September 23, 1970, Brighton, Massachusetts, near Boston: Katherine Ann Power, age twenty-one, student at Brandeis, tightens her fingers on the wheel of the switch car, an old Ford station wagon. Six blocks away, her comrades—her roommate Susan Saxe and three male convicts on parole—are robbing the State Street Bank & Trust Company. When she awoke in her studio apartment this morning, she had to step over a jumble of rifles, ammunition boxes, walkie-talkies, blasting caps, and a green duffel bag marked “Company A 101st Engineer Battalion”; most of it had been “liberated” from the National Guard Armory at Newburyport a few nights ago. She has come to believe that the only thing that will stop the Vietnam War is revolutionary action. National Guardsmen have killed four students during a peaceful antiwar demonstration at Kent State; President Nixon has been secretly bombing Cambodia and publicly lying about it; and even national-security adviser Kissinger is acting as though the country is about to fall apart. Katherine is determined to keep herself as cold and hard as iron. She wants to be a warrior. As yet, though, she is not a very good one. While the others were firebombing the Armory’s supply room, her job was to keep watch, but she had crouched in the bushes and thrown up all over her gun. She is here in the switch car today because she is not considered dependable enough to be allowed on the scene of the bank holdup. But here comes the blue Chevy, and Susan and two of the others, carrying bank bags bulging with bills, jump out of their getaway car and into the station wagon. The men hide under blankets in the back seat as Katherine slides over and lets Susan take the wheel. Thank God, she thinks, the robbery has gone off as easily as child’s play. They speed away, unaware that the fifth member of the gang, William Gilday, has hung back and, for no apparent reason, given one of Boston’s most beloved cops a fatal bullet in the back.
September 15, 1993: Alice Metzinger, a successful restaurateur, family woman, and community volunteer in Corvallis, Oregon, surrendered herself as Katherine Ann Power, bank robber and fugitive from justice, who had remained on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list longer than any other woman in American history. After a year of tense negotiations, which were conducted by go-betweens, she was now in the hands of the Boston law-enforcement authorities, who had proved powerless to locate her. A state murder charge in the death of Officer Walter A. Schroeder, which could have carried a sentence of life in prison, was reduced to manslaughter and armed robbery, and Power agreed to a recommended prison term of eight to twelve years; she would be eligible for parole in five and a third years. Federal authorities agreed to give her a five-year sentence to be served concurrently for her role in the raid on the National Guard Armory in Newburyport—one of five robberies committed by the gang she belonged to during the late summer of 1970. Charges in the holdup of a Philadelphia bank, which Power says she does not remember participating in, were dropped. Officially, the case against the last well-known sixties radical was closed.
But if Power’s surrender initially seemed also to close one of the last chapters of Vietnam-era history, it has served just the opposite purpose. The story of her fractured existence has turned out to be at least as sensational and full of contradictory extremes as that of her brief, explosive career in violent crime. A high-school valedictorian from a devout Catholic family, Power had been transformed seemingly overnight from a sedate Brandeis coed into an armed felon. For more than a decade, federal authorities had hunted her with special intensity, sending out periodic sweep teams, assembling federal grand juries to try to collect information on her, and jailing women who refused to testify concerning her whereabouts. But while the rest of the Boston holdup gang, and also members of other terrorist groups, like the Weather Underground, were gradually captured or driven to the surface by hardship, Power managed to create within Oregon’s New Age culture a protected life that seemed carved from the American dream.
The woman who left Oregon last fall was praised, lionized, and wept over, and the woman who was then arraigned in Massachusetts was as strongly derided and condemned. Her image in the newspapers—dewy-eyed, radiant, righteous—confounded and disturbed many citizens who saw her crime as both inexplicable and unforgivable. But there were also many people who claimed her as an emblem of the lost idealism of the sixties, when thousands of young people had thought themselves empowered not only to end a war but to alter the entire American social structure.
In Boston, it was an insult beyond bearing that the subversive who had been involved in a robbery that took the life of a Catholic policeman looked as though she had emerged from the sacristy of a Catholic church. Published photographs that showed her joyful pre-surrender reunion with her parents and siblings—all of them raising wineglasses even as the authorities were still looking for her—only fed the fury. The day of Power’s sentencing, however, belonged to another large Catholic family—Marie Schroeder and her nine children, who had been left fatherless twenty-three years earlier. Flanked by rows of uniformed officers, the family sat in the courtroom as Walter Schroeder’s eldest daughter, Clare, told their story. Clare Schroeder, herself a police sergeant, spoke of the suffering the family had endured, living with “the open wound of her unresolved crime. . . . While Katherine Power was establishing her new life in Oregon—learning to cook, establishing a restaurant, and hunting game birds with her husband—my mother was struggling every day to care for us, to provide for us, and to give us a loving home.” Whereas Power had sought therapy and spiritual self-fulfillment programs for depression, she added, “my mother could not afford such a luxury.” Walter Schroeder had been a decorated public servant who had saved many people’s lives. Why then, she asked, was everyone talking about Power’s heroism and courage?
Judge Robert Banks, of the Suffolk County Superior Court, evidently concurred. In a voice thick with distaste, he told Power, who stood before him in handcuffs, that he was unimpressed by her claims of being clinically depressed. He also refused to allow her son, Jaime, to testify on her behalf. And, in an unusual move, he went beyond the negotiated sentence and added a probation provision that could put Power in jail for life if she or her family should receive any benefit or profit from telling her story. Outside the courtroom, bystanders were passionately divided over the sentence, some declaring that it was too severe and others that it was too lenient. The return of the fugitive had brought long-buried strife to the surface, however briefly, reminding Americans that the wounds of Vietnam remained unhealed.
“For twenty-three years, I dreamt I would accidentally sign my real name. Well, when I surrendered, I lived my nightmare. For the first time, I signed ‘Katherine Ann Power’—and I had to do it over and over, on these legal documents. It was like some insane, drug-induced experience.” Power sat in the visiting lounge of MCI-Framingham, Massachusetts’ only prison for women. She wore no makeup. Her skin, which was pale, looked translucent. She hugged her elbows, one moment throwing her head back in laughter and speaking expansively, the next becoming watchful and sharp-edged. “Then this prison intake psychologist asks me if I have any anxieties. I said, ‘Me? Ice water runs in my veins.’ . . . I was completely self-possessed, totally the armored fugitive.”
In fact, she had felt buoyantly light, disentangled at last from the heavy net of lies, aliases, and invented selves. For the first time in more than two decades, she had, for a while, felt safe. Once in prison, she had dropped her guard and begun to write poetry. One poem ended by describing how she had gone from being the victorious to the vanquished warrior:
Then she found out that someone wanted to kill her. A prison guard had picked up a voice on his police radio, talking about ways to “murder Katherine Power.” For security reasons, she was moved from a cell with a window that offered a view to a cell whose window faced a wall, above which floated a tiny slice of sky. That her reappearance and surrender have moved some people to want to kill her strikes her as deeply ironic, since for years she has fought off depression—and the urge to do the job herself. The authorities at Framingham put her in a “special care” cell block, named after one of the prison’s first supervisors, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton. Her schedule now includes a women’s spirituality group and an aerobics class; she publishes her poetry in the prison newspaper; she takes Trazodone, an antidepressant, and Prozac; and she undergoes intensive psychotherapy twice a week. She explained that after spending years living only in the present and, quite literally, wiping out any memories of the past, she must now “reintegrate” her personality, reconciling Alice Metzinger with an old, and forgotten, Katherine Power. It is so difficult a task that, on the advice of her prison therapist, she has added photographs of herself at various stages of her life to the photos of her parents she had taped on a wall of her cell—“to remind me,” she said, “that this everyday reality I wake up to is not all there is of me. The central reason I didn’t give myself up before is that I was so afraid that my frenetic activity was my only weapon against suicide. Prison has taken the activity away, but I have another weapon that I never had before—anger.”
The Massachusetts corrections authorities have refused to make a decision on whether to allow Power to serve her sentence in a West Coast prison, so that she could be nearer to her husband and son. The authorities’ intransigence is vengeful, according to Power’s lawyers, who maintain that the transfer was promised Power in an oral agreement. (The D.A.’s office denies this.)
“When I think about the betrayal of the Boston authorities and Judge Banks and the others who would love it if I died by my own hand, I get mad, and it strengthens my defenses,” she said. “A little while ago, my contract began to break down—the tools left me. This voice said, ‘If you just stop taking Trazodone, nobody will hold you responsible for leaving them.’ I told my therapist, and he said, ‘If you start to actually plan how to kill yourself, will you call me?’ And I did begin to plan it, and I called him and asked to be put on suicide watch. Of course, my strongest weapon against suicide is my contract with God and my family. This time, I am going to come back—not like the other times, where I’ve walked away from my family and everyone that I knew in my life. Now I have said I will not leave anymore. I will not hurt anyone anymore.’’
