Sounds like a swell guy. I'm sure he'll be warmly welcomed in Champaign.The last imprisoned member of the 1970s-era Symbionese Liberation Army has been cleared to serve his parole in Illinois after his release next month from a California prison, corrections officials said Tuesday.
James Kilgore, 61, is completing a six-year sentence at High Desert State Prison in Susanville for his role in the murder of Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four who was killed during a 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb.
California corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said Illinois authorities have agreed to supervise Kilgore for a year. Federal authorities have approved his transfer to Illinois, where he will be supervised as part of a federal term he completed after being convicted of charges related to his years with the SLA and fleeing the country.
Another SLA fugitive, Sara Jane Olson, was released from prison last month and allowed to return to her home in St. Paul, Minn.
The Symbionese Liberation Army was a band of radicals from mostly middle-class backgrounds that sought to foment revolution and overthrow the government. Best known for the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, it claimed responsibility for assassinating Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster and was involved in a shootout with Los Angeles police officers that killed five SLA members.
Kilgore's wife moved to Illinois after her husband was arrested in 2002 in South Africa after nearly three decades on the run. She teaches at the University of Illinois in Champaign. While on the lam, Kilgore became a University of Cape Town professor under the alias of Charles William Pape.
He served his state prison term after completing a 4 1/2-year federal prison sentence for using a deceased baby's birth certificate to obtain a passport and for possession of a pipe bomb that federal authorities said they found in his Daly City apartment in 1975.
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Kilgore disappeared from San Francisco on Sept. 18, 1975, the day FBI agents arrested Hearst and four other SLA members.
He went with Olson, known then as Kathy Soliah, first to Minneapolis, then to Zimbabwe. Olson returned to the United States, while he remained in Africa until his arrest.
Freeman, his attorney, said Kilgore has served his prison time like he lived his life after he fled the country: teaching.
He taught other inmates Spanish and English as a second language, and learned sign language himself. Both Freeman and a 2003 probation report refer to Kilgore as a "model inmate" with no disciplinary problems.
"He's just the kind of person who makes the best of every situation," said Freeman. "He's not somebody who grouses or complains or can't wait to get out."
He expects Kilgore will return to teaching and writing, following the mold of former '60s radicals Angela Davis and Bill Ayers.
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