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Speaker 2: Four in the morning. On May seventeenth, nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 2: three and a half months after Patty Hurst's kidnapping, Donald
Speaker 2: de Fries, better known as sin QW, the leader of
Speaker 2: the Simbionese Liberation Army, knocked on the door of fourteen
Speaker 2: sixty six East fifty fourth Street in Los Angeles. He
Speaker 2: probably picked us home because there were lights on in
Speaker 2: the windows. Inside, four adults listened to the radio, played cards,
Speaker 2: and drank wine. Two children were asleep in their bedrooms.
Speaker 2: Minnie Lewis, who lived in the house, answered the door.
Speaker 2: Sinq said that he and some friends needed a place
Speaker 2: to lay low for a few hours. Mini was sure,
Speaker 2: but Sinq offered her one hundred dollars and she agreed.
Speaker 2: Sinq asked the man playing cards if he could help
Speaker 2: them empty their vans. They brought in boxes of documents,
Speaker 2: sleeping bags, suitcases, and a foot locker. They also brought
Speaker 2: in weapons, a lot of weapons, nineteen shotguns, rifles and pistols,
Speaker 2: and over four thousand rounds of ammunition. When the vans
Speaker 2: were empty, they stashed them a block and a half away.
Speaker 2: Later in the day, the Los Angeles police spotted the
Speaker 2: two SLA vans where they'd been hidden behind a burned
Speaker 2: out apartment building at fourteen fifty one East fifty third Street.
Speaker 2: It was a spot they stopped by frequently where criminals
Speaker 2: would drop stolen and stripped cars. The stash vans indicated
Speaker 2: to the police that the SLA was almost certainly in
Speaker 2: the area. They checked several addresses before receiving information that
Speaker 2: Sinq and his companion were at the house at fourteen
Speaker 2: sixty six East fifty fourth. According to neighbors, people had
Speaker 2: been coming and going from that address all day. At
Speaker 2: five point forty that evening, the police surrounded the house.
Speaker 2: At five point forty four, an officer using a bullhorn
Speaker 2: called for the people inside the house to surrender. An
Speaker 2: eight year old named Tony emerged crying. Minutes later, a
Speaker 2: man named Clarence Ross came out. In all, the police
Speaker 2: made eighteen surrender announcements. At five point fifty three, the
Speaker 2: shooting began.
Speaker 3: The Los Angeles Police used a record amount of ammunition
Speaker 3: in that shootout.
Speaker 2: Today, the air shook.
Speaker 3: With gunfire and police realized what they were up against.
Speaker 3: Gunfire was so massive it was absolutely impossible to tell
Speaker 3: if you were safe or not. Then police went to
Speaker 3: tear gas bombs.
Speaker 2: Fire was squires coming from the house.
Speaker 4: I to have spread to the adjacent how it does go.
Speaker 3: On, and it's possible at this point find that the
Speaker 3: flames themselves were setting off the tremendous amounts of ammunition
Speaker 3: that the SLA had stockpiled inside the house.
Speaker 5: Several companies of the Los Angeles Fire Department were poised,
Speaker 5: but police would not allow them near the blaze because
Speaker 5: in spite of the inferno firing from the house continue.
Speaker 5: Is the body of Patty Hurst among the five found
Speaker 5: early tonight in a shot up, burned out home on
Speaker 5: fifty fourth in Compton Avenues. The experience of watching the
Speaker 5: holocaust and progress was more shocking, more terrifying than anything
Speaker 5: I have ever experienced. A family spokesman said tonight that
Speaker 5: the feeling inside the Hearst Hold is that it's all
Speaker 5: over for Patty.
Speaker 6: I'm to be bald and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and
Speaker 6: this is rip current.
Speaker 7: That could betray the network. The underground network. But again
Speaker 7: I told him to, I told him take take Eye.
Speaker 6: Episode nine contradictions.
Speaker 2: All six of the SLA members at fourteen sixty six
Speaker 2: East fifty fourth were killed in the shootout and the
Speaker 2: fire that followed. This included since mis Moon, Soltizik, Camilla Hall,
Speaker 2: Angela Atwood, Willie Wolf, and Nancy Ling Perry, but not
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst. Author Jeffrey Tubin.