Power’s instant celebrity brought her a great deal of unwanted attention, and that, too, has angered her. Hollywood agents have hounded her husband; Boston newspapers have published negative stories about her; and reporters from all over the country have posed as visitors to try to get in to see her. The Corvallis Gazette-Times reported that Clare Schroeder’s brother Paul, who is also a Boston police officer, telephoned the paper after her sentencing, saying that Power “should have died for it,” and adding, “I have friends in the prison system. We’ll make it as hard on her as we can.” Power’s lawyer says that although she has received several anonymous threats, her treatment in prison has been good. Still, Power reports that “at night, I’ve had these dreams. People are trying to tear out my heart with their teeth, and I wake up shaking.”
For much of her life as a fugitive, Power wore her hair so short it sometimes stuck straight up. Now, however, the ends of her hair dipped forward girlishly, and, in her prison-approved garb—jeans, a black cable-knit sweater with a little white collar peeking out neatly, white socks, and Keds—she looked almost as though time had stopped for her back on that September day of her senior year at Brandeis. In a sense, it did. The killing of Walter Schroeder immobilized Katherine Ann Power in her own history. She became the stuff of counterculture myth, and, throughout the seventies, the F.B.I.’s intensive hunt for her served only to aggrandize that image. But, when the war ended and her fellow-radicals dispersed and slipped back into the establishment, Power was left alone with the myth, a revolutionary without comrades or a revolution. Running from one false persona to another, she clung to the only self that was constant—the warrior who represented the moral outrage of a generation. One senses in her today a poignant grandiosity: the stories she tells invariably feature her as the heroic central character in an ongoing epic. They tend to have grand themes (Catholicism, feminism, victimization, struggle, shame, transformation) and to depict her archetypally (the defiant rebel, the depressed workaholic). Her language sometimes lapses into sixties revolutionary jargon overlaid with nineties recovery-movement platitudes, and this serves to protect her by keeping others at a safe distance. So does the fact that there are gaps in her story—her memory, she says, is only now beginning to return.
Ironically, the story about herself that Power has the most difficulty believing is perhaps the simplest, and the one told most often by the friends she made in Oregon over the last sixteen years. They talk of her generosity and loyalty, and yet she questions how these qualities can be real if Alice Metzinger is not.
It was in May of 1992, after half a lifetime on the lam, that Power admitted to herself that she needed help. Taking a step that was tantamount to coming out of hiding, she walked into a series of four seminars on depression being given at a hospital in the Corvallis area. The instructor, Linda Carroll, had barely begun her talk when Power, who had never before dropped her guard in public, began to sob openly. “She could barely get the words out,” Carroll, a family therapist, recalled. “She was like a burn victim that has somehow miraculously survived.” When the seminars ended, Power began to see Carroll privately, and soon blurted out her disjointed story. Carroll tried to call on lawyers for consultation in the case, but she found that many were unwilling to become involved in representing a fugitive. Finally, Carroll enlisted the services of Steven Black, who was a renegade public defender, known for taking cases that others wouldn’t touch; a physician named Barry Reeves, who put Power on an antidepressant; and a psychiatrist named Charles Kuttner.
Each week for fifteen months Power travelled to Carroll’s office, in a local medical center, and sat for fifty minutes in an easy chair. She would stare at the Karastan rug or the Impressionist prints on the walls, and, behind her big granny glasses, her tears would flow as she related details of her life. Back in the nineteen-seventies, Power had often joked to Susan Saxe that she’d had so many identities a shrink would have a field day with her. Two decades later, it was no longer a joking matter.
Carroll became convinced that Power had inherited from her father a condition known as endogenous clinical depression and then that she had suffered post-traumatic stress, reliving the robbery and murder in vivid flashbacks. It seemed to Carroll that Power’s fugitive state and the symptoms of this biochemical depression “fed each other furiously. The depressive symptoms—anxiety, vigilance, isolation—were exactly the qualities she needed to cultivate to survive. Each one cloaked the other. If her depression subsided, the fugitiveness would kick in, so that even in her good periods she would isolate herself and her family.”
As early as the third week, according to Power, Carroll suggested that she investigate the charges that were outstanding against her. “Katherine became aware of a deep, unrecognized desire to reunite with her parents and siblings,” Carroll told me. “Katherine Power had been a young Catholic trained to seek a higher purpose, and for more than twenty years she had been living almost without purpose. It became clear that she could find meaning again only by surrendering.”
From their home, in the little city of Lebanon, Oregon, twenty miles east of Corvallis, Power’s husband, Ron Duncan, and her son, Jaime, talk to her for at least twenty minutes a day. Money is scarce and they are running up huge phone bills, but they cannot seem to limit their calls. The small house is ramshackle: the lampshades are shredding, the coffee table is chipped, the plants are yellowing. Though it is mid-January, a Christmas tree still stands in a corner, sagging under big outdoor lights. “Alice and I very comfortably live a life of voluntary poverty,” Ron tells me on the first day I visit. It is certainly a cozy place, however, with a Sweet Home wood-stove roaring away in the living room.
Ronley Duncan was once a comparatively conventional man—earnest, gentlemanly, anchored to his marriage and his family’s accounting firm, now known as Duncan-Duncan Associates, in Portland. Then, fourteen years ago, Alice Louise Metzinger flew into his life like a comet. Within the first weeks of their romance, she had entrusted to him the secret of her identity. Subsequently, he gave up everything, including his wife and his then eleven-year-old daughter, for love of her. Today, he wears his hair, which is thick and wiry and graying, pulled back into a ponytail and works as a meat cutter and as a freelance tax accountant. His skin seems colorless and parched. He has a gentle manner, an unwavering gaze, and a deep, calming voice. His eye alights happily on the traces of his wife that are everywhere—a new hiking jacket he had given her, which she hardly got to wear; a half-used deodorant stick; scraps of her poems, sticking out from between stacks of clients’ old tax returns; her charcoal drawing of the head of a horse.
The phone rings, and Ron jumps up to answer it, thinking that it is his wife, whom he still calls Alice; he is concerned because she has not been feeling well but has been reluctant to complain, for fear that the doctors might think her antidepressant is to blame. “And if her medication goes, so does her life,” he says. But the caller is Jaime. “Hello? Hello?” Ron shouts. “Jaime, is that you?” Jaime, who has just turned fifteen, is at the movies and has spent his last dime, but he has figured out that on this particular kind of pay phone you can dial a number without depositing any money and still be heard, if faintly. An hour later, Jaime, dark-haired, handsome, and affable, wearing oversized green shorts and a Raiders baseball cap turned backward, clatters in, and disappears into his room to listen to some new rap CDs.
Jaime was told of his mother’s real identity only a month before her surrender and many months after the secret negotiations with the authorities had begun. Although he says he supports his mother’s decision, he clearly has some lingering anger and confusion. He is popular at Lebanon High School, but his schoolwork has suffered and he dropped off the swim team after his mother left, last fall. This is partly because he has had to travel to the East Coast several times to see her, and partly because she was the disciplinarian of the family, and Jaime, like any teen-ager, is enjoying his freedom. To see his mother deprived of hers is more than he can handle. He becomes restless and uncomfortable visiting her. “We were a very close little family,” Ron says. “Jaime and I still touch a lot, we still kiss. He is very affectionate, and Alice misses that affection terribly. It is a loss she had not counted on.” Jaime’s way of handling his mother’s absence seems to be to keep her at an emotional distance. This is made easier by the fact that, for the first time, he has become seriously involved with girls. Once when he travelled to Framingham, he kept a Teddy bear a girl gave him by his bed.
His mother’s surrender introduced him to the large extended family he had never known. He had just spent Christmas in Denver with his maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and boisterous cousins, all of whom hovered over him and argued about him, as though they wanted him instantly to fill the hole that his mother’s disappearance had left so many years ago. As for Ron, he’d been exactly where he wanted to be for the holidays—with his wife. “They let you have one kiss and one long hug at the beginning and the end of our visits,” he says. “If you hug too long, the guards start coughing. The price of the hugs is that Alice has to be strip-searched with rubber gloves afterward, but I guess she’s got used to it.”
The phone rings again, and this time it is his wife. He cradles the receiver, speaks softly into it, chuckles, whispers, and looks suddenly revived.
Steven Black, who was Power’s first lawyer, is a large man with an easy, bluff manner that is at startling odds with rather fierce, jutting eyebrows. He is a fixture in Corvallis’s old Italianate county courthouse; customarily, he can be found loping back and forth between jail and courtroom, waving casually to a retinue of recidivist drunks, con men, and drug users, all of whom return the greeting. He is known for being outspoken, for irritating judges by a failure to be punctual, and for wearing ties shaped like fish, in protest against the court’s dress code.
