James Kopp Biography

Originally a “Poster Boy” for the American right-wing Pro-Life, Anti-Abortion movement, James Kopp dealt them a devastating blow when he admitted the 1998 killing of Dr. Barnett Slepian, in 2002. Pro-life supporters had, in those four years, made numerous claims of a left-wing government conspiracy, which had targeted Kopp, and lost credibility when he finally admitted guilt. In addition, the post 9/11, pre-Iraq War sentiment in the United States shifted public priorities significantly towards foreign affairs, and left Pro-Lifers with a greatly reduced public platform.

James Charles Kopp and his twin brother, Walter, were born in Pasadena, California, on 2 August 1954, to second generation Austrian immigrant, Charles Leo Kopp, known as “Chuck”. Along with elder sister Anne, the Kopps enjoyed an unremarkable childhood, growing up in Marin County, near San Francisco, which appears to have been uninfluenced by any strong religious convictions. James, known as “Jim”, was an excellent student, and he graduated from the University of California in Santa Cruz, with a bachelor’s degree in Biology, going on to take a master’s degree in Embryology from California State University at Fullerton.

After graduation, Kopp was employed as a laboratory technician at the University of Texas, and considered further study to qualify as a doctor, but decided against this, moving on to Stanford to work on a project relating to spinal nerve research work, principally with Vietnam War veterans.

Kopp claims that his Damascene conversion occurred in 1980, at Stanford Hospital in California, when a female acquaintance, who was in favour of abortion, took him to the hospital morgue to show him an aborted foetus in its eighth month of gestation, which had been discarded in a small bucket. Kopp was horrified by the sight, and decided to abandon his research and involve himself in the Anti-Abortion movement, which eventually led to his conversion to Catholicism.

He travelled widely over the next 15 years, spending time at a retreat founded by fundamentalist Francis Schaeffer in the Swiss Alps, and promoting the Pro-Life cause in many countries, including Italy, Poland, India and the Philippines. His periods in the United States were punctuated with arrest, however; unlike in the Philippines, abortion in the US was legal, and efforts to disrupt clinics carrying out legal procedures were dealt with severely.

The majority of his arrests centred on protests outside clinics, the first of these recorded in April 1984, in San Francisco, an occurrence repeated many times over the next four years. He was also arrested in Pensacola, Florida, in November 1986, in defence of another Pro-Life protester, Joan Andrews Bell, with whom he travelled widely in support of their common beliefs. Kopp gained a reputation for the use of unbreakable locks, the mechanisms of which he developed himself, which were extremely difficult for authorities to remove. These locks were used to chain themselves to railings or other structures outside clinics, making the removal of the activists a lengthy process, garnering maximum publicity.

He also became involved with the militant Christian groups, the ‘Army of God’ and the ‘Lambs of Christ’, after an extended protest at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, in July 1988. It is likely that his exposure to militant organisations like these might have influenced what had been, until then, his pacifist, ascetic stance, much admired amongst those who came in contact with him. The next few years saw him arrested on numerous occasions around the Northeast United States, up until 1994, which was followed by a three-year period, when he dropped out of public view.

This hiatus coincided with the passing of the ‘Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances’ (FACE) Act by Congress in May 1994, which made the type of protests mounted by Kopp a federal crime. During his absence, there were also a number of attacks in Canada, which resembled the later attack on Dr. Slepian, (although the victims were wounded, not killed) including the November 1994 attack on Vancouver physician Garson Romalis, and the November 1995 attack on Ontario physician Hugh Short. Following Dr. Slepian’s murder, Canadian authorities did bring charges against Kopp in the case of Dr. Short.

The Crime

Dr. Barnett Slepian was an obstetrician/gynaecologist with a full-time private practice in Amherst, New York, who also provided abortion services at a women’s clinic in Buffalo, New York. On 23 October 1998, at 10 p.m., he was killed in his kitchen by a single shot, fired from a wooded area behind his Amherst home. His family were in the kitchen with him at the time. Kopp later claimed that it had been his intention only to wound Slepian, made plausible by the other previous Canadian attacks, and that he had been horrified to read of Slepian’s death in the press, the next day.

