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Eryl Hendra's Camera Shop was an eclectic print shop and gathering place in San Francisco in the nineteen sixties and seventies. It was owned by Errol Hendra, a former seaman from New Zealand author Jerry Spieler.
It was a camera shop on Folsom Street, but they did all the printing of the various flyers and posters for the political community in the Bay Area.
They also did rock concert posters, underground comic art, and so on, and the shop seemed more like a clubhouse than a business. In a footnote in his book The Pirates in the Mouse Disney's World Against the Underground, Bob Levin describes the scene.
His place was wall to wall posters with Hell's Angels, rock stars, underground cartoonists, dope dealers, and sometimes the Sheriff of San Francisco hanging out in the dark room, sitting on the waterbed itemized as a depreciable water storage facility on Hendra's irs returns, joking, bantering, smoking weed, playing out the dramas Hendra like to set in motion, like he was the ringmaster of a Bedlamite circus.
Dan O'Neil was a cartoonist with a cartoon called Odd Bodkins, which was very popular at the time. Sarah Jane would go visit them and they would basically sort of put her on and laugh behind her back and get her all excited. They would tease Sarah Jane and she didn't realize she was being teased, and she would get all worked up about their conversations. But it was Dan O'Neill who said, if Ford wasn't president anymore and Rockefeller would
become president, all hell would break loose. And they were joking, but Sarah Jane took them seriously, and when that conversation happened, they realized that she thinks that's real.
She really thinks that's real.
In her interview in Playboy magazine months after the attempt, Sarah Jane talked about this motive, Oh.
Ford of the Nevish. I have nothing against him personally. It was the office of the Presidency that I was trying to attack. Killing Ford would have shaken a lot of people up. More importantly, it would have elevated Nelson Rockefeller to the presidency, and then people would see who the actual leaders of the country are.
Nelson Rockefeller was a member of the extravagantly wealthy Rockefeller family, considered it a moderate. He'd run unsuccessfully three times for the Republican presidential nomination before Ford named him as vice president after Nixon's resignation. Referring to Rockefeller as Rocky, Sarah Jane went on to say, killing Ford.
Would have meant that people would have had to face Rocky head on, which should rouse a lot of people out of their rationalizing daydreams.
I'm Toby Ball.
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
We feel that the murder of Popeye Jackson and Sally Boy was the work of.
Pigs Episode ten. It serves the pig's interests to create confusion.
In the early morning hours of June eighth, nineteen seventy five, Popeye Jackson was murdered along with a friend named Sally Voy as they sat in a parked car just a couple of blocks from Sarah Jane Moore's apartment. His death was ominous for Sarah Jane. Popeye had been her mentor and entree to the radical groups in the Bay Area. She had recently accused him of being a police informant, and it seemed likely this had contributed.
To his murder.
But in truth, it was she who was an informant, and many people in the Bay Area knew this. She had good reason to believe she was not safe at the time. Ellen Hume was a young reporter with the Los Angeles Times during this period. Sarah Jane went by the name Sally. When Allen mentioned Sally, she is talking about Sarah Jane.
One time she called and she was absolutely terrified. She said, I'm in danger. My life is in danger. I said, what are you talking about? She said, Popeye's just been killed and he was about two blocks from her apartment. And I didn't know anything about her involvement with Popeye. She hadn't told me about Popeye. So Popeye's murder really
freaked Sally out. After Popeye's murder and Sally, who always acted as if she had several screws loose, I gave her fifty dollars, which I never did, not for the story, but I said, get out of town, cool off for a while. Because she was so scared. She was literally shaking. I flew up and was with her in her apartment. A couple days later, she seemed to be okay again.
As Sarah Jane wrestled with how to protect herself after Popeye's murder, the investigation into his death got underway. His murder was yet another black mark for a city that had been hit with high profile violence and gained a reputation for fear and paranoia author Jeffrey Tubin.
In the nineteen seventies, San Francisco was synonymous with urban decay.
You get to ask yourself one question, Do I feel lucky?
Well?
Do you bunk?
Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry was a San Francisco detective. The Streets of San Francisco, Michael Douglas's TV series was based on the idea that San Francisco was a very dangerous place to be a detective.
In the night's episode.
Death Watch by seventy two, seventy three, seventy four, you had cops being ambushed and killed because they're cops. I think San Francisco lost seven officers in a year and a half period, which was unheard of. My name is Duffy Jennings. I am a retired journalist and publicist who lives here in the San Francisco Bay area. I was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen eighty. The city just morphed into an
ugly place. This kind of random violence, political violence just rolled on through this seventies. There was just no letup.
But the violence also gave opportunities to San Francisco's homicide detectives to make their names in high profile cases. One of those detectives was Frank Falson, who we heard from last episode.
Every day was a new exciting day. Every day was a new and exciting case. And being young, energetic and always wanting to work the big cases, I didn't have to look very far. They were right in front of me.
Falson was assigned to Popeye's case.
Well, initially, we're totally in the dark when we started researching the background of Popeye Jackson. And it wasn't like he was a wallflower. He was very well known in the criminal justice system. Within two days, a citizen called in about finding a barrel of a gun. It was the nine millimeter automatic gun. It had been discarded in the street. We knew it was probably linked to our murders, but without the rest of the gun, we just booked it into the property clerk's office to see if it
would prove to be influential at a later time. The radical violent underground was a tangled web of competing New left radical extremists. We started looking into all those radical extremists individuals, trying to talk to people that might be able to point us in the right direction. Popeye Jackson was loved by many and hated by some.
Popeye was executed in the early morning of June eighth. As Frankfelzhan mentioned, the investigation would center on the complicated ecosystem of small, violent radical groups in the Bay Area. The trail actually was laid five days before Popeye's murder. On June third, a mysterious group called the New World Liberation Front or NWLF, had sent an open letter to San Francisco radio station KPOO accusing Popeye of being a
police informant. In the days following Popeye's assassination, a commentary on whether his death was justified played out in a letter to the editor page of the underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb. It began with two Communica's signed by the NWLF. The first Communica claimed credit for Popeye's execution. It was quickly identified as a fraud. It is still unclear who wrote this letter. The second, much longer Communica arrived soon after.
It was regarded as genuine. In it, the NWLF stated that Popeye's execution was justified, but denied that they had actually carried it out. It harshly condemned the murder of Sally Voi, and then it denounced the first fake communicate as disinformation. Its language was heated.
When the ruling class pigs and steal fear and oppressed peoples. We must be able to decipher pig shit from revolutionary tactics and respond by drawing together, not in paranoia, but in strength and imagination.
It ended by calling on an underground prison group called the Black Gorilla Family to conduct an analysis of Popeye's murder. This analysis, it was implied, would be the definitive judgment. The NWLF was just one of several groups to communicate through that week's edition of the Berkeley Barb. Something called the People's Commission of Inquiry Berkeley sent an open letter asserting that the nwlf's June third letter contained only accusations
and no actual evidence. It also claimed that no true revolutionary group would have executed Popeye under what they called these circumstances. The letter went on to say that if the NWLF didn't denounce the murderer and the previous communications about Popeye.
That we would have to assume that the NWLF is a creation of the repressive forces of the state, created to so confusion and division among the general population and a left, in particular as to the true actions, behaviors, and policies of revolutionary underground groups.
In short, the NWLF accused Popeye of being an agent of the government, and the People's Inquiry accused the NWLF of being an agent of the government for making that accusation. To further complicate the situation, many on the left thought that Popeye had most likely been executed by the government in the form of the police. Pat Singer, Popeye's wife, who was nine months pregnant at the time, told the Berkeley.
Barb Popeye's most outstanding enemies were the police. They had talked about him being killed and made threats from the California Department of Corrections down to the blacks and whites on the SFPD. They were his most outspoken enemies and the ones who would have benefited most from his death.
Rumors also circulated that the racist Aryan Brotherhood had put out a ten thousand dollars contract for the murder of Popeye and four other unnamed radicals in the Bay Area.
Paranoia reigned, so what we saw here was factions of this extreme left, very divided on who they felt should be supported and who should be taken out.
