—
Family and church dominated the life of Myrna Opsahl, who was forty-two years old. She was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, into a family of Seventh-Day Adventists, and as a teenager she went to Riverside, California, to study nursing at the school then known as the College of Medical Evangelists. There she met Trygve Opsahl, who had emigrated from Norway for medical school. Shortly after their marriage, in 1954, they moved to Trinidad to work as medical missionaries. Later, they settled in Carmichael to raise their four children, who were all teenagers by the mid-1970s. At this point, Trygve had a practice at a local hospital, and Myrna was a homemaker. On the morning of April 21, 1975, their son Jon, who was fifteen, stormed off to school after a tiff with his mother about whether there were any pens in the house to do his homework. She told him she would buy some that day, but Jon left without his customary “I love you.”
The women of the Opsahls’ church divided the responsibilities of counting the weekend’s offerings and depositing the cash on Monday at the Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael. On that Monday, one of the women scheduled to make the deposit had another engagement, so Myrna offered to take her place. She arrived at the bank, with two friends, just as it opened. As they approached, one of the three women noticed, with some curiosity, the four young people who were heading to the bank from the opposite direction. Why, she wondered, were they wearing heavy jackets—“hunting clothing,” she called it—on a beautiful spring morning? Opsahl was carrying a small adding machine with two hands, so it was a natural gesture for the young man in front of her to open the door.
“Thank you,” Myrna Opsahl said to Mike Bortin.
As soon as Bortin and his three colleagues walked in behind Opsahl and her two friends, he began screaming.
“Everybody down on the ground!”
He waved a .357 Colt pistol. He and his comrades put on ski masks, and the others flashed their weapons as well.
“Get the fuck on the floor! Down!” Bortin said.
Kathy moved toward the tellers, to start grabbing cash. Kilgore stood guard at the door. Emily unsheathed a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun and began counting off the time, to keep the heist to the SLA standard of ninety seconds.
“Fifteen seconds!” she said. Emily turned to the three customers. “Get down!” she said. “Get down!”
Myrna Opsahl appeared to hesitate, perhaps looking for a place to put down her adding machine. Emily raised her shotgun, and the weapon discharged with a tremendous explosion. Opsahl crumpled to the ground, bleeding from an enormous wound in her side.
There was a stunned silence in the bank. No one moved. Opsahl did not flip backward but rather sagged to the floor. Blood pooled by her side. Her friends lifted their heads to look at her, but Bortin shouted them down. “Get your noses to the carpet!”
After the brief pause, the comrades proceeded with their plan. In an athletic move, Bortin jumped up on top of the tellers’ counter. “Get your drawers open,” he yelled. “Lie down! Do not look up!” Kathy Soliah, wielding a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic, awkwardly crawled over the counter, dropping bullets along the way, and started grabbing money.
“Thirty seconds!” said Emily.
“Where are the traveler’s checks?” Bortin bellowed. “We don’t have them!” a teller replied from the floor. Kathy Soliah kicked the woman in frustration as Kathy scampered from drawer to drawer, pulling bills.
“Sixty seconds!” Emily said.
Drawing on information from her sister Josephine’s briefing about bank operations, Kathy remembered to search the drawers by the drive-through tellers, too.
“Ninety seconds,” Emily yelled. “Let’s go!”
The four bank robbers headed for the exit, stepping around Opsahl’s body. As Emily squeezed through behind Bortin, she said, “You were supposed to say, ‘We’re the Dillinger gang!’ ”
Waiting nervously in the van, Patricia saw the Firebird peel out ahead of her. She followed the sports car to a deserted street, where both cars stopped. Emily, Kathy, Bortin, and Kilgore jumped from the Firebird into Patricia’s van. “Go, go, go!” Bortin yelled at Patricia, who kept her cool and remembered to stick to the speed limit.
“Well, should we count the money?” Bortin said, with a kind of sneer at Emily.
“No, not now,” Emily said.
“Well, you’re in command,” Bortin said. “Why don’t you give us some orders?”
Emily, ignoring Bortin’s sarcasm, told everyone to start removing their disguises. Then, for reasons Patricia didn’t understand at the time, Emily said, “Maybe she’ll live…”
“No,” said Kilgore. “I saw her.”
—
An ambulance arrived quickly at the bank to take Opsahl the twenty blocks to the emergency room at Carmichael’s American River Hospital. The staff immediately recognized Myrna, because her husband worked there as a staff surgeon. An ER staffer paged Dr. Trygve Opsahl and told him his wife had been shot. The doctor raced to the ER, where he saw two of his colleagues attending to Myrna. As he later recalled the scene, “She was pale, unresponsive with fixed, dilated pupils, not breathing and no pulse or blood pressure. The EKG showed only a straight line with an occasional faint bleep. The I.V. fluids were running in at a fast pace but the blood and fluids were seeping out of her massive flank wound as quickly as it was pumped in. She was beyond saving.” (In addition, the teller who had been kicked by Kathy Soliah went into premature labor and lost her baby.)
