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. And there I was feeling morally compelled to break the rules. One senses in her today a poignant grandiosity: the stories she tells invariably feature her as the heroic central character in an ongoing epic. The media criticized us for prosecuting Susan Saxe by saying we were just prosecuting her because she was an anti-war activist.". In a statement Saxe issued yesterday, she said, "I plead guilty today for one reason and one reason alone--that it is the surest and quickest way to end the hold this state will have on my life and my personal freedom. The quality of our dreams would go., The depression robbed me of so much energy and order, Power recalled. I mistrusted myself deeply. Gerald Zerkin, who lived across the hall from Bond, and who is now a lawyer in Virginia, commented, He was a scary guy. In a sense, I have always been absent. Boca Raton, FL 33486. September 16, 1993 BOSTON, SEPT. 15 -- Katherine Ann Power, a radical opponent of the Vietnam War and one of the longest-sought women in FBI history, voluntarily ended 23 years as a fugitive. I assumed they were getting my phone records, maybe tapping my phones. In fact, my father told me hed rather see me in jail than in Vietnam. The Feds had finally figured it outwe were women living among women! 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. If I had difficulty in the job, her tolerance for discussing it was thin. How could this have happened? It was like a world shattering. "There was no way it is a victory for the prosecution. Clare Schroeder, herself a police sergeant, spoke of the suffering the family had endured, living with the open wound of her unresolved crime. He said, Mom, youve wanted to own your own restaurant for your whole life. She was a dedicated risk-taker. But apparently the woman eventually decided that Saxe and Power were risks not worth taking. She was placed on the list on October 17, 1970, [2] and remained on it until March 27, 1975. 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. in Massachusetts, happened to attend Brandeis University just after Katherine Ann Power did and has personal feelings about the political nature of her crime. If Ron raised his voice to Jaime, I went crazy. Im tired of being made into a symbol. After half a lifetime on the run, Power (center) left her family and life in Oregon to serve time for her role in an action that left a Boston policeman dead. We were both obsessed with a desire to be punished, to seek expiation for our acts.. We enlisted him to hold the flashlight, and it was wavering, and we yelled at him, and he said, But Im only three years old! 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.. I can see her now, at 6 a.m., running out of the house with a piece of toast in her mouth. 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 miss him with all my heart, Power told me. Duncan left his wife and his young daughter. Encyclopedia.com. 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 mothers disappearance had left so many years ago. ", Saxe's attorney, Nancy Gertner, said yesterday, "We made a good deal. 16530 VENTURA BLVD STE 603. I never met Kathy Power. I had been drinking there for weeks and I had never paid a bit of attention to why it was called the Slammer. That was fine with me, because I thought Girl Scouts was stupida 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. Then what was left was clandestine action. It was published in Northampton in Old Maid, Lesbian Gardens' first publication, Spring 1975. calligraphy by laura kaye Many feared the Government was attempting to infiltrate and destroy the Lesbian/Women's Movement as it was doing to other progressive groups. BORN: February 5, 1820 Adams, Massachusetts 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. I was overweight. But she easily made the deans list. It seemed to Carroll that Powers fugitive state and the symptoms of this biochemical depression fed each other furiously. One poem ended by describing how she had gone from being the victorious to the vanquished warrior: She bowed her headOffered her hands for the manacles, her legs for the shacklesAnd admitted defeat.She stands unguarded, infant open to a universe that may not be benevolentBelieving the truth of this wayTerrified. ." You dont acknowledge the feelings that are the most dangerous. 'The Partridge Family' star Susan Dey has an estimated net worth of $10 million. And then the alarm was gone, as though he had shaken it out of his head. Want to keep up with breaking news? American suffragist The phone rings again, and this time it is his wife. Dictionaries thesauruses pictures and press releases, Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages. Neither man professed any political beliefs. He burned with this same vision that through his work he was taking care of people. I encoded all references to the case in my diary. They were all out there on the roof putting shingles on, Darlene Lindgren recalls. But even my uncle Ted, the priest, forgave me., Isnt there a way you can achieve authenticity without leaving us? Duncan pleaded. It seemed right to tell her. I heard that a very senior person at Brandeis had got this