Paroled SLA Terrorist Turned Professor to Land In Illinois

This maggot winds up serving a mere six years for the murder of a mother of four children and gets to move to Illinois despite the objection of police organizations. Who said crime didn't pay for these leftwing radicals?

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.

Sounds like a swell guy. I'm sure he'll be warmly welcomed in Champaign.

More here.

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.

SLA Terrorist Back Behind Bars

Oops.

We noted our displeasure about this woman being released Friday.

Well, not so fast, she going back to jail due to a an administrative error.

Oh well.

California authorities re-arrested Sara Jane Olson at noon today, just days after the former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled from a California women's prison after serving about six years for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

Shawn Chapman Holley, the attorney for the woman who changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, said her client called her Friday night and told her that prison officials had detained her at Los Angeles International Airport when she was about to board a plane for Minnesota and that she had then been taken to her mother's home in Palmdale.

Holley said that on Saturday morning, she called an official of the Corrections Department and was told that there might have been "a computation error" regarding the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve. Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had no immediate comment but said they would hold a press conference later today.

Holley said Olson's husband and an official from the Corrections Department told her that her client was being taken to a prison in Frontera. She said she was outraged by the action and asserted that her client had been illegally arrested and is now being "illegally imprisoned."

Earlier in the day, Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that when she left her office Friday, she had been informed that department officials had cleared an out-of-state parole transfer for Olson "and she was going to be traveling to Minnesota."

Olson had lived in Minnesota for a number of years before being arrested on charges related to the 1975 plot to plant pipe bombs beneath police cars in retaliation for a shootout with Los Angeles police that left six SLA members dead.

Holley said she had told Olson goodbye Friday at the home of a Southern California friend. "She met with her parole agent earlier in the day," Holley said. "He told her she was free to go to Minnesota and told her to tell her Minnesota parole agent to call her Los Angeles parole agent on Monday as a formality."

But about 11:15 Friday night, Holley said, she received a call from Olson, who told her that law enforcement officials at LAX "were telling her her travel pass was rescinded and they would escort her back to her mother's home in Palmdale."

After midnight, Holley said, she got another call from Olson, telling her that she had been taken to her mother's home in a law enforcement convoy and that although she was not under arrest, law enforcement officials had stationed a car in front of the house and told her she would be followed if she left.

Looks like she'll be back chilling behind bars until next March.

Too bad it's not for life.

I guess this means she won't be attending the Democrat Convention this summer.

Patricia Hearst Shaw was unavailable for comment.

SLA Terrorist Turned Progressive Activist Walks Free

This woman should have received far more jail time than she did, and not only did she get a relatively light sentence, she now walks free after serving only six years for trying to murder Los Angeles policemen.

Kathleen Soliah, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole this week from a California women's prison after serving about six years behind bars for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

The white-haired convict, who has changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. Like most California inmates, Soliah earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, prison officials said.

The 61-year-old Soliah, who was released Monday, must now serve a three-year parole, although prison officials declined to provide the conditions of her release.

Reached at her family's home in Palmdale on Thursday, Soliah refused to comment. Her husband, Dr. Gerald Peterson, who was also at the house, said only that he was "relieved."

Soliah's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, said, "We're thrilled she's out and can return to her family. For someone who was not a danger or a threat to society, it was six years too long."

Los Angeles police see Soliah in far harsher light.

She "attempted to murder LAPD officers by bombing two police cars," said Tim Sands, president of the Police Protective League, which represents the city's 9,300 rank-and-file officers. "She needs to serve her full time in prison for these crimes and does not deserve time off for working in prison. Criminals who attempt to murder police officers should not be able to escape justice simply because they have good lawyers."

The child of a middle-class Palmdale family, Soliah joined the violent band of radicals best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the mid-1970s. She was charged with taking part in a 1975 plan to plant pipe bombs beneath police cars in retaliation for a shootout with Los Angeles police that left six SLA members dead.

The nail-packed bombs didn't detonate when the triggering device on one malfunctioned. Not waiting around to make her case in court though, she fled.

She changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, left California and married Peterson, an emergency room physician. The couple lived for a while in Zimbabwe before settling in St. Paul, Minn. Soliah lived the quiet life of a homemaker and mother of three daughters in a Tudor-style home in an upscale neighborhood near the Mississippi River and performed in a local theater's Shakespeare productions.

I wonder whether she'll now return to being a community activist?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune describes the attitude of the liberal community in St. Paul after learning of her past in these terms: "In the days since her June 16 arrest, Olson [Soliah] has been almost canonized: reader of newspapers for the blind, volunteer among victims of torture, organizer of soup kitchens. The office manager of the Minnehaha United Methodist Church, where she is a member of the congregation, called on its members to build a "contingent of support." Twenty of them were said to have been in court in California on the day she was arraigned.

Soliah's brother-in-law, Michael Bortin, was a Berkeley radical and with his wife Josephine (who is Soliah's sister) was also an SLA member. Recently, Bortin attempted to explain to the press the relationship between the radical gangster Soliah and the St. Paul housewife "Sara Jane Olson," who was such an upstanding member of the progressive community: "There's not this dichotomy between what Kathy was and what she is now. She was doing the same things in the early Seventies."