4 SLA Members Plead Guilty to Killing

SACRAMENTO —  Four members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical leftist group that cut a violent path through California in the mid-1970s, pleaded guilty Thursday to the murder of a churchgoing mother of four during a suburban bank robbery here more than a quarter-century ago.

In an emotional courtroom hearing, the four aging SLA defendants -- Emily Montague, her former husband William Harris, Michael Bortin and Sara Jane Olson -- agreed to second-degree murder charges in the 1975 shotgun slaying of Myrna Opsahl and tearfully apologized to her family.

“I do not want them to believe that we ever considered her life insignificant,” said Montague, 55, who acknowledged that she pulled the trigger in the shotgun slaying of Opsahl, but told a hushed courtroom that the shotgun discharged accidentally.

The slaying was “something I’ve thought about every day for the last 27 years,” Montague, a computer consultant from Altadena, said after the court hearing.

“I just hope that by telling the truth that it brings some relief to the family, them knowing that I’m taking responsibility.”

Asked why she hadn’t done that sooner, Montague paused for a second and then answered: “That’s a long and complicated thing.”

Under terms of a plea agreement reached after days of negotiations, Montague could spend eight years behind bars and Harris faces a seven-year sentence. Olson, who is already serving up to 14 years for attempting to bomb two Los Angeles Police Department squad cars, and Bortin are to serve six years in prison. A sentencing hearing is set for Feb. 14.

Opsahl’s son, Jon, who learned of the plea agreement late Wednesday afternoon, said he was stunned that the case had come to such a sudden conclusion. Although he had hoped for a stiffer sentence, Opsahl said he accepted the penalties that the SLA foursome face.

“There was no reason to pursue any lengthier prison time,” Opsahl said, noting that each of the four had remade themselves into responsible citizens with families and children.

“There is no such thing as perfect justice,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do that will bring my mother back to life.”

His father, Trygve Opsahl, also expressed compassion for the four defendants and their families.

“I have no hard feelings for the people involved,” said Opsahl, 76, a retired surgeon. “I hope they’ll be able to have some life after they leave prison.”

Jan Scully, Sacramento district attorney, said prosecutors agreed to the deal only after concluding that substantial legal and evidentiary hurdles remained if they went to trial. The 27-year-old case, she said, had grown musty with age, faded memories and the deaths of some witnesses.

“There comes a time when a wrong, albeit an old one, has to be addressed,” said Scully, adding that the agreement was “a very difficult decision for me.”

With good behavior in prison, the four SLA members could see their sentences cut roughly in half. A fifth suspect in the case, James Kilgore, remains at large. Michael Mason, FBI special agent in charge of the Sacramento office, said “we will not rest until he, too, is brought before the bar of justice.”

Sacramento Sheriff Lou Blanas credited Jon Opsahl as “the man who single-handedly got us going” to reopen an aggressive investigation into the case two years ago. Opsahl, medical director at a Colton clinic, created a Web site devoted to the case and waged a persistent campaign to push authorities to bring charges against his mother’s killers. He eventually prevailed after Olson was brought to trial on the Los Angeles bombing charges.

The defendants pleaded guilty before Judge Thomas M. Cecil, for the first time admitting to crimes they had long denied.

Their pleas marked what is probably the final chapter for the paramilitary band, which became notorious after it kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment.

Hearst reemerged weeks later as a brainwashed, carbine-toting member of the SLA. If the plea agreement had not been reached, she was expected to be the star witness for the prosecution.

Montague and Harris went to prison in 1977 for their roles in Hearst’s kidnapping and a string of other crimes. They were released in 1983.

Hearst’s past with the SLA, seemingly behind her, came crashing back with the 2000 arrest of Sara Jane Olson, the pseudonym adopted by SLA member Kathleen Soliah, who reinvented herself as a Minnesota soccer mom during 25 years in hiding.

Hearst was slated to be, by her own account, a reluctant witness at Olson’s trial for planting bombs that failed to go off under several Los Angeles police cars.

After the arrests in the Opsahl slaying, Hearst presented a different face, calling Opsahl’s murder a “violent, senseless, evil act” and suggested no qualms about testifying against her erstwhile comrades.

“They just don’t have any power over me anymore,” she said in an interview on CNN’s Larry King program. “They haven’t had for years.”

Hearst had detailed the events of the bank robbery in a chapter of her 1982 autobiography, “Every Secret Thing.”

Defense lawyers planned to attack Hearst’s truthfulness and character, painting the portrait of a brainwashing victim steeped in suspect memories and sullied recollections.

Her brief reign as Tania, the name Hearst chose as the SLA’s radical convert, induced a trauma that shadows her to this day, making her unfit as a witness, the defense lawyers have argued.

They had talked of asking for a full psychiatric examination of her.

Hearst’s book recounted the roles of each SLA member during the slaying of Opsahl. While the armed William Harris waited outside, Hearst wrote, Olson, Bortin and Montague entered the bank, masks or disguises in place.

Hearst, who admitted to driving a getaway car, recounts that Montague rationalized afterward that Opsahl “was a bourgeois pig anyway.”

During the court hearing, Montague emphatically denied she ever said such a thing. “There has never been a time when I or any of my co-defendants devalued Mrs. Opsahl’s life in any way,” she said.

But the Hearst book also provided Montague with key evidence that apparently helped persuade authorities to drop first-degree murder demands, which would have carried a life sentence. Hearst said that the shotgun Montague used was known to have a hair trigger, going off accidentally.

Hearst served nearly two years in prison for her 1976 conviction of robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with the SLA.

The robbery provided one of the iconic images of the 1970s: A surveillance shot of Hearst carrying a semiautomatic carbine during the holdup.

