New Life Vs. Old Murder

As a young FBI agent in the mid-1970s, James Botting spent 18 months looking for Emily Harris and her fugitive band of Symbionese Liberation Army terrorists. Roaming the country, he kept her wanted poster in his briefcase and her face--bright, blue-eyed, imperious--ever present in his mind.

Twenty-five years later, when it no longer mattered, he found her.

By that time, Botting had left the FBI and become head of security for MGM Studios in Santa Monica. There, he was stunned to discover Harris working for the studio under a new name as a highly paid, highly respected computer programmer.

The face hadn’t changed, Botting noticed. But just about everything else had.

No longer a fugitive, no longer an avatar of armed revolution, Emily Montague--the name she had taken after she was released from prison in 1983--was now a quiet, middle-aged, middle-class computer consultant with a six-figure salary and a comfortable home in Altadena. She had paid a debt to the society she once battled: more than seven years behind bars for kidnapping, robbery, auto theft and other charges. Now she had a dog, a sensible wardrobe, a loving family, a long list of charitable activities. Divorced from Bill Harris, she had a long-term, committed relationship with another woman.

Once considered one of the country’s most dangerous criminals, she was now, by all outward appearances, a pillar of the community.

Paralyzed by professional propriety, Botting couldn’t bring himself to approach her.

“I would have loved to sit down and just talk to Emily off the record, but neither one of us could do that,” said Botting, who has since left MGM and is chief of police for the Ventura Community College District. “So I never did. We never talked; she probably never knew I existed--and then this whole thing came down a few months ago.”

In January, Harris was arrested on murder charges. She, her ex-husband and three other people associated with the SLA are accused of shooting to death a bystander during a 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb. She is now free on $1-million bail pending a trial next year.

The case has brought on stage, for one more encore, the most operatic and violent of the radical groups to emerge from the leftist antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Melding black ex-convicts with white, college-educated radicals, the SLA preached a “symbiosis” of races that would throw off the “puritan capitalist ethics of competition, individualism, fascism, racism, sexism and imperialism.”

And so, out of the shadows has emerged Emily Harris, SLA code name Yolanda, who at 55 might be settling into a comfortable middle age, were she not accused of pulling the trigger on Myrna Lee Opsahl.

It was a blast that did not echo loudly at the time. Initially, it seemed another random act of violence, and wasn’t publicly linked to the SLA. Even after the group was blamed, the Opsahl murder never achieved the Day-Glo celebrity of the SLA’s signature acts of mayhem, which included the assassination of Oakland schools chief Marcus Foster, the kidnapping of publishing heiress Patricia Hearst, and an apocalyptic shootout with Los Angeles police in which six SLA “soldiers” died with their hide-out in flames.

No one had ever been charged with the murder. Prosecutors at the time said they simply lacked the evidence. One SLA associate, Steven Soliah, was charged with the robbery, but he was acquitted, seemingly ending any likelihood that anyone would be held accountable for Opsahl’s death.

That seemed true even after Hearst wrote her 1982 memoir, “Every Secret Thing.” It dramatically described Hearst’s kidnapping and conversion to the SLA’s cause, but also included a detailed description of the Carmichael robbery.

In a passage that came to haunt Myrna Opsahl’s family, Hearst wrote that after the holdup, Emily Harris admitted she had shot a woman.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Hearst quoted her as saying. “She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor.”

Harris denies taking part in the robbery, much less killing Opsahl, much less bragging about it. “Unequivocally, I was not involved,” she said in an interview in 1999.

Harris gave that interview not long after the arrest in Minnesota of Steven Soliah’s sister, Kathy Soliah, who had been living for years as a fugitive under the name Sara Jane Olson. She was charged with, and ultimately convicted of, trying to bomb two Los Angeles Police Department squad cars for the SLA.

Friends said Harris knew Olson’s arrest could lead prosecutors to reopen the Opsahl murder case. That Harris did not flee, despite having the opportunity and means to do so, shows how much she has changed, these supporters say.

To take a measure of how far Emily Harris has traveled since her days as an urban guerrilla, scurrying from one low-rent SLA safe house to another, one need only drive by the home in Altadena that she bought in 1995 and occupies with her partner, Noreen Baca.

