Prison Years

My Journey to Non-Violence

Essay in Answer to the Page Five Questions Asked at Parole Hearing

In answering the Page Five questions, I want to make it clear that my offenses include not only the events of 1970, when Walter Schroeder was killed during a bank robbery, but also my 23-year flight from justice and my defensive posture at the time of my surrender. I particularly want to acknowledge that the Schroeder family have been victims of my action in each of these three phases.

Phase I: The Robbery and Murder

In the summer and fall of 1970 I was guilty of a series of ethical failures, compulsive rebelliousness, and wrong thinking that resulted in the robbery of the State Street Bank in Brighton and the murder of Walter Schroeder. I know now that my actions were misguided, hurtful, and indefensible. As I review for you the thoughts and feelings that led me to that event, I must emphasize that I intend no justification or defense of any of them. I write about these ideas and feelings in order to show that I recognize them, and having recognized them, I have rejected them as influences on my behavior.

That summer, I was in unbearable pain over the suffering caused by the war in Viet Nam. The war, and its seemingly unstoppable momentum, evoked a blinding rage. My particular sensitivity was a product of events in my personal and family life, but so many people seemed to share that rage that I convinced myself that it was all right to act on it. We were arrogant in our confidence of our moral rightness and in our certainty that it was pure evil that we opposed. I decided that I would try to do acts of sabotage against the war effort. I had no idea what these acts might be, or how they might be done; I had no experience in sabotage. That is no excuse. I set out to find people who knew what to do, and how. Stanley Bond asked me to join a “revolutionary action” group he was forming. I agreed. It seemed like what I had been looking for.

We were not clear about what exactly this group would do. We thought we would be one of many revolutionary groups trying to overturn capitalism and the military/industrial complex. We were drenched with dangerous romanticism and saw ourselves as noble warriors for a great cause. We thought there was glamour in gun-toting violence. Everything had escalated far beyond what I had originally pictured myself doing, but I did not find the courage or the presence of mind to leave. Instead, I went along, riding a high of pent-up anger finally released, the relief that came from feeling finally able to be doing something—anything—to feel useful instead of powerless.

I remember clearly and with deep shame the moment when I realized that some of the people in the group were dangerous in their willingness to use criminal violence, and decided to stay anyway. I thought that I would learn from them, then leave. On the day of my surrender, Kathleen Brannigan of the FBI said to me, “You should have known better.” It is precisely because I should have known better, should have known that there is no such thing as a “little bit violent,” should have known that if you go around with guns, someone is going to get hurt or killed, that I am responsible in the death of Walter Schroeder. I was active in the group, supporting its operations: renting the apartment which was a base of operation, purchasing used cars, and acting as a lookout during the robbery of the Newburyport Armory. I also provided a sense of comradely loyalty and ideological justification for what we were doing. We were all in agreement that we would finance the group’s activities by bank robbery. We all deferred to Stanley Bond’s planning the details and assigning the roles in the September 23 robbery.

At about 10:00 that morning I was parked in the “switch” car about one half mile from the State Street Bank. Bond, Valeri, and Saxe went into the bank and held it up at gunpoint. Gilday was supposed to stand watch across the street. Bond, Valeri, and Saxe met me at the switch car, and we returned to the apartment. There, we heard on the radio that a police officer had been shot in the back by a gunman. (We assumed it was Gilday.) I was shocked and angry. But mostly I was sickeningly, shamefully aware that in my immature, romantic, and stupid quest to feel that I was putting my life on the line for a cause, some real person—someone who loved his life and was loved in it—was killed.

In preparing for this hearing, I have had a glimpse at the life of the Brighton community where Walter Schroeder grew up, lived, and worked. I have learned that he was able to plan his patrol so that he could drive past his mother’s house, where she watched for him from the front porch, and waved. I now know that she was watching from the porch as his partner drove him, mortally wounded, from the bank to the hospital. I have seen how my act tore a hole in the lives of a whole group of people, of family, friends, neighbors, and fellow officers. I know it is late, and far too little, but today I offer again my sincere and humble apologies to those people.

William Gilday never returned to the apartment, and, as far as I know, none of us ever saw him again. Valeri left the apartment and was arrested at his mother’s home. He told the police the names of the other people in the group. By that time Saxe, Bond, and I had left Boston and become fugitives.

Phase II: Flight From Justice

Thus began the second phase of my offense: living as a fugitive, denying justice to the victims of my crime, refusing to answer for my actions to legitimate authorities. I justified this refusal by a combination of terrible shame and a continuation of the compulsive rebelliousness in which I denied that there is such a thing as a legitimate authority. Shame, of course, can be both convenient and morally sleazy, since it takes into account only the feelings of the wrongdoer and not those of the victim of the wrong.

