by Jon Wells
“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.
Chapter 9 ~ Sneaky bastard
Jim Kopp spent Christmas in Delaware with his sister Anne. Jim would just show up unannounced with his dirty laundry, unshaven, looking like he’d been living in the woods for months. Then he’d be gone again.
On December 30, 1994, John Salvi, a 24-year-old drifter, sprayed two Boston-area abortion clinics with gunfire, killing two women who worked there and wounding several other people. Anne was pro-life, but never took part in protests.
“So is this what’s happening to the movement?” she asked Jim about the violence.
“No-no,” he said. “It’s not good for the movement.” Early in the new year, Pope John Paul II released an encyclical
letter, Evangelium Vitae. Jim always followed the Pontiff’s words carefully. It was in the encyclical that he used the phrase “culture of death” to describe the combination of laws, political and social institutions that undermined the value of life. Abortion, he said, is “deliberate and direct killing… we are dealing with murder.”
In the summer of 1995 Jim Kopp bought a car—although bought is probably the wrong word. He filed no income tax forms from 1994 through 1997. In 1995, his official earnings totaled less than $4,000. He worked odd jobs here and there, handyman work. He got the old beater from Loretta Marra, a green 1977 Dodge Aspen registered with the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles under a new license plate number, BFN 595. In the fall he spent time in Vermont, lived in a farmhouse in Swanton, a town of 6,000 near St. Albans, about ten minutes from the Canadian border. He stayed with Anthony and Anne Kenny. Anthony Kenny was among the 95 anti-abortion protesters, including Kopp, arrested and charged with trespassing outside one of the two women’s clinics in Burlington, Vermont, a few years earlier. Jim also spent time in Fairfax,Vermont. He had met a young woman named Jennifer Rock through the movement and for a time he lived at Rock’s parents’ home on Buck Hollow Road. Just passing through, he told them.
He got in the green Aspen and headed north. On the evening of November 3, near Ancaster, Ontario, he was pulled over and released by a police officer on a routine traffic stop. One week later, Ancaster physician Hugh Short was shot and wounded by a high-powered rifle fired through his den window.
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&nb
sp; Ancaster, Ontario
Friday November 10, 1995
Hamilton Major Crime Unit detective Mike Holk squinted through the windshield into the blackness, the wipers battling a cold hard rain. Where the hell was the house on Sulphur Springs Road? For the Hamilton detectives charged with cracking the mystery of the shooting earlier that night, finding the crime scene was a chore in itself. It was an appropriate start to a case which, from the word go, would be like nothing they had ever experienced.
The 911 “shots fired” call had come in at 9:30 p.m. Dr. Short had wrapped his elbow wound and was taken to Hamilton General Hospital. Mike Holk was the senior ranking officer, 48 years old, a 24-year veteran on the force. It was an ugly night, cold and wet. He found the Short house, got out of his unmarked car and stepped into the downpour, walking towards the flashing police lights. A uniformed officer approached. The detective identified himself. “Staff Sergeant Holk,” he said, and flashed his badge. “Who’s in charge?”
The cop took Holk to meet John Bronson. Bronson, himself a veteran cop and detective, was the duty officer assigned to evaluate the scene before handing it off to Holk. Bronson said there had been shots from the rear of the home. Blew through the den window—window frame, actually. Two holes visible.
Hamilton Police stake out the crime scene at Dr. Hugh Short’s home.
Orders were given to expand the official crime scene area, to include the front and back yards, swaths of the wooded area. About ten acres in all. They used so much yellow tape they almost ran out. All officers entering the crime scene had to record their movements to minimize contamination of any evidence. Holk stood in the driveway, rain pelting his trench coat, water streaming down his face and mustache.
It didn’t take long for him to see it, the cardboard box on the upper part of the driveway.
“What do we have?” Holk asked.
It was a ski mask. Black. One of the officers covered it with the box to keep the evidence dry. Was it the sniper’s? And why would he have left it there? Dropped it? In a hurry? Frightened by something? A plant, by either the shooter or another party, to confuse police? It all raced through Mike Holk’s mind—all questions, no answers. Even though he was a veteran cop, the whole scene left him feeling ill at ease, his head spinning. It was all so—big. The crime scene. The questions. Who comes to a place like this, he thought, on a miserable night like tonight, waits in the shadows and takes a shot at a physician?
At the hospital, Detective Mike Campbell met with Short’s wife, Katherine, her husband’s blood still fresh on her clothes. Dr. Short, meanwhile, was awake when Detective Peter Abi-Rashed came to his bedside in the trauma suite. He had been treated, was in stable condition and could talk. Abi-Rashed was broad shouldered, with dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes. He was a sharp investigator who had a playfully brusque manner. He followed the book on investigating. You put the biggest umbrella possible over the investigation, consider all angles.
“Is my family all right?” asked Short.
“They’re fine, Dr. Short.”
It’s not something a homicide detective telegraphs to a victim, but the cold fact is, the first suspect who needs to be eliminated in an attempted-murder investigation is—the victim himself. Suicide. But Abi-Rashed was satisfied, after conversations with medical staff, that Short’s wound from a high-powered rifle could not have been self-inflicted. He needed to start fishing for suspects.
“Dr. Short, can you think of any reason someone would want to do this to you?”
