Unbroken

Sara Jane Olson stands tall and defiant in a funky cafe before a small crowd of baby boomers with well-worn Birkenstocks and memories of their own counterculture days. The 30 or so listeners sip hot cider and chai tea.

Olson is facing a Sept. 24 trial in Los Angeles, charged with conspiring to kill two police officers in 1975. She is accused of being a card-carrying member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, best known for the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974.

And she is complaining.

Olson insists that she’s being framed with mysterious new evidence and rails against police, prosecutors, witnesses, judges. “Perhaps the fact that some persons have even questioned police tactics in a massacre [of SLA members] in 1974--six people barbecued and a community terrorized--is enough of an incentive for an institution to think it needs to set the record straight,” she says. “Throw in a couple of young, ambitious D.A.s and the shadowy but always helpful FBI and, voila! A case of mammoth proportions has evolved. And it’s being done over my very-alive body.”

She concedes that her lawyers have told her to “get over it.” But Olson--who faces the possibility of life in prison--cannot get over it. “So,” she says, sighing deeply, “here I am dealing with it.”

Sara Jane Olson, 54, is a doctor’s wife and a stay-at-home mom who lives in St. Paul, Minn. She started her life as a girl named Kathleen Soliah, transformed herself into a 1970s radical and changed her name after she went underground in 1975. She’s come to the small Mayday Cafe in Minneapolis to sell copies of “Serving Time: America’s Most Wanted Recipes,” a cookbook that was published to raise money for her defense. But instead of sharing tips on artichoke dip and Norwegian fruit soup, Olson spends her time, as she has at similar events in Santa Monica and Berkeley, attacking her pursuers. She is a victim of a witch hunt, she says, the target of those who must have someone to blame for the sins of the long-defunct SLA.

Olson contends she was never more than a sympathizer; she never tried to kill anyone; and those who call her a criminal are “liars.” Yes, she spent two decades on the lam, but she’s innocent of the conspiracy charges.

When she was taken into custody in her minivan near her home in June 1999, it first seemed as if her conversion from accused revolutionary to soccer mom was complete. The long, flowing red hair was now shoulder-length and graying. She’d married an emergency-room physician, was raising three daughters and was known for throwing lavish holiday parties, acting in community theater and doing recordings for the blind.

But the woman who has appeared at subsequent cookbook signings, press conferences and court hearings is as outspoken today as she was in Berkeley’s Ho Chi Minh Park a quarter-century ago, where authorities first noticed her. “Contrite” would not seem to be a word in her vocabulary.

*

THE MODEST RANCH HOUSE IN PALMDALE WHERE KATHLEEN SOLIAH grew up, with its worn chocolate-colored paint and refrigerator in the carport, seems as unlikely a childhood home for a revolutionary as the ivy-covered Tudor home where she now lives in St. Paul. Martin Soliah was an English teacher and football coach at Palmdale High School, a staunch Republican who flew P-38s in World War II. Elsie Soliah stayed home with their five kids, three of whom were eventually linked by authorities to the SLA. Kathleen is the eldest.

Although Martin Soliah declares his daughter innocent and blames her predicament on that “scorpion Patty Hearst,” he has expressed dismay about his children’s association with the revolutionary group. He has said he raised his kids to be God-loving, patriotic Americans, and that they were led astray when they moved to Berkeley, then the heart of the country’s counterculture movement.

“They were OK here. We raised them right,” he said in a 1975 interview. “But then they went up north. They’re still good kids. Misled, I’ll grant you that, but they’re good kids.”

Friends from the Palmdale High School Class of 1965 say that they, too, have trouble reconciling their classmate with the woman targeted by police. Merlyn Kimball, now an operating-room technician in Canton, Ga., was a member of the drama club, as was Kathleen. He says she was a sweet teenager whose greatest passion was the Rolling Stones.

“You saw people going astray, but most were loner types,” Kimball says. “The big thing with her was she just wasn’t the prototypical revolutionary who felt shunned by society or something. She was gregarious and funny.”

Kathleen Soliah was also a voracious reader and honor student, elected as the Class of 1965’s “senior personality” for her “service and spirit.” Her brother, Steven, a year younger, was a talented athlete who also became Patty Hearst’s lover while she was in the SLA. Josephine Soliah, three years younger than Kathleen, was the impressionable little sister. Two younger siblings, Lance and Martha, did not follow the revolutionary path.

After graduation, Soliah attended Antelope Valley College before transferring to UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in English. In her early college days she was, according to her father, a “Richard Nixon Republican guerrilla,” one of a group of students who cheered when Nixon came through town in 1968. “I was proud of her,” Martin Soliah said after her arrest, “until she got those stupid ideas of hers.” Friends from that time said she was a promising actress who could step outside her own skin with ease and become someone else.