A decorated Vietnam reconnaissance pilot who served in the military for ten years, Black has what he calls his “attaboy buttons”—including one for saving the lives of four soldiers ambushed in a paddy field—hanging on a wall in his office. Black had started drinking to forget Vietnam, and in 1983 he got sober and soon gave up a lucrative corporate practice to become a court-appointed attorney. Periodically, however, he was plagued by sudden, unexplained crying jags. Then, in May of 1992, a short, shy woman walked into his office. “She wore a black skirt, black pumps, and a frilly blouse, and had her hair in a bun,” he recalled. “She looked like she had just fallen off a Keebler cookie box, very waiflike and forlorn. She began spilling out her own Vietnam War story, and I began to get those awful feelings again.” Power and Black began meeting up to two or three times a week. During one meeting, after he told her about a particularly gruesome air operation, she joked that he was the one who should be put on trial. “I said, ‘What a good idea!’ ” he recalled. “We were both obsessed with a desire to be punished, to seek expiation for our acts.”
There are not many places in America where you could open the doors of the county courthouse after hours and find the D.A. prosecuting a public defender for old war crimes before a jury of prominent citizens. But that is what happened in Corvallis, Oregon, in September of 1992. Power agreed to act as Black’s “attorney,” though she was risking exposure by publicly returning, so to speak, to the scene of her own Vietnam-era crime.
About fifty of Steven Black’s friends and associates received invitations to the mock trial, in which Black was charged with crimes against humanity, on the basis of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of them were intrigued, yet few of them found this bizarre event out of character for their town. Corvallis, which is some seventy-five miles south of Portland, in the Willamette Valley, seems to have been reborn from the ashes of the Woodstock Nation: businessmen in Birkenstock sandals and work shirts ride their bicycles or amble along its wide, neatly restored streets, visiting their neighbors’ food coöperatives or art galleries, or turn their own space over to a demonstration of, say, newly discovered tribal chants. The climate is always mild; sporadic bursts of rain put a magical glaze on everything; the roadside alders grow wild with shoots, and the gnarled, rangy branches of white oaks hang heavy with Spanish moss.
At seven o’clock on the night of September 3rd, an expectant audience greeted Black as he walked into Courtroom No. 1 with his attorney, Alice Metzinger, who wore a classic tan suit. The jury—attorneys, doctors, business-people of the town—sat in the jury box beneath the tall shuttered windows. Karen Zorn, the Deputy District Attorney, opened by charging that Black had gone beyond his military duty in Vietnam, and engaged in the “extracurricular killing” of a hundred or more people in the free-fire zone he patrolled in the Mekong Delta. As she elaborated, people began to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. This was more than some of the jurors were prepared to deal with, and two excused themselves.
On the stand, Black, whose nickname in Vietnam had been Captain Kidd, testified to what he had done after he finished his regular duty of providing cover for foot patrols: “I would take my plane, the Iron Butterfly, out hunting. I would look for people. I would shoot at anything that moved”—whether it was sampans, old men, children, or women hanging out their laundry.
“How did you feel about it?” Zorn asked.
Black wiped his forehead. “I enjoyed it,” he replied. “It was a game. I killed a lot of people, I probably killed extra people.”
Next, Alice Metzinger rose and asked him whether he had any justification for shooting unarmed civilians.
“No, I don’t have any justification—what I did was wrong,” Black replied. She then asked him some severe questions about what she termed his “hunting expeditions”; several spectators were moved to wonder why his own attorney was being so hard on him. Then she called an expert witness, a cultural anthropologist named Lucy Skjelstad, and Skjelstad testified that Black’s behavior was explainable in the context of the mores and the values of the military culture in which he had been a member. In her summation, Metzinger argued that you did indeed have to view Black’s crimes in context; that the real criminals in the war were “the profiteers, the politicians, the bureaucrats”; that Steven Black was just a victim of his times.
When the jurors adjourned to deliberate, they were in a collective state of shock. “The Steve I know wouldn’t have been capable of doing those killings—they were the work of a madman,” Rod Terry, an architect and a fellow Vietnam veteran (who never saw combat), said. But very few, it seemed, were proud of their own behavior during the Vietnam War. “We were all sitting there in that jury room with baggage—we all felt very uncomfortable,” Jeanne Ferrell, a legal assistant, said. “I thought about my son. He came out of the Army with considerable psychological damage. How I wish I had listened to him! I wish I had told him not to go in.” Other jurors expressed guilt at having done nothing to try to stop the war. At length, they filed back into the courtroom with a verdict. Alice Metzinger wept when she heard it: not guilty by the standards of 1969 but guilty by today’s standards.
Black was “sentenced” to fifty hours of community service. “I went home almost beatific,” he told me. “I have never felt such a sensation of lightness, of relief. The absolute worst things I had ever done, the worst part of me, was finally out there, and my friends, most of them, could forgive me. And I had shown Katherine that if the guilt for my crimes could be mitigated by putting them in a cultural context, so could hers.” Actually, not all the jurors could forgive Black, or understand his actions. “Nobody would get me in a position where I’d kill like that,” said Rod Terry.
Black now turned his attention to his mock attorney’s future. He asked a law-school friend who was living in Alaska to approach the federal authorities in Boston and find out what the exact charges against Power were. Subsequently, Black got in touch with a Boston lawyer named Rikki Klieman and she approached Ralph Martin, the new Suffolk County District Attorney, in Boston. Word spread through the law-enforcement network, and the F.B.I., which was especially eager to capture Power and thus avoid the embarrassment of having to negotiate with her, renewed its hunt. Klieman called Power and Black only from phone booths. “I knew that the race was on—that they would try to use these negotiations to find her,” Klieman recalled. “I assumed they were getting my phone records, maybe tapping my phones. I encoded all references to the case in my diary. I even got so paranoid that if someone came up and used the pay phone next to me I immediately changed phones.”
Klieman and Martin went back and forth, with Klieman holding out for three years’ time served, and Martin, on behalf of the Massachusetts authorities, insisting on fifteen. Black, for his part, wanted Power to stand trial; his own experience of confessional theatre had whetted his appetite for public debate about Vietnam, and to him the state’s case against Power looked weak. “In fact, we had zippo,” Martin later told me. “No admissible evidence, no credible witnesses. Basically, no case.”
Susan Saxe, who was armed and inside the Brighton bank during the holdup, had made a plea bargain after her trial, in 1976, ended in a hung jury; she served less than seven years. Power hoped to serve much less than that, but she was adamant about entering a guilty plea. She told Black that to claim she had not driven the switch car would make a travesty of her surrender. Klieman, who had other concerns, supported Power’s urge to plead guilty: she feared that, given today’s conservative political climate, a jury was quite capable of sending Power away for life, even on scant evidence.
In the spring of 1993, with neither side budging on the terms, the talks between Martin and Klieman stopped cold. Then, a few months later, Klieman recalled, she was sitting at her desk, looking out of her office window at Boston’s majestic Customs House tower. “I had this vision, this overwhelming sense that we had to end this, we had to bring her in,” she told me. “I called the D.A.’s office and they sensed the change in me. We had to make this work—for Katherine, for the Schroeders, for society.” A compromise was reached, and a week later Power agreed to the terms.
Ralph Martin, who in 1992 became the first black D.A. in Massachusetts, happened to attend Brandeis University just after Katherine Ann Power did and has personal feelings about the “political” nature of her crime. “My dad was a cop,” Martin told me, “and he used to tell me that black officers were expected to be men in the street and less than men in the station house. I marched in Harlem for civil rights, I was against the Vietnam War. In fact, my father told me he’d rather see me in jail than in Vietnam. Brandeis was a hotbed of radicalism, and I was right in it, but, so help me God, when I heard what Katherine Power and her friends had done, I never saw the nexus.
“She certainly deserves credit for coming forward, because we probably never would have caught her,” Martin went on. “But if she is a victim of anything, it is of her own actions.”
For Katherine Ann Power, the clues to what happened to her life are embedded in her upbringing. When I went to see her, she looked around the visitors’ lounge, taking in a set of tiny tables and animal-shaped chairs that prisoners’ children use when they visit, and said, “My own childhood in Denver was kind of extreme.” She was the oldest daughter of seven children in the kind of Catholic family where, often, the aunts were nuns, the uncles were priests, and all those at home recited rosaries together in the evening. Both parents worked—her mother, Marjorie Power, as a nurse and her father, Winfield Power, as a loan officer in a bank. “I grew up on stories of the saints—the ones who got their heads chopped off for the greater good. I always imagined how glorious that kind of sacrifice would be. My mother would rise at 5 a.m., draw my father’s bath, make breakfast, leave for work, ride the bus home, take a fifteen-minute nap, prepare the family dinner, and organize the family workforce to do dishes and laundry, and then she would have a half hour to herself. She would stand behind the living-room chair by the heat register, warming her legs and reading ‘Dear Abby.’ She never, ever complained.”
