Soliah Freed on $1 Million Bail in Bomb Plot

Kathleen Ann Soliah, accused of making terrorist bombs in the 1970s, was teary-eyed as she tentatively stepped out of a Los Angeles jail Tuesday after 250 friends, neighbors and strangers raised $1 million bail for the woman they know as Sara Jane Olson.

“I’m a very fortunate woman,” Soliah said, expressing gratitude for the “loving family and wonderful friends” who, she said, “put up their houses and retirement to get me out of jail.”

It was Soliah’s first taste of freedom since June 16, when FBI agents stopped her minivan a few blocks from her ivy-covered home in St. Paul, Minn., barking, “It’s over, Kathleen!” She was arrested on suspicion of committing a 25-year-old crime while she was allegedly a member of a band of radicals called the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The high bail is intended to guarantee that Soliah, a doctor’s wife who built a comfortable life of good deeds while on the run from the law, returns to Los Angeles and faces a 1976 grand jury indictment. The grand jury charged that in 1974 and 1975, Soliah conspired with other SLA members to kill police officers by planting pipe bombs underneath squad cars.

Soliah walked down a dim staircase at the Twin Towers jail and into the arms of her husband, Dr. Fred Peterson, an emergency room physician. Seeking a private moment with his wife, who had been in jail for the last five weeks, Peterson pulled her back behind a glass door, away from the phalanx of reporters and television camera operators.

They embraced, kissed, and spoke softly to each other before facing the cameras. She bit her lower lip nervously as she stepped before a bouquet of microphones. “Well, hello,” she said. “Needless to say, I’m extremely glad to be out of jail.” She added that she looked forward to heading home and “experiencing the trauma of everyday teenage life, cooking food, and seeing my dog, Emma.”

Soliah could face 20 years to life if she is convicted of planting the pipe bombs during the summer of 1975. One bomb was discovered when it malfunctioned and fell off a patrol car at a Hollywood pancake house; the other was found the next day under a police vehicle at the Hollenbeck station during a countywide search.

The devices, which Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Latin described as powerful and sophisticated, did not explode. Authorities say that the alleged bombing attempts came as retaliation for a 1974 shootout in which six SLA members, including a close friend of Soliah’s, were killed.

The SLA gained infamy in the 1970s when it kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, who later joined the group and spent two years in prison for her role in an SLA bank robbery. Hearst said she had been brainwashed.

On Tuesday, Soliah’s lawyers disputed that she was a member of the radical group. “The SLA didn’t carry cards,” said Susan B. Jordan, who invariably refers to her client as Olson.

The court system here, meanwhile, continues to identify her as Soliah.

To the people of St. Paul, where she has lived since the early 1980s, she was and remains Olson, a 52-year-old mother of three who reads to the blind, cooks for the homeless, teaches English to new immigrants and is active in community theater and local politics.

Without hesitation, “people from all walks of life--doctors, lawyers, artists, bankers and bakers” leveraged their mortgages, college funds and pensions to gain her freedom, Jordan said.

“In no way would Sara Jane Olson violate the trust of this many people,” added Jordan, who with co-counsel Stuart Hanlon marched into court Tuesday with a certified check for $1 million. About $750,000 was raised in little over a week.

The fund-raising effort began with the defendant’s large but close circle of friends, and fellow congregants at the Minnehaha Methodist Church. By the weekend, Jordan said, “We were getting calls and letters and wads of money” from all over the country.

Minnesota state Rep. Andy Dawkins, a longtime friend of Olson and her husband, said donors dipped into their savings, firmly believing that she would honor her court commitments.

Many of the contributors recalled the tense political and social climate of the 1970s, he said, and thought: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Many donors, even those who did not know Olson personally, also said they believed that her three teenage daughters need her at home.

“This family needs to be reunited,” Dawkins recalled one woman saying as her husband handed over a check last weekend.

Under terms of her release, Soliah must submit to video monitoring while she awaits trial. Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler ordered weekly reports under a supervision plan by Minnesota Monitoring Inc.

She will meet with her lawyers for several days in Northern California before heading home to Minnesota late Friday. She is to return to court Aug. 31.

The defense attorneys insist there is no evidence against their client and vow that there will be no plea bargains. At this point, a 1999 trial seems a near certainty, they said.

“She knows she wasn’t there and she knows she didn’t place bombs under police cars,” Hanlon said.

Even the prosecutor has acknowledged in court that his case is “hardly slam-dunk.” Latin says key witnesses have died in the years since the indictment.

The prosecutor has raised Hearst’s name as a possible witness linking Soliah to the bombs and to another bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento. Authorities there have reopened their investigation into the death of a customer during the 1974 holdup.

Hearst is a reluctant witness. She has made public statements pointing out that as a convicted felon she would not make a very reliable witness in the Soliah case.