The United States of America is almost 250 years old, and political violence has been here the whole time. On this episode of Bad Elizabeth Kathy and Gideon look at Betty Ann Duke, a Texas-Born woman who joined a bunch of domestic terrorists (or are they Freedom Fighters?) called the May 19th Communist Organization. The May 19 Group started as an offshoot of The Weather Underground and was a women-led revolutionary group that perpetrated a number of violent acts in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. They robbed banks, broke other revolutionaries out of prison, and were responsible for a series of bombings including the US Capitol in 1983.

To help navigate this complicated and fascinating story, is Bill Rosenau whose book Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America's First Female Terrorist Group is a gripping chronicle of who these people were, what they did, and what they believed in. It is the only in depth look into The May 19 group, and members like Betty Ann Duke, who is still at large.

In 2026, political violence is still very much a part of pop culture (One Battle After Another) and in the news (the recent assassination attempt of the President) so this episode about a group of 70s radicals seems oddly relevant.

----------------------------------------

Jett Road Studios - Website - YouTube - Instagram - Substack

Bad Elizabeth - Instagram - YouTube - Substack

Welcome to Battle Elizabeth.

I'm your host, Gideon Evans.

And I'm your host, Kathy Egan Taylor.

The premise of this show is exactly what it sounds like.

Each episode we profile a different Elizabeth or derivation of the name

like Betsy

or Lilette

or Liz Zander,

who deserves to be called bad.

These Elizabeths run the gamut.

From Royalty to Radicals.

This episode is gonna be explosive.

That's our producer and engineer Will Becton of Jet Road Studios.

Hi guys.

Hi.

Our episode today is about Elizabeth and Duke,

also known as Elizabeth Anna Duke.

Huh.

That's some alias.

Welcome to Battle Elizabeth.

I am your co-host Gideon Evans.

And I'm Kagan Taylor.

And we are here, of course, in Studio City at.

Jet Road Studios with Will Beckton.

Hi

guys.

This is a podcast about Pat Elizabeths exactly as it sounds.

That's right.

We do have to repeat because we do get haters occasionally who think

we hate Elizabeths and we don't.

We did get that one negative review.

You two are out hating Elizabeths,

so I'm overcompensating by repeating this all the time.

I think most people know.

We're just choosing some Elizabeths that have some dubiousness to them.

Exactly.

And I know we wanna get into the show and will told me not to bring

this up, but do you like my shirt?

I've never seen.

A shirt like this, and I've never seen Gideon in a shirt like this.

The shirt you're wearing right now has two roosters on it,

right?

One on each shoulder.

It's an audio medium, so you do have to describe it.

It's a bit distracting.

Okay.

It's a bit loud.

Alright.

Okay.

The roosters are facing in opposite directions

and they're not cock fighting roosters.

And we've talked about cock fighting on the show before.

For, but they would be perfect if we put little spurs on their cloth.

That's right.

Is that all you need to convert a rooster to cock fighting Rooster is the blades?

I think so.

I mean, just make the angry, I would imagine, and then put some blades on them.

Yeah.

And the experience of being in a lot of fights, I'm Exactly.

I'm, you get better and better.

Well, it's a lovely shirt.

Yes.

It's just, it's unique.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

So we are talking today about Elizabeth Ann or Anna Duke.

Mm-hmm.

Who's part of the May 19th Communist Organization, which is

an interesting sort of splinter group from the weather underground.

It was a female led violent revolutionary group that active

in America from 78 to 1985.

They created a new sisterhood of the bomb and the gun.

They would rob banks and bring trucks, and they would break people outta jail.

They set up safe houses.

They had arsenals of weapons,

kind of like one battle after another.

The Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

A lot of these groups were associated with like the sixties and a little bit later.

This movie takes place.

Now.

People are talking about these types of groups that use violence

and extreme techniques for getting their politics across.

They don't even really know what their politics are.

They're just anti everything.

A lot of them, yes.

This group is a female led, violent revolutionary group

and mostly lesbian led group.

They kind of like were splintered from the weather underground.

Right.

The weather underground came to be more in the sixties.

Yeah,

but I think they were almost defunct by the time May 19th came along.

We're looking at this Elizabeth, Betty and Duke that was part of May 19th, and

she was just one member of the group.

So there's a lot of names, a lot of information.

It's fascinating shit.

But.

Because there's so much going on with this topic, we're gonna lean a bit

on our guest who's coming later on.

His name is Bill Rosenau and he has a book called Tonight We Bomb

the US Capitol, and he's basically the only expert on earth about this

group and this woman in particular.

So we're excited to talk to Bill later.

Elizabeth Anna Duke.

We don't know much about her.

She is currently 85 and she's wanted,

she's on the lamb.

She's on the lamb at 85.

I don't know where the lamb is.

No, she's probably in a rocking chair.

She is from Beeville, Texas.

Okay.

I mean, part of the purpose of these groups is they're secretive, so some

of them we know more than others.

What's her name?

Patty Hearst.

Patty Hearst.

What was the group

she was in?

She was the Simeon

Symbolize Liberation

Army.

Army, yes.

Yeah.

Basically all these people are educated, privileged kids.

When she was kidnapped and held for ransom, she dug it.

And they probably didn't call themselves terrorists, right?

Oh, no.

They thought they were activists.

Right.

You know, they're revolutionaries.

Well, there's that saying one person's terrorist is another as freedom fighter.

Right.

Exactly.

Here's the interesting thing too.

The people who were sort of radicals in the sixties, a lot of those people

come the seventies, eighties, and we're coming into Reagan America right now.

Yeah.

Where wealth is king and all that type of stuff.

They all went to grad school, they became normal people.

Right.

And they became the man just like everybody else.