It is a well-tended, four-bedroom, Spanish-stucco house with a chimney, a tidy cactus garden and a tall, overarching tree in front. Attached to the tree is a wooden placard bearing the house address. Attached to the placard is a small American flag.

The surrounding neighborhood, overwhelmingly white and affluent, shadowed by the San Gabriel Mountains and graced with Craftsman-style homes dating to the early 20th century, has the sturdy Midwestern feel of so many older Southern California neighborhoods that were settled by newcomers from the heartland.

It is, in many ways, the sort of neighborhood in which Emily Montague Schwartz grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Her parents and lifelong friends say she has become again the person they knew as a child. Smart, sensible, well-adjusted; nobody’s rebel.

Her lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, refers to her, with apologies, as “a sorority girl,” something she was when she attended the University of Indiana. “Suzy Sorority” is the way one old friend remembers her, a conservative girl who wore matching skirts and sweaters--cute, never provocative.

Hers is a variation on a theme. Kathleen Soliah remade her life as a Minnesota soccer mom. Soliah’s brother-in-law and co-defendant, Michael Bortin, ran a hardwood flooring business in Portland, Ore. Bill Harris remarried and found work as a criminal investigator in San Francisco.

Emily Harris found her own path back to the bourgeoisie.

In August 1997, Joanie Lubrant hosted a reunion of high school girlfriends at her home in Aspen, Colo. Three came, including Harris. Those who were there recall a weekend of nonstop talking, broken only by TV coverage of the death of Princess Diana of Britain. Harris’ wild years never came up, at least not directly.

Susan Clay Benson, one of the classmates from Hinsdale Central High School, recalled only one awkward moment, involving one of the other women.

“She had made a comment to Emily, something like, ‘Gee, I need to learn how to use a computer’ and ‘How did you get to be so good on computers?’ And Emily said, ‘Seven years in prison.’ ”

Few people, even among her closest friends, can answer the two questions that seem central to understanding Emily Harris: What turned an All-American sorority girl into a violent revolutionary? And what turned her back into Emily Montague?

Friends recall Harris as apolitical until midway through college, around the time she met a garrulous, politically engaged Vietnam veteran named Bill Harris, moving with him from Indiana to Berkeley.

“They ... began feeling there was no way to change the world but to get violent,” said Hanlon.

One key to understanding why they became violent, Hanlon and others believe, is that the SLA was an underground organization cut off from society and the rest of the radical left. “A group of people get closed off from the world, believe only themselves, talk only to themselves and start to believe it,” Hanlon said.

Barbara Shoup, a novelist who has been friends with Harris since college and wrote a book partially based on Harris’ life, believes the very strength of her personality made her susceptible to political extremism. “When I run that all through my mind, the only thing that makes sense to me is my knowledge of her as a person who does everything she does 100%. So once she entered that world, she would enter it fully.”

Harris was sentenced in 1976 and again in 1978 for crimes that included the Hearst kidnapping. The woman who was sent to prison was defiant, arrogant and very much a revolutionary. In an interview with New Times magazine before her first trial in 1976, Harris justified the use of violence as a revolutionary tool and predicted “the spirit of the SLA will always be carried on, no matter what the name of the group or organization.”

But something happened to Harris during her years at the California Institute for Women in Corona.

“I think she grew tremendously,” Shoup said. “She thought about all those things and reflected on them.... And the voice of her letters changed. The earlier letters were more strident, they spoke more about politics, and the later letters--I recognized her voice. It was the voice of my friend.”

“They kept on messing with her in prison because she was SLA,” Hanlon said. “They kept on locking her up, they kept on taking away privileges. And Emily reached this decision that we talked about, that, ‘If I don’t want anything, they can’t take anything away from me.’ So she stopped smoking, she stopped wanting the TV.... She never fought. She just said, ‘I don’t need that.’ She started living in her mind, and exercising.”

She also discovered a profession.

In the late 1970s, Apple had just released the world’s first true personal computer. Harris’ prison began offering word-processing classes. She enrolled and became fluent in computer programming.

