Cautiously, Olson Tells of Life as Fugitive

It took Sara Jane Olson a while to remember, to understand, when the police cruiser pulled up behind her last June, flashed its lights and stopped her on one of the nicest streets in her neighborhood in St. Paul, Minn.

“What’s wrong, officer?” she asked, very much the innocent Midwestern housewife. He mentioned the tinted windows on her minivan, she recalled.

“Then I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw several other cars pull up, and people jumping out,” Olson, recently freed from a judge’s gag order, said Friday during a day of limited media interviews. “I thought, ‘Oh, OH!’ The whole thing struck me as odd.”

“FBI, Kathleen,” one of the men barked, invoking the name she was given at birth but hadn’t used in years. “It’s over.”

And so, after more than two decades hiding in plain sight, alleged Symbionese Liberation Army foot soldier Kathleen Ann Soliah was arrested on a 1976 indictment out of Los Angeles accusing her of plotting to kill police officers by blowing up LAPD squad cars.

“No, I did not expect this,” said Olson with a nervous laugh. “I expected to go on with my life and die someday.”

The pipe bombs did not detonate, and no one was hurt. But 25 years later, the case goes on. A trial is scheduled in January.

After her arrest, Olson spent five weeks in jail, coping by keeping a low profile and watching everything that went on around her. She was freed when her friends and neighbors raised the $1-million bail.

The last year has been filled with cross-country flights, court appearances, and a celebrity she never experienced as a local stage actress in Minnesota. She feels like she’s been living in a state of suspended animation. Her husband, Fred Peterson, is supportive, but there are limits. He now has his own lawyer as authorities investigate what he knew about her past, and when he knew it.

The children’s college fund is depleted, with the money spent on defense lawyers and investigators.

“I just want my life back,” she said.

On Friday, Olson sat down at a Pasadena restaurant and talked at length for the first time.

It was her third interview of the day; she had just kept a promise and made artichoke dip to promote her cookbook during a talk show on KPCC-FM.

Over the course of two hours, Olson measured every word, fully aware that anything she says can and will be used against her in court.

“This is my entire future--whether or not I even have a future,” said, explaining her caution.

Asked about her two decades on the lam, Olson politely refused to discuss details. Asked about how and when she broke the secrets of her past to her physician husband, she passed again.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, as her attorney, Shawn Chapman, nodded in agreement. “I have to be careful. I have to assume the possibility that anything I say can be seized upon by the district attorney,” she said.

She did answer two questions: No, the pseudonym Sara Jane had nothing to do with Sara Jane Moore, the would-be presidential assassin.

“There’s nothing really glamorous, romantic or juicy about it,” she said. “There was no epiphany. It was just a name.”

And, no, her eldest daughter was not named after SLA comrade Emily Harris.

“I like the name. It’s just a good, old-fashioned name,” she said.

At her fund-raisers, with prepared comments in front of her, Olson can draw on her theatrical training and be an inspiring speaker.

One-on-one, however, she is nervous. Her thoughts trail off. She laughs often, making her appear flighty when she is not.

She has tried to maintain some semblance of a normal life, but says it’s difficult when she doesn’t know if she eventually will go free or spend time in prison.

Her three teenage daughters seem to be handling their mother’s case by ignoring it. She never got the chance to tell her daughters about her past.

“The media did it,” she said, recalling how she returned home to find reporters camped on her lawn.

The girls haven’t asked for an explanation, she added.

“They just think everybody else is crazy.” It helps, she says, that as teenagers they are totally self-absorbed. To them, she said, the family’s situation “is a real bummer, but it’s peripheral.”

But Olson says she is scared. “I think about it, but I have come to the conclusion I can’t prepare myself too much. I’ve read a lot of books about women in prison.”

She isn’t acting now, preferring to lay low at home. But she’s beginning to take a more active role in helping her defense lawyers. In the meantime, she gardens. She runs, sometimes 11 miles at a time.

“If I find myself getting into some kind of reverie about it, I just stop,” she said. “I just let it go. A lot of my stability comes from my friends.”