Speaker 8: As it happened, Patty Hurst and the married couple that
Speaker 8: was sort of minding her, Bill and Emily Harris, were
Speaker 8: not in the house, although that was not known for
Speaker 8: some time, and the three of them then went on
Speaker 8: the lamb. But at that point the Cydndiinese Liberation Army
Speaker 8: really just amounted to those three people. That's all that
Speaker 8: was left.
Speaker 2: They were forced to retreat even further underground, eventually making
Speaker 2: their way across the country to a farm in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: They went dormant, but their influence was still felt. Two
Speaker 2: weeks after the shootout in Los Angeles, a memorial was
Speaker 2: held for Angela Atwood, one of the SLA members killed.
Speaker 2: The setting was Willard Park in Berkeley, also known as
Speaker 2: Ho Chi Min Park after the North Vietnamese leader among
Speaker 2: the speakers at the rally was Popeye Jackson, one of
Speaker 2: the few members of the left willing to publicly align
Speaker 2: themselves with the SLA at this point.
Speaker 9: And not only did they see too that this food
Speaker 9: was distributed, but I think a more important part that
Speaker 9: they did for everyone is proved that while we were
Speaker 9: always too many of us that are in community groups
Speaker 9: that have day in and day out conversations with the
Speaker 9: establishment or the reuning class or whatever. You know, your
Speaker 9: particular political persuasion makes you call those, but not only
Speaker 9: do when we have our day in and day out
Speaker 9: of contact with them, we're always told the question of time,
Speaker 9: that you're right, we realize that people need.
Speaker 2: These things, but it takes time.
Speaker 4: But what a program is in the interest of the
Speaker 4: people of that class, it only takes a matter of days.
Speaker 4: It only takes a matter of days to move to
Speaker 4: get things organized and moved, to put cert goods in
Speaker 4: the hands of the people. But it's not until they
Speaker 4: feel pressured for whatever reason, is that thing done. What
Speaker 4: we want to stress is that, contrary to what said
Speaker 4: in the press, is that what happened with the SLA
Speaker 4: is not an end, but we hope it's beginning.
Speaker 9: A future, frankly a beginning in terms of the fact
Speaker 9: that we hope certain things will be illustrated to people
Speaker 9: in this country.
Speaker 2: Popeye went on to say that he was quote tired
Speaker 2: of armchair revolutionaries who theorize but don't act. At an
Speaker 2: event commemorating the death of a member of a wildly
Speaker 2: violent group, this was a provocative statement of intent. Popeye
Speaker 2: was signaling what he felt was the need for violent action.
Speaker 2: Why did Popeye say this? The SOLA had previously been
Speaker 2: regarded with caution. Now people on the left were trying
Speaker 2: to distance themselves from what seemed like unnecessary, unrevolutionary violence.
Speaker 2: Was his support a tactic to maintain his viability as
Speaker 2: a contact between what remained of the SLA and Randolph
Speaker 2: Hurst or did he sincerely believe in the need for
Speaker 2: SLA style violence regardless. During this time, he was also
Speaker 2: acting as Sarah Jane's patron among the radical left. Jerry Spieler,
Speaker 2: author of Sarah Jane Moore's biography.
Speaker 10: They wanted her to go to these various rallies and
Speaker 10: meetings of these radical organizations and try to get the
Speaker 10: names of people who are there and find out what
Speaker 10: they're plans. Are and then get that back to the FBI.
Speaker 10: So they wanted her to infiltrate these different groups, and
Speaker 10: she got Popeye to quote introduce her or take her
Speaker 10: to these things and say, this is Sarah Jane, and
Speaker 10: she wants to help out. She's taking notes and getting
Speaker 10: information back to the FBI. This was very cool on
Speaker 10: her part. She was, you know, a spy basically, Sarah
Speaker 10: Jane felt very important about that, working with the FBI
Speaker 10: and being able to give them information.
Speaker 6: The SLA shootout in Los Angeles happened in May. Two
Speaker 6: months later. July nineteen seventy four marked a turning point
Speaker 6: for Sarah Jane and her informant work with the FBI and,
Speaker 6: to a lesser extent, her work with Randolph Hurst in
Speaker 6: the San Francisco Police Department. That month, she took two
Speaker 6: big steps. The first was to distance herself from Popeye Jackson.