In 1979, Hearst’s sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

During the hourlong court hearing, Montague spoke of the murder of Opsahl and took full responsibility.

Wearing glasses and a dark pants suit, Montague said she hoped the Opsahl family would gain some measure of solace from the admissions of guilt and expressions of remorse she and the others offered.

William Harris, his hair and beard gray, said he acted as a lookout during the robbery, from a position across the street from the bank. “There’s absolutely nothing I can say that can repair the Opsahl family, and I say that from the bottom of my heart.”

Olson, in a yellow smock and orange prison pants, a prison ID bracelet on her left wrist, calmly described how she entered the bank and climbed over the bank counter during the robbery.

“I never entered that bank with the intention of hurting anybody,” she said.

Bortin, a Portland flooring contractor, spoke from a statement handwritten on a piece of notebook paper. He said he walked into the bank, “announced the robbery” and “waved my handgun a little bit.”

Speaking of Opsahl’s death, Bortin said he was “devastated and very ashamed ... I know it doesn’t mean much to say I’m sorry to the family.... I just can’t imagine how horrible it must be.”

Bortin alone alluded to the social and political context in which the crime took place during the turbulent final days of the Vietnam War. The robbery took place April 21, 1975 -- nine days before the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces put an end to the war.

Resorting to Violence

Bortin apologized for having caused horrible damage to the cause of social change by his resort to violence.

“I feel terrible for all the nonviolent people that were really idealistic and well-intentioned in the ‘60s,” he said after the court hearing. “We kind of deflected some bad karma on them.”

Bortin also said he hoped “this will provide some closure for the Opsahl family.”

In addition to admitting guilt, the four SLA members agreed to financial restitution to Opsahl’s family. If they in any way profit from the case, such as writing a book, the money would be donated to a scholarship fund for nurses, Scully said.

In a statement to the court, Assistant Dist. Atty. Rob Gold said that each of the four defendants had led law-abiding lives in the last two decades and no longer “pose a threat to the community.” Gold said he had consulted with Opsahl’s family before accepting the plea agreement.

Defense attorneys said their clients agreed to the deal only after getting assurances that if the state Board of Prison Terms seeks to add extra time to their sentences, the deal would be voided and the case would go back to trial.

The board held a hearing last month in Chowchilla state prison for women, where Olson is serving her sentence in the LAPD case, and added nearly a decade to her sentence. Olson’s attorneys are attempting to overturn that ruling.

Prosecutors also agreed to let Harris, Montague and Bortin remain free until their sentencing early next year.

Support From Friend

Mary Ellen Kaluza, who has been friends with Olson for 25 years, said that the plea doesn’t change how she feels about her.

“We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to be keeping her behind bars,” said Kaluza, a loan officer in Minnesota. “She is kind, she is generous, she is smart.”

Susan Clay Benson, who has known Emily Harris since junior high school in Hinsdale, Ill., said she was stunned by news of the guilty plea.

“It can’t be easy to keep quiet about something like that with all the people close to you for so long,” she said. “I’m surprised and sad and I hope that, for Emily, this brings some comfort.”

The SLA, formed in the Oakland-Berkeley area in 1973, drew a mix of college-educated white radicals and black ex-convicts who believed in a violent leftist revolution driven by a “symbiosis” of races.

The SLA was largely shunned by the rest of the left, which viewed the group as overly violent and more than a little strange.

It exploded onto the scene with the assassination of Oakland’s popular black schools superintendent, Marcus Foster.

That was followed, in February 1974, by the kidnapping of Hearst and her reemergence as one of the memorable figures of the era.

One month later, six SLA “soldiers,” including leader Donald David DeFreeze, aka General Field Marshal Cinque, died in a fiery shootout with police in Los Angeles.

After a series of bombings and the Opsahl murder, the remaining SLA members were arrested in San Francisco in September 1975.

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Times staff writers Anna Gorman and Mitchell Landsberg contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

5 Lives Diverged After SLA Days

The five people charged with the murder of Myrna Opsahl have taken various paths since their days together in the Symbionese Liberation Army. Here is a look at what they have been doing.

William Harris

The oldest of the five at 57, he served nearly eight years at San Quentin for other SLA crimes and has worked since then as a private investigator in the Bay Area. He briefly worked as an investigator for the district attorney’s office in San Francisco, but was forced to give that up when his felony record kept him from obtaining a state license in 1995, according to state officials. Divorced from Emily Harris, he remarried and has two sons.

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Emily Montague (formerly Harris)

She served more than seven years for kidnapping heiress Patricia Hearst and other crimes. Montague, now 55, learned computer skills in prison and parlayed that into a successful career as a computer consultant to the entertainment industry. She has a committed relationship with Noreen Baca, with whom she shares a home in Altadena.

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Sara Jane Olson

The former Kathleen Soliah, now 55, went underground after her SLA days and remade her life as a middle-class Minnesota housewife and amateur actress before her arrest in June 1999. She pleaded guilty in February of this year to charges stemming from a failed bombing attempt against Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1975. Married to a St. Paul doctor, she has three children.

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Michael Bortin

Never one of the higher-profile SLA members, the 54-year-old Bortin has lived quietly in Portland, Ore., for the last two decades, installing hardwood floors for a living. A father of four, he is married to Olson’s sister, Josephine Soliah.

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James Kilgore

Whereabouts unknown. The driver’s license photo at right is believed to be that of Kilgore. The 55-year-old Kilgore went underground with the rest of the SLA in the mid-1970s, but unlike the others, he never surfaced. Four years ago, Bortin hinted that he was in touch with Kilgore and described him as “in the same situation the rest of us are in, basically -- middle class, kids and everything.”

Los Angeles Times