Posted on 09/07/2001 2:57:57 PM PDT by RobertJames
This is an extensive read, but flows like a novel - 'cause you keep saying this must be fiction.
How could there possibly be such blatant FBI misconduct in the Kopp investigation?
Burying a rifle at the scene of the shooting makes no sense. So will they ask a jury to believe that he buried the rifle BEFORE Slepian was shot?
I don't know, maybe so. Should be an interesting trial.
See "October 24, 1998 — NEIGHBORHOOD VISITORS QUESTIONED
. . .8. According to newspaper accounts, after the initial questioning by the APD in the Slepian neighborhood, nothing is reported about an ongoing investigation. In fact, the FBI apparently didn’t investigate this situation until November 13, 1998, when they went to the home of the woman who loaned them her car. On November 19th, the FBI issued a nationwide bulletin to law enforcement that they were seeking Stauber and Gingerich for questioning. Then, shortly after a November 20th meeting between FBI agents, Stauber and his attorney — during which Stauber refused to answer questions — the investigation was evidently halted.
Who can claim that the Reno "Justice" Department was above this type of frame up?
From the InsightMag.com article by James P. Lucier
In June, U.S. authorities sought to get around French objections to the death penalty and agreed they would not seek capital punishment for Kopp if he is convicted. Shortly after that, Ashcroft said, "Kopp committed a heinous crime that deserves severe punishment. We need to send a strong message that no matter what our differences are, violence is not the solution."
If this is an exact quote by AG Ashcroft, it shows that he has already determined that James Kopp is guilty as charged.
What are the chances that Mr. Kopp will receive a fair trial?
Of course, who is going to make the FBI accountable for their sloppiness and corruption? No one in Congress will, no one at DOJ will and GW Bush will not. They like it the way it is.
***Sounds similar to the famous movie line from the corrupt Mexican Federales : "Badges?, We need no stinking badges!"
See reply #10.
Perhaps he is unaware of the shortcomings and possible rigging of this investigation. But he surely is not unaware of Reno's other juiced up witch hunts. This stinks to high Heaven.
In this fiction masquerading as fact, they would surely be the ones the 'clues' point to, unless you're the clueless Feds.
Here's a web site taking up Kopp's cause: JAMES KOPP
Free Uncle Jimmy! We always knew he was innocent!
---Dr. Brian Kopp (proud2brc)
(actually, no relation)
http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,291847-412,00.shtml
Denies He Killed New York Doctor In 1998 Sniper Attack Lawyer Says France Shouldn't Extradite If Execution
A Possibility Network Of Violent Anti-Abortion Rights Activists Still Supports Him
AP, RENNES, June 7, 2001
Kopp was on the FBI's Most Wanted list until his capture this March.
(CBS) James Charles Kopp told a French court Thursday he did not kill an abortion doctor, and his lawyer said assurances by the United States that it would not seek the death penalty against him could not be believed.
One of the FBI's most-wanted fugitives, Kopp was captured March 29 near Rennes after a two-year manhunt. He is charged with the 1998 murder of Dr. Bernard Slepian, a Buffalo obstetrician who performed abortions.
"I am innocent of the death of Doctor Slepian," Kopp said in a brief statement. Asked outside the courthouse, if he committed the murder, Kopp said, "Hell no, I didn't."
Inside, the issue was not Kopp's guilt but America's death penalty. France abolished capital punishment in 1981 and is always reluctant to send a suspect home to face execution. The government wants a guarantee that Kopp would not be put to death, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.
Prosecutor Dominique Matthieu argued in favor of extradition, explaining that the U.S. Embassy in Paris had sent a letter promising the death penalty would neither be sought nor carried out against Kopp.
But Kopp's French lawyer, Herve Rouzaud-Le Boeuf, said that given President Bush's track record on capital punishment, he's not inclined to believe the letter.
"I cannot forget that he was the governor of Texas. I cannot forget that Texas has been the state where there has been so many … executions in the past," he said.
