ven before Sept. 11, there should have been zero-tolerance for terrorism, and the dismal rationalizations used to justify it.
But it's better late than never for this particular policy. And the crimes of Katherine Soliah, the former pipe bomb enthusiast turned Minnesota matron who now goes by the name of Sara Jane Olson, are a good place to start.
"Be careful what you do -- it could come back to haunt you," Soliah/Olson told the Los Angeles Times last week, as part of a media campaign to gain public sympathy in advance of her sentencing for attempted murder of Los Angeles police officers. She faces a sentence of 20 years to life, but hopes to be paroled within five years.
An early release will only happen if the rest of Soliah/Olson's past doesn't catch up with her. Her two decades of lies and evasions protect not only herself, but also killers who remain free.
On April 21, 1975, four robbers -- one of them later identified as a gun toting Soliah/Olson -- entered the Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, near Sacramento. Five minutes later, Myrna Opsahl lay dying on the floor of the bank, her abdomen ripped open by a point-blank shotgun blast.
Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four teen-agers, had had the misfortune to be delivering collection receipts from her church just as the Symbionese Liberation Army was liberating about $15,000 from the bank.
These East Bay terrorists are best known for first kidnapping and then converting heiress Patricia Hearst. Before the Hearst kidnapping, the SLA had gained notoriety for assassinating Oakland Schools chief Marcus Foster, who they deemed a "fascist" for trying to introduce identification cards into the Oakland schools. SLA members used bank robberies to finance operations and saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Their various manifestoes and communications were largely incoherent, faux-Leninist screeds that read like Saturday Night Live parodies. The group's motto was "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."
Many of the group died in a spectacular shoot-out with Los Angeles police in 1974. Among those killed was Angela Atwood, a friend of Soliah/Olson's. Soliah/Olson gave a fiery eulogy for Atwood at a memorial service in Berkeley, and was later recruited by Emily Harris, then married to SLA "Field Marshal" Bill Harris.
Soliah/Olson denies participation in the Carmichael robbery. But Hearst, who drove a getaway car, provides a detailed account of Soliah/Olson's role in her 1982 memoir Every Secret Thing. Hearst and others say that Bill Harris, now reported to be a San Francisco paralegal/investigator, planned the bank heist and stood guard outside with an automatic weapon. Inside, Emily shot Opsahl when she didn't follow orders to drop to the floor quickly enough. Another robber -- sometimes identified as Soliah/Olson -- kicked a pregnant teller in the stomach, which caused her to miscarry.
In Hearst's account, Olson later asks Emily Harris, who had been listening to radio reports, "How's the woman who was shot?"
"Oh, she's dead," replied Emily Harris, airily. "But it really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor. He was at the hospital where they brought her."
Hearst says that Bill Harris mocked Opsahl's death, referring to her as "good, old Myrna" and congratulated the robbers for having committed a "gas chamber" offense. He praised Emily for not losing the shotgun shell from the fatal shot, and later buried the cartridge in a Sacramento park.
After the bank robberies, Soliah/Olson went to L.A., where she unsuccessfully attempted to bomb police cars using pipe bombs.
Neither Emily nor Bill Harris, nor Soliah/Olson was ever charged in Opsahl's death. Soliah was charged in the attempted L.A. bombings, fled California and later married a prominent St. Paul physician. In Minnesota, she became what the younger Emily Harris would have described as the quintessential "bourgeois pig"- with a large home, three daughters and a reputation for hosting elegant dinner parties.
In 1990, eight years after Hearst's account was first published, a Sacramento grand jury heard her testimony about the Carmichael robbery. But it handed down no indictments. The Opsahl family and other observers believe that the Sacramento DA's original investigation was incompetent, and that forensic evidence and Hearst's testimony prove the guilt of both Soliah/Olson and Bill and Emily Harris.
After the 1990 grand jury was dismissed, the investigation into the death of Myrna Opsahl might have ended but for two intervening events. One was a televised account of Soliah's SLA involvement on America's Most Wanted, which led to her being arrested for the Los Angeles bomb attempts. The second was the Sept. 11 tragedy, which made the entire nation more vigilant to terrorist threats, and less disposed to forgive and forget those responsible for past outrages.
Facing a mandatory life sentence on the L.A. charges, Soliah/Olson agreed to a plea bargain that promised the 20-years-to-life sentence and made her eligible for earlier parole. But immediately after the plea and outside the court, she proclaimed her innocence to the assembled media. Called back later by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler to explain her disavowal, she again confirmed her guilty plea. But shortly afterwards, Soliah/Olson filed a motion to withdraw the plea, on the grounds that her defense lawyer had unduly influenced her. Fidler denied the motion, saying from the bench, "She pled guilty because she is guilty."
Meanwhile, Soliah/Olson has refused to cooperate with investigators in the now rejuvenated Opsahl murder investigation, or to disclose what she knows about the involvement of Emily and Bill Harris. Referring generally to her SLA comrades, she told The New York Times in another of last week's media interviews that "I know they have lives like me and I don't want to destroy other peoples' lives the way my life is being destroyed."
That is the rationalization of an aging, self-absorbed terrorist who claims virtue in protecting other terrorists and killers. Having discovered in middle age that the life of a "bourgeois pig" is not so unpleasant, she wants to return to a way of living she earlier claimed to despise in a society she once hoped to destroy. But she's numb to the suffering of Myrna Opsahl and her family. Terrorist crimes against one citizen are crimes against all. They cannot be forgotten or ignored simply because the crimes have grown old and the perpetrators wiser. Soliah/Olson deserves no pity, much less ever to be released from prison.
Contributing writer George M. Kraw is an attorney in San Jose.
