My Fugitive
My Fugitive
CATEGORY: True Crime
Nina Gilden Seavey was twelve on May 5, 1970, the day an Air Force building in St. Louis burned to the ground. Her dad represented a young man accused of the crime: Howard Mechanic. Facing serious federal time, Howard went on the run and became one of the longest-running fugitives in U.S. history. As an adult, Nina picked up the trail. What ever happened to Howard Mechanic?This eight-part series is the tangled story of her search for answers. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. FBI surveillance and confidential informants. Cold War spies, conspiracy theories and the murder of a civil rights icon. And the sacrifices America makes in the name of national security.
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01: The FireOur story begins in St. Louis, where host Nina Gilden Seavey recounts how the FBI surveilled her family in the 1970s to keep an eye on her father, Louis Gilden, a civil rights attorney at the time. We also lear… -
02: The AssassinationWhile Nina searches for Howard Mechanic, she discovers the story of another fugitive from Missouri: James Earl Ray. In 1967, Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary and went on to assassinate Dr. Marti…
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03: The FBIThe shadow of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI looms over this story: from surveillance of left-leaning student protestors to harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We learn about Hoover's anti-communist fervor, and how…
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04: The ActivistsIn this episode, we return to St. Louis. Nina learns about the FBI's harassment of her father's clients, Percy Green and Jane Sauer, whose left-leaning groups were targets of COINTELPRO. Howard Mechanic and the…
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05: The TrialsHoward and others are arrested by the FBI and put on trial by the feds. For reasons neither Nina’s father nor his clients understand, St. Louis is the only place in America where student protestors are facing f…
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06: The FugitiveHoward goes underground and emerges as Gary Tredway. He gets married. There are dangerously close calls, but he gets away with it for decades—until a reporter uncovers the truth. To learn more about listener da…
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07: The SpiesAfter 11 months in prison, Howard is granted a pardon. But Nina has more questions. How is Howard's story connected to the other threads she has pulled? We go back to 1975, and the Church Committee's suspicious…
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08: The ConspiracyThe House Select Committee on Assassinations picks up where Church left off. Nearly four decades after those hearings, Nina visits Robert Blakey, HSCA's Chief Counsel, to try to understand why the FBI never loo…
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Coming Soon: My FugitiveNina Gilden Seavey was twelve on May 4, 1970, the day an Air Force building in St. Louis burned to the ground. Her dad represented a young man arrested in connection with the fire: Howard Mechanic. Facing serio… -
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