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 Is He Being Framed?
While federal prosecutors insist that James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian,
pro-life activists see gaping holes in the government’s case.

By Philip F. Lawler

He has been compared with Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. He has been linked to a “domestic Taliban” of radical pro-life activists. He spent nearly two years on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, after being indicted for the October 1998 murder of a New York abortionist, Barnett Slepian.

Yet James Kopp is described by his friends as “a total pacifist.” Although he has a long record of involvement with pro-life activism—including more than 20 arrests for blocking abortion clinics—he has never before been accused of any act of violence. He has endured beatings—including some that left him with broken bones—without retaliating or even defending himself.

Kopp—who is now in jail in France, awaiting extradition to the US to face trial for Slepian’s murder—is also a devout Catholic with an active life of piety. He once traveled to Calcutta to work as a volunteer in Mother Teresa’s house for the dying. He has spent countless hours in private Eucharistic adoration. If he is a cold-blooded killer, he is a very unusual one.

Unlike other radical pro-lifers who have been charged with shooting abortionists, Kopp has never attempted to justify the use of violence. Since he was arrested in France last March 29, he has been unwavering in his insistence that he is innocent. His friends, without exception, believe that the FBI has arrested the wrong man.

The Life Dynamics report
When Kopp was captured, his friend Susan Brindle decided that he would need not only a capable defense lawyer, but also a skilled publicist who could convince the mass media that Kopp was innocent. For the latter purpose, she contacted Mark Crutcher, the head of Life Dynamics Incorporated (LDI)—a Texas group with a track record of generating public attention.

At first Crutcher was reluctant to take up the case. He is adamantly opposed to the use of violence, and he was convinced that Kopp was guilty—partly because of the media reports, and partly because Kopp had left the country rather than staying to defend himself in court. But Brindle persuaded him to send LDI attorney Ed Zielinski to France for a meeting with Kopp. If Zielinski was convinced of Kopp’s innocence, Crutcher said, LDI would take up the case.

Zielinski was convinced, and LDI began its own in-depth research of the Slepian case. The result was a 108-page booklet, published last year, which rigorously scrutinized the evidence put forward by the US government in legal documents prepared to support the case for Kopp’s extradition. LDI found large gaps in the government’s case, and suspicious indications that the FBI had rushed to judgment. The subtitle of the LDI report characterized the government’s case against Kopp as “A Conclusion in Search of Its Evidence.”

The evidence
The LDI report made the following points:

• The only evidence placing Kopp anywhere near the crime scene came from a neighbor of Slepian, who saw a stranger on the street several days before the killing, felt that he was acting suspiciously, and took down the number of his car’s license plate. (Oddly, despite her suspicions, she did not report the stranger’s appearance to police until after Slepian was killed.) The license plate belonged to a car owned by James Kopp.

• Slepian was killed by a 7.62-mm bullet, apparently fired by a gunman located in a wooded area about 140 feet from the back of his house. Eventually investigators discovered an SKS rifle which they identified as the murder weapon. However:

- There is no direct evidence that Kopp owned the gun. It was traced to a pawn shop in Tennessee, whose owner did not remember the buyer, who had given a false name and address. (“I only know what the FBI told me,” she said.) The gun was purchased at a time when Kopp was living in Pittsburgh. There is no explanation as to why Kopp would have traveled over 500 miles to purchase a weapon that is readily available at gun shops through the US.
- Ballistics tests failed to establish that the bullet that killed Slepian came from the rifle in question. The FBI explained that with the SKS, “it is not uncommon for the rifle barrel’s interior to change with each shot, thereby precluding the finding of an absolute connection.” But LDI found several other cases in which prosecutors had convicted suspects by using clear ballistic evidence taken from an SKS rifle.
- Slepian was killed by a single shot, fired at a considerable distance—at night, through a window. James Kopp is an unlikely candidate to perform such a feat of marksmanship; he has very poor eyesight, and there is no evidence that he had ever received training or practice in the use of firearms.

• Two weeks after the killing, investigators found a plastic bag buried in the woods near Slepian’s home, containing an empty box of 7.62-mm ammunition and miscellaneous other items including a wristwatch, a baseball cap, and ear muffs. There was no explanation why a sniper would have buried these items—all of which could be easily carried away, and none of which would have roused suspicion.

• Six months after the shooting—after an autumn of fallen leaves, and a winter of heavy snow—the police who had combed the area so thoroughly in October announced that they had inexplicably found the SKS rifle buried 150 feet away from where the other items had been discovered. The rifle had been carefully preserved in a cardboard tube, wrapped in plastic coating.

Why, LDI asked, would a sniper who had just committed murder, and was presumably anxious to leave the scene, take time to dig two different holes? Why would he take extra time to preserve the evidence? Why would he bury his wristwatch? To accept the government’s case against Kopp requires the belief that the killer of Dr. Slepian behaved in a thoroughly irrational and reckless manner, after carrying out a crime that had been meticulously planned.

• The FBI began questioning Kopp’s friends and acquaintances before receiving word about the “suspicious stranger” in Slepian’s neighborhood—in other words, before acquiring the first evidence that connected Kopp with the crime. And numerous items were confiscated from Kopp’s previous residences before the investigators announced the discovery of his personal effects at the scene of the crime.

• Despite their exhaustive investigation, police found only one neighbor who had seen any suspicious activity in Slepian’s neighborhood on the night of the crime. A 14-year-old girl, who had been jogging with her mother when she heard the police sirens, reported that she had seen a man dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt emerge from the bushes of a nearby house and leap into the passenger’s seat of a car that sped away. That report would suggest that Slepian’s killer did not act alone—as Kopp’s prosecutors say he did.

An easy target
If James Kopp did not kill Barnett Slepian, who did? There is one alternative theory.

On the day after the murder, police stopped and questioned two men who had been driving through the neighborhood in a car which matched the description of a vehicle seen prowling slowly through the same streets several days before the crime. These two men were affiliated with a radical group called Refuse and Resist, which has an announced policy of doing “whatever it takes” to preserve legal access to abortion. But police soon released the men, explaining that they were sure that Slepian had been killed by a pro-life extremist.

The murder of Barnett Slepian occurred at a time when the US Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Janet Reno, was pursuing a nationwide investigation of pro-life activists, looking for evidence of a violent conspiracy. (No such evidence was ever uncovered.) The case against James Kopp, LDI concludes, was built by federal authorities who had decided in advance that a pro-life activist was guilty, and wanted to convince the public that the pro-life movement is dangerous.

The LDI report dwells at length on the FBI’s widespread display of a photo that showed a gaunt, haggard, desperate-looking Kopp. It was not a good likeness, yet it was used on Wanted posters and in newspaper reports long after more accurate photos became available. The LDI report concludes:

The FBI wasn’t using the photo in an effort to catch Kopp, and the media wasn’t interested in accuracy. Both used it for one reason and one reason only: It projected an image of Kopp they wanted the public to have.

Philip F. Lawler is the editor of Catholic World Report.

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