4 SLA Figures Arrested in ’75 Bank Slaying

A full generation after their alleged crime, William and Emily Harris and Sara Jane Olson, co-survivors of the weird and violent revolutionary movement known as the Symbionese Liberation Army, were arrested Wednesday and charged with murdering a Sacramento-area church volunteer during a 1975 bank robbery.

A fourth person, Michael Bortin, was arrested on similar charges. The case was notorious in part because kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst admitted taking part and described in a book how the robbery and killing took place.

Hearst, who said she was brainwashed by the cult-like terrorist group, was long ago granted immunity from prosecution for her role. She told her story to at least one grand jury, but her testimony was not enough to bring charges.

The arrests came two days before Olson, who changed her name from Kathleen Soliah and spent years as a fugitive, was scheduled to be sentenced in Los Angeles County Superior Court for her role in an SLA bomb plot. Prosecutors said they acted now because they had collected enough evidence in the bombing case to file charges in the bank murder.

Olson, who pleaded guilty in the attempted bombing, has denied taking part in the robbery at a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb.

After a tearful goodbye to her husband and three daughters, she surrendered to authorities Wednesday afternoon at her lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills. The other three suspects had been arrested in quick succession Wednesday morning, Emily Harris near her home in Altadena, William Harris while driving his sons to school in Oakland, and Bortin at his home in Portland, Ore. All four were being held without bail.

Murder charges were also filed against a fifth suspect, James Kilgore, who vanished years ago and remains at large.

The arrests were a bittersweet requital for the family of Myrna Opsahl, who was making a deposit on behalf of the Carmichael Seventh-day Adventist Church when she was shot at close range on April 21, 1975. She left behind a husband and four children, including a 15-year-old son, Jon Opsahl, who later became a physician in Riverside County and dedicated himself to seeing that his mother’s killers were brought to justice.

“Our family has waited 26 years for this day,” Jon Opsahl said at a news conference in Sacramento. Turning to Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas, he added: “It’s about time.”

Blanas smiled and put a hand on Opsahl’s shoulder.

Opsahl said that before Los Angeles prosecutors brought evidence to the family in the summer of 2000, he and his father and siblings had largely given up. Three previous Sacramento County district attorneys did not believe there was enough evidence to file charges.

The timing of the arrests provoked questions, coming just two days before Olson’s sentencing on charges of planting a bomb under a Los Angeles police car in 1975. The bomb never exploded.

Sacramento County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. James E. Lewis said the charges--developed by a task force created last March--were primarily based on thousands of pieces of existing evidence and hundreds of statements from witnesses that were accumulated, reviewed and prepared for prosecution.

And Sacramento County Dist. Atty. Jan Scully said there is additional corroborating evidence implicating the five suspects.

“Using forensic testing procedures not available until recently,” she said, “the FBI laboratory linked the lead pellets that killed Mrs. Opsahl to shotgun shells found in an SLA hide-out in San Francisco.”

The 1999 arrest of Olson--who had spent 23 years as a fugitive, most of them as a middle-class housewife and mother in suburban Minneapolis--helped restart an investigation that had long since gone cold, said Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley. “That is what broke it open,” he said.

Olson’s arrest allowed Los Angeles police and prosecutors to reexamine a mountain of evidence collected by Sacramento County authorities in connection with the Carmichael robbery and murder. Authorities said Olson did not provide any information to further the bank murder case.

Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Attys. Michael Latin and Eleanor Hunter have said forensics experts linked live shells found in the bank and shotgun projectiles in Opsahl’s body with ammunition in the Harrises’ San Francisco apartment. Olson’s palm print was also found in a Sacramento garage where SLA members stored the getaway car from the Carmichael robbery, they said.

