The Judy Clark I knew had two distinct sides. She was capable of warmth and joy. But her smile could vanish in a moment, replaced by an accusing finger. “How many people did you kill in Vietnam?” was her sudden jab across a Park Slope kitchen table at a friend roiled by nightmares after his return from the war. Stunned, he shook his head.

“Judy, it was a war,” he said.

“Yes, and you were the invading army,” she insisted. “How many did you kill?”

The bright, laughing woman was someone you wanted to like. The rigid radical made it tough. Then the Brink’s robbery occurred, and there was no point in trying anymore.

In the years after she disappeared behind prison gates, occasional word came from friends who visited her that Clark was different than she was during her days of rage. I had my doubts: could anyone so stubborn and unrepentant really change? Eventually I drove up to Bedford Hills to see for myself.

On my first trip, in 2006, Clark strode into the sunny visitors’ room wearing a wide grin, one quickly returned by the dour-looking guard overseeing the area and by inmates seated at nearby tables. Her dark hair had gone mostly gray, but otherwise she looked much the way I remembered her: she is small with brown eyes, an olive complexion, a tiny pock mark on her forehead left over from childhood chicken pox. She had been in prison for 25 years. Her voice still carried the accent of her Brooklyn youth. It was softer now, though, without the righteousness that I remembered from even the simplest exchanges.

I returned several more times over the years, sitting at the same table near a playroom where inmates spent time with their children. On a recent visit in June, Clark arrived with a black Labrador on a leash trotting beside her. The Lab was the eighth dog Clark trained under a program in which the pups stay with inmates for about a year before becoming service dogs, mostly for disabled war veterans and for law-enforcement agencies. The dog this former terrorist trained would soon be sniffing out bombs like those her old Weathermen pals once planted. As we spoke, a pair of young girls came over to look at the dog. Clark had him raise his paw in greeting. The girls tittered. Their mothers joined them. “I told them to introduce themselves to you,” one inmate said. Clark leaned close and grasped each girl by a shoulder. “Your mothers talk about you all the time,” she said. “They talk about how much they love you and have such great stories.” The girls smiled. Most of the women at Bedford Hills are parents. Clark knows a lot about the heartache of leaving a child behind. Her daughter, Harriet, was 11 months old at the time of her arrest.

On the day of the Brink’s heist, Clark told me, she was hesitant on several counts, starting with her baby at home. A gay, single woman, Clark had decided that she wanted to have a child, and a fellow militant served as surrogate father. When Harriet was born in November 1980, Clark was “deliriously happy.” It was, she said, an utterly personal experience, a break from the lock-step demands of her dogmabound sect. The commune welcomed children, as long as they were brought up in proper collective fashion. But the doting motherhood Clark displayed was considered a bourgeois indulgence.