The Lexington Six

Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America

Josephine Donovan

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781625345448
  9781625345431
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613767900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards

On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In pursuit, the FBI launched a massive dragnet. Five lesbian women and one gay man ended up in jail for refusing to cooperate with federal officials, whom they saw as invading their lives and community. Dubbed the Lexington Six, the group's resistance attracted national attention, inspiring a nationwide movement in other minority communities. Like the iconic Stonewall demonstrations, this gripping story of spirited defiance has special resonance in today's America. 

Drawing on transcripts of the judicial hearings, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, hundreds of pages of FBI files released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with many of the participants, Josephine Donovan reconstructs this fascinating, untold story. The Lexington Six is a vital addition to LGBTQ, feminist, and radical American history.

chapter one

Lena and May in Lexington

One afternoon in late fall 1974, Letty Ritter, a sometime student at the University of Kentucky, happened to be in the Lexington Post Office with a friend she called her “drug buddy,” Alan Johnson.2 As they idly flipped through a binder of the FBI’s “Wanted” posters, they noticed that two of the sought fugitives bore a certain resemblance to two women who had recently roomed in the house Letty shared with several other women on 341 Lexington Avenue. One in particular, identified on the poster as “Katherine Ann Power—5', 150 pounds, light brown hair, hazel eyes, wears glasses”—struck Letty as resembling a woman she had known as May Kelly. But no, she thought, that’s silly, that can’t be May. Then she noticed a second poster—of a “Susan Edith Saxe—5'4"–5", 160 pounds,” with “dark brown hair,” also wearing glasses and with “an identifying black spot in her left eye”—and her suspicions grew. Letty still wasn’t sure, though. After all, the woman they’d known as Lena Paley had blonde hair (though it was likely bleached) and didn’t look exactly like the FBI poster photo. Nevertheless, the more she thought about it, the more she was shocked to realize that her two former housemates were likely the fugitives on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, wanted for “Interstate Flight, Murder; Theft of Government Property; Bank Robbery,” the posters read. At the bottom of the poster Letty couldn’t help but notice a further alarming warning: “Both may be armed and should be considered very dangerous.” Signed: J. Edgar Hoover. (J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, was dead by then, but the agency hadn’t updated the poster.) Yes, Letty finally decided, Lena and May were indeed Saxe and Power.

Nevertheless, Letty hesitated about what to do with her discovery. Because she was a heavy drug user, smoking marijuana every day and “dropping acid” (LSD) two or three times a week (Ritter 1987)—both of which were illegal with heavy prison sentences for anyone convicted of using, she was afraid of contacting the police or FBI lest they do a house search and turn up drugs or other evidence of drug use, sending her to prison. Alan Johnson, however, told her he doubted the FBI would go after them over a small amount of pot. In the end, Johnson decided it was his “civic duty” to report their suspicion to the FBI and so, pressured by his “straight-laced” girlfriend, Johnson called the FBI on January 6, 1975, at the bureau office in Cincinnati where Johnson lived (Ritter 1987; FBI, January 13, 1975).

Meanwhile, Letty began doing research on Saxe and Power and the Brighton bank robbery by checking through newspapers in the university library. She learned that the policeman who had been killed during the robbery, Walter A. Schroeder, had several kids, which upset her quite a bit. “I felt sorry,” she later recollected, in trying to explain why she eventually cooperated with the FBI and grand jury, “for the policeman” (Ritter 1987).

Moreover, as she thought back on her experience with Lena and May, she realized she hadn’t really liked them, having had a few straightforward confrontations with Lena especially, whom she found too “bossy” and “militant,” constantly harping on political issues. One time, for example, they’d gotten into it over whether Letty’s cat should be allowed on a counter, and it was clear to Letty that Lena and May didn’t approve of her heavy drug use. Letty, who wasn’t particularly political at the time, found herself trying to avoid the two as much as possible. Thus, since she “didn’t even like them,” when the time came to decide whether to testify or face contempt, she “couldn’t see going to jail for them” (Ritter 1987).

On November 12, 1974, at about the same time that the FBI posters caught the attention of Ritter and Johnson, another person, Barry Bleich, a filmmaker connected to Kentucky Educational Television, also happened to notice the poster photos and likewise recognized the two fugitives, especially Saxe, whom he had seen at the health food restaurant Alfalfa where he and she had worked (Kundert 1986; Peterson 1975a). The next day Bleich mentioned his discovery to several friends but decided not to contact the FBI. “They were not criminals to me,” he later told a reporter, Bill Peterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal. “They were just young radicals like we all were at the time. They got caught up in Kent State and the injustice of the war and went out and robbed a bank” (Peterson 1975a).