Speaker 6: Until this time, she'd been closely associated with him. In
Speaker 6: San Francisco. She'd volunteered to answer phones at the United
Speaker 6: Prisoners Union, the organization that Popeye led. Popeye's wife, Pat Singer,
Speaker 6: said that Sarah Jane quote followed him around like a
Speaker 6: puppy dog. But something caused her to decide to make
Speaker 6: the split. Maybe it was that she felt used by Popeye.
Speaker 6: He had borrowed money from her, which he had not repaid.
Speaker 6: He'd also borrowed her car at one point and returned
Speaker 6: it with some damage that went unrepaired. The clash of
Speaker 6: two strong personalities was probably also a factor. For all
Speaker 6: his talk of representing the people, Popeye was a chauvinist
Speaker 6: photographer and friend of Popeye Jackson Jacob Holt.
Speaker 11: Popeye was a terrible sexist, so I don't know how
Speaker 11: he was able to get so many female white supporters.
Speaker 5: As he did.
Speaker 6: Later, explaining the split, Sarah Jane told the Berkeley Barb
Speaker 6: he treated people like shit. He wanted money in middle
Speaker 6: class life. He did not give people the same respect
Speaker 6: he expected from them. The second and more consequential decision
Speaker 6: was to disclose to a prominent member of the underground
Speaker 6: Left that she was an FBI informant. From the beginning
Speaker 6: of her work with the FBI, they had told her
Speaker 6: that their top target was this man, whom Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: referred to as Tom. She has never revealed Tom's identity.
Speaker 6: In a retrospective nineteen seventy six, interview with journalist Andrew
Speaker 6: Hill for Playboy magazine, she talked about her growing sympathy
Speaker 6: with the people that the FBI was asking her to
Speaker 6: report on. I began to see that the leftist people
Speaker 6: I was working with were not enemies of this country.
Speaker 6: They were dedicated people working for qualitative change. They were
Speaker 6: not evil. Yes, they recognized revolution. They were dedicated to
Speaker 6: the armed overthrow of the government because they did not
Speaker 6: think there was any other way to do it. I
Speaker 6: became aware of how dangerous what I was doing was
Speaker 6: in terms of those people. I was looking at people
Speaker 6: getting arrested on the basis of information like that which
Speaker 6: I was telling the FBI. I was looking at people
Speaker 6: getting killed. I couldn't do what I was doing any more.
Speaker 6: The reality was that Tom was radicalizing her, bringing her
Speaker 6: in to the Maoist ideology that underpinned so many groups
Speaker 6: in the Bay Area. Maoism in the US took the
Speaker 6: form of a number of Marxist groups that roughly aligned
Speaker 6: themselves with Chinese style communism or selectively picked from that ideology.
Speaker 6: Its philosophy held some special attraction at the time. It
Speaker 6: drew a parallel between what radicals called the Imperial war
Speaker 6: in Vietnam and racial oppression in the US. It connected
Speaker 6: domestic civil rights efforts with decolonization movements around the world,
Speaker 6: seeing it as an international struggle, and there was an
Speaker 6: expectation that a mass worker's revolt would take place and
Speaker 6: that the current MAOIs would serve as the leadership, and
Speaker 6: because of this needed to be educated in the correct
Speaker 6: political philosophy. Maoism was often about studying an education or
Speaker 6: re education. This is how Patty Hurst became a gorilla
Speaker 6: and Sarah Jane Moore became a radical. As she tells
Speaker 6: the story of her disclosure, she informed Tom that she was,
Speaker 6: in her words, a pig, someone who worked with the cops.
Speaker 6: Tom didn't believe it. She understood his doubts. She didn't
Speaker 6: fit the profile of an agent, but Tom asked her
Speaker 6: a series of questions and satisfied himself that she was
Speaker 6: telling the truth. Tom told her that the FBI would
Speaker 6: never allow her to genuinely work with a radical left.
Speaker 6: He said he needed to talk with his group to
Speaker 6: make a decision about what to do with this information.
Speaker 6: The decision of Tom's group was that I was a
Speaker 6: security risk to them and therefore they had to break
Speaker 6: off all contact with me. However, they believed in my
Speaker 6: sincerity and therefore they were making what to them was
Speaker 6: a dangerous decision. They would not tell anyone else I
Speaker 6: was a pig. In September, she told her FBI handler
Speaker 6: about her confession to Tom. They initially dropped her as informant,
Speaker 6: but picked her up again a month later when they
Speaker 6: realized that she had maintained her relationship in the LEFT.
