Sara Jane Olson, Four Former SLA Members Charged in Deadly Bank Heist...

[eanax]

Sara Jane Olson, Four Former SLA Members Charged in Deadly Bank Heist
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
Associated Press


SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Five former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, including former fugitive Sara Jane Olson, were charged Wednesday with killing a woman during a bank robbery 27 years ago.

Three of the former members of the SLA, the 1970s radical group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, were taken into custody at their homes, authorities said. Olson, 55, known as Kathleen Soliah at the time of the robbery, turned herself in Wednesday night in Los Angeles. The fifth suspect remained at large.

Olson, Emily Harris, ex-husband Bill Harris, Mike Bortin and James Kilgore were charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of a bank customer during a 1975 holdup in the suburb of Carmichael, authorities said.

Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully said authorities had obtained more evidence in the case but declined to give details.

"Based upon the review of both old and new materials, I believe there is now both direct and circumstantial evidence sufficient to file charges and begin criminal proceedings for the murder of Myrna Opsahl," Scully said.

In a book Hearst wrote about the robbery, she claimed she was waiting in a getaway car during the holdup. She placed Olson and Bortin at the scene and said it was Emily Harris who shot Opsahl. But none of them was ever charged in the case.

The case has been the subject of numerous investigations, and Dr. Jon Opsahl, the son of the victim, had lobbied prosecutors for years to file charges.

"Our family has waited for 26 years for this day," he said Wednesday. "I'm very happy that my mother's murder is getting the attention it deserves and I trust that justice will be served."

Emily Harris was arrested at her home in Los Angeles, her ex-husband was taken into custody in Oakland, and Bortin was arrested in Portland, Ore. Kilgore has remained at large since the 1970s. Arraignments were scheduled for Friday.

The charges came two days before Olson's sentencing for her role in a failed 1975 attempt to blow up Los Angeles police cars. Olson has denied any role in the holdup.

One of her lawyers, Shawn Snider Chapman, said that during the two years she investigated the Olson case, "All I've learned and all I've read is that they consider this to be an unprosecutable case. All these people have been snatched from their homes for nothing."

Olson had been free on bail pending her sentencing Friday in the attempted bombing case. She and the three others were jailed after their arrests Wednesday.

Chapman dismissed the prosecutor's suggestion of new evidence in the case.

"I haven't seen anything new in the 27,000 pages of discovery," the lawyer said.

Unlike Olson, who was captured in Minnesota in 1999 after two decades on the run, the three SLA figures arrested Wednesday were not fugitives. Their whereabouts had been known to authorities for years.

The 1975 holdup of the Crocker National Bank led to the slaying of Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was shot while depositing a church collection. At the time, the robbers were widely believed to be members of the group that kidnapped Hearst as a 19-year-old from her Berkeley apartment.

After kidnapping Hearst in 1974, the SLA demanded that her parents, Randolph and Catherine Hearst, distribute millions in food to the needy. Ultimately, Hearst became a member of the SLA and took the name Tania.

Two months later, she was photographed carrying a carbine during an SLA bank holdup in San Francisco. Although she claimed she was the victim of brainwashing, she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served about two years before President Carter commuted her sentence. In 2000, she was pardoned by President Clinton.

The Harrises spent eight years in prison for kidnapping Hearst. Emily Harris had been living in Southern California under an assumed name and was working as a computer consultant. Her former husband is remarried, the father of two, and was working as a private investigator.

Bortin, 53, spent 18 months in prison for possession of explosives. He is married to one of Olson's sisters and has a flooring business.

"I think people know he's a really good guy," Bortin's wife, Josephine, said Wednesday from her home in Portland. She declined to discuss the arrest.


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,43202,00.html

[eanax]

Aging Radicals Called to Account
Friday, January 18, 2002
Associated Press


SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The bank robber in a ski mask pressed a shotgun to Myrna Opsahl's side and killed her with a single blast, the result of a holdup by a 1970s group known for its revolutionary rhetoric.

According to a later account, the alleged killer claimed the shooting was an accident but that it didn't matter because the victim "was a bourgeois pig anyway."

This week, police and prosecutors moved on homes of quiet middle-aged residents allegedly linked to the 1975 robbery, triggering a court fight sure to revive memories of the revolutionary passions and rhetoric from a different era.

The Symbionese Liberation Army emerged from the ashes of the 1960s anti-war movement and was blamed for several violent acts in the 1970s.

Merging black ex-convicts and middle-class college graduates, the group achieved notoriety for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst and forcing her wealthy parents to donate millions of dollars of food to the needy. The SLA's actions were fed by the rhetoric of militant revolutionaries, together with a passion for minorities and the poor.

Opsahl's routine, dropping off a church collection at the bank, had collided head-on with the radical SLA. Four armed robbers burst into the bank in Carmichael, Calif., shot Opsahl and escaped with $15,000, dropping as much cash as they kept.

Opsahl's son, physician Jon Opsahl, has dedicated much of his adult life to bringing his mother's killers to justice.

"This is very therapeutic, that it did matter," he said after the charges were filed against the former SLA members. "That it matters to a lot of people."

Police in Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland, Ore., arrested former SLA members Emily Harris, William Harris and Michael Bortin on Wednesday morning. Sara Jane Olson, already facing sentencing Friday for a failed 1975 plot to bomb a Los Angeles police car, surrendered to police after she was charged in the robbery. Also charged was former SLA member James Kilgore, a fugitive since the 1970s who remains at large.

One of Olson's lawyers, Shawn Snider Chapman, said prosecutors have built a weak case. "All these people have been snatched from their homes for nothing," he said this week.

Olson went by her given name, Kathleen Soliah, in the 1970s before disappearing and resurfacing in Minnesota. She faces 20 years to life in prison for the bombing attempt, which she said was to avenge the death of six colleagues in a 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles.

Her brother, Steven Soliah, was acquitted in a 1976 federal trial for the Carmichael robbery.

Hearst, at the center of a kidnapping drama that consumed the world's attention, is expected to be the prosecution's leading witness in the robbery case.

In a 1982 book called Every Secret Thing, Hearst said Emily Harris shot Opsahl. She also named the robbers and lookouts and detailed her own role as a getaway driver.

Hearst wrote that Harris answered a colleague's question about Opsahl's condition by saying, "Oh, she's dead. 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."

She explained in the book, "Emily told us the shotgun had gone off by accident. She had told the woman to get down on the floor, but the woman had not moved fast enough to suit Emily. So Emily thrust the shotgun forward to threaten her, and the gun had gone off."

Hearst, Steven Soliah and Wendy Yoshimura were granted immunity for their involvement in the robbery in exchange for their testimony before a 1991 grand jury, Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully said.

The long-dormant case has gathered legal momentum since Olson was arrested in 1999 after two decades on the run.

Scully said there was new information in the case, "which we believe establishes additional corroborating evidence linking those named by Patty Hearst to the Crocker Bank robbery and murder."

Affidavits filed in Sacramento Superior Court for Wednesday's arrests said bullets, drawings of banks, robbery instructions and a Sacramento street map had been found at the SLA's San Francisco safe house. The FBI also linked shotgun pellets found in Myrna Opsahl to ammunition from the SLA house.

The files also say Olson's palm print matches prints on the door of a Sacramento garage where the group stored a getaway car.


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,43342,00.html

[Powerboss]

GOOD.
I sense the tides may somewhat be a changin.