had changed. Chuck, the ex-Marine, who used to be so sharp, seemed gone. One day Jim returned home to visit his father at the hospital, and sat with Lynn in the cafeteria. Jim had not spoken to her for a couple of years. He never warmed to her.
“That last time we talked you said you weren’t going to see him any more,” Jim said.
“That’s how I felt at the time,” Lynn told him. “But it reached the point of no return.” Jim put his head in his hands, elbows on the table, staring at her, incredulous, and then glowered at her, saying nothing.
Chuck slowly bounced back from the stroke. He kicked his drinking habit. Things were improving, but there remained the problem with his youngest son, and his antics in the anti-abortion movement. Lynn told the story how one night, she and Chuck were out for dinner with Jim’s twin brother, Walt, and Chuck’s brother, James, from Los Angeles.
“So did you see Jim on TV last night?” asked Walt. The TV news had carried a story about a violent protest at a clinic in the Bay Area. The footage showed Jim arrested after chaining himself to an examining table.
Chuck’s lips narrowed. “Damn fool,” he said.
Was it possible that on some level, while shaking his head at his son’s behavior, Chuck appreciated Jim’s passion? If that sentiment did exist, Chuck did not express it to anyone. Jim believed he knew. He looked into his dad’s eyes on the occasions when they were together and was certain he saw pride.
In 1991, Chuck picked up and moved with Lynn to her home state of Texas. In September 1992, Lynn persuaded him to go on an Alaskan cruise. Their first port was Juneau. Chuck had a heart attack on board. Just over a week later, he suffered another heart attack, and died at 2:30 a.m. on September 26.
The funeral was held at Trinity Baptist Church in Sherman, Texas. Walter Kopp gave the eulogy, spoke of his dad’s military service and legal career. Jim, who was listed as “James C. Kopp of New York City” in the official obituary, was at the service. Outside, at the burial at West Hill Cemetery, Lynn Kopp arranged for the release of colorful balloons. She thought it was a nice touch, there were grandkids there who had never been at a funeral before. Lynn told the story later that Jim turned away, as though angry, refusing to look at the balloons. Maybe he felt it was sacrilegious, she thought. Despite his longtime antipathy towards her, Jim stayed at Lynn’s house for ten days. She urged him to start fresh.
“You should do something with your life,” she said.
“But I am. And Dad was proud of me,” Jim said.
“No, he was distressed by what you were doing.”
Jim did not, ever, put stock in Lynn’s words. She had broken up his parents’ marriage, hurt his mother, and his father. He also did not care for Lynn’s recollection of events years later, when she was sought after by journalists for opinions on Jim and the Kopp family. Lynn told stories of how, among other things, Chuck Kopp hit his kids. Lynn claimed she saw a letter that Marty had written about Chuck, recalling a blow she took to her back when she was a girl, saying she had never forgiven him. Hanging out the family’s dirty laundry, true or not, only deepened the anger for Lynn that Jim already felt to his core.
“Slepian! You pig!”
Pro-life protesters blocked the clinic’s driveway off Main Street as Bart Slepian tried to come to work. A man named Paul Schenck stepped in front of the car, lay down on the pavement. Bart and others at the clinic filed charges. Six of the protesters were ordered to pay more than $100,000 in legal fees incurred by Bart and other doctors and clinic workers. The protesters had been, wrote a federal judge, in contempt of a previous court ruling governing the nature of the protests. U.S. District judge Richard J. Arcara ordered that key Buffalo-area pro-life leaders stay at least 100 yards away from any health clinic.
Bart Slepian did not shrink into the background, he did not have it in him. He gave a speech to health care officials called “It’s Not Over Yet: The Rising Tide of Anti-Choice Violence and What You Can Do About It.” Bart was a physician, he had no intention of becoming a pro-choice activist. But, intentionally or not, he had become a visible personality in the pro-choice camp.
At the end of the year, in December, for the first time a doctor who provided abortions was shot. Dr. Douglas Karpen was wounded in a parking garage in Houston. Two weeks before that attack, two clinic staffers in Springfield, Missouri, had been wounded by a man wearing a ski mask and wielding a sawed-off shotgun. The shooter in both incidents was never caught.
Fifteen months later marked the first time a physician who provided abortion services was murdered. It happened on March 10, 1993, outside a Pensacola, Florida, clinic. Dr. David Gunn was shot three times in the back and killed by a man named Michael Griffin. Most pro-lifers decried the violence. One man, a Presbyterian minister named Paul Hill, went on the Donahue talk show and defended the shooting, comparing it to killing a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Two weeks after the shooting, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy introduced a bill to enforce protection of abortion clinics.
On August 19, in Wichita, Kansas, a 38-year-old woman named Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon walked up to Dr. George Tiller—a physician reviled by pro-lifers as “killer Tiller”—and shot him outside his office. The .25-caliber handgun she fired was never recovered. Shannon was arrested when returning her rental car. Investigators found The Army of God handbook buried in her backyard. Federal agents hooked her up to a lie detector and asked her about the manual.
“Who is The Mad Gluer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is The Mad Gluer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is Atomic Dog?”
“I don’t know. His first name is Steve.”
“Is Reverend Michael Bray teaching people how to blow up clinics?”
“I don’t know.”
Shannon failed the polygraph test and was later convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
The day before the Tiller shooting, meanwhile, Jim Kopp was arrested in San Jose for trespassing and damaging property, then went north to be with old friends, spent some time in Delaware with his sister, Anne. He would sometimes drop in like that, usually in desperate need of a shower, with just the clothes on his back. On occasion he took Anne’s son, Jeff, to a local shooting range for target practice. “I’m thinking about writing a book about my experiences in pro-life,” Jim told Anne.
On February 22, 1994, Nancy Kopp, at 72, died from cancer, the same disease that had claimed Jim’s sisters Mary and Marty at a young age. Jim had always revered his mother. He compared her capacity for love and healing others to that of Mother Teresa. Her death severed whatever emotional ties that remained for Jim with his boyhood home in the Bay Area. He helped clean out the family home in Marin, but kept little for himself. One of the others (probably Walt, he figured) took the photo of Chuck Kopp with Governor Ronald Reagan. Nancy was buried in Marin Memorial Gardens, in Novato, north of San Francisco, where one of the churches she attended was located. A beautiful spot, the flat stone that covered Nancy’s grave lay not far from the markers for Mary and Nancy’s mother.
The day before Nancy Kopp died, the trial of doctor-killer Michael Griffin began in Pensacola. Pro-lifers demonstrated on a street corner near the courthouse. Among them was Paul Hill, an apologist for Griffin, struggling to keep aloft his sign which read: “Execute Abortionists.” Beside him stood Michael Bray, whose profile in the radical pro-life fringe continued to grow. An activist walked up to Hill and chastised him for the violent message on the sign. Hill was “spewing false teaching.”
Bray chided Hill’s detractor. “So why aren’t you out blocking doors?” he said.
Paul Hill drafted and circulated a document pledging support for Griffin and the philosophy of justifiable homicide against abortion providers. It was called the Defensive Action Statement: “We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all Godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn
