Read Sniper: The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp for Free Online Page A

something different at halftime, make a statement against the Vietnam war? They would form a peace sign at the center of the field. A couple of the students spoke out against doing it. One of them was Jim Kopp. When it came time to do it, he and the other dissenters stood off to one side in silence. Vietnam would soon cease to be an abstraction for him. According to his own account, in 1973 he and Walt had their names drawn as “high probability” numbers in the U.S. draft lottery. But the war ended before their numbers were called. Yearbook photos of Jim Kopp, far left, and sister Mary, middle, and brother Walt.
***
    Life for Mary Kopp, the youngest of Chuck and Nancy’s three daughters, was never easy. To the neighborhood boys living near the Kopp house on Via Lerida, Mary seemed odd. She was a heavy girl with a round face, who wore dark-rimmed glasses. She resembled her mother, Nancy, who also struggled to keep her weight down. It was Marty, the middle sister, who had the looks, the personality.
    Jim believed Mary was tormented by other students. They were shallow and cruel. He knew she was a gentle soul who taught everyone how to love. She was the one who first taught him to read when he was four. Jack and the Beanstalk. He still could see sunlight pouring in the window back in South Pasadena, the room with walls covered in knotty pine and painted a garish pink. Mary had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1965, when she was 13. Not uncommon for those suffering mental illness at the time, she underwent electric shock therapy. She was diagnosed with leukemia six years later, when she was 19. Even as she fought the disease, Mary managed to graduate from Redwood high in 1972. She became a born-again Christian.
    On May 2 1974, she died. Three months away from his 20th birthday, it was the first time Jim could say that death had truly affected him. The family gathered for the burial in a town just north of Greenbrae called Novato, where Nancy’s Lutheran Church was located. It is a beautiful spot, lush green grass of the cemetery set against the parched foothills in the background. On top of the main stone is a concrete cast of her small hands, with “Mary” written freehand with a finger above it. She was buried next to Grave marker for Jim Kopp’s sister, Mary, in Novato, California.
    her grandmother, Kathryn Leonard. Jim wept along with Mary’s friends from the neighborhood, the ones who had understood her and had cared about her.
***
Guadalajara, Mexico 1974
“OK, so I ask to borrow the book. Borrow, you understand.”
    Bart was at it again, holding court. Could anyone tell an anecdote better? He had that delivery, that Bill Cosby thing going. He picked out things in everyday life, little absurdities, ironies. It was a Sunday night, and Bart was hanging out with the guys, Rick, Lawson, John. None of the others could match his jokes, his knack for telling a story, apocryphal or not, to highlight an absurdity, and just be damn funny. Maybe it was the setting that gave him so much material. What he and the others were engaged in was a serious enterprise, to be sure, but here they were, in their mid-20s, studying medicine in Mexico for Chrissakes. They were attending med school at Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara (UAG) with its more liberal admission standards.
    “Borrow. A book. Just—a book. From Brian,” continued Bart. “I needed to borrow it, you understand. It was mainly for this one chapter.”
    The guys grinned and listened. Bart Slepian shared an apartment with a married couple who were also in the med school. The husband’s name was Brian. He was pleasant enough, but Bart did not get along at all with Brian’s wife.
    “And so Brian says, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and he turns to his wife. ‘Can Bart borrow the book?’ And she says, ‘Well, you know, we, ah, paid for that book.’”
    Pause.
“And the husband said, ‘Well, he’s just going to read it. He’s just going to read a chapter.