The circumstantial murder case against James Kopp could turn on a prosaic document residing in the office of Doris Grady's lawyer. Mysteries, I suppose, must end somewhere.
Dated July 14, 1997, it is a receipt for the purchase of a permit to construct a fence at the Grady home in Shadyside. Grady, a longtime anti-abortion protester, had a house guest at the time -- James Charles Kopp, a deeply religious wanderer who occasionally turned up and stayed for long periods.
Before the family left for vacation in the final week of July, Kopp, they say, joined in the building of the fence. They are certain that he was there on July 16.
It was that day that someone calling himself B. James Milton bought an SKS rifle at the A-to-Z Pawn Shop in Old Hickory, Tenn., about 550 miles away. It was the very rifle, police say, that was used 15 months later by someone who shot and killed abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian at his home outside Buffalo.
The FBI, in documents used to extradite Kopp from France, where he was found hiding earlier this year, insist that B. James Milton and James Kopp are the same person.
"If B. James Milton and James Kopp are not the same person, then not only does the case against Kopp fall apart, but you've got improper activity by the FBI," said Mark Crutcher, longtime abortion foe whose firm has been doing pretrial investigation for Kopp's defense team.
Just how strong is the evidence? Crutcher won't say for now, and has asked Doris Grady not to comment.
But in past conversations, Grady told of Kopp's frequent visits, and is certain that her fence was well under construction, with Kopp deep into the work, on July 16.
"He was living in my basement," she said.
Kopp had come to town in May, to help out on a lawsuit brought by a cadre of protesters who sued Allegheny County and the Pittsburgh Police over abusive treatment when they were arrested blockading an East Liberty abortion clinic.
"He was here and he said do you need anything done around the house?" Grady remembered. "I said yes, tons of stuff. I gave him not only the fence job but plumbing work, putting in two sinks."
On July 13, Grady said, her son picked up the building permit. The building, she said, continued until the last week of July when the Grady family left for Geneva on the Lake and Kopp resumed his wanderings.
By July 31, the city issued a "certificate of occupancy," meaning the fence was completed and approved. Crutcher presumably has witnesses who place Kopp, hammer in hand, on the Grady family sidewalk on July 16 -- the day B. James Milton bought the rifle in Tennessee.
What federal prosecutors must establish is a clear link between Kopp and the rifle they think was used to kill Slepian. If that falls apart, the case dissolves.
Kopp, in a letter to Grady this week, put forward his own theories about who the shooter might have been.
"It's not good enough to blow holes in the FBI case," Kopp wrote from prison. "We need to float a suggestion of who did it. I do not know who did it. But I could guess if I had to the guy who did it would be (possibly) a white supremacist, a racist, a U.S. Patriot, a Protestant God-and-Country kind of person (as opposed to someone with a profound Christian faith)."
Kopp's defenders have many hurdles to clear in this case. How, barring the boldest of conspiracies, could the FBI have found handwritten directions to the pawn shop among Kopp's effects if he had not bought the rifle? Why were personal effects attributable to Kopp found buried a few hundred yards from where the rifle was ditched? And why does an innocent man flee the country?
Kopp, in his letter to Grady, said he believed the FBI had already fixed itself on the idea he was the shooter and would have required an alternative suspect.
"I ran away partly because I did not want to play this game with the FBI," he wrote.
The day Kopp was captured, Grady told me of a long conversation she had with him in the old days, the days when cloud watchers in the pro-life movement saw some ominously dark sheets of gray on the horizon.
"He said, 'Someday they're going to get you and they're going to get me.' He thought it would be for some kind of bombing. But he said, 'When they do, Doris, don't you believe it. Talk to me first before you believe anything.' "
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