Speaker 6: She had less information to offer after her July disclosure
Speaker 6: to Tom. Sarah Jane also realized that her disclosure to
Speaker 6: Tom might have put her in danger. She talked about
Speaker 6: this fear in the Playboy interview. I began to wonder
Speaker 6: if Tom's group might be setting me up. What he
Speaker 6: had done was contrary to all I had learned about
Speaker 6: the way PIG agents were treated when they were discovered.
Speaker 6: And you have to remember that violence and death were
Speaker 6: very real in the Bay Area. Then, Marcus Foster had
Speaker 6: been killed, Patti Hurst kidnapped, The People in Need program
Speaker 6: operated in a sea of threats and violence. Then there
Speaker 6: was the SLA's fiery shootout in LA. Three months after
Speaker 6: being reinstated, technically, at least to the FBI payroll, she
Speaker 6: made another rash decision. In the same interview with Playboy magazine,
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane said that in January nineteen seventy five, she
Speaker 6: told a left wing lawyer named Charles Garry about her
Speaker 6: work for the FBI. He convinced her that her activities
Speaker 6: had done more harm than she realized, and that she
Speaker 6: had a duty to the people she reported on to
Speaker 6: come clean, especially if she wanted to continue to work
Speaker 6: with organizations on the left. On this advice, she contacted
Speaker 6: people within the radical scene and told them about her
Speaker 6: informant work. In a Berkeley barb article, she claimed that
Speaker 6: she told around twenty five people, and Playboy Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: claimed she had contacted the heads of three groups as
Speaker 6: she had infiltrated. Of the three she contacted, one small
Speaker 6: violent organization called Tribal Thumb would become a major part
Speaker 6: of her story to these groups. Sarah Jane both confessed
Speaker 6: to her work for the FBI up until July of
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy four, and provided what she felt was damning
Speaker 6: information about Popeye Jackson. Specifically, she disclosed his agreement with
Speaker 6: Randolph Hurst Hearst's intervention in his parole revocation case. In
Speaker 6: what she he claimed was Popeye's use of United Prisoner
Speaker 6: Union funds for his own purposes. Sarah Jane claimed that
Speaker 6: two of the groups handled this news at the leadership level,
Speaker 6: but that the third spread her admission throughout the Bay
Speaker 6: Area Left. That third group was most likely the Vietnam
Speaker 6: Veterans against the War. While she had made this disclosure
Speaker 6: with the aim of continuing her relationships within the leftist organizations,
Speaker 6: their negative reaction angered her and recommitted her to her
Speaker 6: work for the FBI. Paradoxically, the disclosure of her identity
Speaker 6: as an FBI informant to the left at large actually
Speaker 6: helped Sarah Jane's information collecting. She told Playboy, the faster
Speaker 6: word about me spread through the movement, the more new
Speaker 6: people came to me to ask me questions, and the
Speaker 6: more information I was able to give about them to
Speaker 6: the FBI. The interviewer followed up, asking if informing on
Speaker 6: her friends bothered her. She replied, sure it did, and
Speaker 6: I don't know how how I handled it, and then
Speaker 6: rambled about how stupid those people were to talk to.
Speaker 2: Her as an informant. Sarah Jane was part of a
Speaker 2: concerted FBI effort to infiltrate and disrupt political extremist groups
Speaker 2: on both the left and the right, but mostly on
Speaker 2: the left. This initiative began in nineteen fifty six as
Speaker 2: the infamous co intel Pro program that was technically shuttered
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy one, but continued on in practice through
Speaker 2: the mid seventies.
Speaker 12: Co intel Pro is a bad acronym for counterintelligence program.
Speaker 12: When we talk about counterintelligence, the idea is this goes
Speaker 12: beyond the more passive monitoring or surveillance of particular groups
Speaker 12: in order to uncover what they might do, and it
Speaker 12: moves to the more active disruption of these groups, like
Speaker 12: seeking to proactively defuse these groups' ability to organize, ability
Speaker 12: to act. I'm David Cunningham. I am a professor of
Speaker 12: sociology at Washington University in Saint Louis. Co intel Pro
Speaker 12: was predominantly targeting left wing groups, and so almost all
Speaker 12: of the co intel Pro programs focused on left wing
Speaker 12: quote unquote threats, ranging from the communist part of USA
Speaker 12: to the Socialist Workers Party, to the New Left and
Speaker 12: anti war movement, to civil rights and black power organizations
Speaker 12: that the FBI deemed black nationalists and hate groups.