“She was a very smart student,” recalled Joanne Dubois, a prison teaching assistant at the time. “She got to the point where she could go out to the community and get a job with no problem.”

Harris was released at a perfect time to begin a career in computers. She was hired by Unisys Corp. in Westwood, and after two years moved to the Walt Disney Co. in Burbank.

“She was wonderful,” recalled Bill Clune, who--unaware of her background--hired her for a contract job at Disney and then recommended her for a full-time position. There, Harris became an expert in the highly complex use of computers to track film rights.

“You’re writing or designing computer systems that are really capturing rules established by attorneys, and they change,” Clune said. “The hard part is understanding all the different rules, and what rules were in place at what point in time, and dealing with a lot of the personalities in the film business.... There’s probably 50 to 100 people in the world who really specialize in that type of thing. As I said, Emily is very good at it.”

In 1994, Harris began her own consulting business. Her clients have included Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios and Spelling Productions. Since her arrest, Hanlon said, business has dried up.

At the same time she was establishing her business, Harris was making new friends. She had come out as a lesbian in prison, said Hanlon, and her social life reflected that change. She rode a bicycle from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a charity AIDS ride and also was involved in Habitat for Humanity, the Revlon Breast Cancer Walk and Living Free, an organization that rescues stray dogs and cats.

She built, by many standards, an exemplary resume.

“She is a kind and loving person and has many friends who love her,” wrote Carol Baca, the mother of Emily’s partner, in a letter to the court. “She is a wonderful asset to her friends, family, community and neighborhood.”

There are people who take strong exception to that. Bob Blackburn was assistant superintendent of schools in Oakland when he and his boss and best friend, Marcus Foster, were ambushed by the SLA. Foster was killed, Blackburn seriously wounded. Harris was not among those charged and has insisted she was only an SLA sympathizer at the time.

Still, Blackburn wonders if she didn’t help plan the attack. He said he believes she killed Opsahl and should be held to answer for it.

“How many years do you have to live as a good citizen before the murder you committed is forgiven?” he said. “Let’s see justice and then we’ll talk about reconciliation or whatever. It would go down a lot better with me if, instead of putting up a lot of legal pyrotechnics to get off, if Ms. Montague would come forth and say, ‘You know what, you’re perfectly right, this is what I did. And I am haunted by it, and I throw myself on the mercy of the court and I beg forgiveness from the family. I’ve dreaded this day, and it’s here, and it’s time for me to come clean.’”

Another doubter is Eleanor Hunter, one of two deputy district attorneys in Los Angeles who looked into the Opsahl case while prosecuting Kathy Soliah.

“Up until this time she’s been incredibly lucky,” Hunter said. “But she was able to shoot a woman and essentially just continue with the robbery and show absolutely no remorse. You ask, has she changed? She continues to show absolutely no remorse.”

Finally, there is Dr. Jon Opsahl, who pushed authorities for years to find and prosecute his mother’s killer. “What purpose would it serve for her to be convicted and put in prison?” Opsahl asked. “The purpose is this little thing called justice. We have a moral obligation to society to hold killers accountable. Even after 27 years.”

The case against her largely rests on whether a jury will believe Hearst. Hanlon argues that the new evidence claimed by prosecutors is neither new nor significant. The Sacramento district attorney’s office declined to comment.

In the meantime, some of Harris’ closest friends acknowledge being troubled by a thought: What if she did do it?

“I’ve asked myself that question a lot,” said Joanie Lubrant. “I think, ’27 years later, what’s the point?’ And yet, had it been my mother that was killed and justice hadn’t been done and the case was still open, would I look at it differently? I go back and forth on this.”

“It’s a real test to our belief system,” said Margaret Conger, now a high school counselor. On the one hand, she said, Harris has paid a debt to society. On the other: “What debt can you pay for death? I mean, there is no debt you can pay for that.”

Harris declined to be interviewed for this story. In an interview with The Times in 1999, she discussed her past, but obliquely.

“Any person’s life is an evolution and growth path,” she said. The SLA “was one of the phases that my life went through. I made choices and, looking back now, I think some of those choices were extremely reckless and ill-conceived. But I paid the price. I’ve moved on.”