Jon Wells - Sniper - The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp

Canada was part of Jim Kopp’s story. The visitor mentioned Ancaster to Kopp—Jim, they have your DNA from Dr. Short’s backyard. They can put you at the scene. Kopp put his hand over his mouth as if gagging himself, shook his head. No, don’t talk about Canada. Anything but that, he replied. He’ll be on a slow boat to Siberia if he does—nothing against Siberia! It’s better than prison!

In the movie that was his life, how did the next scene look? For him, for Loretta, for pro-life? Jim Kopp would have a surprise for everybody before he was done in court. Was he not a lawyer’s son? The reporters, the prosecutors will all end up looking like idiots. He had even written it out.

“Imagine a letter, the very existence of which would send any number of lawyers, etc. etc. all scurrying and fussing yak yak.”

What did that mean?

The black-and-white images returned. San Francisco. The cold dark heart of Bogart’s Sam Spade, who, true to nothing or no one but his own code, is telling Brigid that her number is up. She is the real killer.

“Yes, angel, I’m gonna’ send you over,” Spade said.

“Don’t, Sam,” she replied. “Don’t say that even in fun. I was frightened for a moment there, you do such wild and unpredictable things.”

“You’re taking the fall. I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.”

“You’ve been playing with me, just pretending you cared for me, to trap me like this. You didn’t care at all! You don’t love me!”

“I won’t play the sap for you,” he snapped.

“It’s not like that! You know in your heart that in spite of anything I’ve done, I love you.”

Spade stared at her, his eyes hard, unrelenting.

“I don’t care who loves who,” he said. “I won’t play the sap. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it.”

“How can you do this to me, Sam?”

“Chances are you’ll get off with life. If you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in 20 years. I’ll be waiting for you. And if they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”

A classic scene. If Kopp had one “hot tip” it was to watch that final scene from The Maltese Falcon. He’d been thinking about it an awful lot lately. Anyway. If Jim Kopp could just finish the latest draft of the essay he was writing about Dad, his mind would be eased considerably. Still need to clean up a few things for publication. The reference to General Douglas MacArthur, for starters, as “Dugout Doug.” Don’t think that derogatory label would be appreciated by military types. But it should be a good read. He’d come to terms with his father. Dad had beaten his drinking near the end of his life, had made a comeback. Oh, and he still needed to find a new bridge in the narrative of the novel he was working on. Perhaps use a “sunset piano” touch. Sunset piano, he reflected, was the part that comes two-thirds of the way through every movie—every “classical” movie, not the dumb action stuff. There is a sunset, and gorgeous music washing over all of it. Yes.

Don’t fret about the writing, Jim, you dope. As always, at times like this, just think about Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark. Your guardian angel is writing for you. Just put the words on paper and everything will take care of itself.

The discussion with the visitor returned to Loretta’s release. What was it, he thought, about living in a cell—in a concrete room the size of a bathroom—that made one’s emotions reverberate so acutely? It was all overwhelming. Just wonderful. God had watched over them, Loretta and Jim, the whole time. He really had. Jim had known it would unfold one petal at a time, and it had. Loretta was free to be with her children again. She was still in danger, though, he thought. Very much so. Children. The meeting with the visitor came to an end. Jim hung up the phone and picked up his stack of papers, stood to leave, knocked on the door for the guard to come and escort him back into the general population. Through the glass, the visitor raised his voice to ask one more question. Did Loretta name her son James after you? Jim Kopp stopped, his mouth breaking into a wide grin, eyes twinkling.

“You’ll have to ask Loretta.”

Buffalo, N.Y.

June 25, 2007

In the spring of 2007 a Buffalo jury found James Charles Kopp guilty on federal charges of violating access to reproductive services. On June 25 he was sentenced. That day in a Buffalo courtroom, Lynne Slepian sat on the left side of the gallery, with her friends, and her sons—boys at the time of their father’s murder, now young men. On the right side were faces from Kopp’s past, among them pro-life veterans like Joan Andrews and a priest who had been meeting with him lately in prison. In the back row was a woman who had traveled several hours from her home, which is likely somewhere in New Jersey, at the wheel of an old beater of a car as thunderheads gathered above. Loretta Marra. She brought her two kids, who stayed with friends in town while she went to court as a spectator. Dennis Malvasi did not make the trip.

Kopp’s court-appointed lawyer, John Humann, stood in court and argued before Judge Richard Arcara for leniency in the sentence. It was an unusual case, Humann said. Jim Kopp had not killed anyone for greed, or out of anger. “People kill for selfish motives, for money, contract killing, for evil reasons. In this case he meant to wound, not kill, because he felt a higher calling to stop abortions.” Once again the sniper attacks on the Canadian doctors were floated in court, even though Kopp continued to maintain his silence about them. Those shootings “show intent to wound,” Humann said. “The court should take that into account.” He added that Kopp should get a break because the person who had helped him was a free person.

He was referring to Loretta Marra. Why should his client take the entire brunt of the punishment? The federal prosecutor, Kathleen Mehltrutter, stood and also invoked Marra, suggesting for the first time in a courtroom that Loretta had more direct involvement in the attacks than merely harboring a fugitive. She told the judge that Marra and Kopp crossed the border together, leaving British Columbia soon after Dr. Garson Romalis was shot in Vancouver. Outside court in the corridor, a writer from the Hamilton Spectator asked Loretta if that was true. Had she been in the car with Jim?

“We’re not going there,” she said with a smile. She appeared on edge during the entire hearing. Out in the hallway one of Bart Slepian’s sons glared at Marra angrily. She stared back, her expression flat, saying nothing. Mostly she was upset that Jim, “an innocent man,” was being condemned. An amazing man, she reflected. It was just a few months earlier that Marra had been officially released from being monitored by the authorities in her day-to-day life on the outside. She and Dennis were free. She could lead a normal life now, couldn’t she?

“Normal? My life will never be normal,” she said, the green eyes glowing with intensity, fighting to find the right words to express the fire inside that had not been tempered by doing time.

“Not when this country is bathed in the blood of millions of children.” She very nearly spit the words out. “All I can smell is the stench—the stench of the blood. That means my life will never be normal.”

Jim Kopp had one last chance to speak, to show remorse that might mitigate his federal sentence. Instead he defended shooting Bart Slepian, though adding that he had not intended to kill him. The physician died because of a “crazy ricochet.” He had no regrets about the attack, though.

“If I see someone attacking a pregnant woman, or their children,” he said, “I’m gonna do something.”