Speaker 1: Rip Current is a production of iHeart Podcasts. The views
Speaker 1: and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the host.
Speaker 2: Producers or parent company.
Speaker 1: Listener discretion is it fine.
Speaker 3: Eryl Hendra's Camera Shop was an eclectic print shop and
Speaker 3: gathering place in San Francisco in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3: It was owned by Errol Hendra, a former seaman from
Speaker 3: New Zealand author Jerry Spieler.
Speaker 4: It was a camera shop on Folsom Street, but they
Speaker 4: did all the printing of the various flyers and posters
Speaker 4: for the political community in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3: They also did rock concert posters, underground comic art, and
Speaker 3: so on, and the shop seemed more like a clubhouse
Speaker 3: than a business. In a footnote in his book The
Speaker 3: Pirates in the Mouse Disney's World Against the Underground, Bob
Speaker 3: Levin describes.
Speaker 1: The scene his place was wal to wall posters with
Speaker 1: Hell's Angels, rock stars, underground cartoonists, dope dealers, and sometimes
Speaker 1: the Sheriff of San Francisco hanging out in the dark room,
Speaker 1: sitting on the waterbed itemized as a depreciable water storage
Speaker 1: facility on Hendra's irs returns, joking, bantering smoking weed, playing
Speaker 1: out the dramas Hendra like to set in motion, like
Speaker 1: he was the ringmaster of a Bedlamite circus.
Speaker 4: Dan O'Neil was a cartoonist with a cartoon called Odd Bodkins,
Speaker 4: which was very popular at the time. Sarah Jane would
Speaker 4: go visit them and they would basically sort of put
Speaker 4: her on and laugh behind her back and get her
Speaker 4: all excited. They would tease Sarah Jane and she didn't
Speaker 4: realize she was being teased, and she would get all
Speaker 4: worked up about their conversations. But it was Dan O'Neill
Speaker 4: who said, if Ford wasn't president anymore and Rockefeller would
Speaker 4: become president, all hell would break loose. And they were joking,
Speaker 4: but Sarah Jane took them seriously, and when that conversation happened,
Speaker 4: they realized that she thinks that's real.
Speaker 5: She really thinks that's real.
Speaker 3: In her interview in Playboy magazine months after the attempt,
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane talked about this motive, Oh.
Speaker 6: Ford of the Nevish. I have nothing against him personally.
Speaker 6: It was the office of the Presidency that I was
Speaker 6: trying to attack. Killing Ford would have shaken a lot
Speaker 6: of people up. More importantly, it would have elevated Nelson
Speaker 6: Rockefeller to the presidency, and then people would see who
Speaker 6: the actual leaders of the country are.
Speaker 3: Nelson Rockefeller was a member of the extravagantly wealthy Rockefeller family,
Speaker 3: considered it a moderate. He'd run unsuccessfully three times for
Speaker 3: the Republican presidential nomination before Ford named him as vice
Speaker 3: president after Nixon's resignation. Referring to Rockefeller as Rocky, Sarah
Speaker 3: Jane went on to.
Speaker 6: Say, killing Ford would have meant that people would have
Speaker 6: had to face Rocky head on, which should rouse a
Speaker 6: lot of people out of their rationalizing daydreams.
Speaker 3: I'm Toby Ball.
Speaker 6: And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Speaker 7: We feel that the murder of Popeye Jackson and Sally
Speaker 7: Boy was the work of.
Speaker 6: Pigs Episode ten. It serves the pig's interests to create confusion.
Speaker 3: In the early morning hours of June eighth, nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 3: Popeye Jackson was murdered along with a friend named Sally
Speaker 3: Voy as they sat in a parked car just a
Speaker 3: couple of blocks from Sarah Jane Moore's apartment. His death
Speaker 3: was ominous for Sarah Jane. Popeye had been her mentor
Speaker 3: and entree to the radical groups in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3: She had recently accused him of being a police informant,
Speaker 3: and it seemed likely this had contributed.
Speaker 8: To his murder.
Speaker 3: But in truth, it was she who was an informant,
Speaker 3: and many people in the Bay Area knew this. She
Speaker 3: had good reason to believe she was not safe at
Speaker 3: the time. Ellen Hume was a young reporter with the
Speaker 3: Los Angeles Times during this period. Sarah Jane went by
Speaker 3: the name Sally. When Allen mentioned Sally, she is talking
Speaker 3: about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 9: One time she called and she was absolutely terrified. She said,
Speaker 9: I'm in danger. My life is in danger. I said,
Speaker 9: what are you talking about? She said, Popeye's just been
Speaker 9: killed and he was about two blocks from her apartment.
