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Macedonia closes border
Thousands of Kosovar Albanians are stranded or turned back.
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[05/06/99]

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[05/06/99]

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[05/05/99]

Endangered congressman?
Former allies target a term-limit promise-breaker.
By Jake Tapper
[05/05/99]

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James Kopp, a well known anti-abortion demonstrator, was charged Thursday with the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, director of Buffalo's most prominent abortion clinic, last October 23. Authorities said DNA tests linked a hair found near Slepian's house to the 44-year-old suspect, who vanished shortly after a rifle shot struck the doctor as he stood in his kitchen. Kopp's car was later found abandoned at the Newark, N.J., airport, but he remains at large. The investigation has been criticized for delay -- especially for a six-month lag time in finding a scoped rifle, buried in the woods behind Kopp's house, that investigators now believe was the murder weapon. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to release any ballistic test results on the rifle.

One detail linking Kopp to the case was a report that Kopp was spotted cruising Slepian's neighborhood in the days leading up to the doctor's murder. And in a curious sidelight to the case, two other men were spotted in Kopp's neighborhood the night after his killing. Weeks later they were soon subjected -- wrongly -- to the intense, chilling, and perplexing attention of the FBI.

The two men, longtime left-wing activists in their 50s, suspect they were picked up for Driving While Political.

The twisted tale of mistaken identity began on Oct. 24 when Robert Stauber and Michael Gingerich, of Cleveland, Ohio, borrowed a friend's car and drove to Buffalo to attend a vigil for Slepian, who ran western New York's primary abortion facility, which served women from as far away as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where there are restrictions on the procedure.

With the wrong directions, they drove to Slepian's home in suburban Amherst, N.Y., instead of to the city clinic where memorial services were scheduled. Seeing no vigil on the dark street, they inquired of a passing patrol car. The police asked for identification, which they supplied, and sent them on their way. They attended the vigil and returned to Cleveland the next day.

In the ensuing weeks the FBI announced it was seeking Kopp for questioning in connection with Slepian's murder.

On Nov. 13, however, the official finger of fate pointed to Stauber and Gingerich. Several FBI agents showed up outside the apartment of Debbie Szemborski, owner of the car that Stauber and Gingerich had borrowed to drive to Buffalo. Questioned tersely through the intercom, because she refused to let them in, Szemborski explained why her car had been spotted there.

Meanwhile Stauber, 52, a skeptical man with the wisp of a goatee, quickly got word the FBI was looking for him. He immediately called a lawyer, Mark A. Kaiser, who notified the FBI he would arrange a meeting with his client.

Apparently, that was a red flag for the hard-charging G-men -- especially because of Stauber and Gingerich's affiliation with the Revolutionary Communist Party, a small Maoist group with a well-known loathing for the U.S government. Or, as Kaiser put it, people who "harbor serious distrust of the FBI and an unwillingness to talk to any FBI agents."

Handed a bad script, the FBI played to type.

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