OTTAWA – A notorious anti-abortion sniper serving a murder sentence in the U.S. will not face justice in Canada for suspicion of attacks on three doctors here, The Canadian Press has learned.
That’s because police say the doctors – each wounded by a bullet for performing abortions – are content to let James Kopp live out the rest of 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 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.”
Steele is the pseudonym for an American operative whose two years of undercover work led to the conviction and life-imprisonment of Kopp. Kopp sparked outrage across North America in 1998 when he gunned down an upstate New York physician who performed abortions.
Recruited by the FBI with the promise of lucrative reward, Steele infiltrated a homegrown terrorist network of anti-abortionists and eventually uncovered Kopp’s secret French hideout – leading to his extradition and arrest in 2001 for the 1998 murder of Dr. Bernard Slepian.
For his efforts, the U.S. government paid him $700,000. But he says Canada owes him another $547,000 because 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 Kopp. Their wanted poster identified Kopp as a “person of interest” in the shootings of the Canadians, and offered the $547,000 reward for any information that led to an arrest and conviction for those crimes.
Steele says he earned his payday. But since Kopp was never charged with the Canadian shootings, law enforcement has concluded Steele doesn’t deserve a loonie.
“It’s not my fault that the government of Canada didn’t catch him first. It’s the promise that they made,” 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 injured in the shoulder in Winnipeg in 1997.
On Oct. 23, 1998, Slepian was killed by a single shot through the kitchen window of his Amherst, N.Y., home.
Despite strong evidence linking 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 Sgt. John Burchill, a former spokesman for the Canada-U.S. task force.
Burchill said he’s not aware of any Canadian plans to extradite Kopp to face justice for the lesser charge of attempted murder in Canada since he is serving life in the U.S. and will likely never be released.
Police asked Romalis, Fainman and Short for their views and they are content to let Kopp spend the rest of his life in U.S. prison, said 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 (Steele) could collect but I can’t speak for what representations were made to him way back when originally.”
Neither Romalis nor Fainman were available for comment.
When contacted by phone Friday, Short said: “I have nothing to say.”
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 Kopp had exhausted all appeal avenues.
Two years ago, Canadian police tried unsuccessfully to interview Kopp in prison.
Last year, when an appeal court in Manhattan slammed the door shut on Kopp, Steele thought he would finally get his payday. But the Canadian Medical Association, which put up the reward money, concluded 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 was met.
The FBI is also distancing itself from 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 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 Kopp’s car crossed the Manitoba border into North Dakota four hours after Fainman was shot in Winnipeg.
Kopp was brought to justice in 2001, two years after the FBI recruited Steele to infiltrate his network of true believers.
Kopp fled the United States, through Mexico, and made his way to London and eventually Ireland after he killed Slepian in 1998.
Beginning in 1999, Steele worked hard to prove his loyalty to 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 Kopp at a secret location in Europe. Steele asked for a photocopy of the receipt – with the address of where 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.”
Steele worried about phoning his FBI contacts on his cell phone because members of the anti-abortion group listened to calls with a scanner. In a driving rain, Steele drove to a phone booth 15 kilometres away and called his special agent handler.
“I said to him, ‘I have it.’ And I could hear a pin drop,” 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,” Steele recalled.
