Always take advantage of cover and have the gun in hand before the shooting starts if a gunfight is in the offing. If you shoot a man, keep shooting until he is unconscious, disarmed or so torn apart that he can’t function.
—MAY 19TH MANUAL ON SMALL-ARMS TACTICS1
The law enforcement net continued to tighten. “Our underground organization had unraveled in the past few weeks,” Alan wrote in his unfinished memoirs. “All that remained now was the bust.”2 There was still a handful of public, aboveground members, but after the Dobbs Ferry bust, they stopped using the May 19th name. None of them were going to be able to help.
Betty Ann and Alan were professional revolutionaries, so they didn’t panic. But they were “numbed and exhausted,” Alan said.3 They decided their only option was to try to flee the country.
Cuba seemed like the ideal destination. The Castro regime was a sanctuary for fugitive American radicals. Maybe they could meet up with Willie Morales and Assata Shakur. Morales remained one of Alan’s biggest fans. As he wrote later, “Alan, your [sic] my hero, and above all you will be my brother no matter what the damn consequences are.”4
They’d planned a layover at a bungalow they had rented in the Poconos Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania, where they’d have a chance to rest and regroup.
Alan was driving a blue Toyota, registered to someone called “Frances Marshall” in New Jersey, and carrying a driver’s license in the name of “William Lunderman.” He was wearing a red wig and had a white plastic shopping bag, inside of which was a fully loaded Walther PPK .38-caliber pistol. Betty Ann rode in the passenger seat. Inside her tan purse, there was May 19th’s favorite sidearm—a Browning Hi-Power 9mm pistol, fully loaded, with a round in the chamber.
They headed up Route 611 toward their Poconos hideaway. Seventeen miles outside Philadelphia, they decided to take a break. Driving through Horsham, Pennsylvania, they saw a Friendly’s Restaurant and pulled into the parking lot. Betty Ann took her purse, and Alan grabbed his plastic bag. They had hamburgers and coffee for supper, and fifty minutes later, they returned to the Toyota and headed north toward Doylestown.
Then their antennae started to twitch—something wasn’t right. “We’ve got to get off this road and check it out,” Alan said.5
At about 8:30 p.m., they pulled into the parking lot of a Doylestown Township elementary school. Their instincts were right. Unmarked cars cut them off, and FBI special agents pounced.
“Put your hands up,” an FBI agent shouted. “Put your goddamn hands up where we can see them or I’ll fuckin’ kill you! Get your hands off that fuckin’ wheel.”6
The Bureau man grabbed Alan’s hair, and the wig came off in his hand. Another agent got the drop on Betty Ann, who had her hand in her purse. Betty Ann and Alan were cuffed and taken away to the FBI’s Philadelphia Field Office at 600 Arch Street.
Special agents searched the Toyota’s passenger compartment. In addition to the pistols, they found a bottle labeled “sulphuric acid.” They popped the trunk, and inside there was a miniarsenal: a 12-gauge sawed-off Mossberg pump, loaded; a silencer-equipped 9mm Beretta pistol, also loaded, with a round in the chamber. Sniffer dogs detected TNT traces.
“They both seemed stoical and hardly said a word when agents surrounded them,” said FBI special agent James McIntosh. “. . . They offered no resistance.”7 During processing, Alan maintained his revolutionary discipline and kept his mouth shut. Betty Ann said nothing more than that she was not going to collaborate and demanded to speak to her lawyer.
The FBI found plenty of evidence to connect them to the New York and Washington bombings and to other May 19th members. There was a key in Betty Ann’s handbag, and it turned out it was for a lock on a garage she’d rented at 1850-52 South Easton Road in Doylestown. The Bureau had a look and found loads of cash—between the garage and what Betty Ann and Alan had had on them when they were busted, about $15,000 was recovered. The garage was stuffed with DIY publications: “The Women’s Gun Pamphlet,” “The Poor Man’s James Bond,” “Blaster’s Handbook,” “Five Steps to Good Shooting,” and “Full Auto Uzi.”
The FBI men dusted the garage. Everybody’s prints were there: Alan’s, Betty Ann’s, Linda’s, Laura’s, Susan’s, Tim’s, and Donna’s. The agents found some spent shell casings, and the FBI lab determined that they had been fired from weapons used during Brinks.8 There was also a substantial cache of weapons, explosives, and other materials, including semiautomatic rifles, ammunition, a silencer, bulletproof vests, fifteen to twenty pounds of Tovex, eighty-six pounds of dynamite, and ten pounds of Gelodyn.
The dynamite was in terrible shape, just like the stuff in Cherry Hill. “The nitroglycerin had begun to seep out of the tubes” and was crystallizing, making it extremely dangerous, Special Agent Michael Macys said. It could be set off easily—even by a vibration from a passing truck. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near,” he added.9
The Gelodyn had also deteriorated badly and was highly volatile. As with the dynamite, the nitroglycerin had wept out, and it had the consistency of honey—“and that makes the hair stand up. It’s not very safe,” Macys said.10
Betty Ann was arraigned on explosives and gun charges and for harboring a fugitive, namely Alan. And Alan had a full load of legal woes hanging over his head: conspiracy, possession of unregistered firearms, unlawful storage of explosives, bail jumping, the Stop & Shop heist, accessory to murder after the fact. And the authorities still suspected he had been part of the Morales breakout back in 1979.
• • •
United States District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge Louis H. Pollak, presiding. Betty Ann told the judge that she was “fed up with the depravity of the system,” and she vowed to continue to fight the forces of repression that were working against progressive forces.11 She and Alan were “revolutionary anti-imperialists,” she declared.12 For many in the courtroom, it must have sounded a little odd—like when Patty Hearst had stated her occupation as “urban guerrilla” or Watergate burglar Bernard Barker had said at his arraignment that his profession was “anticommunist.”
“The charges against me are far less serious than those brought against murderers, rapists who are frequently released on bail,” Betty Ann said. “People such as abortion bombers are granted bail while I and other revolutionaries are held in preventive detention.”13
The defense lawyers asked for bail. Pollak said no to Alan, a fugitive and veteran bail jumper. But the judge was inclined to be more lenient with Betty Ann. She’d never been in trouble with the law before; letters to the judge from friends, loved ones, and the clergy attested to her sterling character; and her two sisters down in Texas were willing to put up their houses as collateral to cover the $300,000 bail.
The federal prosecutors didn’t like the idea. They said that she was facing decades in prison and that she had “no known legitimate employment, no known legitimate source of income, no ties to this district, had traveled in several districts within the last year in the company of notorious fugitives [and] had acted to assist those fugitives while using disguises and false identification.” And incendiary rhetoric in the courtroom indicated that she intended “to flee and continue the clandestine lifestyle.”14
Judge Pollak remained unconvinced and on July 24 revoked Betty Ann’s detention order, and she was released. There were many conditions, though: she could have no credit cards, could carry no more than ten dollars in cash at any given time, would have to live with her sister Kathleen Weir Vale in San Antonio and work at the family business, Hope Medical Supply, and would have to check in with the federal Pretrial Services Agency twice a day. During the trial, she’d have to travel back to the Eastern District courthouse in Philadelphia at her own expense. And when she was in Philadelphia, she would have to stay with a court-approved defense lawyer.
Maybe if ankle monitoring bracelets had been invented, the judge could have found the conditions to force Betty Ann to prove him right. Instead, while she was at the house of one of her approved lawyers, Judith Chomsky, on the night of Friday, October 13, 1985, she skipped bail. The next morning, Chomsky found a note from Betty Ann saying she was sorry, but she was leaving. On Monday morning, the court issued a warrant for her arrest.