SLA Figure, a Fugitive Since 1975, Is Arrested

More than two decades after she allegedly tried to bomb two Los Angeles police cars, former Symbionese Liberation Army soldier and federal fugitive Kathleen Soliah was arrested early Wednesday near her home in Minnesota.

Soliah, whose 24 years on the run had taken her from San Francisco to Zimbabwe and finally to St. Paul, was taken into custody without incident, not far from her Tudor-style home in an upscale neighborhood near the Mississippi River.

Living under the name Sara Jane Olson, Soliah was married to a physician with whom she had three children. She was involved in local Democratic politics and acted in community theater, where she had roles in such productions as “Macbeth” and “King Lear.”

Los Angeles Police Department detectives interviewed old acquaintances and family members and used the World Wide Web to find Soliah. The detectives also received tips about her from the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” which broadcast a show about her last month.

Soliah, 52, had been living on the run since Sept. 18, 1975, the day she unwittingly led FBI agents to Patricia Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper heiress who eventually took up arms with her SLA captors.

Soliah had come to the attention of the FBI after she gave a fiery speech condemning the May 17, 1974, shootout with Los Angeles police in which six SLA members died, including one of Soliah’s best friends.

Radical Politics Took Violent Turn

Soliah is charged with planting pipe bombs under two LAPD cars, in apparent retaliation for the shootout. She was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in 1976, authorities said, and could face 20 years to life in prison if convicted.

Her husband, Dr. Gerald Peterson, said neither he nor his children had any inkling of his wife’s double life.

“I know nothing about that,” Peterson said in a telephone interview. “I’ll tell you the truth, I’m totally shocked.”

Peterson said he and his children were confused and frightened by the arrest, which came without warning. Kathy Soliah was pulled over by police in her white minivan.

Soliah’s parents, Martin and Elsie Soliah of Palmdale, said Peterson knew his wife was a fugitive.

“She told him about her situation when they got serious,” Elsie Soliah said. “He understood.”

Patricia Kramer, a neighbor for more than a decade, said Soliah participated in block parties and Christmas celebrations and belonged to the neighborhood crime watch group.

“She was very friendly, outgoing and bubbly,” Kramer said.

Soliah’s father said he hoped his oldest daughter would not be judged too harshly.

“She has led a decent life. She’s a mom. She’s a person who works in her community, someone who cares about others,” said Martin Soliah, 82.

Soliah was arrested by St. Paul police with the assistance of LAPD detectives and FBI agents. She is being held without bail in the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center pending her expected extradition to Los Angeles.

Tom King, the LAPD detective who supervised the investigation, said Soliah was “somewhat surprised and somewhat relieved” by her arrest.

King knew the case well. It began when he was a rookie and he had discussed it countless times over supper and at backyard barbecues.

His father, Mervin King, was the LAPD captain who supervised the bloody shootout with the SLA, which was televised live in Los Angeles. He also oversaw the investigation into the bombs that were found under the LAPD cars a year later.

But Mervin King retired before the bombers could be found. Five months ago, taking advantage of a lull in crime, Tom King said he assigned two of his best investigators, Dets. David Reyes and Michael Fanning, to track Soliah down and finish the job his father began.

Mervin King said he remembers well the night of Aug. 22, 1975, when a phone call woke him just after midnight.

Patrons at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood had seen something fall from beneath a patrol car as it sped from the parking lot. It turned out to be a bomb.

King said he thought immediately of the shootout a year earlier on 54th Street in which six SLA members died. Revenge, he thought.

He knew the SLA had been blamed for the Marin County bombing of two police cars. On a hunch, King ordered a search of every LAPD vehicle.

It was an arduous task, especially in the middle of the night. But his judgment proved sound. A second bomb was found attached to the bottom of an unmarked LAPD car in the Hollenbeck Division.

Neither pipe bomb had gone off. The triggering device on the first malfunctioned when the patrol car made a sharp turn out of the restaurant parking lot. The second device was disabled by the bomb squad. Each bomb was packed with about a hundred heavy-duty construction nails.

John Hall and James Bryan were the two young officers who left the restaurant driving car 6Z38. “It almost got blown to bits,” said Hall, now 52 and still on the force.

“We would have been gone for good,” he said, shaking his head. “So would a lot of innocent people in that restaurant.”

Although neither bomb exploded, the fallout lasted years.

