Middle-Aged Radicals, Plucked from Suburbia

By Jodie Morse

On Jon Opsahl's website there is a photograph of his mother Myrna. She wears a sensible bob and a dimpled smile. Her gingham blouse is buttoned all the way to the top. The grainy black-and-white image is a throwback to an earlier time. But her son's words running beside it are both clear and current: "We know who was there when she was shotgunned to death... Twenty-six years is long enough to have waited."

That wait finally ended last Wednesday, when police charged five former figures in the Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent band of '70s radicals, with the murder of Myrna Opsahl. In February 1974 the S.L.A. entered the lexicon of domestic terror with the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, who was later caught on a bank security camera toting a gun; in May of that year, the group was nearly wiped out in a fire fight with Los Angeles cops. But there were still plenty of hangers-on, like, allegedly, Sara Jane Olson, a Minnesota doctor's wife arrested in 1999 after 23 years as a fugitive and sentenced last week to 20 years to life for her role in a failed plot to blow up two police cars. Prosecutors allege that Olson and four others also robbed $15,000 from a suburban Sacramento bank one quiet Monday morning in 1975 and shot Opsahl in the stomach as she was depositing her church's collection-plate money.

This time the guerrillas surrendered quietly, having long ago swapped their '70s extremism for 21st century suburban anonymity. William Harris, who served more than eight years in prison along with his ex-wife Emily for their role in kidnapping Hearst, married a lawyer, coaches soccer and works as a private investigator in San Francisco. Police pulled over William, formerly known as General Teko, in his Honda Passport SUV shortly after 8 a.m., as he was driving his kids to school. Emily, a computer consultant who has gone back to using her maiden name, Montague, was stopped near her suburban Los Angeles home. Michael Bortin, who runs Zen Hardwood Floors, was asleep when police called to say they were outside his Victorian house in Portland, Ore. A final suspect, James Kilgore, the only fugitive in the group, vanished decades ago and remains at large.

The four have consistently maintained their innocence in the case, which has languished ever since the government tried but failed to convict one S.L.A. figure in the robbery 25 years ago. It was revived with the 1999 arrest of Olson. According to the Sacramento district attorney, the FBI has used new forensic techniques to link the lead pellets in Opsahl's abdomen to shotgun shells recovered from an S.L.A. safe house. Olson's guilty plea in the bombing plot reportedly confirmed what Hearst told the FBI decades ago--that the loot from the robbery helped finance subsequent S.L.A. crimes.

"They are two middle-aged, middle-class people who have paid their debt," says Stuart Hanlon, who represented Emily and William Harris in their earlier trial and signed on as Emily's attorney again last week. "It's like The Twilight Zone." More of the past may surface if Hearst, who served two years on a different robbery charge, is called to testify. Granted immunity years ago, Hearst described the carefully choreographed heist in her 1982 book, Every Secret Thing, writing that Emily Harris confided she had shot Opsahl, saying "it really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway."

Jon Opsahl remembered those words. Now a doctor in Riverside, Calif., he has unrelentingly pressured prosecutors to revisit the case. He took his quest to the Internet two years ago MyrnaOpsahl.com) posting a damning dossier of evidence and providing postcards for visitors to print out and mail to the Sacramento D.A.'s office. In a strange coincidence, before his mother was shot, Jon's eighth-grade history teacher assigned him a current-events report on the Symbionese Liberation Army. He is finally one step closer to writing the conclusion.

--Reported by Stacie Stukin/Los Angeles and Chris Taylor/San Francisco

With reporting by Stacie Stukin/Los Angeles and Chris Taylor/San Francisco