Charity and Acting Filled the Life of Ex-SLA Soldier

Every Monday at 8:30 a.m., Sara Jane Olson sat down in front of a microphone and read aloud a week’s worth of local papers so blind people could call in and listen to the news.

Exceptionally bright, inquisitive and a semiprofessional actress known for her onstage complexity and subtlety, the 52-year-old mother of three was shy about revealing a semi-secret hobby to her artist friends: She collected homey ceramic Christmas ornaments, arranging them each December into miniature snowy villages.

At 8:15 a.m. Wednesday, Olson, whose husband is a doctor, backed the family’s 1998 Plymouth minivan out of the garage and, driving alone, headed northwest along winding maple-lined streets.

Six minutes later, a gaggle of authorities surrounded the van and calmly asked Kathleen Ann Soliah--former Symbionese Liberation Army “soldier,” accused terrorist bomber and federal fugitive--to step out and place her hands behind her head.

She did. And 23 years of a flawlessly executed life on the lam came to an end.

“She was one of those rare fugitives who just disappears,” said Arthur Roderick of the U.S. Marshal’s Service. “The only thing she probably could have done better was marry a priest.”

As authorities seek to extradite Soliah to California, friends and neighbors, charity acquaintances and fellow actors who knew her as Sara Jane Olson are rummaging through their memories for hints dropped, clues scattered to her radical previous life.

But even in retrospect, her left-leaning politics, fondness for the underdog and travels outside the country seem entirely ordinary for a thoughtful, educated woman who came of age in the post-Vietnam era.

“This has stunned everybody--and I mean everybody,” one friend said.

Soliah, police said, was one of the last members of the SLA, the group of neo-Marxist radicals whose 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst initiated one of the century’s most spectacular crime sprees.

She was indicted in 1976 on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, accused of planting pipe bombs under two Los Angeles police cars in retaliation for a fiery 1974 Los Angeles shootout that left six SLA members dead, including the group’s charismatic escaped-convict leader, Donald DeFreeze. Neither of the bombs exploded. If convicted, Soliah could face 20 years to life in prison.

Soliah’s parents, who live in Palmdale, insisted that their daughter is innocent, saying that any bombs she may have handled were not loaded with explosives but simply props used to make a political statement.

“They weren’t real bombs. They didn’t know how to make bombs,” Elsie Soliah said Wednesday of her daughter.

But police said that the bombs were loaded with explosives and construction nails. “They were large and capable of causing bodily injury and death to anyone nearby,” King said.

The tall, slender redhead, who received her introduction to radical left-wing politics while studying theater at UC Santa Barbara, disappeared soon after the bombs were discovered.

And before long, authorities believe, she made what was perhaps the most crucial move in her long life as a fugitive. At the height of the search, with Patricia Hearst stories still on Page One of the newspapers and parents panicked when their children were accepted at politically active colleges, Soliah headed for Zimbabwe.

“The minute you leave the confines of the U.S., it makes it a lot more difficult” for law enforcement, said Roderick, who has chased federal fugitives for 16 years.

By the time she returned to the United States nine years later, the acronym SLA had largely vanished from the pop lexicon. (The name Symbionese Liberation Army may have been suggested by a 1959 novel that used the term “symbiology,” a word describing separate organisms that live together comfortably.)

Authorities believe that Soliah and her husband, Dr. Gerald Peterson, moved to the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s after a brief stay in Baltimore. And somewhere along the line, she adopted the name “Olson,” among the most common surnames in the Upper Midwest. In 1989, she and her husband bought a house in one of St. Paul’s nicest neighborhoods, an ivy-covered Tudor-style home with zinnias and a massive maple tree in the frontyard.

Before long, the former revolutionary was something of an upper-middle-class woman about town, entertaining in her home, writing letters to the editor of a local newspaper, volunteering at Minnesota State Services for the Blind.

And she returned to her first love, theater, impressing critics with her performances in a host of roles, including the disturbed Miss Habisham in “Great Expectations,” the queen of the witches in “Macbeth” and a conniving daughter in “King Lear.”

In 1998, Soliah seemed especially taken with her role in “A Fair Country,” playing the liberal wife of an American diplomat whose experiences in Apartheid-era South Africa bring out feelings of racism and lead to a nervous breakdown.

“She said she had spent years in Africa during this same time and seemed intuitively to understand the complexities of the role,” said Pam Nice, director of the production.

It is not clear where police got the tip that finally brought them to the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. In May, the television program “America’s Most Wanted” ran a special on the 25th anniversary of the SLA shootout, and the FBI offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to Soliah’s capture.

Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department had been on Soliah’s trail since reopening the case five months ago, interviewing friends and family members in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., and San Francisco. But it was a tip last month that followed the TV special that helped crack the case, police said.

“The show led to that [arrest],” said LAPD Det. Tom King, who supervised the investigation.

If taking to the stage and having her face appear on theater posters and in local newspapers seems foolhardy, experts point out that fugitives who attempt to change their lifestyles too dramatically seldom avoid authorities for long. Those who make it year after year under the weight of an arrest warrant create an identity with its roots in the truth.

As Sara Ann Olson, Soliah hosted teas for a Democratic congressman. She also supported gun control efforts, followed foreign affairs and read everything from Charles Dickens to The Economist, friends said.

She jogged through the neighborhood with her husband, made Christmas candy and--after a particularly invigorating play rehearsal--went with her cast mates to drink Summit Pale Ale at a bar called Sgt. Preston’s.

Sometimes, fellow actors said, she would engage in casual conversation about politics. Mostly, though, she talked about the theater, her flower garden and her three teenage daughters.

Said Fiacre Douglas, who performed with Soliah several times and often joined her at Sgt. Preston’s: “I don’t think she left any hints at all.”

*

Times staff writers Kurt Streeter and Robert Lopez in Los Angeles and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.

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Where Are They Now?

A look at other 1960s and ‘70s radicals who spent years as fugitives.

Katherine Ann Power: An antiwar activist implicated in a fatal bank robbery in Boston in 1970 took an alias and settled near Corvallis, Ore., where she taught, worked as a chef, married and had a son. She surrendered in 1993 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. With continued good behavior in prison, she could be freed in January.

Silas Trim Bissell: Founding member of the Weather Underground was charged with trying to bomb a University of Washington ROTC building in 1970. He spent 17 years in hiding before he was arrested in Eugene, Ore., where he had worked as a physical therapist and freelance artist. He served 17 months in a federal halfway house.

Bernadine Dohrn: Alleged conspirator in a series of bombings by the Weather Underground spent 11 years as a fugitive, four of them on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. The conspiracy charges against her were dropped, although she was jailed for seven months for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury.

SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY MEMBERS NOW

A look at what has happened to some of the people connected to the Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst:

Patricia Hearst Shaw: Served two years of seven-year term for bank robbery before President Carter commuted sentence. Lives in Connecticut with husband Bernard Shaw and children. Appeared in two John Waters movies and several sitcoms. Board member of Meals on Wheels.

Joseph Remiro and Russell Little: Imprisoned three months before Hearst kidnapping for murder of Oakland, Calif., school superintendent. Little was later retried and acquitted. Remiro remains in prison.

Bill and Emily Harris: Captured along with Hearst in their San Francisco apartment. Both served eight years for their part in the kidnapping. They later divorced. Now remarried with two children, Bill Harris has been trying to get a private investigator’s license.