Local pro-choice activists and clinic workers were shocked. They had thought of the pro-lifers as noisy and pushy and obnoxious. But shooting someone? By the time the evening news rolled around, the media were already reflecting on the abortion battle:
TV Anchorwoman (wearing a Remembrance Day poppy): No one knows for sure what provoked the attack on Dr. Romalis, but tonight police throughout the Lower Mainland are stepping up protection for people who work in Vancouver’s abortion clinics. If this shooting is related, it’s the most serious act of anti-abortion violence in Canada.
(Visuaclass="underline" A woman, face darkened.)
Narrator: We can’t identify her. She’s afraid she and her family are in danger, too.
Woman: I’ve frequently said that in Canada we are safe. We have crazy people after us, but they don’t carry guns.
Narrator: Today she realizes she may have been wrong. (Quick cut to pro-life firebrand Gord Watson’s bearded face, a camcorder date on the screen reading August 3, 1994, 11:44 a.m. He’s shown lecturing a woman about to enter an abortion clinic in Vancouver.)
Watson: If you kill this baby, you will be murdering your own child… Do you believe there is a God? (He glowers into the lens.) Get that stupid camera out of my face. (Picture scrambles as he shoves the camera away.) You get out of my way, lady, or you’re going to get it.
(Cut to mainstream, nonviolent pro-lifer Will Johnston, a member of Physicians for Life.)
Johnston: We feel revulsion at this cowardly and murderous attack on Dr. Romalis.
(Cut back to Gord Watson.)
Watson: This country has perpetrated violence for a generation against unborn children and that violence is now coming against the people who perpetrated it.
Police searched in the laneway behind the Romalis home, piecing together what happened. It had been dark when the shooter crept silently up the alley, past one backyard, two, three, four, five—about 110 paces to the spot. He would have seen the top quarter of the house over the fence, the upstairs windows. There was a Beware of Dog sign, but no dog. The Romalis family had just returned from a week-long vacation. The dog was still in a kennel in Langley. There were two battered silver-gray metal garbage cans in the square cubby.
The sniper had taped the lids down with silver duct tape—better stability, less noise when taking up a position. He rested the rifle on top of the cans and cleared dead leaves from inside the cubby, which was elevated off the ground a few inches. It was big enough for him to kneel inside on his right knee, left elbow steady on the lids, hand cradling the forestock of the AK rifle, his right hand and trigger finger free. He pointed through a missing panel in the fence, toward the sliding glass door of the kitchen. And waited.
It was a well-planned attack. The first bullet neatly punctured the glass of the sliding door, creating a spiders web of cracks; the second shot, the one that shattered the doctor’s thigh, hit lower, splitting the glass above it in a V-shape, shards of glass flying from the impact.
The two bullets were mangled—the one from Romalis’s thigh and the one that went through his chair and lodged in a closet door in the kitchen. Difficult to get a make on their type. Bullets only hold their shape in the movies. But these could still be useful in determining what kind of firearm had been used. When a round is fired, the barrel makes identifiable markings on the bullet. Those markings tie the bullet to a particular firearm. Under a microscope the bullets from the Romalis shooting seemed to have rifling marks known in ballistics terminology as “four barrel markings with a right-handed twist”—four “lands” and “grooves” with a right-hand twist to them. The marks were characteristic of an assault rifle such as an AK-47.
Police searched up and down the laneway, looking in composters and other garbage cans for clues.
“Got one.”
The uniformed cop bent over a wooden enclosure. He reached into a composter several houses down and picked out the object with his gloved hand. It was a cartridge, a live round. And another. And another—20 unused cartridges in all, all of them AK-47 military hard-points. An important clue. Or was it? It didn’t add up. Why would the sniper have carried so much ammunition? Surely he had no intention of showering the house with bullets? And having fired and fled, why leave the cartridges? Another question: was the sniper trying to kill? A Vancouver detective named George Kristensen was assigned to the case. He heard a theory making the rounds that the sniper was trying to wound the doctor, end a medical career but not a life. Not a chance, thought the detective. It was just his opinion, but there was no way on God’s green earth you could tell where a bullet would end up after it was fired through a window like that.
Chapter 9 ~ Sneaky bastard
Jim Kopp spent Christmas in Delaware with his sister Anne. Jim would just show up unannounced with his dirty laundry, unshaven, looking like he’d been living in the woods for months. Then he’d be gone again.
On December 30, 1994, John Salvi, a 24-year-old drifter, sprayed two Boston-area abortion clinics with gunfire, killing two women who worked there and wounding several other people. Anne was pro-life, but never took part in protests.
“So is this what’s happening to the movement?” she asked Jim about the violence.
“No-no,” he said. “It’s not good for the movement.” Early in the new year, Pope John Paul II released an encyclical
letter, Evangelium Vitae. Jim always followed the Pontiff’s words carefully. It was in the encyclical that he used the phrase “culture of death” to describe the combination of laws, political and social institutions that undermined the value of life. Abortion, he said, is “deliberate and direct killing… we are dealing with murder.”
In the summer of 1995 Jim Kopp bought a car—although bought is probably the wrong word. He filed no income tax forms from 1994 through 1997. In 1995, his official earnings totaled less than $4,000. He worked odd jobs here and there, handyman work. He got the old beater from Loretta Marra, a green 1977 Dodge Aspen registered with the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles under a new license plate number, BFN 595. In the fall he spent time in Vermont, lived in a farmhouse in Swanton, a town of 6,000 near St. Albans, about ten minutes from the Canadian border. He stayed with Anthony and Anne Kenny. Anthony Kenny was among the 95 anti-abortion protesters, including Kopp, arrested and charged with trespassing outside one of the two women’s clinics in Burlington, Vermont, a few years earlier. Jim also spent time in Fairfax,Vermont. He had met a young woman named Jennifer Rock through the movement and for a time he lived at Rock’s parents’ home on Buck Hollow Road. Just passing through, he told them.
He got in the green Aspen and headed north. On the evening of November 3, near Ancaster, Ontario, he was pulled over and released by a police officer on a routine traffic stop. One week later, Ancaster physician Hugh Short was shot and wounded by a high-powered rifle fired through his den window.
Ancaster, Ontario
Friday November 10, 1995
Hamilton Major Crime Unit detective Mike Holk squinted through the windshield into the blackness, the wipers battling a cold hard rain. Where the hell was the house on Sulphur Springs Road? For the Hamilton detectives charged with cracking the mystery of the shooting earlier that night, finding the crime scene was a chore in itself. It was an appropriate start to a case which, from the word go, would be like nothing they had ever experienced.