Investigators Cast a Wide Net to Find Abortionist Murderer

by Paul Likoudis. Reprinted from The Wanderer newspaper, December 10, 1998

Reports from the US of allegedly prolife activists murdering abortionists have been used by our pro-abortion opponents, and significantly the media, to discredit the prolife movement. World wide, the prolife movement has condemned outright these shootings. The following report however, is reprinted as very worthwhile information for prolifers on the true nature of the seedy abortion industry. It's information you are not likely to read in the mainstream press. Editor Buffalo, New York. Since the October 23 assassination of Buffalo-area abortionist Dr Barnett Slepian, investigators from the FBI, the New York state police and the Amherst Police Department have chased down hundreds of leads and interrogated hundreds of Americas prolife citizens in their effort to find James C. Kopp, sought as a material witness.

Performing abortions is a high-risk business, with abortionists often dying by suicide, gangland-style executions, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and many other noteworthy causes. But police are convinced that Slepians murder is a prolife "hit" and not just a typical end for an abortionist. Among some of the more grisly though not atypical deaths of prominent abortionists are these few from the files of the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago:
San Diego abortion clinic director, militant radical feminist and lesbian, Deborah Fleming, 35, shot herself in the head on May 26, 1990 in a motel room in Yuma, Arizona. She was apparently distraught over her inability to conceive a child.
Abortionist Lynn D. Weller of Kansas City was shot to death in his home in September, 1973 by two masked gunmen, hired by rival abortionist, Dr William Carlos, who was angry that Weller was having affair with his exwife.
Notorious Chicago abortion mill owner Kenneth Yellen literally died in the gutter after his gangland-style execution in November, 1979: five shots in thehead as he walked to work. Police discovered that Yellen who was also involved in the gambling, prostitution and pornography businesses was more than $US1 million in debt.
George Patterson, who operated abortion mills in Alabama and Florida, was gunned down in downtown Mobile in August, 1993, outside a porn theatre where he was a regular customer.

But wanted by the authorities as a federal material witness in the Slepian case is a man who as everyone who knows him will attest is fundamentally incapable of committing a violent act.

"If I had a nickel for every time someone told me it couldn't be James C. Kopp," one Amherst police investigator told The Wanderer, "Id be a rich man. But the fact is his car was seen in Slepians neighbourhood, and we want to talk to him.

"James Kopp is wanted as a federal material witness only," insisted the Amherst Police's Assistant Chief, Frank Olesko, "and that is the scope of our wanting him at this time, so that he could be talked to about what he saw and did in the neighbourhood at that time and what he knows."

In their effort to find Kopp, police investigators have set up a nationwide dragnet with a zeal that Buffalo News Washington correspondent Doug Turner described as "not seen since the Communist scares of the 1940's and 1950's, and J. Edgar Hoovers curiosity about black leaders of the 1960's."

"Just about everyone I know who has ever participated in a rescue has been questioned," Joan Andrews Bell told The Wanderer in a telephone interview from her New Jersey home.

Noted prolife attorney John Broderick said that he knows at least a half dozen New York City area pro-lifers who know Kopp as he does and who have received subpoenas to testify before a grand jury in Buffalo investigating the murder.

Both Broderick and Bell cannot believe that Kopp was involved in the murder.

Bell said she has known Kopp since 1988, when he began writing letters to her while she was serving time in a Florida prison. They subsequently rescued together in Vermont, where they both served a three-month prison sentence.

"Kopp is a gentle person," she said. "His arrest record is for non-violence. He is the most low-key, spiritual person I know. He is very Catholic, very contemplative, and the main focus of his life is praying for souls. He would never shoot an abortionist. He would never endanger a soul in jeopardy.

"I don't think Kopp ever held a gun," she continued. "I don't even think he has ever held a mousetrap. He's just a very gentle person."

Attorney Broderick concurs. "James Kopp was a guest in my home three, four, five, maybe six times," he said. "He is an absolutely tremendous guy, the exact opposite of a shooter and in this case, were talking about a professional shooter who calculated and carried out a well-thought-out plan.

"Kopp is a very dedicated pro-lifer, a saintly person, and totally non-violent."

Then, why, The Wanderer asked Broderick, doesn't Kopp come forward?

"I think but I don't know he's afraid they'll fabricate a case against him."

According to a member of the Amherst Police Departments task force investigating Slepians murder, Kopp is only sought for questioning as a federal material witness because his car, bearing Vermont licence plates, was seen within a half-mile of Slepians home near the time of the shooting.

A person suspected of being a material witness, said Broderick, "can stay in jail a long time."

Also caught in the wide net cast by the federal, state and local investigators for questioning are any individuals who ever rescued with Fr Norman Weslins Lambs of Christ, because Kopp rescued with the Lambs on at least three occasions, though he wasn't a Lamb "per se", according to Bell.