Speaker 9: And I didn't know anything about her involvement with Popeye.
Speaker 9: She hadn't told me about Popeye. So Popeye's murder really
Speaker 9: freaked Sally out. After Popeye's murder and Sally, who always
Speaker 9: acted as if she had several screws loose, I gave
Speaker 9: her fifty dollars, which I never did, not for the story,
Speaker 9: but I said, get out of town, cool off for
Speaker 9: a while. Because she was so scared. She was literally shaking.
Speaker 9: I flew up and was with her in her apartment.
Speaker 9: A couple days later, she seemed to be okay again.
Speaker 3: As Sarah Jane wrestled with how to protect herself after
Speaker 3: Popeye's murder, the investigation into his death got underway. His
Speaker 3: murder was yet another black mark for a city that
Speaker 3: had been hit with high profile violence and gained a
Speaker 3: reputation for fear and paranoia author Jeffrey Tubin.
Speaker 10: In the nineteen seventies, San Francisco was synonymous with urban decay.
Speaker 7: You get to ask yourself one question, Do I feel lucky?
Speaker 10: Well?
Speaker 4: Do you bunk?
Speaker 10: Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry was a San Francisco detective. The
Speaker 10: Streets of San Francisco, Michael Douglas's TV series was based
Speaker 10: on the idea that San Francisco was a very dangerous
Speaker 10: place to be a detective.
Speaker 11: The night's episode.
Speaker 12: Death Watch by seventy two, seventy three, seventy four, you
Speaker 12: had cops being ambushed and killed because they're cops. I
Speaker 12: think San Francisco lost seven officers in a year and
Speaker 12: a half period, which was unheard of. My name is
Speaker 12: Duffy Jennings. I am a retired journalist and publicist who
Speaker 12: lives here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was
Speaker 12: a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle from nineteen sixty
Speaker 12: nine to nineteen eighty. The city just morphed into an
Speaker 12: ugly place. This kind of random violence, political violence just
Speaker 12: rolled on through this seventies.
Speaker 2: There was just no letup.
Speaker 3: But the violence also gave opportunities to San Francisco's homicide
Speaker 3: detectives to make their names in high profile cases. One
Speaker 3: of those detectives was Frank Falzon, who we heard from
Speaker 3: last episode.
Speaker 13: Every day was a new exciting day. Every day was
Speaker 13: a new and exciting case. And being young, energetic and
Speaker 13: always wanting to work the big cases, I didn't have
Speaker 13: to look very far. They were right in front of me.
Speaker 3: Falson was assigned to Popeye's case.
Speaker 13: Well, initially, we're totally in the dark when we started
Speaker 13: researching the background of Popeye Jackson, and it wasn't like
Speaker 13: he was a wallflower. He was very well known in
Speaker 13: the criminal justice system. Within two days, a citizen called
Speaker 13: in about finding a barrel of a gun. It was
Speaker 13: the nine millimeter automatic gun. It had been discarded in
Speaker 13: the street we knew it was probably linked to our murders,
Speaker 13: but without the rest of the gun, we just booked
Speaker 13: it into the property clerk's office to see if it
Speaker 13: would prove to be influential at a later time. The
Speaker 13: radical violent underground was a tangled web of competing New
Speaker 13: left radical extremists. We started looking into all those radical
Speaker 13: extremists individuals, trying to talk to people that might be
Speaker 13: able to point us in the right direction. Popeye Jackson
Speaker 13: was loved by many and hated by some.
Speaker 3: Popeye was executed in the early morning of June eighth.
Speaker 3: As Frankfelzhan mentioned, the investigation would center on the complicated
Speaker 3: ecosystem of small, violent radical groups in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3: The trail actually was laid five days before Popeye's murder.
Speaker 3: On June third, a mysterious group called the New World
Speaker 3: Liberation Front or NWLF, had sent an open letter to
Speaker 3: San Francisco radio station KPOO accusing Popeye of being a
Speaker 3: police informant. In the days following Popeye's assassination, a commentary
Speaker 3: on whether his death was justified played out in a
Speaker 3: letter to the editor page of the underground newspaper The
Speaker 3: Berkeley barb It began with two communica's signed by the NWLF.
