Olson Case Alters Lives of 3 Aging Witnesses

This is not the way Evelyn Berns expected to spend her twilight years--giving court testimony about something she saw 26 years ago. But lawyers and police investigators believe she is a significant witness in the complex murder conspiracy case of Sara Jane Olson.

“We’ve been hearing that for 25 years,” said her husband, Donald, last Thursday evening, only minutes before leaving their home in the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove to visit his 78-year-old wife in a hospital intensive care unit where she was recuperating from a heart attack. The pressure of having the case suddenly focus on her has been unsettling, he said.

“This is what brought on the heart attack,” Donald Berns said. “For about the last month she’s been on edge.”

Berns is one of three elderly, ailing Sacramento County witnesses whom prosecutors have obtained permission to examine in court before the scheduled Sept. 24 start of the Olson trial. Berns was a teller at the Crocker National Bank branch in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael that vaulted into the news in 1975 when four masked robbers burst in, stealing money and fatally shooting a customer, Myrna Opsahl, who was depositing money from her church.

Authorities maintain that the Symbionese Liberation Army committed the robbery and that one of the robbers was Olson. The most that Berns can tell them is that she saw a masked woman behind the teller counter.

“I doubt whether she remembers too much,” said Donald Berns. “Of course there are a few things I imagine she would never forget. It’s the sort of thing you would want to forget. All the girls who worked at the bank with her are all spread out now and she rarely sees them.”

Berns retired from the bank on disability because of arthritis in 1978, according to her husband. He said last week that his wife was recovering well from the heart attack and he expected that she would be moved out of intensive care. It’s not that his wife does not want to help the prosecution, he said, it’s just a matter of whether her memory will let her.

“If she remembered, she’d tell you,” said Berns. “She says that’s a long time ago.”

Dorothy White, Marceline Jones and Berns do not rank among the touchstones of the case against Sara Jane Olson.

They don’t have the aura of familiarity and emotion connected with such figures as onetime radical Emily Harris, kidnapped heiress-turned-SLA compatriot Patty Hearst, and the still elusive alleged co-conspirator James Kilgore.

Yet the three women, and their ailments, have been thrust onto center stage in the murder conspiracy case.

Because of their age and infirmity, the women were scheduled to provide their trial testimony in a Sacramento courthouse last Friday.

But none of them made it to court.

Prosecutors were so worried about White’s failing health that they went to her home and interviewed her there Aug. 3. According to a defense attorney at the session, White was unable to remember anything germane.

Then, days later, Jones and Berns both ended up in the hospital.

Jones suffered a broken hip. Berns had a heart attack Tuesday, just three days before she was due to testify.

It is now unclear when either of them will provide testimony sought by prosecutors against Olson, who was known as Kathleen Soliah before she went into hiding more than two decades ago. One of the hurdles of going to trial so long after any crime is the loss of witnesses. Prosecutors say 27 witnesses in the Olson case have died.

Where White, Jones and Berns fit in a trial that will revisit the legendary, violent history of the SLA is not where one might think. They’re not radicals. They’re not friends of radicals. They don’t even have information about whether Olson planted the bombs under the police cars. (Neither of the bombs went off.) Jones, 80, was also a bank teller in the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael. White was a clerk in a Sacramento liquor store.

What they have been expected to offer are eyewitness accounts of key people in key places inside and outside two 1975 Sacramento area bank robberies tied to the SLA.

White, now 77, sold cigarettes to a man she identified 26 years ago, from photos shown her by police, as Kilgore, Olson’s then-boyfriend. The liquor store where she worked was on the same block in Sacramento as the Guild Savings & Loan, which was allegedly robbed by Kilgore and other SLA members.

Jones is expected to testify that she saw the same masked woman whom Berns saw. Jones supposedly saw her hop over a teller counter. Prosecutors not only contend that that was Sara Jane Olson, but also that money from the Carmichael robbery helped finance bomb materials that Olson allegedly used in the Los Angeles attempted bombings.

According to the prosecutors’ pretrial brief, a woman they said is Olson allegedly kicked one of the tellers in the bank, but it was neither Berns nor Jones.

Shawn Chapman, one of Olson’s defense attorneys, says the testimony of the three women is irrelevant to whether Olson planted bombs under police cars. Olson, after all, is not charged with the robberies in Sacramento.

But prosecutors say the women’s memories are all part of the patchwork they are weaving to prove that Olson was deeply involved with the SLA.

“It’s significant because it substantiates what Patty Hearst says,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter said, referring to Hearst’s accounts of Olson’s involvement with the SLA.

All three women were interviewed by police in 1975. But because Olson was in hiding for more than 20 years and is only now about to be tried, the women--who live in various Sacramento suburbs--are being called upon to testify. It’s not a situation that the witnesses or the lawyers relish.

Told that Berns believed his wife’s heart attack was brought on by the court case, Hunter said, “That just takes my breath away. God, I hope not.

“These people were nice, nice people just doing their jobs and then this comes up,” the prosecutor said. “This is a time when you need to be with your family. It’s a traumatic experience going to court.”

When lawyers, a judge, a court reporter and a police detective arrived at the mobile park home of Dorothy White in Citrus Heights two weeks ago, they found her in her nightgown in a reclining chair hooked up to oxygen and on medication. White, who has suffered previous heart attacks and had recently been hospitalized, broke down when she saw the group, according to defense attorney Chapman.

“The moment we got there, she started crying and said, ‘I told you I know nothing,’ ” recalled Chapman. “I think her frustration in part was because she couldn’t offer any help.”

According to Chapman, not only could White not remember selling cigarettes to Kilgore, she could not remember talking to police about it.

White had worked at the liquor store 12 years, said Chapman, and spent the last two decades living in a mobile home and participating in her mobile home park’s community activities.

But a spate of heart attacks have left her debilitated. “Apparently, Dorothy White takes 11 medications in the morning and eight at night,” said Chapman. “She can’t eat. Her daughter said she’ll make her some mashed potatoes and she’ll pick over that.”

Hunter would not comment about the content of what White said at the conditional examination.

“She came home to die, that’s one thing she did tell us,” Hunter said. “There was a certain sense of her almost feeling guilty because she couldn’t remember. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe we’re here.’ ”

Hunter said they would not have had to be at White’s house if the defense had agreed to allow into the court record White’s past recorded recollections.

But Chapman said the defense couldn’t do that. “The foundation was not laid for [that] given the fact that Ms. White could not remember having spoken to the police in the first place,” said Chapman. “Although we certainly didn’t want to disrupt this poor woman’s life by coming into her home in her final days, I have a responsibility to my client to protect her rights. It’s an unfortunate situation to be in.”