Remembering James Kilgore (ex Symbionese Liberation Army) in Cape Town
It was an event that should have produced a novel long before today’s announcement, by Umuzi, of James Kilgore’s We are All Zimbabweans Now: Kilgore, an academic known to Capetonians as John Pape, was arrested at his Claremont home in late 2002 and subsequently unmasked as a member of the USA’s radical left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army – a man wanted in connection with the 1975 murder of Myrna Lee Opsahl in California.
Kilgore’s arrest sparked a media frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the most comprehensive reports still extant on the web comes from San Francisco, and includes the in-custody photographs of Kilgore and his wife Terri Barnes shown above:
In California, he’s James Kilgore, wanted on murder and explosives charges, but to the packed courtroom in Cape Town he was John Pape, “CHAMPION OF (THE) POOR,” as the local paper headlined him just before he appeared at an extradition hearing Monday.
He walked into court almost as a celebrity, applauded by dozens of friends and relatives, and it was difficult to tell whether Kilgore’s new predicament seemed to worry him or anyone else.
Unlike court appearances in Sacramento involving his former Symbionese Liberation Army cohorts, where the courthouse bristled with armed deputies, and one of the defendants — Sara Jane Olson — was dripping with manacles and waist chains, the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court here exuded an atmosphere so relaxed that Kilgore looked more like someone coming in to discuss a parking ticket than murder and bombs.
Kilgore entered the courtroom from a basement holding cell by way of a staircase rising into the center of the room. As soon as his bald head appeared in the stairwell, many in the audience applauded and cheered him. He turned, smiled, waved and then gave a big thumbs-up to his supporters, who were of many races and ages.
Kilgore met Barnes in Harare, Zimbabwe – which provides the setting for his first novel, also the first work published under his real name. Zimbabwe was Kilgore’s first African port of call as a fugitive. He lived there for almost ten years before moving to South Africa.
After his arrest and extradition to the USA, on 26 April 2004 Kilgore was sentenced to 54 months in prison for explosives and passport fraud charges (but not murder). He was the last remaining SLA member to face federal prosecution. He wrote his novel while in prison, according to Umuzi, and now lives, a free man, in the state of Illinois.
BOOK SA will post further reports of the dramatic end to Kilgore’s stay in SA here as we find them – keep checking back (and post your own links in the comments section, below). Congratulations to Umuzi, meanwhile, for another publishing coup: today’s announcement is more than faintly reminiscent of the news of Charles van Onselen’s unmasking of Jack the Ripper last year.
Update – 4 June 09
Fantastic piece from January 2003 by Gavin Evans in the Observer, spotted by Rustum Kozain
You learn to expect that final reckoning. The knock knock knock on your door. The tap tap on the shoulder. The bullet. Push it out of mind, but it always comes back. Dream about it, dread it, wait for it. Sometimes you almost welcome it.
That’s how it is for outlaws, and for the quiet bespectacled 55-year-old American who called himself John Pape, that’s how it was for 27 years: a life as somebody else, but always on guard, never sure where the danger lay. In the week before 8 November 2002, John was particularly jumpy because he knew his days of freedom were numbered. He had two scares: one real, another phantom, as it turned out.
First, there was the woman with the bottle. She trotted up the path towards the modest, red-roofed Cape Town bungalow that was home to Pape, his partner Terri and their two sons, and announced: ‘I’m doing a survey on wine.’ As she handed him a bottle, he thought to himself: ‘So, you’re finally on to me. The FBI put you up to it. And now you want a fingerprint.’ And as his captors later confirmed, he got it right.
Update – 3 June 09
From the Huffington Post, May 2009:
A former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army has arrived in Illinois to serve his parole from a California prison.
Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp says James William Kilgore checked in with his parole officer Tuesday morning. Schnapp says he can’t say where Kilgore is.
[...]
Kilgore’s wife, Teresa Barnes, is an associate professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Book details
- We are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore
Book homepaget
EAN: 9781415200711
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Photos courtesy SFGate.com / Obed Zilwa
Apr