Officials involved in the investigation can neither confirm nor deny that there are any suspects in the murder, but the Buffalo media, led by the avidly pro-abortion Buffalo News, cranks out almost daily stories that portray pro-lifers as conspirators conducting a campaign of terror, murder, arson and bombings.

Typical of the News anti-pro-life agitprop is a Sunday, November 8 front-page story, "Radical fringes violent bond born in confinement'. The story by staff writer Phil Fairbanks opens:
"Shadowy and secretive, they operate as an underground, close-knit and tight-lipped, using names like Iron Maiden, Baby Huey and Ann the Lamb. They preach guns, explosives and butyric acid, and their targets are clinics of doctors, all of it in the name of protecting Gods children. James Kopp is viewed as one of the leading activists in a small network of anti-abortion radicals born ten years ago in the jail cells of Atlanta. It was there, during a 40-day prison sentence, that extremists formed alliances and the roots of violence took hold."

Fairbanks report conveniently ignores the fact that the Lambs have twice been cleared of engaging in a violent anti-abortion conspiracy" by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) after investigations in 1985 and 1992.

Accompanying Fairbanks report was a quarter-page map depicting "anti-abortion violence" in the United States, with gun sights marking shootings, flames marking arson attacks, dynamite marking bombings and flasks marking acid attacks.

But the News did not report on the findings of a BATF inquiry that found that many of the clinic arsons and bombings were staged either by staff or by angry patients or their boyfriends. For example, when the perpetrator of four bomb attacks on abortion mills in Portland, Oregon, was nabbed, his motive was anger that his girlfriend had an abortion without his prior knowledge or consent.

After an investigation into clinic arsons in 1992, Special Agent Jack Killoran of the BATF stated: "No conspiracy theory survives the arrests we've made. The connections would have been found. Were looking for these kinds of connections."

Lambs founder Fr Weslin was so outraged by the News slanted coverage that he called a press conference on the steps of the federal courthouse in Buffalo to state that no one he knows has any notion of who killed Slepian.

"Civil disobedience," he continued," is not violence. Both labour and civil rights activists have always used peaceful means to stop social evils. Therefore, it [the press] has no cause to castigate and hold public lynchings of decent people who have no connection to a homicide."

He said Slepians murder "took place conveniently at a time when William Jefferson Clintons presidency was in trouble, an election was at risk and seems to be the work of a trained professional."

The other side

What Buffalo-area readers won't find in their pro-abortion, pro-pornography, pro-homosexual, pro-population control newspaper owned by multimillionaire Warren Buffett is the truth that abortionists are often cut down by their competitors, by hit men demanding a cut of their cash earnings, and even by their victims.

At the time of his death, Chicago abortion clinic owner Kenny "The Creep" Yellen was in debt $1 million, was being investigated for the mysterious deaths" of several women who had abortions at his mills, was gambling away his enormous earnings, and was living in fear that a rival abortion profiteer was planning to eliminate him.

One of Yellens clinics, the Women's Medical Facility, was shut down by the Chicago Board of Health after it was determined that the mill was operating without a licence and its staff was performing abortions on women who were not pregnant.

Yellen, stated The Chicago Sun Times in a report on his death (November 4, 1979), was also sued for impersonating a doctor, medical malpractice, performing illegal abortions, reckless conduct and theft by deception, and battery for squeezing a woman's breasts during an "examination".

There wasn't much public wailing in the abortion establishment when Yellen was murdered, but when George Wayne Patterson was killed outside an adult porn theatre he'd been frequenting regularly for years, abortion advocates immediately charged that he was the victim of a pro-life hit.

But as the facts emerged after the August 20, 1993 slaying, press interest evaporated. Patterson, who owned four abortion mills, in Pensacola and Ft Walton Beach in Florida, and in Bay City and Mobile in Alabama, was shown to be not only addicted to pornography and gambling, but was deeply in debt. He was also the defendant in several lawsuits: two by the families of women who died after he attempted abortions on them, the other for a botched abortion.

Legal racket

Veteran journalist and publisher Kevin Sherlock has authored two books that highlight the inherent corruption of the abortion industry, Victims of Choice and The Scarlet Survey (Brennyman Books, P0 Box 2629, Akron, Ohio 44309; $US2O each).

In The Scarlet Survey, Sherlock provides summaries of thousands of lawsuits culled from courthouses across the country against abortion clinic owners, abortionists and clinic staff for deaths caused by abortion, medical malpractice, fraud, health-code violations, sexual abuse and other crimes.

Sherlock is the first to admit that the lawsuits he lists are only a sample because its just not possible for one person with limited resources to go into every county, state, and federal courthouse in the country to gather the documentation.

