“It’s an old military tactic,” Van Allen said. “If you leave the victim wounded and incapable of carrying out his skill as a physician, he is a walking, living reminder to other doctors that this can happen to them.”
Van Allen also believed that another shooting was inevitable.
Jekabsons and Penfold reviewed notes, interviewed and reinterviewed those who had called in tips two years earlier. And there was a new lead. One month earlier, on December 10, a package of anonymous anti-abortion hate mail had been delivered to the Hamilton Spectator daily newspaper. It contained six pages of hand-written invective on photocopied newspaper articles and pictures. The package had arrived one month after the shooting of Jack Fainman. The Spectator notified police about the package.
Three weeks later, on December 31, a second hate letter arrived at the Spectator. It, too, was reported to police. Four days later, a letter containing more anti-abortion invective was hand-delivered to Vancouver General Hospital.
Was there any connection between the letters and the shooting of abortion doctors? Was it a break in the case, or did the letters throw more heat than light? Jekabsons, for one, felt they were red herrings.
At 6:50 a.m.on December 31, the same day the second hate letter arrived at the Spectator, a 55-year-old former taxi driver named Ron Wylie banged on the superintendent’s door at his Hamilton apartment building. He wanted the storage locker opened, to get a suitcase.
“I’m going to Vancouver. Need to pack.”
Ron Wylie had been arrested several times at anti-abortion protests in the United States in 1992: at Amherst, New York, during the Spring of Life in April, Milwaukee in May, Baton Rouge in July. He had taken part in the July 7, 1998, street protest in Hamilton staged by Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the PreBorn. Wylie had clearly moved in hardcore anti-abortion circles. When he first heard about the sniper shootings, his instinct was to feel sympathy for the notion of justifiable homicide, and the sniper.
But Wylie claimed that he had nothing to do with the attacks, and that he didn’t know who the sniper was. Jekabsons believed him; he was just out for attention. Hamilton police eventually charged him with five counts of threatening death and he was sentenced to 18 months in jail and three years’ probation. They also took a blood sample from his fingertip. His DNA profile was compared to that retrieved from the DNA sample found on the ski mask in Hugh Short’s driveway four years earlier. The two samples did not match.
Through the early weeks of 1998, Jekabsons and Penfold compiled a list of every criminal incident on record that had an antiabortion angle. The list included everything from arson at a clinic, to a phone call to an obstetrician in which baby lullaby music was played in the background. Ultimately, they interviewed hundreds of people, most of them Canadians, some of them Americans.
One of the unanswered mysteries continued to be “Why Hugh Short?” He was not a high-profile physician before the shooting. His name had never appeared in the media. Dr. Short was no crusader. How did his name get out? Jekabsons asked Short, “Have you ever attended a medical conference on abortion?” Answer: No. Was it possible that his name was spread through the prolife grapevine? They interviewed the few pro-life protesters who regularly marched out in front of Henderson Hospital, where Short had worked. Short was a senior physician, 62 years old, had worked enough years that his name was known in the medical community, if nowhere else. Obviously there were people who knew that he performed abortions. And anti-abortion activists travel together, talk, go to rallies. “Is it possible,” Jekabsons asked one of the Henderson Hospital protesters, “that you inadvertently gave Short’s name to someone, who passed it on until it was heard by the sniper?”
One who knew of Hugh Short was Dr. Carmelo Scime. He was a family physician and local coroner who regularly marched outside Henderson. Scime protested nearly every Friday on Concession Street beginning in 1986, holding high his “Justice for the Unborn” sign. He knew Short was an obstetrician and gynecologist. But then he knew most of the doctors in Hamilton. How did Scime feel when he heard that Hugh Short had been shot? “I felt sorry for the doctor,” he said. “And I thought the culprit should be caught. The doctor’s integrity had been attacked—just like the integrity of the unborn.”
Another protester outside Henderson Hospital was Randy Dyer, who sometimes accompanied Scime. Detectives had interviewed Dyer within two weeks of the shooting in 1995. Jekabsons and Penfold listened to the CD that Dyer had recorded, in which he referred to his girlfriend having an abortion, and spoke to him again. But it was another dead end.
Aivars Jekabsons visited the shooting scenes in Rochester, Vancouver, Winnipeg. Each attack targeted a home in a suburb, maximizing the time it would take for city police to respond. As he stood in each sniper position, the similarities were eerie. They were all well planned, the ground staked out. In Winnipeg, the tracks had gone up past the house, up the riverbank, doubled back again, a route that indicated a thorough inspection of the scene prior to the shooting. The sniper had no intention of getting caught, thought Jekabsons. He planned to keep his reign of terror going.
The detective firmly believed all the shootings were connected, clearly it was the same guy. And he was convinced the shooter had not acted alone. The case haunted Jekabsons, always would. Had they done everything possible, explored every angle, 100 percent? By the fall of 1998 he had a list of names of pro-life radicals in Canada and the United States. One of them was almost certainly the sniper, or knew who the shooter was. The name of James Charles Kopp was there, but it was just one among many.
Chapter 11 ~ Decidedly Distasteful
On January 29, 1998, a bomb exploded at a women’s clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing an off-duty police officer. The culprit would turn out to be domestic terrorist and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. Jim Kopp was staying at Doris Grady’s house in Pittsburgh, as he often did during his travels in the U.S. northeast. Jim sat with Doris and watched the news of the explosion on TV.
“What do you think about that?” Doris asked.
He said nothing.
Doris continued: “I mean, I don’t know if I really have a problem with it. It’s just bricks and mortar. Just a mill.”
“But what if somebody gets hurt?” replied Jim. “That’s the problem. What if, say, a firefighter comes in there to help, totally innocent, and he gets hurt?”
One thing was certain, the government would pin the bombing on pro-lifers. Clinton and his attorney general, Janet Reno, were out to crush the movement. “Someday, you know, they’ll come for me,” Jim said. “Whatever they say about me, don’t believe it. Don’t believe it until you talk to me.”
Doris enjoyed Jim’s visits. They chatted, watched rental movies. Jim enjoyed old classics, Second World War movies like Midway, which struck a chord in him, focusing as it did on the Pacific—an underappreciated theater, he always felt—where his father had served. Among more recent movies, he loved The Usual Suspects, the convoluted thriller starring Kevin Spacey. So many good lines: “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.” Lots of twists, where nothing is as it seems. Spacey had the best line in the movie, right near the end: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled on man was to convince him that he didn’t exist.” A great line, although not original to the movie.