killing, for God and a higher good,” Loretta told her friend. Surely only a moral coward would rule out violence in all circumstances.
Special Agent Michael Osborn met with the informant. What did he have? Osborn listened as CS1 talked about what Loretta had said. Interesting, but not what Osborn was after. “Anything on Kopp’s location?” he asked. “No. Nothing.”
Loretta had been careful whenever Kopp’s name came up. So far, all the FBI had court permission to do was listen to what CS1 relayed to them. They needed more surveillance, they needed a fly on the wall. In October, Osborn filed court applications to conduct audio surveillance on a car. CS1 had access to several vehicles. They’d put the bug in a car, have him take Loretta for a drive, get her talking. Osborn and Buffalo special agent Joel Mercer went before a judge to argue their case. They said the bugs were necessary for two reasons: one, to establish that Marra and Malvasi were themselves breaking the law by harboring a fugitive and obstructing justice; and two, the prime reason, to locate the fugitive himself, James C. Kopp. “There is probable cause,” argued Mercer, that the couple will “further the conspiracy to harbor and conceal Kopp… and would talk in connection to facilitate, accomplish, and continue his status as a fugitive from justice and to continue to evade apprehension and arrest.” On November 1, U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit judge Ellsworth A. van Graafeiland signed an order authorizing the FBI to bug a gold Chevy Malibu for 30 days “for the purpose of obtaining evidence concerning the location of a fugitive as defined in Section 2516(1) pursuant to Section 2561(1)(n).”
CS1 phoned Loretta. They chatted. She said she wanted to visit a friend in Oneonta, New York. Turned out she was in luck—her friend had use of a Malibu. He picked up Loretta and Dennis. He turned the conversation to a familiar topic. “So when do want to scout clinics?” he asked Loretta. “Anytime you want,” she replied.
Osborn listened on the bug as talk turned to details about what type of clothing the friend should wear and which night of the week was best to glue locks at clinics. They moved to the bigger picture of the pro-life movement, where it was heading, use of force, and Slepian’s death.
“I’m still not sure myself—you think the shooter was trying to kill him?” CS1 asked.
“You’re always out there to maim,” said Loretta.
“What’s Jim’s opinion on that?”
“I know he feels bad for Slepian’s children. But he knows Slepian was not an innocent person, either. He was, morally, a guilty person.”
The talk turned to Malvasi’s surrender to police after blowing up an abortion clinic back in 1986, when Cardinal John O’Connor had urged him to turn himself in.
“I disagree with it,” Loretta said.
“With what?”
“Surrendering.”
“Why?”
“In my opinion Dennis had an obligation not to obey him. But he didn’t know that.”
“Would you have given yourself up?”
“No, I don’t care if the Pope tells me to. He has no authority to tell me, to tell me to turn myself in for doing something morally praiseworthy. O’Connor’s request was a sinful command.” Later they discussed whether the FBI was on to them. “If I leave the security of that address, you know,” said Marra, “my whole life will fall apart again. I can’t risk it.” Loretta knew the government had come close. How did she know? asked CS1. Because they had questioned her brother Nick. But the FBI did not know where they lived. If they did, she knew, they would be breaking down her door by now.
Dublin, Ireland
November 2000
On November 26, Jim Kopp was issued a new passport, number T895122, in the name of John O’Brien, date of birth January 2, 1960, parents Charles and Bridget O’Brien, from County Cork. On December 14, he applied for a provisional driver’s license under the name Daniel Joseph O’Sullivan, and took an eye test. He was getting some work in construction, paid through the Irish Nationwide Building Society, checks made out to Sean O’Briain. In January, he got a part-time job at Dublin’s Hume Street Cancer Center using the name Tim Guttler. He did clerical work, a quiet, unassuming man, avoided eye contact with anyone, walked with a limp.The hospital was a few blocks from his beloved Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green.
On Sundays Jim Kopp attended St. John’s church in a seaside port town called Dun Loughanie, a short train ride south of the city along Dublin Bay. St. John’s had been an Anglican church before its conversion to the St. Pius X denomination. The Society of St. Pius X is a breakaway sect of the Roman Catholic Church, rooted in disaffection over liberal church reforms. Canadian police hadn’t been too far off the mark to follow leads linking Jim Kopp to the group. St. Pius X churches around the world still held their mass in Latin. Its fundamentalist Catholicism appealed not only to Kopp’s faith, but also to his fascination with intrigue, power, connections. One of his favorite books was A Windswept House, by Malachi Martin, a novelist and Vatican insider. It is a dark tale about a global conspiracy of satanists and freemasons that threatens to take control of the church—and is opposed only by the few Catholic traditionalists who cling to the old ways. It was fiction, but Martin claimed that much of it was true.
A typical winter daytime service. About 50 people. The smell of candle smoke, air so frigid inside the old building some parishioners wear coats. Before the service begins, total silence. A young woman kneeling in prayer, dressed in black, head covered according to the rules, a veil over her face. A rumpled man named Pat sitting in one of the back rows, holding his personal Bible, which is bloated, as if it had fallen into a bathtub long ago, pages worn and yellowed and patched with tape.
The priest enters, keeps his back to the congregation, says no words of greeting. To the uninitiated, the Latin mass is a hard, cold ceremony. The priest kneels at the altar and begins.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Introibo ad altarre Dei. (In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. I will go up to the altar of God.) Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam. (To God, who gives joy to my youth.) Judica me, Dues, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me. (Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from an ungodly nation: save me from an unjust and deceitful enemy.)
Later, he gives a brief sermon. ‘‘It is time to wake up from our sleeping. We have the power to wake up from our lives, to overcome materialism, to witness the supernatural life. God is a god of vengeance. He will strike the unjust. Some would say, there is no God, no hell. Oh, but wait until the day of judgment.’’
At the end of the service, Jim Kopp—Timothy—liked to kneel and pray before one of the small altars along the side wall. Over time he talked about his life with a couple of parishioners. Said he planned to leave Ireland soon. Family emergency. Sad story. Timmy had to get to Germany to see his mother. She was dying.