But then there, there was a string and a lot of women who were connected

to these, and a lot of them were lesbians that sort of carried on.

Mm-hmm.

So the interesting thing to me, because I'm, I'm always fascinated by

underground groups like this, it's, I mean, it's kind of hard not to be.

Part of it is just the whole like living off the grid thing.

Like was she completely separated from her family or friend?

Was it basically her whole world?

Yes.

At a certain point,

that's what tends to happen.

There are people who are disenfranchised in one shape or form.

It could be from their family.

They generally don't have their family members.

Like this is almost like cultish.

Yeah.

Also like women are kind of perfect for this type of stuff.

We know how to set things up.

We can get safe houses, we get everything organized.

We plan ahead.

We know how to deal with this stuff.

So it was interesting that this was strictly a group of women.

Yeah.

But these are basically women who were disenfranchised in one form or another,

whether through their sexuality, whether what expected them of their families,

they just didn't wanna be into that role.

Yeah.

And that's what they found this group to work with who supported each other.

But as typical, they would turn on each other too.

Yeah.

And did they have different roles like in one battle after another?

Like was there one that was an expert in bombs?

One was the marksman and one was the coordinator.

Yes.

They all were good at bomb making apparently.

Oh,

really?

They were good at bomb making and they were good at breaking people outta jail.

Who were arrested radical, so to speak, and one of these people that she broke

out of Jeff's name was Willie Morales.

He was a Puerto Rican radical.

He was a bomb maker.

He was under surveillance, so he was actually caught while he was building

a bomb, but the bomb blew up on him, so he lost nine out of 10 fingers, and

his face was completely disfigured.

So,

wow.

He goes to jail, but while he is in jail, he's gonna get prosthetic fingers.

So they transfer him to a prison hospital.

So he is in the prison hospital.

While he's there, he tied together ace bandages and made

a rope where he lowered himself.

Oh my God.

Wait, so he, he was able to make a bed sheet ladder with one finger.

Yes, with stubs.

Oh

Jesus.

And a blown

up face.

And a blown up face.

Oh my God.

I think he broke a leg or something when he fell, so I mean, it might as

well.

It's a crazy story.

But anyway, she helped with that escape

and he ended up escaping.

Was he part of a revolutionary group as well?

I think he was part of Flon, which was the Puerto Rican separatist group.

I love Flon.

Yeah.

Also, they threatened to blow up the bicentennial in 1976.

Oh, and you're

working.

Yeah, so I've been researching a lot about Flon and they're not called Flon.

They're the F-A-L-A-N.

I see, I see.

It's just hard to not say Flan.

Flan, exactly.

It's FALN, not FLAN, but I do love flaw.

Did she get arrested at some point?

She got arrested twice and she got out on bail, and that's when she escaped.

So this woman, you say there's not that much info about

her who we're talking about.

And it kind of makes sense 'cause it sounds like she's slippery.

Well, the thing is like if we had more info about her, we'd know where she is.

You know?

The only thing I know is that she's from a small town in Texas

and she got radicalized and she's been on the lamb ever since.

Yeah.

So the thing that really made them huge was in 1983, they bombed the US Capitol.

Wow, that's so crazy that I was totally unaware of that.

1983, not that long ago,

they bombed the US Capitol caused a million dollars worth of damages,

and then they embarked on like a 20 month spree with five more bombings.

I see.

Just randomly.

I see.

I mean, you have to imagine they're not in the best frame of mind.

Maybe it seems random.

At that time, there were like hundreds of bombings.

Even in New York alone, it was actually a really common thing.

So maybe that's why we didn't really know that much about it.

There was just a lot of political violence.

Some people got away, some people didn't.

Yeah, some people did the time, some people didn't, and then they would

splinter off and just go underground.

I think he probably.

Become very isolated.

Yeah.

Like whenever I try to imagine myself going off grid or living underground

or being on the lamb, I always think about that Guns N Roses song.

They're out the Get me.

Mm-hmm.

I think your perception probably gets pretty warped.

We're social beings and if you're in this kind of weird bubble

with all these activated people.

All the time, your brain is gonna get warped.

That's another part of this whole story that like, yes, these people

were activated and radicals and doing these violent acts, and then when

the groups end, the people either.

Get back into society, or if they're on the wanted list, they're just running

for their entire lives if they're lucky.

And there's that movie, right?

That Judd

Hirsh.

Oh, running Ont.

That's a great movie.

I don't think I saw it.

Is River Phoenix in it?

River Phoenix was in it, yeah.

Martha, Martha, Clemson.

Judd Hirsch was the father.

It's a great movie.

Do you remember the director?

I wanna say Sidney Lumette.

Christine Lottie was the wife.

I think that's a really fascinating thing though.

Do you have.

Either the true believers or the people that just painted themselves into a corner

and they can't go back to real society.

Yeah.

As far as trying to place yourself in their shoes.

It's an interesting thought exercise, like the end of Goodfellas or whatever.

It's like the witness protection program, like Yeah.

How would I do in those circumstances, like Kathy, like

how do you think you'd do if you.

Had to go off grid and you had to exist as a revolutionary.

Do you think you have a good personality type for

it?

I think I'd be great at it.

I kind of do too.

Um, I think I'd be great at it.

I'm a loner.

My husband is away for the holiday weekend.

I miss him, but I love being alone.

It's so great.

My fantasy is to move up to Northern California to be a waitress.

Changing everything.

Wouldn't be a shock to your system?

No.

If we all had to pick our ideal revolutionary.

Location and roles.

Mine would be big sir. That

sounds nice.

Work in a cafe and be a bomb maker.

I think those would be my three.

No, but Big Sur is not a good place because there's only one,

it's Pacific Coast Highway, right?

