Chesa, Kathy, and David

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1:05How would you describe your mother and father? Well, the first thing I would say is that I have two mothers and two fathers. And I suppose that's not so uncommon in today's world with high rates of divorce, but that wasn't the issue in my case. So the first thing I'd have to ask is, which set of parents are you referring to? Let's start with the first set that you knew. All right, the biological parents, as I call them. Biological set. My biological mother was Kathy Boudin. My biological father is David Gilbert. David grew up in Boston. Kathy grew up in New York. Kathy Boudin went to Bryn Mawr for college and majored in Russian studies.

1:53After college, she moved to Cleveland to work for the Economic Research and Action Project, where she helped mothers receiving public assistance demand better treatment from social services. David Gilbert went to Columbia and got involved with Students for a Democratic Society, a national activist organization that protested for racial equality and against the Vietnam War. In 1969, David and Kathy met and became friends. They started dating. And in 1980, their son Chesa was born in New York City. Chesa and his parents lived in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University. My dad had long, dark hair.

2:42He had a massive, bushy beard. They wore tie-dye. They wore lots of buttons with political slogans. My mom wouldn't stop me from breastfeeding even after I'd learned to walk. When his mother was pregnant with him, she became friends with a woman named Nancy. They gave birth around the same time. Nancy's son was named Waniki. While their parents were at work, Chesa and Waniki would stay with a babysitter at her apartment. We'd fight over a toy, as kids do, whichever toy one of us wanted, the other one wanted. and the fights would almost invariably end with him biting me, me crying and him getting the toy.

3:22He was a biter back then. He's still my best friend. And that was our weekday ritual. Our parents would come and pick us up at five and we'd go home and get ready for bed before repeating the same routine the next morning. And then one day, Moniki's mom picked him up at five o 'clock as she usually did. But my parents weren't there.

3:47That morning, on October 20th, 1981, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert dropped Chesa off at the babysitter's house. Then they picked up a rented U-Haul truck in the Bronx and drove to a small town just outside New York City called Nyack. They parked in an empty lot and waited. They were part of a plan called the Big Dance At around 3.45 p.m., an armored truck pulled up to the Nanuit National Bank Guards got out to pick up money from the bank Then four members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, ambushed the guards They shot and killed a guard named Peter Page They stole$1.6 million.

4:38They planned to use the money to buy land in the South, in former slave-holding states, to create an independent black nation. The plan was for everyone to meet at the parking lot, get rid of the van from the robbery, and get into the U-Haul that Kathy and David were driving. They were the switch car drivers. Kathy and David were in the front of the U-Haul. Their friend Judith Clark was driving a yellow Honda, which is where they put the money. The idea was the police wouldn't be looking for white drivers. Both cars drove off, but they didn't get far. Someone had seen them switching cars and called the police.

5:21By the time my parents got on the freeway, there was already a roadblock set up, and the police knew exactly which car they were looking for. So they came out with guns drawn. My parents didn't have any weapons. They exited the vehicle, hands in the air, and then a shootout began. One detective who was there that day later testified that he saw, quote, two black males jumping out of the back of the U-Haul truck, and that one of them fired an automatic rifle at him. He said he saw the same man shoot police officer Sergeant Edward O 'Grady, and that he saw another police officer on the ground, Waverly Brown.

6:02Both of them died. When David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were arrested, they gave fake names to the police. Off-duty New York corrections officer Michael Koch grabbed a woman who later said her name was Barbara Edson. I see an officer go down. She's running. She runs up to me. She yells, I didn't shoot him. He did. I know she's one of them. Prosecutors said that Barbara Edson is in fact Kathy Boudin, a 38-year-old member... David and Kathy were both indicted for robbery and felony murder. Felony murder charges can be brought if someone is killed during the course of certain felonies, even if you didn't intend to kill anyone.

6:44They were arrested in October of 1981. My dad wasn't actually sentenced until after his trial concluded in 1983, and my mom's case didn't finally resolve until 1984. So there was a number of years in the beginning when I was visiting them in jail. Initially, we were denied contact visits. And all visits had to be conducted through a thick plexiglass wall. And it was soundproof. So conversations had to be conducted over sort of a telephone that went from one side of the wall to the other. And obviously, as a 14, 15-month-old kid, that wasn't going to work for me. I was traumatized enough, and then to see my parents but not be able to touch them was just devastating.

7:31Kathy eventually pled guilty. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. David went to trial and was convicted on three counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. Chesa was three years old. Why wasn't there a contingency plan? You'd think your parents being as smart and worldly and educated as they were would have thought, well, this could go bad. Well, you would have thought that. But the reality is they didn't expect to get caught. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

8:22What did you know about the Weather Underground when you were growing up? Well, I knew an awful lot about it compared to most kids my age, that's for sure. I knew that all four of my parents had been members of the Weather Underground. I knew that the Weather Underground had been a radical, mainly white group that sought to do what they referred to as armed actions.

