Partner linked to eco-terrorism killed self in jail
Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
By JULIE POPPEN
Rocky Mountain News (Denver)
If her life partner, Bill Rodgers, were still alive, he almost certainly would have been indicted along with four other environmental activists for allegedly torching the Two Elk Lodge at Vail Resorts.
Rodgers, labeled by authorities as the “mastermind” of a band of so-called eco-terrorists who set fires across the country under the banner of the elusive Environmental Liberation Front, avoided prosecution because he killed himself in an Arizona jail cell late last year.
But Katie Rose Nelson, 23, is still angry about the government’s decision to indict.
She’s even angrier at the friends who gave the government its case.
“I’m really disappointed in the people who have chosen to talk with the FBI,” Nelson said in her first newspaper interview since her life partner’s suicide. “Whether or not any of it’s true, if you’re somebody’s friend, you back them up all the way. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done or you’ve done, you just back them up.”
Together, Nelson and Rodgers, 40, ran the volunteer-based Catalyst InfoShop in Prescott, Ariz., a community-based center and used bookstore focused on environmental and social justice issues.
Nelson, in a phone interview from the shop Friday, said that none of the four people indicted was ever associated with the Catalyst.
She said that Rodgers never talked to her about the Vail fires. An arrest affidavit that became public in January cast Rodgers as the ringleader.
“I really don’t know the truth about what happened,” she said.
She said she doesn’t trust the people who talked to investigators. “It seems like the only evidence they really have right now are people who are talking,” she said. “And if you’re the kind of person willing to talk about somebody else, how totally trustworthy are you?”
Nelson also takes issue with the persistent use of the word “terrorists” to describe Rodgers, Chelsea Gerlach, Rebecca Rubin, Josephine Overaker and Stanislas Myerhoff.
“Whoever did these acts, they did them from a place of really caring about the environment - so much they were willing to sacrifice their lives,” she said. “I don’t think they should be looked at as terrorists at all. Compare the damage to different facilities to the kind of environmental damage that corporations and people are doing every day.”
Nelson said that torching a building may be “radical” but that it’s not “killing anyone.”
She said the current indictments are politically motivated.
“They want to put these people away, and they want to scare the environmental movement,” she said. In the short term, the tactic may work, but not over the long haul, she said.
“The political climate and the environmental situation we’ve got ourselves into in this point in history is so off the hook there’s no way people are going to stop being very impassioned about the Earth and about politics,” she said. “It’s only going to get more intense.”