Speaker 2: And it was the very existence of these left wing groups,
Speaker 2: rather than their actual capacity to undertake meaningful action that
Speaker 2: caught the eye of the FBI. Say what you will
Speaker 2: about the rhetoric of some of these groups, they were
Speaker 2: tiny and their goal of fomenting a national revolution was
Speaker 2: comically unattainable.
Speaker 12: Because when the FBI targeted the whole spectrum of groups
Speaker 12: on the left wing, their aim almost across the board,
Speaker 12: unilatterally was to eliminate these groups. They really wanted these
Speaker 12: groups to be gone, and so even when these groups
Speaker 12: seemed weak and ineffectual, the FBI would kind of relentlessly
Speaker 12: go after undermining them and continuing to undermine them because
Speaker 12: FBI Director Jagrew Hoover always saw them as having the
Speaker 12: potential in the right climate, of having a revolutionary potential,
Speaker 12: of being able to lead or further a revolutionary threat.
Speaker 2: The goal of the FBI when they went after right
Speaker 2: wing groups was significantly different.
Speaker 12: When the FBI targeted the right wing groups. So the
Speaker 12: ku Kluxplan in particular, the issue was not whether they
Speaker 12: existed or not. It turned out the FBI didn't have
Speaker 12: any problem with the KKK being active and being organized.
Speaker 12: What they really wanted to do was control those groups.
Speaker 12: So the aim of cointelpro against the Klan to be
Speaker 12: more towards placing informants in these groups, which they were
Speaker 12: very good at, and trying to get these informants placed
Speaker 12: highly within the KKK so they could in effect run
Speaker 12: the clan in a way that the FBI could see
Speaker 12: as predictable and could see as controlling unpredictable violence against
Speaker 12: civil rights workers and others.
Speaker 2: Over time, changes in the size and tactics of the
Speaker 2: revolutionary groups provided the FBI with new challenges.
Speaker 12: As we move into the later nineteen sixties and into
Speaker 12: the nineteen seventies, when a lot of these targets were
Speaker 12: maybe seen as more explicitly revolutionary or radical in their
Speaker 12: orientation and oftentimes took an underground approach to organizing, so
Speaker 12: it was less about building, you know, mass events with
Speaker 12: marches and things like that, and more about cell based
Speaker 12: action or something that would look more insular and underground.
Speaker 12: The FBI was less and less effective trying to burrow
Speaker 12: into those groups with informants, which does not mean that
Speaker 12: they stopped trying, and if anything, they tried harder in
Speaker 12: that environment, but with much more mixed success in terms
Speaker 12: of their ability to do this effectively.
Speaker 2: You can see this in Sarah Jane's recruitment. She was
Speaker 2: an outsider to the movement and someone who didn't really
Speaker 2: fit in with the radical scenery. Not only was she
Speaker 2: outside the normal demographic of black ex convicts and young
Speaker 2: white radicals, but her personality guaranteed that she would stand
Speaker 2: out as well. Recruiting members from small, intense groups, though,
Speaker 2: was difficult. This is Rick Riley, who will hear more
Speaker 2: from next episode. He was a member of Tribal Thumb,
Speaker 2: one of the groups Sarah Jane confessed to. Here, he
Speaker 2: talks about a recruitment approach by the FBI to become
Speaker 2: an informant. He had been sentenced to a one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty day prison stint and the FBI let him
Speaker 2: sit a month before an agent came to talk with him.
Speaker 7: Their plan was to send me to prison for a
Speaker 7: little bit to scare me, you know, scare straight. They
Speaker 7: came to visit me while I was in prison. After
Speaker 7: I had been there like thirty something days, they came
Speaker 7: to see me and again made the offer to me,
Speaker 7: And this time they wanted me to escape and use
Speaker 7: utilize travel thumbs escape resources. And then betray that, you know,
Speaker 7: because like travel Thumb was involved in jail breaks and
Speaker 7: prison breaks and stuff like that. So they wanted me
Speaker 7: to go to a camp facility and get them to
Speaker 7: help me to escape, and that way I could betray
Speaker 7: the network, the underground network. I told him to take
Speaker 7: a y.
