Bomb Plot Suspect’s Fervor Is Still Hot Despite Arrest of 8

The Kreipal home sits at the foothills in an affluent part of Santee.

Neat and clean, there’s a basketball hoop over the garage, comfortable furniture in the living room, a Christmas tree so big it had to be sawed off to fit by the picture window, and religious pictures decorating the walls.

Basketballs are bounced. Bicycles are ridden. And the noise of children is heard rushing in and out of the front door.

Their mother is 35-year-old Jo Ann Kreipal, a Lamaze teacher and alleged conspirator in a plot to bomb an abortion clinic.

She said she works hard at being a Christian housewife.

‘Husband is the Lord and Master’

“My husband is the lord and master of this home and I like it that way,” she said in an interview. “I made him my main ministry. If he’s uncomfortable, I know it. I fix it. If he comes home at 11 or 12 o’clock (at night), I have a meal for him.”

Kreipal’s fervor runs high for her church, the nearby Bible Missionary Fellowship, where she and other members of the congregation follow a life ordered by a strict interpretation of the Bible.

But her passion appears to burn brightest in her work as an anti-abortion activist.

Forever ready to discuss the topic, Kreipal grows animated, her hands gesturing, her words pouring out fast in the East Coast accent of her native Rhode Island.

She is an encyclopedia of medical terms and fetal development statistics. She says an eight-week fetus can suck its thumb. She underscores her arguments with graphic video cassettes she readily pops into her home VCR to show visitors.

On the picket line, she can be even more assertive.

While protesting at the doors to an abortion clinic, she will say almost anything to force a pregnant woman to think twice, and she readily admits that she could be considered obnoxious.

“They’re going to smash his head,” she said, repeating how she commonly describes an abortion to pregnant women. “They’re going to pull your uterus outside of your body and rip your baby out.”

She has even offered to adopt the baby if the mother goes through with the pregnancy, and recently she helped a fellow church couple do just that when a Mexican woman was persuaded outside the clinic’s door to turn around and carry her child to term.

In fact, Kreipal estimated that out of 200 pregnant women who crossed the church picket lines each week to enter an abortion clinic, two or three were turned back.

“We know that if we are out there, at least three babies a week don’t die and three women don’t ruin their lives,” she said.

“I don’t care if I have to get six jobs to save a baby’s life. I would do it. And we all feel the same . . . . There’s nothing more valuable than one little life.”

So fervent is her hatred for abortion, the government contends, that it has led her to conspire with other church members to bomb a San Diego abortion clinic.

Kreipal has pleaded innocent in court, but declines to talk much about the charges, except to say it has affected her home life and children.

When asked directly if she would ever advocate the bombing of a clinic, she said: “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

Like other devoted church members, she quickly inveighs against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and other so-called sins of the world.

At one point during the interview, she stated bluntly that AIDS wouldn’t be a problem if America would abide by the Law of Moses, which orders society to execute the homosexual.

Killing an ‘Act of Love’

She said the killing would actually be an “act of love” for both the homosexual and society, but then quickly added: “Don’t write that down.”

Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, she turned against that religion in search of more certain salvation. She was introduced to the Bible Missionary Fellowship through her next-door neighbors after moving to Santee.

“I prayed that I would move next to someone who went to a church that didn’t lie,” she said.

She traced her involvement in the anti-abortion movement to a late Bible Missionary Fellowship member, a man who often walked the sidewalks in a lonely protest.

Eventually, Kreipal and a small band of church members joined him, their enthusiasm spreading through the congregation until their pastor, Dorman Owens, blessed their efforts and joined them on the streets.

“It was God’s Word and Dorman was the teacher. Dorman was the catalyst. He was the preacher. It was a natural process of growth for the church to spread its ministry,” she said.

During their demonstrations against abortion and other sins, Kreipal said that BMF members have been bumped, slapped, yelled at, and the target of lit cigarettes.

“One homosexual spit in my mouth,” Kreipal said.

But none of that has deflated Kreipal’s determination to picket and preach against abortion. After all, Kreipal said, she and other church members have a higher calling.

“God got us involved,” she said.