None of it was any good.
The Berkeley barb Letter section also carried two anonymous letters, both concerned with the effects of violence within the left. A letter signed by a comrade concluded this way.
We his fellow revolutionaries killed Popeye, regardless of who pulled the trigger. We who got angry and left him, We who feared displeasing his followers, We who were afraid to confront and struggle with a strong but misled comrade.
The second letter referred to the executions of Popeye and Oakland School's superintendent Marcus Foster instead of the violence.
The result of this approach has been confusion, divisiveness, paranoia, and increased physical and mental oppression for us. All it was signed with intense feelings some of the people.
A week later, the Black Gorilla Family responded to the nwlf's requests for an analysis. This is from a report on KPFA, a Bay Area community radio station.
Last week, when the New War Liberation Front communicate denying responsibility for the June eighth execution of Popeye Jackson, they also called on the Black Gorilla Family to use its vantage point from inside prison to analyze some of the charges made earlier against Popeye Jackson. Today, the Black Gorilla Family issued their response, which reads as follows. To the people, this is long in coming because we had decided not
to become involved. However, due to the conflict and speculations which have arisen, we feel it is necessary to clarify our position and give an objective opinion.
The communicay was long, but this paragraph summed up the findings.
We feel that the murder of Popeye Jackson and Sally Voi was the work of pigs. As to the murder of Sally Voi, there is no justification to the left, especially the Gorilla Army, but it serves the pig's interests to create confusion within the left and to maintain control through that confusion, the charges lodged against Popeye we feel are void of foundation.
The Black Gorilla family said it was the work of the pigs. In other words, they placed the blame on the police department, that the police for some reason didn't like Popeye Jackson, didn't like what he was promoting, and the police killed Popeye. But this, obviously for us, was totally disregarded because there was no indication of that at all. There was also a word that Popeye was killed because he was an FBI informant. Well, we checked with the FBI.
They don't give up their informants, so we hit a wall there. To our knowledge, Popeye Jackson was not an informant.
But Falzan is still not sure. The question over whether or not Jackson was an informant would continue to be debated, but the public statements on Popeye's murder and not tackle a big ethical question. Does a snitch deserve to be executed? In the radical underground, it seemed the answer was taken for granted. Yes, a code of death for informants seems to have a kind of movie logic to it, But to Sally Voy's sister Lee Darby, it is almost a farce.
As it turned out, all their investigation happened on the San Francisco and pop By Jackson end of things. He was accused of being a snitch. And you know, that whole thing is just so ridiculous. You could be a murderer and a rapist and a child molester and hold your head high, but a snitch that was grounds for immediate assassination. The worst thing in that underworld is to be an informant, and they weren't, but that probably led to their killing.
My partner, Dave Toski, his original partner had retired. My partner had been promoted to the district attorney lead job as the lead investigator. I and Dave were teamed up together.
If you've seen the movie Zodiac, Dave Tashi is a detective played by Mark Ruffalo.
Were coordinating with the Scoreboard, and we expect to break in.
The case very soon.
What do we really got and they can't get anyone.
On the tip line.
In the early days of the investigation into Popeye's murder, Falzan and Tashi struggled to get a foothold on the case. On June tenth, Tasha even made the statement that though they thought the target was most likely Popeye quote, we can't rule out the possibility that maybe miss Voi had been involved in something that might make her a target. Two days later, it was reported that Falzan and Tashi's boss had forbidden any further public comment about the case.
But the idea that Sally might somehow have been targeted by a militant group was disorienting to her grieving family.
There was just a bunch of them, the New World Liberation Front, the people who who had kidnapped Patty Hurst, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood. All of these groups delivered communic hays about the killings that either supported it or condemned it. And we were just who are these people? And were trying to hunker down at our house, and you know, reporters would call and my dad would you know, We were just bewildered.
Popeye most likely was not an informant. Sally Voy was definitely not, but Sarah Jane definitely was. And soon this fact was published in a newspaper. On June twentieth, the Berkeley bar Ran an article about Sarah Jane's involvement with Popeye and her possible role in his death.