In the investigation which followed over the following fortnight, descriptions provided by neighbours of Kopp, and his Chevrolet Cavalier car, lead to the issuance of a material witness warrant against him by the FBI, on 4 November 1998, although it was stressed at the time that he was wanted only in connection with moving their enquiries forward, and was not necessarily a suspect.

At around the same time, Kopp decided that he would be better off leaving the United States, and made plans to fly to Europe, but an acquaintance, Jennifer Rock, persuaded him that he would be more likely to evade capture if he left the country by car. Kopp abandoned his Chevrolet at the long-term parking lot at Newark International Airport, one of New York’s main air termini, where the car was discovered on 18 December. Rock drove him across the border to Mexico, where he took steps to disguise his appearance, with Rock’s assistance, and then flew to Europe from the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo.

FBI investigations continued on all fronts, but it wasn’t until 8 April 1999 that a Russian-made SKS sniper rifle was found, with the aid of a metal detector, buried near Slepian’s Amherst home. Despite using false identification to purchase the weapon, it was eventually traced back to Kopp, who had purchased it in Tennessee in July 1997.

On 6 May 1999, Kopp was charged with using deadly force to prevent the delivery of reproductive health surfaces, a federal crime under the new FACE Act, as well as a separate charge of intentional murder in the second degree. Each charge carried a maximum penalty of life in prison, and a $500,000 reward was offered for information leading to the prosecution of Kopp.

FBI authorities were fairly certain by this stage that Kopp had left the country and, on 7 June 1999, Kopp’s name was added to the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List”. Incidentally, this occurred on the same day that Osama Bin Laden appeared on the list for the first time.

On 24 June 1999, a federal grand jury indicted Jim Kopp, in his absence, on the charge of second-degree murder. On 24 January 2000, following extensive cooperation between Canadian and US authorities, the Canadian police charged Kopp with the shooting of physician Dr. Hugh Short, and he also remained a suspect in the other Canadian attacks. Finally, on 17 October 2000, he was indicted by a separate grand jury on the FACE violation, as well as additional firearms charges.

From the time of fleeing the States, Kopp was on the move in Europe, seeking assistance from anti-abortion sympathisers. Having secured two false Irish passports, he spent most of the year 2000 in Ireland, but was forced to flee to France, on 12 March 2001, when he received advance notice that an Irish newspaper, the Irish Mirror, was planning to publish an article about his whereabouts.

Unbeknownst to Kopp, the FBI were managing to track Kopp’s movements via the wire-tapping of some of his US associates, most notably through husband and wife, Dennis Malvasi and Loretta Marra. Having had to flee Ireland on short notice, Kopp was short of funds, and arranged for the couple to wire funds to him in the town of Dinan, in Brittany, where he was hiding out. It was his plan to return to the United States via Canada, to stay with Marra and Malvasi, and he needed assistance with fare costs.

The FBI were immediately aware of the plans, through communication intercepts, and informed French authorities, who arrested Kopp on 29 March 2001, as he was leaving the post-office where the funds were to be collected. Marra and Malvasi were arrested in Brooklyn, New York, within hours of Kopp’s arrest, and charged with conspiring to harbour a fugitive.

Kopp declined to be interviewed by local authorities, and the United States made a formal request for his extradition on 8 May 2001. The Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was forced to concede that the death penalty would not be sought, in order to facilitate the extradition, since the European Human Rights Convention, to which France is a signatory, forbids the imposition of the death penalty on subjects of extradition orders.

French legal authorities initially approved the extradition request on 28 June 2001, but Kopp appealed this decision, in order to delay his return to the United States for as long as possible. He was held in a French prison pending the appeal. There was a huge amount of support for Kopp from the Anti-Abortion lobby in the United States, who maintained that he was innocent. There were also a number of threats from far-right extremist groups, such as the “Black Scorpion Militia”, who threatened to bomb abortion clinics if Kopp was returned to the United States for trial.