"We do not even know who wrote the letter. It was not signed. It has no legal value," Le Boeuf argued. He said a better guarantee would come from U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
By Jeff Stein salon.com/news/feature/1999/05/06/abortion
Thursday's indictment in the assassination of a Buffalo abortion doctor comes as cold comfort to two other men who were wrongly sought for questioning in the high-profile case.
James Kopp, a well known anti-abortion demonstrator, was charged Thursday with the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, director of Buffalo's most prominent abortion clinic, last October 23. Authorities said DNA tests linked a hair found near Slepian's house to the 44-year-old suspect, who vanished shortly after a rifle shot struck the doctor as he stood in his kitchen. Kopp's car was later found abandoned at the Newark, N.J., airport, but he remains at large. The investigation has been criticized for delay -- especially for a six-month lag time in finding a scoped rifle, buried in the woods behind Kopp's house, that investigators now believe was the murder weapon. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation has yet to release any ballistic test results on the rifle.
One detail linking Kopp to the case was a report that Kopp was spotted cruising Slepian's neighborhood in the days leading up to the doctor's murder. And in a curious sidelight to the case, two other men were spotted in Kopp's neighborhood the night after his killing. Weeks later they were soon subjected -- wrongly -- to the intense, chilling, and perplexing attention of the FBI.
The two men, longtime left-wing activists in their 50s, suspect they were picked up for Driving While Political.
The twisted tale of mistaken identity began on Oct. 24 when Robert Stauber and Michael Gingerich, of Cleveland, Ohio, borrowed a friend's car and drove to Buffalo to attend a vigil for Slepian, who ran western New York's primary abortion facility, which served women from as far away as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where there are restrictions on the procedure.
With the wrong directions, they drove to Slepian's home in suburban Amherst, N.Y., instead of to the city clinic where memorial services were scheduled. Seeing no vigil on the dark street, they inquired of a passing patrol car. The police asked for identification, which they supplied, and sent them on their way. They attended the vigil and returned to Cleveland the next day.
In the ensuing weeks the FBI announced it was seeking Kopp for questioning in connection with Slepian's murder. On Nov. 13, however, the official finger of fate pointed to Stauber and Gingerich. Several FBI agents showed up outside the apartment of Debbie Szemborski, owner of the car that Stauber and Gingerich had borrowed to drive to Buffalo. Questioned tersely through the intercom, because she refused to let them in, Szemborski explained why her car had been spotted there.
Meanwhile Stauber, 52, a skeptical man with the wisp of a goatee, quickly got word the FBI was looking for him. He immediately called a lawyer, Mark A. Kaiser, who notified the FBI he would arrange a meeting with his client. Apparently, that was a red flag for the hard-charging G-men -- especially because of Stauber and Gingerich's affiliation with the Revolutionary Communist Party, a small Maoist group with a well-known loathing for the U.S government. Or, as Kaiser put it, people who "harbor serious distrust of the FBI and an unwillingness to talk to any FBI agents."
Handed a bad script, the FBI played to type.
The agents went back to Szemborski's apartment, pounded on her door, and demanded to be let in for questioning, according to Kaiser's account. She refused. Then they showed up at the lawyer's house, even though -- or maybe because -- he'd called the local FBI office, explained a scheduling conflict for that evening, and arranged for the agents to meet his clients the next day.
The agents rushed back to Szemborski's building, let themselves in and began pounding on her apartment door.
"I have nothing to say to you," she said. "Call my attorney. Go away."
"If something comes of this matter," the agent allegedly said, clearly meaning the Slepian killing, Szemborski could be charged "as an accomplice."
When Szemborski told them to leave, the agents began working the hallway, pounding on her neighbor's doors.
Kaiser says he finally arranged for the agents to meet Stauber in a downtown restaurant at 10:30 a.m. the next day. They showed up at noon, after Kaiser called several times. Ever tactful, they tried to brush aside Kaiser and interrogate Stauber at the table.
No deal, Stauber and Kaiser said. Is he a suspect? the lawyer asked the agents. No, they said. A material witness? No. Then, Kaiser said, Stauber has nothing to say.
End of story.
