Sara Jane Olson

Sara Jane Olson (born Kathleen Ann Soliah on January 16, 1947) is an American far-left activist who was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1975.

The group disbanded and she was a fugitive for decades before being arrested.

Kathleen Soliah was born on January 16, 1947, in Fargo, North Dakota, while her family was living in Barnesville, Minnesota.

When she was eight, her conservative Lutheran family relocated to Southern California.

Soliah attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she initially majored in English.

While a student at university, she participated in theater and was cast in a production of J.B.

After graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in theater, Soliah moved to Berkeley, California, with her boyfriend, James Kilgore.

There, she met Angela Atwood at an acting audition where they both won lead roles.

They became inseparable during the play's run.

Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist group she had joined.

Soliah, Kilgore, and Soliah's brother Steve and sister Josephine followed the SLA closely without joining.

They were being pursued for armed robbery of banks, the November 1973 murder of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster, and the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

The Soliahs organized memorial rallies for the SLA victims, including one in Berkeley's Willard Park (called Ho Chi Minh park by activists), where Soliah spoke in support of Atwood and was covertly filmed by the FBI.

She said that SLA members had been:

"viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs in L.A. while the whole nation watched. Well, I believe that Gelina [Atwood] and her comrades fought until the last minutes, and though I would like to have her with me here right now, I know that she lived happy and she died happy. And in that sense, I'm so very proud of her. SLA soldiers – I know it is not necessary to say; but keep on fighting. I'm with you and we are with you!"

Soliah asserted that Atwood "was a truly revolutionary woman ... among the first white women to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in".

Founding SLA member and fugitive Emily Harris visited Soliah, who was working at a bookstore.

Soliah later recalled, "I was glad she was alive. I expected them to be killed at any time."

She felt sorry for the group and agreed to help the remaining members hide from the police and FBI.

She assisted them by procuring supplies for their San Francisco hideout, and birth certificates of dead infants that could be reused for false identification.

Known then as Soliah, she was also accused of helping a group hide Patty Hearst, a kidnapped newspaper heiress, in 1974.

Atwood and five other core members of the SLA, including leader Donald DeFreeze, were killed in May 1974 during a standoff and shootout with police at a house near Watts, Los Angeles.

On April 21, 1975, SLA members robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California.

In the process they killed Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four depositing money for her church.

Patty Hearst, who had acted as getaway driver during the crime, later provided the information that led police to implicate the SLA in the robbery and murder.

She identified Soliah as one of the robbers.

According to Hearst, Soliah kicked a pregnant teller in the abdomen, leading to her suffering a miscarriage.

Police later searched Soliah's room at the SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco.

They found several rounds of 9 mm ammunition on the floor and in a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol in Soliah's dresser drawer.

Manufacturing marks appeared to match similar cartridges found in Opsahl's body during the autopsy.

After being federally indicted in 1976, Soliah was a wanted fugitive for several decades.

She lived for periods in Zimbabwe and the U.S. states of Washington and Minnesota.

While in Minnesota, she legally changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, married, and had a family.

Arrested in 1999, she pleaded guilty in 2001 to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder, and in 2003 to second-degree murder, both stemming from her SLA activities in the 1970s.

She was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

In 2001, she pleaded guilty to attempted murder related to a failed bombing plot.

In 2003 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder related the death of a customer during a botched bank robbery the SLA committed in California.

She was mistakenly released for five days in March 2008 due to an error made in calculating her parole, and was rearrested.

She was released on parole on March 17, 2009.

On November 4, 2020, Olson was arrested along with several others for blocking Interstate 94 in Minneapolis during a protest.