Biography
Grew up in California, graduated San Rafael High in 1965 and UC Santa Barbara in 1969, where he was the boyfriend of Kathleen Soliah and active in radical leftist circles. Joined the SLA's second formation in 1974 and participated in the April 1975 Crocker National Bank robbery in Carmichael during which Myrna Opsahl was killed. After a 1975 federal indictment he fled the U.S. and lived as a fugitive for 27 years in Zimbabwe, Australia, and South Africa under the alias "John Pape," completing a Ph.D. and writing widely on African political economy. Captured in Cape Town November 8, 2002, he pleaded guilty May 2003 to second-degree murder (Opsahl) and to federal explosives and passport-fraud charges. James William Kilgore was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army from 1974. After the May 17, 1974 LAPD-FBI raid that killed six SLA members in South Central Los Angeles, he and the surviving members went underground. He left the United States in 1975, lived under various assumed identities for 27 years, and from the late 1980s built a life in Cape Town, South Africa, where he became an academic and lecturer at the University of Cape Town. He was identified and arrested in Cape Town on November 8, 2002.
He was extradited to the United States and pleaded guilty in May 2003 to second-degree murder in connection with the April 21, 1975 SLA bank robbery in Carmichael, California in which a customer named Myrna Opsahl was killed. He was sentenced to 6 years in California state prison and was released on parole in May 2009. He has since become a leading academic on U.S. mass incarceration and the author of several books, including the prison-abolition introduction Understanding Mass Incarceration (2015).
