The name of Myrna Opsahl meant nothing to them.

Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, was shot to death on April 21, 1975, during a bank holdup in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb. For nearly three decades, her murder went unsolved, or at least unpunished. Time and again, it was reviewed by prosecutors in Sacramento who felt certain the SLA was responsible. Time and again, they decided there was insufficient evidence to file charges.

Hunter and Latin, now deputy Los Angeles County district attorneys, will take no small measure of satisfaction today when four people associated with the SLA are sentenced in Sacramento Superior Court for their role in Opsahl's death. Although the two prosecutors had no formal role in the case, they can rightly claim credit for bringing the killers to justice.

Emily Montague (then Emily Harris), who admitted pulling the trigger, will get the most time, eight years. Lesser terms will be handed down to her ex-husband, William Harris, to Sara Jane Olson (then Kathleen Soliah) and Michael Bortin. All four pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

A fifth suspect, James Kilgore, was captured recently in South Africa and awaits trial.

What brought Opsahl's killers to justice was a lucky break, a modest advance in technology and the dogged work of Hunter and Latin, who believed in the case in a way that their Sacramento counterparts didn't.

Their role began in early 1999, when Latin accepted a transfer to a new job on the district attorney's major crimes squad. Being the division's rookie, he inherited one of its least promising cases: charges against Kathleen Soliah of planting bombs under Los Angeles Police Department patrol cars in August 1975. Soliah had been a fugitive since.

"It was a dead case," Latin said. "The lady had successfully evaded law enforcement for some 24 years. I really didn't expect to have much more to do with it than to just review." He did that, stuck the case in a desk drawer and forgot about it.

A few months later, on June 16, 1999, Latin was at his son's preschool graduation when his pager went off. Soliah had been arrested in Minnesota.

What followed was more than two years of stalling and parrying by defense lawyers for Soliah, now Olson. On Oct. 31, 2001, she pleaded guilty.

Latin had been paired up, early on, with Hunter, a veteran with more experience in big cases. She is 41, tall, blond and savvy; he is 43, shorter, with boyish features and a gung-ho zeal. Both blend idealism with a prosecutor's predatory instinct.

Both say that if Soliah had gone to trial without delays, they would have done their best to prosecute her and then wash their hands of the SLA.

"Luckily for us," Latin said, "they kept delaying and delaying and delaying, and giving us time, and that was our most precious resource."

The more time they had, the more they learned about the SLA. The more they learned, the more they became convinced that the group had escaped prosecution for numerous crimes. One was the slaying of Opsahl. They began to read old case files with a rising sense of excitement.

"It just kind of hit us over the head," Latin recalled. "We both kind of looked at each other and said, 'Are we crazy or is this a great case?' "

The case hinged on detailed accounts by Patricia Hearst, the newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by the SLA and later joined its revolutionary cause. Hearst had driven a getaway car in the bank robbery, and recounted in her book, "Every Secret Thing," how Emily Harris had admitted shooting a woman when her gun went off by accident.

When Hearst, the Harrises and others were arrested in September 1975, the Sacramento County district attorney deferred to federal prosecutors in the Opsahl case. But the U.S. attorney in Sacramento charged only Kathleen Soliah's brother, Steven -- and only in the robbery, not the murder. Federal prosecutors decided not to let Hearst testify, apparently because she insisted that Steven Soliah had stayed behind in a getaway car outside the Crocker National Bank branch. Other witnesses said they saw him inside the bank, and the prosecution was based on that.

When the case went to trial in April 1976, the defense brought forward a man who bore a striking resemblance to Soliah. He said he had been in the bank as a customer that day. Soliah was acquitted -- and Hearst, in a sense, was vindicated.