Bullets from the Underground (Monday, Nov. 02, 1981)
When fingerprinted, one of the four in custody turned out to be Katherine Boudin, 38, a leading activist in the violent Weather Underground movement of that period and a fugitive from justice for eleven years. Once on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for her participation in the 1969 “Days of Rage” demonstrations in Chicago, Boudin no longer faced federal charges, but was liable for prosecution in Illinois for jumping bail. She had been in hiding since March 6, 1970, when a Greenwich Village town house used as a Weather Underground bomb factory accidentally exploded, killing three group members. Boudin and a comrade, Cathlyn Wilkerson, fled naked from the burning wreckage. Wilkerson turned herself in ten years later and is now serving a three-year sentence for criminally negligent homicide. Most of the other leading Weather radicals had already surrendered, generally to face fines and suspended sentences. Among them: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who came in from the cold in Chicago last December.
Two other suspects, both pulled from the Honda, were also Weather Undergrounders: Judith Clark, 31, and David Gilbert, 37. Clark had served 18 months in jail for the Days of Rage. Living in Manhattan for the past ten years, she has recently been associated with the all-female May 19 Coalition, a group that takes its name from the common birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh and fancies itself as a support team for clandestine black liberation terrrorist organizations. The fourth suspect, Samuel Brown, 41, who was injured in the crash, is an ex-convict with a 23-year police record.
As authorities began following up on leads in the Nyack crime, they found links to an ever widening circle of radicals and outlaws, perhaps including members of the Black Liberation Army, a recently resurgent ’70s group dedicated to the killing of police officers. The license plate on the abandoned Oldsmobile, for example, led to an apartment in East Orange, N. J. There a six-hour search turned up a cache of weapons and explosives, a manua