Olson Trial Was Planned as Journey to the 1970s

A letter in Sara Jane Olson’s handwriting ordering fuses days before nail-packed bombs were found beneath two LAPD cars in 1975. A chain of stolen credit cards, false identifications, and a closet full of bomb components. And testimony by star witness Patricia Hearst that Olson traveled to Los Angeles with two fellow SLA members to plant the bombs.

That’s the heart of a largely circumstantial case against the accused Symbionese Liberation Army member, a case in which both sides planned to frame their arguments around the turbulent tenor of the 1970s. Olson’s trial, which now seems unlikely to take place, would have relied heavily on testimony from onetime radicals and taken jurors back through the Hearst kidnapping, the murder of the Oakland schools chief and a Sacramento-area bank robbery in which a woman was shot to death.

Olson pleaded guilty last week, though there is still an outside possibility that a Los Angeles judge could throw out the plea. Olson admitted in court to the failed attempt to blow up the cars in an effort to kill police officers, but walked outside minutes later and publicly denied her guilt. Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, citing the contradiction, scheduled a hearing for Tuesday.

Lawyers for the defense and prosecution, in interviews last week, revealed what their strategies would be if the case goes to trial.

Just as the prosecution planned to tie Olson directly to the SLA and its series of crimes, the defense intended to argue that Olson was never a member or privy to the closely held secrets of the core group.

Defense attorneys planned to call their own SLA member, Wendy Yoshimura, who would testify that she noted in a still-missing diary that Olson was in Northern California scouting for a mountain hideaway at the time of the bombing attempt. They would try to discredit Hearst as a convicted felon who has lied under oath. And they would tell jurors that Olson--then known as Kathleen Soliah--gave about $2,000 to the SLA but never took part in their crimes.

The 54-year-old defendant was arrested in June 1999 in St. Paul, Minn., where she was living under an adopted name with her husband, an emergency room physician, and their three daughters. The Los Angeles County Grand Jury had indicted Olson 23 years earlier on charges of conspiring with SLA leaders Bill and Emily Harris to murder police officers by planting bombs beneath their cars.

Before the jurors even began hearing an estimated six to nine months of trial testimony, the judge would also revisit two critical sticking points--how much SLA criminal history could be presented and whether the group could be labeled as a terrorist group.

During the trial, prosecutors planned to present evidence that the SLA, with Olson’s help, waged an armed struggle to overthrow the government.

“Piece by piece by piece, we were going to prove . . . that Kathy Soliah was a member of the SLA, and the SLA committed these crimes,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Eleanor Hunter said. “We were able to link her up in so many ways.”

The SLA burst to prominence in the early 1970s, near the conclusion of the Vietnam War. Olson’s involvement with the paramilitary group didn’t begin until after the group’s most famous crimes and after six SLA members were killed during a shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Prosecutors would try to establish a close relationship between Olson and the SLA by showing that Olson lived in a San Francisco apartment with the Harrises, who were eventually convicted of kidnapping Hearst. Olson helped by renting a car, ordering fuses and giving them money, prosecutors said.

“She was living in the apartment with the basic arsenal of the SLA,” Hunter said. “She can’t claim ignorance.”

Hunter and co-prosecutor Michael Latin also planned to present evidence about several crimes tied to the SLA, including bank robberies they say funded the bombing attempt. Witnesses would include a bank teller who witnessed the Sacramento-area robbery connected to the SLA and a man whose credit card was fraudulently used by an SLA member to buy a gun days before the bomb attempt.

Central to the case was a 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael that prosecutors said helped pay for bomb-making materials and for the car used to drive the conspirators to Southern California.

During that robbery of Crocker National Bank, customer Myrna Opsahl was fatally shot while depositing her church collection money. Though the murder remains unsolved, the Sacramento district attorney’s office is investigating the case, and authorities have long suspected the SLA.

Prosecutors say Olson’s palm print was found in a Sacramento garage where SLA members stored the getaway car. Forensics experts also linked live shells in the bank and bullets from Opsahl’s body with ammunition in the Harrises’ San Francisco apartment.

The SLA were pack rats, Hunter said, saving bomb plot blueprints, diagrams of potential sites and shopping lists for items such as “Molotov cocktails, three-inch pipes, powder for pig cars.” Olson’s fingerprints were found on one bomb plan and on a Los Angeles map, prosecutors said.

One way the SLA and Olson worked was to steal driver’s licenses and credit cards, prosecutors planned to argue. They hoped to show jurors, through handwriting evidence, that Olson used one such card stolen the week of the Carmichael bank robbery to rent a mailbox in San Francisco. FBI agents later found 200 feet of explosive fuse in the box.

“You find these stolen IDs moving with the SLA from city to city where crimes are committed,” Latin said. “It comes to a full circle back to the bombs.”

