Kilgore’s Bombs
Mangus
10/12/03
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 22 Corrections in bold red and bold maroon below
A notebook, recovered by the FBI from an
SLA Safehouse in September 1975 and filled mostly with painting instructions in the hand of SLA associate Jim Kilgore, links the long-wanted fugitive to an attempt to blow up policemen in their cars in Los Angeles the previous August.In addition to the painting instructions, the notebook has within it a hand-drawn map, in another’s hand, of an office said to be on the seventh floor of 5900 Wilshire Boulevard. Wilshire Boulevard is a major thoroughfare in downtown Los Angeles.
On another page of the notebook, in Kilgore’s hand, is a representation that the Wilshire Boulevard office was linked in some way to Argentina. A phone number listed on this page at the time connected to the Argentinian Consulate.
However, by far the most interesting entry in the notebook is a list of components, sans pipe, known to have been used to manufacture the bombs recovered from beneath LAPD
police vehicles in August 1975:"ID, Powder, Shoe, Grip, Glove, Bags, Magnet, Paint
- brown white, Tape, Nails," the list relates.This list also is in the hand of Mr. Kilgore.
According to the FBI Laboratory, in a report sent in October 1975 to the commanding officer of LAPD’s Investigative Support Division, the bombs recovered from beneath the police vehicles were made of three-inch pipe bearing "Plum" brand end caps. Additional bomb components tested by the lab included a battery, a clothespin switch, tape, a knife switch, smokeless powder, nails, a magnet, plastic fishing line, a wedge made from a clothespin, wires, a plastic bag, and an electric blasting cap.
This list is almost identical to the list in the notebook, except for the words, "grip" and "shoe."
However, in some English dialects, clothespins are known as "grips."
"Shoe" is an electrical term used to describe part of a switch where the contacts come together. The LA bombs were to be activated by a booby trap made from the clothespin and attached as a switch to the electric blasting cap; the bombs were supposed to go off when the police car was moved.
Only the grandest luck prevented that from happening on August 21, 1975 outside an International House of Pancakes in downtown L.A.
Two patrolmen had parked their vehicle outside the restaurant, which they then had entered to enjoy a meal break; while they were inside, a then unknown individual attached one of the bombs to the patrol car, using a magnet. The officers then received a false "robbery-in-progress/man-with-a-gun call" and promptly responded; they pulled away from the pancake house so quickly and turned so sharply that the patrol car twisted the clothespin booby trap. As a result, the switch contact missed the shoe by a thirty-secondth of an inch, and the bomb did not go off.
The bomb, which was hidden inside a plastic garbage bag, subsequently was discovered by a passer-by, who began playfully kicking it until he realized that the bag contained something which could kill him and everyone else on the street
-- prosecutors later claimed that this was one of the biggest pipe bombs ever recovered in Los Angeles.At that point, the police were called for real.
One of the intended officer victims, James Bryan, eventually identified Kathleen Soliah as a woman he had seen in the area at the time. He said she had scowled at him.
However, after Soliah’s arrest in June 1999, Bryan’s credibility was challenged by Soliah’s attorneys
— they pointed out that Bryan had not made his identification at the time and had waited almost thirty years until after Soliah was arrested and the case against her looked weak.Soliah, who disappeared the day newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was
arrested, who moved to Minnesota and eventually became Sara Jane Olson, the wife of a doctor, already was wanted for the offense -- her latent fingerprint had been identified inside a locked closet at an SLA Safehouse rented by Emily Harris (one of Patricia Hearst’s kidnappers). It was inside this closet that numerous components similar, if not identical, to those used to build the L.A. bombs were found.Soliah eventually pleaded guilty to "aiding and abetting" the attempted bombing and recently admitted her role in the shotgun slaying of Myrna Lee Opsahl during an
SLA bank robbery gone bad in April 1975. She currently is serving an extended prison term at a women’s facility in Chowchilla.Miss Hearst, now Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was kidnapped by the
SLA and later said on tape that she had joined them, also identified Soliah as being party to the L.A. bombing attempts, both in Hearst’s 1981 book, Every Secret Thing, and in her 1976 post-trial statements to the FBI.According to Hearst, Kilgore and
SLA "General Field Marshall" William Hams also were part of the L.A. away team.But, Hearst’s version was contradicted by a former high-school associate of Kilgore, who independently told the FBI that he had seen Kilgore fleeing the scene of another bombing at the Mann County Civic Center on the same date.