Her family traces the onset of her radicalization to a student protest in Santa Barbara, shortly before graduation, when antiwar demonstrators burned a Bank of America office.

“She came back and told us the police turned the situation into chaos,” her mother said in a 1999 interview. “I think it was a moment that changed how she looked at things for good.”

*

IN 1971, KATHLEEN SOLIAH AND HER BOYFRIEND, JAMES KILGORE, headed to Berkeley. The budding actress, the good girl who had impressed her parents and critics onstage, would disappear in the smoke and anger of the place and time. Discontent over the Vietnam War was peaking, inflamed by the May 1970 shootings of four students by the National Guard at Kent State.

Soliah worked as a cocktail waitress in San Francisco and took small acting roles. She befriended Angela Atwood, the daughter of a New Jersey Teamsters boss who, like Soliah, had grown up in a middle-class home before coming to Berkeley. Atwood, who appeared with Soliah in “Hedda Gabler,” helped her friend get a job at the Great Electric Underground, an upscale restaurant in the Bank of America world headquarters.

Soliah and Atwood, who were enrolled in a women’s studies class at UC Berkeley, complained about the skimpy work outfits they were required to wear and started a waitresses union. Eventually they quit the Great Electric Underground after denouncing their managers in a letter as “agents of the ruling class,” according to “The Voices of Guns,” one of several books written about the SLA.

Soliah took an extended vacation to Mexico, according to news accounts. When she returned to Berkeley, she learned that Atwood had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small band of self-styled revolutionaries whose members believed the only way to change society was through violence. Atwood had been called “Angel” all of her life. She now answered to Gen. Gelena.

The SLA took its name from the word “symbiosis,” which was picked to represent a symbolic joining of black and white, rich and poor. The group’s founder was Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, an escaped convict. Most of his followers were from middle- and upper-middle-class homes, the children of doctors, engineers and proud World War II veterans. The group’s slogan, written at the bottom of its communiques, was “Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people.”

In November 1973, the SLA made its first headlines with the murder of Marcus Foster, an African American school superintendent in Oakland. The group mistakenly believed Foster wanted to require students to show identification on campus, which it believed analogous to a police-state tactic. His killing was controversial even among SLA sympathizers, who questioned whether it was smart to start off a movement aimed at helping the common man by killing an an up-and-coming black leader.

The Foster killing was overshadowed three months later by the kidnapping of Hearst, who was dragged out of her small Berkeley apartment at night. The crime, and the publishing heiress’ subsequent “coming out” as a radical, were among the most-publicized news events of the 1970s.

The nation watched in horror as Hearst, who took on the name “Tania,” and other SLA members continued to terrorize California. They robbed banks, and they sent out communiques taking responsibility for the crimes and espousing their violent views. Then came the fiery shootout on 54th Street and Compton Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles in May 1974. Six SLA members, including DeFreeze and Atwood, died in the firefight with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Two weeks later, Soliah delivered a eulogy in Berkeley’s Ho Chi Minh Park. It would be the most watched and remembered performance of her life. Standing before a large crowd, with news cameras rolling, she declared that the six SLA members had been “viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs.”

“I am with you,” she concluded. “And we are with you.”

That is when Kathleen Soliah caught the eye of authorities, who soon realized the SLA was not dead. That is also, authorities say, when Kathleen, Steven and Josephine Soliah and Kilgore went on active-duty status with the SLA.

The group resurfaced in February 1975 with the robbery of Guild S&L;, just outside of Sacramento. No one was hurt. Then came the April 1975 robbery of Crocker Savings & Loan in Carmichael, during which customer Myrna Opsahl was killed. It is the most serious unsolved crime linked to the SLA.

Hearst described the incident in her book, “Every Secret Thing,” claiming that Soliah, Kilgore and another SLA member, Emily Harris, went into the bank while she and others waited outside. Hearst wrote that Harris, who served eight years in prison for the Hearst kidnapping, shot Opsahl, a physician’s wife and mother of four. Harris then left her bleeding, according to the book, while Harris, Soliah and other SLA members finished the heist.

Harris and Soliah have denied any involvement in the bank robbery and killing. Steven Soliah was tried in 1976 for the robbery and acquitted. But the events in Carmichael continue to haunt the woman who was to become Sara Jane Olson: In recent months, spurred by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and Opsahl’s family, the FBI and Sacramento Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation of the robbery.