The bombs used in Los Angeles were nearly identical to a bomb found in the Harrises’ apartment.

Prosecutors also planned to call witnesses who testified before the grand jury that indicted Olson in 1976. During those proceedings, James Marshall, a South Gate hardware store clerk, identified Olson as the woman who bought pipe fittings at his store the day before the Los Angeles incident. Although he is dead, prosecutors wanted that testimony allowed into the trial.

But the prosecution hoped that its most damaging testimony would come from Hearst, the newspaper heiress who was expected to echo the account she gave in her 1982 book “Every Secret Thing.” She wrote that Bill Harris, Olson and her then-boyfriend James Kilgore (who is still a fugitive) drove around Los Angeles looking for a target. They first considered a VFW building but decided on the police cars, she wrote. At one point, Olson said something that angered Kilgore, and he reached over and hit her, Hearst wrote. Prosecutors said other witnesses would corroborate much of Hearst’s account.

Olson’s defense was to be two-tiered. First, her lawyers would fight to exclude much of the physical evidence and testimony detailing the SLA’s past. If the judge sided with the prosecution, defense attorneys would argue that Olson was only a peripheral figure on the fringes of the SLA.

The defense fight to keep Olson out of prison would start before the jury began hearing the case.

Defense attorneys Shawn Chapman and J. Tony Serra planned to challenge the evidence found in the apartment used by the Harrises, arguing that the FBI didn’t have valid search warrants. They also planned to ask the judge not to allow prosecutors to present evidence that Olson conspired with the SLA to incite a revolution.

The defense would try to convince a jury that Olson never was allowed to see any of the physical evidence found in the closet in the Harrises’ apartment because she was never part of the core group.

Chapman said the SLA kept that closet--and their intricate plans--locked and hidden from all but the major players. “[Soliah] didn’t know the inner workings of the organization and didn’t participate in violent acts,” Chapman said.

To try to further distance Olson from the SLA leadership, the defense planned a risky strategy of not cross-examining any witness who testified about any SLA crime other than the attempted bombing in Los Angeles.

Part of their strategy, however, was to acknowledge that Olson at one point helped SLA members who had fled underground.

She was introduced to the SLA through Angela Atwood. They met while they worked as cocktail waitresses in San Francisco. When Atwood and five other SLA members were killed in a 1974 shootout with Los Angeles police, Olson was devastated, Chapman said. So she attended a rally in Berkeley and gave a speech eulogizing the SLA members and saying they had been “viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs.”

They hoped to show that her actions were in keeping with the cynicism and radicalism of the 1970s, but were in no way violent. Olson’s comments in Berkeley were “inflammatory in our perspective in 2001, but that was the sort of language used at the time,” Chapman said.

After the rally, Olson was asked to help SLA members who were hiding from police and FBI agents. She agreed because she thought the SLA members were in danger of being killed by law enforcement officers, Chapman said. She gave them money, rented a car for them and wrote letters on their behalf, including one terminating a rental agreement for a Sacramento apartment.

“She did things for them that they obviously couldn’t do for themselves because they were wanted,” Chapman said. “She was one of dozens of people who did the same.”

But, although she occasionally stayed with the Harrises in San Francisco, Olson never lived at the apartment where some of the most incriminating evidence was found, Chapman said.

Chapman admitted that the most damaging physical evidence against Olson is the letter ordering fuses, which prosecutors say contains her fingerprints. The handwriting appears to be Olson’s, but she doesn’t remember writing the letter, Chapman said. “That was a stumper,” she said. “It would have been difficult to overcome.” Defense attorneys planned to challenge the scientific validity of fingerprint and handwriting evidence.

They were not, however, worried about Hearst.

Chapman and Serra planned to argue that Hearst was convicted of bank robbery in part based on her own testimony. “She’s caught in lie after lie after lie at her own trial,” Chapman said. “I don’t think a jury would have believed her.”

They would also question the credibility of Officer James Bryan, who now says that he saw Olson outside an International House of Pancakes restaurant where the bombing attempt took place.

However, it wasn’t until after her arrest that he came forward to identify her.

Even though prosecutors would fail to prove that Olson was in Los Angeles in August 1975 or took part in the bomb plot, Chapman said, there were compelling reasons why Olson pleaded guilty.

“Our fear was that there was probably enough evidence for a jury to convict her on either an aiding and abetting theory or a conspiracy theory,” Chapman said.

Though Chapman and Serra had not decided whether to call Olson to the stand, they said she wanted to testify.

If she did, Chapman would have called Olson’s friends and family as character witnesses. Defense attorneys also planned to portray her as a caring mother who was involved in her community and led an exemplary life for more than two decades.

“She’s always been an outspoken person who cares about political issues and social issues,” Chapman said. “She is the person who got up [in Berkeley] and made that speech. There is a huge divide of being that person and somebody who resorts to violence.”