Attorney General Janet Reno—who herself frequently talked to President Clinton about the case and about anti- abortion violence in general.
Shortly after Tolbert’s announcement that James Kopp was wanted as a material witness, a $500,000 reward was offered by the Justice Department for information. The police and FBI were careful not to publicly call Kopp a suspect. They did, however, tell reporters they believed he might hold the key to the investigation.
Tolbert cursed the zeal with which reporters chased the story. Reporters didn’t have to play by the same rules as agents, could talk to anyone they pleased without regard for the legalities or nuances of criminal investigation. There were times FBI agents showed up at the home of someone connected to Kopp to find journalists already there. Reporters were all over the place in Vermont. Agents were losing the element of surprise and the media attention was helping Kopp.
On the other hand, the FBI counted on media coverage to spread images of Kopp’s face to encourage public tips. One of those tips came from Daniel Lenard, a Buffalo high school teacher. He told police he had seen a jogger on October 18, five days before the murder, hunched over and running slowly along a road near Dr. Slepian’s house. Saw him for maybe 10, 15 seconds. He had glasses and a reddish goatee, wore a black hooded sweatshirt and black biker shorts. Ruddy complexion. Pronounced jawline. Looked stressed. And he held his hands up as though he were training for a boxing match, strange compared to other joggers you’d see around there, hardly the picture of health or fitness. Lenard later met with a detective who placed a page of head shots in front of him. There were photos of six men who had brownish-red beards or goatees. The photos were numbered 1 to 6.
“Do you recognize any of them?” the detective asked.
“Yes. Number four. That’s him. No question that’s the jogger, and the same guy I saw on TV. ”
It was a photo of James Charles Kopp. Later, FBI special agent Joel Mercer visited the home of another witness who claimed to have seen the mysterious jogger. “His beard was about the color of your hair,” the witness told the redheaded Mercer. He showed the witness the same photo array that had been placed before Lenard. The witness paused.
“There—number four,” he said. Kopp. Later, a third witness signed his initials beside photo number four as well.
The search in the woods behind the Slepians’ house continued. On November 5, a police officer noticed a sliver of plastic sticking from the ground. It was a buried garbage bag. Contents they found inside included a green baseball cap with the inscriptions “New York” and “NY,” a silver men’s wristwatch, an empty rifle ammunition box, binoculars, two green earplugs, black fanny pack, flashlight, protective gun muffler earmuffs and two plastic shopping bags. Amherst police sent the evidence to the FBI’s Washington lab. One latent fingerprint was eventually lifted from the evidence—but the print did not match prints on file from Kopp’s criminal records. The bag was a good find, suggesting the level of planning used by the sniper. But the key piece was still missing—the weapon.
Members of the joint U.S.–Canadian police task force on the five sniper attacks continued to share information and discuss strategy. A joint management meeting was held in Hamilton. Senior Hamilton police officials discussed the investigation with task force members from the FBI, RCMP, and Winnipeg and Vancouver police forces. Amherst police chief John Askey burst into the meeting, angry. The chief had learned there had been an RCMP officer in Amherst, conducting surveillance, in the days before the murder of Bart Slepian. How could the RCMP have not told him about the suspect they were tailing? “You’re following the guy, and you let him shoot one of my citizens!” he charged.
RCMP officials at the meeting said there had in fact been an agent in the Buffalo area, but it was for surveillance concerning a matter unrelated to the doctor shootings. And no one knew Kopp was a suspect prior to the shooting, so how could they be following him at the time? One man dead, three seriously injured, another barely escaping injury, and the sniper still at large. Pressure was mounting on all of the law enforcement agencies.
Phone ringing, before dawn, Wednesday morning, November 4. Jennifer Rock picks up.
“Jen. I’m in trouble. Can you call me back?”
Jennifer Rock had an office job with IBM in Vermont. She had known Jim Kopp for several years, met him through protests several years before when she was in her early twenties, he had once stayed at her parents’ home. Rock’s Vermont address had been one of several to which Kopp had his mail sent, she had deposited money in banks for him. She phoned him back at 6:30 a.m.
