Criminal - Chesa, Kathy, and David

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were once members of the radical activist group the Weather Underground. In 1981, they helped members of the Black Liberation Army rob a Brink’s armored car at the Nan...uet National Bank. Their son, Chesa Boudin, was 14 months old at the time. He spent his childhood visiting his parents in prison. Criminal is going back on tour in February! We’ll be telling brand new stories, live on stage. You can even get meet and greet tickets to come and say hi before the show. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com/live. We can’t wait to see you there! Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative. Along the Mississippi River, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, there's a stretch of land nicknamed Cancer Alley, because according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the cancer rate is more than seven times the national average, reportedly due to a very high concentration of petrochemical plants. Hear how the community is fighting back against some of the top polluters in the country. Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast. Botox Cosmetic, adipotulinum toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you.
Starting point is 00:00:43 For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Very soon, I get to do my favorite thing. Go on tour and meet so many of you. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand new stories, most of which will probably make you laugh. I'll even try to come and say hi at the merch table. Get your tickets while they last at thisiscriminal.com slash live. How 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.
Starting point is 00:01:54 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. The 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. After college, she moved to Cleveland
Starting point is 00:02:27 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.
Starting point is 00:02:58 They started dating. And in 1980, their son Chesa was born in New York City. Chesa and his in New York City. Chesa and his parents lived in Morningside Heights near Columbia University. My dad had long, dark hair. He had a massive, bushy beard. They wore tie-dye. There were 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.
Starting point is 00:03:31 They gave birth around the same time. Nancy's son was named Juaniki. While their parents were at work, Chesa and Juaniki 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. He 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, Monique's mom picked him up at 5 o'clock, as she usually did, but my parents weren't there. That morning, on October 20, 1981,
Starting point is 00:04:22 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 Nanuet 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.
Starting point is 00:05:06 They stole $1.6 million. They 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.
Starting point is 00:05:30 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. By 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.
Starting point is 00:06:00 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. Both of them died. When David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were arrested, they gave fake names to the police.
Starting point is 00:06:42 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... David and Kathy were both indicted for robbery and felony murder.
Starting point is 00:07:07 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. They 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
Starting point is 00:07:46 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. Kathy 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.
Starting point is 00:08:19 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. What 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.
Starting point is 00:09:12 I knew that the Weather Underground had been a radical, mainly white group that sought to do what they referred to as armed actions to 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
Starting point is 00:09:45 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. Kathy Boudin was one of two survivors.
Starting point is 00:10:11 A former member later said, when this explosion happened, a group of us disappeared from sight. That was really the official beginning of what came to be called the Weather Underground. The name is a reference to a Bob Dylan song. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Starting point is 00:10:32 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.
Starting point is 00:11:04 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. Members 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.
Starting point is 00:11:33 Wilkerson, who is serving three years for possession of dynamite, said at her sentencing, 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. They lived in Harlem and had two other sons.
Starting point is 00:12:00 At the time, Bill was working at a daycare and Bernadine was a waitress. Chesa 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. Kathy Boudin was eventually sent to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security women's prison just outside of New York City.
Starting point is 00:12:43 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. The 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.
Starting point is 00:13:24 It was really tough as a three-year-old, a five-year-old, an eight-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.
Starting point is 00:14:02 For 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.
Starting point is 00:14:22 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. In 1987, Chase's adopted family moved from New York to Chicago. In order to visit his mother and father,
Starting point is 00:14:41 Chase 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 Wainiki'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. And then I boarded and they said goodbye.
Starting point is 00:15:17 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
Starting point is 00:15:43 call my parents. I made them come back and pick me up, and I skipped that visit. We'll be right back. Thank you. their communities. In the latest episode, host Ashley C. Ford talks to Sharon Levine, who's fighting to protect her hometown, St. James, Louisiana, from petrochemical pollution. I would smell that smell in the morning, but not knowing where it was coming from. Right. And all of a sudden, I said, I wonder if the whole world's smelling. Not knowing it was just St. James Parish, it would smell so bad.
Starting point is 00:16:46 For more than 80 years, the petrochemical industry has operated in the region. And now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the cancer rate is more than seven times the national average. When Sharon Levine heard about a new multi-billion dollar deal to build another plant near her home, she rallied her neighbors to fight it. I've been speaking ever since. I've been talking. You can't shut me up now. Subscribed into The Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast.
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Starting point is 00:18:20 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 were 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,
Starting point is 00:19:02 you know, inevitably somebody would say, or a teacher going around would say, well, what does your dad do? Or what does your mommy do? I 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
Starting point is 00:19:44 part of the dynamic. My friends knew, their parents knew, school teachers knew. It was just part of life. As 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.
Starting point is 00:20:13 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, I'd have friends over at the house playing basketball or doing homework. And so they'd get a chance to talk to my friends. Do 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.