Nevertheless, his sample is depressingly impressive. Among the more notable cases:
Dr Edward Allred, the notorious LA abortionist, attempted to bury a woman who died after an abortion without first turning the body over to the county coroner (Los Angeles County Coroner Case N. 84-16016 and Los Angeles County Superior Court Case N. C575154).
Abortionist Nabil Ghali lost his licence to practise medicine in Kentucky after numerous lawsuits were filed against him for medical malpractice (including killing a woman) and sexual abuse of patients, including children, and moved on to do abortions in Florida, and then Ohio, where he racked up similar records.
Among the numerous lawsuits against Ghali for botched abortions was one by a woman who had her bladder removed without her permission.
Florida abortionist Theodor Lehrer was charged with aborting his wife's child without here consent after he handcuffed her to their bed. He was angry when she refused his sexual advances.
A number of abortionists, including Richard Ragsdale in Illinois and Milan Chepko in Mississippi, were charged with child pornography in Ragsdale's case, of his own three-year-old foster child.
Howard Silverman, the largest abortion provider in Massachusetts and the owner of a chain of clinics (Repro Associates: 10,000 abortions in four clinics per year), was the subject of a 1995 federal probe for rigging ultrasound tests in order to overcharge women for their abortions.
Some abortionists, such as California's Suresh Gondrata, simply flee the country after they cause the death of a woman. Gondrata, who killed a young Mexican woman, Magdalena Rodriguez, on December 8, 1994, fled to his homeland, India, before authorities could charge him with murder.
Gondrata was convicted in 1990 in Orange County Superior Court on 17 felonies and misdemeanours ranging from grand theft and medical fraud, to providing dangerous drugs without proper authority and aiding the unlicensed practice of medicine.

Unfortunately, the common thread running through the bulk of this documentation is the ability of abortion providers to evade conviction, and often prosecution for their crimes, because of their unlimited financial resources for legal protection and the complicity of judicial bodies in the abortion protection racket.

Another of the fascinating facets of Sherlocks work is his meticulous compilation of lawsuits filed against the nations largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, on a wide range of issues. These include: violations of health codes, equipment and utility deficiencies, medical record deficiencies, patient care deficiencies, sanitation deficiencies, staff and procedural deficiencies, professional deficiencies (such as altering lab reports), labour complaints, fraudulent billing, use of government "family planning" funds for political purposes, sex offences, and so on.

Sherlock also persuasively argues that the US Governments Centres for Disease Control is engaged in covering up the number of abortion-related deaths in the US each year. By checking CDC statistics against state and local records, he shows that 30% to 40% more women die from abortion than the Government reports, and is willing to go to court to prove it if challenged.

He also proves how difficult it is to gain access to government documents. When he asked CDC officials in 1990 to give him a list of abortion-related deaths, they charged him $US13,OOO for 11,000 pages "of censored documents" that eliminated the names of the abortionists and their victims. In 1996, when he renewed his request, the charge was $US24,OOO for 16,600 pages of fatal statistics, or $US26.OO per hour for 845 hours so clerks could black out the names on the documents.

In Victims of Choice, Sherlock documents the tragic deaths of hundreds of women who have been, as he says, "sacrificed on the altar of sisterhood".

Sherlock shows that many women who died from botched abortions might be alive today if state regulatory and licensing officials had done what they are charged to do: protect the public from medical butchers.

For example, a young Honduran woman, Guadalupe Negron, died at the hands of Dr David Benjamin, who performed an abortion on her at his Metro Women's Centre in Queens on July 9, 1993. Benjamin's licence had been revoked a month earlier for "gross incompetence and negligence" in rupturing the uteruses of five other women, but medical officials allowed him to continue his practice. But as early as 1980, after he was dismissed from a Utica hospital for substandard work, New York health officials already knew that he was a public menace.

And there is the case of Angela Nieto Sanchez, 27, who died on the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1993, in an unlicensed San Diego clinic, Glinica Feminina de la Comunidad, while her children awaited her return from the clinic in a borrowed car. While Nieto Sanchez lay dying on a clinic table, a staff member gave the children some money to run out for some lunch. Later that night, when Nieto Sanchez's family came back to get her, wondering why she didn't come home, they found her dead body in the parking lot.

Unsafe, illegal, and common

According to some medical professionals, it is statistically impossible for "professional" abortionists who often practise Third World medicine under Third World conditions to escape involvement in the inevitable consequences of the trade. Abortion is not only a highly dangerous and unnatural procedure (can you imagine going to a freestanding, unlicensed, unequipped, unregulated, unstaffed, unclean office for an appendectomy?), but, like all organised-crime controlled, profit-and-sex-orientated businesses, it is mired in graft and corruption, protected and tolerated, aided and abetted by officials from the highest to the lowest levels of every social institution, including the courts, legislatures, medical associations and the churches.