This spring Olson will relive her past in a Los Angeles courtroom, where she is set to go on trial for attempted murder. When Olson was nabbed last summer, many observers assumed that the old case, based on a relatively minor incident (the bombs never went off), would be settled and never reach a courtroom. But Olson, who insists she is innocent and says she never participated in the SLA’s violent activities, demanded a plea agreement without jail time, a condition the district attorney refused. Now the law-and-order judge on the case, James Ideman, has said he will allow prosecutors to delve into the SLA’s entire bloody history, recounting crimes in which Olson took no part and has not been charged. The star witness will be Patty Hearst herself, who is expected to testify that Olson also took part in a 1975 bank robbery in which an innocent bystander was shot dead. Not to be outdone, the defense intends to call other former SLA sympathizers to aggressively undermine Hearst’s account. What began as a simple trial to clear an old case has now stirred old rivalries and reignited feuds among the former comrades.
Kathy Soliah would seem an unlikely urban guerrilla. She grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, middle class and comfortable, in Minnesota and California. In high school, she was “pep chairman” for the football team. But after graduation, Kathy’s politics began turning leftward. She moved to the Bay Area in 1969, where she worked as a waitress in a cocktail lounge with a young leftist radical named Angela Atwood. Their boss had them wear revealing outfits. When they tried to unionize the place, they were fired.
Atwood introduced Soliah to a small group of Berkeley revolutionaries who dreamed of overthrowing the government. They came to call themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. Their leader was a career criminal and prison escapee. The group lived together in “safe houses” rented under fake names, and armed themselves for the revolution to come.
Before long, the violence began. In November 1973, SLA members shot and killed Marcus Foster, the superintendent of the troubled Oakland, Calif., school system, whom they regarded as a tool of the establishment. Then on Feb. 4, 1974, SLA fighters knocked on the door of Patricia Hearst’s Berkeley apartment just after 9 p.m. They gagged and blindfolded her and put her on the floor of a waiting car, driving her to a safe house in San Francisco. The group hoped to extort money from her wealthy father in exchange for her release–and also demanded the freedom of the SLA members accused in the Foster assassination. Two months after her abduction, Hearst accompanied the group to rob the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Hearst, who had by then taken the name “Tania,” was photographed by security cameras holding a semiautomatic weapon. Other robberies soon followed. When Hearst was eventually captured and put on trial for bank robbery, she testified that she had changed into a gun-toting revolutionary only after extreme physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
Kathy Soliah–now Sara Jane Olson–has insisted that she had no part in the SLA during this time. She was friends with some of the members, and was especially close to Angela Atwood. But she wasn’t a member or supporter of the group. Then in May 1974, the police tracked the SLA to a bungalow in South-Central Los Angeles. More than 400 police officers surrounded the building, setting off a fierce gun battle that left six SLA members dead, including Atwood. Soliah was distraught by her friend’s death. At a public memorial service for the SLA soldiers at Peace Park in San Francisco, undercover police filmed an emotional Soliah declaring, “SLA soldiers, I am with you. We are with you.”
It was at this point, the prosecution alleges, that Soliah became deeply involved with the SLA. A few days after the memorial service, an SLA member named Emily Harris approached Soliah at the bookstore where she worked and asked for help. The surviving SLA members needed food, new identities and a place to hide from police. Olson’s lawyers concede that their client willingly helped them to go underground–finding them safe houses in San Francisco and Sacramento. During that time, according to Hearst, the SLA robbed two more banks. During one heist, near Sacramento, a bank customer named Myrna Opsahl was shot and killed. Hearst has claimed that Soliah, disguised as a man, took part in the robbery–a charge she denies. The group also attempted a number of terrorist attacks in the summer of 1975–including the failed bombings Olson is accused of carrying out.
A few weeks later, in September 1975, the SLA met its end. Hearst and most remaining members were rounded up by the FBI. A grand jury indicted Soliah in the attempted police-car bombings. But before she could be captured, she fled to Minnesota and started a new life under her new name, Sara Jane Olson. She met a young doctor, married and started a family.
Olson’s lawyers say she fled California out of fear of being railroaded for SLA crimes she didn’t commit. And her old identity might have simply slipped away, had it not been for an L.A. detective named Tom King. King’s father, Mervin, had been in charge of the deadly L.A. shoot-out with the SLA, and in 1999 his son decided to reopen the SLA file and track down Soliah.
The prosecution’s case may not be particularly strong. There is little, if any, physical evidence linking Olson to the pipe bombs. And even the prosecutors themselves at first admitted that the decades-old case is hardly a “slam-dunk.” (The judge has since put a gag order on lawyers from both sides, forbidding them to talk to the press.) Bill Harris, the SLA soldier who kidnapped Patty Hearst and later befriended Olson, told NEWSWEEK, “Sara Jane was on the fringe” of the army. But prosecutors hope jurors will lose whatever sympathy they might feel for Olson after hearing graphic accounts of the violent crimes committed by the people she has admitted protecting.
To strengthen its case, the prosecution also plans to call an extraordinary eleventh-hour witness. James Bryan, a former L.A. police officer, says he can positively identify Olson as a woman he saw near his car on the night of the attempted bombing. Bryan recently told investigators he remembers her giving him a look of “absolute contempt and hatred,” according to court documents–a seemingly critical detail he failed to tell investigating officers or the grand jury back in 1976. NEWSWEEK has learned that Bryan recently contracted with a well-known agent, who says he believes he will sell a movie based on Bryan’s story. (Olson’s lawyers call Bryan’s account a “fabrication.”) Bryan’s attorney says he may also sue Olson for emotional distress he suffered after the attempted bombings. That’s in the spirit of the charges against Sara Jane Olson. It’s about closing an old case–but also settling old scores.