Speaker 12: I think that sort of tactic is really central to
Speaker 12: what the FBI would try to do. I mean, they
Speaker 12: knew that the placing of informants had a direct value
Speaker 12: to them in the sense that these informants could act
Speaker 12: directly and provide information directly. But they also knew that
Speaker 12: the global effort to place informants had an indirect effect,
Speaker 12: which is that it created a climate that really sowed
Speaker 12: suspicion and potential dissent around the presence of informants generally.
Speaker 12: And part of that indirect effect was trying to use
Speaker 12: informants and others to accuse non informants of informing. And
Speaker 12: sometimes they would do things that would signal to others
Speaker 12: that someone was being treated like an informant by law enforcement,
Speaker 12: so providing a light sentence releasing them from jail when
Speaker 12: their co conspirators remained in jail. Things like this oftentimes
Speaker 12: they would try to do for folks who were not informants,
Speaker 12: precisely because that would be a signal to other members
Speaker 12: that they must be an informant, and that's why they
Speaker 12: were treated in that way. And so the FBI clearly
Speaker 12: knew that this could be effective in an indirect way,
Speaker 12: and that they could exploit the climate that they themselves
Speaker 12: had created.
Speaker 2: Even unsuccessful attempts to recruit served to increase the fear
Speaker 2: in the radical community that there are informants in their
Speaker 2: midst a paranoia that would play out in the coming months.
Speaker 2: For Popeye and.
Speaker 13: Sarah Jane after the break.
Speaker 14: Oh well, yeah, we definitely had privileges. I would call
Speaker 14: it middle class upbringing, but maybe, you know, maybe a
Speaker 14: little more so economically. We lived in a really nice
Speaker 14: home neighborhood in Menlo Park. I'm Lee Darby, author of
Speaker 14: Stars in Our Eyes.
Speaker 6: Stars in Our Eyes is a memoir that focuses in
Speaker 6: large part on Lee's sister, Sally Void.
Speaker 14: When I was a freshman in high school, you know,
Speaker 14: just right on the cusp of adulthood, we moved over
Speaker 14: to the town of Alamo, which is near Walnut Creek
Speaker 14: because my dad got a new job. We just had
Speaker 14: a kind of a privileged life and intact family and
Speaker 14: friends would come over and hang out and it was
Speaker 14: just we really had a good time. There wasn't any
Speaker 14: real angst other than the usual teenage stuff. She had
Speaker 14: a real sense of justice. She would confront and tell
Speaker 14: people off, and she was very popular. She didn't let
Speaker 14: transgressions happen. You know, if somebody said something rude or
Speaker 14: not nice, she would call them on it. She was
Speaker 14: just that way, just really opinionated, you know, she wanted
Speaker 14: to be right. Everything kind of changed. We went to
Speaker 14: different colleges. You know, we've been joined at the hip
Speaker 14: since early age, being only one year apart in school.
Speaker 14: I went to University Pacific and she went to U
Speaker 14: see Santa Barbara. So both of us joined sororities, and
Speaker 14: we just loved campus life and she was active in
Speaker 14: it and she ended up being the president of her
Speaker 14: sorority her senior year. She then went and did her
Speaker 14: fifth years what they call it, to become a teacher,
Speaker 14: and she went to Berkeley and everything changed there. She
Speaker 14: saw people that were underprivileged and she wanted to do
Speaker 14: something to help, and she became interested in plight of
Speaker 14: black people, especially, And after she got her teaching credential,
Speaker 14: she started teaching in Vallejo, and there's a large black
Speaker 14: population over there, and a friend told her about this
Speaker 14: literacy program at San Quentin, and so she became active
Speaker 14: in this teaching prisoners to read, and so she was
Speaker 14: volunteering over there, and that's how she met Popeye Jackson,
Speaker 14: because he was an ex con and he was involved
Speaker 14: in several different programs over there at the prison. Just
Speaker 14: completely unclear about what she thought she was doing with
Speaker 14: these people. I think she talked to my brother a
Speaker 14: little bit about it, but I don't think he even
Speaker 14: recognized the name Popeye Jackson either. But somehow we knew
Speaker 14: that she was involved with a group of ex convicts,
Speaker 14: and we all felt like she was out of her element.
