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(Wednesday, September 15, 1993, just before sunrise at 6:24 a.m. EDT) — Katherine Ann Power, an anti-Vietnam War radical who spent 23 years as a fugitive from a fatal bank robbery, surrendered today after throwing a going-away party at which she revealed her identity to her friends.
Power, 44, who has lived quietly with her husband and son in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, most recently in Lebanon, working as a cook and restaurant owner, turned herself in just before sunrise at a Newton, Massachusetts, police station.
Power’s attorneys had arranged the surrender over recent months.
Power was wanted on murder charges in connection with the September 23, 1970, killing of Boston police Officer Walter Schroeder, Sr., 42 during a bank holdup. She was a senior at Brandeis University at the time.
Power enrolled at Brandeis in 1967 as a sociology major and honor student at a time when the campus was being roiled by student protests opposing the Vietnam War.
Power and her roommate, Susan Edith Saxe, worked to organize student protests for a committee known as the National Student Strike Force. The two also became acquainted with fellow organizer Stanley Ray Bond, an ex-convict and soldier attending classes at Brandeis through a special program.
Bond introduced the pair to former convicts William Gilday and Robert Valeri and together the group plotted to rob the State Street Bank & Trust.
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On Sept. 20, 1970, the group robbed a National Guard armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and took 400 rounds of ammunition. They also stole weapons and set fire to the facility, causing about $125,000 in damage.
Three days later, the group robbed a bank in Brighton (a neighborhood of Boston), carrying handguns, a shotgun, and a submachine gun. The first policeman on the scene, Officer Walter Schroeder of the Boston Police Department, was shot in the back by Gilday when he attempted to stop the robbery. He subsequently died from his wounds.
The group escaped with $26,000 in cash that they planned to use to finance an overthrow of the federal government. Power was behind the wheel of one of the two getaway vehicles.
While raiding her apartment after the bank robbery, police found evidence tying Power to both robberies. This included weapons, ammunition, and a telephone switchboard from the armory. Power’s attorneys would subsequently blame her involvement in the robberies as the result of manipulation by her partner Bond.
Gilday, Valeri, and Bond were captured shortly after the Brighton robbery. Bond died in custody while making a bomb as part of an escape attempt, while Valeri turned state’s evidence and testified against Gilday.
Valeri received a jail term of twenty-five years for the robbery, while Gilday received the death penalty (but his sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment). Power and Saxe eluded capture.
In November 1970, Power and Saxe became the sixteenth and seventeenth persons on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. At first, Power and Saxe traveled together, escaping arrest by hiding out in women’s communes. For part of this time, the two went to Connecticut and Power assumed the name “Mae Kelly.”
Saxe was able to elude arrest until 1975, when she was captured in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then served five years in prison.
Prior to her surrender in 1993, Power had last been seen in Kentucky in 1974. In 1977, she assumed the alias “Alice Louise Metzinger”, taking the name from the birth certificate of an infant that had died the year before her birth. In 1979, she moved west to Oregon and gave birth to a son, Jaime, by an unknown father.
As time went by, authorities received few tips regarding Power’s location and she was eventually removed from the Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1984.
The following year, she settled in the city of Lebanon in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with her son Jaime and boyfriend Ron Duncan, a local meat cutter and bookkeeper.
While living in Oregon, Power taught cooking classes at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany and worked at restaurants in Corvallis and Eugene. She reached the shortlist for the post of food writer for the Corvallis Gazette-Times and became part-owner of Napoli Restaurant and Bakery in Eugene.
Power had suffered from clinical depression since childhood and confided her fugitive status to her therapist Linda Carroll.
She developed the desire to stop living her life under her assumed name and, through therapy that included participation in the mock trial of a soldier charged with killing civilians during the Vietnam War, she began to prepare for her surrender to the authorities. This included her decision to marry Duncan in 1992 and reveal her background to her friends.
After turning herself in, Power pleaded guilty to two counts of armed robbery and manslaughter in Boston and was imprisoned in Massachusetts for six years before being released on fourteen years’ probation.
While in prison, Power completed her bachelor’s degree, and after her release, earned a master’s degree at Oregon State University.