The article began damaging information about Popeye Jackson was leaked to numerous movement groups before his death by a woman who had worked as an informant for the FBI.
Sarah Jane was interviewed for the article and sought to put the best face on her work with the FBI and accusations against Popeye, but it was the most public of confessions that she had betrayed the radical Left. She confessed that she had been an informant and about the information she had distributed in the left about Popeye Jackson. In the article, Mark Bramhall of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was quoted as saying we had gotten word
from many movement groups that she was a pig. He also said that the VVAW had voted to expel Sarah Jane from their organization. Sarah Jane was becoming more and more marginalized by the radical Left. Isolated and desperate, she headed into the summer of nineteen seventy five determined to show the left that she was not an agent of
Middle America but one of them. The radical young. After the break, it's an indication of the chaos in San Francisco in nineteen seventy five that detective Frank Falzand lost his partner Dave Tosh because Tashi was too busy investigating the high profile Zodiac murderers to help with the Popeye Jackson case.
Dave was also at the time working the Zodiac case in San Francisco, so I grabbed Jim Lessart, lead prosecutor in the DA's office. He and I took this case head on. We realize that we're dealing with very violent underground groups that had fragmented into many arms and tentacles. Group we weren't even aware of turned out to be one of the more violent groups, a group called a Tribal Thumb.
One name which police and certain media have linked to the Jackson Voice shooting is Earl Satyre, a black man who served nineteen years in prison until his release a few years ago. Satur has been labeled the leader of a clandestine guerrilla group known as the Tribal Thumb, and most recently was acquitted of a November nineteen seventy three bank robbery in Berkeley.
Tribal Thumb was another small revolutionary group led by a charismatic black man who had been involved in prison radicalism. In this case, the man's name was Earl Satcher. Satcher was a more formidable figure than SLA leader Donald de Friese. Defrize had picked up radical ideology in prison, but wasn't a leader inside the walls. Sacher, however, was. In nineteen seventy one, E. F. Shaver of Houston's underground newspaper Space
City identified him as SOLIDAD prisons leading black panther. It gets a little complicated, but Sacher was released from prison and then arrested again in nineteen seventy three in connection with the shooting down of a police helicopter in Oakland. It was while he was in jail awaiting trial for this that he met Rick Riley.
I met Earl in the Oakland County jail. I was there fighting my case and they got him brought him in.
It was a police helicopter shot.
Down and some banks had been robbed, so they had Earl in on suspicion on all that stuff.
Right. My name is Rick Riley. I'm known as Sundown.
I was the leader in the Western phil Media prison gang criminal organization.
I was also a member of Tribal Thumb.
Prior to that, I was a martial artist and I used to work out all the time, and Earl loved the martial arts. And so that's how we became friends because he would want to spar with me, and he began talking to me, and he began recruiting me.
He was a good looking black man, muscular, he had charisma.
Earl had charisma, man had a smile that was very charismatic. Women loved him and guys liked him.
Like many of these small groups, Tribal Thumb started in prison and then evolved to a new form when Earl Satcher was released.
The goals were anarchy.
Everybody talked about revolution, right, but anybody who had any sense realized that in America you were not going to have a revolution. The most you could have is anarchy. It's like like the elite, they create problems because they believe they're out of chaos they get control. You know, they'll create a situation and then they'll have the answer to that situation.
Right, So out of chaos they get their power.
They also out of anarchy, the revolutionary groups that were smart would get their power.
In the previous episode, we looked at the efforts by various law enforcement agencies to plan informants in the radical underground. At the time of Popeye's murder, the FBI had two informants within Tribal Thumb. Their names were Gary Johnson and Walter Handsacker. They were able to help Frank fels On break Popeye's murder case.
This informant, Walter Handsacker, was in possession of the stolen guns that had been given to him after a hold up in Crockett, California, where multiple weapons were stolen. These guns were now in possession of Walter Handsacker. Jim Lasart myself, we interviewed Walter and what he told us was quite shocking. He said that the man he was talking to was definitely not a black man and was a white man. His name was Richard London, also known as Ricardo London.