There's

Oh yeah.

It's escape route challenge.

That's, yeah.

You can't, there's no escape route because like if a boulder falls out and

you are fucked, you know what I mean?

Even like big rainstorms,

I think road, yeah, it floods everything out.

Exactly.

I know it would be risky to try to go to the border.

Go to Canada and live in like Nova Scotia in like a cute fisherman town.

Just like living that simple life.

And I could like make folk art with a knife.

You carved soap.

Right.

But I also wanted to say, I know you, Kathy, and I, we wanna

get more and more people to.

Be aware of our podcast.

Yeah.

We were like, how awesome would it be as if we could find Elizabeth Duke

DM Gideon,

right.

That Elizabeth pod at gmail do com.

We don't have to reveal your name.

We can alter your voice.

5 5, 5 1 2 1 2.

Right.

No, but I do think that would be amazing, wouldn't it

with any of these revolutionary groups?

The where are they now?

Aspect of it is always so interesting.

You know?

Definitely.

It's definitely one thing to kind of like go out in a blaze of glory.

It's another thing to kind of have to live your life in the shadow of what you

did as an impressionable 20 something.

Exactly.

And I think some of the weather underground people like, aren't they

like public speakers and stuff like that.

I mean, there is a way to rehabilitate your reputation after being a

part of one of these things.

The reentry is the interesting part to figure out.

It's called book deals.

So anyway, she has been on the lamb since 1983, uh, after this capital bombing.

And it was interesting 'cause I was reading about another radical group

and I didn't realize that there was an underground railroad of like lesbians

Oh wow.

Um, that were based in Maror, Pennsylvania.

When.

This was like in the eighties.

Oh my.

The seventies.

Oh my.

It was an interesting thing.

'cause I'm from Philadelphia and I didn't like Narberth.

Really?

There was a collective of lesbian

undergrounds.

What is that place like

Narberth, Pennsylvania.

It's part of the main line.

It's a nice, yeah.

We called it RB Town.

Okay.

I mean, I think that was an interesting thing.

I think it was like a group of women.

They found each other and they had a cause and they had a purpose.

So guys, so based on what we know about May 19th, and based on what we

know about Elizabeth Duke, is she bad?

I think so,

yeah.

There are certain ways of making arguments that could make it

seem a little more textured.

This story is, so, it's, it's intriguing because she's still on lamb.

It's a very specific, interesting female led group of, of radicals.

Luckily we're gonna be talking to William Rosenau who wrote the book about this

very well informed.

He's gonna know his shit.

Joining us now from Washington DC is Bill Roseau, the author of

Tonight We Bomb the US Capitol, the explosive story of May 19th,

America's first female terrorist group.

A gripping account of a revolutionary group who was active in the

late 1970s and early 1980s.

It's also suddenly topical.

Now we have that movie one battle after another, and then just the

other day there was an assassination attempt on the president.

So political violence is something people are talking about.

Thank you so much, bill, for joining us on Battle, Elizabeth.

Well, thank you very much.

It's great to be here.

Bill, how did you come upon this story?

How did you start following radicals and the weather underground?

Like what piqued your interest here?

There were a few things.

I went to Columbia as an undergrad in the late seventies and early 1980s, and

during this time a whole bunch of people who had been in the Weather underground

organization, the sort of preeminent.

Left his terrorist group of the seventies, um, started to emerge and, and it was

a big story and some of them had lived actually near Columbia and I probably saw

some of them on the street not knowing who they were because they were underground.

And then later I became a, a terrorism researcher and a political scientist

at the Rand Corporation and, and terrorism was part of my portfolio.

Looking at domestic terrorist groups, I kept coming across these references

to something called the May 19th Communist Organization, and it was

always sort of mentioned in passing, and this was just a bunch of old

weather underground types and there would just be a few comments about it.

And I became fascinated.

And then over the years, just sort of informally began collecting

information and I realized.

Why has no one written about this?

I mean, there have been a few things written about them,

but nothing comprehensive.

And I thought, well, you know, not only were they sort of forgotten violent

extremist group, but there were violent extremist group founded and led by women.

I thought this is just too good.

I. And they bombed the US Capitol on November 7th, 1983.

And so it just all came together and, uh, I found that their individual

stories so compelling and their trajectory from sixties college campus

protestors to armed revolutionaries to, you know, full-blown terrorists.

When the opera's over and the fat lady, so to speak is sung and you, you're still

on stage or you want to be on stage, what kind of mental universe do you inhabit?

So those are some of the reasons.

What does the name of the group May 19th mean?

Well, May 19th was the birthday of two of the heroes of the

group, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh.

So there's a message.

A little Easter egg in the name.

It's an, an homage to uh, to Malcolm X and Ho Chi man.

I did a little bit of research.

I was just curious who else had May 19th birthdays and apparently Andre

the Giant Arsenio Hall and Grace Joan.

Three great people

we're all May 19th.

You know, obviously we've come to this story because we're

looking at one particular member of the group, Betty Ann Duke.

She's a woman who's still on the lam as far as we know right now.

But maybe we could start by giving sort of an idea context of the time

of how these women became radicalized.

How did that evolve?

Almost all of the members had been sixties radicals.

They had been in Students for Democratic Society.

They had been in the Weather Underground Organization, and they just kept

on doing what they were doing.

Even after most of their former comrades had left the scene, so they remained

animated by their self-described revolutionary anti imperialism.

They remained committed to supporting armed struggles in the, was then

called the Third World in places like Zimbabwe and Ada and uh, elsewhere.

And they started off.

This small group of women started off in a, I would say, sort of in

an above ground way in 19 78, 19 79.

They'd issue leaflets.

They had meetings, they would have protest meetings.

They would give speeches supporting various causes.