8:49to fight against U.S. imperialism at home and abroad, as they would put it. Many of them had been members of Students for a Democratic Society. They were fighting for what they called a classless world and said, quote, in every case, our aim is to raise anti-imperialist and anti-racist consciousness and tie the struggles of the working-class youth to the struggles of third-world people. By 1970, they were building bombs and planned to target police and military buildings. In March of that year, while building bombs in a Manhattan townhouse, a bomb went off accidentally. The explosion killed three members.

9:36Kathy Boudin was one of two survivors. A former member later said,

9:54The name is a reference to a Bob Dylan song. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Originally, they called themselves the weathermen. Kathy had been in hiding for more than a decade, when she was arrested after the bank robbery. According to the FBI, the Weather Underground claimed credit for 25 bombings between 1970 and 1975. They bombed the Capitol building, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Besides the accidental bomb explosion in Manhattan, no one was killed from the bombings. Some members were on the FBI's most wanted list. With the arrest of Catherine Boudin, police believe they've all but broken up the weather underground.

10:42Members who surfaced in recent years include Bernadine Dorn, a University of Chicago valedictorian, William Ayers, son of a prominent Chicago executive, Mark Rudd, leader of the Columbia University insurrection, and Kathy Wilkerson, who fled her parents' townhouse with Boudin. Most were sentenced to various terms of probation. Wilkerson, who is serving three years for possession of dynamite, said at her sonencing, I choose to join the folks inside, for they are my people. The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. After their arrest, Kathy and David's son, Chesa, was adopted by two other members of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.

11:25They lived in Harlem and had two other sons. At the time, Bill was working at a daycare, and Bernadine was a waitress. Chaser remembers his grandparents would take him to see his parents in prison. In many ways, my earliest vivid memories as a child are of going to jails, waiting in line at metal detectors, getting searched by officers in order to be able to give my parents a hug.

11:57Kathy Boudin was eventually sent to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security women's prison just outside of New York City. The visiting room for children was called the Children's Center, and it was carpeted. They had blocks and toys and stuffed animals and arts and crafts projects. And it meant that my mom and I could curl up in a corner with some stuffed animals and read a book. We could build a castle out of blocks. We could play board games. Chase's father, David Gilbert, was moved frequently throughout Chase's childhood. He bounced around from Attica to Auburn to Comstock to Clinton to others still.

12:42The visiting rooms were also far less child-friendly. They were long rows of tables, and you weren't really allowed to get up or move around except to go to the restroom or the vending machine. it was really tough as a 3-year-old, a 5-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old, even a 12-year-old to sit across a table from my father and speak to him for five or six hours straight. It's just not how kids interact or build relationships. Luckily, my father's prisons, unlike my mom's, had access to what was known as the family reunion program. Trailer visits is what we called them. They were overnight visits where immediate families of incarcerated men could go into the prison and they could spend about 48 hours in the prison in a separate part, essentially in a trailer home.

13:32For me, it allowed my dad to help me with my homework. It allowed us to have pillow fights. It allowed him to put me to bed. It allowed us to cook meals together and to step out in front of the trailer and throw a ball back and forth. I would do those overnight visits usually twice a year. And if it weren't for those visits, I just can't imagine that I'd have much of a relationship with my dad at all.

14:01In 1987, Chaser's adopted family moved from New York to Chicago. In order to visit his mother and father, Chaser would have to get on an airplane. He started flying as an unaccompanied miner at five years old. Sometimes his grandmother would meet him at the airport. Sometimes Wyniki's mother, Nancy. And other times, friends of his parents would pick him up. He didn't always know them. There was one visit, for example, that I had planned with my dad, a trailer visit, where I must have been nine or ten years old. My adoptive parents, Bill and Bernadine, dropped me at the airport and took me through and waited until it was time to board the plane.

14:44And then I boarded and they said goodbye. And then as often happens, there was a delay. There was a mechanical issue. We had to deplane. The delays got longer and longer. And I got scared. I was scared about the mechanical issues on the plane. I was scared about whether the people who were supposed to pick me up, who I didn't know, were going to know about the delay and be there to get me on the other end. And I just decided I didn't want to go. I made the flight attendant call my parents, and I made them come back and pick me up, and I skipped that visit.

15:27We'll be right back.

