

Ferdon opposed this plan, arguing that Latimer’s sudden appearance could be a ploy. Once she was granted immunity, he feared, she would simply change her story and confess to planning and executing the bombing alone, clearing herself and her former comrades of criminal liability. He won the argument, and local detectives renewed their efforts to find more evidence or informants to support a prosecution.

Caution in filing charges based solely on Latimer’s statements may have been warranted for other reasons. Testimony from criminally implicated informants is notoriously problematic for prosecutors, who must explain to a jury why their witnesses aren’t merely lying to avoid more severe punishment. Hence the need, in an ideal world, for more extensive corroboration of what happened the night of the bombing, such as physical evidence—in the form of fingerprints or ballistics—to back up Steen’s and Latimer’s stories.

Ayers and e Dohrn, photographed 
in 2001, are now professors in Chicago
Todd Buchanan
Ayers and e Dohrn, photographed in 2001, are now professors in Chicago
Noel inspects Weather Underground members' belongings during a 1971 apartment search
Courtesy Max Noel
Noel inspects Weather Underground members' belongings during a 1971 apartment search


The FBI’s witness statements are also less comprehensive than investigators would like. For instance, neither Steen nor Latimer said they had been present for the construction of the bomb (though Reagan said at least one of them reported seeing such bombmaking materials as detonator cord at the planning session), and neither had seen who placed the device on the station’s window ledge.

And then there is the most vexing obstacle to a successful prosecution of the Weathermen based on former collaborators’ confessions: the inconvenient fact that an entirely different set of militant activists has also claimed credit for the bombing.

*     *     *

On Aug. 28, 1971, Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington, cadres of the violent Black Panthers splinter group known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), pulled up in a car alongside the patrol cruiser of San Francisco Police Sergeant George Kowalski at an intersection in the Mission District and leveled a submachine gun at him. The BLA was suspected or convicted of multiple attacks on police officers in the 1970s, including the 1971 shotgun killing of Sergeant John Young at San Francisco’s Ingleside Police Station. On this occasion, however, they were unsuccessful. The gun, loaded with the wrong type of ammunition, jammed. Bottom and Washington were arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Over the next month, Bottom, while in police custody, made an extraordinary series of statements, according to investigators familiar with his case. Among other confessions, he reportedly told SFPD homicide inspectors Frank McCoy and Eddy Erdelatz that he had personally planted the bomb that killed McDonnell and that he had helped plan the Ingleside attack, which took place while he was in jail.



Another former investigator connected to the case is more blunt: Bottom, he said, “would confess to the Quake of ’89.”

Mark Goldrosen, a San Francisco attorney who represented Bottom when he was charged with seven other defendants in 2007 for the 1971 attack on Ingleside Station, concurs with investigators’ dismissive takes on his client’s statements about the Park bombing. “If he had admitted it, and if it was considered credible,” he said, “this would have been prosecuted a long time ago.”

Another former BLA member, Ruben Scott, also told police in the 1970s that the organization was involved in the Park Station killing, according to law-enforcement sources. Scott reportedly said that he was not personally present the night of the bombing.

The BLA connection to Park Station may be a red herring—or it could mean that McDonnell’s murder was simply the result of two militant groups working in tandem. A prime tenet of the Weathermen’s through-the-looking-glass revolutionary doctrine was that it was their duty to shed “white-skin privilege” and put themselves at the service of black radicals, and there are indications that the affinity between the BLA and Weathermen was particularly strong. For example, the BLA collaborated with former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert in a 1981 armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, that ended with the deaths of two police officers and a Brink’s armored-truck guard. And Ayers and Dohrn named their son, Zayd Dohrn, after BLA member Zayd Shakur, who died in a shootout with New Jersey state troopers in 1973.

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