Somehow the rumors, which by December 1974 were swirling around the Lexington radical community, that Lena and May had been “most wanted” fugitives, reached the ears of a reporter, John B. Wood, at the Boston Globe—probably thanks to Alan Johnson, who notified the Globe through a friend. According to FBI records, on January 7, 1975, a Globe reporter contacted the Kentucky FBI, asking for information (FBI, January 13, 1975). Wood then headed for Lexington, determined to find out if Saxe and Power had indeed spent part of the preceding year in Lexington. On January 12, 1975, Wood published in the Boston Sunday Globe the results of numerous interviews he conducted in Lexington during the preceding week: “Were Susan Saxe and Kathy Power Living in Kentucky?” Wood interviewed Bleich; Letty Ritter; Marla Seymour, later one of the Lexington Six; Betty Rudnick, who was chair of the Nursing Program at UK; and some forty, mostly unnamed, others in the course of his week’s stay in Lexington (Wood 1975a).

Wood gleaned from these sources that Saxe and Power had arrived in Lexington on bicycles in early June 1974 (some of these minor details proved to be inaccurate) and had lived for approximately six weeks in a house called the “Lexington Avenue Women’s Collective”—the house where Letty, Marla, and several others lived—and later for a few weeks in another apartment nearby.

By the time of Wood’s interviewing (roughly January 7–11), most of those who had known Lena and May well were convinced that these two women were indeed Saxe and Power. Marla Seymour, however, portentously declined to identify the two as such. When pressed by the reporter as to why, she replied, “Because this is America.” Although she didn’t elaborate at the time, with those words Marla, almost by instinct it seems, laid down the first line of the Lexington Six defense. This is America. This is not Nazi Germany or any other totalitarian regime where enforced loyalty to the state supersedes all other loyalties—to friends, to family, to lovers. On the contrary.

As rumors continued circulating about the true identity of Lena and May, one of their former housemates in the “Lexington Avenue Women’s Collective,” Nancy Scott, who had since moved to Louisville, went to the local post office, along with her lover Laura Clark,3 to check for herself. “I looked at Lena’s picture, and I knew it was her,” she reported. “It wasn’t a good picture, but it was her. Then I turned the page, and right in the middle of the Post Office, I yelled ‘May!’ I freaked out.” Bleich offered the Globe reporter an even more positive identification; he said he had noticed a distinctive black spot in Lena’s left eye, which is specified on the FBI poster as a distinguishing mark. “We used to sit across the counter from each other and talk. I remember looking at that spot . . . and wondering what it was” (Wood 1975a).

Curiously, despite what was by then a general awareness in the Lexington women’s community that the women they had known as Lena and May were probably Saxe and Power, none of the people John Wood interviewed for his article had as yet been visited by the FBI. Those visits began shortly after the appearance of the Globe piece. So it appears that it was the article, more than the information called in to the FBI by Johnson and Ritter, that triggered the FBI investigation in Lexington. Indeed, an FBI agent later acknowledged that the Globe article had regalvanized the hunt for Saxe and Power, which by January 1975 had “run out of gas.” Until the Globe investigation in Lexington, the agent admitted, the FBI hadn’t received a single bit of information about the two since the time of the Brighton bank robbery in 1970, a fact acknowledged by FBI director Clarence Kelly in a teletype on January 16, 1975. The FBI didn’t even know if they were still alive. But, the agent revealed, “the Lexington clue started it all. . . . The hunt jumped into high gear” (Jones 1975).

Kathy Power and Susan Saxe had met in the late 1960s at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where they both were students. Saxe graduated magna cum laude—a literature major—in 1970, and Power, a sociology major, was set to graduate the following year. Both were active in the movement against the escalating Vietnam War. Like many activist protestors of the day, they were appalled at the atrocities—such as that at My Lai on March 16, 1968, where several hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered by American troops—being reported almost daily in the news. The first notice of the My Lai massacre reached the American public on November 13, 1969, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a series of articles by Seymour Hersh. The Boston Globe featured the Hersh exposé of the massacre the same day on its front page—where Saxe and Power likely learned of the atrocity (Brandeis being within the Boston news compass). In addition, like other antiwar activists, Saxe and Power thought the war was unjust and ill-conceived to begin with.

