Hiding in Plain Sight

By Howard Chua-Eoan

The 52-year-old guerrilla lived with her husband the doctor in a $264,000 five-bedroom, four-bath home in St. Paul, Minn., surrounded by neighbors who included doctors, bankers, a stockbroker and Republicans of all types. She grew hostas and geraniums and ran a mean marathon. Though she may have once consorted with bank robbers and bombmakers, the soccer mom of three girls was now a gun-control advocate and found time to narrate Christmas pageants, feed the homeless and read to the blind. In this life and on the local stage, where she most recently starred in a one-act drama called Tall Tales, she was known as Sara Jane Olson--her maiden name, she said. But last week, as she was driving her Plymouth minivan to teach English as a second language, FBI agents arrested her on 24-year-old California charges. They called her Kathleen Ann Soliah. She never denied they had the right person. All she asked for was a lawyer.

The arrest brings with it a history lesson and a trip through radical America. In February 1974, a handful of urban guerrillas calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped publishing heiress Patricia Hearst in Berkeley, Calif. Two months into her abduction, Hearst became the armed S.L.A. operative "Tanya" whose image was captured by security cameras at bank heists. In May 1974, the S.L.A. was decimated after a cataclysmic shoot-out with the Los Angeles police. At about this time, police say, Soliah, actress, part-time waitress and best friend of a slain S.L.A. member, joined the movement after surviving guerrillas reluctantly approached her and her boyfriend Jim Kilgore for help. As Hearst later wrote, "She had been considered too flaky to be trusted." But Soliah joined "enthusiastically." As did her sister Josephine and brother Steve, who briefly became Hearst's boyfriend. In August 1975, Soliah allegedly planted pipe bombs underneath two L.A.P.D.. vehicles, which were found before they detonated. The next month, Hearst was arrested and gave up evidence against the remaining guerrillas before being sentenced to seven years. (She claimed the S.L.A. had brainwashed her, and served two years before President Carter commuted her term.) Soliah and Kilgore remained at large.

Her parents say that 10 years ago the FBI told them it was no longer pursuing Soliah. But California still wanted her. The recent dip in crime allowed the L.A.P.D.. to reassign officers to unsolved cases, and Lieut. Tom King, 50, whose father Mervin had led the firefight against the S.L.A., took a fresh look at Soliah's and Kilgore's. His men got a federal jury to indict her for "unlawful flight to avoid prosecution." That warrant brought the FBI back in. Last month the bureau posted a $20,000 reward and asked the syndicated TV show America's Most Wanted to feature Soliah and Kilgore, who is wanted for "possession of an unregistered explosive device." Calls to the show's hot line led the FBI and the police to Soliah.

Before that, however, Soliah had been thinking of negotiating her way back from pseudonymity. An attempt in 1989 came to naught. But this year, through an intermediary, she passed word to Larry Hatfield, a veteran reporter with the San Francisco Examiner (coincidentally, a Hearst publication), that she might turn herself in to the FBI if she could avoid jail time. She broke off talks when America's Most Wanted aired its segment. Says Hatfield: "Kathy's side thought that the show indicated bad faith" on the FBI's part. She also became skittish when L.A.P.D.. detective David Reyes, one of King's men, insisted on cutting out the middlemen and talking directly to Soliah.

The law was already close to her. Hatfield, who has followed the S.L.A. since the '70s, had published some clues: that she was living in a major Midwestern city, married to a doctor and the mother of three children. Says he: "It didn't seem that hard a thing to find her." The L.A.P.D.. even found a woman resembling Soliah featured prominently on the website of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. "If you're going to be a fugitive, it's not a good idea to put your picture on the Internet," King chuckles. "She's the first picture you look at."

Soliah emerged in Minneapolis after the collapse of the S.L.A. in California and met and married medical intern Fred Peterson. For a while, the couple lived in Zimbabwe, where he worked as a doctor. They returned to Minnesota, and she occasionally sent messages to her parents in Palmdale, Calif. They met her husband and daughters. "She never hid," her mother Elsie said proudly last week. The last time the elder Soliahs visited with their daughter was a decade ago, in a park in Santa Clarita, a town between Palmdale and Los Angeles. It was just for an hour or two, Soliah's mother told TIME. "We tried to reassure her," she says. "But she was so frightened because she was in California. It was very hard to say goodbye because we didn't know when we would see her again." And did their son-in-law know of his wife's fugitive status? "We thought he did," Elsie Soliah says hesitantly. Peterson told authorities he'd had no idea of his wife's radical past.

At her arraignment last week, Soliah smiled at her husband and three weeping daughters as her alleged crimes were read out to the court. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura says he will allow her extradition to California. King of the L.A.P.D.. claims objectivity: "All we wanted to do was find her [bring her before a judge] and close this book out." Her supporters want history to be taken into account. Says her friend Chris Coleman, a St. Paul city councilman: "It was a different era. It's not a reflection of who we are now." Others are indignant at her treatment by authorities. Says neighbor Anne Fabie: "We send people to prison to rehabilitate them so they can become the kind of person Sara is today. It would serve no purpose to incarcerate her." That depends on whether imprisonment is reformation or punishment. Says John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted: "She's led a good life and done good deeds, but if you have tried to kill cops, you're going to be in trouble."

--Reported by David S. Jackson/Los Angeles and Timothy Roche/St. Paul

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Los Angeles and Timothy Roche/St. Paul