Obviously, Kilgore could not have been on opposite ends of the state at the same time.
Hearst, herself, had been disbelieved at her 1976 bank-robbery trial in San Francisco, where a jury rejected her duress-and-brainwashing defense and convicted her. In response to papers Hearst filed to have her sentence commuted, Larry Lawler, an FBI agent then with the San Francisco field office, admitted that the Bureau to that time had not been able to resolve the contradiction between her account and that of Kilgore’s high-school associate.
Lawler made no mention at the time of the "smoking" notebook; he may have been unaware of its existence, content, or handwriting because of what appears to be a filing snafu.
The notebook originally was listed by the FBI Laboratory as "HEARNAP Q 2181." However, this "Q" number also was being used at the time to refer to some pages from a similar-sized notebook in the hand of Patricia Hearst.
This second notebook later turned up as a prosecution exhibit at Miss Hearst’s trial and indicated she had the freedom to buy items like cat food at local stores during the time she was a fugitive.
Kilgore’s notebook was reassigned a new number, HEARNAP Q 2160; but, by then, many of the laboratory reports were referring to Q 2160 as the notebook penned by Hearst.
In a case already drowning in paper, cross-numbering of these exhibits apparently caused one of them to be overlooked.
A copy of the notebook subsequently came into possession of this writer some twenty years ago, in response to a federal Freedom-of-Information request filed before Miss Hearst and the Harnses were arrested in 1975. While this writer has been aware of the list for some time, identification of its author remained unknown to him until, in the course of researching the data base for the Opsahl murder, in the course of examining
papers on economic subjects written by Mr. Kilgore, this writer realized that Kilgore also was the unidentified author of the bomb-components list.The notebook copy, with its list, subsequently was made available to the judge in Miss Soliah’s case for whatever discovery of it he deemed appropriate.
The notebook is the strongest evidence known to date showing that Hearst’s account is the correct one. While Kathleen Soliah has pleaded guilty to some of the L.A. charges and currently is serving an extended prison sentence for that as well as for her part in killing Mrs. Opsahl, Soliah subsequently told the press she was not guilty and was pleading guilty only because, in the aftermath of 9/11, she could not get a fair trial.
She continues to deny that she ever had actual possession of the L.A. bombs, or that she placed any bombs or built any bombs. According to Soliah and her attorneys, the only thing she
did was "aid and abet" the S.L.A. in a general sense.Prosecutors, however, have said the aiding and abetting was, at minimum, aiding and abetting bombings in the general sense. They already have represented in court papers that, in addition to the materials in the Safehouse closet which can be linked to Miss Soliah, they also have surveillance diagrams in her hand of several businesses and government offices in the Bay Area, documents (also in her hand) setting up mail dead drops to which bomb components could have been sent, and a letter of hers, mailed under a phony name, seeking to buy bomb fuse.
Many of these documents sport Mrs. Olson’s latent fingerprints, and one of them sports the latent fingerprints of Mrs. Olson’s sister, Josephine Soliah Bortin.
Josephine Soliah has been identified by Patricia Hearst as one of the persons
who actually carried out the bombing of the Marin County Civic Center, and not Jim Kilgore. Josephine’s husband, Michael Bortin, also was among those who recently pleaded guilty to the slaying of Mrs. Opsahl. No charges ever have been brought against his wife.The surveillance diagrams and other materials mentioned raise an interesting question re the drawing of the Wilshire office in the painting notebook: Who, exactly, is authoress of it?
Kathleen Soliah and Emily Hams at the time had very similar handwriting styles, and it would take a genuine expert to separate their writings dispositively. From other writings in this writer’s possession, it would appear that the office diagram is more like the handwriting of Emily Harris; but, this writer cannot discount the possibility that the actual authoress was Kathleen Soliah
-- Mrs. Olson.Neither conclusion could be of much help toward establishing some kind of distance between Mrs. Olson and the SLA’s bombings:
According to Hearst, the L.A. away team traveled to the site of the bombing attempts in a 1967 Ford, California plate number UKD726.