prisoner-release thing to happen and didnt want it to fail, Onorato said. Then, in May of 1992, a short, shy woman walked into his office. I like to give him an equal voice in the making of his rules. American political terrorist. Basically, no case.. The authorities intransigence is vengeful, according to Powers lawyers, who maintain that the transfer was promised Power in an oral agreement. I even had the wrong kind of pajamas, Power told me. There are not many places in America where you could open the doors of the county courthouse after hours and find the D.A. While Katherine Power was establishing her new life in Oregonlearning to cook, establishing a restaurant, and hunting game birds with her husbandmy 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 peoples lives. Judge Robert Banks, of the Suffolk County Superior Court, evidently concurred. 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 cellto remind me, she said, that this everyday reality I wake up to is not all there is of me. Join Facebook to connect with Susan Saxe and others you may know. Each one cloaked the other. When Dow Chemical tried to recruit on campus, students responded by planning to napalm a dog. Home. All rights reserved. This is the best I can do., By all accounts, Jaime is a surprisingly well adjusted boy. Alice Metzinger wept when she heard it: not guilty by the standards of 1969 but guilty by todays standards. When the tellers hesitated in putting cash into bank bags, he fired two shots into the ceiling. Gaffney has yet to prove Susan Saxe guilty before a jury, or even guilty of anything. They let you have one kiss and one long hug at the beginning and the end of our visits, he says. We wouldnt go hiking or to the beach. 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 wasnt about pretending to be radical. 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. I was lost the first time I saw her. 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. I was a science nerd, not a politico, Cotton recalled. No, I dont have any justificationwhat I did was wrong, Black replied. Ralph Martin, who in 1992 became the first black D.A. Other liaisons fizzled after that. He has a gentle manner, an unwavering gaze, and a deep, calming voice. He drew his gun and ran toward the bank. The return of the fugitive had brought long-buried strife to the surface, however briefly, reminding Americans that the wounds of Vietnam remained unhealed. She was the communitys ideological police, and she covered for us, making excuses for why we couldnt appear at public rallies, Power explained. 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. "Saxe, Susan (1947) 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. "I saw Dr. Saxe today. At ten-twelve the next morning, her father died. Possible related people for Susan Saxe include Andrew S Saxe, David Leroy Saxe, Jonathan Mark Saxe, Joshua David Saxe . She had been living in Lebanon, Oregon, under the assumed name "Alice Metzinger". 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. 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. Still, Power reports that at night, Ive had these dreams. It was one grim day after another. She looked like she had just fallen off a Keebler cookie box, very waiflike and forlorn. In fact, we had zippo, Martin later told me. At that point, we were really starved for meaning in our lives, Power said. (Neither attended a single college class.) Alice and I very comfortably live a life of voluntary poverty, Ron tells me on the first day I visit. I just want to start by saying her bedside manner is fantastic. What Kevin McCarthy Will Do to Gain Power. It was excruciatingly painful. Refine Your Search Results All Filters Susan S Saxe, 74 Resides in Saint Louis, MO Lived In Maryland Heights MO, Chesterfield MO Related To Adrienne Saxe, Electa Saxe, Matthew Saxe, Gerald Saxe, Bianca Saxe Also known as Saxe Susan, S S Saxe, Susan Samson Finally, Carroll enlisted the services of Steven Black, who was a renegade public defender, known for taking cases that others wouldnt touch; a physician named Barry Reeves, who put Power on an antidepressant; and a psychiatrist named Charles Kuttner. I quit and decided to put myself, my family . Miss Saxe was four and a half years on the F.B.I. Its so like Alicethe degree of suffering she needs to experience in order to give her act of principle value, Duncan says, sighing. The central reason I didnt give myself up before is that I was so afraid that my frenetic activity was my only weapon against suicide. Success was making Alice Metzinger nervous. 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. 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 Newburyportone of five robberies committed by the gang she belonged to during the late summer of 1970. We Found 20 Results For Susan Saxe. 