The friends of Barnett Slepian, the doctor murdered in October, 1998 for performing abortions, lined up outside the Erie County Courthouse at 8:00 a.m. They were there to hear the sentencing statement of one James C. Kopp, convicted murderer who admitted in an interview and in court stipulations that he'd shot Slepian through the kitchen window of the doctor's home. What everyone wanted to know was how Kopp could say he did it - and still claim he was innocent of the doctor's murder.
At 9:00 a.m. the press and law enforcement officials were admitted to the small courtroom. The remaining chairs were reserved largely for the friends and family of the murdered physician who rapidly filled them. Only three members of the anti-choice contingent were allowed in after others had been seated. One of them, Elizabeth McCormick, is openly and lovingly supportive of Kopp and his actions. Another, Buffalo anti-choice presence Hetty Pascoe says she disavowed the violence as "a follower of Dr. Martin Luther King" but she smiled and nodded at all of the self-justifying statements Kopp later made.
In a surprise move Assistant District Attorney James Marusak spoke to the judge prior to the sentencing. For over 90 minutes he provided facts not admitted into the stipulated evidence upon which Kopp had earlier accepted as true despite his innocent plea. Marusak told a chilling story of a man he said had a "Jekyl and Hyde personality" who as early as 1989 was consulting a Catholic priest in California about the legitimacy of 'justifiable homicide' to 'save babies'. The priest later testified to the authorities that he had told Kopp in no uncertain terms that such actions were utterly disavowed by the Church, a fact to which Kopp clearly turned a deaf ear. Marusak then went on to say how often and in what ways Kopp has portrayed himself as a peaceful man - and how often he had recruited and set up people for clinic blockades without informing them of probable penalties. In one case he involved several protestors as new recruits to an action that cost some of them up to 2 years in prison - while he stayed out of the action and just walked away.
Marusak then devoted time to a long and detailed description of Kopp's careful and methodical preparation - his purchase of a high-powered rifle and ammunition, his stake-out of Dr. Slepian's home, and his three-year practice on tartet ranges to become a crack shot. "Whenever have you seen such deadly preoccupation?" the District Attorney asked the judge. He noted that with Kopp's scientific background (he has an MA in marine biology) he was well aware of human anatomy and that the middle of the back, where Slepian was hit with the bullet, was 'packed with vital organs" where the supersonic bullet would do maximum lethal damage.
A "cowardly assassin" the DA said. He pointed out that from Kopp's vantage point not only could he see Slepian but also Lynne Slepian and at least one of the doctor's sons. Kopp clearly did not care that if he missed he could have killed any and all of the family members which he nearly did as the bullet slammed through the doctor's body and ricocheted around the room nearly striking Mrs. Slepian. Once the deed was done, Kopp buried the rifle in a pre-arranged hole he'd dug at some distance from the scene and fled, reportedly in a car driven by a woman whose identity is not yet determined.
"And this is a peaceful Christian?" stormed Marusak. "God TOLD him to do this?"
After departing the scene Kopp recruited Jennifer Rock, a young woman he'd lured into protests but to whom he'd confided nothing of his murderous intentions. To her he pled for help saying "I'm being framed." It was she who drove him to Mexico to elude authorities and set up a 2 1/2-year international manhunt. When Kopp was finally apprehended after leading authorities to him in Ireland then France, it was through wiretaps with Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, a convicted clinic arsonist. To them Kopp said he was tired of being a fugitive and that he wanted to return to America to take up where he had left off. Upon his arrest French authorities found the instructions on how to use a semi-automatic pistol.
In a retelling of one communication between then-fugitive Kopp and Loretta Marra, his about to be convicted accomplice in flight, he said to her he was glad people loved him - 'but let them love me with cash.' Together Kopp, Marra, and Dennis Malvasi, a convicted clinic arsonist, set out to create the public relations campaign to convince peaceful prolife people that Kopp had been framed. Even after his apprehension in Dinan, France March 29, 2001, he further created a story of his 'frameup' by the local and federal authorities designed explicitly to recruit more money for his cause. And recruit cash he did - he garnered enought from those thinking he was being persecuted to hire one of the most expensive attorneys in America. He had created an arrest manual over the years in which he asserted "when charged with a real crime, I will get as good a lawyer as I can and pull out all the stops in a technical defense."
Nevertheless, his desire for a grandstand, especially in the face of clear and convincing evidence of his guilt, when the end came, Kopp took a technical defense indeed. He admitted he had done each and every thing the police and FBI had alleged - but that he was innocent. This is the tactic long employed by his allies in the Lambs of Christ. In a 1990 stipulated agreement to a 1989 clinic occupation in Buffalo, the Lambs did precisely the same thing - on the agreement as well that each and every person charged be allowed to speak before sentencing. Later the Lambs' leader, paratrooper-turned-priest Norm Weslin, used the tactic to provide a 15-page statement on his 'justification' for breaking the federal injunction outside a clinic in Buffalo. So in the final act of a 4 1/2-hour marathon, Kopp himself spoke.
Stating facts that made no common sense for his becoming not only anti-abortion but pro-actively murderous, he likened himself to John Brown, anti-Nazi resistance people, and myriads of others - generally misinterpreted historically - all to paint himself as a saint. Simultaneously, he painted Bart Slepian as a 'mass murderer" and castigated everyone who knew him including the town of Amherst for 'allowing' Slepian to live there. He accused Slepian of racism, being a eugenicist, and being like a Nazi, ignoring utterly the fact that Slepian was Jewish and would have been a Nazi victim had he lived in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. He stated at the end of the first hour that 'this is the point where I should express remorse." Then he did not. He assaulted Slepian's career, personality, occupation, and even his family as he turned the accusations from himself to the doctor, painting the physician as evil, himself a saint.
In one of the final chilling statements, he made very clear that the violence was not over. Everyone who'd abetted Slepian in the 'mass murder' of 'babies' was at risk, he said. He then told the Judge, Michael D'Amico, that unless he let Kopp go and started prosecuting pro-choice people, the judge himself would be seen as an abetter of murder.
At the end it came to naught. Slepian's assassin was repudiated in both his interpretation of the law and his interpretation of morality. The judge sentenced him to the maximum - 25 years in prison before he can even consider an appeal for parole with a life maximum if the parole officials so deem proper. Since Kopp stated at the close of his erratic, rambling, often-incoherent self-justifying screed that if he were let out and abortion were still legal, he would do it all over again, the chances of his freedom are highly remote. As he was led away by Erie County sheriffs, he turned and said, 'bye Mrs. Slepian.' She did not acknowledge him.
