James Kilgore

James William Kilgore (born July 30, 1947, aka John Pape) is a convicted American felon and former fugitive for his activities in the 1970s with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing terrorist organization in California.

After years of research and writing, he later became a research scholar and ultimately worked at the University of Illinois' Center for African Studies in Champaign–Urbana.

Kilgore grew up in California, graduating from San Rafael High School in 1965.

He attended University of California, Santa Barbara.

He played on the college volleyball team and subsequently became active in politics during the anti-war protests of 1969 and 1970.

During these years, he met Katheleen Soliah, and they developed a relationship.

He graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1969.

After graduating from college, Kilgore and Olson moved to Oakland, California, where he became involved in various political activities.

He also visited a number of political activists who were in prison, including Willie Brandt, convicted for his role in anti-war bombings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1974, Kilgore joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst in February of that year.

According to Hearst's memoir, Every Secret Thing, Kilgore, Soliah, and other friends of theirs assisted Hearst and her compatriots, William and Emily Harris ( Montague), to escape the FBI after six members of the group were killed in a shootout in Los Angeles with police on May 17, 1974.

Hearst also said that Kilgore took part in a number of crimes in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974 and 1975, including a bank robbery in Carmichael, California.

After the arrest of the core SLA members in 1975, Kilgore fled a criminal indictment.

He lived as a fugitive for 27 years, working in Zimbabwe, Australia, and South Africa.

During his time as a fugitive, Kilgore wrote a number of books and articles under the pseudonym John Pape.

Hearst, Harris, and Montague were arrested in September 1975, but Kilgore remained at large.

Evans reported that Kilgore moved in 1991 to South Africa, where he became the Director of Khanya College in Johannesburg, a small institution that prepared youth for university.

In 1997, he and his family moved to Cape Town, where he took a position as co-director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), a unit affiliated with the University of Cape Town which specialized in education for union members.

Upon his arrest, a number of people in South Africa came forward to claim that Kilgore was a changed man; others said that Kilgore had murdered innocents and should stand trial.

South African activist Trevor Ngwane noted that everything Kilgore

"'did in South Africa showed that he had broken with terrorism as a method of struggle, preferring the hard patient slog of building among ordinary workers, in the trade unions and among working-class youth. He exchanged his guns and masks for pen and paper. He stopped living between the cracks and in the night; he built a new life, took care of his family and contributed to the struggle of the workers.'"

Statements of support for Kilgore were also made by representatives of the South African Municipal Workers' Union, Khanya College, the University of Cape Town, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

US authorities had a very different perspective.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft noted that the arrest of Kilgore proved that "terrorists can run and they can try to hide overseas, but in the end we will find them and bring them to justice."

Kevin Ryan, US Attorney in the San Francisco Federal Court, where Kilgore was wanted for almost three decades, said, "The arrest and prosecution of James Kilgore, the last of the fugitive SLA members, represents the Department of Justice's commitment to bringing terrorists, be they domestic or foreign, to justice. We will never forget their acts, and the passage of time will not diminish our resolve or our vigilance."

After being extradited to the United States, Kilgore eventually pleaded guilty to both the possession of explosives charge and his deadly role in the bank robbery in Carmichael.

He developed a career as an educator, researcher, and far-left radical activist, before being arrested in Cape Town, South Africa, in November 2002.

He was extradited to the United States, where he was convicted and subsequently served six and a half years in prisons in California on charges of participation in SLA criminal activities.

During his incarceration, he wrote several novels.

In 2002, Kilgore, along with Harris, Montague and Olson, was indicted for participation in the Carmichael bank robbery, in which a customer was killed.

The defendants, including Kilgore, subsequently pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a plea deal, and all served time in California state prisons for this offense.

He remained on the run for 27 years until November 2002, when he was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa.

According to reports by British journalist Gavin Evans, during his time as a fugitive, Kilgore constructed an alternative identity as Charles "John" Pape and worked as a teacher in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

During that period he married Teresa Barnes and the couple had two children.

He also lived in Australia for two years where he enrolled in Deakin University and eventually earned a Ph.D. using a false name, writing a dissertation on the history of domestic workers in Zimbabwe.

There is no independent verification, however.

The first of these, We Are All Zimbabweans Now (2009), was published a month after his release by Umuzi Publishers of Cape Town.

Kilgore was released in 2009, the last of the defendants in the case to leave prison.

After the arrest of Hearst and the others, federal authorities charged Kilgore with possession of an explosive device and he went underground.

In 2015, he published a non-fiction book, Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.