Very important in supporting LGBD.

Sorry,

that's, it's a hard one sometimes.

Yes.

Uh, they were prominent supporters of the third world of people in

the United States, so-called Third World people that they considered

to be part of this interior colony.

So they're doing this very aboveground politics.

They're in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Hard to imagine nowadays seeing those kind of radicals.

Or maybe they're still there.

I don't know.

They were in Park Slope.

They had an outpost in Chicago, in Austin, Texas, which we'll come back

to and elsewhere in the country, never more than a hundred people, I would say.

And a lot of this information is based on declassified FBI files, but

eventually they came into the orbit.

There was a man called Matula Shakur, and he was an acupuncturist trained in Quebec.

He had an acupuncture clinic up in Harlem.

He would treat patients there.

He was also very involved in something called the Lincoln Detox

Program, which was up in the Bronx, part of the Lincoln Hospital.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of a crazy story in its own right.

Lincoln Detox, they believe in acupuncture.

They were opposed to methadone as an alternative to heroin, but

they were also a political base.

It was sort of a, um, political foundation, and they did a

lot of recruiting from there.

They did a lot of processing from there.

Really annoying the city over the course of many years.

People like Ed Koch, who eventually shut it down.

Chuck Schumer we're very upset about this.

Yeah.

But through Lincoln Detox and the acupuncture stuff, one of the members

of May 19th met Matullo Shakur.

Another thing about Matullo, his nephew, ed later stepson.

Interesting was none other than Tupac Shakur.

I was gonna ask

Yes, the rap great.

So Matullo Shakur, his brother was married to a woman who gave birth to

Tupac and they got divorced and Matullo got married to his brother's ex-wife.

Wow.

Quite a family.

Interesting.

Yes.

So Mat was known as Doc, that was his nom Deger, doc Shakur.

And he had his acupuncture clinic.

He had this brownstone.

Brooklyn.

He had a lot of expenses, but he also had a big drug habit.

He was very into cocaine and he and some of his comrades went on a bank

robbing spree in the late 1970s.

Bank robbery, armored car robberies, in some cases netting

hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And the women of M 19, some of them became involved in this.

They were doing reconnaissance.

They were renting safe houses.

They were renting cars.

They were nice looking, college educated white ladies who could do things that

Doc Shakur and some of his ex-con buddies who were black couldn't do

without inviting police attention.

So for a number of years they were side by side with Doc

and what he called the family.

The women called themselves the White Edge, and Doc referred

to the women as the crackers.

The crackers,

yeah.

Oh my goodness.

But he was a very charismatic character.

He'd tell the women that he was raising money for something

called the Republic of New Africa.

Which was a group that was seeking to reclaim states in the south as a African

American homeland public of New Africa, had lots of members, it had consulates.

How much of that money went to the Republic of New

Africa and how much went into

his nose?

Yeah.

His nose is not really clear.

Yeah.

So that is their entree to, I would say.

Really violent politics, although many of them had been in the weather

underground and participated in bombings, including perhaps the notorious bombing

on, uh, west 11th Street in the village that brought down the entire house.

So that was their entree, and then things got really hairy.

Hmm.

Yeah, it was interesting 'cause like women were really the backbone of a lot of this,

the weather underground, as you said, a lot of college students, white college

students, like at Brandeis and whatnot.

'cause you're right, they could get driver's license easily, passports,

easily rent cars, rent safe houses, and no one really questioned them

because there were proper looking women.

So it was an interesting strategy.

Absolutely.

And it worked very well for a long time.

One of the members of May 19th, not Betty Ann, also from Texas.

Marilyn Buck, a fascinating character veterinarian, USDA media inspector

described as the only white member of the Black Liberation Army in the

Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she was arrested eventually,

or was imprisoned for buying.

Ammunition using a fake id, which apparently is a federal crime, was shipped

off to a women's prison in West Virginia.

This was the good old days where prison authorities believed that

people could be rehabilitated, and so there were furloughs.

One year she went to visit her parents who had moved to Galveston

came back six days later the next year, 1973, if I'm not mistaken.

Gets another furlough to visit her lawyer in New York.

Susan Tippo, who's a recurring character and never comes back.

Things kind of came crashing down October 20th, 1981 in upstate New York,

and that was a botch Brinks job.

The Brinks job.

Yeah.

A really shocking episode.

You had a, a brink guard killed another one.

Wounded.

The wounded one, almost 20 years to the day is in a garage in the basement of a

building in lower Manhattan, and he radios saying that a building has been hit and

the police are telling me to get out.

Of course, it was the World Trade Center and

oh my goodness,

no one ever heard from him again after that.

So amazing to me and

terrible luck.

Also, the the robbers who included the family, Matullo and others did

the real shooting, killed a Bri Guard, wounded a Bris guard and

murdered two policemen from niac.

The women, May 19th were very involved.

They had done surveillance.

They had organized safe houses in New Jersey and Rockland County.

They had rented getaway cars.

They actually drove getaway cars.

This became a shocking episode.

Most of the women involved in the robbery were, were able to escape.

Some weren't.

Susan Rosenberg, who was one of the members, drove off the road, kind

of freaked out during the course of this, and one of the women who was

a driver, her name was Judy Clark.

She gets stopped, she gets arrested, she's reaching for her pistol.

She winds up with a massive sentence for murder.

I believe it's second degree murder, and she's locked up in Westchester

and she gets visited in 2016 in prison by another than Andrew Cuomo.

That's right.

The governor.

And he likes her,

who spends an hour with her and tell reporters quote, when you meet

her, you get a sense of her soul.

He commuted her sentence.

Finally, a few years later, April, 2019, she gets parole and gets sprung.

So the brink robbery, 1.6 million, the cops get all the money.

