Is Leo Burt alive?

I run the website http://leoburt.com and, to be honest I don't know. I have heard form people who knew

Leo from high school or from the U of Wisconsin in Madison but no confirmed sitings after the documented disappearance.

I have read two books about this. Rads, by the late Tome Bates and the extremely rare “The Madison Bombings,published in South Africa. The latter book is more revealing in several ways. First off, it described how the Anderson brother's father was a violent domestic abuser, especially to the two boys. People growing up in this this kind of environment often exhibit what Sigmund Freud would call “Projection”. IE: Rather than dealing with the root cause of their problem. The Armstrong brothers appeared to focus in on stopping the “violence of the Vietnam war” rather than their own “issues”. Usually such people are pretty harmless but they can sometimes respond to the “siren song” of radical political activists in a way that seems irrational most people. At worst, they get immune to feedback. Examples of this were the “New Years Gang” failed air-bombing attack on the Baraboo, Wisconsin arsenal and munition works. Basically, they dropped Molotov cocktails from an airplane in the snow which quickly extinguished them. By the accounts in the book it is lucky the plane didn't blow up from gasoline leaks. They issued a communique about the attack before surmising it had failed. Another was their mistaken firebomb attack on the Primate research lab when they got their target wrong.

The local media no doubt had a field day with this. One bit of punditry labeled it “Guerrilla Warfare” because they mistakenly targeted the primate research lab. You figure they would quit when they were ahead but they plowed on. After the Madison the Armstrong's tend to play “true confessions” with the people who were helping them by telling them who they were and what they did. This is a dumb move for several reasons. I eliminates “plausible deniability” and it draws people into illegal activity where they can can potentially be prosecuted rather than “playing dumb”. Also, it greatly increases you chances of getting caught. I suspect that Leo Burt realized this and decided to get estranged from from the Armstrong brothers. I'm not sure how David Fine, who escaped and turned himself in six years later fit into this. David Fine was obviously smarter than the Armstrong brothers but he made some key mistakes when he contested his rejecting into the lawyer bar for moral torpidity.

My main are of interest and research is the Symbionese Liberation Army. They had some remarkable similarities with the Madison bombers. First off they issued “death warrants” including one to a person who had died six months before (“Death to the dead”, the media pundits proclaimed)<grin!> As a fugitive the SLA's Micheal Borton also, did the “true confessions” thing “spilling the beans” to people helping them. This seemed to have caused an estrangement with the other two SLA fugitives. Borton moved to Boston and the other two lived in the Twin Cities, Minnesota for a while.

I believe that Leo Burt got that “I'm surrounded by incompetents” epiphany and decided to ditch the Armstrong's before he got arrested. After that, I believe that Leo Burt basically “lurked” the protest movement and decided that the revolution wasn't going to happen and the Madison bombing wasn't going to be the “spark”. Two years after his disappearance Leo apparently wrote a “manifesto” which was sent to a West Coast leftist publication. I haven't read it or obtained a copy (anyone have one I will post it). It was said to be very similar to the Unibomber manifesto. I'd have to see it to tell, my knowing the “lingo” helps. I consider it to be “Dear John” letter to the far left after which Leo Burt basically “dropped out”. This was very common outside of the “core activists” of that era. The response to the Madison Bombing was overall extremely negative, it came to be dubbed “The Hiroshima of the New Left”. It had a strong negative effect on a movement already in a steep decline

(In the fall 1969 and string 1970 nationwide “college” protests drew more than one million. In the spring of 1971 the “May Day protests drew 30,000 nationally, a 97% decline. It never recovered after that.) *

In trying to find Leo Burt it might be good to study the “Mall of America Man” http://citypages.com/databank/24/1195/article11613.asp to get an idea of the identification techniques. Leo Burt was also a white male brought up in a healthy middle class way. This shows up on the skeleton or autopsy even if the person is now middle age. Unlike the Mall of America Man Leo Burt's fingerprints are on file. What I found out with James Kilgore is that anytime someone has fingerprints taken by authorities they are eventually put into the central government database. My father died in 2003. He was buried from a mortuary where a number of his close relatives worked. A positive ID was definitely not a problem but fingerprints were required for a full death certificate. Every so often someone is found this way after they die. There is an industry in this not just for fugitives but for old bills, deadbeat dads and such.

If Leo Burt were found dead with an intact body that could yield fingerprints this should have showed up. If Leo had become a relatively common transient (IE: “wino”) he would have likely been arrested and fingerprinted a few times even if he got thrown into detox. Detox and medial Emergency Rooms like getting paid so they get suspicious of people without an ID. Increasingly they run these through through computers, especially if they don't get paid and the person seems a US citizen middle class education white person.