Or it should have been. Instead, less than 24 hours after the restaurant parley with the FBI, a Cleveland television broadcast opened dramatically: "The FBI says there are two more men they think might have information about the sniper slaying of Dr. Barnett Slepian."
According to the FBI press release, "The FBI office in Cleveland asked police across the country Friday to look for Ronald Stauber and Michael Gingrich [sic]." The broadcast said, "the FBI report indicates a connection between the two men and Kopp, who was reportedly sighted in Mexico recently."
The Associated Press filed an account, quoting an Amherst, N.Y., policeman saying, "there's a tie-in there, that's all it says." That was enough. The story circled the globe in an instant, picked up by radio and television stations, the New York Times and other leading papers. And, of course, the Internet. Months later the newsletter of NOW, the National Organization for Women, repeated the erroneous report, although it later issued a correction. No one else has.
State police cruisers everywhere, meanwhile, still had the "BOLO" -- "be on the lookout" --bulletin in their computers. It may still be there. The FBI won't say. In an interview last month in Buffalo, where he'd gone to protest anti-abortion demonstrations, Stauber remained genuinely puzzled by what had happened to him.
"It was not clear where they were going with this, or what they were trying to accomplish," he said. As a hardened leftist, he suspected some sort of political motivation. But he can't understand how the FBI could pull a frame-up since he hadn't the remotest connection with Slepian, beyond paying respects to the dead man and his family the night after his murder.
According to the FBI, it was all just a misunderstanding, a mistake. "A rookie screwed up," was one exasperated explanation from an agent who asked not to be identified. Another FBI source suggested blithely that it was probably just a clerical error.
"Those [bulletins] are handled by clerks and secretaries," the source said. "They have a whole pile of them to type up. They just take them from the pile and put them in the system. Sometimes they don't catch up for days." Stauber, for his part, still gnaws on the events that gave him unwanted notoriety.
"They had hundreds of leads they were following up. How come just our names got into the paper?" he wonders. "And after we had talked to them? It doesn't make sense." He shakes his head.
The FBI says it's looking into it.
salon.com | May 6, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Jeff Stein covers criminal justice and national defense issues for Salon News.
The following significant article was published in the Dec. 10 issue of the U.S. The Wanderer newspaper. It presents the case that James Kopp, the prime suspect in the shooting death of abortionist Barnett Slepian, is an unlikely personality to have done the deed and may have been set up as the fall guy for a murder committed to protect the presidency of Bill Clinton. The article also reveals that much violence and criminal activity related to the abortion industry comes from within the seamy industry itself.
Investigators Cast a Wide Net To Find Abortionist's Murderer
By Paul Likoudis
Reprinted with permission from The Wanderer.
BUFFALO, N.Y.—Since the Oct. 23rd assassination of Buffalo area abortionist Dr. Barnett Slepian, investigators from the FBI, the New York state police, and the Amherst Police Department have chased down hundreds of leads and interrogated hundreds of America's pro-life citizens in their effort to find James C. Kopp, sought as a material witness.
Performing abortions is a high-risk business, with abortionists often dying by suicide, gangland style executions, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and many other noteworthy causes.
But police are convinced that Slepian's murder is a pro-life "hit" and not just a typical end for an abortionist.
Among some of the more grisly—though not exactly atypical—deaths of prominent abortionists are these few from the files of the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago, provided to The Wanderer for this report: • Abortionist Lynn D. Weller of Kansas City was shot to death in his home in September, 1973 by two masked gunmen, hired by rival abortionist Dr. William Carlos, who was angry that Weller was having an affair with his ex-wife.
• Notorious Chicago abortion mill owner Kenneth Yellen literally died in the gutter after his gangland-style execution in November, 1979: five shots in the head as he walked to work. Police discovered that Yellen—who also was involved in the gambling, prostitution, and pornography- businesses —was more than $1 million in debt.
• George Patterson, who operated abortion mills in Alabama and Florida, was gunned down outside a porn theater in downtown Mobile in august, 1993, where he was a regular customer.