Mm-hmm.

Everybody's scattered.

The heat is really on, I mean, nationwide for this bunch of

cop killers, and that sends.

The women into survival mode and they go deep underground.

The ones who escaped the FBI is all over them.

They have to decide what they're gonna do next, if anything.

And this is where Betty Ann comes in.

'cause she was, she was not part of this.

She was a member of the group.

But she was above ground, right?

She was in Austin.

Yeah, she was in Austin.

So she's not yet on the FBI radar?

No, not yet.

Although she, it's interesting, in 1980.

A massive load of Gel Tite kind of dynamite goes missing from the bland

construction company in Austin.

I don't have any concrete proof.

I think Betty Ann is involved in this and this load of dynamite kind

of makes its way around the East coast and is probably used by the

FAN of Puerto Rican terrorist group.

Earlier carried out the bombing of Francis Tavern in lower Manhattan,

and so she's involved in that.

She's probably involved in buying weapons, but she's not part of the

inner group yet, but she does move East.

Betty Ann Duke.

Yeah.

Bill, if you could just tell us like who is she in the world?

Sure.

She's born in November of 1940, so she's a little bit older than some of

the other women who wound up in May 19th, and she was born in Beville.

Texas, apparently is a beautiful town.

She's definitely the all American girl, straight A student.

She's a member of the National Honor Society.

She's in the, the pep Squad winds up at Southwestern University.

She's got a nice beehive hairdo.

This is the early 1960s.

Graduates in 62.

She gets married, gets divorced in 65.

She'd always had a. Political consciousness.

She abhorred racism.

She gets into graduate school, north Texas State University.

The mid 1960s, the anti-war movement is ramping up.

She gets involved in student politics.

She gets involved in campus protests.

During one protest, she calls the Board of Regents, a stupid bunch of motherfuckers

that gets her in big trouble.

There's an obscenity charge that's not the end of the world.

She's highly intelligent.

She's a really good writer.

She wounds up as a researcher in the.

Texas State legislature.

She's in Austin, which is, you know, keep Austin weird.

And they had a big weather underground movement there as well.

Oh yeah, in ut there's definitely a scene there and she gets involved with

anti-racist activities, something called the John Brown Anti Clam Committee.

They have a newspaper, it, the name suggests they're fighting the clan.

They're demonstrating against the clan.

She's beginning to really get.

A name for herself as a left-wing organizer radical.

And so it's the early 1980s and she's down in Austin with another gal who's from

the Midwest, Linda Sue Evans, and they're kind of working together down there.

And Betty Ann decides it's not exactly clear how.

She comes east and she becomes part of really by 82, 83, part of this

new variation on May 19th, which is decided despite the fact that

they're hunted people in connection with Brinks and other things.

They decide they're gonna wage the arms struggle on their own through bombing.

One thing that I was curious about, and I think you mentioned in your book,

is that a lot of these revolutionary groups were against a lot of things,

but when you talk about what the society would look like that they

wanted to see, it was a little hazier.

Yes, and that's not unusual.

The prominent terrorism scholar and academic, Bruce Hoffman has talked about

this in respect to a lot of different revolutionary and terrorist groups at

different times and different places.

It's sort of more about the struggle, what the world is gonna look like after

the revolution's, a little vaguer.

I mean, it was certainly true in the case of a group like Shining Path in Peru.

They came close to seizing power in Peru, but what they were gonna

put in its place, I mean was it gonna be like 1975 in Cambodia?

It's not really clear.

And May 19th is, I'm not comparing them to the, to shining path of the Khm

Rouge, but the similar sort of vagueness.

So I'm gonna just pull this out 'cause it's sitting across from me.

Maybe you can see that's,

oh.

So this is an original poster and

can you say what it says on there for people listening?

Yeah.

It says Support the resistance, conspiracy defendants.

And this was a massive case in, uh, late 1980s involving

most of the people in May 19th.

It was a big federal trial in DC.

One of their front groups, the committee to fight repression.

Put this poster out.

I just bring this up because around the edges it's got all these sort of phrases,

human rights, self-determination, national liberation, women's liberation, peace,

anti imperialism, lesbian and gay rights.

You know, it's not really terribly specific.

It's not really much of a program.

Yeah.

But it's just these are things that we like.

Yeah.

I think very lofty ambitions.

Very idealistic.

Yeah.

They're not quite sure what the ends was, but they were gonna

make theater out of getting there.

Yeah.

We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Now, I love that you brought up the poster because you mentioned in the

book a few times that graphic design and my wife is a graphic designer, but

just that that was a very important part of the movement, making art and

making posters and that sort of thing.

Absolutely.

They had a front group called the Madam Bin Graphics

Collective, and Madam Bin was a.

North Vietnamese, I wanna say foreign ministry officials, prominent woman in

the communist regime in North Vietnam.

They named it after her.

And so they had a graphic sense.

Some of the members had actually been to art schools.

Some would wind up teaching in art schools.

And I've looked at the Madame Bin stuff and it's pretty good for

what they used to call AGI prop.

I mean, they definitely had a visual sense.

Also, some of the women were, were also very skilled printers.

That also became very useful when you wanted to run up a bunch of.

Freaking fake IDs, which they did with enthusiasm.

Fake social security numbers, that description of that, they

would take them from dead babies.

That was crazy.

The classic, the dead baby ruse.

They had FBI, they had printed up warrants.

Oh my god.

That they used when they were robbing a stop and shop.

Oh, that's right.

I was gonna ask you about that.

They went in there and they pretended to be, uh, DEA agents and they

were gonna find all the dope that was kept in the safes of the, uh,

stop and shop.

The safes of the, of the stop and shop, but

he didn't wanna open it.