When Katherine was about fourteen years old, her mother was put on the night shift at the hospital. “I quit Girl Scouts to cook dinner,” she told me. “That was fine with me, because I thought Girl Scouts was stupid—a bunch of hoohaws riding horses and not doing much for other people.” Her father suffered from untreated depression, and his illness, she said, was a major force in shaping her life. “He had such a feeling of inadequacy that he couldn’t support his family by himself. He fought it in the same way I did, with lots of activity—bowling leagues, Toastmasters, various fraternal organizations. I was extremely bright, and they wanted to make a public speaker of me. Every night, I had to stand by the fireplace and recite the Optimist Club creed, promising to look at the sunny side of every situation. He was a loving father, but he demanded that everyone perform perfectly, and he would have these unpredictable rages. When he yelled at me, I thought I was going to die. I had to be perfect, I had to be absolutely good and perfect.”
At Marycrest High School, Katherine worked with the poor and elderly, and was a youth columnist for the Denver Post, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, and a winner of the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award, for her recipes and her sewing. She graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade average. “My first criterion for college was: How far away from home is it? Then, that it wasn’t Catholic. I wanted to get away from this Catholic burden.”
In the fall of 1967, Katherine Power made an escape of sorts—landing in another rarefied community, the heavily Jewish intellectual world of Brandeis University, in Waltham, ten miles west of Boston. Brandeis had awarded her a full scholarship. “It was in the days when people dressed in togas and took acid to go to French class,” the filmmaker Mickey Lemle recalled. “When Dow Chemical tried to recruit on campus, students responded by planning to napalm a dog. I remember we provided sanctuary to a soldier who was awol in the middle of Mailman House. We slept around him, and we all had a number to call if we got busted. A lot of us were there to meet girls. It was the era of free love, and some people were motivated by sex as much as by politics, and everyone knew that radical people tended to do it more.”
As for Katherine Power, her prim, wholesome aura made her a walking advertisement of the pious life style she had fled. On her first day at her dormitory, Gordon Hall, while other students were wandering about at a welcome party, “I found her sitting in a corner, crying,” recalled Deborah Cotton, who was a freshman from a similarly sheltered Catholic background and is now a doctor conducting aids research in Boston. “She was a little fish in a big pond, and she was severely homesick. For a girl used to a strict, structured school life to come in on Day One and see couples openly sleeping together and tripping on LSD and mescaline was too much for her.”
By the late fall, Power had found a niche for herself: she had made friends and had become involved in the antiwar movement, though she was far from an extremist; in fact, she was active on the Brandeis Social Committee, in charge of arranging the décor, the food, and the entertainment for school dances and parties. In her sophomore year, she was a part of the Big Brother/Big Sister program for incoming freshmen. Yet she still had an air of not belonging, and she tended to befriend underdogs and misfits. “I even had the wrong kind of pajamas,” Power told me. “It was a class thing. I didn’t have money. I was overweight.” But she easily made the dean’s list. Mark Seth Lender, a fellow-student, who is now a writer living in New York, says, “I would even say she had genius. It came right off her.”
Power’s friends say that her emotional maturity did not keep pace with her intellectual gifts. Madeline Raetz, one of her suitemates during junior year, said that when she looks at her teen-age daughter’s friends, she remembers what Kathy was like: “She was doing everything late. I think she was just learning to drive, she was boy crazy.” According to Cotton, Kathy was also often depressed. “She would spend an inordinate amount of time sleeping. We would come back from classes and she would be parked there in her bathrobe. She was very sweet and eager to please, and she would make toast and tea on the hot plate and listen to other people’s troubles. There was not a lot going on in her life. But I’ll never forget a discussion several of us had about abortion. She was adamant that there was never a justification for taking a human life, no matter what the greater good was.”
In the spring of 1970, campuses all over the country erupted in outrage over the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State killings. More than four hundred universities and colleges were shut down as students and professors rioted or went on strike. Close to a hundred thousand demonstrators marched on Washington and engulfed the White House. At Brandeis, many students who were merely liberal, such as Katherine Power, became radicalized. “I was a science nerd, not a politico,” Cotton recalled. “But we all thought that in fact the older generation was ready to kill their young.” The antiwar movement had gradually spread roots to foster an entire “Amerikan” subculture, with a network of underground newspapers (serviced by the Liberation News Service), radio stations, theatre groups, and leftist philosophers and revolutionary theorists, ranging from Herbert Marcuse and Staughton Lynd to Eldridge Cleaver and Abbie Hoffman. Some groups splintered off to advocate violent action.
Power helped set up a National Student Strike Information Center, which had its headquarters at Brandeis, and acted as the strike committee’s press secretary. She told me that, as her activism escalated, so did her disillusionment with her professors: “They were teaching us that this was the apocalypse. They were in the car with me, hurling bricks through the windows of firms with Defense Department contracts. But then they went back to their comfortable lives, their security. They didn’t take real risks.”
Allen Grossman, who was an English professor at Brandeis at the time and now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, recalled, “Impossible moral burdens were put on students. They were told that legitimate sources of money for the movement had dried up. Students like Kathy Power, in their enormous desire to be good, took it all as a personal mandate. I am angry at myself, and at others in the college, for not stepping in. Katherine Power became enormously confused. The liberal system and legitimate action within that system were denounced, with no thought about where this could lead.”
The choice that Power made in the summer of 1970 was a fateful one. “The Mobe—the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—wanted me to move into a leadership role, to go to Cuba and meet with the Vietnamese and come back and lecture around the country,” she said. “I met David Dellinger and all these male stars, and I shrank back. I mistrusted myself deeply. I ran screaming from that legitimate leadership role, because I thought I would just love its trappings of power and status and that would be a mortal sin. Then what was left was clandestine action. I didn’t want to be famous, I just wanted to be effective—to finally make it impossible for the war to go on anymore.”
As a result of her connections on campus, Power was able to get keys to administrative offices, and she used them to enter the Student Council office (she had run for president that year and lost) and steal stationery. She printed and distributed a notice saying that classes had been cancelled in protest against the Cambodia bombing, and the notice caused chaos on campus. At the end of the school year, Power, Susan Saxe, and some other students stayed on at Brandeis. The university ordered the strike center shut down, shut off telephone service, and posted guards outside the building. Power and five other students sued the school to keep the center open, and lost.
If she had joined Mobe that summer instead, Katherine probably would never have met Stanley Bond, a clever, articulate, largely self-educated twenty-five-year-old convict. In February, Bond had suddenly found himself plucked from nearby Walpole State Prison and deposited on the campus of Brandeis, courtesy of a group of college-sponsored liberal philanthropists, who thought him a perfect candidate for an experimental parole project they supported. Bond, who grew up in Pasadena, California, had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and after coming home in 1965 he had gone on to commit twenty armed robberies over a three-month period. He was tall and had a thick head of hair, a tight, muscular body, and a cocky swagger. He would tell people right away that he had been in prison, and sometimes he would invite them into his dorm room to see a pistol he kept there. Richard Onorato, then the dean of students, recounted, “I was showing him around, and he said, ‘Look at all these young cunts, you can fuck ’em all.’ Then he said, ‘It’s such a beautiful day it makes you want to die—no, it makes you want to kill someone.’ ” Onorato, who is now an English professor at Brandeis, recalled that he had immediately alerted the dean of faculty and other university officials. “The next thing we knew, Bond was telling people that he had a gun and that a certain dean had better stop criticizing him. I remember one dean said, ‘Well, he’d better not come here, because I have a gun in my drawer.’ But, of course, I knew I was the one Bond was threatening, and I was shaken up.” Bond was reported to have threatened other faculty members during the spring term at Brandeis, but no action was taken against him. “I heard that a very senior person at Brandeis had got this prisoner-release thing to happen and didn’t want it to fail,” Onorato said.
Gerald Zerkin, who lived across the hall from Bond, and who is now a lawyer in Virginia, commented, “He was a scary guy. I liked Kathy, and I saw Bond’s effect on certain kinds of women, who were vulnerable and perhaps a bit lonely. I was concerned when I saw her hanging around him.”
Lender remembers Power looking that spring like “an escapee from parochial school, damage and all,” and explains, “She had gained weight, and her hair was a mess, and there were cigarette ashes on her clothes.” Bond, on the other hand, had the quality of a rock star. “He was like Mick Jagger. He gave off this electric and sexual energy, and everyone picked it up—kids, gay men, women. I was just a naïve kid, but it seemed to me he could have any woman he wanted.”
The woman he chose, in late July, was Kathy Power. “What I knew was that he was not like the other people,” Power told me. “He wasn’t about pretending to be radical. The very things that made other people so uncomfortable about him—his intensity, his passion, his commitment, his not-straightness—were what made me aware of him as a possible comrade.”
