“Jim, your face is everywhere. You have to get out of here.”
They got in her car and headed for Newark, New Jersey. (Jim had changed plates again on his car, but he knew he could no longer use the wanted black Cavalier anywhere in the country.) He should get on a plane and leave the country, now, he said, until his name could be cleared. No, argued Jennifer. Had he seen the papers, the news on TV? His face was everywhere. Not to Newark airport. They should drive, in her car, south.
The FBI hit the places where Kopp had been, retracing his steps, interviewing people he had stayed with, even questioning a mailman who confirmed he had delivered mail to a “Jack Crotty,” one of Kopp’s aliases. They searched a Laurel Avenue residence in Newark, Delaware, and seized computer disks containing eight Texas driver’s licenses under various names. They searched room 148 at the Travel Inn, 8920 Gulf Freeway, Houston, Texas, and seized a telephone book. On Thursday, November 6, agents visited TV station WOWK in Huntington, West Virginia. Kopp had once been arrested at a protest outside a clinic in nearby Charleston. The station provided video from coverage of the scene. He was on the tape. For the FBI, finding contacts of Kopp’s was not the problem. He had fleeting pro-life acquaintances all over the country, people like Gannon, Betty, Anthony Kenny. But these were not the type of contacts who held the key to catching him, they knew nothing of his movements. It seemed as if he had no intimate friends, no trusted allies he would turn to at a time like this. Even his sister didn’t know much about him. It was as if James Kopp had planned it that way: “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.” ***
From his office in Quantico, Virginia, FBI profiler James Fitzgerald advised agents in the field on what kinds of questions to ask James Kopp’s friends and family, about his background, personal history. Ask the right questions, in the right order. Did he change his appearance much over the years? What about his relationships?
Fitzgerald studied the information coming in. The subject knew many people, had traveled the country, and the world, extensively. His emerging analysis suggested James Charles Kopp was a conflicted individual. He was well educated, holding a master’s degree, but had held mostly menial jobs. He was deeply religious—yet apparently a killer. Kopp clearly belonged to an extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement. But even within that wing he was a bit of a loner, marched to his own drummer, did his own thing. Nonviolent, his friends said, but Fitzgerald sensed an escalation in Kopp’s thinking about how he should combat abortion. The profiler believed that Kopp had been the one who pulled the trigger in all three of the Canadian attacks, in addition to the Rochester shooting, and the Slepian murder.
Question: Would Kopp try again?
Surely not, thought Fitzgerald, now that he was a wanted man, now that his cover was blown. He would try to disappear. It would be too risky to try again in the foreseeable future. Kopp fitted the sniper mentality: calculating, careful, nonconfrontational. He would not attack again, not unless he was motivated to simply taunt the FBI. And that was highly unlikely. He was too smart for that, his mission too strictly defined.
Among the first people agents interviewed was Jim’s stepmother, Lynn Kopp, in Texas. She talked about the family: Chuck Kopp, ex-Marine, disciplinarian; Nancy Kopp, devout mother; the twin brother; three sisters, two of whom had died young. Jim’s past relationships? There was Jenny, the girlfriend at UC Santa Cruz. At least, that’s what Lynn had heard. She had never met Jenny, had never seen Jim with any girl, actually. From what she heard, the relationship with Jenny didn’t last long, and Jim went berserk when he learned she’d had an abortion.
Fitzgerald examined the interview transcripts. Interesting. Kopp had been extremely close to his mother. And over the years, on the road, protesting, he had had strong associations with women. Yet he never married, and there was no evidence of a long-term relationship with a female. Most of the relationships, if not all, appeared to have been platonic. Women were the key to James Kopp’s future, Fitzgerald was convinced that if he were to communicate with anyone while on the run, either for shelter or to resume his sniper campaign, it would definitely be a woman, somewhere.
There was a list of activists who had joined Kopp at protests in Vermont. An FBI agent had titled one document, “Vermont Rescuers—February 21, 1990 to May 9, 1990,” and included addresses. There were several women on the list. Agents had already located a few of them. But there was one who had not yet been found. Her name was Loretta Marra. Agents had discovered, among Kopp’s possessions in James Gannon’s attic, a magazine with abortion clinic bomber Dennis Malvasi’s mailing address on it. Malvasi was known by the authorities to be married to Loretta. She had been photographed under surveillance at Malvasi’s Brooklyn apartment back in October 1997. But she had since fallen off the radar. Perhaps Kopp would try to contact her.
Chapter 13 ~ On the Lam
After leaving New Jersey, Jennifer Rock and Jim Kopp drove for more than 30 hours, taking turns at the wheel, sleeping in the car. Jim altered his appearance on the road, bleached his hair blond to match the photo on the fake West Virginia driver’s license. There were long stretches where Jim said nothing at all to her. “The government has done this,” she said. “Set you up.”
Jim nodded and said nothing.
“I’ll never be able to see my family again,” he finally said. It is 1,986 miles from Newark to the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas. They crossed the border, parked near an airport. The thin blond man got out of the car and disappeared. On November 8, Rock drove back into the United States and headed north. When she returned to New York she dialed a pager number belonging to a “John Rizzo.”
The next day, FBI special agent Walter Steffens Jr. searched a lot in a truck stop campground in Kent County, Delaware. The lot belonged to a man named Javier Hernandez, who had bought it from James Kopp. Kopp had owned the property for three years, but his name did not appear on the deed. The land included a trailer and camper top. Steffens talked to neighbors who said they recalled Kopp living in the trailer about a year and a half before. He searched the camper and found a priority mail envelope containing an updated résumé for Kopp, detailing his work history through April 1993. And he found a permit in the name of Dwight Hanson for use of the Elkneck Shooting Range, located about an hour’s drive away. There were four newsletters from another shooting range nearby, the Delmarva Sportsman Association, addressed to Kevin James Gavin at a Maryland post office box. Steffens visited the post office box and found another shooting range permit. Back at the FBI lab, the documents were dusted for fingerprints. The prints on the papers matched each other. They also matched fingerprints on file for James Charles Kopp.
That same day, agents searched the house at 1073 Buck Hollow Road, Fairfax, Vermont. It was a house belonging to a relative of Jennifer Rock. On Wednesday, November 11, agents again searched James Gannon’s home in Whiting, New Jersey. They seized four boxes containing papers, maps, computer disks, books, notebooks, an address book. There was an envelope addressed to Jack Crotty, c/o Doris and Scott, Pittsburgh.