Activist Sought In Doctor's Slaying
Authorities in Upstate New York say they want to talk to a known anti-abortion activist about the slaying of a Buffalo doctor.
FBI officials have issued a material witness warrant for James Charles Kopp of St. Albans, Vermont. They say he's not a suspect but is being sought for questioning in connection with the sniper slaying of Dr. Bernard Slepian last month.
More information has been revealed about Kopp. As CBS News Correspondent Diane Olick reports, it was in 1988, during the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, that Kopp joined the ranks of the militant anti-abortion movement. He was arrested there for blockading abortion clinics, and it was in those jails that a hard knot of extremists formed, says Mark Potok, who studies the radical right.
"In fact he was a big player in 1988...he became so well known in the prison in Atlanta that he acquired a nickname...Atomic Dog," said Potok.
The name Atomic Dog later appeared in the dedication of the anonymously written, underground terrorist guide entitled Army of God.
It is "a manual which talks about instructing people on building ammonium nitrate bombs, building C4 plastic explosives, cutting the hands off abortion physicians and so on," said Potok.
But Kopp, who has a master's degree in marine biology, has a long record of nonviolent crimes.
He has been arrested for chaining himself to various clinics, one in Florida in 1986, one in West Virginia in 1990 and another in New York in '91. Kopp also was allegedly the director of a program in San Francisco that was sued for harassing pregnant women seeking information on abortion.
After seeing his picture, an editor of a Canadian newspaper says lit was Kopp who, for months, delivered threatening anti-abortion literature to the paper.
The newspaper also received a phone call just after Dr. Slepian's murder from a man they believe was Kopp. The caller named the next doctor on the sniper's list. Editors gave that name to the FBI.
Kopp, was believed to have been seen jogging in Slepian's Amherst, New York, neighborhood on the morning that the doctor was killed. Authorities say a car bearing his license plate was seen in Dr. Slepian's neighborhood in the weeks before the murder.
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| James Charles Kopp |
Sources tell CBS News that the search is urgent because of the upcoming Veterans Day and Canada's Remembrance Day holidays on Nov. 11. Anti-abortion activists use the holiday to remember the unborn, and there have been four other sniper attacks on doctors surrounding past holidays
Associate Attorney General Ray Fisher told reporters Thursday that the Department of Justice is meeting daily about related issues. Officials there are setting up a national task force and considering what can be done about Web sites that give out information on abortion doctors.
Slepian, 52, had been targeted with threats because he performed abortions, among other procedures. He was killed by a sniper while at home with his wife and four sons on Oct. 23. Police believe his murder was connected to four other shootings of doctors who performed abortions in Canada and the United States.
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