Speaker 14: We saw the danger, she just saw the potential to help.
Speaker 6: In March of nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane moved into
Speaker 6: an apartment that had previously been home to her friends
Speaker 6: Joyce and Paul Halverson. The Hoversons had also been friends
Speaker 6: with Camilla Hall, a member of the SLA who was
Speaker 6: killed in the LA shootout. Paul had earlier spent two
Speaker 6: weeks in jail for refusing to testify in front of
Speaker 6: a grand jury investigating Camilla Hall. The apartment that Sarah
Speaker 6: Jane moved into was just two blocks from Popeye's apartment building,
Speaker 6: and as had so often been the case in her life,
Speaker 6: she made an impression on her neighbors. The New York
Speaker 6: Times interviewed a woman named Evelyn Jebaut, who was described
Speaker 6: as the local Avon lady. She said that she never
Speaker 6: called on Sarah Jane, explaining, she seems so strange. She
Speaker 6: was so quiet and unfriendly, and this is such a
Speaker 6: friendly neighborhood. Of course she don't go out much after dark,
Speaker 6: but it's a friendly neighborhood. Also in March, Popeye had
Speaker 6: a close call photographer Jacob Holt. Talking about Popeye.
Speaker 11: He himself certainly made me paranoid that this that personal
Speaker 11: towards out for and I think, as far as I remember,
Speaker 11: he was the one who, Yeah, he warned me about
Speaker 11: FBI spices in his union and so on, but he
Speaker 11: ignored it all. He didn't he didn't care that had
Speaker 11: already been an assassination at himt on him and Pat
Speaker 11: Singer before that excellent sal Sally voice card which was
Speaker 11: full of bullet holes, and so was such a nice
Speaker 11: suburban teacher. I couldn't believe that had the guts to
Speaker 11: go into all this, even after that assassination nets him.
Speaker 6: Popeye, his wife Pat Singer, who was six months pregnant
Speaker 6: at the time, and two others were driving through the
Speaker 6: Mission District in March of nineteen seventy five. One of
Speaker 6: those other two people was likely Sally Voy, though this
Speaker 6: was never reported. As they drove, at least one shot
Speaker 6: was fired at the car. Reports vary about the number
Speaker 6: of shots, with some people saying the car had several
Speaker 6: bullet holes. Lee Darby again talking about her sister Sally Voy.
Speaker 14: Somebody took some shots. I'm not sure why Popeye Jackson
Speaker 14: didn't have a car, but somehow she was taking him,
Speaker 14: you know. I guess all this happened on weekends because
Speaker 14: you know, she taught school, but she was taking him somewhere,
Speaker 14: and there was other people in the car too, I think,
Speaker 14: And so somehow we've I think she told my brother
Speaker 14: about that, So somehow we found out about that, and
Speaker 14: so we were further concerned about her safety. But she
Speaker 14: just waved it off and just thought she was John
Speaker 14: Wayne dodging apache arrows, and it was all kind of fake,
Speaker 14: and she just never thought that bullets would catch up
Speaker 14: to her and the bullet the bullet holes got repaired somehow,
Speaker 14: and nobody got killed. But it was definitely a severe
Speaker 14: warning that none of them heeded.
Speaker 6: Three months later, on June fourth, nineteen seventy five, a
Speaker 6: mysterious group called the New World Liberation Front sent an
Speaker 6: open letter to KPOO, a community radio station in San Francisco.
Speaker 6: The letter, which KPOO read over the air, laid out
Speaker 6: accusations against Popeye Jackson. It claimed that Popeye displayed what
Speaker 6: it called four contradictions against the revolutionary cause. The first
Speaker 6: was that he received privileged treatment by the courts and
Speaker 6: prison system. This was related largely to a shoplifting offense
Speaker 6: for which Popeye had received sixty days in jail. The
Speaker 6: writers felt that sentence was too short. The second contradiction
Speaker 6: was that Popeye projected a capitalist image. This probably concerned
Speaker 6: his habit of wearing fancy clothes, though his defender said
Speaker 6: these were generally homemade. He also at this time drove
Speaker 6: a Catillac, which was another symbol of this capitalist image.