He didn't mind opening it after a while.

'cause they were waving guns in his face.

Right.

This is Alan Berkman, md.

He was involved with May 19th.

Oh yeah.

Another fascinating character.

Much revered by some people on the extreme left, and this guy, Timothy

Blanc, who was a sort of, uh.

Junior banana in the group that waved, you know, guns in his face.

And he is like, yeah, I'll open it.

But then it turned out you needed a second key to get into the main safe.

So they were only able to walk out with,

he was like, you know, 20 grand or something like that, but

enough to fund them for a little.

They didn't have the, uh, the family money as they did in the past.

They had pretty low overhead.

They lived in pretty scruffy kind of student accommodations.

One of 'em had jobs.

It was not a glamorous lifestyle by any means, but it was relatively

low cost to keep surviving.

I thought it was so interesting that for a while they kind of

lived in these collectives.

Yes.

Where they're all roommates and they're kind of watching each other to make

sure that nobody's straying off the path of, you know, whatever they were for.

But then they kind of decided we better just live regular lives

so we don't raise any red flags,

you know, live in decent sized cities, but in sort of out of the way pockets.

A couple of the FBI retired FBI.

Special agents I interviewed actually were fairly impressed

with their underground trade craft.

They were really into, uh, disguises.

They were pretty good at not attracting a lot of attention.

Now they're not just hiding out though.

They're making bombs and they're bombing a whole set of.

Targets over a two year period.

Part of the May 19th women's jobs too was to break people outta prison.

One of the members of the committee, topograph, she was a lawyer.

Yes.

For Willie Morales.

She was sort of a movement lawyer and she, you know, she was like

a, a William Kunstler type.

Yep.

You know, the famous radical lawyer from the sixties and the seventies and

the eighties, and she was very involved with FALN and with the May 19th.

Another person who declined my,

your request for an interview?

Yes.

Perhaps, understandably

so.

One of her clients was Willie Morales, who was the bomb maker for

For the FALN?

Yes.

Can you tell that story?

We called them flan.

Yeah.

Flan.

Whereas it was Armada libian nationality.

Yes.

Puerto Rican.

Inas sort of Cuba line.

Basically we need to be an independent country involved in some pretty horrific

violence, particularly in the seventies.

I mentioned the Francis Tavern in, in lower Manhattan,

New York.

Yeah.

Killed four people and

they were supposed to bomb the bicentennial in Philadelphia

as well, but they didn't.

Yeah.

So it's July of 1978 and Willie Morales, who's the, the sort of

the chief bomb maker of the FAN is.

Working on a new project in his apartment in Queens.

You know, it's a hot day.

He is working in his bomb factory.

He's in Elmhurst, Queens.

Do you know where that neighborhood is?

And, uh, he crosses the wrong wires and, uh, the bomb blows up in his face.

So the upstairs neighbor or downstairs neighbor, calls the cops.

Willie has managed to, you know, this blast.

He's lost half of his face and he is lost nine of his 10 fingers in this.

The police come in.

Everyone is obviously very jumpy.

They take morales away and the cops notice that there's a blood trail

leading up to the stove and one of the dials on the gas has got blood on it.

And what they deduced was that Morales was trying to turn on the gas, hoping that.

When the cops came and say, inevitably would, one would light

a cigarette or a cigar and the place would blow up pretty hardcore

with half of his face on too.

Yeah,

exactly.

Mutilated.

Yeah, he's mutilated, but he ain't dead and he ain't giving

up against the wishes of the FBI.

He winds up at Bellevue Hospital.

He doesn't get his fingers sewn back on because this was the story that they, they

wanted to keep the fingers as evidence.

Hmm.

He's gonna get a pair of artificial hands and he is waiting around in this.

Prison ward.

One of the people working at at Bellevue is Medical Doctor Alan Berkman, who winds

up as an important member of May 19th.

He's one of the guys, Susan Tippo is his lawyer.

He's lying around waiting for his new hands to come.

So this is May, 1979.

Somebody.

Some people say it was Susan Tippo.

She says it wasn't her smuggle in bolt cutters and he was able to snip the

rather thin screens over the windows.

And with the help of FALN people, members of May 19th, members of

the family and the Black Liberation Army, they're all involved in

helping Willie Escape and he's got.

Ace bandages wraps him around to lower himself.

My God,

the ACE bandages broke and he fell like a story and crashed

into this air conditioning unit.

Got spirited away.

This guy made it to Mexico.

Unbelievable.

And was involved in, in a shootout in Mexico.

Yeah.

Prison in Mexico.

I mean, just incredible.

Then he makes it to Cuba where he is to this day, to the best of our

knowledge, he's living in Cuba.

Amazing.

Also, I was gonna bring up, there was a post headline that was reminiscent

of headless torso in a topless bar.

Yes.

That so like hand endless terrorist escapes.

Yes.

The post, they were enjoying themselves and they had some, uh.

Pretty entertaining coverage of May 19th.

The Post had started, you know, it's turned to the right and you couldn't

ask for a better cast of characters, you know, radical lesbian terrorists, bombers.

It was the, the complete package for Rupert Murdoch and his editors.

What did the nation and like the experts, the terrorism

experts make of women terrorists?

Of lesbian women terrorists.

I would say that the professional literature, the terrorism literature,

I mean as a field terrorism studies, I think was pretty underdeveloped.

There were certainly psychologists and and journalists who wrote about

women terrorists, but a lot of them were extremely condescending.

No,

to say the least.

You know, not accusing them of exactly of penis envy, but you

know, sort of sub Freudian musings on why women would do this.

And it seemed to be particularly shocking to, to some of these experts.

And who knows, maybe, you know, regular, normal people that, you know, women who

are meant to be, uh, caregivers and the.