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 Powers exile was in 1983, when they moved to a tiny house in Halsey, Oregon. Hello? was attempting to manipulate her, she was thrilled by the letter. They didnt believe in a lot of rules. Then they went through the pile again, paused at mine, shook their heads, and kept going. He gave off this electric and sexual energy, and everyone picked it upkids, gay men, women. On other fronts, things are not going well and may escalate quickly. agents were hunting for them. Im a fugitive. This may sound strange, but do you know what my reaction was? At seven oclock on the night of September 3rd, an expectant audience greeted Black as he walked into Courtroom No. Ensconced in group therapy, she felt, for the first time, such a sense of unconditional loveno 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. We had all her books and clothes and stuff, and no one bothered to even look through them., The F.B.I. 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. [8], "FBI Adds 10th Woman to 'Most Wanted' List: Meet Them All", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Susan_Edith_Saxe&oldid=1097467871, This page was last edited on 10 July 2022, at 22:15. Black was sentenced to fifty hours of community service. At the end of the school year, Power, Susan Saxe, and some other students stayed on at Brandeis. . 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. 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. Psychology; INSURANCE PLANS ACCEPTED . I began talking in euphemisms. 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. View Susan Saxe's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Brandeis had awarded her a full scholarship. Students like Kathy Power, in their enormous desire to be good, took it all as a personal mandate. Clearly, her particular personality, in those particularly perilous times, had driven her to the edge, but what had pushed her over? I liked Kathy, and I saw Bonds effect on certain kinds of women, who were vulnerable and perhaps a bit lonely. She was born on January 18, 1949 in Hartford, Connecticut. Saxe, known as Lena Paley, and Power, known as Mae Kelly, plunged happily into the feminist communities in Torrington and Hartford. Subsequently, he gave up everything, including his wife and his then eleven-year-old daughter, for love of her. 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. At the end of the summer, she returned to Hartford, to help a woman friend convalesce after a breast-cancer operation. How I wish I had listened to him! One of the hardest and saddest things in a committed relationship is when one of the people has to leave, she said. He fought it in the same way I did, with lots of activitybowling leagues, Toastmasters, various fraternal organizations. But that is what happened in Corvallis, Oregon, in September of 1992. One of her predictions involved Barron Trump. . Susan Edith Saxe is a 73 years old American bank robber from Hartford, Connecticut. I marched in Harlem for civil rights, I was against the Vietnam War. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. So does the fact that there are gaps in her storyher memory, she says, is only now beginning to return. How can I do this to a kid? It came right off her., Powers friends say that her emotional maturity did not keep pace with her intellectual gifts. Power hoped to serve much less than that, but she was adamant about entering a guilty plea. Why then, she asked, was everyone talking about Powers heroism and courage? Subscribe to our email newsletter. I had let my hair grow long and it had gone back to its natural color, so I didnt even look that different from my poster. We were a very close little family, Ron says. He sent Power out with cash to buy a used car and the two of them drove it to Philadelphia. At Mount St. Josephs Academy, across the street from the hospital, Clare Schroeder, seventeen, was called out of her classroom. Power kept her secret from the outside world with such ferocity that it pervaded life within. The F.B.I. From their home, in the little city of Lebanon, Oregon, twenty miles east of Corvallis, Powers husband, Ron Duncan, and her son, Jaime, talk to her for at least twenty minutes a day. 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. 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. They didnt 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. Yet she still had an air of not belonging, and she tended to befriend underdogs and misfits. We were just like this family, living, reading, gardening, fishing, swimming. Flanked by rows of uniformed officers, the family sat in the courtroom as Walter Schroeders eldest daughter, Clare, told their story. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. They were basically free-for-all witch-hunts. Saxe, Susan (1947-) American political terrorist. Education & Training Graduate School: St. Georges University School of Medicine: Grenada, West Indies - 1987 Internship: Coney Island Hospital: Brooklyn, NY - 1987-1988 Residency: Coney Island Hospital: Brooklyn, NY - 1988-1990 Fellowship: University Hospital at Stony Brook: Stony Brook, NY - 1990-2002 I was almost thirty. 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. Power put together a partnership of six investors to launch Napoli, an airy, plant-filled caf and bakery with sloping glass walls and classical music wafting through the booths. In a rural section of Northern California, Bond taught Power and Saxe how to fire a rifle. The next day, Massachusetts police, who had got on Gildays 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. 