But wanted by the authorities as a federal material witness in the Slepian case is a man who—as everyone who knows him will attest—is fundamentally incapable of committing a violent act.
"If I had a nickel for every time someone told me it couldn't be James C. Kopp," one Amherst police investigator told The Wanderer, "I'd be a rich man. But the fact is, his car was seen in Slepian's neighborhood and we want to talk to him."
"James Kopp is wanted as a federal material witness only:” insisted the Amherst Police's Assistant Chief Frank Olesko, "and that is the scope of our wanting him at this time, so that he could be talked to about what he saw and did in the neighborhood at that time and what he knows."
In their effort to find Kopp, police investigators have set up a nationwide dragnet with a zeal that Buffalo News Washington correspondent Doug Turner described as "not seen since the Communist scares of the 1940s and 1950s, and J. Edgar Hoover's curiosity about black leaders of the 1960s."
"Just about everyone I know who has ever participated in a rescue has been questioned," Joan Andrews Bell told The Wanderer in a telephone interview from her New Jersey home.
Noted pro-life attorney John Broderick told The Wanderer that he knows at least a half-dozen New York City area pro-lifers who know Kopp—as he does—and who have received subpoenas to testify before a grand jury in Buffalo investigating the murder.
Both Broderick and Bell cannot believe that Kopp was involved in any way, shape, or form.
Bell said she has known Kopp since 1988, when he began writing letters to her while she was serving time in a Florida prison. They subsequently rescued together in Vermont, where they both served a three-month prison sentence.
"Kopp is a very gentle person," she said. "He has an arrest record for nonviolence. He is the most low-key, quiet, spiritual person I know. He is very Catholic, very contemplative, and the main focus of his life is praying for souls. He would never shoot an abortionist. He would never endanger a soul in jeopardy....
"I don't think Kopp ever held a gun," she continued. "I don't even think he has ever held a mousetrap. He's just a very gentle person."
Attorney Broderick concurs. "James Kopp was a guest in my home three, four, five, maybe six times," he said. "He is an absolutely tremendous guy, the exact opposite of a shooter—and in this case, we're talking about a professional shooter who calculated and carried out a well-thought-out plan.
"Kopp is a very dedicated pro-lifer, a saintly person, and totally nonviolent."
Then why, The Wanderer asked Broderick, doesn't Kopp come forward?
"I think—but I don't know— he's afraid they'll fabricate a case against him."
According to a member of the Amherst Police Department's task force investigating Slepian's murder, Kopp is only sought for questioning as a federal material witness because his car, bearing Vermont license plates, was seen within a half-mile of Slepian's home near the time of the shooting.
A person suspected of being a material witness, said Broderick, "can stay in jail a long time."
Also caught in the wide net cast by the federal, state, and local investigators for questioning are any individuals who ever rescued with Fr. Norman Weslin's Lambs of Christ, because Kopp rescued with the Lambs on at least three occasions, though he wasn't a Lamb "per se," according to Bell.
Officials involved in the investigation can neither confirm nor deny that there are any suspects in the murder, but the Buffalo media, led by the avidly pro-abortion Buffalo News, cranks out—almost daily—stories that portray pro-lifers as conspirators conducting a campaign of terror, murder, arson, and bombings.
Typical of the News' anti-prolife agitprop is a Sunday, Nov. 8th front-page story,
"Radical Fringe's Violent Bond Born in Confinement." The story by staff writer Phil Fairbanks opened:
"Shadowy and secretive, they operate as an underground, close-knit and tight-lipped, using names like Iron Maiden, Baby Huey, and Ann the Lamb.
"They preach guns, explosives, and butyric acid, and their targets are clinics and doctors, all of it in the name of protecting God's children....
"[James] Kopp is viewed as one of the leading activists in a small network of anti-abortion radicals born ten years ago in the jail cells of Atlanta.
"It was there, during a 40-day prison sentence, that extremists formed alliances and the roots of violence took hold."
Fairbanks' report conveniently ignored the fact that the Lambs had twice been cleared of engaging in a "violent anti-abortion conspiracy" by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) after investigations in 1985 and 1992.
