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

by Wells, Jon

  ***

  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.

  Two and a half weeks after the second crossing, on October 28, in Perinton, N.Y., near Rochester, an obstetrician named Dr. David Gandell was in the glass-enclosed pool area of his home, toweling off his young son after a swim. At 8:35 p.m., a bullet shattered the glass. Then a second shot. Both narrowly missed the doctor and his child. The shots were fired from a wooded area behind the house. The shooter got away. The rounds were from a military assault rifle.

  That same night, in Brooklyn, New York, FBI surveillance agents took photos of a dark-haired woman walking from a house. It was Loretta Marra, leaving a house belonging to a man listed in the phone book as John Howard at 2468 Lynden Avenue. His real name was Dennis Malvasi. Just after midnight, meanwhile, less than four hours after the shooting at Dr. Gandell’s home, a car crossed the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls into Canada. The car was a black Chevy Cavalier, Vermont plate BPE 216.

  ***

  Winnipeg, Manitoba November 1997 Manitoba’s capital city had been in the eye of Canada’s abortion battles ever since pro-choice standard-bearer Henry Morgentaler had opened a clinic in the city in 1983, even before he was established in Toronto, even as former Manitoba provincial cabinet minister “Holy” Joe Borowski vowed that Morgentaler’s “butcher shop” would not be permitted to open. Winnipeg’s police raided the clinic several times. And, in 1997, the city still had an aggressive pro-life movement. There was a document making the rounds that listed the names of all physicians in the city known to provide abortion services.

  On November 4, 1997, police in Hamilton, Ontario faxed a memo across Canada. It advised all police services to issue warnings to doctors who perform abortions that they might be in danger at this time of year, around Remembrance Day—the time when doctors in Vancouver and Hamilton had been shot. The memo said doctors should be advised to take precautions in their homes, alter their routines, avoid standing in front of well-lit windows or doors at night, keep blinds drawn. In Winnipeg the warning arrived on the fax machine of the Criminal Intelligence Service of Manitoba (a provincial agency comprising city police officers) and the RCMP. The warning was filed and never circulated to the Mounties or city police.

  On the night of November 11, Remembrance Day, a car drove along snow-packed streets past homes in the Winnipeg suburb of St. Vital, stopped at a residential crescent where two streets named Salme and Lotus met. The shooter entered the woods bordering a park that ran behind homes along Victoria Crescent. He moved, cloaked in darkness, the bare thin branches nearly invisible in the blackness. It was peaceful in the woods in the late evening, the only sound the distant ambient buzz of the city. The Red River ran alongside the woods. The river floods in springtime, so residential areas in the floodplain use dikes for protection. That included Victoria Crescent, where an obstetrician lived. A mound of earth, a dike about eight meters high, ran right behind the house, some fifteen meters from his door.

  The shooter walked close beside the river. There were a few clouds, but the black water shimmered in the reflected light of the moon and of the homes on the far side of the river. The shooter was now roughly parallel with the doctor’s property. He stopped, scaled the riverbank, negotiating the slippery, steep hill through the trees to the chain-link fence. Up and over. And there was the dike. He climbed it, then walked along the ridge. The house was an unusual design, raised up on stilts, a carport underneath. The entire back wall of the house was glass. Winnipeg is frigid in November, on a crisp night you can feel the harsh air rip through your nostrils, your breath floating like smoke in the air. It was 8:45 p.m. Dr. Jack Fainman walked into his living room.

  He had studied medicine at the University of Manitoba, further training in obstetrics and gynecology in Chicago, then moved to Emo, a town of a couple thousand in northwestern Ontario, where he set up practice. He and his wife, Fagie, eventually moved to Winnipeg. There was something of the legend about tall, handsome Jack Fainman. The story went that, when he worked as a country doctor in Emo, more than once he walked across the frozen lake in the dark, the wind whipping his face, just to get to a patient. One day, before the advent of Canada’s universal health care system, a pregnant woman refused to go to hospital because she couldn’t afford it. So broad-shouldered Jack Fainman went to her home, picked her off the ground and literally carried her to the hospital.