It is true that I tried to reform my life during this period. Publicly I was a good neighbor, a valued co-worker, a loving mother, a helpful friend. My remorse and sorrow over Walter Schroeder’s death did dominate my inner life and drive me to re-establish sound ethical standards. It broke through the enchantment of zealous self-righteousness and allowed me to put careful treatment of and right relations with people back into the center of my moral vision. I grew up, into the understanding that the hard work of living peacefully, and not the simplistic glory of war, is the only possible response to the pain of what is around us. It looked as though I had found a place in decent society after all. But it was a fraudulent place because of what it failed to account for, namely my debt to justice and to the family of Walter Schroeder.

My refusal to answer for that obligation had implications in the life I was leading, potentials to harm still more people, which I could not ignore. Every time people invested money in a business with me, they were subject to a risk I was not disclosing, the risk that I would be apprehended, with calamitous results for the business they had invested in. I came to realize that I could not subject people to this fraud. There were many possible solutions to that problem. But the other fraud in my life was not so easily resolved.

I was lying to my son, about my life and about his own family. He did not deserve to be deprived of the family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins of which he was a part, nor they of him. He was approaching adolescence, that time of life when parents owe their children the honest stories of their lives. I knew that he was learning the values I modeled to him. Did I really want to teach him to lie about and cover up his mistakes?

My refusal to accept public responsibility for my actions had serious consequences for my mental health. Self-disgust, guilt, and the feeling that I was an irredeemable monster caused a depression that ultimately threatened my life and provoked me to seek professional help. I knew that this inner conflict could not be resolved by therapy and that I would have to come forth and accept the legal consequences for those acts, including going to prison.

Phase III: The Surrender Process

I began the process of surrender, the third phase of my offense against the Schroeder family. I meant my surrender to communicate my deep remorse for what I had done. I meant my guilty plea to be an unequivocal admission of responsibility. And yet the Schroeder family and their community were robbed of justice by the way I was presented on my surrender. At the moment when they should have been unequivocally identified as the victims of a terrible loss, press attention was lavished on the story of my family’s loss and hardships.

I am sorry for that injury, and I want to acknowledge my part in bringing it about. I contributed to it by my posture of defensiveness, by the way that I called attention to my “limited” legal responsibility and not to the enormity of what my human responsibility was for—that on a September morning Officer Walter Schroeder said goodbye for the day to whoever in his family was awake, that he went out conscientiously to do his job, that he never came home. That he would never come home again; that he would never again come home at the end of a shift with sore feet and an aching back to hear about his children’s day. That he would not watch proudly as his children, one by one, graduated and made their way into the world of work, some of them following in his own profession; that Marie Schroeder, his wife, and Clare, Paul, Erin, and his other children would ever after wake up in the morning with that hole in their lives, the place where his love and his fears and his advice and his stories and his whole alive being belong.

When I heard that the Boston Police Headquarters had been named in honor of Walter Schroeder, I thought how even that wonderful honor, the highest honor his city could devise, would for his family be no replacement for what I had helped to take away.

My work in prison has been to peel off the layers of that defensiveness, to get to the point where I could look squarely into the pained accusing faces of the victims of my crime and say, “I was wrong. I was wrong all along. Before God I am sorry. I will always be so sorry.”

First, I had to stop turning away (conveniently) from my own acts in shame, had to sit unflinchingly in the presence of the reality that because of my acts another human being was dead.

Then, I had to be willing to look deeply at my distorted relationships with authority, the source of my thinking that living as a fugitive was somehow an all right thing to do. I had to find and reject the source of the “Yes, but…” that the Schroeders heard from me every time I talked about my criminal acts.

One question on Page 5 asks, “How did this crime end?” The answer is that my crime could not really begin to end until this moment when I could stand with no defenses before the people I have wronged, both the family of my victim and the representatives of the justice system, admit my culpability in these events, and accept my responsibility for all the harm that I have caused.

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About Katherine Power

I didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government….

Recent and Upcoming Appearances & Publications
3/12/19 Peace, Justice and Transformation, Parallel Conference to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 777 United Nations Plaza, NYC
11/13/18 A Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother, Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative, Temple Shir Tikva, 141 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778
10/10/18 Provincetown Women’s Week Reading from Doing Time:Papers from Framingham Prison, AMP, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
4/6-9/2018 The Nature of Change, Radical Imagination Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
1/15/2014 Complexity and Social Change, Occupy Radio
10/31/2013 Surrender, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
10/25/2013 Surrender, Taos Community Theater, Taos, NM

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