Accompanying Fairbanks' report was a quarter-page graphic depicting "anti-abortion violence" in the United States, with gun sights marking shootings, flames marking arson attacks, dynamite marking bombings, and flasks marking acid attacks.
But the News did not report on the findings of a BATF inquiry which determined that many of the clinic arsons and bombings were staged either by staff or by angry patients or their boyfriends. For example, when the perpetrator of four bomb attacks on abortion mills in Portland, Ore., was nabbed, his motive was determined to be anger that his girlfriend had an abortion without his prior knowledge or consent.
After an investigation into clinic arsons in 1992, Special Agent Jack Killoran of the BATF stated: "No conspiracy theory survives the arrests we've made. The connections would have been found. We're looking for these kinds of connections."
Lambs' founder Fr. Weslin was so outraged by the News' slanted coverage that he called a press conference on the steps of the federal courthouse in Buffalo to state that no one he knows has any notion of who killed Slepian.
“Civil disobedience,” he continued, “is not violence. Both labor and civil rights activists have always used peaceful means to stop social evils. Therefore, it [the press] has no cause to castigate and hold public lynchings of decent people who have no connection to a homicide.”
He said Slepian's murder "took place conveniently at a time when William Jefferson Clinton's presidency was in trouble, an election was at risk, and seems to be the work of a trained professional."
The Other Side
What Buffalo-area readers won't find in their pro-abortion, pro-pornography, pro-homosexual, pro-population control newspaper owned by multibillionaire Warren Buffet is the truth that abortionists are often cut down by their competitors, by hit men demanding a cut of their cash earnings, and even by their victims.
At the time of his death, Chicago abortion clinic owner Kenny "The Creep" Yellen was in debt $1 million, was being investigated for the arson of a second abortion clinic he owned, was being investigated for the "mysterious deaths" of several women who had abortions at his mills, was gambling away his enormous earnings, and was living in fear that a rival abortion profiteer was planning to eliminate him.
One of Yellen's clinics, the Women's Medical Facility, was shut down by the Chicago Board of Health after it was determined that the mill was operating without a license and its staff was performing abortions on women who were not pregnant.
Yellen, stated The Chicago Sun-Times in a report on his death (Nov. 4th, 1979), was also sued for impersonating a doctor, medical malpractice, performing illegal abortions, reckless conduct and theft by deception, and battery for squeezing a woman's breasts during an "examination."
There wasn't much public wailing in the abortion establishment when Yellen was murdered, but when George Wayne Patterson was killed outside an adult porn theater he'd been frequenting regularly for years, abortion advocates immediately charged that he was the victim of a pro-life hit.
But as the facts emerged after the August 20th, 1993 slaying, press interest evaporated. Patterson, who owned four abortion mills, in Pensacola and Ft. Walton Beach in Florida, and in Bay City and Mobile in Alabama, was shown to be not only addicted to pornography and gambling, but was deeply in debt. He was also the defendant in several lawsuits: two by the families of women who died after he attempted abortions on them, the other for a botched abortion.
Legal Racket
Veteran journalist and publisher Kevin Sherlock has authored two books that highlight the inherent corruption of the abortion industry, Victims of Choice and The Scarlet Survey (Brennyman Books, P.O. Box 2629, Akron, OH 44309; $20.00 each).
In The Scarlet Survey, Sherlock provides summaries of thousands of lawsuits culled from courthouses across the country against abortion clinic owners, abortionists, and clinic staff for deaths caused by abortion, medical malpractice, fraud, health code violations, sexual abuse and other crimes.
Sherlock is the first to admit that the lawsuits he lists are only a sample—the tip of the proverbial iceberg—because it's just not possible for one person with limited resources to go into every county, state, and federal courthouse in the country to gather the documentation.
Nevertheless, his sample is depressingly impressive.
Among the more notable cases:
• Dr. Edward Allred, the notorious L.A. abortionist, attempted to bury a woman who died after an abortion without first turning the body over to the county coroner (Los Angeles County Coroner Case N. 84-16016 and Los Angeles County Superior Court Case N. C575154).