“I can’t think of any reason for the shooting,” he replied.
A doctor, any doctor, can have disgruntled patients, patients who might not be entirely mentally stable. Hugh Short was an OB. Delivered babies, performed standard gynecological services. Like most doctors, he had a couple of patients who had been unhappy about something—but there was nothing to suggest they’d want to shoot him.
Dr. Short mentioned one call that was a bit different, though. About ten years earlier a man named Randy Dyer had called Short’s office. Dyer had been bitter towards the doctor for a long time because his girlfriend had had an abortion against his wishes, and he was certain Short had performed the procedure and terminated his unborn son. There were days when the darker instincts inside Dyer urged him to hurt Dr. Short for what he had done. But in fact by the time Dyer actually phoned Short, in 1985, the bitterness was gone. He wanted the doctor to know he no longer felt ill will towards him. Hugh Short’s receptionist had put the call through. Short picked up.
“Hello?” Dr. Short had said.
“I want to say, as a Christian man, I forgive you for taking the life of my child in 1982.” A disquieting experience, but certainly no threat.
Peter Abi-Rashed met with the other detectives, then drove out to the house to take a look. He ducked under the police tape, went upstairs and saw the chair where Short had been sitting, saw the splinters on the floor from where the two rounds had punctured the wooden window frame. Camera flashes popped in the dark backyard. Ident was out there—forensic identification officers.
Detective Larry Penfold was out in the rain with his partner, Bill Cook. Time was short to gather evidence and take photos. The forecast was not good, snow on the way. It would cover the scene, transform it. The scientific ballistic work needed to be done to determine where the shots had come from, the bullet trajectory. In the critical early hours, Penfold and Cook tried to reconstruct what had happened. “Tell me a story,” Penfold beseeched his surroundings.
The bullets were easy enough to find. Inside the house, Penfold and Cook had already collected the rounds that had splintered the window frame—7.62 x 39 ammunition. They examined the inside of a tool shed in the backyard. Bingo. Someone had definitely been inside, and very recently, for an extended period. Items had been moved around, space made. Whoever was here had made himself at home, prepared. Eaten some food. They found earmuffs, the type worn by shooters at gun clubs. They collected the black ski mask from the driveway. A key piece of evidence, perhaps, there might be hairs on it.
Back at the station, Penfold walked through the main doors, past the desk, and turned left into the ident department. Then a quick right, into the storage section, his shoes clicking on the grayblue concrete floor, to the biohazard locker and the glass-doored cabinet for blood samples and other materials that would need drying out. Penfold stored the bullets, and the ski mask. He closed the door, signed in the check-in time and his case ident number, locked the door, wrote his report and went home in the early dawn. A few hours’ sleep, and then back to Sulphur Springs Road.
Randy Dyer
The search of the Short property intensified the morning after the shooting, Saturday, and lasted all day. Ten auxiliary officers were brought in to comb the outer perimeter, six for the inner perimeter. The day had dawned sunny and clear. The snow hadn’t materialized in the night, perhaps a good omen for the case. But the temperature had dropped and snow was still forecast. Inside the house, Detectives Mike Campbell, Frank Harild and Peter Abi-Rashed gathered, standing in a circle around the island in the kitchen, bouncing theories off each other.
The house bordered the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. AbiRashed wondered about a stray shot—poachers, perhaps, shooting at deer. But it could have been anything. A malicious, random act of violence in which Hugh Short happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? You start big, then you eliminate, eliminate. Don’t pursue one path and use all your resources only to hit a dead end.
Hamilton Detective Abi-Rashed appears on TV talking about the case.
Campbell knew all that. But his instincts told him there was only one possibility. It sliced through all the other noise. Deer? No.
“If it was stray shots from a hunter, the guy’s misfires were awfully consistent,” he said. “It’s abortion. I’m sure of it.”
Hamilton had had its share of violent crime, but if Campbell was right, this would be a first: a shooting for a cause, a belief. So many questions. The sniper h
ad planned meticulously, had likely cased out the scene in advance. Yet how could he be so sloppy as to leave a ski mask there? And if he was an abortion sniper, why Ancaster, of all places?
Later that day the search party found something: spent cartridges in wet grass in the backyard, not far from the house. Larry Penfold examined the location and the empty casings. Penfold’s official title was forensic identification officer. Cops called him an ident officer. In the American vernacular, he was a crime scene investigator. Penfold and Cook bounced ideas off each other. How could they determine where the shot had come from? Penfold put in a call to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. CFS had lasers that could pinpoint such things. But CFS didn’t have anyone available that day. Penfold didn’t want to wait. Time to break out the tackle box.
Later, in the backyard, a nearly invisible thread stretched from the second-floor window to the ground. It was fishing line. Penfold and Cook had invented their own low-tech machinery to determine the trajectory of the shots. Penfold had once worked on the Hamilton police tactical team, knew how to use power scopes. Using the scope he estimated the line of fire from the holes in the window and frame to a spot on the ground near where the casings and footprints were found. They stretched fishing line from the holes to the spot. Between the two points, taking into account the angle of probable entry of the rounds, and other calculations, Penfold and Cook established where the shot had probably come from on the grass. When CFS did show up with their laser beams and other special equipment, technicians took their measurements. Penfold’s fishing expedition had come within inches of the CFS finding.
