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Saturday, March 31, 2001
Libby Sholes was northbound on I-79 when she picked up the car phone, heard that the man suspected of killing her friend was in custody, cried briefly, then drove on to Buffalo.
"I've gone through this for too many years not to be able to pull myself out of it," she said. Whatever else happened, Bart Slepian was still dead. For years, she'd hustled him past the demonstrators outside his abortion clinic, each side certain of its rectitude unto invincibility.
While Libby Sholes was crying on the roadside, Doris Grady's answering machine informed her James Kopp had been traced to a village in France and scooped up as a fugitive. Jim Kopp had lived in Grady's house in Shadyside for weeks on end, spent Christmas and Easter with her family, wore her grown son's castoff clothes, walked every day to Sacred Heart Church where he took communion.
For a woman who believes in Kopp's innocence, Grady felt a strange relief.
"At least I know he's still alive," she said. "I was beginning to think he was dead. We couldn't believe he would disappear so thoroughly."
From 220 miles apart, lives were colliding in ways that made it hard to know what wreckage belongs to whom.
Sholes was running a small business in Buffalo 10 years ago, when Operation Rescue declared her town ground zero in its war on abortion. She volunteered to walk patients and doctors and nurses past demonstrators who jammed sidewalks and blocked doors.
"Bart didn't like doing abortions," Sholes said. "His greatest joy was delivering babies." Slepian refused to perform abortions at the 18th week of pregnancy. But he believed someone had to do this thing he so disliked.
"He really felt anguish for these young women," Sholes said. Like Kopp, Slepian was religious. The night a sniper caught him through a kitchen window, Slepian returned from synagogue.
Sholes might have met Kopp one afternoon in 1995. She has looked at security videotapes time and again, but can't be sure the man who stared her in the face that day was Kopp. His mouth moves, but she can't remember his words to her.
"They were vaguely threatening," she said. "But that was true of everyone. On three occasions I put myself between Bart and someone else because they were coming at him."
It was hard for Doris Grady to think of Kopp as threatening. He turned up at her house in 1989. He'd left the religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta so he could be arrested at clinic blockades. The only possessions he took with him were his vows of poverty and celibacy.
In long nights of talk, between rented movies, he told her his story. His parents were divorced. He studied medicine for a time, then law, but finished neither. He read the works of Calvinist philosopher Francis Schaefer, then moved on to Catholicism. He was haunted by estrangements. He didn't talk to his twin brother. His sister, before her death from breast cancer, was active in the California chapter of Planned Parenthood.
"He was devastated by that," Grady said. "He felt as though she had lost her soul."
In a movement full of noms de guerre, Kopp was called "Atomic Dog," mentioned in the Army of God Manual, which instructs followers on the fine points of gluing locks, dropping putrid chemicals down an air vent, and using bicycle locks to chain themselves to junked cars parked in a clinic doorway.
That lock tactic was Kopp's donation. They tried it out at an East Liberty clinic in 1989. He was arrested but never showed up for court.
"He was always trying to build better locks," Grady said. They took many forms. Kopp and Grady were close friends, but he would never give her his home address. "He said, 'What you don't know, you can't hurt me with.'"
Libby Sholes was at a business meeting in Pittsburgh in autumn 1999 when someone told her a doctor in Buffalo had been shot down. Later, friends called to say that, after his death, Bart Slepian's name showed up on an Internet site called "The Nuremberg Files." There was a line running through the name, as if Slepian were a chore that had been completed. They found Libby's name on the list, too. People worried it might be there waiting for someone to cross it off.
"Initially, it didn't mean much to me," she said. She attended a memorial service for Slepian and it was then that it hit her: "This is for the rest of my life." She didn't work at the abortion clinics. She was a volunteer. She wasn't covered by the federal laws that powered the hunt for James Kopp.
Libby Sholes closed her business in Buffalo and moved away.
Doris Grady worried, too. When the FBI came knocking at her door two years ago, they searched for Kopp. They asked her to promise she'd call if she heard from him.
She was honest. She said no.
"I used to live in fear that he would come here. What would I do? What kind of person would I be if I called the FBI and said 'come and get him'?"
Kopp never showed. He vanished almost as thoroughly from Doris Grady's world as Barnett Slepian had from Libby Sholes'. Things cannot be undone.
As Libby might tell Doris: This is for the rest of their lives.
Dennis Roddy's e-mail is droddy@ post-gazette.com.