Speaker 6: The third contradiction was urging people to commit premature acts,
Speaker 6: in other words, being a provocateur, remember, for instance, his
Speaker 6: advocating violence at Angela Outwood's memorial. The fourth was for
Speaker 6: quote subjective criticism verbal trashing, which has to do with
Speaker 6: the way in which disputes were aired. In the letter,
Speaker 6: the NWLF says, we welcome comradeley criticism of our acts,
Speaker 6: but we reject trashing. It is divisive and neither further's
Speaker 6: dialogue or revolutionary theory. The letter concluded, we feel Popeye
Speaker 6: got weak and turned undercover pig. It was an accusation
Speaker 6: that would have been true about Sarah Jane. It was
Speaker 6: less certain about Popeye. The first two of the letters points,
Speaker 6: the short sentence and the capitalist image, were certainly part
Speaker 6: of the documents that Sarah Jane had supplied the underground
Speaker 6: groups in January. The third may have been as well,
Speaker 6: or was an inference made from the first two points.
Speaker 6: In short, at least some of the charges levied by
Speaker 6: the New World Liberation Front could be traced back to
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane's accusations. Again, this letter was received by radio
Speaker 6: station KPOO on June fourth. On the evening of June seventh,
Speaker 6: Popeye and Sally Voy attended a benefit party for the
Speaker 6: radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Late that night,
Speaker 6: as Sally dropped Popeye off at his apartment, they were murdered.
Speaker 15: What happened was Popeye Jackson was sitting in a car
Speaker 15: at forty one Albion Street in San Francisco, and young
Speaker 15: lady about ten years old was looking out the window
Speaker 15: after she heard gunshots us and she saw a tall, thin,
Speaker 15: black male shooting a gun into a car. Seated in
Speaker 15: that car was Popeye Jackson.
Speaker 6: This is retired San Francisco Police detective Frank Fausan. He
Speaker 6: worked many of the big homicide cases in San Francisco.
Speaker 15: He was in the driver's seat. Next to him was
Speaker 15: a young lady. Turned out, the young lady was a
Speaker 15: school teacher elementary school teacher in the Valeo School District,
Speaker 15: which is in the East Bay of San Francisco. The
Speaker 15: sad thing about Sally Voy and I never did confirm it.
Speaker 15: I felt like she was just collateral damage. She was
Speaker 15: in the wrong place at the wrong time when this
Speaker 15: assailant stepped up outside the driver's side window and started shooting.
Speaker 15: We eventually found five casings on the ground next to
Speaker 15: the driver's door, so it indicated that he was using
Speaker 15: an automatic, which turned out to be a nine millimeter automatic. Well,
Speaker 15: we come to find out later there was another individual,
Speaker 15: another blackmail, standing on the opposite side with a handgun,
Speaker 15: a revolver which wasn't ejecting shells, and he fired through
Speaker 15: that window. Both victims ended up with multiple gunshot wounds
Speaker 15: and died right in the position that we found them.
Speaker 15: We knew right away it was two forty five am
Speaker 15: Sunday morning when these gunshots rang out. It was a
Speaker 15: June eighth, nineteen seventy five. This was definitely assassination. It
Speaker 15: was not a robbery. There were two suspects laying in
Speaker 15: wait to take down Popeye Jackson. One had the revolver,
Speaker 15: the other one had the automatic. Witnesses told us again
Speaker 15: both suspects were black mail.
Speaker 6: Identification of two black men turned out to be wrong,
Speaker 6: but at this point the investigation had barely begun. Two
Speaker 6: blocks away, Sarah Jane heard the news and realized that
Speaker 6: Popeye's death changed everything for her. It had been six
Speaker 6: months since she had provided a number of underground groups
Speaker 6: with a letter accusing Popeye of being a police informant.
Speaker 6: Now he was dead, assassinated, as she told Playboy Magazine.
Speaker 6: When he was killed, all I could think about was
Speaker 6: that I had fingered him. When I hung up the
Speaker 6: phone after hearing the news, my immediate thought was, oh,
Speaker 6: my god, I've killed Popeye. That same week, I got
Speaker 6: another call. The voice on the other end said, you're
Speaker 6: next next time on Rip Current.
Speaker 1: Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary
Speaker 1: Katherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sanoff, Show art by
Speaker 1: Jeffney as Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk, Rema
Speaker 1: O'Kelly and Noams Griffin. Supervising producer Trelie Young. Executive producers
Speaker 1: Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick. Hear episodes of Rip Current
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