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Saturday, November 09, 2002

Jon Opsahl woke me from a deep sleep on the fifth ring of the phone. To wake up the California justice system he needed 27 years.

"I guess it's finally over. I hope it's over," Opsahl said. A few hours earlier, four remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army weepily confessed in court to killing Opsahl's mother.

The self-styled urban warriors served the people by bombing, assassination, kidnapping Patty Hearst and, on April 21, 1975, bursting into the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, Calif., and shooting Myrna Opsahl, 42, mother of four and former medical missionary, as she arrived to deposit that Sunday's church collection.

"All this case has ever been about was finding out the truth," Opsahl told me. "We wanted justice. After 27 years at this point it's hard to know what the truth is."

Emily Montague, nee Emily Harris, a woman who could keep a firm grip on neither her surname nor her trigger finger, will receive eight years in prison. Sara Jane Olson, who gave up being Kathleen Soliah when she fled to Minnesota, married and raised her family, will add six years to the term she is serving for attempted bombing. William Harris gets seven years. Michael Bortin gets six. Add it up and it totals 27 years in jail; one for each year Myrna Opsahl has spent in the ground.

After Myrna Opsahl melted to the floor and bled to death from a stomach wound, the SLA departed with $15,000 of The People's money. They used it to buy a new car. Trigger woman Emily Harris seemed little troubled, according to a 1982 book by getaway driver Patricia Hearst.

"How's the woman who was shot?" fellow robber Kathleen Soliah asked Harris.

'"Oh, she's dead,' replied Emily airily, 'but it really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor.'"

On Thursday, a tearful Emily Montague assured the Opsahl family that she never said such things and told the court, "There has not been a day in the last 27 years that I have not thought of Mrs. Opsahl and the tragedy I brought on her family."

"She did try to soften the edge of her confession somewhat," Jon Opsahl told me. "I'll give her the benefit of the doubt."

Sara Jane Olson became a medical missionary, a doctor's wife, and joined a church. She, in essence, lived 24 years of the life she helped deny Myrna Opsahl.

"I never entered that bank with the intent of harming anyone. I am truly sorry, and I will be sorry until the day I die," Olson told the court.

This is great moral progress. Until Thursday, Olson maintained she had never even entered the bank.

What she did not mention is that on the way out of the bank that day, Olson gave a jolly kick to the midsection of a pregnant bank teller who was sprawled on the floor. The teller miscarried.

In the intervening years between the Crocker Bank holdup and this week's court pleas, Jon Opsahl had to badger Sacramento authorities to pursue the case. Eleven years ago, they convened a grand jury, immunized a few witnesses and, at the end, a prosecutor told jurors he would write his report, gather up the transcripts "and then I will put it in about 15 boxes and put it in a warehouse somewhere. So, I doubt very seriously the case will ever be examined again ... we will put it all in one spot and tell them to save it and who knows?"

Who knew, as it turns out, was the Los Angeles prosecutor who threatened to take the case himself if Sacramento did not move. The gambit ended with junior sentences for second-degree guilty pleas, but gave Jon Opsahl and his family the moment they wanted -- a literal moment of truth.

That came on the elevator upstairs to the courtroom, where Trygve Opsahl, Myrna's widower, realized he was sharing the ride with a fifth member of the holdup squad: Steven Soliah, Sara Jane Olson's brother. Soliah had been acquitted of the robbery in 1976 after a witness said he had been with her. At the time, nobody noticed that the same witness was signed into the visitor's book at Folsom Prison, paying a social call on an inmate. The acquittal put Steven Soliah beyond prosecution.

A prosecutor introduced Soliah and Trygve Opsahl and asked Soliah if he'd like to say something.

"He actually apologized that the SLA did this," Jon Opsahl said. "He basically admitted it and said he was sorry."

Trygve Opsahl forgave him. You're supposed to do that when someone tells the truth.