Speaker 3: The first Communica claimed credit for Popeye's execution. It was
Speaker 3: quickly identified as a fraud. It is still unclear who
Speaker 3: wrote this letter. The second, much longer Communica arrived soon after.
Speaker 3: It was regarded as genuine. In it, the NWLF stated
Speaker 3: that Popeye's execution was justified, but denied that they had
Speaker 3: actually carried it out. It harshly condemned the murder of
Speaker 3: Sally Voi, and then it denounced the first fake communicate
Speaker 3: as disinformation. Its language was heated.
Speaker 1: When the ruling class pigs and steal fear and oppressed peoples.
Speaker 1: We must be able to decipher pig shit from revolutionary
Speaker 1: tactics and respond by drawing together, not in paranoia, but
Speaker 1: in strength and imagination.
Speaker 3: It ended by calling on an underground prison group called
Speaker 3: the Black Gorilla Family to conduct an analysis of Popeye's murder.
Speaker 3: This analysis, it was implied, would be the definitive judgment.
Speaker 3: The NWLF was just one of several groups to communicate
Speaker 3: through that week's edition of the Berkeley Barb Something called
Speaker 3: the People's Commission of Inquiry Berkeley sent an open letter
Speaker 3: asserting that the nwlf's June third letter contained only accusations
Speaker 3: and no actual evidence. It also claimed that no true
Speaker 3: revolutionary group would have executed Popeye under what they called
Speaker 3: these circumstances. The letter went on to say that if
Speaker 3: the NWLF didn't denounce the murderer and the previous communications
Speaker 3: about Popeye, that.
Speaker 1: We would have to assume that the NWLF is a
Speaker 1: creation of the repressive forces of the state, created to
Speaker 1: so confusion and division among the general population and a left,
Speaker 1: in particular as to the true actions, behaviors, and policies
Speaker 1: of revolutionary underground groups.
Speaker 3: In short, the NWLF accused Popeye of being an agent
Speaker 3: of the government, and the People's Inquiry accused the NWLF
Speaker 3: of being an agent of the government for making that accusation.
Speaker 3: To further complicate the situation, many on the left thought
Speaker 3: that Popeye had most likely been executed by the government
Speaker 3: in the form of the police. Pat Singer, Popeye's wife,
Speaker 3: who was nine months pregnant at the time, told the Berkeley.
Speaker 1: Barb Popeye's most outstanding enemies were the police. They had
Speaker 1: talked about him being killed and made threats from the
Speaker 1: California Department of Corrections down to the blacks and whites
Speaker 1: on the SFPD. They were his most outspoken enemies and
Speaker 1: the ones who would have benefited most from his death.
Speaker 3: Rumors also circulated that the racist Aryan Brotherhood had put
Speaker 3: out a ten thousand dollars contract for the murder of
Speaker 3: Popeye and four other unnamed radicals in the Bay Area.
Speaker 8: Paranoia reigned, So what we saw here was factions of
Speaker 8: this extreme left, very divided on who they felt should
Speaker 8: be supported and who should be taken out.
Speaker 13: None of it was any good.
Speaker 3: The Berkeley barb Letter section also carried two anonymous letters,
Speaker 3: both concerned with the effects of violence within the left.
Speaker 3: A letter signed by a comrade concluded this way.
Speaker 1: We his fellow revolutionaries killed Popeye, regardless of who pulled
Speaker 1: the trigger. We who got angry and left him, We
Speaker 1: who feared displeasing his followers, We who were afraid to
Speaker 1: confront and struggle with a strong but misled comrade.
Speaker 3: The second letter referred to the executions of Popeye and
Speaker 3: Oakland School's superintendent Marcus Foster instead of the violence.
Speaker 1: The result of this approach has been confusion, divisiveness, paranoia,
Speaker 1: and increased physical and mental oppression for us. All it
Speaker 1: was signed with intense feelings some of the people.
Speaker 3: A week later, the Black Gorilla Family responded to the
Speaker 3: nwlf's requests for an analysis. This is from a report
Speaker 3: on KPFA, a Bay Area community radio station.
Speaker 7: Last week when the New War Liberation Front is to
Speaker 7: communicate denying responsibility for the June eighth execution of Popeye Jackson.