During the summer of 1975, California police departments from San Francisco to Los Angeles reported a string of patrol car bombings. The charges against Olson involve two nail-packed pipe bombs that were planted under LAPD squad cars on Aug. 22, 1975. The first bomb was discovered under the squad car of Officers John Hall and James Bryan at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. A clothespin, which was supposed to cause two metal parts to spark and ignite, did not close properly. (Police say the SLA never perfected the art of bomb making; most didn’t go off.) After finding that device, the LAPD searched its entire fleet of squad cars and found a second bomb in a patrol car at the Hollenbeck station. Police quickly suspected the SLA, and it was only a matter of weeks before their operation was shut down.

Martin Soliah, who has been as outspoken as his daughter over the years, gave the FBI the tip that ultimately helped agents find the SLA’s San Francisco hide-out. He had arranged to have a secret dinner with his three eldest children in San Francisco in hopes of getting them to surrender, but they refused. He said they parted with a tearful goodbye and a promise from Josephine that they would be a family again soon. After the meeting, Martin Soliah told the FBI that his son had a painting job at a San Francisco business; agents eventually trailed Steven Soliah back to the safe house. “We’ve cooperated with everybody,” Martin Soliah said. “How many fathers would go up there and try to get their kids off the street and help the government?”

When the SLA was finally cornered, FBI agents captured Hearst, Emily and Bill Harris, Wendy Yoshimura and Steven Soliah. Kathleen and Josephine Soliah and James Kilgore had vanished.

Josephine, who was not charged with a crime, eventually moved to Oregon, where she married Michael Bortin, a former SLA member. Kilgore and Kathleen went their separate ways. In her absence, a grand jury in Los Angeles indicted Kathleen on charges of conspiring to kill two LAPD officers. Kilgore was indicted on weapons charges based on items found in the San Francisco safe house. An FBI task force is still searching for him.

*

KATHLEEN SOLIAH SOON settled in the Twin Cities, not far from her birthplace of Fargo, N.D. The area, a haven of independent thinking, proved to be the perfect cover for someone who wanted to escape her identity but was unwilling to abandon her political views. “A lot of people don’t realize it, but [the Twin Cities] is Berkeley in the middle of the Midwest,” says Peter Erlinder, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul and a staunch Olson supporter. “In many ways it still has the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Soliah assumed the name of Sara Jane Olson and got a job cooking at a local fraternity. She also met and eventually married Fred Peterson, an emergency-room doctor who played trumpet in a local reggae band.

Andy Dawkins, who would eventually become a state representative, was a regular at the couple’s popular parties. “This was before we had kids. We would literally move the furniture out of Fred and Sara’s living room into the kitchen and hallway. We would listen to all sorts of great music and dance until 2 and 3 in the morning.”

As the party-goers started having children, the parties became less about dancing and more about eating. “When you went to Fred’s and Sara’s, it was an elaborate spread,” says Dawkins. “She just took the time to spend the day, or probably a couple days. I don’t know the fancy names of all the things, but by everyone’s account, it was elaborate.”

Peterson and Olson were among the first to have kids, Dawkins says. It has not gone unnoticed by prosecutors that Olson named her first daughter Emily.

Friends say Olson has been an attentive and caring mother to Emily, 20, Sophia, 19, and Leila, 14. She has raised money for workers in Nicaragua and El Salvador and organized a women’s day festival.

Olson embraced apartheid in Africa as one of her causes. Despite her fugitive status, she managed to move to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, where her husband worked as a physician and she taught English and drama. Prosecutors say she used a friend’s passport to get out of the country. After three years in Africa, the family moved to Baltimore for a couple of years and then returned to St. Paul.

“The notion that she had been hiding here as some sort of soccer mom is not a really good description,” says Macalester College professor Peter Rachleff, who got to know Olson through her community activism. “She never shied away from the public eye or progressive politics, which is the reason she got so much support.”

*

OVER THE YEARS, OLSON reportedly tried to negotiate her surrender twice. But she could not get authorities to waive her expected jail time. Then, in June of 1999, near the 25th anniversary of her Berkeley speech, “America’s Most Wanted” aired a story about the SLA and the Los Angeles bombings. Phone tips led police to the stay-at-home mom in St. Paul.

The news of her arrest shocked the community; within a week friends raised $1 million bail. Neighbors and colleagues, some of whom have since grown impatient as the trial continued to be postponed, took out second mortgages and borrowed money from their children’s college funds. Many of her supporters believed that her prosecution is a waste of time and resources, says Dawkins, who attended her bond hearing in Los Angeles.

Supporters started a Web site and created the cookbook, which has generated money for her plane trips back and forth to the West Coast. Los Angeles County is paying a portion of Olson’s legal bills because the case has drained her family’s resources. So far, her defense has cost the county about $500,000.