• Abortionist Nabil Ghali lost his license to practice medicine in Kentucky after numerous lawsuits were filed against him for medical malpractice (including killing a woman) and sexual abuse of patients, including children, and moved on to do abortions in Florida, and then Ohio, where he racked up similar records.
Among the numerous lawsuits against Ghali for botched abortions was one by a woman who had her bladder removed without her permission.
• Florida abortionist Theodor Lehrer was charged with aborting his wife's child without her consent after he handcuffed her to their bed. He was angry that she refused his sexual advances.
• A number of abortionists, including Richard Ragsdale in Illinois and Milan Chepko in Mississippi, were charged with child pornography—in Ragsdale's case, of his own three-year-old foster child.
• Howard Silverman, the largest abortion provider in Massachusetts and the owner of a chain of clinics (Repro Associates; 10,000 abortions in four clinics per year), was the subject of a 1995 federal probe for rigging ultrasound tests in order to overcharge women for their abortions.
• Some abortionists, such as California's Suresh Gondrata, simply flee the country after they cause the death of a woman. Gondrata, who killed a young Mexican woman, Magdalena Rodriguez, on Dec. 8th, 1994, fled to his homeland, India, before authorities could charge him with murder.
Gondrata was convicted in 1990 in Orange County Superior Court on 17 felonies and misdemeanors ranging from grand theft and Medi-Cal fraud, to providing dangerous drugs without proper authority and aiding the unlicensed practice of medicine.
Unfortunately, the common thread running through the bulk of this.documentation is the ability of abortion providers to evade conviction, and often prosecution for their crimes, because of their unlimited financial resources for legal protection and the complicity of judicial bodies in the abortion protection racket.
Another of the fascinating facets of Sherlock's work is his meticulous compilation of lawsuits filed against the nation's largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, on a wide range of issues. These include: violations of health codes, equipment and utility deficiencies, medical record deficiencies, patient care deficiencies, sanitation deficiencies, staff and procedure deficiencies, professional deficiencies (such as altering lab reports), labor complaints, fraudulent billing, use of government "family planning" funds for political purposes, sex offenses, and so on.
Sherlock also persuasively argues that the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control is engaged in covering up the number of abortion-related deaths in the United States each year. By checking CDC statistics against state and local records, he shows that 30%40% more women die from abortion than are reported by the government, and is willing to go to court to prove it if challenged.
He also proves how difficult it is to gain access to government documents. When he asked CDC officials in 1990 to give him a list of abortion-related deaths, they charged him $13,000 for 11,000 pages "of censored documents" which eliminated the names of the abortionists and their victims.
In 1996, when he renewed his request, the charge was $24,000 for 16,600 pages of fatal statistics, or $26.00 per hour for 845 hours so clerks could black out the names on the documents.
In Victims of Choice, Sherlock documents the tragic deaths of hundreds of women who have been, as he says, "sacrificed on the altar of sisterhood."
Sherlock shows how possible it is that many women who died from botched abortions might be alive today if state regulatory and licensing officials would do what they are charged to do: protect the public from medical butchers.
For example, a young Honduran woman, Guadalupe Negron, died at the hands of Dr. David Benjamin, who performed an abortion on her at his Metro Women's Center in Queens on July 9th, 1993.
Benjamin's license had been revoked a month earlier for "gross incompetence and negligence" in rupturing the uteruses of five other women, but medical officials allowed him to continue his practice. But as early as 1980, after he was dismissed from a Utica hospital for substandard work, New York health officials already knew that he was a public health menace.
And there is the case of Angela Nieto Sanchez, 27, who died on the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Jan. 22nd, 1993, in an unlicensed San Diego clinic, Clinica Feminina de la Communidad, while her children awaited her return from the clinic in a borrowed car. While Nieto Sanchez lay dying on a clinic table, a staff member gave the children some money to run out for some lunch. Later that night, when Nieto Sanchez's family came back to get her, wondering why she didn't come home, they found her dead body in the parking lot.