Speaker 7: They also called on the Black Gorilla Family to use
Speaker 7: its vantage point from inside prison to analyze some of
Speaker 7: the charges made earlier against Popeye Jackson. Today, the Black
Speaker 7: Gorilla Family issued their response, which reads as follows. To
Speaker 7: the people, this is long in coming because we had
Speaker 7: decided not to become involved. However, due to the conflict
Speaker 7: and speculations which have arisen, we feel it is necessary
Speaker 7: to clarify our position and give an objective opinion.
Speaker 3: The communicay was long, but this paragraph summed up the findings.
Speaker 7: We feel that the murder of Popeye Jackson and Sally
Speaker 7: Voi was the work of pigs. As to the murder
Speaker 7: of Sally Voi, there is no justification to the left,
Speaker 7: especially the Gorilla Army, but it serves the pig's interests
Speaker 7: to create confusion within the left and to maintain control.
Speaker 7: Through that confusion, the charges lodged against Popeye we feel
Speaker 7: are void of foundation.
Speaker 13: The Black Gorilla family said it was the work of
Speaker 13: the pigs. In other words, they placed the blame on
Speaker 13: the police department, that the police for some reason didn't
Speaker 13: like Popeye Jackson, didn't like what he was promoting, and
Speaker 13: the police killed Popeye. But this, obviously for us, was
Speaker 13: totally disregarded because there was no indication of that at all.
Speaker 13: There was also a word that Popeye was killed because
Speaker 13: he was an FBI informant. Well, we checked with the FBI.
Speaker 13: They don't give up their informants, so we hit a
Speaker 13: wall there. To our knowledge, Popeye Jackson was not an informant.
Speaker 3: But Falzan is still not sure. The question over whether
Speaker 3: or not Jackson was an informant would continue to be debated,
Speaker 3: But the public statements on Popeye's murder did not tackle
Speaker 3: a big ethical question. Does a snitch deserve to be executed?
Speaker 3: In the radical underground, it seemed the answer was taken
Speaker 3: for granted. Yes, a code of death for informants seems
Speaker 3: to have a kind of movie logic to it, But
Speaker 3: to Sally Voy's sister Lee Darby, it is almost a farce.
Speaker 14: As it turned out, all their investigation happened on the
Speaker 14: San Francisco and pop By Jackson end of things. He
Speaker 14: was accused of being a snitch. And you know, that
Speaker 14: whole thing is just so ridiculous.
Speaker 15: You could be a.
Speaker 14: Murderer and a rapist and a child molester and hold
Speaker 14: your head high, but a snitch that was grounds for
Speaker 14: immediate assassination. The worst thing in that underworld is to
Speaker 14: be an informant, and they weren't, but that probably led
Speaker 14: to their killing.
Speaker 13: My partner, Dave Toski, his original partner had retired. My
Speaker 13: partner had been promoted to the district attorney lead job
Speaker 13: as the lead investigator. I and Dave were teamed up together.
Speaker 3: If you've seen the movie Zodiac, Dave Tashi is a
Speaker 3: detective played by Mark Ruffalo.
Speaker 14: Were coordinating with the Scoreboard, and we expect to break in.
Speaker 1: The case very soon.
Speaker 9: What do we really got and they can't get anyone
Speaker 9: on the tip line.
Speaker 3: In the early days of the investigation into Popeye's murder,
Speaker 3: Falzan and Tashi struggled to get a foothold on the case.
Speaker 3: On June tenth, Tasha even made the statement that though
Speaker 3: they thought the target was most likely Popeye quote, we
Speaker 3: can't rule out the possibility that maybe miss Voi had
Speaker 3: been involved in something that might make her a target.
Speaker 3: Two days later, it was reported that Falzan and Tashi's
Speaker 3: boss had forbidden any further public comment about the case.
Speaker 3: But the idea that Sally might somehow have been targeted
Speaker 3: by a militant group was disorienting to her grieving family.
Speaker 14: There was just a bunch of them, the New World
Speaker 14: Liberation Front, the people who who had kidnapped Patty Hurst,
Speaker 14: the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood.
Speaker 14: All of these groups delivered communic hays about the killings
Speaker 14: that either supported it or condemned it. And we were
Speaker 14: just who are these people? And were trying to hunker
Speaker 14: down at our house, and you know, reporters would call
Speaker 14: and my dad would you know, We were just bewildered.
Speaker 3: Popeye most likely was not an informant. Sally Voy was
Speaker 3: definitely not, but Sarah Jane definitely was. And soon this
Speaker 3: fact was published in a newspaper. On June twentieth, The
Speaker 3: Berkeley bar Ran an article about Sarah Jane's involvement with
Speaker 3: Popeye and her possible role in his death.
