Latest / Pionerd / [FROM THE ARCHIVES] The Fugitive of Highland Park
Transcript
- Welcome to Pionerd, the Minnesota Edition. I'm Robert Thomas. Every day I bring you a story from Minnesota history that is novel, compelling, and hopefully a little surprising. Today is June 16th. Let's get into it. Today, we track a long, quiet struggle with unatoned violence, shifting into the shadows of St. Paul, where a decades-long flight from justice ended on a bright summer morning. The Symbionese Liberation Army shocked the nation. In late 1973, the militant cell stepped into the national spotlight by assassinating Oakland schools Superintendent Marcus Foster. Months later, in February 1974, armed radicals kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her California apartment. They demanded her wealthy parents distribute two million dollars in food to the poor, an amount that quickly climbed to six million. By May 1974, the law caught up to the core cell in Los Angeles. Police surrounded their safehouse, sparking a fierce shootout that was broadcast live on national television. The home caught fire, and six armed radicals perished in the flames. Watching the screen in horror was Kathleen Soliah, a young actress whose close college friend, Angela Atwood, died in the blaze. The deaths of her associates intensified her public involvement. Soliah organized a public rally in Berkeley just two weeks later, delivering a fiery speech that drew the immediate attention of the FBI. Following the rally, Soliah and her siblings integrated into the radical underground. They associated with a network of fugitives and sympathizers linked to radical factions. On April 21, 1975, this combined faction executed an armed robbery at the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael. During the chaotic heist, a forty-two-year-old church collector named Myrna Opsahl was shot dead by a twelve-gauge shotgun blast. Investigators later traced currency from the bank, using recorded serial numbers to connect the stolen cash directly back to the active cell. By August 1975, Soliah sought direct retaliation against local law enforcement. She placed powerful pipe bombs beneath two LAPD patrol cars parked at a Hollywood restaurant and the Hollenbeck Station. The steel devices featured a complex, custom design rigged to detonate when the cars shifted into motion. Fortunately, the trigger systems failed to ignite, and officers discovered the unexploded weapons before they could detonate. Within weeks, federal investigators closed the net. On September 18, 1975, FBI agents raided an SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco. Inside the apartment, raiding officers seized weapons, ammunition, and evidence connecting the occupants to the Carmichael heist. By early 1976, a Los Angeles grand jury indicted Soliah based on fingerprints, handwriting on component receipts, and a local plumber who picked her out of a lineup as the buyer of the bomb parts. Before teams could serve the warrant, the suspect vanished into the Pacific Northwest, leaving her old life behind. By the late 1970s, the federal hunt for the bomb suspects forced Soliah out of California. She arrived quietly in Minnesota, using her theatrical training to blend into the local population. To maximize her cover, she selected a common regional name, reinventing herself as Sara Jane Olson. This Scandinavian alias allowed her to establish an entirely separate identity within the Twin Cities community. Around 1980, the fugitive took a major step toward permanence. She married an emergency room intern named Dr. Gerald Peterson in a Minneapolis civil ceremony. Olson deliberately refused to take his last name, keeping her assumed identity clean on all state documents. Her parents later claimed she told her husband about her past when the relationship grew serious. However, Peterson publicly maintained he had no inkling of her real history. Within months of the wedding, an international deployment provided the ultimate geographic shield. Oxfam sent Dr. Peterson to newly independent Zimbabwe to reestablish rural medical clinics after their civil war. Olson accompanied her husband into the African veld from February 1981 to September 1982. She taught English and drama classes at a local secondary school, putting thousands of miles between her and active FBI tracking teams. The family returned to the United States in the fall of 1983, settling briefly in Baltimore while Peterson studied at Johns Hopkins. Olson used this pocket of time to study cooking at a culinary arts institute, graduating with a restaurant skills certificate. By the mid-1980s, the family moved back to Minnesota, purchasing a stone Tudor home in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. Neighbors knew Olson as a down-to-earth soccer mom who brought casseroles to block parties. Behind this conventional facade, she integrated deeply into local progressive networks. She became a prominent actress at St. Paul's historic Theatre in the Round, winning critical praise for playing intense, high-strung characters. Simultaneously, she joined the Minnehaha United Methodist Church, where she served meals at peace camps and hosted a local Somali refugee family. She lived in total security, running local road races to test her stamina. On June 20, 1998, she won her age group at the Gary Bjorkland Half Marathon in Duluth. She logged an official finishing time of 1 hour and 36 minutes. Her dual life was completely seamless, but this rising public profile was about to trigger her downfall. By May 1999, twenty-five years of underground evasion began to unravel. The FBI launched a fresh twenty-thousand-dollar capture reward, timing it to the anniversary of the deadly Los Angeles shootout. A few days later, the television show America's Most Wanted broadcast her