Kathy's Clowns

By John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson
{Appeared in the November/December 1999 edition of the The American Enterprise}


In the early 1970s, the Oakland, California school board hired Dr. Marcus Foster, an African-American from Philadelphia, as superintendent of its troubled school system. Dr. Foster initiated a number of reforms that began to yield promising results, but also aroused the anger of critics on the left. On November 6, 1973, as Dr. Foster was walking from his office to his car, three men stepped out from the shadows and opened fire. They shot Dr. Foster five times with bullets that had been dipped in cyanide. The next day, a previously-unknown organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army claimed responsibility for Dr. Foster's murder.

The SLA has occasionally been characterized in the media as a "leftist militia" and a "1970s revolutionary group." These descriptions are accurate enough; the SLA's manifesto declared "Revolutionary War Against the Fascist Capitalist Class," and described the organization as "socialistic." In reality, however, the SLA was nothing more or less than a criminal gang. Its principal activities were murder, bank robbery and kidnapping. It never had more than a dozen members, and is not known to have participated in any political activity. (While recent discussions of the SLA have generally viewed that organization in the context of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, most of the group's activities actually occurred after American involvement in Vietnam had substantially ended.) Like many other Marxist groups, the SLA advocated violence. What separated the SLA from most other radical organizations was the willingness of its members actually to commit murder.

In 1974, the SLA carried out its most notorious crime, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, then 19 years old. The group imprisoned Hearst in a closet and repeatedly raped her over a period of weeks, until she agreed to join her captors.

This was the "army" that Kathy Soliah, age 27, joined in 1974 with full knowledge and approval of its criminal history. She did not have to wait long for her first SLA crime. In January 1975, the gang decided to rob the Guild Savings and Loan in Sacramento, California. According to Hearst's 1982 autobiography, Kathy Soliah was "eager to get on with her first real action." She was not, however, assigned an active role. She watched the bank robbery from a store across the street.

Elated by the success of the Guild job, the gang planned another bank robbery. This time they targeted the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California. This was the first time her SLA colleagues permitted Kathy Soliah to participate actively in a felony.

The Crocker bank robbery took place on April 21, 1975. The night before, according to Hearst, Soliah and two other SLA members stole license plates from cars at the University of California and put the stolen plates on two stolen cars that the gang intended to use in the robbery. Soliah was part of the four-person assault team that robbed the bank. Hearst's account describes Soliah as carrying a carbine and pistol during the robbery. Other SLA members waited in the stolen getaway cars.

The SLA's leader, Bill Harris, appointed his wife Emily to command the assault team inside the bank. Emily carried a shotgun and, like the other gang members, wore a ski mask and wig. The bank robbers burst into the Crocker Bank and ordered the bank customers to lie on the floor. According to news reports, they kicked and stomped on the customers, many of whom were elderly. While the robbery was in progress, a 42-year-old woman named Myrna Opsahl entered the bank. A mother of four, she was depositing the previous Sunday's collection of the Carmichael Seventh Day Adventist Church. Emily Harris ordered Mrs. Opsahl to lie down on the floor. Mrs. Opsahl, bewildered, failed to comply quickly enough to satisfy Harris. Harris shoved her shotgun into Mrs. Opsahl's stomach and pulled the trigger.

Not surprisingly, Emily Harris later claimed that the shotgun discharged "accidentally." But she showed no remorse over Mrs. Opsahl's murder. Hearst quotes her as saying, "Oh, she's dead, but it doesn't really matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor." Dr. Opsahl was a surgeon, and he was working at the hospital where Mrs. Opsahl was taken after the shooting. He was summoned, too late. Dr. Opsahl found his wife dead on an operating table.

The Crocker Bank robbery and the murder of Myrna Opsahl caused the authorities to intensify their efforts to apprehend the SLA, and the members of the gang were forced even deeper underground. There is no evidence that Kathy Soliah regretted Opsahl's murder. She did not break with the SLA or the Harrises. On the contrary, she continued to live with the Harrises and supported Bill Harris in the gang's perpetual power struggles.

The SLA's next "revolutionary action" was to place pipe bombs under cars in San Francisco and Emeryville, California, in hopes of killing policemen and, presumably, passersby. Some of the bombs went off, but no one was killed.

In August 1975, the gang planned a more ambitious, two-pronged bomb attack. According to Hearst, Bill Harris divided the SLA into two groups. One group was assigned to bomb the Marin County Civic Center. This team succeeded in planting two bombs in the Civic Center; they went off, but fortunately no one was killed.

The SLA's plan was to strike simultaneously in the Bay area and in Los Angeles. Thus, while the Marin County bombers went about their work, Bill Harris, Kathy Soliah, and Soliah's SLA lover drove to Los Angeles, armed with pipe bombs, in search of a suitable target. Harris told Hearst that he had built a new kind of pipee bomb, twelve inches long an made from three-inch diameter pipe, filled with gunpowder and construction nails. These weapons, called "anti-personnel bombs" by Harris because of the nails, were to be used by the Los Angeles group.

