Hearst Told to Testify in Olson Case

Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army a quarter-century ago, has been ordered to testify at the Los Angeles bombing conspiracy trial of former SLA “comrade” Sara Jane Olson. In response to a subpoena recently issued in Los Angeles Superior Court, a judge in Connecticut, where Hearst lives, recently ordered her appearance as a prosecution witness at Olson’s trial. The trial is scheduled to begin in January.

Hearst’s longtime lawyer, George C. Martinez, confirmed Monday that his client had been ordered to testify.

“I can tell you she is not happy about it,” he said.

In their trial brief made public Monday, prosecutors also mentioned Hearst’s upcoming role. Deputy Dist. Attys. Michael Latin and Eleanor Hunter wrote in the court document: “Patricia Hearst Shaw will be called to testify as a witness.”

The demand for her testimony comes as Hearst seeks a presidential pardon for a bank robbery conviction from her days with the SLA. It is a period of her life, she has said, that she is not eager to relive.

It is not clear how a pardon would affect her value as a witness. As a convicted felon, her credibility could be called into question.

Olson, then known as Kathleen Ann Soliah, was not associated with the SLA when Hearst, then 19, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974. Hearst was trained by her captors and later claimed she had been brainwashed.

Prosecutors allege that Olson “became directly involved” with the SLA that June, organizing a rally in Berkeley to protest the deaths of six SLA members in a fire and shootout with Los Angeles police.

The prosecution brief describes Olson as an enthusiastic member of the “small but potent” band’s attempt to regroup after the SLA shootout. During that time, the brief states, Olson and “her fellow SLA members hid from authorities, reorganized, gained financial strength and accumulated arms and explosives.”

Olson is accused of plotting with the others to avenge the SLA deaths by killing Los Angeles police officers with nail-packed pipe bombs planted under squad cars in August 1975. The devices did not explode and no one was hurt.

She alone stands indicted in the Los Angeles bomb plot. Her alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. One of them, former boyfriend Jack Kilgore, remains at large.

The brief indicates that testimony at Olson’s trial could range far beyond pipe bombs and police cars. The document states that prosecutors, invoking an umbrella conspiracy theory, wish to cover a number of alleged SLA crimes, dating to the 1973 murder of Oakland schools chief Marcus Foster.

One of Olson’s lawyers, Stuart Hanlon, said Monday that reciting the entire history of the SLA would be inflammatory and irrelevant.

Particularly problematic for Olson and the other SLA witnesses is the April 1975 robbery of a bank in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb. During the holdup, a customer making a deposit for her church was shot and killed. No one has been tried for her slaying, although Olson’s brother, Steven Soliah, was acquitted of federal bank robbery charges in the case.

Hearst was on trial for her role in an SLA bank holdup in San Francisco when Olson’s bomb-plot indictment was handed down in Los Angeles in 1976. Hearst served part of her sentence before it was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Olson, meanwhile, went underground for 23 years. The FBI finally caught up with her in June near her home in St. Paul, Minn.

In the years since their involvement with the SLA, both Hearst and Olson have enjoyed a lifestyle they once would have condemned as “bourgeois.” Both are married and raising families in comfortable surroundings.

Hearst married her private bodyguard, wrote two books and has appeared in films by quirky director John Waters. Olson married an emergency room physician and became active in local theater, politics and social causes. When she was arrested, fellow church members, friends and others raised $1 million in bail to secure her freedom.

While prosecutors admit that their case against Olson is largely circumstantial, the brief released Monday discloses new items of physical evidence they say link Olson to the SLA’s “most brutal and violent period”--from February to August 1975.

The evidence includes a Browning 9-millimeter pistol and a ski mask that prosecutors allege Olson used in the Carmichael bank robbery, as well as a fingerprint on a map of Los Angeles found in a car the group allegedly bought with proceeds from that robbery.

Prosecutors allege that the car was used in the Los Angeles bombing attempts.

Olson’s defense team is asking prosecutors to provide Hearst’s prior statements to the FBI, any grand jury testimony, and any pardon applications or immunity agreements.

In court papers filed Friday, Olson claims the case has devastated her family’s finances. She and her husband, Fred Peterson, filed a declaration stating that they have depleted their daughters’ college fund and their retirement accounts, having already spent $190,000 for her defense.

Olson is asking the court to either reduce her bail from $1 million to $500,000--or to pay the $200,000 to $500,000 it will cost to hire defense bomb, handwriting, firearms and political experts.

Prosecutors in Northern California, meanwhile, have reopened their investigation of the Carmichael bank robbery and the slaying of customer Myrna Opsahl, herself a physician’s wife and mother of four.

Hearst mentioned the Los Angeles bombing attempt and Carmichael bank robbery in her book “Every Secret Thing,” reprinted in 1988 as “Patty Hearst: Her Own Story.”

Hearst’s book says that Olson accompanied SLA members William “Teko” Harris and Kilgore to Los Angeles to plant the bombs. When they returned, Hearst wrote, Olson had a black eye. The book provides few other details.

Hearst also placed Olson inside the Carmichael bank during the holdup, and identified Emily “Yolanda” Harris as the person who fatally shot Opsahl.

Hearst’s book recalls this conversation as the SLA members scrambled into a getaway van: “Kathy mumbled something which I could barely hear, but it sounded as if someone in the bank had been shot, a woman. I heard Emily say, ‘Maybe she’ll live,’ Hearst wrote.

“ ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, not wanting to believe what I heard. Kathy then said that a woman in the bank had been shot.”

“ ‘Who shot her?’ I asked. ‘I did,’ snapped Emily.”

In a later conversation, Hearst wrote, Emily Harris dismissed the dead woman as “a bourgeois pig.”