Old Charges, New Identity for Olson

Even on the grand jury indictment, turned yellow with age, the defendant now is officially known as Sara Jane Olson, the name she used to build a respectable life while running for 24 years from charges that she conspired to kill Los Angeles police officers by planting nail bombs under squad cars.

But although the devices never exploded and no one was hurt, the allegations against Kathleen Ann Soliah, as she was known during the summer of 1975, cannot be washed away so painlessly.

On Tuesday, Olson, a 52-year-old doctor’s wife and mother of three from St. Paul, Minn., appeared in Los Angeles Superior Court to begin the legal process that her lawyers say probably will result in a trial by Thanksgiving.

It promises to be part history lesson, part flashback to the politically turbulent 1970s. And, as defense attorney Susan B. Jordan noted, those memories of anger and protest and mistrust of the government will prove troubling for all involved to relive.

Olson’s lawyers, Jordan and Stuart Hanlon, maintain her innocence. The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Latin, doesn’t speak outside the courtroom. But in court he has acknowledged that the case is difficult and the evidence thin.

Grand jury transcripts released last month revealed that there indeed is scant evidence left to link Olson to the bomb plot. A store clerk who tied her to the purchase of pipes used to make the bomb has died, as has an LAPD bomb expert who linked the defendant to fingerprints and bomb-making materials found in the closet of a Symbionese Liberation Army hide-out in San Francisco.

Olson was surrounded in court Tuesday by supporters, including her husband and parents. On the other side of the courtroom, several LAPD detectives gathered to ensure that Olson faces up to the charges contained in a 1976 grand jury indictment: conspiring to murder police officers, and possessing and attempting to detonate destructive devices.

Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, citing a recent Minnesota court ruling, allowed the name switch. “This case was formerly the People vs. Kathleen Ann Soliah,” he said. “Now it will be the People vs. Sara Jane Olson, a.k.a. Kathleen Ann Soliah.”

Asked if the name change was an attempt by the defendant to distance herself from her radical past, attorney Jordan told reporters: “This is the name she was married under, the name her children know her by. It’s the name she has lived under for 23 years.”

Fidler first sent the case to Judge J.D. Smith, but Olson’s lawyers, mindful of the 24 years Smith spent with the Los Angeles Police Department, challenged the assignment. It then went to Judge James M. Ideman, a former deputy district attorney and federal judge with a military background. Ideman, a graduate of the Citadel and a retired U.S. Army colonel, served with the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Forces during the 1950s.

Jordan and Hanlon also asked the judge to consider papers signed by Soliah and two of her alleged former SLA colleagues, William and Emily Harris. The papers waived any conflict of interest by the defense attorneys, who have represented the Harrises in the past. But Fidler said the matter should be decided later by Ideman, the trial judge.

Olson was arrested in June, when the FBI pulled over the family minivan a few blocks from her Tudor home in an upscale, leafy St. Paul neighborhood. She was accused of planting the two pipe bombs under the police vehicles to avenge the deaths of six SLA members, including her close friend, Angela Atwood, during a shootout the previous year with the LAPD. The SLA was notorious at the time for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who later joined her captors and participated in a string of bank robberies.

Olson was jailed, then freed by Fidler after 250 friends, neighbors and supportive strangers raised her $1-million bail.

Since her arrest, Olson’s case has hit the World Wide Web, big-time.

Her supporters in St. Paul, where she is known as a doctor’s wife, devout churchgoer and community activist, this week announced the formation of a defense fund, complete with official Web site. Other high-profile defendants, such as Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, have successfully used the Internet to raise tens of thousands of dollars. But fund-raising is just the half of it.

Less sympathetic sites also have popped up, including one that features “Safehouse Beautiful”--a satire contrasting Olson’s homemaking present with her alleged bomb-planting past. The site’s operators could not be reached Tuesday.

The satiric site claims to be “dedicated to luxury on the lam,” and includes features such as, “I’m bourgeois, you’re bourgeois, and that’s just fine with me.” Inside is “Bomb Appetit, the SLA cookbook.”

The mock cookbook includes a recipe for “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People Jello Salad.” Ingredients include lime gelatin, the plastic explosive C-4 and shredded carrots.