Officials Guess at Use of Stolen Money

Hunter and Latin have said they believe the Carmichael bank robbery helped pay for bomb-making materials and for the car used to drive the conspirators to Southern California, where they then attempted to blow up Los Angeles Police Department cars, including one parked behind the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

The SLA was one of the oddest and most violent bands of revolutionaries to emerge from the tumult of the Vietnam War era. The group was founded in the Bay Area in the early 1970s with the goal of fomenting violent revolution. Its oft-repeated slogan was: “Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people.”

It sprang into headlines in November 1973 with the murder of Marcus Foster, the Oakland city schools superintendent. The group--which numbered no more than a dozen members at a time--then kidnapped Hearst, whose grandfather founded the Hearst publishing empire. Within months, she had emerged as “Tania,” a convert to the SLA’s cause. She served two years in federal prison, but was later pardoned by President Clinton.

In court papers, Los Angeles prosecutors said documents in the Harrises’ San Francisco apartment clearly link the SLA to the Carmichael bank robbery. Those documents included escape routes, layouts of the bank, surveillance notes and a typewritten strategy outline.

The robbery was scheduled for 9 a.m. on April 21, 1975. Olson, Kilgore, Emily Harris and Bortin agreed to be the masked gunmen inside, while William Harris, Hearst, Wendy Yoshimura and Steven Soliah, Olson’s brother, made up the getaway team, according to prosecutors.

Inside the bank, the four robbers ordered bank employees and customers to the floor. A female robber fired a single round from her sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, hitting Opsahl, who was depositing the collection from her church’s Sunday service. Meanwhile, the other robbers collected cash from the tellers’ drawers, according to court papers.

The team stole more than $15,000 in cash, and then fled in getaway vehicles to safe houses in Sacramento, authorities said. Harris told the others she shot the woman, court papers said, and “seemed very casual about the shooting.”

Eventually, Yoshimura and Hearst were given immunity from prosecution. In 1976, Steven Soliah was tried and acquitted of bank robbery charges.

The prosecutors’ account is similar to the description given by Hearst in her 1982 book, “Every Secret Thing.” She wrote that the night before the robbery, Kilgore, Olson and Steve Soliah drove to UC Davis and placed stolen plates on their stolen cars, a Firebird and a Mustang.

The next morning, Hearst wrote, she drove the Firebird getaway car and was parked outside the bank while Emily Harris, Olson, Kilgore and Mike Bortin went inside. Others, including William Harris, Yoshimura and Steve Soliah, helped outside.

Most of them wore disguises, including ski masks and wigs, she wrote. Hearst wrote that Bortin stood on a teller’s counter and waved his gun around, Olson emptied the tellers’ drawers and Emily Harris shot the female customer. “No one was bragging about the success of this venture,” which netted about $15,000, she wrote.

Book Describes Reaction to Shooting

When Olson asked about the condition of the woman who had been shot, according to the book, Harris said, “Oh she’s dead, but it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway.” Emily Harris said the shotgun had gone off by accident when she pushed the gun into the woman to make her get down onto the floor, according to the book.

Jon Opsahl said his family never forgot the “bourgeois pig” remark.

Esther Stebner, 80, volunteers once a week at the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Carmichael and was a close friend of Myrna Opsahl’s. She recalled that the women of the church divided the duty of counting the church collection and depositing the money in the bank every Monday. The day Myrna Opsahl was killed, she had agreed to do the job for another volunteer who was busy that day, Stebner said.

“Thank God that something is finally happening,” she added. “I thank the district attorney and also the son.”

The arrests of the two Harrises and Bortin were carefully timed, and occurred within 16 minutes of each other, according to the Sacramento County sheriff.

At 8:02 a.m., California Highway Patrol officers and Sacramento district attorney’s investigators stopped Emily Harris’ car in the 700 block of Altadena Drive, a few hundred yards from the Spanish-style home where she has lived quietly as Emily Montague, her unmarried name.

“I asked her to get out of her car, and she did,” said CHP Officer Vincent Bell.

