The Shattered Peace

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

By Joan Ladowski's assessment, things had been quiet lately at the GYN Womenservices clinic in Buffalo, N.Y., where she worked as a technician with Dr. Barnett Slepian--at least according to the standards she had come to accept. "I mean, the protesters are out there," she explains. "They'll say, 'Good morning,' we'll say, 'Good morning, have a good day,' and they would do their picketing. It's been peaceful." Last Wednesday evening, Slepian, 52, the man she calls "a sweetheart," left with his wife for dinner in nearby Toronto, saying cheerfully that he would "see you on Saturday" at the clinic.

He never made it. At 10 p.m. Friday, Slepian was with his wife and children in the kitchen of their Amherst, N.Y., home when, according to subsequent reports, there was a popping sound. He said to his wife, "Did you hear that?," and then, "Lynn, I think I've been shot." Ninety minutes later, he was dead. Investigators think his assassin waited behind the Slepians' swimming pool and fired once through their window with a high-powered rifle. Police were searching for a boxy white car with Ontario license plates.

And they are expecting, most likely, to connect it with an antiabortion fanatic. Over the past four years, similar snipings have wounded four area abortion providers within weeks of Veterans Day on Nov. 11. The FBI was concerned enough to warn local clinic doctors to keep their curtains closed. Slepian, moreover, was a longtime target of the heated protest that for years marked the Buffalo antiabortion scene. As one of only a few western New York doctors who performed the procedure, he had been blocked from entering his office and had seen his name on WANTED posters. The Buffalo News reported one activist admonishing Slepian's children, "Don't grow up to be a murderer like your father." Things came to a boil in 1988, when Christmas-caroling antiabortion protesters converged on his house as he was celebrating Hanukkah with his family. Slepian emerged with a baseball bat and attacked one man; later he agreed to pay $400 for the man's medical care and repairs to his van. When Dr. David Gunn was gunned down in Pensacola, Fla., in 1993, Slepian commented, "It could happen to me."

In recent years, however, the protests have grown more civil. Reacting to Slepian's death, Karen Swallow Prior, a former Operation Rescue spokeswoman now running for lieutenant governor, said that "for anyone to take it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner is nothing but pure evil." Ladowski recalls that these days cries of "murderer" ring out only once or twice a month, when someone new joins the pickets. "I'm proud to say that Buffalo has not had violence," she says.

Until now. "We're afraid," she admits. "We're afraid for his family. We're afraid for our clinic." Slepian, she says, did no late-term procedures. He took scant satisfaction in abortions, performing them, he told her, "'because it is the law, this is a medical facility, and if they come to me, I will provide for the patient.'" He preferred deliveries. Three weeks ago, in his capacity as private doctor to Ladowski's daughters, he brought her granddaughter, a 9-lb. 5-oz. girl named Ryleigh, into the world. "He was great in the hospital," the grandmother reports. "Great after delivery. My girls are so upset. They say, 'What are we going to do now?'"

--By David Van Biema