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17:52Chesa Boudin grew up on the south side of Chicago with his adopted family. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn and their two sons. Bernadine was a law professor at Northwestern, and Bill was a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Do you remember when you were little, you know, what you would tell your classmates if they're asking what you were doing that weekend? Unlike most kids with incarcerated parents, I never was taught to be ashamed. As a kid, I actually felt much more comfortable. When people around me knew that my parents were incarcerated, when I would go to school, you know, first day of school, first grade and a whole class of new classmates to meet, you know, inevitably somebody would say or a teacher going around would say, well, you know, what does your dad do or what does your mommy do?

18:46I would immediately say, well, I have two sets of parents. My biological parents are in prison. My dad's job right now is to mop the floor in the prison. My mom's job is to teach a literacy class to other incarcerated women. I wanted kids around me to know. I wanted it to be transparent, and I didn't see any reason to be ashamed at that point. And I didn't want to lie. If somebody had a problem with the fact that my parents were incarcerated, Let's just move on right now. And so, yeah, people knew about it, and it was just kind of part of the dynamic. My friends knew, their parents knew, school teachers knew.

19:26It was just part of life.

19:32As Chesa got older, he started playing soccer and baseball. He joined the school swim team and started doing Model UN. But I definitely continued to visit regularly. And in high school, I even brought some of my high school friends with to visit my mom. You know, we'd do a weekend trip to New York. We'd stay with Waniki and his mom. We'd go up and visit together one day. And then the next day, I'd go up on my own. I wanted my friends to get to know my parents. And I wanted my parents to get to know my friends. And so we found different ways to make that happen. Sometimes when my mom would call, when my dad would call from their prison, And I'd have friends over at the house playing basketball or doing homework.

20:15And so they'd get a chance to talk to my friends.

20:21Do you remember the first time in an academic setting, be that high school or in college, when the weather underground and what happened in 1981 came up? You were reading about an event that your parents had taken part in. I mean, I know you knew and everyone talked about it. There was no secret, but the moment when it was being taught in some way, did that happen? I think the first time that I directly studied the radical political history of the 1960s and 70s academically was when I was, I think, a sophomore in college. And I took a class focused on the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army and other similar groups that my parents had done work in solidarity with.

21:09one of the things that stood out of me was that by 1981, the mass movement around the civil rights movement, around the war in Vietnam, around the Black Panther Party, that mass movement was done. And yet somehow my parents were still participating in the most radical fringe, politically motivated crimes that you could imagine. And so that was something that the course made me really come more face to face with was like, I understood what motivated them. I understood the history that led to their radicalization. I understood that even though I disagreed with their tactics, that, you know, broadly speaking, their values were solid anti-racist values.

21:53but then to try to make sense of why in 1981 that crime that they were arrested for why that still seemed like a good idea or something that could possibly be helpful rather than hurtful that was a whole new series of conversations i had to have with them did anything get more complicated for you yes but i don't know that it was that course in particular i think You know, I have a very detailed memory when I first learned that our school library had microfiche, and I could go back and actually read the New York Times headline on the front page from October 21st, 1981, the day after the robbery.

22:35The headline reads, Three Killed in Armored Car Holdup, and describes his mother being brought into the courtroom with her hands, quote, manacled behind her back, dressed in a simple gray prison-issue dress, describing Chase's father, quote, His shoulder-length black hair was disheveled. And I could see the photos and the news depiction of what happened, and I could compare notes with what I'd been told. And I would regularly have conversations with them, almost constantly, about what they did. And sometimes I'd ask the same question over and over again for years on end. Why did you risk losing me?

23:26In 2003, Chesa graduated from college. He'd won a Rhodes Scholarship and would be moving to England in the fall. But then, he heard that his mother, Kathy, would be granted parole. Chase remembers the moment he heard the news. And I was, at that very moment, driving from California, where my family, my adoptive family, spent summers in Northern California my whole life, back to Chicago. I was in the car with my brother. The two of us were driving alone from California to Chicago. And by this point, we had cell phones. One of my parents, adopted parents, had a cell phone they'd given to us for the ride.

24:06And we got a cell phone call as we were somewhere in the middle of Nebraska telling us that my mom had been granted parole. But we didn't yet know the exact day that she would be released. That was up to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to decide. And, of course, I wanted to be there to meet her. at the prison gates, but we couldn't exactly time it or predict it. And I only had a couple of weeks before I headed off to Oxford to start my Rhodes Scholarship. And I had a lot of things I had to do, including go visit my father for a trailer visit, for an overnight visit with him.

24:46So I flew to New York, and I was hoping that my mom would get out while I was there. I was there waiting. But after a couple of weeks, Chase still had no news about when his mother would be released. His visit with his father was coming up. He remembers that once the trailer visit started, he would have no internet and no phone for 48 hours. No one would be able to contact him. I had to make a difficult decision. Do I go ahead with a visit to my dad and risk not being there, not even knowing when my mom gets out? Or do I skip this visit with my dad knowing that I'm off to England and the next time I see him may not be for over a year.