Starting point is 00:20:59 I mean, I know you knew and everyone talked about it and there was no secret, but the moment when it was being taught in some way, did that happen? 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. And one of the things that stood out to 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,
Starting point is 00:21:59 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 broadly speaking, their values were solid anti-racist values. But 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 and actually read the New York Times headline on the front page from October 21st, 1981, the day after the robbery. 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.
Starting point is 00:23:21 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? In 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. Chesa remembers the moment he heard the news. And I was, at that very moment, driving from California,
Starting point is 00:24:10 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.
Starting point is 00:24:32 And 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.
Starting point is 00:24:59 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. So 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.
Starting point is 00:25:36 Do I go ahead with the 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. So I made the decision to go ahead and see my dad. And it was on the last day of that trailer visit, as we were packing up, cleaning the trailer for the next family, packing up clothes and leftover food that we heard on the radio that my mom had been released that morning. Chaser remembers that it was a few days before he could see her. He flew home to
Starting point is 00:26:12 Chicago and then to New York City, and this time his mother picked him up at the airport. My mom and her best friend Nancy, Waniki's mother, the one who picked me up at the babysitter all those years ago when my parents got arrested, drove to the airport. And they were there waiting with flowers and a fruit smoothie that they'd gotten from like a Jamba Juice. My mom was waiting right where you come out of security at the airport, LaGuardia Airport. She had a smoothie in one hand and a big bouquet of sunflowers in the other to greet me as I came out of the airport. How did your visits change once your mother, you were able to see your mother freely? Being able to go to a restaurant, being able to go for a walk in Central Park, being able to
Starting point is 00:27:02 go visit her childhood home where she grew up, you know, those things were really significant differences. Being able to, you know, have private conversations and not have our visits observed by correctional officers. I mean, there were countless, infinite differences in what it meant for us being able to ultimately go on adventures once you got permission to travel. Being able to show her the house I grew up in in Chicago or take her to my favorite places in the city. It was radically different. We'll be right back.
Starting point is 00:28:00 Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.
Starting point is 00:28:35 Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? Thank you. use AI. A special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What was your parents' reaction when you decided to go to law school? On the one hand, I don't think they were surprised. It was something that had sort of been in my personality and in my blood since I was a kid. I mean, my adoptive mother was a lawyer.
Starting point is 00:29:21 My biological uncle was a federal judge. A lot of the people in our social circle who I grew up seeing as role models and mentors were lawyers. On the other hand, my father had chosen to represent himself at trial. He'd chosen not to have the assistance of a lawyer. and there was a level in which he and my mom i think to a much lesser extent by that point had at least in the 70s and 80s seen lawyers as part of the system and so i think there was a level of maybe trepidation about what direction it would take me in but for the most part they were thrilled and supportive when your mother was sentenced to 20 years in prison, your father, 75 years, how did you feel about their sentences when you were younger?
Starting point is 00:30:14 And then did that or how did that change once you yourself became a lawyer, district attorney? As a kid, you know, four or five-year-old kid when my parents had both been sentenced, the numbers seemed impossibly large. I couldn't really even make sense. I didn't know enough math to figure out that the 20-year minimum my mom had received was five times my age at that point. I just literally didn't have the math or the ability to even comprehend what a 20-year minimum sentence was. And I didn't easily understand what it meant that it was a minimum, that she might not even get out then, that it would be up to the parole board, that we really had no idea when or if she'd get out. 75 years was a life sentence. And so I came to terms very early with the likelihood that at least my father would die in prison, absent extraordinary circumstances.
Starting point is 00:31:18 That was a difficult thing as a kid. It was a hard thing as a kid. It was a hard thing. You know, when I went to law school, I remember I took criminal law. And the first day, it was a big lecture class. It was maybe a couple hundred students in the classroom. And the very first day of class, the professor gave a hypothetical. And it was supposed to be dramatic and it was supposed to be an obscure area of law that nobody on their first day of criminal law
Starting point is 00:31:50 would be familiar with. It was this fact pattern where two people are walking down the street and one of them says, hey, let's go rob that guy and the other one goes over to rob the guy
Starting point is 00:32:00 and ends up shooting and killing him. And the question is, what can the first person, not the one who actually did the robbery, but the one whose idea it was, be charged with? And I raised my hand immediately because I know there's this legal doctrine in the United States called felony murder
Starting point is 00:32:16 that allows prosecutors in most states, but not all, to prosecute anybody who's participating in a robbery or other serious felony with murder if somebody gets killed, no matter what their role was. And that's why my parents were convicted and prosecuted for murder, even though they didn't personally hurt anybody. So, you know, as I studied the law, it came up again and again in different ways. When I became a prosecutor, all the more so. And as I thought about proportionality and trying to have consequences for people who commit crimes that are proportionate to the harm that they've caused, my parents' case was a constant reminder that criminal justice outcomes in this country are arbitrary. My parents did exactly the same thing. They were both in the front of a switch car. They were both unarmed. They were both arrested that day. My father ended up with a 55-year additional minimum sentence on top of the 20 years my mom was given. So when I was a public defender, the stakes were vivid for me. It wasn't just about their freedom. It was also about their kids and their families. Your father was granted parole in 2021.
