Remembering a Radical’s Senseless Acts of Kindness

When you’ve been in the news reporting racket a while, you can lay money on what people are bound to say about certain big stories.

After an explosion, someone, without fail, will tell a reporter, “It sounded like an atomic bomb went off,” never mind that the number of living humans who have actually heard an atomic bomb go off is probably in the low three figures.

And after some out-of-the-blue crime, always there’s someone to say how much of a shock it was, how nice a neighborhood this is, how quiet a man he was.

Now, to his own surprise, Richard Murphy is one of those people too, one who finds himself saying, “I can’t believe it. She seemed so nice.”

It is not his neighbor down the street of whom he speaks, but his neighbor across the office, across a distance of a dozen years.

Murphy is a project documentation writer. The nice woman he knew was Emily Montague. You’ve read about her lately as Emily Harris. To her associates in the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had renamed themselves Cinque and Tania and Mizmoon, she was Yolanda.

But it was as Emily Harris that she appeared on the FBI’s “wanted” posters 28 years ago. It was as Emily Harris that she was arrested this month in the shotgun murder of a woman in a holdup at a Sacramento bank on a Monday morning in April 27 years ago.

This old stew of long-ago murder and long-forgotten radicals has been freshly stirred with the arrest of Harris, her ex-husband and three others, and newly spiced with talk-show topic A, America’s latest radical sheik: John Walker Lindh: Spank him or shoot him?

As Murphy found out for himself, it’s one thing when you read about it in the paper, and another thing entirely when it’s personal.

The sixth floor of the Disney Channel building was a high-pressure place when Murphy joined in 1987. Emily Montague had been there since 1985, two years after she was paroled from prison for kidnapping and other crimes. (Disney is mum on personnel matters. Harris attorney Stuart Hanlon says she worked there as a systems analyst and left in 1994 to start her own company.)

The woman at extension 2323, the woman who had made revolution against bourgeois culture, was earning a paycheck from Disney.

Emily Montague was about 10 years Murphy’s senior, “one of the best-liked people on that floor” and a computer whiz who went way out of her way to help him. “She saved my bacon, at a time when she was probably the only one who would have bothered to do it.”

On his very first assignment, “I did a bunch of boneheaded things,” and Harris caught them, marking them in red like an English teacher “as kindly as possible.” Without her, “I probably would not have been able to hold onto that job.”

Murphy danced with her once at the office Christmas party. He has a vague memory of a photo of a pet pinned to her desk, but that’s all.

If anyone had had an inkling about her past, it would have spread through Disney’s gossip mill “like wildfire.”

A dozen years later, he scooped up The Times from his door and felt a “brain gasp” of recognition--Emily Montague was Emily Harris.

In contrast to Harris’ computer competence, the SLA had been inept radicals, more Harpo Marx than Karl Marx.

Their last stand took place because a parking ticket on the Harrises’ van led the police to the house where most of the SLA died in a live-TV shootout.

Murphy was in high school when he saw it all on TV. He could never understand what it was about.

“The Black Panthers, I could figure out . . . but this one I couldn’t figure out. It all just seemed a bunch of gobbledygook,” a waste, and it still does. The rest of us can turn the page. For Murphy, it can’t just end here.

So what happens now?

He is a Christian, and he has an example right across the breakfast table. In high school, his wife knew Leslie Van Houten, one of Charlie Manson’s three girls sent to prison for murder, for life. Murphy’s wife visited her in jail as a gesture of comfort.

And if Murphy were to do the same for Harris, what would he say?

“I would say my faith tells me that everyone can be redeemed, but part of embracing that redemption is owning up to what you have done.”

She should take a “moral inventory, and then for the things you know you’re responsible for, be prepared to come forward and take the rap for them.”

From what he’s read, Murphy thinks the evidence against her is “fairly solid.”

On the other hand, there’s that person he knew, who helped the new guy save his job.

“Nothing would make me happier than for some piece of evidence to come up to show it’s all a big mistake. But I’m not naive about that.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.