The Return of the Fugitive

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To her mother she was never Alice Metzinger, the teacher and restaurant consultant who lived an exemplary life in Oregon. To her mother she was Kathy, a daughter she had last seen 23 years ago on a weekend visit from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The National Merit scholarship finalist, the winner of a Betty Crocker Homemaker award, the valedictorian of Marycrest, her Catholic high school in Colorado, Katherine Ann Power was the family's "pride and joy," says her older brother. She gave no hint that she was anything but a sweet and bookish child happy to be with the large Power brood.

That weekend in 1970 would be the last time anyone in her family would see her -- until last Tuesday. In the intervening years, she would be the object . of the largest womanhunt in FBI history, one that kept her on the 10-most- wanted list for 14 years. But in the past decade, she was largely forgotten. She fell off the list. She even disappeared from the records at Brandeis. Says Catherine Fallon of the alumni office: "She is not in our data base. It's like she never was here." Her reappearance and surrender in Boston last week produced a surge of images among those who had lived through the turbulent '60s and early '70s -- flower children, protest marches and violence in the name of peace. Power was an apparition from another time, an era whose idealism now seems musty and quaint except when it went badly awry. Power still felt the agony of her deeds, and she finally relinquished her freedom to the memory of a crime that would not let go of her conscience.

Through the years, the only memory the Power family had of their daughter was yellowing newspaper clips they had sorrowfully added to a family album the day their daughter-turned-radical robbed a bank. A policeman, the father of nine young children, was murdered. As the years passed, one brother feared that Kathy's parents "would die before there was a chance to mend fences." But last spring they received a call from an FBI agent working on the case. She was negotiating with a woman who might be their daughter. What questions could she ask that only the real Katherine Power would know?

Ask this mysterious woman who the neighbors were on one side of the house in which Kathy grew up, her parents said. What were their habits? Who was the friend in eighth grade who had a life-threatening illness? Who was the relative who used to take Kathy fishing? The woman answered the questions correctly; so on Sept. 5, 1993, her parents and siblings not only learned Katherine Power was alive, but also that she was married and had a teenage son. Katherine's mother cried.