Mary Alice Willey arrived in San Francisco in 1969.
She was 21 years old, the product of a conservative Southern California family, newly divorced and ready to experience life in the free-wheeling Haight-Ashbury district.
She rented an attic apartment and enrolled at San Francisco State, where she eagerly participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War sit-ins and demonstrations.
Then Mary Alice discovered the black power movement.
In movies about the Sixties, this is the moment when the soundtrack cues up "I Want To Take You Higher," or, if the rights are avaiable, "What's Going On."
She became a strident devotee of George Jackson, the charismatic but militant San Quentin inmate who had gained international fame for his best-selling prison classic, "Soledad Brother." She wrote letters to Black Panther Johnny Spain, who was also incarcerated at San Quentin.
And she began associating with members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers that would become implicated in the Aug. 29, 1971, killing of a police officer at San Francisco's Ingleside Station. There is reason to believe that Mary Alice may have played a role in the attack and the slaying of Sgt. John V. Young.
That's the problem with the "idealists" beloved of the Sixties' marketers. Their "idealism" could easily turn violent. In Mary's case, she was not just hanging out with Black Panthers, she was also sexually involved with a typical type found in the Haight to this day: the thug who mouths just enough hippie blather to get into as many girls' pants as possible. Ah, innocense! And idealism!
Most girls, of course, survive their run-ins with the world's Bad Boys, allowing for a lifetime of rueful smiles while lunching with their friends. But, Mary found a darker end:
But less than two weeks after the attack on Ingleside Station, Mary Alice disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Thirty-seven years would pass before an investigator with the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department would determine that an unidentified body found floating in a canal near Modesto on Sept. 11, 1971, was Mary Alice.
She had been stabbed 65 times. Ten of the wounds were fatal, the rest defensive. Her body had been buried in the Patterson District Cemetery. Atop her grave was a beige stone that said, simply, "Jane Doe."
There's an old saying that God takes care of drunks, young children, and pretty girls, but it doesn't often work that way.
The Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll Revolution in Sixties-era San Francisco may well be one of the most overwritten pieces of history in modern times, yet the truth of its effects has never been adequately explored. People love to talk about the "idealism" of middle class kids traveling to SF to hang-out with thugs masquerading as revolutionaries. It's rare to hear a negative word about the overdoses, the homelessness, the rapes, the occasional murders, and the disease that were part of the "San Francisco experience" back then. Even a story like that of the murder of Mary Alice Wiley comes couched in the BS language of Sixties hagiogaphy - "idealists," "die-hard militants," the treatment of criminals like George Jackson as noble revolutionaries. Please. The Black Panthers and their ilk killed a lot of people - many of them naive white progressives who supported their "cause," whatever that was. They also ripped off a lot of people, both in terms of money and politics. And yet to raise these issues, and to try to prosecute these murderers is to invite scandal and opprobrium. There are plenty of prominent people in the Bay Area - Ron Dellums and Barbara Lee come to mind - who carry a lot of secrets, and yet maintain the silence of Left-Wing Omerta.
The continued reverence for the "revolutionary" Sixties tells you everything you need to know about the Left's values and intentions.
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