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. In the end, she said, the decision had a great deal to do with her son. As she elaborated, people began to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. She and her four accomplices broke into a National Guard Armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on Sept. 20, 1970, and stole a pickup truck, blasting caps and 400 rounds of .30-caliber ammunition. 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. While in prison, Power completed her bachelor's degree, and after her release, earned a master's degree at Oregon State University. Bost, SONTAG, Susan Klieman called Power and Black only from phone booths. SPECIALTIES. Klieman, who had other concerns, supported Powers urge to plead guilty: she feared that, given todays conservative political climate, a jury was quite capable of sending Power away for life, even on scant evidence. Bond put four thousand dollars in brand-new bills from the State Street robbery into a lens cap. I guess it was a dimension of closeness with his mother that I could not achieve, Ron said. About fifty of Steven Blacks 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. And yet, already, Power has singled herself out at Framingham. 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. She said "The Defense Committee all felt it was a wise decision to enter a guilty plea given political and legal realities of the new judge, of the probability of less peremptory challenges and the climate within the legal system against Susan Saxe, we all agreed it made sense.". She graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade average. 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. 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. 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. No admissible evidence, no credible witnesses. The sexual part was trivial, she said. It was in the days when people dressed in togas and took acid to go to French class, the filmmaker Mickey Lemle recalled. The authorities at Framingham put her in a special care cell block, named after one of the prisons first supervisors, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton. trunks. I have distinctive features, I am barely five feet tall, I should have been captured. This wasnt supposed to be about taking livesthis was about stopping the taking of lives. She began to cry. And he is in love with my family in Denverhe 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. 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. This was more than some of the jurors were prepared to deal with, and two excused themselves. After serving eight years of a sentence for manslaughter and armed robbery in connection with a 1970 bank robbery, Susan Saxe, the former Brandeis University honor student turned radical, was released from the State Correctional Facility at Framingham, Mass., last week. However, the date of retrieval is often important. I knew how serious this was, because I expected to die for the cause. They were in the car with me, hurling bricks through the windows of firms with Defense Department contracts. I knew that the race was onthat they would try to use these negotiations to find her, Klieman recalled. They talk of her generosity and loyalty, and yet she questions how these qualities can be real if Alice Metzinger is not. Its not because you want to spend more time with somebody else. 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. I think I was suicidal. I went home almost beatific, he told me. She has come to believe that the only thing that will stop the Vietnam War is revolutionary action. 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. Saxe, by now a militant lesbian, wanted to participate openly in feminist activity, and Power knew that such a life would mean capture. It was never a questionyou dont even ask it. At first, I thought, What a crazy, stupid idea. Why? Jaime said, You know how it disturbs me to see my mom in prison. 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 pair shares a daughter, Sarah (born in 1978). Susan Edith Saxe. Medication and intense psychotherapy made a dramatic difference. Susan Saxe-Clifford's Rating . There was this overwhelming sense of wrongness. They were told that legitimate sources of money for the movement had dried up. never even came to the dorm to question us. An honors graduate from Brandeis University and antiwar activist, joined a revolutionary group; was involved in the robbery of a bank in Brighton, Massachusetts, during which a Boston police officer was murdered; along with Katherine Ann Power, was 1 of 5 people accused of the crime; became underground fugitive until finally arrested (1975); after a deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial, pleaded guilty to robbery and manslaughter; received 12-to-14-year sentence; after release, reportedly became gay-rights activist. In fact, she had felt buoyantly light, disentangled at last from the heavy net of lies, aliases, and invented selves. She told us that she didnt know if she would be able to make up all her incompletes from junior year, and she didnt 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.