My Fugitive

The 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 looked into a conspiracy to kill King. Blakey tells her, 'I've been waiting 40 years for someone to ask me these questions.' The answers go back to St. Louis, and the COINTELPRO operations against Nina's father's clients, including Howard Mechanic.

After 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 suspiciously truncated investigation into the possible conspiracy to kill Dr. King.

Howard 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.

Howard 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 federal charges -- and the verdict is too much for Howard to bear.

In 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 student activists at Washington University are also on the FBI's radar, and there are informants among them.