Springers of life could actually kill this created this cognitive dissonance.

There was a word,

it's called amania.

That's hilarious.

I had to look that one up.

ERO mania was not what I thought it was.

Basically the people found it very difficult to see violence

and women connected and something that women were not capable of.

Such savagery.

So this is why it was so crazy.

So crazy

that this was not natural to the female character.

Right.

And we know it's very natural.

Well,

but the literature has developed and, and I think attitudes have

progressed, if that's the right word.

And there was a, a famous book, I think it was in, came out in the

nineties called Shoot the Women First.

Mm-hmm.

Which was a early study of female terrorism.

And that was apparently the motto of the German counter-terrorism force.

You wanna shoot the women first?

'cause they're the most dangerous.

I mean, we've already had the Bonoff gang for God's sake in the early 1970s.

I'm not sure why people were so shocked.

Can we start moving to the capital bombing, which is the title of your book?

Yeah.

So they're in the middle of a, of a campaign.

Their first bombing is out on Staten Island of all places, and there was this

little FBI resident office in the St. George neighborhood in Staten Island.

Mm-hmm.

They wound up bombing that and doing some damage and decided, you know, you know

we're gonna hit these targets that are really going to shock the imperialists.

We're gonna show the third world liberation movements that

there are people in the belly of the beast who have their back.

We are gonna be the US outpost and violence supporters of these movements.

So in November of 1983, they decide, they decided it earlier.

US capitol if you're gonna be involved in terrorism and, and admittedly

it's somewhat symbolic terrorism.

I don't think they went into this saying, we want kill a lot of these

rich, fat white guys who have their boots on the necks of the third world.

It's symbolic.

Every American knows it.

Most people in the world probably have seen it in pictures

anyway, built with slave labor.

Mm-hmm.

On top of everything else.

So November 7th, 1983, they came into town the night before, roll into town, stay at

a sleazy motel out on Rhode Island Avenue.

No security to speak of the Capitol had actually already been bombed

in the early 1970s by the weather underground, but still there was

really no security to speak of.

They're able to plant a bomb outside the main chamber, the Senate Chamber.

It goes off.

It does what's purported to be.

Someone claims it does a million dollars worth of damage, doesn't kill anybody.

Hell of a racket.

People outside can hear it.

You know, out on Constitution Avenue, they sent a message to National Public Radio.

Perhaps another reason for the Trump administrations hatred.

Npr.

Anyway, they pick NPR, which broadcast this message.

It's from a group called the Armed Resistance Unit.

The men and women, mostly women in May 19th.

They adopt different names.

Red Giver of Resistance, armed Resistance Unit, things like that.

Not uncommon for terrorist groups.

And, um, there's a message tonight.

We bomb the US Capitol.

It's an international news story.

A million dollars worth of damage, big crater.

They managed to shred a portrait of Senator John C. Calhoun, a hated

figure, a man who the great historian Richard Hofstadter referred to as

the Carl Marx of the masterclass, the theorist of secession.

And anyway, his picture gets blasted and uh, it gets press attention.

But you know, I've mentioned to so many people, I've talked about this to so many

people, people who were in Washington, even people who were in Washington at the

time, it's like, I don't remember that.

I think.

During the seventies, there were literally thousands of

bombings in the United States.

That was the lingua franca of many, many groups and individuals.

I mean, thousands of terrorist bombings.

Hard to remember.

Now we're talking 1983, so this is sort of after that wave.

I think people sort of enured to this.

Like the way we treat school shootings a little bit.

Yeah.

I think there was some of that.

We're numb to it.

Yes.

Well, that was interesting when you brought up that poor Brinks

driver who had almost lost his arm during the robbery and then ended

up dying in the World Trade Center.

Gideon and I were speaking like there's people who have survived school shootings

only to survive other mass shootings.

Yes.

I'm sure back then bombings were like yet another one.

Yeah.

This is part of this campaign.

They go on to bomb a computer center at the Washington Navy Yard.

They bombed an officer's club, the National War College also in dc.

They bombed.

This is over like a two year period.

Patrolman's Benevolent Association office.

Why?

Because they're opposed to cop killers.

They bomb the Israeli Aircraft Industries Association on West 23rd Street.

Why?

Because they hate Zionism.

They hate what they call settler colonialism in Israel

and occupied West Bank.

The other one that was interesting is what they were anti-apartheid,

and so they tried to go after a South African football team that was landing

at JFK, but they got the dates wrong, and so they threw acid on a cop.

Anyway,

yeah, so this was the South African rugby team, the national

rugby team, the spring box.

They were seen as these ambassadors for the apartheid regime, and they

were on this sort of goodwill tour.

There had been a place in upstate New York where there was supposed to be

some kind of exhibition match that got bombed, that got called off the spring

box show up at JFK, supposedly May 19th gets the days wrong and the people in May

19th decide, well, we're gonna have this demonstration anyway, throwing punches.

They throw some kind of acid.

One of the women, Donna Bup, they all get arrested.

You know, they go to trial, they're at Rikers Island, Donna Bup.

The woman who threw the acid strangely is out on bail.

She escaped.

She absconded.

She's still on the run.

You know, as late as 10 years ago, there were press reports that Donna

and Betty Ann Duke were sort of a Thelma and Louise, you know, roaming

the country together as fugitives and, and, and Bora is certainly still.

Wanted a hundred thousand dollars.

If anyone has any information.

Do you want to talk about Betty Anns falling into the clutches of the state?

Sure.

She's our bad Elizabeth.

And that was happening when other people were getting arrested as well, right?

Yeah, so the Brinks robbery really sets the law enforcement and

prosecutorial antibodies in motion.

There are a whole bunch of arrests.

