The hubris of 1970s crimes continues following former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson, the onetime member of the group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
Olsen then went into hiding for nearly a quarter of a century, until she was caught in 1999. She was freed on Monday — and has now been re-arrested and put back in prison again.
The official reason: a clerical error.
Sara Jane Olson, the former SLA member and Minnesota housewife who was released from prison Thursday, is back in prison today after the Department of Correction said it made a mistake calculating her sentence.
Olson, 61, was arrested at her family’s home in Palmdale Friday night and placed in custody. She will return to the Central Women’s Facility in Chowchilla for another year, officials said Saturday.
“The department is sensitive to the effects this has had. The department sincerely regrets the mistake,” said Alberto Roldan, chief deputy general counsel for the Department of Corrections.
Just as American politics today seems mired in polarization stemming from the 1960s-1970s Vietnam War years era, Olson’s fate remains intertwined with what she did in another time and another era — and one thing she did left a hole in a family’s life. The issues: punishment, rehabilitation, and suitable time spent give the gravity of her crime.
It all came to a boiling point Monday when she was released, sparking howls of protest from police officials and the family of the woman whose life she helped end. She had served 6 years of a 12-year California prison sentence for in 1975 being involved in helping plant nail-crammed bombs in police patrol cars.
In 1975 Olson, then known as Kathleen Soliah, was all over the front pages at a time when the SLA — a group started in 1973 by some white college students led by a black ex-convict — had been pitchforked into the headlines due to a series of dramatic events: the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and the Feb. 1974 kidnapping 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley, Calif. apartment.
Within four months, Hearst, now using the street name “Tania,” was photographed holding a rifle as the group robbed a bank. Newspapers ran speculative stories about her being brainwashed. It was an era when newspapers still ruled the info-roost in America. And Hearst was literally a princess of the news media. The Patty Hearst story was all over the news casts and generated SCREECHING HEADLINES! in newspapers across the country.
But the most dramatic event was yet to come: on May 17, 1974 SLA leader Donald DeFreeze and six other members died in a hail of police gunshots and flames engulfing their hideout in Los Angeles. Bill and Emily Harris and Hearst weren’t there since they had a slight detour: they had been stopped in a store for shoplifting.
The group then planted bombs under police squad cars as payback for the deaths of their members. But, even then, in the context of the times, the SLA still seemed a kind of wannabe revolutionary/quasi-terrorist group. In 2001 the real thing would come along…
And the rest rest of the time line soon played out:
April 21, 1975: Myrna Opsahl, 42, is killed during a robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, near Sacramento. Olsen was there.
Sept. 18, 1975: Hearst captured by the FBI in San Francisco.
March 20, 1976: Hearst convicted of robbing the San Francisco bank.
1976: Steven Soliah acquitted on charges related to the Carmichael robbery.
January 1979: President Carter commutes Hearst’s seven-year sentence and she is released from prison after serving 21 months.
And Olson?
She seemingly had vanished off the face of the earth for 25 years. But not really: she had married a doctor. Her name became Peterson. She became a mother with three children. She lived for a while in Africa. In short, she took on an entirely different identity, totally under the radar of law enforcement.
But then, in June 1999, she was arrested in St. Paul, Minn. after being featured on Fox TV’s “America’s Most Wanted.” Once she was caught, she pleaded guilty to the shooting death of Opsahl, who had been a customer in the bank that day — a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hearst’s book on her years with the SLA didn’t help Olson:
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.
So Olson spent 6 years in prison, eventually becoming an author, writing a cook book titled: “Serving Time: America’s Most Wanted Recipes.”
So on Monday when she was released, police and Opsahl family members were outraged, arguing that 6 years was insufficient punishment for the bombs or the eradication of an innocent woman who was merely in the wrong bank one day.
Now Olson is in prison again and her lawyer is accusing California prison authorities of “bowing to political pressure”.
But, tonight, police officials and Opsahl’s family likely feel the cookbook author who now has to serve one more year has gotten her just desserts.
MORE RESOURCES ON THIS SUBJECT:
You Tube video showing robbery with Hearst
What Is the Symbionese Liberation Army
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Patty Hearst Kidnapping FBI Files
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.