At the headquarters, Kraus received a backpack full of plastic explosives. No one told her where they sourced them. She was told that an “advance team” had been deployed to disable the alarm systems and unlock the doors. She was instructed to enter a particular door at her assigned station, drop her backpack and set the bomb to detonate, then pull the fire alarm to clear out any security guards or stray homeless. According to Kraus, she was told that there wouldn’t be any security guards or homeless people; she was told pulling the fire alarm was just a precaution. The bombers planned to reconvene at the headquarters by no later than 4 a.m.
They believed their plan was simple and in its simplicity, doable.
Kraus’s evening began according to plan. She walked to her station, dropped her bag, and pulled the fire alarm — but then Kraus noticed a security guard passed out at her desk, unmoving despite the noise. Kraus spent several moments trying to wake her, only running at the last moment. Kraus managed to escape the bomb’s blast radius, but only barely. The force of the explosion knocked her to the pavement; she landed on her chin, breaking her front two teeth. The police found her bloody and wailing. They arrested her on the spot. Safe in their headquarters, the rest of the New Situationists escaped notice as police tried to contain the mass chaos.
When questioned that evening, Kraus told the arresting officers, senior detectives, and the District Attorney that she would give them everything she knew, then claimed to know very little. Kept in an interrogation room for twelve hours, her jaw swollen and aching, she repeated the same facts over and over again: she didn’t know the names or faces of any New Situationists, except David Wilson and Nicolas Berliner; Berliner and Wilson didn’t participate in planning the bombing and were completely unaware of the plans; she didn’t participate in planning the bombing but did what her superiors told her; she didn’t know the names of her superiors; she didn’t know the faces of her superiors; she didn’t know what they wanted; she didn’t know where they were. She ate three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank three cans of Diet Coke, and took four bathroom breaks. She waited until the eighth hour of her interrogation to ask to speak to an attorney.
The Chicago Tribune sent the manifesto they received to the CPD and published it alongside the report of the bombings. The CPD arrested Wilson and Berliner. Wilson lawyered up immediately and refused to say anything except “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” Panicking, Berliner talked a lot, but the more he said the more it became clear to the detectives and the DA that he had no information. Berliner’s mother and grandmother provided an alibi, as did the classmate who had stayed up with him past 4 a.m., playing Halo 2 over the Internet. Wilson had spent the night at his girlfriend’s apartment, which had a doorman and security cameras. The detectives wanted to charge both Berliner and Wilson anyway, but the DA decided to focus on Kraus.
The Grand Jury proceeding that anticipated Kraus’s criminal trial was something of a surprise in the hubbub it caused. The DA, the defense attorneys, the judge, and the court reporters all expected Wilson to refuse to speak, and to serve some jail time as a result. No one expected Berliner to do the same, but sometime between his arrest and the Grand Jury, Berliner got with the New Situationist program. He sat stone-faced and unspeaking in the witness stand. The judge called a recess; Berliner’s attorney took him into a small conference room in the building, and Dana and Raulson both begged Berliner to talk. He refused to speak even to them. The judge cut him some slack, due to his age and because she considered him a victim of sexual assault (statutory rape). Berliner spent the next five months in a juvenile detention facility; he was released the day he turned eighteen.
Kraus pleaded not guilty to her one count each of involuntary manslaughter and property destruction, against her lawyer’s wishes. The jury found her guilty on both counts. The judge sentenced her to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. In her ten years of incarceration so far, she’s agreed only to two interviews, the aforementioned one with Anna Kirkpatrick, during which she expressed remorse for the life she took but excitement that the city took the opportunity to “better the property” she had damaged by building an improved new station. The second interview, actually a series of interviews, was with me, toward the end of the assembling of this book. She spoke to me because Berliner negotiated the meeting.
When I asked her if she felt remorse for killing a security guard, she snapped, “Yes, obviously. I’m not a murderer.”
“But, you admit to killing someone?”
“If you don’t mean to kill someone, you aren’t a murderer, not in your heart. My violence accidentally caused a person’s death. That’s unfortunate, I have nightmares, I’ve cried, but I’m not a murderer.”
She also told me the article about her in Vanity Fair, written by Nancy Jo Sales, and the movie based on that article, directed by Sofia Coppola, are both “complete bullshit.” However, she did like that she was played by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie, even though Lawrence looks nothing like Kraus.
During our conversations, Kraus barely spoke about the New Situationists. Although I now know more about the New Situationists than anyone outside the membership ever has, except Molly Metropolis, the organization remains a mystery to me. Berliner says he still doesn’t know the names of the New Situationists’ leaders. He wouldn’t give me the names of any of the members, or even describe them using pseudonyms. He insisted that he could only speak about people who were already “out in the open,” and he told me that I was lucky the person he was the most “emotionally involved” with was already identified, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to talk about the New Situationists at all. If someone other than Kraus had been arrested, this book couldn’t exist.
Everything Berliner did admit, the details of his induction party for example, he ran by his “higher-up” before he told me. “So, the New Situationists still exist?” I asked him.
“Yes and no,” Berliner said vaguely, as was typical in the conversations we had about the group: “There were a few projects in motion when the group disbanded, I didn’t even know about them during the real days, or until the whole thing with Cait, but a skeleton crew, myself included, has to keep them going now. They’re not the kinds of things we’d want to stop in the middle.”
“Can you tell me about any of these projects?”
“Not really.”
“You can’t tell me anything at all? Do they take place in Chicago?”
“I really can’t say.”
“Is someone keeping you from talking? Threatening you in some way?”
“No. When I said ‘can’t’ before, I meant ‘won’t.’ ”
“Are they paying you anything to keep quiet?” I asked.
“They are paying me to work, and I keep quiet because I want to.”
“How much are they paying you?”
“I won’t say.”
Berliner delivered all these refusals to speak with a schoolboy smirk, smoking cigarettes and looking very pleased with himself.
“So, no new projects, no new members?” I asked.
“No new projects,” he said, “But as for members, I might say Taer was a member. Before she died. And, after everything happened, we asked Nix if she wanted to join so we could look after her. We offered her a job.”
“When you say we,” I asked, “do you mean to imply that you have become a decision-making member of the New Situationists?”