For years afterward Power’s family and friends would search for a way to explain what happened to her that summer. Clearly, her particular personality, in those particularly perilous times, had driven her to the edge, but what had pushed her over? Some speculated that drugs were involved, others that she had had a nervous breakdown. Some friends who knew her well, including two of her roommates, felt that she had simply arrived at a political realization that legal protest against the war was futile. But others pointed to Stanley Bond. “In 1969, our daughter told us she was not ‘one of those radicals,’ ” Marjorie Power told me. “In 1970, she disappeared. Kathy was very naïve and open to influence, and it has been said that Bond was a con artist who could talk anybody into anything.” Detectives who worked on the case agreed, describing Bond as a Manson-like character who manipulated Power with little effort. Some people believed that she was deeply infatuated, even sexually obsessed, with him.
In our conversations, Power was scornfully dismissive of these speculations. “The sexual part was trivial,” she said. “We were soulmates. There was this intense trust, this vision-sharing, life-sharing bond. I will never forget his story of not cutting his wrists—of being in prison and saying either I die now or I make meaning out of my life. At last, I thought—here, at last, in the universe is another person like me. There was a very deep part of me that was alienated and lonely, that I kept hidden at Brandeis, and Stan found that part.”
Bond also recruited Susan Saxe, a women’s-rights activist who had just graduated, magna cum laude, from Brandeis. Saxe, who was from Albany, New York, was an intellectual with a quick wit, and was as sophisticated as Katherine Power was not. The three teamed up with two other paroled Walpole inmates, Robert Valeri and William Gilday, who had been released to another Boston school a few weeks before on the same prisoner-education project. (Neither attended a single college class.) Valeri was a twenty-one-year-old native of Leominster, Massachusetts, who had joined a travelling circus and been jailed for attempted robbery. William Gilday, forty-one, had been a minor-league pitcher before going to prison for armed robbery. Neither man professed any political beliefs. But Power, Bond, and Saxe wanted to use the money from bank robberies to arm the Black Panthers and to buy thermite to weld military trains to their tracks. The five rented two apartments in Boston, one in Power’s name and the other in Bond’s, and in August and September they crisscrossed the country, splitting up and regrouping, and receiving help from radical-left contacts in various cities. Saxe bought guns, ammunition, and a “Shooter’s Bible” in Portland, Oregon, and joined a gun club. In a rural section of Northern California, Bond taught Power and Saxe how to fire a rifle.
Members of the group robbed banks in Los Angeles, Evanston, Illinois, and Philadelphia; stole cars; held up a motel manager and used his I.D. card to rent a car; transported guns from place to place. Power says she did not participate in most of these actions and is certain that she never went inside a bank. Police reports indicate that Saxe carried a Molotov cocktail that Bond had made out of a Kotex soaked in lighter fluid. In all, forty-five thousand dollars was netted from the robberies. Bond took charge of the money, handing out funds for expenses sparingly.
On September 20th, the group broke into the Newburyport National Guard Armory and stole military equipment, ammunition, two vehicles, and papers that outlined the National Guard’s plans for quelling riots in Boston, which they mailed anonymously to the Boston press. They discussed the pros and cons of blowing up the Cambridge police station. And on the night of September 22nd, Bond went out to look for a bank they could rob, while Power went to see her suitemates at Brandeis. “She looked excited, kind of like somebody in love,” Madeline Raetz recalled. “She told us that she didn’t know if she would be able to make up all her incompletes from junior year, and she didn’t know whether she would be rooming with us, or even coming back to school.” Then she returned to her Boston apartment and spent the night with Stanley Bond.
The next day, Saxe, Valeri, and Bond entered the Brighton branch of the State Street Bank through the back door while Gilday sat in a car out front. Saxe, wearing a red wig and a long purple dress and carrying a .30-calibre carbine, and Valeri, in a stocking cap and sunglasses, stood watch at the doors while Bond disarmed a guard. When the tellers hesitated in putting cash into bank bags, he fired two shots into the ceiling.
A couple of minutes after Bond, Saxe, and Valeri drove off, Officer Walter Schroeder and his partner arrived in their patrol car. Two years earlier, Schroeder had disarmed robbers at the same bank, and he may have thought he was about to do it again. He drew his gun and ran toward the bank. Gilday, who was still sitting in his car, diagonally across from where Schroeder was approaching the bank, lifted a Thompson submachine gun and sprayed thirty rounds in his direction, also shooting at a moving truck that got in the way. Schroeder turned to run for cover, and a bullet hit him in the back. His partner, Frank Callahan, got him into the cruiser, turned on the siren, and headed for St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. On the way, they passed the home of Schroeder’s mother, who was sitting on her porch, as she always did, waiting to wave to her son as he drove by. Callahan could not bring himself to wave back. At the hospital, doctors tried to remove the bullet but held out little hope for Schroeder’s survival. At Mount St. Joseph’s Academy, across the street from the hospital, Clare Schroeder, seventeen, was called out of her classroom. A few minutes later, classmates heard her in the hall, wailing and crying. At ten-twelve the next morning, her father died.
Robert Valeri, who was picked up later that day and swiftly turned state’s evidence, said that Gilday had opened fire on Schroeder because “he said he wanted to shoot a cop.”
Back at Power’s apartment, the group turned on the radio and learned that Gilday had shot a policeman after they drove off. Power and Saxe were upset and irate at Gilday, but Bond reportedly defended him, saying that he had actually committed a very brave act.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Power told me. “I was saying, ‘What? What? How could this have happened?’ It was like a world shattering. It was a sharp, intense pain. I had been dissociated, and suddenly I was back.” As she said this, she looked at the prison window and bit her lip until her chin turned white. “There was this overwhelming sense of wrongness. This wasn’t supposed to be about taking lives—this was about stopping the taking of lives.” She began to cry. “I have memorized that moment, replayed it again and again—so many times. I will never in my life ever forget it.”
Power said that she still cannot piece together or fully understand the role she played in Bond’s group. “I know that I was scared,” she said. “I think I was suicidal. I knew how serious this was, because I expected to die for the cause. Me and Susan talked about it. I knew that Gilday and Valeri weren’t safe people. They were dangerous, I lived dangerously. But I never imagined they could be dangerous to other people—only to me.” Her breath quickened. “I’ve always been good, like the kind of good that’s in quotes. I’m ‘nice.’ It’s like, I’m a joke to the inmates here, because I don’t break the rules. I don’t do things that are going to make the grownups mad. And there I was feeling morally compelled to break the rules. There was this discomfort—it felt so disturbing, so not me. I was violating something but I was feeling that I had to do it, I had to do this to be an O.K. person.”
Bond put four thousand dollars in brand-new bills from the State Street robbery into a lens cap. He told Valeri that the bills could be too easily traced for them to spend, and so he was going to send them to the widow of the wounded policeman if he died. He sent Power out with cash to buy a used car and the two of them drove it to Philadelphia.
Power cut off most of her hair, dyed what was left of it red, and changed her glasses. A day or two later, she had to change her appearance again. She and Bond had continued to Atlanta and had separated there, arranging to meet again later, and she had flown to St. Louis with a suitcase that Bond had told her to carry. She claims she did not know that a fully cocked shotgun was inside. It exploded on the luggage carousel at the St. Louis airport, injuring two workers. “I was standing at the gate, waiting to be called for standby on a flight to Detroit, and all of a sudden I see all these men in suits running toward me, and an obvious code comes over the P.A. system. I feel this terror returning as I talk about this—I hadn’t remembered it until now. I was standing there, and men were converging on me, and all of a sudden it was as if I woke up. I realized that I had yielded all control. Somewhere, I had known all along about Bond’s narcissism, his patriarchal arrogance, his lack of sense and attention to other people’s safety, but I had only paid attention to his astonishing noble qualities. I knew what to do, I knew how to act, and I gave it away. That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever let somebody else be the leader.”
Power recalled that she stood absolutely still as the security men riffled through the stack of tickets. “My ticket stood out. I’d gone a lot of places on standby, and it was marked up in black ink. They stopped at my ticket, looked at it, and kept going. Then they went through the pile again, paused at mine, shook their heads, and kept going. I told myself, ‘Don’t panic.’ Then they returned to my ticket and took it out of the pile. Very slowly, I walked away, and I kept on until I reached the airport door. That’s when I heard my alias being paged. I got in a taxi, went to the biggest department store, bought a suitcase, a curly brown prissy old-lady wig, and a double-knit polyester dress, put them on, and went to the bus station. I had to wait there for hours for the right bus, and I remember police strolling through the depot. I have distinctive features, I am barely five feet tall, I should have been captured. They looked right at me but they didn’t see me. I looked like the woman next door.”
Within a week, police had picked up Gilday and Bond. Bond was caught after he charmed a foreign visitor sitting next to him on an airplane, offered to show her America, and, at a hotel that night, bragged to her about the robbery and cop killing. The next morning, the woman told Bond she could not go with him any farther, and as soon as he boarded a plane at the Grand Junction, Colorado, airport she ran to notify officials. Thirty minutes later, the F.B.I. arrived and arrested him; he looked at the woman and told agents that he had been thinking of killing her in the night. (Bond died nineteen months later in prison while making a bomb to use in an escape attempt.) The next day, Massachusetts police, who had got on Gilday’s trail when he drunkenly waved money around in a New Hampshire bar, captured him after a wild chase in which he held two people hostage in their car at gunpoint. (Gilday is serving a life sentence for Schroeder’s murder.)
