who is accused of murder, who’s been gone two and a half years? It’s insane!”
“I know, I—”
“Look, I’ll ask her, but not her father.”
“No-no-no, just ask him, just say, ‘Mr. Boissonneault, if Amy didn’t have cancer, and if Jim wasn’t in jail accused of murder, would you allow him to date Amy?’ And if he says no, then don’t ask her. I’ll just pray. I’m meant to wait. But if the answer is yes, can you find her, bring her over here to me?”
Susan left the jail that night, thoughts swirling, caught between what her heart and her mind were telling her. Her heart won out. Back at the hotel, she spoke to Amanda Robb. Jim had not killed her uncle, Susan was sure of it. And Jim was about to become engaged.
“Jesus is going to work a miracle,” Susan said. “I just know they’re gonna get married and have babies.”
Amanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
The next day, Bart Slepian’s niece was introduced to Jim Kopp. She expected to meet him in a room divided by Plexiglas. But in the Rennes jail they sat in a private room, only a wooden table separating them. Jim carried a Bible with him. Amanda, a writer, soaked up the atmosphere, took the measure of this man Kopp, made mental notes. He was tall, lean. Baby-blue eyes. Handsome? Yes, she decided, maybe even shockingly handsome. He offered his hand. “Hi, I’m Jim,” he said.
She shook his hand and quietly muttered, “Amanda.”
Amanda later wrote an article about the meeting, and her quest to find Kopp, and sold it to New York Magazine. It ran under the headline “The Doctor, The Niece And The Killer.” She wrote:
“There was a long silence, and to fill it I told Jim two people had sent their love to him via me. The instant I mentioned the second person’s name, Jim curled into a fetal position and sobbed… Eventually he choked out that he thought this person hated him. He pulled himself together, saying, “If you wait long enough, everything in life comes back to you.” Then he started rambling… His narrative was a tangle of strands about victim souls, abortion, his “calling” to stop it, his destiny, my uncle’s murder, and fleeting mentions of his “fiancee.” “I didn’t shoot your uncle,” he said. “But I’m going to plead guilty and do the time—25 years straight up—because someone of my religion did.” This hung heavily in the air. I worried I was going to throw up. As I felt my face twitching, Jim smiled beatifically and changed the subject to movies. He suggested I watch Pay It Forward, which he said was the story of his life… He then urged me to see There’s Something About Mary and quietly added that I looked like Cameron Diaz… It suddenly dawned on me that my uncle’s killer was flirting with me.”
Amanda Robb told Jim she wanted to understand him, asked if she could write to him. He agreed. A guard entered the room to escort him back to his cell. He handed Amanda a Bible. Inside, he had written “To Mandy.” Only her family had ever called her by that nickname, she reflected.
Before leaving Rennes, Susan Brindle spoke to Jim about Amy one more time. Amazing thing. Susan had called home and spoken to her sister about Jim’s proposal to marry Amy. And her sister Joan said that out of the blue Amy had called, said she was coming to town, would stop in to say hi. Susan relayed the story to Jim and he smiled. God was directing everything! Susan finally said goodbye to Jim. She took the train back to Paris. That night she searched for the ring Jim had requested, went store to store for several hours, until, late in the evening, she found a small jeweler who had it. She bought the ring and took it to Notre Dame Cathedral to get it blessed. No priest was available, so she returned the next morning to early mass and got the ring blessed. Then she caught her flight to New York. Susan called Amy’s father early the next day. He knew she had been in France visiting Jim Kopp. “How are you, Susan? And how was Jim?”
Susan got around to asking. “Mr. Boissonneault, can I ask you a really strange question? If Amy didn’t have cancer, and Jim wasn’t in jail, would you ever allow him to ask her out? I just need to know.”
“Kind of an odd question, don’t you think?” he said. “I know, I know. But I need to know.”
“It’s not really up to me. It’s up to Amy.”
“Thank you. And God bless.”
Susan went and saw Amy, who was visiting Joan’s home. They walked in the backyard past a statue of the Blessed Mother. “How is Jim?” asked Amy. “Does he talk about his friends?” “He does. He talks about you.”
“Me?”
“He talks about you, he really cares about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He loves you, Amy.”
Amy stared at her, bewildered. “What? Jim? I always—I always thought of him like a priest, in a way. Never thought of him in that way.”
Susan smiled. That was how she had always felt about him, too. “Jim did say that you went on a date once,” she said.
“A
“Yes, to an antique store or something.”
“That wasn’t a date!”
“Well, Jim doesn’t go out alone with girls, and you two were alone. To him it was a date.”
Amy was shocked. She didn’t know what to say. Susan drew the engagement ring out of her pocket.
“Jim asked me, Amy, to ask you to marry him.”
Amy started to cry. Susan did too. “You can tell him to ask me in person when I see him in France.”
It was all too much. But miracles happen, right? Maybe Amy would get better, and Jim would get out of jail, and—and they could get married, maybe even live in France. But Amy was dying, they had no future, did they?
Susan, Amy, and Susan’s daughter flew to France and visited Jim in the Rennes prison. They met as a group, then Amy and Jim met privately. The women left the jail and walked outside its walls to a specific spot Jim had told them about. Just stand there and listen, he had said. It was dark. They could barely hear, but were sure they could make something out.
God bless him. He was singing hymns.
Susan felt Jim had a beautiful voice. Not everyone was a fan— his singing drove his cellmates crazy. He had shared a cell with a Brit who was being extradited. They got along at first, but after a while he asked to be moved because Kopp sang his hymns, loudly, at three or four o’clock in morning. Amy made one last visit to see Jim. He did not propose to her. She asked him not to. She did not have much time to live, she was certain of that. Before they said goodbye, Jim elicited a promise from Amy. They would not tell anyone about their relationship, or what was said in private. They would take the secret with them to the grave.
On May 8, the U.S. Justice Department formally submitted a request to the French government for the extradition of James Charles Kopp. A deadline was set for the end of the month for the French courts to decide the matter. Under the extradition treaty between the two countries, no one arrested in France for a crime committed in the United States could face a penalty harsher than a convict would face in France. As the deadline neared, American officials speaking for Attorney General John Ashcroft insisted that the death penalty remain an option should Kopp be found guilty of murder. This, even though the European Court of Human Rights had previously ruled that no individual could be extradited from any European country without a guarantee that capital punishment be taken off the table. The French Court of Appeal in Rennes would make the final decision on the matter.
Herve Rouzaud–Le Boeuf considered the situation an intriguing one. His client had broken no French law. Perhaps he might be charged with illegal entry to the country, using a false passport and so on. Perhaps. Might get a couple of months in jail. After that? If the extradition failed, Mr. Kopp could stay in France or go elsewhere. No Western European country would send him back to the United States to face the death penalty. He could remain in legal limbo indefinitely.
Herve Rouzaud–Le Boeuf faced something of a dilemma. On the one hand he could hope that Ashcroft would agree to drop the death penalty. But that would mean extradition and a murder trial for his client, a possible life sentence. On the other hand, maybe it would be better if there was no deal at all. Then French justice would determine Kopp’s fate. Rouzaud–Le Boeuf had many long talks with his client. The American was an engaging man, highly intelligent, but could be volatile at times, unpredictable. He talked of his family, his father. He told a fantastic story of how he ended up in France: he had learned that the Archbishop in Ireland was a homosexual, had started
