Patty Hearst To Testify In Trial Of SLA Member

Reuters/October 26, 1999
By Michael Miller

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Prosecutors want an unwilling Patty Hearst to relive her days with the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, as first a captive and then an active participant, so that she can testify against an SLA member accused of planting bombs under police cars.

In court documents unsealed late Monday, prosecutors said the newspaper heiress, who was kidnapped in 1974 from her Berkeley, California, apartment by the SLA and later allegedly became a willing member of the radical urban guerrilla group, "will be called to testify as a witness" in the trial of Sara Jane Olson.

Los Angeles County District Attorney spokeswoman Victoria Pipkin confirmed Tuesday that Hearst had been ordered by a judge in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two children, to testify when Olson's trial gets under way in January.

"We subpoenaed her and there was some concern that she might fight the subpoena. It was our understanding that she is not exactly happy about testifying," Pipkin said.

Hearst is expected to testify that Olson traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles with two other SLA members, William Harris and Jack Kilgore to plant nail bombs under two police cars in August 1975. The bombs did not go off and no one was injured.

Harris has not been charged in the alleged bomb plot and Kilgore is still at large.

In her book, "Patty Hearst: Her Own Story," Hearst writes that Olson returned from the trip to Los Angeles with a black eye.

Olson, 52, who was known as Kathy Soliah during her days in the SLA, fled when the bomb charges were filed and eluded police for some 24 years, living much of that time in Minneapolis, where she married a physician, was active in church, local theater and volunteer work and drove her children to soccer matches.

She legally changed her name in August to Sara Jane Olson, the alias she had used during her more than two decades on the run.

In their brief, filed under seal on Oct. 1 and unsealed Monday, Deputy District Attorneys Mike Latin and Eleanor Hunter made it clear they intended to explore Olson's other alleged activities while she was a member of the SLA, including a 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael, California, a suburb of Sacramento, in which a customer was shot and killed.

According to Hearst's book Olson and Emily Harris, the sister of William Harris, took part in the robbery and Harris later admitted to Hearst that she had shot the woman.

But Olson's attorneys, Stuart Hanlon and Susan Jordan, have said they would resist any prosecution attempts to broaden the case outside the alleged planting of bombs.

Hearst, 45, the granddaughter of press magnate William Randolph Hearst, was captured in 1975 and was subsequently convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in jail. Then President Jimmy Carter ordered her release after she had spent 22 months behind bars.

Carter recently asked President Clinton to grant her a full pardon.