Unsafe, Illegal, And Common
According to some medical professionals contacted by The Wanderer, it is statistically impossible for "professional" abortionists who often practice Third World medicine under Third World conditions to escape involvement in the inevitable consequences of the trade.
Abortion is not only a highly dangerous and unnatural procedure (can you imagine going to a freestanding, unlicensed, unequipped, unregulated, unstaffed, unclean office for an appendectomy?), but, like all organized crime- controlled, profit-and-sex- oriented businesses, it is mired in graft and corruption, protected and tolerated, aided and abetted by officials from the highest to the lowest levels of every social institution, including the courts, legislatures, medical associations, and the churches.
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Slain New York doctor mourned; police ask for information
Family and friends gather for Slepian's funeral
Terror tactics haunt abortion doctors
Anyone with any information on Dr. Slepian's killing is asked to contact: Amherst, New York Police Dept: 716-689-1390 New York State Police: 716-343-2200 FBI (Buffalo, New York office): 716-856-7800
October 27, 1998
Web posted at: 6:30 a.m. EST (1130 GMT) http://europe.cnn.com/US/9810/26/doctor.killed.03/ In this story:
'I want him remembered as a birth doctor'
Canadian-American task force investigating
No description of shooter
Related stories and sites
AMHERST, New York (CNN) -- As family and friends mourned Dr. Barnett Slepian on the day of his funeral Monday, police and the FBI held a news conference to ask for help in finding his killer, offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
(ME:Did this reward “jog” any memories?)
Anyone with information, "even if seemingly unrelated," is asked to contact authorities, said John Askey, chief of police in Amherst, New York, the Buffalo suburb where Slepian was gunned down at his home by a sniper Friday night.
Investigators speculate that the killer, who remains at large, is someone opposed to the abortions the 52-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist performed as part of his practice. Authorities did not reveal any leads in the case during the news conference.
CNN's Susan Candiotti reports on the continuing investigation of the shooting death of a doctor in New York
The police chief said the sniper hid in a wooded area near Slepian's home "for an undetermined period of time" before firing one shot from a high-powered rifle. FBI Agent Bernard Tolbert said the agency may include some anti-abortion Internet sites in its investigation
POLICE AND FEDERAL AGENTS BRACE FOR VIOLENCE AS ANTI-ABORTION FORCES OBSERVE A NEW "HOLIDAY."
(ME: Slepian was murdered two weekends before the 1998 Congressional elections. Senator Schumer and Eliot Spitzer easily defeated D'Amato and Att Gen Vacco in New York because of the hysteria created against pro-lifers after this murder.NARAL had an ad running the day after Slepian was murdered. Coincidentally, Canadian elections are around Remembrance Day!!)
Federal and local police are bracing for a spike in anti-abortion rhetoric and threats on Veterans Day, two days after the Justice Department announced it was forming a task force to combat a surge in "right-to-life" terror. Nov. 11, observed as "Remembrance Day" in Canada, has in recent years been embraced by anti-abortion forces to commemorate "the unborn." Three times since 1994, right around Nov. 11, snipers have fired into the homes of doctors who provide abortions in Canada. A U.S. federal agent said security precautions have been taken around Atlanta and other Southern cities as the hunt for two assassins linked to anti-abortion killings intensified in New York and North Carolina. Federal officials are also investigating a recent rash of letters said to contain anthrax that have been mailed to schools, churches and abortion clinics in seven states.
"Tomorrow's a big one in Canada, but it's used here south of the border to remember not only the fallen (in war), but those who have fallen among the unborn," said a senior federal agent in Atlanta.
"It's become something of a focal point, not so much for violence -- I'm not so sure how well some of these people can read a calendar -- but for a ratcheting up of the rhetoric. Then we begin to see more threats being called into clinics." (ME: If you call an abortion clinic and ask them to stop killing tiny children, that is considered a threat!!)
Police are beefing up patrols and federal agencies are on heightened alert for any violence, the official said. "We tend to ratchet up, too. You may be demonstrating in a clinic every day," he added, "but on Nov. 11 you'll notice a patrol car coming by every 15 minutes. That's a significant deterrence."
