When James Kopp visited Doris Grady's big old house in Shadyside, they always rented a stack of movies so Kopp, a nomad without a job, fixed address or television, could catch up on cultural references.
His favorite, Grady said, was "The Usual Suspects," the dark thriller in which Kevin Spacey narrates the story of a band of aspiring robbers who run headlong into the homicidal fury of Turkish gangster Keyser Soze.
Spacey's character survives because his comrades leave him behind as an incompetent fool, incapable of the stealth needed for the big confrontation. Turned loose by the police, Spacey loses his limp, strides up to a limousine and rides off. He is Keyser Soze, mastermind and manipulator.
Grady remembers what Kopp told her as they watched the movie: "You know, Doris, we're going to get called in sooner or later. We're all the usual suspects."
Kopp and Grady had become friends when he came to Pittsburgh to help in a civil rights lawsuit over mistreatment of abortion pickets at the Allegheny County Jail. He would camp in her basement for weeks at a time, then move on like a fugitive years before he actually qualified for the title. The depth of paranoia that had overtaken the pro-life movement cannot be discounted. Many of them expected to be rounded up, framed and consigned to some gulag.
They were, in that sense, the usual suspects: a confederation of people drawn together by the bond of their civil disobedience and antiabortion politics that ran counter to the reigning political orthodoxy.
Kopp, Grady said, always told her not to believe anything she heard about him until she spoke to him first.
"We even discussed things like the blowing up of buildings and the morality of it and he always said, 'Well, somebody could be injured.'"
What Grady did not guess was that, aside from being a usual suspect, Kopp was also Keyser Soze. Religious, self-effacing, calculating every life decision on the basis of what it would mean to his immortal soul, Kopp struck Grady as incapable of violence. Kopp attended Mass daily, believed in such things as the near occasion of sin and avoided it. He seemed hell-bent on getting to heaven.
When the story from the Buffalo News arrived in her e-mail this week, Grady's world spun around her. Kopp admitted to killing Barnett Slepian, explaining that he only intended to wound the abortion doctor, but that the bullet ricocheted and killed his target. He had failed to practice safe assassination. Go figure.
A few of Kopp's remarks beggar belief. He said he had never heard of Slepian, who had once written to the newspaper predicting his own murder, and got his name from a phone directory that lists abortion doctors. Slepian never advertised himself as an abortionist.
Kopp talked of how guilt-wracked he felt over Slepian's death, although he chose to provide his secular confession not to the people who risked their own freedom and credibility to hide and defend him, but to a newspaper.
Doris Grady was one of those people. She stood up for Kopp, accepted his intimations of innocence and has now been burned by the heat of her own faith in him. She had explained in public that Kopp was in Pittsburgh acquiring a permit to build a fence at her home at the same time prosecutors said he was in Tennessee buying the gun with which Slepian was killed.
Now Kopp says he went to Tennessee and bought the gun. Talk about putting a friend in an awkward spot.
"When I would have doubts, I'd keep saying, 'If he was in his right mind, he would have been stopped by the 'soul' thing,' " she said. She is planning to get into her car sometime soon and point it north toward Buffalo.
"I want to look him in the face and ask him. To say to him, 'Tell me.' "
Doris Grady still considers James Kopp a friend. She will still be in his corner, even the one into which he has self-righteously consigned himself. But it would have been good of him to get her out of the room before he started painting the floor.
Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1965.
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