Feb. 15, 2003: Olson sentenced in deadly bank robbery

In the end, Sara Jane Olson was silent.

Olson, the one-time revolutionary who went underground and became a St. Paul homemaker, said nothing Friday morning when she was sentenced to serve six years in prison for her role in a 1975 murder.

She was the only one of four former Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) members who did not speak when a Superior Court judge in Sacramento, Calif., handed down their sentences. That silence was a stark departure from her vocal defiant public posture from the time she was arrested in June 1999.

The final chapter in Olson's legal odyssey was largely a formality, one that ratified the sentence she agreed to serve last November when she pleaded guilty to the murder of Myrna Opsahl during a bank robbery in Carmichael, Calif.

In a letter that was included in Olson's probation report, she repeated an apology she had made in court three months ago: "If we had foreseen her killing, we would never have robbed the bank. We were young and foolish. We felt we were committing an idealized, ideological action to obtain government-insured money and that we were not stealing from ordinary people. . . . In the end we stole someone's life."

The other defendants - Emily Montague, William Harris and Michael Bortin - were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to eight years.

Judge Thomas Cecil said the California Board of Prison Terms has the power to extend the sentences agreed to by all sides, but he discouraged such an action, saying he and everyone involved had carefully considered the long history of the case in making their recommendations.

He referred to their upstanding lives since the crime and said, "In my view and in the view of the district attorney, none of these defendants poses a danger to society."

That wasn't the case in the mid-'70s, the heyday of the notorious SLA, a radical group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. Olson was one of the members who unsuccessfully tried to blow up Los Angeles police cruisers, and several members died in a nationally televised fiery shootout with police officers.

But by the time Olson was arrested, the SLA was nearly forgotten. It turned out her arrest was crucial to resolving the Opsahl murder, which also had faded into obscurity.

When Olson was indicted for helping plant pipe bombs in Los Angeles in 1975, she shed her birth name of Kathleen Soliah and disappeared. Renamed, she began a new life in St. Paul, where she and her husband, Gerald Peterson, raised three daughters. Peterson and two of the girls were in the courtroom Friday.

Olson was arrested by the FBI after the pipe bomb case was aired on "America's Most Wanted" and someone tipped law enforcement authorities. The case became a media circus, and friends quickly raised her $1 million bail.

Michael Latin, the Los Angeles County assistant prosecutor assigned to the case, said this week that he had inherited "a dead case" until Olson was arrested.

"Luckily for us, they kept delaying and delaying and delaying and giving us time, and that was our most precious resource," he said. Prosecutors used that time to dig into other unsolved crimes and pressed their Sacramento counterparts to reopen the Opsahl case. Opsahl's son, Jon, had been doing the same for years.

Olson pleaded guilty in the pipe bomb case in October 2001, only to recant her guilt, to reassert it and unsuccessfully withdraw it one last time. For that crime, she is serving a 14-year prison term at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She could be eligible for parole in seven to nine years.

In court Friday, Jon Opsahl called the four defendants "monsters" and "a group of pathetic, deranged revolutionaries who simply decided one day to make my mother instantly and permanently expendable."

Of Olson, he said that she "still insists that she never intended to hurt anyone in the bank that day. In reality, Ms. Soliah knows that she kicked a pregnant teller who was lying on the floor of that bank, not far from where my mother was bleeding out. Ms. Soliah would have us believe that it never happened, and if it did, it wasn't her fault the woman miscarried."

The other three defendants apologized to Opsahl.

"I've thought about your mother a lot," Harris told him. "Your mother was never an abstraction to me. It's absolutely unacceptable that this happened."

Montague carried the gun that killed Opsahl but said it fired accidentally. "I will be sorry for the rest of my life," she said.

The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times contributed to

this report.