Hearst did not know at the time she said this that the FBI already had recovered from this vehicle a Shell road map of Los Angeles, and that the map bore latent fingerprint impressions not only of Kilgore and Mrs. Olson but also of Emily Hams.
Also found inside the Hams’ apartment were
two telephone books for the L.A. area, a white pages dated June 1975, and a yellow pages dated that August (these books would not have been available prior to their issue date).Also, at the time the Harrises were arrested, a pistol formerly registered to an actor living in L.A. was recovered from the Hams’ kitchen table. When police traced this gun, they found that it had been obtained in trade by a man using the name "Brian Bach" at a gun show in Culver City the week before the botched bombing effort.
Identification, including a driver’s license, in the name of Brian Bach was recovered from the Harris’ apartment, and the photograph of Bach, who had
reported the ID stolen, looks similar to Steven Andrew Soliah, Mrs. Olson’s brother and an individual seen visiting the Harris’ abode.The pistol provided other links to the SLA:
The pistol traded for the recovered pistol turned out to be registered to a ________ (corrected 10-19-03) ____________, an "associate" of Michael Bortin who had known Bortin at least since the latter’s involvement in an earlier bombing conspiracy involving William Brandt and his girlfriend, Wendy Yoshimura. (___________ has stated that he was not an "associate" of Michael Borton, the apparent "paper trail" link being his position as chairman of the Willie Brant defense committee, specifically correspondence with a prison case worker, apparently of the then imprisoned Willie Brant)
My note: Willie Brant, who was in prison was the boyfriend of Wendy Yoshimura . Yoshimura escaped capture and became a fugitive jointing up with Hearst and the Harris's in the Pennsylvania farm house during the "lost year". To me it seems plausible that ________ could have had some communications with related people without knowing the SLA connection. I had an indirect pre-SLA Camilla Hall connection, abet weak, that may have led to 1977 contact with James Kilgore here in Minneapolis but I didn't know it was SLA.
Yoshimura was the Japanese woman who later was arrested with Hearst in 1975, and who recently was fictionalized in Susan Choi’s book,
American Woman. She currently resides in Oakland.________ at one time lived in Arizona, and his initials, address, and phone number were found on a piece of paper recovered from the Harris’ apartment. (_________ was chairman of Willie Brandt's defense committee so it's no surprise that his address was out there) ._________ vacated the Arizona address during early summer of 1975 and next was known to have paid a visit to Brandt at Soledad prison in California. It was apparently at this time that he made contact with the SLA,
who also were in contact with Brandt via Yoshimura. (Last sentence redacted, Sale of gun by ________ was legal and he was cleared of any involvement or legal jeopardy.)Hearst has said that the person who did this and other weapons launderings for the group was Steven Soliah, and it is a fact that Soliah is the
SLA associate who most looks like Brian Bach. Connecting the dots, which all confirm Hearst’s previous account, it would appear that Soliah, with Emily Hams, went to L.A. in mid-August 1975, where on the 16th Soliah disposed of ________ gun. Hams at this time would have had the opportunity to surveil the Argentinian Consulate as a possible bombing target. Later, after returning to San Francisco, where the SLA had moved after the death of Mrs. Opsahi, Mrs. Harris related her surveillance information to Kilgore and Mrs. Olson, drawing the diagram in the notebook and showing them locations on the map. Kilgore made the entry, "Argentina 938-201 [or 7]3 5900 Wilshire." Kilgore and Mrs. Olson then took the map with them to Los Angeles but for some reason did not bomb the consulate. Instead, they tried to target Officer Bryan and his partner, who miraculously survived the attempt on their lives without a scratch -- but (after two trips by their attackers totaling almost 1,400 miles) only by a thirty-secondth of an inch. Mangus10-19-03 FYI: _____ was awarded a masters in theology by St. Thomas Seminary in June 1973, last known address __________ St., Denver, Colorado. Perhaps you will recall that, when Jack Scott rented the Ryder van in which he ferried Patricia Hearst back to the West Coast, he originally declared that he would drop off the van in Denver. However, I have no information placing __________ in Denver in September 1974.
Last Update October 22, 2003