The French poet Charles Baudelaire coined it in a short story in 1864, chiding the myopia of those who celebrated the triumph of the Enlightenment. Jim Kopp, who took the long view on things, understood completely.
He continued to earn money doing odd jobs, he used the alias Clyde Svenson while doing construction and carpentry work, in exchange for living in an unfurnished apartment in Jersey City. He had some small deals on the go. He and a man named Kent Richter sold a camper they owned in Kent County in Delaware. Jim gave $7,000 from the sale to young friend Jennifer Rock, for her to put in a bank account for him.
In May he was in Florida. That same month there were ten butyric acid attacks on clinics in Miami, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Daytona Beach, and Clearwater. Shortly after that he created eight false Texas driver’s licenses for himself and other pro-lifers. In July there were five acid attacks in New Orleans and four in Houston.
He spent time that summer at his friend James Gannon’s home in Whiting, New Jersey. Gannon always made Jim feel welcome.
But a man named Alex, who shared Gannon’s place at the retirement village, didn’t care much for Jim just dropping in all the time, so he also stayed with Elizabeth Lewis, an elderly woman in the village. She noticed him always writing on the computer. What was he working on?
On July 17, at 2:49 p.m., Jim Kopp’s black Chevy Cavalier entered Canada at the Queenston border crossing. Six days later the car returned to the United States at Niagara Falls.
“Abortion is the killing of potential life. It is not pretty. It is not easy. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be necessary.” Dr. Bart Slepian had insisted on saying that part in his speech. His niece, Amanda Robb, had helped him craft the words for a presentation he made to a Buffalo group called Medical Students for Choice.
Why would Bart say those words to a pro-choice audience? He had to know pro-life activists would jump all over a quote like that, to illustrate that even abortion providers like Dr. Barnett Slepian had moral issues with the procedure. But Bart, being Bart, was simply telling it as he saw it, and damn the political optics. Quite obviously most terminated fetuses would otherwise live. But abortion was legal. Women requested them. OBs were needed to perform the surgery safely. Bart was an OB. And so he provided the service. He had a full-time private obstetrics and gynecology practice, where he provided prenatal and postnatal care. He also performed abortions at the GYN Womenservices clinic in downtown Buffalo. In one sense he was just doing his job, but Bart had become a visible player in the abortion wars in the area. Earlier in the year he was presented with a Choice Achievement Award at a rally in Buffalo marking the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Bart was 52 years old and had made it, climbed the ladder, was a successful doctor, family man. His father, Philip, had died nine years earlier, but had lived to see the success Bart had battled to become. Bart lived with his wife Lynne, and their four sons, Andrew, 15, Brian, 13, Michael, 10, and Philip, 7, in a large house on Roxbury Park in Amherst. It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood except for a couple of streets, like Roxbury, where the homes were palatial. Some in the area dubbed Bart’s home “the Taj Mahal.” It was a beautiful area, mature trees, lush lawns, parkland and sprawling backyards.
As for the storm of protest surrounding his professional life, Bart joked darkly about his fate, as was his custom. Other OBs who provided abortion services were wearing bulletproof vests on the advice of police. Bart? He cracked that it wasn’t necessary, they’d probably just shoot him in the head anyway. But in fact Bart bought a vest, and got in the habit of watching his back, checking under his car for explosives.
Lynne bought him a parrot once; Bart said the bird would probably outlive him—and that they should teach the parrot how to say a eulogy. He joked that, at his funeral, friends should all come in separate cars, it would make for a longer procession that way. Typical Bart. But the jokes revealed more than just his predilection for black humor. Perhaps Bart could sense that he was on a collision course that was inevitable.
Wednesday, October 14, 1998
Eyes scan the White Pages of a phone book. Residential listing for D. Slepian, 93 Garden Parkway, Grand Island, New York. Phone ringing, 7:30 p.m. A woman named Ruth Slepian answers.
“Hello?” she says.
“Is Dr. Slepian there, please?” asks a man’s voice.
Doctor? Ruth has a husband named David. He is not a physician. Her father-in-law, also named Slepian, was a doctor. But he has passed on.
“Dr. Slepian—is dead,” she says.
Pause.
“Right. I don’t think so,” the man mumbles, the words barely audible.
He hangs up.
Prepare. Plan. Remove the vagaries of the moving target. Later, near the doctor’s private practice, a vanity plate on the car. “SLEPIAN.” Could shoot him right here, right now. Of course, that would mean shooting across the street, can’t imagine that would be appreciated, he reflected. Hard surfaces, traffic, residences, businesses, plenty of chance for ricochets.
Sunday, October 18. A jogger, lanky, moving slowly, ungainly, through the leafy neighborhood, so slow that he was nearly walking, up Paradise Road in Amherst. He wore glasses, had a reddish goatee. The next day, early morning, the jogger was in the same neighborhood, where two streets named Roxbury Park and Deer Run intersected.
“Hello,” said a woman passing by him. The jogger said nothing. Friday, October 23, early morning, he shuffled through the neighborhood in his dark tracksuit. A landscaper working at a home made eye contact.
“Hello,” said the worker.
“Hi,” replied the jogger, before slowly disappearing around the corner.
Later, a car passed through the neighborhood. It was a black Chevy Cavalier. It glided through a boulevard stop sign. There was a police cruiser nearby. The Cavalier made a U-turn, left the area, slowly, deliberately, with the cruiser following at low speed. The cop turned away, let him go. A close call.
Kill? A thousand ways to kill someone, really, he reflected later. Blow up their car. Do a Rambo thing and empty a magazine into them. Run them over with a car. Put nicotine acid on their steering wheel.
Wounding, however, is tricky business.
The phone rang at Jim Fitzgerald’s desk inside the FBI complex at Quantico, Virginia. It was early October. Fitzgerald, surrounded by stacks of papers in his office, picked up. It was the FBI’s legal attaché office in Ottawa. Fitzgerald had been with the bureau 13 years, grew up in Philadelphia. His official FBI title was supervisory special agent with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. One branch, of the unit was for training and education, the other, Fitzgerald’s branch was operational. In popular culture, though, Jim Fitzgerald was simply a profiler. It was too sexy a term for Hollywood and the media to resist. The psycho-thriller Silence of the Lambs—on which John Douglas, one of the original FBI profilers in the 1970s, served as technical consultant—ensured that. Some started to call analysts like Fitzgerald “the Silence of the Lambs boys.”
The FBI called them “psychological profilers,” as early as the 1970s, back when behavioral psychology was a relatively new tool for deconstructing criminal minds, either to identify suspects, predict violent acts, or break down suspects once they were arrested. The titles had changed, however. “Psychological profiler” left the door open to cagey defense lawyers attacking their credibility in court. “Are you, in fact, FBI Special Agent Smith, a trained psychologist? No? Then why are you called a ‘psychological profiler’?” They became, instead, officially, “behavioral analysts.” Jim Fitzgerald worked in Unit Number One with nine other agents.