Hall said Bryan was so rattled he quit. Until just a few years ago, Hall himself felt compelled to get down on his hands and knees and inspect his car every time he prepared to get in--a ritual once practiced departmentwide.

“You would think that sort of paranoid, but in that period people were actively trying to kill cops,” Tom King said.

Detectives dismantled the devices and traced each part to its source, which eventually led them to two suspects. One was Kathleen Soliah. The other was her boyfriend, James Kilgore.

By then, Soliah had been underground for more than a year. A brother and sister also had ties to the SLA. At the time, the Soliahs’ parents said they were not even sure where their children lived.

Kathleen was eventually tracked to two San Francisco apartments, which were raided by the FBI on Sept. 18, 1975. Instead of finding her, however, agents found Patty Hearst; Kathy’s brother, Steven; and three other SLA members.

Kilgore and Kathleen Soliah apparently went their separate ways after the raid, and lived underground. Kilgore was never charged with the attempted bombings in Los Angeles, although police say he remains a suspect. He is wanted on a federal warrant stemming from the discovery of firearms and explosives during a raid in San Francisco and remains at large.

Kathleen Soliah and her four siblings were raised “by the book,” said Martin Soliah, who moved his family from the Midwest to Palmdale in 1957. Martin, who had flown P-38s in the Pacific during World War II, became the football coach at Palmdale High.

The oldest children--Kathleen, Steven and Josephine--were good students who never got into trouble, Martin said. He and his wife describe themselves as “staunch Republicans,” and said the children followed suit.

Kathy was soft and sweet and gentle, they recalled. She also was “a Richard Nixon guerrilla”--a high school student who joined the cheering crowd when Nixon swept through town in his 1968 campaign.

“I was proud of her--until she got those stupid ideas of hers,” Martin Soliah said.

Changes Came After a Violent Clash

By the early 1970s, Kathleen Soliah was studying drama at UC Santa Barbara. Her view of the world was turned upside down during a student protest that turned into a violent clash with police.

“She came back and told us the police turned the situation into chaos,” Elsie Soliah said. “There were bullets flying overhead; Kathy could hear them swooshing by. I think it was a moment that changed how she looked at things for good.”

The Soliahs knew their three college children were flirting with liberal politics--typical of the times.

They didn’t know, however, their children were forming alliances with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of radical college students led by a charismatic ex-convict who espoused the overthrow of the United States government. Or that all three helped to hide Patty Hearst, daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, after the SLA kidnapped her in 1974.

“How gullible could we be?” Elsie said.

She told of a time in 1974 when the family was together watching a TV news report on Hearst. “I remember saying, ‘I wonder where that Patty Hearst is?’ and they sat right there and said, ‘I wonder, too.’ They were practically living with her. We just had no idea.”

Sometime in the late 1970s, Soliah arrived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where she moved next door to Peterson, then a medical intern.

Elsie Soliah said the two lived for a number of years in Zimbabwe, where he worked as a physician and she taught drama and English. There, she gave birth to the second of their three daughters. “It was in the bush,” Martin Soliah said. “There was hardly anyone to help except for two village women.”

Kathleen Soliah and her husband returned to the United States in the mid-1980s, the Soliahs said, settling in Minnesota after a brief stay in Baltimore.

Her husband visited Los Angeles for a convention soon after their return and Kathy came along, her parents said. For the first time in more than a decade, she saw them face-to-face at the William S. Hart Park in Santa Clarita.

“We held each other and cried,” Elsie said. “When family gets together, everything’s forgotten. . . . She and I had always had a special bond, we shared so much when she was younger.”

The meeting at the park sparked a family reunion a couple of years later in the Midwest. A portrait taken at the reunion in 1987, featuring Elsie Soliah surrounded by her adult children, hangs in the Soliahs’ home.

Kathleen Soliah, looking more like a suburban soccer mom than the “armed and dangerous” terrorist on her wanted poster, lights up the photo with an energetic smile.

The Soliahs said Kathleen has not returned to California since the meeting in the park. She did keep in touch periodically over the next few years, sometimes with a note in Christmas package, always mailed from a state other than Minnesota.

About a decade ago she cut off all contact, prodded by her lawyer’s concerns that she was being too casual and might be detected, he mother said. “Her lawyer frightened her,” she said. “Her lawyer said, ‘You’d better start lying low.’ ”

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Times staff writers Solomon Moore and Matt Lait contributed to this story.