Soliah Travels Across Country, Across Time for L.A. Hearing

After breakfast Tuesday, she boarded a plane near Minneapolis as Sara Jane Olson, a churchgoing doctor’s wife who was a pillar of her close-knit Midwestern community.

By the time she landed in Los Angeles shortly after 1 p.m., she was once again Kathleen Ann Soliah, a former soldier of the Symbionese Liberation Army suspected of conspiring with other members of that infamous band of radicals to kill Los Angeles police officers in 1974 and 1975.

When she was in her 20s, Los Angeles police say, Soliah helped hide Patricia Hearst after the heiress was kidnapped by the SLA. Soliah, who is to be arraigned today in Los Angeles Superior Court, is charged with helping to plant nail bombs underneath two police cars. The bombs were discovered before they could explode.

In addition, court papers say she “may face prosecution” in Northern California for a 1974 slaying during an alleged SLA bank robbery in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento.

In her St. Paul neighborhood, Sara Jane Olson is known as the mother of three teenage girls who is active in Democratic politics and local theater. She teaches English at the community center and reads to the blind over the radio. For such a person, friends and neighbors are willing to put their money and property on the line to get her out of jail and back home.

But Los Angeles prosecutors are demanding that Soliah either be held without bail or that a $3-million bond be posted. They say a woman who spent 24 years underground can’t be trusted to appear for a trial. In court papers, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael A. Latin calls her “a chameleon . . . able to flourish undiscovered under [a] fraudulent existence.”

Her Bay Area defense lawyers, Susan B. Jordan and Stuart Hanlon, seek her release on $150,000 bail.

Invariably referring to their client as Olson, the lawyers say the prosecution’s case is thin, while her community ties run strong and deep.

Jordan said she expects seven people to speak on her client’s behalf at today’s bail hearing. They include the suspect’s 17-year-old daughter, Sophia; at least one fellow congregant at Minnehaha United Methodist Church; and even an elected official--Minnesota state Rep. Andy Dawkins.

Details of Soliah/Olson’s two lives and the case against her emerged in court papers as she arrived under police guard at Los Angeles International Airport.

She has changed a lot since the 1970s, the defense says, as has society.

“Sara Jane Olson was 27 years old in 1975,” the court papers say. “She was like many of her generation: passionate, swept up in the ‘revolution’ of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and probably prone to the rhetoric of the times. . . . It was a very different time, and in order to determine what bail will assure her appearance in court in 1999--not 1976--we are obligated to view that time through the lens of history.”

It was “a time of excess on all sides,” the court papers say, citing the National Guard killings of four Kent State University students in Ohio, antiwar protests, the SLA shootout with the LAPD in Los Angeles, Watergate and other events.

“An entire generation of young people, as well as those in charge of them, seemed out of control.” Back then, the documents say, their client “was not the person she is now: a wife, a mother, a person who has spent 23 years deeply and passionately involved in the life of her family, her community and church.”

Her lawyers say it wasn’t just that she wanted to avoid prosecution: She disappeared because she feared reprisals from authorities for her association with the SLA.

The defense asserts that the prosecution’s case “is completely circumstantial and, viewed in its best light, can only be termed weak.”

The only witness who might link Soliah to the purchase of materials used to build the two nail bombs has been dead for five years, the defense says, maintaining that his grand jury testimony cannot be used during a trial and that there is no physical evidence.

However, Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said there is physical evidence and “it’s still intact.” She declined to discuss specifics.

Latin, the prosecutor in the case, called the charges against Soliah “extremely serious.” His court filings say her defense is attempting to “soften the facts by putting a ‘historical spin’ on egregious, life-threatening crimes and flight from justice.”

Soliah, he says, “has demonstrated through her conduct that she is not just a potential, but a proven, flight risk.”

Soliah was stopped in her white minivan and arrested June 18 in St. Paul on the way to an English class she was teaching.

The defense documents say she had “made the unfortunate choice not to surrender” because “surrender would have meant reopening a chapter in her life she had tried to put behind her; this she was unable to do.”