Also at Brandeis at the time was a charismatic, twenty-five-year-old ex-convict, Stanley Ray Bond, on parole from a nearby state prison in Walpole on an experimental prison-release program. Bond, who had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, shared Saxe’s and Power’s opposition to the war, and he and Power became romantically involved. She later said they had been “soulmates” (Franks 1994, 50) because of their shared political vision.

Up to the time of meeting Bond, Power’s activism had been focused on a National Student Strike Information Center at Brandeis set up after the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970, in which four unarmed antiwar protestors were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen, triggering massive nationwide student protests, demonstrations, and strikes. But during the summer of 1970, she, Bond, Saxe, and two other ex-convicts who had been released to Northeastern University in Boston under a similar parole program—Robert Joseph Valeri, then twenty-one, and William Morrill Gilday, forty-one—formed the Revolutionary Action Force gang, whose purpose apparently was to rob banks to fund the antiwar movement—a sort of “Robin Hood” concept of robbing the wealthy for a just cause, in this case the cause of obstructing the war. In particular, they had in mind a plan to buy “thermite to weld military trains to their tracks.” As the three men had considerable experience in robbing banks—all had been in prison for armed or attempted armed robbery, Bond being said to have committed twenty-five heists within a three-month period in 1968 (Franks 1994, 50, 49)—their expertise could be put to good use. During the summer Bond taught the women how to use weapons, and they read up on how to rob banks and what weapons to use in the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, an underground publication. Thus fortified, the gang proceeded to purchase weapons, steal cars, and rob banks in Los Angeles; Evanston, Illinois; and finally at the Bell Savings and Loan in Philadelphia on September 1, 1970. Three weeks later, on September 20, the gang stole guns and ammunition as well as files from a National Guard Armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts. In these cases, Power was not involved in the actual entering and robbery but rather drove the getaway car, while Saxe and the men, armed, carried out the actual robbery operation.

Three days after the Newburyport job, on September 23, 1970, the gang targeted a branch of the State Street Bank and Trust Company on 300 Western Avenue in Brighton, Massachusetts, a section of Boston. Saxe and two of the men, Valeri and Bond, entered the bank. Gilday took a lookout position in a car just outside the bank, while Power was in a getaway vehicle several blocks from the scene. Saxe, in a red wig and purple dress, carried a .30-caliber semi-automatic rifle (Franks 1994, 51), then commonly used by the military in Vietnam. After retrieving several thousand dollars, the three—Bond, Saxe, and Valeri—successfully drove away to where Power was parked, jumped into her car, and made their escape. Gilday, however, who had remained at the scene, shot police officer Walter Schroeder, who died in a hospital the next day.

Power was deeply shocked by Schroeder’s death: “It was like a world shattering,” she later told reporter Lucinda Franks. “It was a sharp, intense pain. . . . There was this overwhelming sense of wrongness, this wasn’t supposed to be about taking lives—this was about stopping the taking of lives” (Franks 1994, 51). Power remained haunted by Schroeder’s death. Bond, in a somewhat fatuous gesture, decided to send $4,000 from the robbery stash to Schroeder’s widow.

After the robbery Saxe, Power, and Bond met up in Philadelphia on September 24. Then Bond and Power, now with dyed short hair, drove south to Atlanta where they separated permanently. Power then flew to St. Louis where in the baggage-claim area of the St. Louis airport a suitcase Bond had given Power exploded due to a cocked shotgun inside. Kathy was not hurt (a couple of baggage handlers were injured, though), but since her ownership of the suitcase was easily determinable, she made a hasty exit from the airport, bought a wig and new clothes at a local department store, and headed for the bus station. She managed to get out of St. Louis without being discovered and made her way to Detroit, where she met up again with Saxe. From that point on, they traveled together, aided by members of the antiwar underground who helped them get fake IDs.

Stanley Bond was arrested shortly thereafter on September 27, 1970, in Grand Junction, Colorado. He was killed by a homemade bomb on May 24, 1972, in Walpole Prison in Massachusetts, where he was serving a life sentence. William Gilday was captured in New Hampshire the day after Bond. He was sentenced to the death penalty, later reduced to life without parole. Robert Valeri had been arrested right after the robbery on September 23 in Somerville, Massachusetts.