He brought two guns, in particular to Walt Hansacker and wanted Walter to dispose of them. He said one was extremely hot, and when he said that, he also said, I'm now a hit man. I did a job with this gun. It was the nine millimeter without a barrel. I remembered early on in the investigation that I booked into evidence a barrel from a nine millimeter had to be a divine intervention because we put that gun together. Now was the murder weapon.
Ricardo London was a twenty six year old ex cohn. He'd been a member of Popeye's United Prisoners Union while he was imprisoned, and then joined Tribal Thomb.
Our prime suspect now was Ricardo London, but we had witnesses who described a tall, thin black man with a bushy afro medium dark complexion. Well, as luck would have it, our suspect, Ricardo London was in custody in Napa, Sonoma County for another case that he had been arrested for, and the detectives there booked into evidence from his club box theatrical makeup of bushy mustache and a black afro wig. What we come to find out is he disguised himself as a black man the night he did the killing.
So we not only had the murder weapon, we now had an eye witness.
Ian was handed down on March thirty first, nineteen seventy six, about ten months after the killings. The trial made it clear that Sally Voy was an innocent bystander. She'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even the murderer at his trial said, oh, well, Popeye was the target and Sally was there, so she had to go too, so she was collateral damage according to him.
Ricardo London was convicted in September of nineteen seventy eight and sentenced to life in prison.
It just so happens that the person who supposed he killed Popeye Jackson is a good friend of mine and he's out trying to live his life now, you know, and do good. And I don't want to be saying his name. You can't, I won't. He's free finally, and yeah, I wish him the best, and so I don't want to talk about him other than that.
The motive in this case is still dispute. Rumors circulated at the time that Popeye had burned tribal thumb in a drug deal for thousands of dollars. It seems more likely, though, that it was in reaction to the suspicion that Popeye was an informant. This suspicion was most likely a product of both the accusations leveled by Sarah Jane the NWLF and others, and two police raids earlier in nineteen seventy
five on Tribal Thumb properties. In April, while trying to locate Patty Hurst, police and FBI agents raided a home in Menlo Park and found materials and plans for making pipe bombs, along with radical literature, some of it from Tribal Thumb. The next month, raids were conducted on a house in Los Gatos and one in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Weapons and drugs were seized, and three people were arrested. In Los Gatos. One of the three was Earl Satcher.
He was released soon after. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen Popeye at the scene of the Los Gatos raid. Police disputed this. I want to be clear about the timeline here. Ricardo London was charged with Popeye and Sally Void's murders in March of nineteen seventy six, six months after Sarah Jane's assassination attempt, and wasn't convicted until September nineteen seventy eight. At the time of her attempt, the culprit and reasons behind Popeye's death were still unknown.
One hundred and five days separated Popeye's murder on June eighth and Sarah Jane's attempt on Ford on September twenty second. Our knowledge of Sarah Jane's activities during this time is sketchy. She was certainly concerned with the way she was perceived by people on the left, if she had had some sense of the danger of being an identified and former
before Popeye's murder left no more doubt. Sarah Jane was in fear for her life and took steps she thought would convince the left that she was one of them. She wrote a letter published by the Berkeley Barb on July fourth, trying to walk back some of the allegations in the June twentieth article that revealed her to be an informant. She conceded that she had been an informant, but disputed that she had widely shared her allegations about Popeye.
Her letter was couched in the language of the radical left. It was sandwiched on the page between two letters from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War that accused Sarah Jane of continuing to serve as an informer and criticizing the Barb for giving her a platform where the VVAW had decisively turned against Sarah Jane. Tribal thumb of all groups seemed to welcome her into their midst. Her association with
them was, to put it mildly strange. How could Sarah Jane feel safe with them when they were prime suspects and the murder of her former mentor, and given the rumor swirling that Popeye was killed because he was a snitch, it seems that she would have kept her distance, but she didn't. She is known to have spent at least a couple of days that summer taking shooting practice at a Tribal Thumb property in rural Mendocino County north of
San Francisco. During the two weeks leading up to September twenty second, she also seems to have taken on a roommate, a blond woman alleged to be connected to Tribal Thumb. This roommate's identity has never been confirmed, and it is not clear whether she had any influence on Sarah Jane's actions during that time. Sarah Jane also continued to hound journalists trying to get her story told. Here's Carol Pogash, who was working at the Hurst owned San Francisco Chronicle in nineteen seventy five.