Meanwhile, a federal task force on anti-abortion terror unveiled by Attorney General Janet Reno Tuesday said investigators so far have found no evidence of a conspiracy to attack clinics and doctors. Much of the anti-abortion violence has been claimed by the so-called Army of God, the nom de guerre taken by anti-abortion killers, but the "Army" is no more than a name anyone can claim, says a senior federal agent.
Which has presented law enforcement with a problem over the past 20 years of anti-abortion mayhem: There was nobody the FBI could arrest and squeeze to turn on the others. "If we'd found a conspiracy, we would have crushed it," the agent said. "The Army of God is whatever people who choose to wear that T-shirt say it is."
Yet the Army of God has published an underground manual for anti-abortion violence. Among those the manual was dedicated to was "Atomic Dog," the nickname for James Kopp, who is being sought in connection with the Oct. 23 assassination of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian in Amherst, N.Y. Kopp has a long history of anti-abortion protests associated with the group Operation Rescue.
The shot that killed Slepian as he stood in his kitchen at home passed through double window panes, an accomplishment normally associated with a military-trained sniper. But the U.S. military records center in St. Louis said it had no records on Kopp.
The Army of God has claimed responsibility for at least four bombings in the South over the last three years, according to federal officials and private analysts. Three were in Atlanta in 1996: the Olympic park bombing, an explosion at a lesbian bar and an abortion clinic bombing that killed a policeman. Last Jan. 29 an off-duty policeman employed as a security guard at a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic was killed by a remote-controlled bomb, which also gravely injured a nurse.
Federal officials say all four were the work of a North Carolina man, Eric Rudolph, 32, who has been indicted in those bombings and is the object of a massive manhunt in the forests of western North Carolina.
Rudolph learned to make bombs while assigned to the 327th Infantry Air Assault Regiment at Fort Campbell, Ky., where his "gung-ho former Green Beret commander" taught him how to make explosives with objects discarded around the base, a federal official involved in the case said.
One of the three Atlanta bombings Rudolph allegedly carried out that was claimed by the Army of God, he said, "employed high explosives in a military ammunition can."
While there may be no firm evidence of a "conspiracy" among the nation's violent anti-abortion extremists, analysts have noted a repeated association between suspects like Rudolph and an extremist religious group called Christian Identity, which in turn is said to sponsor independently operating underground cells called the "Phineas Priesthood."
Christian Identity, which has Web sites on the Internet, believes that white Northern Europeans are the true Israelites and all other races are "mud people." In 1985, Rudolph's mother took Eric and one of his brothers to a Christian Identity commune in Schell City, Mo. She arrived at the Church of Israel in an old car with balding tires, "in a desperate, destitute situation," according to Pastor Dan Gayman, who helped the family get on its feet. Gayman has since distanced himself publicly from the Christian Identity movement, but at the time the commune was a beehive of white supremacist militancy, with the pastor proclaiming that "the Jews are the devil's seed and the children of the anti-Christ." The boys were enrolled in religious studies and Eric immersed himself in the commune's book list, from Oswald Spengler to "Holocaust: The Hoax of the 20th Century." When he returned to North Carolina he was full of anti-government, anti-Semitic and racial rhetoric, according to those who knew him.
A federal agent who has studied the Army of God said its manual for anti-abortion violence "started out as a public relations ploy -- 'look how big and bad we are' -- and it got passed around to be used." No one has been identified as its author.
A reliable source inside the extremist movement, meanwhile, said the Phineas Priesthood "was real, for sure," and has "learned lessons from Oklahoma City, which was to go underground and stay underground." Federal officials believe violent extremists are as likely to target police and federal agents as abortion clinics and doctors as the battle intensifies. Some agents expressed frustration with the time and money the government has had to put into the anti-abortion threat. Asked how much had been spent on the Rudolph case alone, which has employed hundreds of agents, an official declined to give a figure but said:
"Well, it's under Mr. Starr's $40 million."
SALON | Nov. 11, 1998 Jeff Stein covers criminal justice issues for Salon.
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