Tax documents obtained in Twin Falls reveal that the titled owner of the warehouse, Mountain Properties, had leased the hundred-year-old clapboard building the previous August for a six-month period to an “M. Bakunin”- believed to be an alias alluding to 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. “Bakunin’s” stated purpose on the lease agreement was “storage of agricultural materials and food.”
Employees and officers of Mountain Properties were not available for comment. However, residents of Bear Lodge (pop. 326) report increased activity in the vicinity of the warehouse during recent weeks, the “outsiders” hauling truckloads of fertilizer, sawdust, sugar and other materials along the quarter-mile service road leading to the four-story storage building.
“They must have bought the stuff somewhere else because they never came into town to shop,” said Dayton Auhagen, a buckskin-clad trapper who sometimes camped in the now-charred forests surrounding the warehouse. Auhagen described the warehouse tenants as “not from anywhere around these parts. But they minded their own business and we minded ours. That’s the way it is out here. We’re all individualists.”
Southern Idaho Regional FBI Agent-in-Charge Morrison Stowe had another view of the blast victims. “They were political radicals suspected of acts of urban terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism. The substances they were stockpiling are all potential nitrating agents and thus have a potential role in the manufacture of nitroglycerine-based explosives.”
Although he declined to specify the precise process of bomb manufacture, Stowe did say, “It’s not all that difficult. During the last couple of years there have been several manuals circulating among the subversive underground: bomb cookbooks that make do-it-yourselfing sound easy. What they don’t emphasize sufficiently is that nitroglycerine is an extremely unstable compound no matter how you cook it up. Minute variations in heat or humidity can set it off. We believe that’s what happened here. These individuals were manufacturing bombs, an accidental detonation occurred and they blew themselves up.”
Stowe added that while the force of the blast was so great as to render identification of bodies virtually impossible, eyewitness accounts combined with a “careful and longstanding investigation” led the Bureau to believe that at least ten individuals perished in the blast, including two young children, and that no members of the group escaped. He listed the blast victims as:
Thomas Harrison Mader Bruckner, 29, of Darien, Connecticut. A Columbia University graduate, teaching assistant in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding member of the violent Weathermen offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Bruckner was scion of an old Colonial family whose members have included several congressmen and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Catherine Blanchard Lockerby, 23, of Philadelphia and Newport, Rhode Island. A former Columbia University psychology student and Weatherman, Lockerby is described as Bruckner’s live-in companion and also the descendant of an affluent, socially prominent family.
Antonio Yselas Rodriguez, 34, of San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Bronx, New York. A convicted forger and burglar, Rodriguez is wanted on an outstanding fugitive warrant for escape from the Rikers Island prison in New York where he was being held for trial on assault charges related to a December 1970 South Bronx bar brawl. He is termed a “major suspect” in several bombings attributed to the Puerto Rican separatist/extremist group, FALN.
Teresa Alicia Santana, 26, of the Bronx, New York, is Rodriguez’s common-law wife and suspected FALN cell leader.
Mark Andrew Grossman, 24, of Brooklyn, New York. Former New York University political science student, Weathermen founder, and self-described “labor activist,” Grossman was wanted for questioning related to attempted sabotage of several Eastern Seaboard power stations.
Harold Cleveland “Big Skitch” Dupree, 39, convicted murderer and armed robber, paroled from Rahway, New Jersey, state prison in October of last year. Dupree was an official of the Black Fist prison gang and suspected founder of the Black Revolutionary Armed Forces, and was believed to be responsible for a string of armed car robberies in upstate New York.
Norman Samuel Green, 27, of Oakland, California. A former graduate student and teaching assistant in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, a former SDS official and antiwar activist, Green is believed to have been a prime force behind the “People’s Park” riots and other student protests at the Berkeley campus. He is thought to he the “M. Bakunin” to whom the warehouse was leased.
Melba Tamara Johnson-Green, 28, of Oakland, California. Norman Green’s wife and a former law student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the Law Review before dropping out one semester short of graduation. An SDS member, an antiwar and women’s liberation activist and a suspected recruiter for the Weathermen on the Berkeley campus.
Malcolm Isaac Green, 2, of Oakland, California, the Greens’ son.
Fidel Frantz Rodriguez-Santana, 8 months, of the Bronx, New York, the son of Rodriguez and Santana.
Asked why members of groups such as the Black Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Weathermen, which had been known to have experienced significant ideological differences in the past, had cooperated in assembling the explosives cache, Agent Stowe said, “Our information is that they were trying a unity-is-strength approach. All the major subversive groups have fallen upon hard times. Successful prosecution and imprisonment of leaders and exposure of their true goals have decimated their ranks, and new recruits are rare. The only ones left tend to be hard-core, violent radicals. This appears to have been a last-ditch effort to establish a radical confederation in order to disrupt society and damage lives and property. Because of their violent tendencies, it’s no surprise they ended up this way. Unfortunately, the two children were innocent victims.”
Facing the clipping was a poem surrounded on all sides by a border of dozens of tiny Jesuses on crosses.
BLACK LIES, WHITE LIES
blood on sawdust
rich and warm sweet with purpose
the splinters pierce martyrflesh
fascist sky ironred firered
uglysound
mycountrytis ofthee
mycountryrightorwrong they say
meanwhile spilling the sacramental blood
of
righteous ones
truth the ultimate victim
in their game the ultimate game
win or lose
battle
not the war
my heart bleeds too
rich and warm
for
joe hill
sacco and vanzetti
che
leon
triangle fire girls
thirdworld saints
piglies black and white
together
just the battle
because of red red
blood
power to the people!!!!
The last page was taken up by a photo, a group portrait of twenty or so people standing and kneeling in two rows in front of an ivy-covered brick building. The handwritten caption said, “Berkeley, Feb. 1969. Great bash. Even revolutionaries have to party.”
Arms around shoulders. Smiling faces. The joy of camaraderie. A few pairs of marijuana eyes.
Several heads had been haloed in black crayon- five men, three women. Handwritten names above each.
Thomas Bruckner and Catherine Lockerby stood together in the center of the front row. He, pear-shaped and stooped in a faded work shirt and jeans, with limp brown shoulder-length hair and a thick drooping mustache that obscured the bottom half of his face. She, big, heavily-built, bare-footed, wearing a batik muumuu, with her blond hair drawn back severely. Thin lips yielded reluctantly to mirth. Piercing eyes, strong jaw. In another place, another time, she might have matured to a horsey society woman.
Next to her stood “Tonio” Rodriguez, medium-sized and clean shaven, surprisingly clean-cut, his dark hair shorter than that of the others, side-parted. Button-down shirt and jeans. Eyes hidden behind mirrored Highway Patrol sunglasses. Teresa Santana had her arm around him. She was very short, very thin, wore a black turtleneck and tight jeans. Her long black hair was parted in the middle, framing an oval face with fashion-model cheekbones, almond eyes, full lips. A miniature Joan Baez, but hardened by a life more brutal than show biz.