SLA's Yoshimura keeps mum while ex-comrades serve time

Enigmatic artist lives alone with her dog and will talk only about her watercolors

San Francisco Chronicle/December 27, 2003
By Patrick Hoge

When five graying, former Symbionese Liberation Army comrades pleaded guilty in recent months to carrying out a deadly Sacramento bank robbery more than a quarter century ago, Wendy Yoshimura was living quietly out of the spotlight in Oakland.

The 60-year-old Yoshimura is an enigma, a painter of tranquil watercolors and a part-time employee of Berkeley's Juice Bar collective who has never publicly discussed her days among some of the nation's most-wanted fugitives.

She was subpoenaed last year to testify about the 1975 Sacramento-area robbery in which prosecutors say she knowingly drove a getaway car, but for which she was long ago granted immunity. But before her day in court came, four of the ex-SLA members had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the case. They were given six-to-eight-year terms.

As a fifth longtime SLA fugitive, James Kilgore, awaits sentencing, Yoshimura granted a rare newspaper interview. She did not want to discuss her radical past. Instead, she wanted to talk only about her painting, particularly 15 exquisite still-life renditions of fruits and vegetables that are on display in downtown Oakland.

"I just want to leave my past and just go on," Yoshimura said when asked about the convictions of her former cohorts. "I hate it every time. I hate it every time."

Yoshimura said several times that she did not recognize the name of Myrna Opsahl, the 42-year-old mother of four gunned down while trying to deposit church offerings at the Carmichael bank raided by the SLA. When told who Opsahl was, Yoshimura ended the interview.

The reclusive artist was never a violent person, Yoshimura's supporters say, despite her association with the SLA and her subsequent conviction on earlier, unrelated explosives and weapons charges.

Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the SLA in 1974, gave some support to this thinking in her 1982 book, "Every Secret Thing,'' writing that Yoshimura clashed with members of the group and argued against some of their violent schemes.

Yet Hearst also described Yoshimura as the group's "explosives expert'' and said she taught other SLA members how to make pipe bombs.

Yoshimura, an only child, was born in Manzanar, the World War II internment camp in eastern California's Owens Valley, where thousands of Japanese Americans were forced to live. After being released, her family moved to Japan, living in atom-bomb-ravaged Hiroshima.

When Wendy was about 13, the family moved back to the Central Valley town of Sanger, near Fresno, where her mother worked as a cook and her father as an agricultural laborer. Wendy Yoshimura could not speak English and was placed in second grade instead of with her teenage peers.

She told The Chronicle that might have been a lucky break for her because American teens were so much more sophisticated than youth in Japan.

"I was able to get along with the young kids OK,'' she said. "I guess it's hard when you think about it, but I did fine.''

Yoshimura was passionate about drawing and went to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, working part-time making lampshades near campus.

According to Hearst's book, Yoshimura said she had been apolitical through most of college. In her last year, Hearst wrote, Yoshimura started dating Willie Brandt, a radical anti-Vietnam War activist, and the two went to Cuba to harvest sugar cane.

She graduated from CCAC in 1969 and briefly worked as a commercial artist in advertising. "It was terrible, and I hated it, and I hated most of all the deadlines thing," she said.

In March 1972, Berkeley police, responding to a landlord's complaint, raided a garage that Yoshimura rented under an assumed name. Inside, police found a pipe bomb, similar devices in mid-construction and guns, including a machine gun.

Yoshimura's fingerprints were found, including on a book about forming an urban guerrilla unit and an Army training manual about rifles and rocket launchers. Officers arrested three men, including Brandt and Michael Bortin, a later SLA member who pleaded guilty to participating in the fatal Carmichael bank robbery.

Yoshimura immediately went underground with the help of a friend, who in 1972 took her to a Pennsylvania farm where SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were hiding with Hearst, who had converted to the SLA's revolutionary cause after being kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment and subjected to abuse. The three had fled California after a shootout with police in Los Angeles that left six other SLA members dead.

Following numerous conflicts with the group, Yoshimura separated for a significant stretch. After police found her fingerprint at the farm and distributed her picture, she sought shelter with the SLA in Sacramento, Hearst wrote. That's when the bank robbery occurred and Opsahl was shot.

Yoshimura was arrested with Hearst in a San Francisco apartment in September 1975. To Yoshimura's surprise, she became a cause celebre among Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans who identified with her family's experience during World War II. People who had never met her gave thousands of dollars for her bail and legal defense.

Novato filmmaker Curtis Choy, who made a 1976 documentary about Yoshimura titled "Wendy ... Uh ... What's Her Name," insisted that Yoshimura was "essentially an innocent."

"We never believed that she was remotely a terrorist," said Choy. "She was framed by the circumstances."

Yoshimura was nevertheless convicted on explosives and weapons charges in the Berkeley garage case and sent to state prison for six months. There, Yoshimura said, she asked her parents to bring art supplies, and she began painting again. She was paroled in 1980.

For more than 25 years, the Opsahl murder case languished as prosecutors did not feel they had enough evidence. Yoshimura didn't make it any easier for them. She was granted immunity in 1990 in the hope she would help a Sacramento County grand jury indict her SLA cohorts. She didn't.

Prosecutor John O'Mara said Yoshimura, in her grand jury testimony, denied knowing she was participating in a bank robbery and insisted she could not remember anyone involved other than Hearst, who had admitted driving another getaway car.

O'Mara said he showed Yoshimura photographs of Opsahl's blood on the bank floor hoping "to jar her emotionally, to appeal to a higher sense within her, some sympathy for this poor woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.''

Yoshimura similarly refused to implicate anyone in her explosives case and weapons case, citing personal and cultural reasons. The judge cited her for contempt of court.

Jon Opsahl, who was 15 when he lost his mother, campaigned relentlessly to see those responsible tried and convicted. He said he was "very disappointed" that Yoshimura, in her interview with The Chronicle, claimed not to know his mother's name.

"It exemplifies their (SLA members) lack of remorse and (lack of) willingness to take responsibility for their past actions,'' he said, "even their violent ones that hurt people."

Today, Yoshimura lives in an apartment in North Oakland with her dog. She offers weekly painting classes in her home studio, as well as in San Francisco's Japantown and finds pleasure in gardening. She says that while caring for her 85-year-old mother, who lives in a Berkeley senior center -- her father died eight years ago -- it is difficult for her to paint regularly.

"It's not that easy for me to find time," she said. "Plus, you have life, you know. You got to do laundry, you got to do errands and then you've got friends. It is hard."

Occasionally, her art gets shown in cafes, but she has never been represented by a gallery. The pieces currently displayed at Cafe 817, on Washington Street near Ninth Street in Old Oakland, range in price from $600 to $2,500.

"I love painting, but I'm not good at promoting my work," she said. "I wish I could find an agent or something, but they wouldn't want to take you if you're nobody."