Leftist U.S. outlaw spent years in hiding

On the morning of March 6, 1970, Kathy Boudin had just finished showering when a shrapnel-packed dynamite bomb fashioned by her radical colleagues in the militant left-wing Weathermen group accidentally detonated in the basement of the Greenwich Village townhouse where they were staying.

Their plan had been to attack an officers' club dance at an army post in New Jersey, part of the Weathermen's effort to bring home the war in Vietnam.

The explosion left three Weathermen dead and the townhouse in ruins, and Boudin staggered naked out of the rubble, along with another uninjured woman. A neighbour gave clothes to Boudin, who fled.

Boudin — a descendant of leftist intellectuals and five years out of the elite women's college Bryn Mawr — became one of the country's most wanted outlaws. She spent the next 11 years in hiding with other militants, by then calling themselves the Weather Underground, in urban safe houses and remote farmsteads.

Using aliases and stolen credit cards, they periodically surfaced to plant bombs at government and corporate buildings. They hit nearly two dozen targets, including a bathroom in the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and another in the Pentagon in 1972.

After the townhouse disaster, the Weather leadership sought to dial back the violence, and no one was injured or killed in the subsequent bombings.

Boudin's life as a fugitive came to an end on Oct. 20, 1981, with her arrest in a botched $1.6-million robbery of a Brink's armoured truck in suburban New York. Two police officers and a Brink's guard were killed in shootouts with violent Black nationalists she had joined.

Boudin, who pleaded guilty in 1984 to murder and robbery charges, was paroled in 2003 and later became a criminal justice scholar at Columbia University. She died Sunday in New York at the age of 78. The cause was cancer, said Rachel Marshall, a spokeswoman for Boudin's son, Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney.

Kathy Boudin was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1943.

Her father, Leonard Boudin, was a civil liberties lawyer who represented the government of Fidel Castro, anti-Vietnam War protest leader Benjamin Spock and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

Kathy Boudin