She would call the house maybe at seven in the morning, or at midnight, or many times during a day, and I I'm sure I brushed her off, but I'm surprised that I didn't simply say stop, you're dominating my life and you can't be doing that. I think at the time I wrote that if Sarah Jane Moore was chummy with you, she made your life miserable. Things that she told me, I don't know if they were true or not.
Another journalist who Sarah Jane badgered was Ellen Hume, and while Carol found Sarah Jane to be nothing more than a nuisance, Ellen thought she was interesting and eccentric. She had initially hoped that Sarah Jane might help her find Patty Hurst. That didn't happen, but Ellen and a colleague were writing a series of articles for the Ellie Times about the current state of the radical movement, and Ellen thought that Sarah Jane could be a small part of that story.
She didn't produce Patty Hurst, but she produced such a fascinating set of stories about herself that I decided to write a little profile of her to go along with the whole story about where is the SLA today?
A year out?
What's happening with that, and how do they fit into the radical movements of the sixties. That was really my new assignment. And she kept calling me chatty self, you know, constantly dishing, and so I drafted my little sidebar. It wasn't a main story, and it was going to go in this huge series that Narda Zequine and I were preparing about the SLA And during that one of those chatty calls, as I drafted my profile for her, she flew down to La on the La Times this money
to have her picture taken. She came to our city room and had her picture taken.
For the profile.
So this was definitely in the works. And then she confessed to me why she was so interested in my story, and it's because she had been an informant for the FBI.
I didn't know that.
That also explained why she was so freaked out when Popeye got murdered and someone from the Tribal Thumb group was later convicted of having murdered him. She had reason to be worried about people on the left taking it badly that she had been informing on them. She expected that my story in the La Times, explaining that she converted to the radical cause. She had spoken, you know, as an informant to the FBI, but her real heart now had converted. She expected that would save her life.
I didn't understand the extent to which she was hanging on that and waiting for that. So the story I drafted it, and I just took what she had told me about herself. She was just a colorful sidebar, and it wasn't ready to go on the paper.
Sarah Jane felt increasingly in danger. In early September, she bought a gun. She did not buy it from a store, which required a five day waiting period, and reported the sale to the state of California. Instead, she went back to Danville, where she had lived before moving to San Francisco. She called Danville birch Kun because of what she saw
as the influence of the John Birch Society there. The John Birch Society is a right wing anti communist, conspiracy minded organization named after an Air Force intelligence officer who they believed to be the first casualty of the Cold War. Among other claims, they asserted that President Eisenhower was a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy in the US. In
the mid seventies, they had ninety thousand members. Sarah Jane knew Bircher's and Danville and was introduced to a prominent member named Mark Fernwood. Fernwood was twenty six, thin, embalding, and a self proclaimed dedicated anti communist. He made and sold replicas of nineteenth century guns. He also bought and sold modern firearms from his house. Fernwood later remarked that Sarah Jane was bright, cheerful, and even gave me tips
and how to decorate my home. He noticed that she was wearing a United farm Worker symbol on her belt. He believed that the UfW was a communist organization and asked her about it. She declined to explain Otherwise, Fernwood thought she was conservatively dressed. He wanted to be sure she knew how to shoot, so he took her to a gun range. Sarah Jane impressed him with her shooting skills, and he agreed to sell her a forty four and ammunition. The total came to one hundred thirty two dollars. For
some reason, she did not pay him that day. Instead, she would return two weeks later with a check and an undercover ATF agent The day after that, she would again visit Mark Fernwood and then drive to San Francisco to kill the president next time on Rip Current.
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary Katherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sanoff, Show art by Jeff Niyaz Goda and Charles Rudder. The producers Jesse funk, Rema O'Kelly and Nolams Griffin. Supervising producer Trilie Young, Executive
producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick Hear. Episodes of Rip Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit our website ripcurrentpod dot com