For the next year or so after the robbery Saxe and Power traveled from place to place in the Northeast, never staying anywhere more than four months. It was during this time that they became lovers. (Saxe already thought of herself as a lesbian.) On International Women’s Day, March 8, 1971, Power and Saxe issued a public letter to Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground, a radical antiwar group, in response to Dohrn’s “New Morning—Changing Weather” communiqué, issued in December 1970. The Power-Saxe letter was published as “Underground in America” in the feminist journal off our backs on April 15, 1971. In the letter, which has an exuberant—even euphoric—tone, the two seemed eager to make the point that one can live well and joyfully underground as a fugitive: “We laugh with you, knowing what it means to be underground in Amerika—not hiding in a cellar or living tightassed straight lives disguised as good little middle class Nazis, but just being ourselves with new names and faces, singing, dancing, blowing dope and making love and revolution.” Part of their “revolutionary duty,” they wrote, is “to prove to the people that it is possible to live underground in Amerika. . . . We can not only evade the pigs, but have a good time doing it. . . . In short, we are alive and well” (Power and Saxe 1971).

Dohrn’s communiqué had announced a new strategy for the Weather Underground, forged in the wake of a disastrous March 1970 townhouse explosion in Manhattan in which three activists were killed. “The townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle”; henceforth, organizing, “armed propaganda,” and working together with other radical groups will be equally important. The townhouse operation Dohrn characterized as a “military error,” reflecting “technical inexperience” (Berger 2006, 109).

In response to the Dohrn message, Power and Saxe acknowledged that their Brighton bank robbery was likewise a “military error,” a “fuck-up,” a “political mistake,” which “forced us into hiding.” They did not, however, renounce the use of violence, regret the death of Officer Schroeder, or repent of their actions. Like most radical antiwar manifestos of the day, Power and Saxe’s letter is filled with rage and indignation about the war and the apparent indifference of the American public—clearly their prime moral animus. During the Christmas 1970 bombing of North Vietnam, they found themselves appalled “as [they] walked through the streets watching people do their Christmas shopping and wondering why rocks weren’t flying through the windows of all those big stores with their hypocritical nativity scenes” (Power and Saxe 1971).

In the spring of 1972, Saxe and Power obtained valid Social Security numbers and moved to Torrington in western Connecticut as Lena Paley and May Kelly. They remained deeply bonded emotionally and increasingly committed to radical socialist feminism. During the next two years they lived in the Hartford area where they worked in a health food store owned by Dick and Pat Ensling and openly participated in the alternative feminist community there, frequenting a lesbian bar, the Warehouse, and becoming involved in a consciousness-raising group that included Ellen Grusse, who later with her partner Terri Turgeon refused to cooperate with the FBI and grand jury regarding Saxe and Power in a case that paralleled that of the Lexington Six.

In April 1974, Saxe and Power left Connecticut rather abruptly, traveling by Greyhound bus, to join the Enslings, who had moved to the Stanford, Kentucky, area, about fifty miles south of Lexington. There they helped the Enslings build a house on a rural farm site. While in Stanford, the two occasionally rode into Lexington to have their hair redyed—an important part of their disguise (Power n.d.). When the housing job was complete in early May, Saxe and Power moved to Lexington, bringing with them their high-speed bikes, which they had used to navigate in rural Kentucky. Once in Lexington they sought out the lesbian community and soon found Marla Seymour, a twenty-two-year-old former University of Kentucky student, one of the few out lesbians on campus. Seymour, who worked in a donut shop, had given many talks on lesbian and gay issues and was one of the few women active in the Gay Liberation Front, the only lesbian-gay organization in town. Accordingly, as Marla was well known as a local lesbian leader, Saxe and Power—as Lena Paley and May Kelly—looked her up as someone who could help them integrate into the community.

In their first get-together at a pizza parlor near campus, the two new arrivals told Marla they were lesbians traveling the country who had decided to stopover for a while in Lexington. They didn’t mention anything about their fugitive “most wanted” status. Nor did they in subsequent months ever reveal to anyone in Lexington their true identities. The talk in the pizza parlor devolved into a heavy political discussion—as it always seemed to with Lena and May, many have reported. Marla was impressed by the depth, astuteness, and radicalism of their political thinking. They told her they were getting into separatism—a vein of lesbian feminism that advocated women cutting off completely from men, both personally and politically. This position appealed to Marla, and it became the focus of many heated discussions that summer among Lena, May, and other lesbian feminists in the Lexington community.

Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note |
• The Story |
• chapter one | Lena and May in Lexington
• chapter two | FBI Dragnet
• chapter three | Grand Jury Resistance
• chapter four | Contempt of Court and Jail
• chapter five | Jail Time
• chapter six | Collaboration versus Resistance
• chapter seven | A Culture of Resistance
• chapter eight | Grand Jury Abuse: Growing Public Awareness
• chapter nine | Jill Raymond Freed
• Concluding Summary and Commentary
• Afterword and Acknowledgments |
• References |
• Index |