Thus it is likely Leo Burt has a valid ID. A popular trick was the use of “dead baby” birth certificates. I recall in the early 1990's I had to provide a birth certificate for work even though I had worked there since 1973 because of new immigration, tax and “deadbeat dad” laws. There are now very specific requirements to report new hires. It catches some fugitives but it is basically t\designed for child support collection. With modern computers, especially after 9-11 this process is a lot more efficient.

James Kilgore took on the identity of John Pape, who died shortly after birth in Seattle. Death records are still pretty “iffy” to find because it wasn't until the early 1990's when Social Security records were issued at birth. (part of crackdown of both custodial and non-custodial parents claiming the same child as a tax deduction. There were over one million fewer children claimed as tax deductions the year after a Social Security number was required for the child to be a deduction. If Leo Burt took such an identity he would have applied for a Social Security card over age 21. This is very rare for a white male. Leo likely took a draft physical (I did and I am two years younger) but a “dead baby” wouldn't. There is a “flag” if that is cross checked. Also, the white infant mortality rate wasn't really high in the the late 1940's. The typical technique was to read the obituaries or visit a cemetery and look for a gravestone of a “dead baby”. Almost all cemetery records are computerized and most are on line now because of the popularity of genealogy. These screenings wouldn't exactly pinpoint Leo Burt if he is using the “dead baby” ID but it would have got it down to a manageable number.

In the case of James Kilgore here is an example of “corny captures”. When Kathleen Soliah was arrested the newspapers mentioned she had been “Nancy Bennet” in Seattle doing a feminist theater where she said she might have to leave on short notice. This seems a flag so I suspected she was still with a group. She arrived here in the Twin Cities around 1977. I was re watching the movie “Patty Hearst” . They apparently cast the James Kilgore character very well because I thought “I met this guy”. I narrowed the time down to mid September 1977. My rather weak SLA connection was that an SLA member Camellia Hall, who was killed in the Los Angeles shootout worked in the Hennepin County (MN) Adult welfare office where I then worked. She had left a couple of years before but news crews were all afternoon the day of the LA shootout. It was a Friday so after work I headed over to tell my then girlfriend of the office excitement. Girlfriend and roommate were consoling a distraught guy. Seems the girlfriend's roommate used be be the roommate of Hall and the guy was Halls boyfriend before Hall moved to California for good two or three years before the shootout.

Somehow this got me the reputation in the Minneapolis “hippie” district” as the guy who knows the SLA. Zoom forward to 1977 and I had more time than money so if someone to talk about the about the SLA it was basically “If your buying, I'm listening”. Mostly people who had know Hall who grew up in Minneapolis and attended the U of MN Minneapolis campus. When “Kilgore” approached me I think he said that he was from Ohio and and he had known hall from the U of MN. He seemed vauge on details of her, I had talked with a lot of Hall's Minneapolis friends. He stated that he had “never been west of the Mississippi” we were on the Minneapolis West Bank named because the Mississippi bisects the city. Afterward I figured out that is a “coastal” term not Midwest. Nice guy, he seemed more articulate and educated than most of the “hippies”. The local police I knew quit asking about Patricia Hearst and the Harris's so I was unaware of any SLA fugitive in September 1977.

I was always an avid reader so I had a few books with me. I flagged a few passages while talking to “Kilgore” and he wore “coke bottle” glasses to read. One I showed off a lot was “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Bob Pirsig. John Sutherland, a real person who was the “cynic” in the book worked with me at the Hennepin County Adult welfare office. Kilgore had read the book and understood it better than most people. It was an enjoyable evening. We went to a former gin mill, then the “Golden Leaf” now Whiskey Junction on the West Bank. http://whiskeyjunction.com/history.htm This is right next to the Cabooze and Joint bars. http://cabooze.com/ It was 1 AM bar close time so, with “Kilgore” I worked the crowd and found two very nice woman who were receptive to the idea of accompanying the two of us to Perkins http://www.perkinsrestaurants.com/home.html .(like Denny's) “Kilgore” suddenly “remembered” that he had a job to get to in the morning (he had not mentioned work and had asked about jobs. Hmm!). These two fine young woman declined the invitation to go to Perkins with just me and not “Kilgore”. <grr!>

As absurd as it sounds this might be the been the “key”. It seemed to indicate that if this was Kilgore (probably but I have not been able to verify) he was still with Soliah. That also led me to recall the “Nancy Bennet” in Seattle and conclude that Kilgore was also there. I shared my theories with my Los Angeles police and district attorney contacts starting in the summer of 2000. Eventually the FBI and Interpol checked the “dead baby” records in Seattle and the Twin Cities and matched records up with the “dead bqby” John Pape. It is still a lot of manual record checking but computerization of records make it a lot easier today. The FBI might give someone in the private sector with genealogy expertise a stipend and a reward if they can find matches and give them restricted database access.

Last updated January 03, 2008

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