Speaker 1: The article began damaging information about Popeye Jackson was leaked
Speaker 1: to numerous movement groups before his death by a woman
Speaker 1: who had worked as an informant for the FBI.
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane was interviewed for the article and sought to
Speaker 3: put the best face on her work with the FBI
Speaker 3: and accusations against Popeye, but it was the most public
Speaker 3: of confessions that she had betrayed the radical Left. She
Speaker 3: confessed that she had been an informant and about the
Speaker 3: information she had distributed in the left about Popeye Jackson.
Speaker 3: In the article, Mark Bramhall of the Vietnam Veterans Against
Speaker 3: the War was quoted as saying we had gotten word
Speaker 3: from many movement groups that she was a pig. He
Speaker 3: also said that the VVAW had voted to expel Sarah
Speaker 3: Jane from their organization. Sarah Jane was becoming more and
Speaker 3: more marginalized by the radical Left. Isolated and desperate, she
Speaker 3: headed into the summer of nineteen seventy five determined to
Speaker 3: show the left that she was not an agent of
Speaker 3: Middle America but one of them. The radical young. After
Speaker 3: the break, it's an indication of the chaos in San
Speaker 3: Francisco in nineteen seventy five that detective Frank Falzand lost
Speaker 3: his partner Dave Tosh because Tashi was too busy investigating
Speaker 3: the high profile Zodiac murderers to help with the Popeye
Speaker 3: Jackson case.
Speaker 13: Dave was also at the time working the Zodiac case
Speaker 13: in San Francisco, so I grabbed Jim Lessart, lead prosecutor
Speaker 13: in the DA's office. He and I took this case
Speaker 13: head on. We realize that we're dealing with very violent
Speaker 13: underground groups that had fragmented into many arms and tentacles.
Speaker 13: Group we weren't even aware of turned out to be
Speaker 13: one of the more violent groups, a group called a
Speaker 13: Tribal Thumb.
Speaker 7: One name which police and certain media have linked to
Speaker 7: the Jackson Voice shooting is Earl Satyre, a black man
Speaker 7: who served nineteen years in prison until his release a
Speaker 7: few years ago. Satur has been labeled the leader of
Speaker 7: a clandestine guerrilla group known as the Tribal Thumb, and
Speaker 7: most recently was acquitted of a November nineteen seventy three
Speaker 7: bank robbery in Berkeley.
Speaker 3: Tribal Thumb was another small revolutionary group led by a
Speaker 3: charismatic black man who had been involved in prison radicalism.
Speaker 3: In this case, the man's name was Earl Satcher. Satcher
Speaker 3: was a more formidable figure than SLA leader Donald de Friese.
Speaker 3: Defrize had picked up radical ideology in prison, but wasn't
Speaker 3: a leader inside the walls. Sacher, however, was. In nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy one, E. F. Shaver of Houston's underground newspaper Space
Speaker 3: City identified him as SOLIDAD prisons leading black panther. It
Speaker 3: gets a little complicated, but Sacher was released from prison
Speaker 3: and then arrested again in nineteen seventy three in connection
Speaker 3: with the shooting down of a police helicopter in Oakland.
Speaker 3: It was while he was in jail awaiting trial for
Speaker 3: this that he met Rick Riley.
Speaker 16: I met Earl in the Oakland County jail. I was
Speaker 16: there fighting my case and they got him brought him in.
Speaker 15: It was a police helicopter shot.
Speaker 16: Down and some banks had been robbed, so they had
Speaker 16: Earl in on suspicion on all that stuff.
Speaker 15: Right. My name is Rick Riley. I'm known as Sundown.
Speaker 16: I was the leader in the Western phil Media prison
Speaker 16: gang criminal organization.
Speaker 15: I was also a member of Tribal Thumb.
Speaker 16: Prior to that, I was a martial artist and I
Speaker 16: used to work out all the time, and Earl loved
Speaker 16: the martial arts. And so that's how we became friends
Speaker 16: because he would want to spar with me, and he
Speaker 16: began talking to me, and he began recruiting me.
Speaker 15: He was a good looking black man, muscular, he had charisma.
Speaker 16: Earl had charisma, man had.
Speaker 15: A smile that was very charismatic.
Speaker 16: Women loved him and guys liked him.
