Biography
Bonnie Urfer is a longtime Nukewatch staff member and anti-nuclear activist who has been arrested more than fifty times at missile silos, weapons sites and military installations. She received an 18-month sentence in 1988 for entering three missile-silo sites and later served six months for a 2000 Plowshares action. For a July 5, 2010 sit-in at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex, a federal jury convicted her of trespass on May 11, 2011 and the court immediately jailed her. She received an eight-month sentence with credit for time served and was released on January 6, 2012.
The Winter 1998–99 Nukewatch Pathfinder names Joel Kilgore, John Heid, Bonnie Urfer and Sarah Arndt as arrested for trespassing during the October 4, 1998 Project ELF protest. It reports possible fines or suspension of Wisconsin driving rights, not an imposed jail term or an individual physical-release date. Source: https://www.laka.org/docu/magazines/nukewatch_pathfinder/1998-4-winter.pdf#page=2
Birth-year sources
- Nuclear Resister, September 14, 2011 — identifies 59-year-old Bonnie Urfer when she was sentenced for the Y-12 anti-nuclear action.
- Nuclear Resister, January 2015 — identifies Urfer as 62 in coverage of her later arrest at the Volk Field drone base. The two dated reports support 1952 as her birth year.
Photograph source
- Wisconsin Historical Society, “Nukewatch at the Gate” — identifies Bonnie Urfer speaking with a local police officer outside Project ELF in January 1999.
1995 custody evidence and limits
The Fall 1995 Pathfinder reports Bonnie Urfer recently released after serving six months for ELF resistance. This is completed physical custody, distinct from her currently recorded 2011–2012 Y-12 episode. It supplies neither an individual intake day nor an actual release day. Cory Bartholomew’s separately stored January admission cannot be copied to Bonnie, and six months is not converted into an exact day count.
Additional individually documented custody
Following the January 30, 1986 Madison courthouse protest, Bonnie Urfer initially signed a citation and was released. Two weeks later she and Sue Nelson pleaded no contest, refused the fine, and actually served two days in jail. Those two completed days are a separate later fine-refusal stay, not continuous imprisonment since the January 30 arrest. Exact admission, release and sentence days are not printed; February 13 is not silently inferred from the rounded phrase two weeks. March 6 trespass charges against Urfer were dismissed after removal from the building, not another multiday prison term.
The Nuclear Resister No.38, March 10, 1986, original PDF pages 2,3.
Nukewatch’s Summer 2002 report says Bonnie Urfer returned home on May 31 after completing a separate five-month term at the federal women’s camp in Greenville, Illinois, for refusing more than $7,000 in restitution to the Navy. It expressly distinguishes this from six months served in 2001 for the Silence Trident action. These were separate custody episodes.
The retrospective chronology reports a May 1993 release from Ashland County jail after discovery that the county trespass ordinance used against ELF protesters did not exist.
In a first-person account in the Winter 1998–99 Nukewatch Pathfinder, Bonnie Urfer described the October 19, 1998 anti-nuclear inspection action at Offutt Air Force Base: participants were searched, handcuffed and held on a bus while exclusion notices were processed, then released at the gate a couple of hours later. Nukewatch Pathfinder, Winter1998–99, PDF page 3.
