Cheryl Robinson has been agonizing over her husband’s disappearance for four decades.
The Detroit-area woman last talked to Ray Robinson in April 1973, when backpacked to Wounded Knee, S.D., to support Native Americans in their fight against social injustices by the federal government.
Despite her pleas to the FBI, the federal government has refused to divulge information about her husband’s disappearance and presumed death. The 69-year-old had relied on rumors that he’d been shot and left to die.
Then on Monday, after her attorneys filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI finally released hundreds of pages of documents that indicate the bureau had long suspected her husband was murdered by the people he was supporting, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Buffalo News reported today.
“They confirm the rumors that have been floating out there for years,” Michael Kuzma, one of the Robinson family’s lawyers, said. “The only missing part of the puzzle is where Ray’s buried.”
Robinson said she wants to bury her husband in Detroit, but she has no idea where his remains are. Nor, apparently, does the FBI.
The new records indicate that a confidential source said, “Robinson had been tortured and murdered within the AIM occupation perimeter, and then his remains were buried ‘in the hills.’ ”
Robinson, the report suggests, was likely killed because AIM supporters thought he was a government spy.
In the early 1970s, Ray Robinson was a black activist dedicated to fighting injustices, no matter the race or creed. He left his Alabama home to join what turned out to be a 71-day siege of the Pine Ridge reservation village of Wounded Knee.
Bloody clashes with the federal government were responsible for the deaths of at least two AIM supporters.
“My husband was profoundly influenced in his political development by the tenets of non-violence; but he believed, as many did even around Martin Luther King, that armed self-defense was important,” Robinson wrote in 2009.
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Robinson and her attorneys also believe AIM was responsible for Ray Robinson’s death.
“I think AIM members were involved in Ray’s murder,” Barry Bachrach, a Massachusetts lawyer working with the Robinsons, told the Buffalo News. “They were very, very paranoid about informants and may have thought he was an informant.”
One memo also mentions that a confidential witness said AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt boasted on a recording that the group “really managed to keep a tight lid on that one.”
Most of all, Cheryl Robinson wants closure and a proper burial so she and their children can say goodbye.
“I never give up hope,” Robinson said. “That’s all I want to know. Just tell me where he’s buried.”
Finding him would mean the world to her children, she added.
“We’ve never had a funeral. We’ve never had a burial. And that’s important to the kids.”
FBI: Detroit woman’s missing husband tortured, murdered at Wounded Knee added by Steve Neavling on
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Steve Neavling
Steve Neavling lives and works in Detroit as an investigative journalist. His stories have uncovered corruption, led to arrests and reforms and prompted FBI investigations.
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