Starting point is 00:33:42 Do you remember the first time you saw him? As soon as we got word he was going to be released the next day, I went to the airport and got on the next plane and took a red eye from San Francisco to New York. I, um, went to the house where my father was going to be living in for his first month or so out of custody. And my mom and I had the keys to the apartment he was going to be staying in, and we wanted to get some of my dad's favorite food. We didn't know exactly what time he'd show up, but we went to a corner store, we bought some fruit, got him some coffee, got some yogurt. Mainly the things he liked to eat were just fresh fruit and vegetables, things he couldn't get in prison. We got some flowers. We sat there and we waited. And then Chase's father called. He was with his parole officer and would be at the apartment soon. Chase and his mother went downstairs to wait. It was cold. It was a cold November morning. So we didn't want to wait outside. So we were in the lobby of this apartment building. We could see out the kind of glass doors.
Starting point is 00:34:49 And every time a car would pass, we'd kind of look out and see if it could possibly be a New York State government car. And for about half an hour, we were looking at every car. No, that's a taxi. No, that's an Uber. No, that's a taxi. No, that's an Uber. No, that's, you know, whatever it is. And then one came up that had government plates and put his flashers on and kind of pulled up partially on the sidewalk because it was a narrow street and they didn't want to block traffic.
Starting point is 00:35:17 And we knew that must be him. Chesa has a video from that day. So my mom and I went rushing out, big bouquet of flowers. And the doors open, and my dad gets out of the car with two kind of big plastic bags, all of his worldly possessions, everything that he owns in those bags. And we all waited for permission from the officers, the parole officers dropping him off before we even gave each other a hug. The sigh of relief in the moment when my dad gives us a hug.
Starting point is 00:36:11 That's what I remember the most. What was it like to see your parents together? I'd never seen my parents together since I was 14 months old. I'd literally never seen them together or didn't have any memory of it. It was more challenging still because my mom was what we all recognized was in the final stages of her battle with, many-year battle with cancer. And it meant that the dynamic between them was maybe defined by things other than what might have been had my father been released five or ten years earlier.
Starting point is 00:37:04 Kathy and David were inseparable during the last few months of Kathy's life. David became her caretaker as her cancer got worse. My father and I were holding hands with my mom at her bedside in the moment that she died. How often do you see your father these days? I see him a lot more often now than ever, thanks to both his freedom
Starting point is 00:37:32 and the fact that he recently transferred his parole from New York State to California. So he's now living in San Francisco, just a 15 or 20-minute drive away from where I live. And that means that not only are we able to see him whenever needed or whenever we want to, but also that we have the best babysitter money can't buy. We've got a two-year-old who is high energy and it's great that my dad's able to take the bus, pick my son up and walk him back and get him his afternoon snack or take him for a walk in the park until my wife and I are able to finish work and pick him up. That's not every day, but when we work late or when we have to go out, it's wonderful to have my dad be on hand to take care of my son.
Starting point is 00:38:28 When you had your own child, did it make you think any differently about what had happened to you? Absolutely. I mean, it put a very new, stark lens on the decision my parents had made. I remember waking up on the day of my son's 14-month birthday and thinking, what would it be like if I didn't come home from work today? You know, and what would I miss out on? What would that do to him? There's really no substitute, and there's just nothing that can fully prepare you for the way in which becoming a parent changes everything.
Starting point is 00:39:10 And one of the things that changed was how I viewed the decision my parents made to participate in that horrible crime. Harder? It was harder. I mean, I think it was something that had always confused me. It had never really made sense. I mean, you know, I'd always said it didn't seem like a very well thought out plan. Multiple people got killed. Everybody got arrested.
Starting point is 00:39:36 What do you mean you didn't expect to get arrested? I mean, what were you thinking? And so, you know, over the years, in some ways, the more I learned, the more I understood, in some ways it had gotten harder. In other ways, it had gotten easier because I fundamentally came to terms with the fact that A, it wasn't my fault. B, there was nothing I could have or should have done differently as an infant to prevent it. And C, I'd recognize that we all make mistakes in life. We all make really serious mistakes, and none of us should be defined by our worst moments. So, as much as I am and always have been critical of my parents for what they did, I also recognize that that's not what or all that
Starting point is 00:40:22 defines them. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Engineering by Russ Henry. This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
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Starting point is 00:41:38 Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I love you. used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling.
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Starting point is 00:43:16 than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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