Harris, who served nearly eight years in prison for kidnapping Hearst, has been working as a computer analyst, with little if any involvement in politics.

William Harris and Bortin were both arrested at 8:18 a.m.

It is one of the odd twists of the case that Bortin and Olson are related by marriage--he is married to her sister, Josephine Soliah-Bortin.

Soliah-Bortin, 50, said she and her husband awoke to find police in bulletproof vests surrounding their house and demanding he come outside with his hands above his head. She said officers ordered him to get down on the ground and then pointed guns at his head as they handcuffed him.

She said her husband has owned a hardwood flooring business for 20 years. The couple have been married since 1988 and have four children.

She said her husband has denied participation in the Carmichael robbery.

William Harris, 57, who served a sentence similar to his ex-wife’s for kidnapping Hearst, works as a private investigator in San Francisco. He was taking his two sons to school when he was arrested.

In an interview with The Times two years ago, he said he sometimes wondered how he was going to tell his sons about his revolutionary past. His older son, 11 at the time, “knows something is going on,” Harris said. “I’ll sit down with him when he’s 18 and try to explain it to him.”

Suspects Earlier Denied Involvement in Robbery

William Harris arrived in custody in Sacramento around noon Wednesday. Emily Harris arrived shortly before 4 p.m. They will be arraigned Friday. Michael Bortin was still in Oregon pending an extradition hearing. The suspects all denied any involvement with the bank robbery in earlier interviews.

As soon as Olson heard about the other arrests, she and her family went to the office of her attorney, Shawn Chapman. Chapman said she had contacted Sacramento County prosecutors and learned that an arrest warrant had been issued for Olson.

The prosectors had asked that she be arrested Friday at her sentencing. But the Sacramento sheriff’s office called Chapman and told her deputies were not going to allow someone suspected of murder to remain free, and “that either you make arrangements for her surrender or we’ll come and find her,” the attorney said. She said the sheriff’s department gave her two hours to surrender her client.

Chapman said she called Olson, who turned 55 on Wednesday, and she arrived with her family at the office about 3:30 p.m.

Olson was booked at the Twin Towers jail on suspicion of murder and will be arraigned Tuesday in Sacramento.

Contributors

Times staff writers Steve Berry, Ann O’Neill, Maura Dolan, Richard Winton, Bob Pool, Greg Krikorian, Daren Briscoe, Eric Bailey, Dan Morain, David Ferrell and researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this report.

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A Violent History

* September 1973: Symbionese Liberation Army, a small leftist revolutionary group, is founded by escaped convict Donald DeFreeze with recruits from the prisoners’ rights movement.

* November 1973: SLA is blamed for killing of Oakland Schools Supt. Marcus Foster.

* February 1974: SLA members kidnap newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst.

* May 1974: Shootout in Los Angeles; six SLA members die during shootout and fire at a Los Angeles safe house.

* April 21, 1975: Robbers take $15,000 from Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, Calif. Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was making a deposit for her church, is fatally shot by robbers.

* April 1976: Prosecutors try alleged SLA member Steven Soliah for the Carmichael bank robbery. He is acquitted. By this time, his sister, Kathleen Soliah, has gone underground.

* 1982: In her book “Every Secret Thing,” Hearst writes that SLA member Emily Harris shot Opsahl. Hearst contends that three other SLA members--including Kathleen Soliah--then helped Harris finish the bank robbery while Hearst and three others waited outside.

* June 1999: Kathleen Soliah, now a homemaker and mother known as Sara Jane Olson, is arrested by the FBI in St. Paul, Minn., on suspicion of participating in an attempted bombing of two LAPD squad cars in 1975.

* February 2001: During pretrial hearings in the Olson case, the FBI and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department announce they are reopening the bank robbery case.

* Jan. 16, 2002: William Harris, Emily Harris, Mike Bortin and Olson are arrested on suspicion of murder in the Carmichael bank robbery case.

Source: L.A. Times’ news files

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times