Sara Jane Olson's return

The Los Angeles police union Monday called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to oppose a bid by former Symbionese Liberation Army member and fugitive Sara Jane Olson to serve her supervised parole in Minnesota, where she would be near her family.

Olson, 62, known as Kathleen Soliah during her SLA days, is expected to be released later this month from Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, where she is serving a sentence for attempting to kill two Los Angeles Police Department officers with pipe bombs in 1975.

Seven years after she went to prison for plotting to bomb police cars in Los Angeles and participating in a deadly bank robbery, onetime '60s and '70s radical Sara Jane Olson is scheduled to return Tuesday to the comfortable life she once led in St. Paul.

But can she really come home again?

Olson remains one of Minnesota's more polarizing figures, as was demonstrated last week when the St. Paul police union sent a letter asking California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to require that she serve her parole there.

For others, Olson's past is now past, her sentence served for crimes committed during the Vietnam era that is fast fading into history.

"I think the community reaction will break down along the similar quasi-political lines we saw before, but it will be more subdued," said Stephen Cooper, a local lawyer who helped coordinate Olson's $1 million bail fund a decade ago.

Cooper is among those who view the Vietnam era, and the various forms of dissent that came with it, as a unique chapter in America's history.

"For many people, what happened in the '60s was not representative of where their lives went afterwards and they feel you shouldn't be held accountable by the same standards as you would in the '90s," Cooper said. "Other people didn't buy that."

Dave Titus, president of the St. Paul Police Federation, is one of them. His fellow cops will be in the awkward position of protecting someone whom many of them loathe.

"There was never a decade when it was appropriate to commit the crimes she did," said Titus, who refuses to call Olson by anything but her birth name, Soliah.

"We do not believe that the state of Minnesota has a sufficient interest in ensuring that Ms. Soliah does not violate her conditions of parole," union President Paul M. Weber said.

"The responsibility to ensure that Ms. Soliah follows each and every requirement of parole is one which should be undertaken by the state of California, not 'outsourced' to another state. Ms. Soliah should be allowed to travel to another state when she fulfills her obligations to California, and not a minute before."

Some legal experts have questioned the union's reasoning.

Shari Burt, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, said Tuesday that the state was ready to allow Olson to serve her supervised parole in Ramsey County if California authorities gave the go-ahead.

"We will do our utmost to provide the appropriate level of supervision for Sara Jane Olson," Burt said.

If her bid is approved, Olson would be one of more than 1,000 California offenders on parole supervision in other states. That, however, is a small portion of the state's total parolees. By law, the vast majority are returned to their county of last legal residence in California, barring extenuating circumstances, such as if a victim lives nearby.

The product of a middle-class Palmdale family, Olson joined the radical group SLA -- best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst -- in the mid-1970s. She went into hiding after being charged with placing nail-packed explosive devices under police cars. The devices were discovered before detonation when the trigger on one malfunctioned and it failed to explode.

Known at the time as Kathleen Soliah, she changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, left California and married Dr. Gerald Peterson, an emergency-room physician. The couple lived for a while in Zimbabwe before settling in St. Paul, Minn. Olson 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.

Her second life came to an abrupt end in 1999 when she was apprehended soon after being featured on TV's "America's Most Wanted" and subsequently imprisoned.

After serving six years of a 12-year term, she was released on parole last year, and corrections officials cleared a transfer to Minnesota for her.

But as she was preparing to board the plane home, she was detained by prison officials and taken to her mother's home in Palmdale. It was there that she was informed of a "computation error" in which it was discovered that she had another year to go on her prison sentence. The extra prison time meant that Olson needed to renew the parole transfer request with California and Minnesota prison officials.

Olson was among those caught up on the radical fringe, associating with the violent Symbionese Liberation Army in the mid 1970s, before taking up her new life, under a new name, in St. Paul, raising three daughters and working as an actress and political activist.

Olson's husband, Dr. Fred Peterson, wants a low-key homecoming and hopes the family's privacy will be respected.