The cookbook, which appears to make light of her arrest and the crimes the SLA is accused of committing, has been a lightning rod for critics. In a chapter on breads, she poses with $20 bills in her hand; prosecutors say she’s alluding to the Carmichael bank robbery in which $20 bills were stolen. In another chapter, she has a picture frame around her head, a suggestion that she’s being framed.

Even one of her friends, Chris Coleman, says some of her supporters have gone too far. Coleman, who attends Minnehaha United Methodist Church with Olson, says supporters should wait to fight her case in the courtroom. “I think some comments made by her political supporters just inflamed the rhetoric,” he says. “Some people just dismissed [the case] as not very serious, and that was a huge mistake. Whether she is guilty or innocent, they are serious charges.”

Henry Beck, who owns a Christian bookstore outside of Minneapolis, said he would be more sympathetic if Olson behaved more like anti-Vietnam War radical Katherine Ann Power, who turned herself in after hiding out for 23 years. Like Olson, Power had assumed a new name, been married and was known for her gourmet cooking. But she eventually decided the only way to ease her guilt was to give up to authorities. Power pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a robbery in which a police officer was killed and served six years in prison. She apologized to the officer’s widow and nine children.

But Sara Jane Olson says she owes no apologies. She is merely a sympathizer who helped the SLA find housing and food after her best friend was killed in the South L.A. shootout. Rather than distance herself from the SLA, she has reached back into the past and hired some of the same lawyers who defended SLA members. J. Tony Serra, who wears a ponytail and is known for his irreverence, won the acquittal of former SLA member Russell Little, who at his first trial had been convicted of killing Foster, the Oakland school superintendent. Two other attorneys who worked on her case, Stuart Hanlon and Susan Jordan, had represented former SLA members.

When the current judge in the Los Angeles case, Larry Paul Fidler, decided that the history of the SLA could be part of her trial, Olson held a press conference to complain. “I’m outraged at what has happened,” Olson said after Fidler’s decision. “This is a case in which they’re trying to take away my freedom forever and destroy me and my family.” The ruling, a strong setback to the defense, means that the entire history of the SLA, including the unsolved Carmichael bank robbery, can be used as evidence at her trial. Serra has said it will make the case difficult to win. “We can’t defend the ideology of the SLA.”

Still, Olson won’t shut up. She has been critical of prosecution witnesses, saving her harshest words for former LAPD Officer Bryan, who after 25 years, now says he can identify Olson at the scene of the attempted bombing at the IHOP. “After 25 years,” she says, “he suddenly can remember seeing me.”

*

AS THE CASE CONTINUES to drag out--trial has been postponed six times--evidence against Sara Jane Olson has grown. At her bail hearing two years ago, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Latin held up a folder with Olson’s indictment and about 30 pages of evidence that his office had on the decades-old case. By his own admission, Latin said much of that evidence was either circumstantial or based on the word of dead witnesses, and conceded a trial would be “no slam-dunk.”

Since then, Latin and Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter have compiled additional material from law- enforcement files around the state. They have filled a room at the D.A.’s office, referred to as the “evidence vault,” with 23,000 pages of documents and dozens of tapes, including recorded conversations of Hearst speaking to her family about the SLA and Soliah.

And, just a few weeks ago a judge unsealed a transcript that revealed even more troubling evidence. Prosecutors now have handwriting evidence that they say shows Olson ordered fuses two weeks before the 1975 attempted bombings of two LAPD squad cars. One of Olson’s attorneys has said the defense is rethinking its strategy.

Prosecutors also have been helped by modern technology, through which Soliah’s fingerprints have been found on key SLA documents. Authorities say new ballistics testing has shown that spent shells found at the Carmichael bank and in Opsahl’s body match those found at an SLA hide-out that was frequented by Olson.

In spite of the renewed interest in the killing and bank robbery in Carmichael, or perhaps because of it, Olson keeps speaking out, although she rarely takes questions. When she’s not talking in person, her supporters send out statements, complaining about everything from Hearst’s presidential pardon for her bank robbery conviction to the behavior of prosecutors and the news media. In a recent statement, Olson said she is being framed.

“At my home, in Minnesota, as I go about my daily life, it is easy to forget that I am being transformed by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office into a model of anti-Americanism and thuggery.

“That office’s representatives schlep up and down the state, relentlessly prodding a D.A. in Sacramento, tinting my reputation with a slight stain of pale yellow because [the district attorney] hasn’t indicted me.

“There are sudden zapped reports of fingerprints miraculously discovered in a vehicle, or was it a bank? Or on a wall? Down the street? Or anywhere?”

But the talkative Olson concedes in the statement, e-mailed to newspapers around the country and posted on her Web site, that it will be 12 Los Angeles jurors who have the final word.