Power, meanwhile, joined up with Saxe in Detroit, and then they moved quietly out of the area; they made contact with members of the antiwar movement, were given false identification, and began living the lives of unobtrusive low-level clerks. The F.B.I. offered rewards, ran down leads, and featured the two women at the close of each episode of the television show “The F.B.I.” for about a year, but it apparently did not know where to look for them. They were not part of any known criminal underworld, there were few photographs of them on record, and, according to Power’s suitemate Madeline Raetz, the F.B.I. “never even came to the dorm to question us. We had all her books and clothes and stuff, and no one bothered to even look through them.”
“The F.B.I. didn’t know how to take women seriously,” Power told me, with some annoyance. “They never had a clue. We even released antiwar statements to underground papers, and still they never got our trail.”
For the next year and a half, Saxe and Power travelled around the Northeast. They usually stayed no longer than four months at a job, because that was how long it took an employer to determine that the Social Security numbers they had given were fabricated. “Moving into a place, getting a job, giving a false address, and then, when it felt unsafe, as if people might be wondering about us, taking other aliases and moving on,” she said. “I was used to performing perfectly, being alert and on my toes, as if I were competing in the Olympics. I knew how to choose places that wouldn’t ask for references, that would take somebody who was a blank slate.” The two women had become strong feminists, and they turned to each other for love and comfort; Saxe thought of herself as gay, and Power, still reeling from her disastrous liaison with Bond, found it easy to embrace a lesbian affair.
In the spring of 1972, Power and Saxe obtained through underground contacts the most cherished form of false identification—names with valid Social Security numbers. This meant that they could have permanent jobs and a permanent address. They moved to Torrington, Connecticut. “At that point, we were really starved for meaning in our lives,” Power said. “We had stopped living as lovers but were still intensely bonded, like a marriage with children. Yet we desperately needed other friendships.” Those were the early days of the feminist movement, and women banded together in neighborhood cells with the fierce enthusiasm of resistance fighters. In some places, underground publications like off our backs and Rat were everywhere, and the community as a whole in any given area was fired by the need to shake off male domination. Saxe, known as Lena Paley, and Power, known as Mae Kelly, plunged happily into the feminist communities in Torrington and Hartford. They went to consciousness-raising groups, danced at a lesbian bar called the Warehouse, and took part in speculum parties—common events in the seventies, where women rebelling against male gynecologists learned how to examine themselves and diagnose their ailments. “These were exciting, vital people, and being one of them was like being inside a large pair of sheltering arms,” Power recalled. She worked as a nurse’s aide and as a clerk in a health-food store, then apprenticed as a chef in a restaurant.
In the early summer of 1974, Power and Saxe moved to the Kentucky countryside to help build a house for a couple they had met in Connecticut. “We felt it was wise to leave the Northeast, because, at the urging of the F.B.I., newspapers up there were running our pictures,” Power said. At the end of the summer, she returned to Hartford, to help a woman friend convalesce after a breast-cancer operation. The woman was the one person to whom Power had confided her real identity. “She was the community’s ideological police, and she covered for us, making excuses for why we couldn’t appear at public rallies,” Power explained. “It seemed right to tell her. She was a dedicated risk-taker.” But apparently the woman eventually decided that Saxe and Power were risks not worth taking. “After about six weeks, I began to get very hostile vibes from this woman, and my instincts told me to get out,” Power recalled. “It was excruciatingly painful. I never told anyone who I was again, until Ron.” She left Hartford in October of 1974, just hours before the F.B.I. swooped down. At the same time, Saxe fled Kentucky, and the two women met up a few days later in a city in the Northeast. They read in the newspapers that swarms of F.B.I. agents were hunting for them. “The Feds had finally figured it out—we were women living among women! About the same time, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, and some of their members were lesbians, so there were grand juries called all over the nation. They were basically free-for-all witch-hunts. The feds would threaten our lesbian friends with exposing them to their families and employers, and then they would carry out their threats. The woman who betrayed us coöperated with them and urged others to do the same.” Many refused to talk, largely on principle; in any case, by this point none of them had information that could help locate the fugitives. Still, two women went to jail for seven months in Connecticut, and a woman in Kentucky served more than a year, for failing to testify.
In late 1974, Power and Saxe finally decided to split up. Saxe, by now a militant lesbian, wanted to participate openly in feminist activity, and Power knew that such a life would mean capture. When, several months later, Saxe was picked up on a Philadelphia street, Power was shaken but not surprised. “I was so afraid for Susan,” she said. “I became extra vigilant. I lit candles and threw the I Ching, and I packed my things and moved.”
For the next two years, Power did bookkeeping and clerical work in various places in New York and New Jersey. In Atlantic City, in Poughkeepsie, in different boroughs of New York City, she dressed in mousy clothing, lived in furnished apartments, stayed at jobs for short periods. “I lived like an illegal immigrant. It was one grim day after another. I got up, and I went to work, and I came home and I drank. I lived through meaninglessness and aloneness. I think I was an alcoholic for a period of years.”
One time, while working in the office of a meat-packing plant in the Northeast, she helped three other female clerks, none of whom had high-school diplomas and who were working overtime without pay, to join a union. “It was a close call,” she told me, smiling. “About the time they got their first fair paycheck, I got fired. The boss said my references didn’t check out.” Power said that even as she was running from the law, she tried to atone for the damage she had done—for instance, by giving part of her income away. “In Catholicism, the catechism of forgiveness is that if you have done something very, very wrong, you can be forgiven by naming your act, knowing how it came to happen, and removing yourself from the environment that contributed to it. I did that and then I vowed that I would make my life an act of contrition for my wrong to the Schroeder family.”
In 1977, a measure of relief came in the form of the birth certificate of a baby who had been born in Jersey City, less than a year before Katherine, and subsequently died. (She refused to divulge how she obtained the document, but said, “Read Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Steal This Book’ if you want to know how to do it.”) She applied for a Social Security number and went to Maryland to get a driver’s license. With these, she made her way to Portland, Oregon, and started life afresh and, at last, openly, as one Alice Louise Metzinger.
“I was suddenly a real person, a real name, but I had no real history,” she said. “My identity was solid on the outside and totally empty within.” She got a job as a waitress-cook in a working-class warehouse district of Portland and began to hang out with a drinking crowd at a local haunt called the Slammer. “I had been drinking there for weeks and I had never paid a bit of attention to why it was called the Slammer. Then, one night, I looked up from the long-neck Bud I was drinking to stare right into my own picture on a ‘Wanted’ poster on the wall. The place was plastered with ‘Wanted’ posters and jail bars. The customer next to me was a Portland police officer. I had let my hair grow long and it had gone back to its natural color, so I didn’t even look that different from my poster. Now, did I stop going to the Slammer after that? No. Sometimes, in your despair, you invite change. I guess I felt at that point as if some kind of magic was protecting me.”
But change did come. Power felt an intense desire, for the first time since her liaison with Bond, for sexual relations with a man. “I was almost thirty. Clearly, what my body wanted was to get pregnant.” She quit drinking, and she weighed the consequences of what she was planning. “At first, I thought, What a crazy, stupid idea. How can I do this to a kid? Then I looked around me at people who had kids and I said, Fuck it, I couldn’t do worse.”
Two months later, she was pregnant. In January, 1979, a midwife delivered Jaime Lee Metzinger at home. “He was a miracle, like an ongoing love affair,” Power said. “He was my first step in attachment to the world of humanity—a relationship that was permanent, that I couldn’t walk away from.” She was living in a lesbian relationship when her son was born, but it soon broke up. Other liaisons fizzled after that.
And then, when Jaime was a year old, she met Ronley Duncan. She had got work as a food and nutrition coördinator for a Portland poverty agency, and he worked for it as an accountant. “He had the most incredible soothing voice, the way he would talk to people across his desk, and he was crazy in the same way as me. He burned with this same vision that through his work he was taking care of people. I knew he would be a person that I could tell about myself.”
Duncan remembers the meeting almost wistfully. “I was lost the first time I saw her. I loved the fact that she was small and yet she had such a big, joyful spirit. I loved that dazzling smile of hers. We would take long walks at night, through the ghetto, holding hands. Sometimes I would recite Shakespeare. And then, one night, we had worked for hours on some audits and it was 4 a.m. and we had to get away from the cigarettes and ink odor. So we went down to the Columbia River and walked along the beach until the sun rose. Suddenly, she turned around and said, ‘There’s something I must tell you. I’m a fugitive.’ This may sound strange, but do you know what my reaction was? Elation. This overwhelming feeling of ‘She loves me! Because otherwise she would not have trusted me with her secret.’ Then, of course, I became alarmed for her safety. I went to the post office and went through the ‘Wanted’ posters. If the loss of her freedom was imminent, I would have to run with her. Her poster allayed my fears—the pictures were not very good. But one that was taken routinely in a bank while she was cashing a check or something caused me the most concern—it was blurry, but it captured exactly the way she carried her body.”