fugitive profile to millions of homes across the country. This sudden wave of national publicity completely severed active, back-channel surrender negotiations that an Examiner reporter had been quietly mediating in Denver. Olson had even flown to Colorado in secret, prepared to turn herself in before the television broadcast disrupted the negotiations, leaving her former boyfriend James Kilgore as one of the remaining fugitives still evading capture. Federal agents and local police units rapidly narrowed their tracking ring down to the upper Midwest. On Wednesday morning, June 16, 1999, a multi-jurisdictional tactical team took up positions along her suburban commute. Officers from the FBI, the LAPD, and both Twin Cities police departments deployed unmarked vehicles to form a coordinated perimeter block. They stopped her minivan without incident in St. Paul near her home while she was driving to a local school function. According to police logs, the arrest was entirely peaceable, but the disclosure of her radical past blindsided her closest friends and neighbors. She was held at the Ramsey County adult detention center in St. Paul while California investigators flew to Minnesota with the original warrants. In July 1999, Olson officially signed her birth name, Kathleen Ann Soliah, on state extradition waivers, erasing her twenty-four-year alias from the public record before flying to California to face the twenty-three-year-old bomb charges. She spent thirty-five days in a Los Angeles jail before returning home to Minnesota. Local grassroots networks and loyal theater friends rallied to her side, raising a massive one-million-dollar cash bail to secure her release. By October 1999, the legal battle intensified when a California judge ruled that the violent history of the SLA was fair game for state prosecutors at trial. Olson immediately fought back in the court of public opinion, slamming the prosecution as a politically motivated stunt. In December 1999, she compiled and published a one-hundred-page cookbook titled Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes. She sold the book through local Twin Cities networks to bankroll her mounting legal defense fees. She even petitioned the court to have her upcoming trial televised, transforming her defense into a highly visible civic campaign. The definitive resolution of the case ultimately came down to witness cooperation and intense legal pressure rather than a swift trial. Soliah's capture broke a twenty-five-year wall of silence, giving California prosecutors the leverage they needed to formally reopen the 1975 Myrna Opsahl homicide case. Faced with accumulated evidence and the reality of a looming trial, Olson and her aging cohorts—including Emily Montague and brother-in-law Michael Bortin—pled guilty to first-degree murder charges in early 2003, bringing a definitive end to the twenty-seven-year crusade for justice led by the victim's son, Jon Opsahl. Olson served her combined sentences inside the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. Upon her final release in March 2009, an unprecedented interstate political battle erupted over her mandatory parole placement. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and the St. Paul Police Federation launched a fierce formal campaign to block her return, arguing that a convicted domestic radical should not serve her parole in her comfortable St. Paul home. Despite the massive public outcry, California corrections officials approved her interstate transfer under standard family reunification guidelines, allowing her to fly back to Minnesota under strict state supervision. The legacy of this decades-long saga does not belong to a single perspective; it rests in the difficult, parallel truths of two different families. On one hand, it lives in the resilience of Kathleen Soliah, who built a life of genuine community service from the ashes of a radical past, and who ultimately faced her history through a protracted legal battle after her secret surrender negotiations in Denver were disrupted. On the other hand, it lives in the unyielding determination of the Opsahl family, who spent twenty-seven years fighting an uphill battle to ensure that a mother’s life was not forgotten by history. Both paths require a fierce, distinct kind of endurance—one to rebuild and repair a fractured life, and the other to demand the justice a lost loved one deserves. Stand on those shoulders. This has been Pionerd, the Minnesota Edition. I'm Robert Thomas. Today was June 16, 2026. On this date in 1999, the multi-decade flight of one of the nation's most elusive fugitives came to a sudden halt on a neighborhood street in St. Paul. This extraordinary case ultimately demonstrated how patient investigation and legal persistence can finally collapse even a decades-old wall of silence and resolve a historic cold-case homicide. This is what it means to pioneer. Tomorrow, we spin the dial forward to look at a day nature completely rewrote the record books—June 17, 2010. We will unpack the single most prolific tornado outbreak in Minnesota history, a six-hour atmospheric collapse that produced forty-eight confirmed tornadoes across twenty-two different counties. We will track the meteorology behind the three distinct, violent EF-4 systems that scarred the landscape from Wadena down to the Iowa border, examining how advanced warning systems and local spotter networks navigated a historic day of environmental destruction. To ensure you never miss a story from our past, please subscribe to Pionerd wherever you listen to podcasts. If today's episode moved you, please leave a review so others can find us, and share this story with someone who cares about the deep, unfiltered, and honest history of Minnesota. Thank you for your support. We really appreciate it. See you tomorrow.