Power, now 44, was a student at Brandeis in 1970 when she joined the campaign to disrupt the Vietnam War effort. The fateful plan was to rob a Brighton, Mass., bank to buy arms for the Black Panthers; this was meant in some way to help protest the conflict overseas. Power's assignment was to drive the backup getaway car. When a silent alarm was tripped, police officer Walter Schroeder responded and ended up with a bullet in his back. He died the next day, leaving a widow and nine children to grow up fatherless in the Boston housing projects.
The police eventually caught four of the five robbers, but Power eluded them and lived the next 23 years on the lam. Eventually she outgrew her bell-bottoms and settled down to marry a bookkeeper, raise a son and work as a chef in an Oregon restaurant. She might well have disappeared forever had she not decided last September, after much thought and more therapy, to turn herself in to police in Boston.
Hers was an especially twisted parable in a year of stories and statistics so hideous that the Senate last month overwhelmingly passed a $22 billion crime bill. One of the FBI's former Most Wanted finally surrendered—and magazines and newspapers everywhere responded with a wave of musings about those who had lost their way during the domestic protest of the war. Power was cast as a sympathetic victim, denying her true self, missing her family, buckling under the strain of a double life. "I have lived my life as something of a penitent," she said, "ever seeking to grow as a person of peace." When it came time for the judge to sentence Power, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery, Officer Schroeder's eldest daughter, Clare, had had enough.
"For reasons that I will never comprehend," she said, "the press and the public seem far more interested in the difficulties that Katherine Power has inflicted upon herself than in the very real and horrible suffering she has inflicted upon my family."
The judge sentenced Power to 8-to-12 years in jail and 20 years probation, with the condition that if she tried to cut a movie or book deal, she could go to jail for life. Unlike the Schroeder family, Power's husband, Ron, and son Jaime, 14, will get their loved one back: She could be released from Suffolk County Jail in as little as five years, with good behavior.
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