Duncan left his wife and his young daughter. (He says that his efforts to get in touch with his daughter in recent years have failed.) He and Power moved into an apartment in a working-class North Portland district, and worked after-hours building a community garden, planting blueberries and beans and other farm crops for the poor. Later, Duncan found work boning beef, which he describes as an art akin to dancing.
Jaime, now a toddler, had his own opinion about Ron’s presence. Having stopped breast-feeding, he demanded to resume. “I guess it was a dimension of closeness with his mother that I could not achieve,” Ron said. “I remember he would trundle into our bed and just stare at me. He would push me away to sit on his mother’s lap. I would hold him and walk him for hours, but he was very willful, like his mother, and he would not turn to me for anything. One day—and I can remember this so clearly—we were standing by the street and something scared him, and he swung around and buried his face in my pant leg. For me, it was like a graduation present.”
For Power, having a family again was an unexpected bounty. “God, we were just like people in love, you know? We were just like this family, living, reading, gardening, fishing, swimming. I was very overprotective of my son at first. If Ron raised his voice to Jaime, I went crazy. But then I gave Jaime enormous freedom. I wanted him to become self-reliant.”
“One night, we were driving and the speedometer cable broke and we had to get under the truck,” Duncan recalled. “We enlisted him to hold the flashlight, and it was wavering, and we yelled at him, and he said, ‘But I’m only three years old! This is the best I can do.’ ”
By all accounts, Jaime is a surprisingly well adjusted boy. In his opinion, his parenting was just fine. “They were not strict, like my friends’ parents—they didn’t believe in hitting. They didn’t believe in a lot of rules. It was good. It made me independent. My mother was real caring about me and my well-being.”
The family did not stay long in Portland, nor, for the next several years, did they stay very long anywhere else. Power kept her secret from the outside world with such ferocity that it pervaded life within. “There was a dual reality in our family,” she told me, almost angrily. “Feelings were talked about as long as they didn’t have anything to do with my past. Ron and Jaime knew not to ask about it—it was a barrier they could not cross.”
They had few friends, except for people they met in the workplace. “Alice wouldn’t go beyond that,” Duncan told me. “I loved her very much, and I was willing to allow this constant moving to happen, to give her what she wanted. I kept thinking it would help. I would withdraw along with her. She would look around and see the clutter of our house, and things would seem hopeless to her. She would let the dishes pile up, the dust collect. Meals would be junk food. We wouldn’t go hiking or to the beach. If I had difficulty in the job, her tolerance for discussing it was thin. The quality of our dreams would go.”
“The depression robbed me of so much energy and order,” Power recalled. “There are parts of my life that I remember, for instance, only because there is an electric bill.” Over the years, Jaime protected himself from his mother’s moods, partly by turning to his friends and partly through a stoicism that echoes his mother’s. “I’m a private person, like my mom,” he explained. “I have a way of zoning out, of listening and watching, without responding.” He said that sometimes the only way he knew that his mother was depressed was that “she would let the house go for two weeks and then, for no apparent reason, she would clean it top to bottom.”
The healthiest period of Power’s exile was in 1983, when they moved to a tiny house in Halsey, Oregon. Duncan remembers that they turned the six hundred square feet of back yard into a garden full of herbs, vegetables, and exotic greens in raised beds. “Neighbors would come and weed and pick, and we would all prepare big salads and pasta primavera and eat by candlelight out in the garden. We developed our own ecosystem and added to the garden until it produced crops year-round.”
Kathy Bethel, a produce buyer, remembers four-year-old Jaime “jumping over the beds in his Wellingtons, looking like Christopher Robin lost in his own adventure of discovery,” and she goes on to say, “Alice was such a loving mother. I remember he pulled up this baby carrot and ran over to her all excited, and she was so childlike, and told him this story about a little, bitty baby carrot seed and how it grew. For a wanted woman, she was amazingly calm.”
In 1984, Power got a job cooking at Linn-Benton Community College, near Corvallis, and was quickly promoted to culinary-arts instructor. “She was so excited,” Bethel recalls. “It was a huge upward career move to be teaching in her trade. She was shouting, ‘Out of the pizza parlors and into fine dining!’ ”
Power and Duncan also learned that, after fourteen years, the F.B.I. had finally dropped Katherine Ann Power from the “Most Wanted” list. They bought a small house in Lebanon, near Corvallis, for thirty thousand dollars. When, in a few years, Power started talking about moving again, it was Jaime’s self-protective instincts that stopped her. “He was just so deeply attached to his friends—fierce, really fierce,” Power told me. “He said, ‘If you move away from here, you will have to leave me behind, because this is my home town and I’m going to stay here.’ And, through some wonderful grace, we were able to hear him.”
Meanwhile, Power had impressed her bosses at Linn-Benton. “This was just a college cafeteria, but she brought exotic ethnic dishes, like South American albondigas soup,” her supervisor, Scott Anselm, recalls. “She was really extraordinary, with her passion for excellence.” In 1989, Power took a daring plunge and, with another cooking teacher, Paula Scharf, opened a restaurant where bosses and employees were theoretically equal. Power was worried about the amount of time she would have to spend away from her son, who was then ten, but Jaime, reared to stand up on his own, now returned the favor. “He was vehement,” Power recalled. “He said, ‘Mom, you’ve wanted to own your own restaurant for your whole life. We’ll be O.K.’ ”
Power put together a partnership of six investors to launch Napoli, an airy, plant-filled café and bakery with sloping glass walls and classical music wafting through the booths. Very soon, they had a solid group of regulars. They also donated food to soup kitchens. Paula Scharf recalled, “She would greet people with this incredible smile. She made a rule. You never say no—you figure out a way to give the customers what they want.” Technically, there was no hierarchy, but some employees describe Power as a formidable boss, someone you wanted to be sure was on your side. “You didn’t want to tick Alice off. She wouldn’t yell, but she would take an onion right out of your hands if you weren’t peeling it right,” Mary Kroeker, a former employee, commented. Scharf remembers that Power wanted to do everything by the book, obeying every health-department code that many establishments ignore.
Success was making Alice Metzinger nervous. Napoli was in Eugene, forty-five miles from Lebanon, so she left home at sunup, worked herself ragged, and came home late. Scharf remembers Power telling her, “I can’t do this any longer, this is a crazy life.” To Ron, her growing dissatisfaction was part of a pattern he had come to recognize: “She would expand and expand on a job until it ate her up, and then she would give it up and get a new one and start expanding all over again.” Scharf said she had begun to understand that Power was suffering from some underlying pain, “because I watched her over and over get what she wanted—her own restaurant, consulting positions, commendations—and, whatever she was doing, she was not happy.”
In 1991, Power quit working at Napoli and concentrated on her family, organizing Ron and Jaime to renovate their white clapboard house. They had kept to themselves, and some neighbors were complaining about the slovenly state of their lawn. But the Lindgrens, an elderly couple who live next door, were devoted to them. “They were all out there on the roof putting shingles on,” Darlene Lindgren recalls. “Jaime and his friends would throw the shingles up in the air, and, of course, where would they land? In our yard. I took him in hand. Alice got me to walk for my health. She gave my daughter her car, and she wouldn’t take a penny. Whatever Alice had, you were welcome to it. She was the best neighbor we ever had. I can see her now, at 6 a.m., running out of the house with a piece of toast in her mouth. My daughter was in a terrible car crash—that was just before Alice surrendered—and her only thought was to be over here holding and comforting me. I cannot believe that she ever hurt anyone. You see, I knew her. For nine years, I watched her chase flies out of her house rather than kill them!”
Duncan, in the winter of 1991-92, watched helplessly as his wife once again started working manically—seventy hours a week this time. She was managing one Corvallis restaurant, consulting at three others, and leading a consortium of friends to buy yet another. “I was in crazy motion,” Power told me. “It was the most frantic, workaholic phase of my entire life. I was flying to Seattle to negotiate everything, and then I would go call people at two or three in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go for coffee.’ ” She became obsessed with the idea that she was putting her associates in danger and their assets at risk, and she pulled out of the consortium. And then, in the spring of 1992, she collapsed.
“I was really this hidden, broken person, and I just couldn’t go on,” Power said. Medication and intense psychotherapy made a dramatic difference. She experienced a blossoming of interests. She read voraciously—everything from fractal geometry to herbalism and earth religions. She ventured out and began to form new friendships. She startled Duncan by suggesting, after thirteen years, that they get married, and that he adopt Jaime. Ensconced in group therapy, she felt, for the first time, “such a sense of unconditional love—no matter what I said, I was supported.” Nevertheless, since she could not tell the group members, or her new friends, who she really was, Duncan said, “ultimately she could not see their acceptance as sufficient to validate her.”