Speaker 3: Like many of these small groups, Tribal Thumb started in
Speaker 3: prison and then evolved to a new form when Earl
Speaker 3: Satcher was released.
Speaker 2: The goals were anarchy.
Speaker 16: Everybody talked about revolution, right, but anybody who had any
Speaker 16: sense realized that in America you were not going to
Speaker 16: have a revolution. The most you could have is anarchy.
Speaker 16: It's like like the elite, they create problems because they
Speaker 16: believe they're out of chaos they get control. You know,
Speaker 16: they'll create a situation and then they'll have the answer
Speaker 16: to that situation.
Speaker 2: Right, So out of chaos they get their power.
Speaker 16: They also out of anarchy, the revolutionary groups that were
Speaker 16: smart would get their power.
Speaker 3: In the previous episode, we looked at the efforts by
Speaker 3: various law enforcement agencies to plan informants in the radical underground.
Speaker 3: At the time of Popeye's murder, the FBI had two
Speaker 3: informants within Tribal Thumb. Their names were Gary Johnson and
Speaker 3: Walter Handsacker. They were able to help Frank fels On
Speaker 3: break Popeye's murder case.
Speaker 13: This informant, Walter Handsacker, was in possession of the stolen
Speaker 13: guns that had been given to him after a hold
Speaker 13: up in Crockett, California, where multiple weapons were stolen. These
Speaker 13: guns were now in possession of Walter Handsacker. Jim Lasart myself,
Speaker 13: we interviewed Walter and what he told us was quite shocking.
Speaker 13: He said that the man he was talking to was
Speaker 13: definitely not a black man and was a white man.
Speaker 13: His name was Richard London, also known as Ricardo London.
Speaker 13: He brought two guns, in particular to Walt Hansacker and
Speaker 13: wanted Walter to dispose of them. He said one was
Speaker 13: extremely hot, and when he said that, he also said,
Speaker 13: I'm now a hit man. I did a job with
Speaker 13: this gun. It was the nine millimeter without a barrel.
Speaker 13: I remembered early on in the investigation that I booked
Speaker 13: into evidence a barrel from a nine millimeter had to
Speaker 13: be a divine intervention because we put that gun together.
Speaker 13: Now was the murder weapon.
Speaker 3: Ricardo London was a twenty six year old ex cohn.
Speaker 3: He'd been a member of Popeye's United Prisoners Union while
Speaker 3: he was imprisoned, and then joined Tribal Thomb.
Speaker 13: Our prime suspect now was Ricardo London, but we had
Speaker 13: witnesses who described a tall, thin black man with a
Speaker 13: bushy afro medium dark complexion. Well, as luck would have it,
Speaker 13: our suspect, Ricardo London was in custody in Napa, Sonoma
Speaker 13: County for another case that he had been arrested for,
Speaker 13: and the detectives there booked into evidence from his club
Speaker 13: box theatrical makeup of bushy mustache and a black afro wig.
Speaker 13: What we come to find out is he disguised himself
Speaker 13: as a black man the night he did the killing.
Speaker 13: So we not only had the murder weapon, we now
Speaker 13: had an eye witness.
Speaker 3: Iman was handed down on March thirty first, nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 3: about ten months after the killings. The trial made it
Speaker 3: clear that Sally Voy was an innocent bystander. She'd been
Speaker 3: in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Speaker 14: Even the murderer at his trial said, oh, well, Popeye
Speaker 14: was the target and Sally was there, so she had
Speaker 14: to go too, so she was collateral damage according to him.
Speaker 3: Ricardo London was convicted in September of nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 3: and sentenced to life in prison.
Speaker 16: It just so happens that the person who supposed he
Speaker 16: killed Popeye Jackson is a good friend of mine and
Speaker 16: he's out trying to live his life now, you know,
Speaker 16: and do good.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to be saying his name. You can't,
Speaker 2: I won't.
Speaker 16: He's free finally, and yeah, I wish him the best,
Speaker 16: and so I don't want to talk about him other
Speaker 16: than that.