Kopp lost his appeal against extradition on 14 October 2001, and launched a second appeal immediately but, on 27 May 2002, he decided to waive his right to any further appeal, claiming that he wanted to return to the United States to clear his name.

He was returned to the United States under tight security a week later, on 5 June 2002, where he pleaded not guilty to all federal charges filed against him in Buffalo, New York. Kopp was forced to submit DNA samples for comparison to those found at the murder scene, and preparations were made for the concealment of witnesses’ identities, given the extremist nature of some of Kopp’s supporters.

Kopp decided to change his defence team in late October 2002, when he replaced Paul Cambria with the more anti-abortion-supportive Bruce Barkett, who planned to garner as much publicity for Kopp’s beliefs as possible.

With this in mind, Barkett was in attendance on 19 November 2002, when Kopp granted an interview with the Buffalo News, in which he admitted killing Dr. Slepian, although he claimed he had only intended to wound him in the attack. He stated that he was motivated to admit his guilt for the sake of his supporters, who continued to argue his innocence, but he refused to be drawn, when questioned, on his possible involvement in the Canadian shootings.

When the interview made front-page news the next day, some of Kopp’s more moderate anti-abortion supporters, who had argued for a government conspiracy against him, were forced to distance themselves from the case, causing them considerable embarrassment. Prosecutors also introduced an additional charge of reckless murder, with depraved indifference to human life, as a result of the published interview.

While the prosecution continued to collate the mounting evidence against Kopp in the run-up to his trial, Kopp suddenly surprised the authorities, and media observers, by waiving his right to a jury trial, on 11 March 2003. Instead, he agreed to be tried in a stipulated bench trial, in front of a single judge, in which he would be found innocent, or guilty, of second-degree murder, on the basis of a 35-page document of facts, prepared by the District Attorney and approved by Kopp’s lawyer. This would result in a trial that would take two days, rather than the numerous weeks that would be required when presenting the evidence to a jury. There was much speculation about why Kopp had chosen this route, although it seemed most likely that he did not wish his anti-abortion message to become lost in the sheer volume of evidence that linked him directly to Slepian’s murder. The stipulated trial would give him an opportunity to make a public statement about the case against abortion, without being subjected to cross-examination.

Kopp’s trial, in front of Judge Michael D’Amico, proceeded on 17 March 2003. Kopp’s opportunity for maximum publicity for his cause was largely wasted: his account was rambling and poorly delivered, including bible references and comparing clinic doctors to Nazis. Kopp’s assertion that violent action had succeeded in reducing the number of doctors practicing abortion in the United States was not well received in court, neither was his assertion that Judge D’Amico was “morally obliged” to refuse to punish Kopp.

In any case, public attention, post 9/11 and in the early days of the Iraq War, was firmly focussed elsewhere. Ironically, had Kopp been captured soon after the Slepian killing, rather than running from justice for four years, his attempt at martyrdom might have been very differently received, in a radically different media climate that, pre-9/11, still focussed on US domestic issues. The nationwide effect of his trial, prior to world terrorist events, on the issues surrounding abortion could easily have been pivotal for a right-wing US administration, already predisposed towards his cause. But by 2003, politics in the United States had moved on, and terrorists of any type were unwelcome.

Since Kopp had admitted the killing of Dr. Slepian, in the stipulated facts document, he was found guilty on 18 March 2003, despite his protestations that it had not been his intention to kill.

On 9 May 2003 Kopp received the maximum penalty, 25 years to life, and Judge D’Amico added: "It's clear the act was premeditated, there is no doubt about it. You made an attempt to avoid responsibility for the act. What may appear righteous to you is immoral to someone else."

Kopp continues to rally supporters to his cause from within the New York prison system. His federal prosecution on the FACE violation and related firearms charges is ongoing, as of March 2006. A guilty verdict will result in a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.