  He also provided abortion services. In 1997 he was 66 years old and still working. He taught medicine at St. Boniface General Hospital. He was one of about a dozen doctors in the city who were referred patients for abortions. But Fainman didn’t handle as many referrals as some of the others, nor did he tend to do later-term abortions like some. A quiet, unassuming man, he put more emphasis, people said, on prenatal care, maybe booked one or two abortions a week.

  Just before 9 p.m., he sat in the living room on the other side of the yawning glass wall. To someone outside, just 15 meters away, the light of the room cast Jack Fainman in perfect silhouette.

  The explosion, a window shatters, Jack Fainman collapses to the ground, a gusher of blood bursting from his right shoulder. His wife rushes into the room, picks up the phone, calls 911. Fainman himself takes the phone. There is urgency in his voice, but also a cool, clinical tone.

  “Hello—” he says.

  “Hello,” replies the dispatcher.

  “This is Dr. Fainman. I’m hemorrhaging here. Get an ambulance quickly.”

  It took nine minutes for police to arrive at the front of the Fainman house. The sniper was gone. Perhaps he drove up Salme Crescent, onto Dunkirk, past the police community kiosk in the strip mall, past the neon glow from the sign of the Dakota Motel, towards the Bishop Grandin expressway. Dr. Fainman, meanwhile, was stable in hospital, as staff debated on whether to remove the bullet embedded deep in his shoulder. Police dogs, forensic unit, detectives combed the scene. The shooter left footprints in the snow, tire tracks. Plaster casts were taken of the tracks. Ron Oliver, a city policeman, took photos of two tire impressions consistent with a General Motors car. Goodyear tire, Concorde caliber, size 195 x 75 x 14, a 5.5-inch-wide tire. Midsize GM car, consistent with model from years 1981 to 1990.

  It takes an hour and half to reach the North Dakota border from Winnipeg. At night the four-lane is lonely and dark, vast stretches of farmland on either side blend into blackness, it feels as though you are in a tunnel, on a drive to nowhere. And then lights, a sign declaring you are about to cross the 49th parallel. Hard on the border is Pembina, North Dakota, population just over 600, the first opportunity for food off Route 59 is a greasy spoon called The Depot Cafe that serves lead-in-your belly cheeseburger soup. At 1:10 a.m. a car license plate was recorded crossing the border: Vermont BPE 216.

  *** Late in 1997 the Hamilton police investigation into the maiming of Dr. Hugh Short was still open, but little was happening. A meeting was called at central station on King William Street on November 18, 1997. A detective named Aivars Jekabsons was summoned to see Acting Superintendent Dave Bowen, Steve Hrab (the senior man in the Major Crime Unit) and Detective Peter Abi-Rashed, who was one of the original detectives on the Short file. Jekabsons, who had a relaxed, irreverent air to him, entered the room, looking like an unemployed surfer. His hair hung long, past his shoulders, tied in a ponytail. Ragged clothes, beard. It was part of the uniform, working undercover on the streets. Jekabsons was a 44-year-old vice and drugs detective with 21 years on the force. His Latvian parents had wanted him to pursue accounting. Aivars had wanted to pursue criminals.

  As an investigator he had come to the conclusion that everything is just a matter of time. There is always a tr
ail. Just stay with it, good things will happen. But if ever his patience would be tried, it would be in the Hugh Short case.

  Two years after the shooting, there were no suspects, and senior officers at the meeting asked Jekabsons if he would take charge of revisiting the cold case. He accepted. Soon after that, Abi-Rashed handed over boxes of evidence and background and investigator notes to the new man. “Here you go,” Abi-Rashed said. “Start reading.” The next step was introducing Jekabsons to Hugh and Katherine Short. Abi-Rashed and Jekabsons visited the house on Sulphur Springs.

  “Detective Jekabsons will now be completely dedicated to the case,” Abi-Rashed told the Shorts. “The investigation is going full bore.”

  Hugh Short looked over the ragged Jekabsons. “So I’m being assigned a guy who looks like this?”

  Jekabsons laughed. He said he planned to get a haircut and shave. They got along just fine after that. The detective came to like the Shorts. There were good people who deserved answers.