Speaker 3: The motive in this case is still dispute. Rumors circulated
Speaker 3: at the time that Popeye had burned tribal thumb in
Speaker 3: a drug deal for thousands of dollars. It seems more likely, though,
Speaker 3: that it was in reaction to the suspicion that Popeye
Speaker 3: was an informant. This suspicion was most likely a product
Speaker 3: of both the accusations leveled by Sarah Jane, the NWLF
Speaker 3: and others, and two police raids earlier in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: five on Tribal Thumb properties. In April, while trying to
Speaker 3: locate Patty Hurst, police and FBI agents raided a home
Speaker 3: in Menlo Park and found materials and plans for making
Speaker 3: pipe bombs, along with radical literature, some of it from
Speaker 3: Tribal Thumb. The next month, raids were conducted on a
Speaker 3: house in Los Gatos and one in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Speaker 3: Weapons and drugs were seized, and three people were arrested.
Speaker 3: In Los Gatos. One of the three was Earl Satcher.
Speaker 3: He was released soon after. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen
Speaker 3: Popeye at the scene of the Los Gatos raid. Police
Speaker 3: disputed this. I want to be clear about the timeline here.
Speaker 3: Ricardo London was charged with Popeye and Sally Void's murders
Speaker 3: in March of nineteen seventy six, six months after Sarah
Speaker 3: Jane's assassination attempt, and wasn't convicted until September nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 3: At the time of her attempt, the culprit and reasons
Speaker 3: behind Popeye's death were still unknown.
Speaker 6: One hundred and five days separated Popeye's murder on June eighth,
Speaker 6: and Sarah Jane's attempt on Ford on September twenty second.
Speaker 6: Our knowledge of Sarah Jane's activities during this time is sketchy.
Speaker 6: She was certainly concerned with the way she was perceived
Speaker 6: by people on the left, if she had had some
Speaker 6: sense of the danger of being an identified and former
Speaker 6: before Popeye's murder left no more doubt. Sarah Jane was
Speaker 6: in fear for her life and took steps she thought
Speaker 6: would convince the left that she was one of them.
Speaker 6: She wrote a letter published by the Berkeley Barb on
Speaker 6: July fourth, trying to walk back some of the allegations
Speaker 6: in the June twentieth article that revealed her to be
Speaker 6: an informant. She conceded that she had been an informant,
Speaker 6: but disputed that she had widely shared her allegations about Popeye.
Speaker 6: Her letter was couched in the language of the radical left.
Speaker 6: It was sandwiched on the page between two letters from
Speaker 6: the Vietnam Veterans Against the War that accused Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: of continuing to serve as an informer and criticizing the
Speaker 6: Barb for giving her a platform where the VVAW had
Speaker 6: decisively turned against Sarah Jane. Tribal Thumb of all groups,
Speaker 6: seemed to welcome her into their midst. Her association with
Speaker 6: them was, to put it mildly strange. How could Sarah
Speaker 6: Jane feel safe with them when they were prime suspects
Speaker 6: and the murder of her former mentor, and given the
Speaker 6: rumor swirling that Popeye was killed because he was a snitch,
Speaker 6: it seems that she would have kept her distance, but
Speaker 6: she didn't. She is known to have spent at least
Speaker 6: a couple of days that summer taking shooting practice at
Speaker 6: a Tribal Thumb property in rural Mendocino County north of
Speaker 6: San Francisco. During the two weeks leading up to September
Speaker 6: twenty second, she also seems to have taken on a roommate,
Speaker 6: a blond woman alleged to be connected to Tribal Thumb.
Speaker 6: This roommate's identity has never been confirmed, and it is
Speaker 6: not clear whether she had any influence on Sarah Jane's
Speaker 6: actions during that time. Sarah Jane also continued to hound
Speaker 6: journalists trying to get her story. Told Here's Carol Pogash,
Speaker 6: who was working at the Hurst owned San Francisco Chronicle
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 5: She would call the house maybe at seven in the morning,
Speaker 5: or at midnight, or many times during a day, and
Speaker 5: I I'm sure I brushed her off, but I'm surprised
Speaker 5: that I didn't simply say stop, you're dominating my life
Speaker 5: and you can't be doing that. I think at the
Speaker 5: time I wrote that if Sarah Jane Moore was chummy
Speaker 5: with you, she made your life miserable. Things that she
Speaker 5: told me, I don't know if they were true or not.
Speaker 6: Another journalist who Sarah Jane badgered was Ellen Hume, and
Speaker 6: while Carol found Sarah Jane to be nothing more than
Speaker 6: a nuisance, Ellen thought she was interesting and eccentric. She
Speaker 6: had initially hoped that Sarah Jane might help her find
Speaker 6: Patty Hurst. That didn't happen, but Ellen and a colleague
Speaker 6: were writing a series of articles for the Ellie Times
Speaker 6: about the current state of the radical movement, and Ellen
Speaker 6: thought that Sarah Jane could be a small part of
Speaker 6: that story.
