Kathy Boudin
Terrorist with the Weather Underground who turned her life around while serving 22 years in jail
KATHY BOUDIN, who has died aged 78, was a member of the radical 1970s US urban guerrilla group Weather Underground and served 22 years behind bars after pleading guilty to second-degree murder for her role in a botched 1981 armed robbery.
While incarcerated she developed programmes on Aids education and parenting classes that became national models and helped to write a handbook for inmates with children in foster care. Her work teaching prisoners to read earned her a degree in education and her articles were published in educational journals. In 1999 she won an award from Pen, the writers’ organisation, for her poetry.
Kathy Boudin expressed regret for her involvement in violent radicalism: “People were killed and injured and I abandoned my son, whom I loved,” she wrote from prison. “After years of soul-searching, I can see that a combination of my personal issues, wrong thinking, and the impact of years of isolation contributed to my moral failures.”
Her release on parole in 2003, however, was opposed by relatives, friends and colleagues of those who lost their lives in the 1981 attempted robbery. They expressed resentment that she had been given a chance to rebuild her life while others endured lifelong grief.
Born in Manhattan on May 19 1943, Kathy Boudin was the daughter of Leonard Boudin, a leading radical lawyer who defended many of those accused of communist loyalties by the House Un-american Activities Committee.
She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and in the 1960s became involved in the Weathermen (subsequently Weather Underground), a predominantly white middle-class group that grew out of the student protest movement against the Vietnam War.
The group took its name from a line in the Bob Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues – “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” – and set out to promote armed struggle in support of the Black Panthers and other militant groups, and to oppose the war in Vietnam by “Bringing the War Home”.
In 1969 Kathy Boudin took part in the “Days of Rage” protests when students ran riot in a wealthy area of Chicago, smashing store windows and clashing with police. She and others were charged with conspiracy and riot, cases ultimately dismissed on grounds that evidence had been obtained unlawfully.
Wanted by the police, she holed up in a safe house, 18 West 11th Street, Greenwich Village. On March 6 1970 she was having a shower there when comrades in the basement accidentally detonated a makeshift nail-bomb which ripped the front off the building, killing three members of the group instantly.
Emerging naked and bleeding from the building, Kathy Boudin was given some clothes by a neighbour and fled before the police arrived. The only evidence of her presence was an appointment card from her dentist found in the debris.
A few days later, still in the city, she kept the appointment then went on the run. She spent much of the next 11 years in Mexico then lived underground in the US, taking cleaning jobs.
The three Weatherman terrorists who died were the only casualties of the organisation during its brief history. The bomb had been designed to go off at an army dance, but after March 1970 the group took pains to avoid further casualties.
They carried out around 24 bomb attacks at locations including the Pentagon, the US Capitol and NYPD HQ, but they always struck at night, in empty offices, and gave advance warnings.
After Saigon fell in 1975, Weather Underground was deprived of its raison d’être and by the end of the decade most members had given themselves up, though the majority were either acquitted or never charged, because the FBI itself had violated laws while pursuing them.
Kathy Boudin, however, remained a fugitive, and in August 1980 gave birth to a son by her partner David Gilbert, another former Weather Underground activist. The following year the couple agreed to act as getaway drivers for members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a group composed of street criminals and convicts radicalised in the aftermath of a 1970 prison uprising, in a planned armed robbery.
On October 20 1981 they left their 14-month-old son with a babysitter and made their way to the Nanuet Mall in upstate New York, where they sat in a truck waiting for members of the BLA, who had attacked an armoured Brinks security van carrying $1.6 million.
The gunmen never gave the security guards a chance to hand over the cash, shooting one in cold blood and critically wounding a second. The getaway truck sped from the scene with Kathy Boudin in the passenger seat and Gilbert at the wheel, but they were soon stopped by policemen.
Kathy Boudin surrendered immediately, but when the police attempted to open the rear of the truck, the gunmen burst out shooting, killing two policemen.
Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. Gilbert, who made a political stand at the trial, received two life terms. She always denied knowledge of the 1970 townhouse explosives conspiracy, and at her trial she claimed to have had little involvement in the planning of the robbery.
However, one police officer claimed that when the getaway truck was stopped she had tried to escape, causing a delay which might have been critical in enabling the gunmen to burst from the back of the vehicle.
Nor were friends and relatives of the victims impressed when she claimed she had been “responsible for not being responsible” – a formula that seemed to acknowledge culpability while simultaneously denying it.
Kathy Boudin was released on parole in 2003. Afterwards she founded a programme that provides health care for people leaving jail and co-founded the Center for Justice at Columbia University, which seeks alternatives to prison. She took a doctorate at Columbia University Teachers College and taught at the Columbia School of Social Work.
She had married David Gilbert after her arrest, and although they divorced in prison they remained close and spent their time together after Gilbert was released in 2021 under a grant of clemency from the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Their son, Chesa, had been adopted by two other radicals, though he kept in close contact with his biological parents in prison and turned out surprisingly well, winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and being elected San Francisco district attorney in 2019.