Hearst relates that Harris, Soliah and their comrade cruised Los Angeles looking for a suitable site to bomb. They first settled on a hotel convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where their "anti-personnel bombs" could have killed a large number of veterans. They brought the bombs into the VFW meeting in an attache case. However, they apparently aroused the suspicion of a guard. Fearful that they were being watched, they left the convention without planting their bombs.

The three gang members later reported that after driving around for a while, they decided to plant the bombs underneath police cars. They succeeded in planting their bombs under two police cars, primed to explode when the cars moved. Fortunately, however, when the first police vehicle later pulled away from the curb, the bomb failed to explode and remained lying in the street. Two children found the bomb and began playing with it. Still the bomb did not go off. Shortly thereafter, an adult recognized that the children's plaything was a bomb and called the police. The second bomb was quickly found and defused.

It was this attempted bombing for which Kathy Soliah was indicted in 1976. Not long after the bomb scheme, the SLA broke up for good and its members went their separate ways. Kathy Soliah, who stayed with the gang to the bitter end, forged a new identity, calling herself Sara Jane Olson, apparently as a tribute to Sara Jane Moore, who had recently tried unsuccessfully to assassinate President Ford. Soliah had her name legally changed to Sara Jane Olson this summer.

Kathy Soliah was arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota twenty-four years after the crime for which she was indicted, conspiracy to commit murder. The local response to her arrest was a vast outpouring of support. Democratic state legislators and former St. Paul mayoral candidates Andy Dawkins and Sandy Pappas were her most outspoken and visible defenders. Pappas, for whom Soliah had raised campaign funds, attacked the FBI for tracking her down and wondered aloud, "Don't they have any real crimes to fight?" It is difficult to imagine what crimes Ms. Pappas considers more "real" than murder, bank robbery, and attempted murder. Welfare reform, perhaps.

Dawkins' comments on the case were equally bizarre. He has invoked events from Selma, Alabama to Kent State in defense of Ms. Soliah, as though they could somehow explain why it was reasonable to rob banks, assault bank customers, kill Myrna Opsahl, and attempt to murder war veterans and policemen. Dawkins says that the allegations against Soliah, if true, represent "a momentary lapse in judgment."

It is perhaps not surprising that Soliah would receive support from Democratic officeholders of the flakier sort. What is more surprising is the undeniable grass-roots movement that has emerged on her behalf. Soliah's friends and allies have produced a cookbook containing her favorite recipes, held benefits to demonstrate their support, and raised $1 million to bail her out of jail. Local church groups and the "theater community," in which Soliah was active, have rallied to her defense.

No less interesting than the magnitude of Soliah's support are the virtues with which her advocates credit her. She is described as a "Democratic activist," "a true humanitarian," a "social activist, marathon runner, volunteer and soccer mom," an actress who hosts fund raisers for Democratic candidates, a gourmet cook who "is involved in every peace and justice issue that comes along." Peace and justice. Soliah's brother encapsulated her defense in these words: "There's not this dichotomy between what Kathy was and what she is now. She was doing the same things in the early '70's." Terrorist or soccer mom; there's not much difference, from a leftist point of view, as long as you're devoted to "peace and justice."

There is no comparable phenomenon on the right. It is impossible to imagine a murderer active in a right wing cause--say, an assassin of abortionists--arrested after twenty years on the run, enlisting comparable support among conservatives. The "hunting community" would not rally to his defense; his status as a "football dad" would not be advanced by anyone as a reason why he should escape punishment; and surely no newspaper would suggest that his activity on behalf of Republican candidates or his devotion to the causes of unborn children or lower taxes should mitigate the legal penalties otherwise awaiting him.

What awaits Kathy Soliah, regrettably, is something other than punishment for her crimes. The criminal case against her is weak. It is nearly twenty-five years old, key witnesses have died, and Patricia Hearst, the only witness who could definitely tie Soliah to the crimes she committed, has said that she wants to forget the entire era and will not willingly cooperate with her prosecution. Soliah might be tried and acquitted, but most likely she will plead guilty to a minor offense in exchange for a nominal penalty. Such an outcome will be hailed by Soliah and her supporters as a vindication. It will be seen by them, and by those who rely on the daily newspapers for their information, as proof that Soliah did nothing that was particularly blameworthy, or perhaps that Sara Jane Olson was not Kathy Soliah after all. The airbrushing of history will continue.

The reality, however, will be quite different. However modest its success may ultimately be, the prosecution of Kathy Soliah--who has never uttered a single word of public regret for her crimes with the SLA--demonstrates that some Americans and American institutions are still devoted to justice. Some refuse to forget Myrna Opsahl. Some still care about the veterans and police officers that Soliah tried her best to murder. Against a near-inexorable tide of muddleheadedness, political convenience and historical revisionism, justice hangs on by its fingernails.

John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson are Minneapolis attorneys and adjunct fellows of the Claremont Institute.

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