Speaker 11: She didn't produce Patty Hurst, but she produced such a
Speaker 11: fascinating set of stories about herself that I decided to
Speaker 11: write a little profile of her to go along with
Speaker 11: the whole story about where is the SLA Today?
Speaker 9: A year out what's happening with that and how do
Speaker 9: they fit into the radical movements of the sixties. That
Speaker 9: was really my new assignment. And she kept calling me
Speaker 9: chatty self, you know, constantly dishing, and so.
Speaker 11: I drafted my little sidebar.
Speaker 9: It wasn't a main story, and it was going to
Speaker 9: go in this huge series that Narda Zequino and I
Speaker 9: were preparing about the SLA And during that one of
Speaker 9: those chatty calls, as I drafted my profile for her,
Speaker 9: she flew down to La on the La Times this
Speaker 9: money to have her picture taken. She came to our
Speaker 9: city room and had her picture taken.
Speaker 2: For the profile.
Speaker 9: So this was definitely in the works. And then she
Speaker 9: confessed to me why she was so interested in my story,
Speaker 9: and it's because she had been an informant for the FBI.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
Speaker 9: That also explained why she was so freaked out when
Speaker 9: Popeye got murdered and someone from the Tribal Thumb group
Speaker 9: was later convicted of having murdered him. She had reason
Speaker 9: to be worried about people on the left taking it
Speaker 9: badly that she had been informing on them. She expected
Speaker 9: that my story in the La Times, explaining that she
Speaker 9: converted to the radical cause. She had spoken, you know,
Speaker 9: as an informant to the FBI, but her real heart
Speaker 9: now had converted. She expected that would save her life.
Speaker 9: I didn't understand the extent to which she was hanging
Speaker 9: on that and waiting for that. So the story I
Speaker 9: drafted it, and I just took what she had told
Speaker 9: me about herself. She was just a colorful sidebar, and
Speaker 9: it wasn't ready to go on the paper.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane felt increasingly in danger. In early September, she
Speaker 6: bought a gun. She did not buy it from a store,
Speaker 6: which required a five day waiting period, and reported the
Speaker 6: sale to the state of California. Instead, she went back
Speaker 6: to Danville, where she had lived before moving to San Francisco.
Speaker 6: She called Danville birch Kun because of what she saw
Speaker 6: as the influence of the John Birch Society there. The
Speaker 6: John Birch Society is a right wing anti communist, conspiracy
Speaker 6: minded organization named after an Air Force intelligence officer who
Speaker 6: they believed to be the first casualty of the Cold War.
Speaker 6: Among other claims, they asserted that President Eisenhower was a dedicated,
Speaker 6: conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy. In the US In
Speaker 6: the mid seventies, they had ninety thousand members. Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: knew Bircher's and Danville and was introduced to a prominent
Speaker 6: member named Mark Fernwood. Fernwood was twenty six, thin, embalding,
Speaker 6: and a self proclaimed dedicated anti communist. He made and
Speaker 6: sold replicas of nineteenth century guns. He also bought and
Speaker 6: sold modern firearms from his house. Fernwood later remarked that
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane was bright, cheerful, and even gave me tips
Speaker 6: and how to decorate my home. He noticed that she
Speaker 6: was wearing a United farm Worker symbol on her belt.
Speaker 6: He believed that the UfW was a communist organization and
Speaker 6: asked her about it. She declined to explain Otherwise, Fernwood
Speaker 6: thought she was conservatively dressed. He wanted to be sure
Speaker 6: she knew how to shoot, so he took her to
Speaker 6: a gun range. Sarah Jane impressed him with her shooting skills,
Speaker 6: and he agreed to sell her a forty four and ammunition.
Speaker 6: The total came to one hundred thirty two dollars. For
Speaker 6: some reason, she did not pay him that day. Instead,
Speaker 6: she would return two weeks later with a check and
Speaker 6: an undercover atf Agent. The day after that, she would
Speaker 6: again visit Mark Fernwood and then drive to San Francisco
Speaker 6: to kill the president 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: Jeff Niyaz Goda and Charles Rudder. The producers Jesse Funk,
Speaker 1: Rema O'Kelly and Nolams Griffin. Supervising producer Trilie Young, Executive
Speaker 1: producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick Hear. Episodes of Rip
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