Anti-abortion extremist James Kopp during his 2003 trial for the slaying of Dr. Barnett Slepian. Mr. Kopp, a person of interest in three non-fatal shootings in Canada, was found guilty of murder.HARRY SCULL JR
A notorious anti-abortion sniper serving a murder sentence in the United States will not face justice in Canada even though he is suspected of attacks on three doctors here.
That's because police say the doctors - each of whom was shot and wounded - are content to let James Kopp live out his days in a Pennsylvania prison.
Authorities are also content to let the matter rest, and that has an angry American undercover operative fuming that Canadian police are cheapskates for withholding his reward for crucial help in capturing Mr. Kopp.
"I stopped a murderer, a terrorist," Jack Steele said from an undisclosed location in the United States. "I put my life on the line; I infiltrated a very dangerous group of people."
Jack Steele is the pseudonym of an American operative whose two years of undercover work led to a conviction and life sentence for Mr. Kopp. Mr. Kopp sparked outrage across North America in 1998 when he shot and killed an upstate New York physician who performed abortions.
Recruited by the FBI with the promise of a lucrative reward, Mr. Steele infiltrated a homegrown terrorist network of anti-abortionists and eventually uncovered Mr. Kopp's secret French hideout - leading to his extradition and arrest in 2001 for the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian.
For his efforts, the U.S. government paid him $700,000. But he says Canada owes him another $547,000 because Mr. Kopp was the prime suspect in the shootings of the Canadian doctors - crimes that remain officially unsolved.
The FBI and Canadian police had formed a cross-border task force - now essentially dormant - to hunt down Mr. Kopp. Their wanted poster identified Mr. Kopp as a "person of interest" in the shootings of the Canadians, and offered the $547,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction for those crimes.
Mr. Steele says he earned the reward. But since Mr. Kopp was never charged with the Canadian shootings, law enforcement has concluded Mr. Steele doesn't deserve it.
"It's not my fault that the government of Canada didn't catch him first. It's the promise that they made," Mr. Steele said. "There's a betrayal there."
All three of the Canadian doctors were shot through windows in their homes:
- Dr. Garson Romalis was hit in the leg in Vancouver in 1994.
- Dr. Hugh Short was shot in the elbow in Ancaster, Ont., in 1995.
- Dr. Jack Fainman was wounded in the shoulder in Winnipeg in 1997.
On Oct. 23, 1998, Dr. Slepian was killed by a single bullet fired through the kitchen window of his Amherst, N.Y., home.
Despite strong evidence linking Mr. Kopp to the Canadian shootings, the case is no longer being pursued.
"In Canada, there's not a statute of limitations. They're all open cases, although I would suggest nobody is actively investigating them, although they are not closed," said Winnipeg police Sergeant John Burchill, a former spokesman for the Canada-U.S. task force.
Sgt. Burchill said he's not aware of any Canadian plans to extradite Mr. Kopp to face justice for the lesser charge of attempted murder in Canada since he is serving a life sentence in the United States and will likely never be released.
Police asked Drs. Romalis, Fainman and Short for their views and they are content to let Mr. Kopp spend the rest of his life in U.S. prison, said Sgt. Burchill.
"My understanding is that the doctors are satisfied with the current situation," he said. "I suppose if he was extradited and brought back to Canada and he was convicted here of those offences, I suppose that was a possibility he [Mr. Steele]could collect but I can't speak for what representations were made to him way back when originally."
Neither Dr. Romalis nor Dr. Fainman were available for comment.
When contacted by phone Friday, Dr. Short said: "I have nothing to say."
Mr. Steele said he was originally told his reward would exceed $1-million. He said Canadian law enforcement strung him along for the better part of a decade, saying they would deal with his portion of the reward once Mr. Kopp had exhausted all appeal avenues.
Two years ago, Canadian police tried unsuccessfully to interview Mr. Kopp in prison.
Last year, when an appeal court in Manhattan slammed the door shut on Mr. Kopp, Mr. Steele thought he would finally receive the reward. But the Canadian Medical Association, which put up the money, concluded Mr. Steele did not meet the criteria to collect.
"There were some limited conditions on the reward - namely, that the information had to lead to a conviction in the cases concerning the specified doctors and any arrests in these cases had to have been made by June 1, 2003," the CMA said in a statement.
The CMA says none of those conditions were met.
The FBI is also distancing itself from Mr. Steele's request for a Canadian reward. "If Mr. Steele believes he has earned a reward, he should seek remedies through the appropriate venue," said the FBI's media office in Albany, N.Y.
Joyce Arthur, a co-ordinator with the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, said it is disappointing and frustrating that Canadian police agencies have decided to drop inquiries into three unsolved Canadian shootings.
She said she has no doubt Mr. Kopp was responsible for the Canadian shootings. She tried to independently investigate some of the "tantalizing connections between Kopp and Canada" and give them to police but nothing conclusive ever turned up.
Winnipeg police have information that Mr. Kopp's car crossed the Manitoba border into North Dakota four hours after Dr. Fainman was shot in Winnipeg.
Mr. Kopp was brought to justice in 2001, two years after the FBI recruited Mr. Steele to infiltrate his network.
After killing Dr. Slepian, Mr. Kopp fled the United States through Mexico, and made his way to London and eventually Ireland.
Beginning in 1999, Mr. Steele worked hard to prove his loyalty to Mr. Kopp's circle of anti-abortionists. He took part in vandalizing abortion clinics to ingratiate himself.
His dramatic breakthrough came on a rain-swept day in Brooklyn in March, 2001, when was enlisted to run a key errand - go to a Western Union outlet and send cash to Mr. Kopp at a secret location in Europe. Mr. Steele asked for a photocopy of the receipt - with the address of where Mr. Kopp would be picking up the money.
He could see his accomplice's car in the partially obscured window on the street outside as he bent down to tuck the photocopy into his right boot. His heart was pounding and he was shaking and sweating.
"I could see getting my ass caught and that's the end of me," he said.
Mr. Steele worried about phoning his FBI contacts on his cellphone because members of the anti-abortion group listened to calls with a scanner. In a driving rain, Mr. Steele drove to a phone booth 15 kilometres away and called his handler.
"I said to him, 'I have it.' And I could hear a pin drop," Mr. Steele recalled.
He pulled the piece of paper from his boot and read out an address in Dinan, France. He repeated the information twice more.
The agent told him to "go home and take a rest. I could hear the sigh," Mr. Steele recalled.
"And the rest is history."