Duncan saw her decision to surrender coming. “I initially tried to talk her out of it. I talked of the cost to Jaime, the fact that she might not find the reconnection with her family and her old self that she wanted, her naïveté about prison. I tried very hard to be all things to her, but I just couldn’t,” he said sadly. “I just wasn’t enough. You have to know Alice to know that once she gets on a track no one can get her off.”
When Power talked in prison about the impact of her absence on her husband, she became teary. “One of the hardest and saddest things in a committed relationship is when one of the people has to leave,” she said. “It’s not for ego, it’s not for money or greed or status. It’s not because you want to spend more time with somebody else. It’s because you have to do it to be alive—you have to quit living this sick-making life. And it’s horrible to the other person, because he feels in the end, How could somebody who loves me have to leave me?”
Several times, Power had panicked doubts about surrendering. In the end, she said, the decision had a great deal to do with her son. “We were on the couch, and I was lecturing him about his low grades and the fact that the teacher wrote that he was not living up to his capacity. He knew that I had been a straight-A student and had dropped out of college, and he looked at me and he smirked and he pointed to the line that said ‘not working to capacity.’ I took that as the accusation that it was. He was asking me, ‘What happened to you?’ I knew I couldn’t parent him if he did not know what had happened to me.”
In September of 1992, while her lawyers were negotiating her surrender, Power sold her interest in Napoli for twenty thousand dollars and gave five thousand dollars to Oxfam America, the international hunger-relief agency. That same month, she married Duncan. “We all said, ‘What? Alice, getting married?’ She had always said she didn’t believe in it,” remarked Scharf, who made her endure an old-fashioned bridal shower, with clothespin games, balloons, and streamers. Another friend also loaned her a white silk suit and helped prepare an “autumnal wedding feast,” whose centerpiece included a sweet-potato cake with praline butter.
In the spring of 1993, when the negotiations had faltered, an F.B.I. agent walked into Rikki Klieman’s office with a plastic envelope containing a letter to Katherine that the agency had obtained from her family, in Colorado. It included photographs and messages from members of the Power family, and it urged Katherine to “come home quick.” Klieman, fearful that the ink or the paper might have been treated with some tracing device, sent copies, not the originals, to Oregon. Though Power was suspicious that the F.B.I. was attempting to manipulate her, she was thrilled by the letter. “In an instant, I was lifted of so much deep psychic shame. I thought they had written me off, condemned me. But even my uncle Ted, the priest, forgave me.”
“Isn’t there a way you can achieve authenticity without leaving us?” Duncan pleaded. By then, however, it was too late; word of Alice Metzinger’s true identity had leaked out. “I couldn’t have continued to live in Oregon, or as Alice,” Power told me. “You cannot take a school-age child underground, so I would have had to go underground by myself and abandon Ron and Jaime forever.”
Power sat down to tell her son she was not the person she had pretended to be. “It was so hard for me. I began talking in euphemisms. Ron had to prod me. I think what disturbed Jaime the most was that Alice Metzinger was not my real name. I could see something pass over his face, like a small earthquake inside him. You see, he is Jaime Metzinger. I knew he was thinking, Am I real if you are not? And then the alarm was gone, as though he had shaken it out of his head. He asked ‘Can I go play now?’ I know that he is angry at me, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. There was the modelling of my own life, of course. Did I miss my mommy? It was never a question—you don’t even ask it. You don’t acknowledge the feelings that are the most dangerous. He is so sensibly protective of his internal space. He was furious at the suggestion that he see a therapist to help him deal with all this.” Wiping her eyes, Power went on, “I had this deep, deep feeling that he needed to know his roots, to have a tribe. And he is in love with my family in Denver—he loves being there.”
In March, just before Ron and Jaime were to leave for a visit East, Jaime asked Ron, “How much do you love me?” Ron replied, “Quite a lot. Why?” Jaime said, “You know how it disturbs me to see my mom in prison. I want to go to Denver instead.” Ron agreed reluctantly, for he was afraid of the rejection his wife would suffer. She took it surprisingly well. “I miss him with all my heart,” Power told me. “But I really understand his need to shape this. At least now he is beginning to talk about his feelings—about how disturbed he is, for instance, when he sees all these women locked up. We have been very close, but I understand that he doesn’t need me just now, and it feels right. In a sense, I have always been absent. I feel guilty for underparenting, and he feels guilty for being the unneedy child. In truth, we are both resilient.” Recently, Power asked to talk to Jaime’s current girlfriend, who, at eighteen, is three years older than he. “Alice liked her,” Ron said. “She cracked up when this young woman told her she wanted to be a corrections officer.”
During her first five months in prison, Power spent three or four hours a day making collect calls to the friends and colleagues she had left behind in Oregon. Then the phone calls dropped off. She has asked that everyone there refer to her as Kathy. Most people do not. Some, like Tom Mathews, a big, strapping man who was for a time the dining-hall manager at Napoli, speak of her tearfully: “Something’s gone from the restaurant. They hired me to try to put it back, but I’m no damn Alice.”
Every time Power tells her story, her guilt and remorse for Officer Schroeder’s death are real, and so is her conviction that she did what she did for the cause. After many hours of talking to her, one is left with the impression that she needs to justify not only her own life but the lives that others have projected upon her. Certainly she has become the repository of unexpiated guilt over the tragedy in Vietnam. She has received more than five hundred letters from people thanking her for standing up for the antiwar values that they merely mouthed. Priests have given homilies in which they evoke Power as the embodiment of sacrifice and atonement. A policeman who wrote that he once carried a picture of her in the hope that he could someday arrest her ended up sending her the Purple Heart he was awarded in Vietnam. She is gratified, and torn, by it all.
“I’m tired of being made into a symbol. Here I am, with the real anger I have over the pain and disruption of this in my life, and here these people are, in love with me—they can’t wait to talk to me,” she said. “I hate it, because I’m tired of the pain, because I believe that what’s true of my life, what makes me so special and all this blah blah blah, is true of everyone’s life, and because I want to be just one of the folks.”
And yet, already, Power has singled herself out at Framingham. Since June 1st, Duncan has not been able to speak to her—she is refusing to telephone anyone, save her lawyer, in protest against a new prison practice of tape-recording all personal calls made by inmates. “It’s so like Alice—the degree of suffering she needs to experience in order to give her act of principle value,” Duncan says, sighing.
He is trying his best to maintain a semblance of normal life in his wife’s absence. Every night, when he finishes cutting his quota of meat he drives back to Lebanon, through miles of flooded grasslands that sweep into the circular boundary of the Coast Ranges and the Cascade Range. Looking at the blue bowl of sky above, a driver might imagine he is a fish swimming into mirrors. That is rather how Duncan feels about his life these days: “I’m buffeted by so many unexpected currents.” At home, he is fiddling with a stove that doesn’t work properly, because his wife gave their other, better stove away. “Since the surrender, we have been off track,” he says. “Alice knows now that she can expect no mercy. To think, if she had acted dishonorably and stood trial, she might be sitting with me now. I’m not really blaming our lawyers, but what has happened is not acceptable, it is not humane.” Duncan has run out of money to travel to the East Coast to visit his wife. Recently, he temporarily left his job to organize a request that the governor of Oregon ask Massachusetts to transfer her. He has also become a surrogate for Power, conscientiously seeing her friends, who, for their part, offer him a way of feeling closer to her. He has stepped into her place in her therapy group. “Actually,” he says, heaving another sigh, “I’ve got my own place now, and Alice is still officially a member—and until last week she checked in like everybody else, at the beginning of each session, via me or others she had been in touch with.”
Neighbors have helped with Jaime, driving him to school and getting his lunch, but Duncan says he is “afraid that one day he will really need his mother and then what he has lost will hit him,” and points out, “You know he will have to graduate from high school without her.” When he talks of how Jaime appreciates his more relaxed attitude toward discipline, however, he manages a smile. “Alice says I should ground him for missing classes, but I would rather that he willingly comply,” Duncan says placidly. “I like to give him an equal voice in the making of his rules. I used to threaten him with leaving Lebanon and moving to Framingham, but he knows that my threats are empty. I do still make him mop the kitchen and bathroom floors, but that is because his friends are not as fastidious as he is, and they make a huge mess.”
Sometimes Jaime stops to look at a large color photograph of his mother, smiling, on a card table in the living room. “It’s hard not having her here, but I’m just glad she did it now instead of five years from now, when I’ll really need her,” he says. He pushes away a newspaper article someone had sent him about Katherine Power. “She’ll always be Alice to me in my heart. I never met Kathy Power. The way I like to remember her is when she took me and my friends swimming. She was great with my friends, and she would sit on the edge of the river in her little straw hat, smiling at us, smiling at all of us while we swam.” ♦
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