“Close the account, bring the money and meet me,” Jim told her.
The next day, Rock left home. She told her parents she’d be in New York for a while. Looking for some work, visiting friends. She arrived at a mall in White Plains, New York. She had the money and a false West Virginia driver’s license she had made at Jim’s request. She tried to look inconspicuous, browse for shoes. She stopped at the newsstand and saw the headline: “James Charles Kopp Wanted by the FBI as a Material Witness.” She saw the murky photo of Jim’s grimacing face. Where did they get that photo? Didn’t look like him at all. The FBI had obviously pointed the finger at him. But he could never have shot someone. She spotted her friend.
“Jim, your face is everywhere. You have to get out of here.”
They got in her car and headed for Newark, New Jersey. (Jim had changed plates again on his car, but he knew he could no longer use the wanted black Cavalier anywhere in the country.) He should get on a plane and leave the country, now, he said, until his name could be cleared. No, argued Jennifer. Had he seen the papers, the news on TV? His face was everywhere. Not to Newark airport. They should drive, in her car, south.
The FBI hit the places where Kopp had been, retracing his steps, interviewing people he had stayed with, even questioning a mailman who confirmed he had delivered mail to a “Jack Crotty,” one of Kopp’s aliases. They searched a Laurel Avenue residence in Newark, Delaware, and seized computer disks containing eight Texas driver’s licenses under various names. They searched room 148 at the Travel Inn, 8920 Gulf Freeway, Houston, Texas, and seized a telephone book. On Thursday, November 6, agents visited TV station WOWK in Huntington, West Virginia. Kopp had once been arrested at a protest outside a clinic in nearby Charleston. The station provided video from coverage of the scene. He was on the tape. For the FBI, finding contacts of Kopp’s was not the problem. He had fleeting pro-life acquaintances all over the country, people like Gannon, Betty, Anthony Kenny. But these were not the type of contacts who held the key to catching him, they knew nothing of his movements. It seemed as if he had no intimate friends, no trusted allies he would turn to at a time like this. Even his sister didn’t know much about him. It was as if James Kopp had planned it that way: “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.” ***
From his office in Quantico, Virginia, FBI profiler James Fitzgerald advised agents in the field on what kinds of questions to ask James Kopp’s friends and family, about his background, personal history. Ask the right questions, in the right order. Did he change his appearance much over the years? What about his relationships?
Fitzgerald studied the information coming in. The subject knew many people, had traveled the country, and the world, extensively. His emerging analysis suggested James Charles Kopp was a conflicted individual. He was well educated, holding a master’s degree, but had held mostly menial jobs. He was deeply religious—yet apparently a killer. Kopp clearly belonged to an extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement. But even within that wing he was a bit of a loner, marched to his own drummer, did his own thing. Nonviolent, his friends said, but Fitzgerald sensed an escalation in Kopp’s thinking about how he should combat abortion. The profiler believed that Kopp had been the one who pulled the trigger in all three of the Canadian attacks, in addition to the Rochester shooting, and the Slepian murder.
Question: Would Kopp try again?
Surely not, thought Fitzgerald, now that he was a wanted man, now that his cover was blown. He would try to disappear. It would be too risky to try again in the foreseeable future. Kopp fitted the sniper mentality: calculating, careful, nonconfrontational. He would not attack again, not unless he was motivated to simply taunt the FBI. And that was highly unlikely. He was too smart for that, his mission too strictly defined.
Among the first people agents interviewed was Jim’s stepmother, Lynn Kopp, in Texas. She talked about the family: Chuck Kopp, ex-Marine, disciplinarian; Nancy Kopp, devout mother; the twin brother; three sisters, two of whom had died young. Jim’s past relationships? There was Jenny, the girlfriend at UC Santa Cruz. At least, that’s what Lynn had heard. She had never met Jenny, had never seen Jim with any girl, actually. From what she heard, the relationship with Jenny didn’t last long, and Jim went berserk when he learned she’d had an abortion.
Fitzgerald examined the interview transcripts. Interesting. Kopp had been extremely close to his mother. And over the years, on the road, protesting, he had had strong associations with women. Yet he never married, and