  Back at the office he started from scratch, digging through documents, forensics. Jekabsons thought the boys who first handled the case did a solid job. But sometimes a fresh set of eyes can spot something new. At least he hoped so. He visited the Shorts’ backyard one night, stood inside the quiet shed where the sniper had waited, then outside, staring at the second-floor window, putting himself inside the shooter’s skin, assuming the firing position, imagining the shot, checking the terrain around him. Two shots in quick succession. Where do you go? Where is the escape route? You probably don’t park your car on the street. Sulphur Springs Road is narrow, in an isolated area, not many homes. A neighbor would notice a strange car parked on the street. There was probably a second person who picked him up. That needs to be coordinated. Not with a cell phone. Back in ’95, you couldn’t count on a cell in a remote area like this. You’d need a walkie-talkie, or to establish a pre-set pick-up time.

  The anti-abortion motive dictated that the investigation had to stretch far and wide. Jekabsons tried to sell his superiors on the international angle. He had to take the show well beyond Hamilton. They said he was biting off too much. Let’s not get too carried away here. But Aivars Jekabsons was ahead of the game. After the sniper attack on Dr. Jack Fainman, Winnipeg police chief Dave Cassels was talking privately about forming a national task force to investigate the link between the three Canadian shootings, and also the attempted shooting in Rochester, New York. On Saturday, November 29, Jekabsons flew to Winnipeg to meet with officers from Winnipeg, Vancouver, the RCMP, and the New York State Police. The task force was an unusual step. Canadian and American police did not typically combine resources. But participants in this effort would share information, hold weekly conference calls, meet in person regularly, cast the widest possible net. Detectives in each city would make up the bulk of the force and would be overseen by a joint management committee of senior officers.

  In Hamilton, Detective Larry Penfold was seconded out of the forensics office to team up with Jekabsons. Penfold got the impression that his new assignment might last a couple of weeks. It turned into two years. On January 26, 1998, the task force met in Hamilton for three days, keeping the meeting a secret from the media. An officer named Jim Van Allen attended. He was a behavioral analyst with the Ontario Provincial Police, working out of Orillia. He was, in the vernacular, a criminal profiler. Van Allen was just the second behavioral profiler the OPP had ever trained, but he had been a police officer for 20 years. He was presented with the evidence to date and asked to compose a profile of the sniper—or snipers—still at large. Van Allen reviewed what had been gathered at the crime scenes. He asked the task force for more information, but there was little more to tell him. From the relatively thin evidence available, Van Allen felt that the shooter was probably Canadian, given his choice of targets, and that if he didn’t strike in Quebec soon, was probably unilingual. The profiler also came to believe that, since the sniper clearly had a political goal in mind, he was not shooting to kill. He was shooting to wound.

  “It’s an old military tactic,” Van Allen said. “If you leave the victim wounded and incapable of carrying out his skill as a physician, he is a walking, living reminder to other doctors that this can happen to them.”

  Van Allen also believed that another shooting was inevitable.

  *** Jekabsons and Penfold reviewed notes, interviewed and reinterviewed those who had called in tips two years earlier. And there was a new lead. One month earlier, on December 10, a package of anonymous anti-abortion hate mail had been delivered to the Hamilton Spectator daily newspaper. It contained six pages of hand-written invective on photocopied newspaper articles and pictures. The package had arrived one month after the shooting of Jack Fainman. The Spectator notified police about the package.

  Three weeks later, on December 31, a second hate letter arrived at the Spectator. It, too, was reported to police. Four days later, a letter containing more anti-abortion invective was hand-delivered to Vancouver General Hospital.

  Was there any connection between the letters and the shooting of abortion doctors? Was it a break in the case, or did the letters throw more heat than light? Jekabsons, for one, felt they were red herrings.

  At 6:50 a.m.on December 31, the same day the second hate letter arrived at the Spectator, a 55-year-old former taxi driver named Ron Wylie banged on the superintendent’s door at his Hamilton apartment building. He wanted the storage locker opened, to get a suitcase.

  “I’m going to Vancouver. Need to pack.” Ron Wylie had been arrested several times at anti-abortion protests in the United States in 1992: at Amherst, New York, during the Spring of Life in April, Milwaukee in May, Baton Rouge in July. He had taken part in the July 7, 1998, street protest in Hamilton staged by Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the PreBorn. Wylie had clearly moved in hardcore anti-abortion circles. When he first heard about the sniper shootings, his instinct was to feel sympathy for the notion of justifiable homicide, and the sniper.

  But Wylie claimed that he had nothing to do with the attacks, and that he didn’t know who the sniper was. Jekabsons believed him; he was just out for attention. Hamilton police eventually charged him with five counts of threatening death and he was sentenced to 18 months in jail and three years’ probation. They also took a blood sample from his fingertip. His DNA profile was compared to that retrieved from the DNA sample found on the ski mask in Hugh Short’s driveway four years earlier. The two samples did not match.

  Through the early weeks of 1998, Jekabsons and Penfold compiled a list of every criminal incident on record that had an antiabortion angle. The list included everything from arson at a clinic, to a phone call to an obstetrician in which baby lullaby music was played in the background. Ultimately, they interviewed hundreds of people, most of them Canadians, some of them Americans.

  One of the unanswered mysteries continued to be “Why Hugh Short?” He was not a high-profile physician before the shooting. His name had never appeared in the media. Dr. Short was no crusader. How did his name get out? Jekabsons asked Short, “Have you ever attended a medical conference on abortion?” Answer: No. Was it possible that his name was spread through the prolife grapevine? They interviewed the few pro-life protesters who regularly marched out in front of Henderson Hospital, where Short had worked. Short was a senior physician, 62 years old, had worked enough years that his name was known in the medical community, if nowhere else. Obviously there were people who knew that he performed abortions. And anti-abortion activists travel together, talk, go to rallies. “Is it possible,” Jekabsons asked one of the Henderson Hospital protesters, “that you inadvertently gave Short’s name to someone, who passed it on until it was heard by the sniper?”

  One who knew of Hugh Short was Dr. Carmelo Scime. He was a family physician and local coroner who regularly marched outside Henderson. Scime protested nearly every Friday on Concession Street beginning in 1986, holding high his “Justice for the Unborn” sign. He knew Short was an obstetrician and gynecologist. But
then he knew most of the doctors in Hamilton. How did Scime feel when he heard that Hugh Short had been shot? “I felt sorry for the doctor,” he said. “And I thought the culprit should be caught. The doctor’s integrity had been attacked—just like the integrity of the unborn.”

  Another protester outside Henderson Hospital was Randy Dyer, who sometimes accompanied Scime. Detectives had interviewed Dyer within two weeks of the shooting in 1995. Jekabsons and Penfold listened to the CD that Dyer had recorded, in which he referred to his girlfriend having an abortion, and spoke to him again. But it was another dead end.

  Aivars Jekabsons visited the shooting scenes in Rochester, Vancouver, Winnipeg. Each attack targeted a home in a suburb, maximizing the time it would take for city police to respond. As he stood in each sniper position, the similarities were eerie. They were all well planned, the ground staked out. In Winnipeg, the tracks had gone up past the house, up the riverbank, doubled back again, a route that indicated a thorough inspection of the scene prior to the shooting. The sniper had no intention of getting caught, thought Jekabsons. He planned to keep his reign of terror going.

  The detective firmly believed all the shootings were connected, clearly it was the same guy. And he was convinced the shooter had not acted alone. The case haunted Jekabsons, always would. Had they done everything possible, explored every angle, 100 percent? By the fall of 1998 he had a list of names of pro-life radicals in Canada and the United States. One of them was almost certainly the sniper, or knew who the shooter was. The name of James Charles Kopp was there, but it was just one among many.

  Chapter 11 ~ Decidedly Distasteful

  On January 29, 1998, a bomb exploded at a women’s clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing an off-duty police officer. The culprit would turn out to be domestic terrorist and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Jim Kopp was staying at Doris Grady’s house in Pittsburgh, as he often did during his travels in the U.S. northeast. Jim sat with Doris and watched the news of the explosion on TV.