One of the most spectacular was of Susan Rosenberg and Tim Blanc.

Mm. They were caught in Cherry Hill, New Jersey at a storage locker that

had hundreds of pounds of degenerating, dynamite, all kinds of automatic

weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, fake social security

cards, fake IDs for FBI agents.

They get caught.

And later during the course of this, you know, multi-year investigation, the

police are going into safe houses or places they suspect May 19th has been.

And one of the names they keep coming across and finding fingerprints of,

and this was on the array at a M 19 member's apartment on West 95th Street.

Sylvia Barini and Italian National lived in the United States.

Anyway, they find information about Betty Ann Duke.

They find her prints in this apartment, and so this is November of 1982.

So they really start, they say, oh yeah, keep an eye on her.

By 1985, by the spring of 1985, things are really getting hot for the members of

May 19th, a bunch of the May 19th people.

They, they're kind of peripatetic.

They're moving around, they're, they're renting apartments here and there.

They move.

Periodically for reasons of security.

They wind up in Baltimore of all places, and Betty Ann rents an

apartment under assumed name and a bunch of the, the women are there.

The FBI has this under surveillance.

Betty Ann and Alan Berkman, the doctor really start getting freaked out.

They decide to leave the FBI raids.

They capture Laura Whitehorn ex weather underground person, prominent

member of May 19th, and Berkman and Betty decide we're gonna run for it.

We're gonna go to the Poconos, kind of an interesting choice.

They're gonna go to a, some kind of like honeymoon hotel in the Poconos and

they're gonna hide out in the Poconos.

One thing leads to another.

They stopped for dinner.

This is in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Basically the FBI gets the drop on 'em, the FBI decide we gotta stop 'em.

The car is loaded with weapons.

They're both armed with nine millimeter pistols loaded.

They get hauled in the judge, they get hauled in front of a magistrate.

Betty Ann says, Hey, we're revolutionary anti-imperialist is what we do.

Here we are and Berkman, who's already on the run for a whole variety of offenses,

bail, jumping and and other stuff.

Judge is like, no bail for you, but he somehow takes a shine to

Betty Ann Duke and her family, her loving family down in Texas.

They put up a house, you know, to post bond.

She agrees to all these conditions and the judge says, okay,

we're gonna give you bail, but.

You have to go down to Texas and when we have hearings you have to come

back up and you have to stay with a court approved lawyer and you can

only have so much money at a time.

Again, this was an earlier age.

Hard to imagine somebody like that getting bail nowadays, but she got bail.

She comes back to Philadelphia.

This is all being heard in the Eastern district of Pennsylvania, and she has

to stay with this court approved lawyer.

Her name is Judith Chomsky.

This is October, second week of October of 1985.

She's staying with Judy Chomsky.

Judy comes down on the morning of the 14th and sees a note from Betty Ann

and it says, sorry, I'm outta here.

Bye-bye.

Dear John.

Yes.

So since that date, 1985, she's been on the run and we don't

know whether she's still alive.

We're in Cuba.

Could she be in, uh, witness protection?

Is that a possibility or no?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

I mean the feds wouldn't really have much to gain out of it 'cause

they kind of knew everything.

They didn't need her to convict the others.

Yeah.

Some of whom were already in prison.

So she could be like Leonardo DiCaprio in one battle after another.

That's true.

Maybe she's in Mexico.

It's hard to say.

But there's a hundred thousand dollars out there waiting, going to

the person who, uh, gives information leading to her prosecution.

So here's the question that we ask of all our guests at the end is,

so Betty Ann Duke, is she a battle?

Elizabeth, what are your thoughts?

Well, I am a scholar of political violence.

I like to think of myself as analytical.

I'm reluctant to be normative.

I mean, we're not gonna be normative.

Yes, she's a criminal.

She was involved in extreme violence after the Capitol bombing.

They said, well, you know, we decided not to kill anyone this night.

We could've.

And then later on they were writing endlessly.

They were writing these screeds and talking about their programs and their

thoughts and their this and that.

And they talked about the need for selective assassination.

I mean, they wrote it down.

I guess they believe it.

I think Betty Ann could have killed.

For the cause.

So it's a kind of a wishy-washy answer.

I mean, I think as a citizen, yes, I think she was a bad Elizabeth, but as

a student of this kind of violence, I'd have to reserve judgment, put it that way.

I would agree.

So we don't think there's gonna be a movie about these May 19th, there's,

you said, this book got option.

But

yeah,

it's such a great story.

Well, thank you.

I, yeah, it got optioned a couple of times and didn't get picked up.

I mean, I still think the.

Cinematic and dramatic possibilities are kind of endless.

I was told at one point that there were various actresses

who were interested in it.

But they got kind of, and this is just Hollywood gossip and third hand, but

they just got kind of spooked by it and that they would somehow be, I don't

know, portrayed as pro terrorist or it would damage their careers in some way.

And I understand, I mean, I totally get that because to do it

properly, you would have to have empathy with these characters.

They can't be monsters.

I think there's, um, a lot in there.

I think the story, I think it holds up over time.

It certainly does.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to go through this very

complicated but exciting story.

There's many, many moving parts.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much.

Thanks again to Bill Rosenau, everybody by his book tonight.

We Bomb the US Capitol.

It's fascinating.

Thank you for listening to Battle Elizabeth.

Please rate and review the show on places like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We are Battle Elizabeth Pod on Instagram and Substack

Battle.

Elizabeth is recorded at Jet Road Studios.

It is hosted by me, Gideon Evans,

and me, Kathy Egan Taylor.

It's produced and engineered by Will Becton, and our executive

producer is Amber Becton.

Our theme music was composed by Alexis and Danny Gray.

Thanks again for listening.

We'll see you next time.