Echoes of the Revolution

Deprived of water, food, and sleep for 72 hours, Taylor alleged, he finally succumbed, his willpower collapsing. "Whatever you want me to say," he recalled telling Erdelatz and McCoy, "I will say it." Likewise, Bowman and Scott acquiesced, and the trio's statements supplied the detectives with their story line of the Ingleside attack.

In a memo sent to the FBI, the investigators, relying on "admissions obtained from Scott, Taylor, and Bowman," fingered BLA member Herman Bell as the man who gunned down Young. Bell was a fugitive at the time, wanted in connection with the slayings of two New York cops in May 1971, three months before Young's murder. (Captured in 1973 and convicted in the New York killings, Bell received a term of 25 years to life.)

The report states that Bowman acted as a lookout during the siege while Scott, Richard Brown, Hank Jones, and a fourth man entered the station with Bell. Taylor cut the chain-link fence that allowed the men access to the station property, according to the document, and Ray Boudreaux and another man drove the getaway cars. The memo also names two women who could be the blond-wigged brunette who visited the station an hour before the attack, and identifies a suspect in the "diversionary" bank bombing that emptied the squad room a short time later.

The document is dated Aug. 29, 1973 — the second anniversary of Young's death. The same day, in a modest ceremony attended by his widow, Geraldine Young, city officials renamed the short street that leads to the Ingleside Police Station in honor of the fallen sergeant. She dedicated Sgt. John V. Young Lane "to law enforcement officers everywhere who risk their lives protecting the public."

Yet if Erdelatz and McCoy believed they stitched together a strong case, it already had begun to unravel. Two days earlier, Bowman, Taylor, and Scott appeared before Magistrate Judge Robert Collins in New Orleans for their arraignment on a variety of charges. At the hearing, their public defender voiced concern that the detectives interrogated the men without first providing access to an attorney.

A concerned Collins reminded prosecutors that, with the defendants now arraigned, due process required authorities to notify the trio's lawyer before questioning them. Absent from the hearing, Erdelatz and McCoy failed to heed that protocol. The next day, Aug. 28, they returned to the jail to interview the three men, court records show, eliciting their alleged admissions about the Ingleside assault — and violating their right to counsel.

Two years later, the gaffe would prompt a Superior Court judge in San Francisco to flush a murder indictment against Bowman, Taylor, and Scott. Judge Edward Cragen faulted prosecutors for failing to disclose to grand jurors the unlawful method by which the detectives wrung statements from Scott, the lead defendant.

A few months later, in February 1976, Cragen wrote a ruling that banned the use of Scott's confession in California courts. The spiking of the statement, coupled with the scarcity of physical evidence, persuaded county prosecutors to shelve the Ingleside file.

Cragen's decision resembled one made in 1974 by a Los Angeles judge, and together, the rulings seemed to virtually inoculate from prosecution those named as suspects in Erdelatz and McCoy's memo. The earlier ruling occurred during a hearing related to the alleged shootout with L.A. police involving him, Boudreaux, and Jones in 1971. The judge found that authorities in New Orleans tortured Taylor to extract a false confession about what had induced officers to plug the trio's car with bullets.

Unable to use the statement in court, prosecutors struggled to mount a case, and jurors found Taylor not guilty. Boudreaux and Jones saw their charges dropped.

But winning release from jail proved easier than finding freedom from the past. Following the dismissal of the Ingleside case in 1976, Taylor went home to Los Angeles to rebuild his life. Soon after he landed a job, he asserted, an FBI agent talked to his employer. The boss gave Taylor the heave.

The cycle repeated so many times that he switched coasts, settling in Florida. He earned for his family by working as a utility lineman, content to recede into middle-class obscurity.

Yet Taylor, 58, admitted the trauma of New Orleans lingers, afflicting body and psyche alike. He blames the jailhouse beatings for the chronic neck and back pain that forced him to retire early, and his ears still ring from the head blows he absorbed. A sense of peace eludes him. Early last year, he received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in San Francisco. Erdelatz and McCoy delivered it.

"In the back of my mind, I always thought, 'This is never going to end. Sooner or later, I'll see them again.'"

---

The same feeling of fatalism seized Ray Boudreaux on Sept. 11, 2001. Watching the Twin Towers atomize on TV, he realized that the relative tranquility of his post-Panther years would turn to ash. "Deep down in my heart," he said, "I knew that someone was going to come visit me as soon as they could get it organized."