News of the death of the doctor’s wife went out quickly on Sacramento radio news. After the robbery, the comrades began making their way to the Capitol Avenue apartment, and Patricia started to understand what happened. Kathy explained how she went through the tellers’ drawers. Kilgore said that Emily had been nervous, fiddling with her watch on the street and delaying their entry into the bank. He said the shooting happened because Emily had been careless with her gun. It was an accident, Kilgore said, because Emily’s gun had just gone off. Kilgore drew a diagram for Patricia, showing how the woman—Myrna Opsahl—had been standing between Emily and Kilgore. “If she didn’t absorb the shot, I would be the one who got shot,” Kilgore said.
Kilgore left the apartment, and Emily arrived, full of bravado. “So what if she got shot? Her husband is a doctor. She’s a bourgeois pig.” Emily went on to explain that the safety must have slipped off her gun. The shooting had surprised her.
Then Bill Harris showed up, making a show of nonchalance. “This is the murder round,” he said, holding up the remainder of a shotgun shell. “If it hadn’t been for good old Myrna, one of our comrades would be dead. She got all the buckshot.” Harris then said he was going to McKinley Park to bury the brass casing. If it was recovered, it would have been evidence against Emily.
For all of Bill and Emily’s brave talk, the comrades recognized that the death of Myrna Opsahl changed the calculus of their own situation. They had a contentious group meeting that night in the T Street apartment. Bortin was furious, arguing that Emily had jeopardized all of them with her incompetence. He had a point. The radio was saying that the Carmichael robbery was an “SLA-style” operation. Even if the police didn’t have any evidence against them at this point, the comrades were now sure to face greater pressure. Coming just a few weeks after the brutal escape attempt by Little and Remiro, the fatal shooting guaranteed that the SLA would receive a renewed level of attention from law enforcement. Alternately enraged and philosophical, Bill Harris pointed out that Governor Reagan had signed a law restoring the death penalty in California. They had all participated in a robbery that led to the death of a customer. That meant that all of them, including Patricia, were guilty of felony murder, which was punishable by execution. “But that’s ok,” Bill said, “because revolutionaries always die eventually, one way or another.” Bortin told Bill to speak for himself.
At last, they got around to counting the take. The main point of robbing a bigger bank had been to produce a bigger score. They were hoping for as m
uch as $100,000. Bortin, Emily, and Kathy Soliah emptied the bag and stacked up the bills. The actual proceeds turned out to be around $15,000—a pitifully small take, considering the implications of what they had done. No one even thought about doing a communiqué. (There hadn’t been one in a year, since Patricia’s eulogy after the shoot-out in Los Angeles.) The optimism that followed the Guild robbery disappeared in the pool of blood in Carmichael.
—
At first, the comrades were too stunned by the debacle to do much of anything. They stayed close to their apartments in Sacramento and tried not to call attention to themselves. Then, with typical impulsivity, Bill Harris decided that the group needed an outing, so he directed everyone to attend the Cinco de Mayo carnival in the city’s small Mexican neighborhood. The others objected, asserting that the risk of discovery was too great, especially for such a trivial reason. In the end, though, Kathy and Steve Soliah, as well as Patricia and Jim Kilgore, agreed to go, but they insisted on wearing disguises and packing weapons for protection. In their wigs and makeup, the group made a lame attempt at celebration; their inappropriately warm clothing hid the telltale bulges by their hips. No one had much fun, but at least no one was busted, either.
Everyone could tell that events seemed to be spinning out of control. The police had the Firebird, which contained the fingerprints of the four members of the invasion team. The cops also learned about the garage they had rented to store the fleet. There were fingerprints there, too. As Bortin predicted, the robbery’s large cast all but announced to the world that the SLA had descended on Sacramento. In light of this, they knew that it was time to get out of town.
In a crisis, the comrades turned to their true north—San Francisco. They didn’t have a lot of options there either, but the city at least offered possibilities for alliances and shelter. There was a critical difference this time as the group retreated west after one setback or another. Patricia’s relationship with Steve Soliah meant that she was no longer tethered to the Harrises for support. The need to flee Sacramento gave her the opportunity to accomplish her long-sought goal of disengaging from her toxic relationship with Bill and Emily. (It was a chance for Patricia to escape the frantic madness of Mike Bortin, too.)
Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore, who were still a couple, took the lead in finding lodging in San Francisco. Using the proceeds from the bank robberies, they rented a pair of apartments in town—one on Geneva Avenue and the other on Lyon Street. There, in the uncharacteristically warm summer, something strange happened. The comrades achieved a kind of normalcy. The emotional temperature among them dropped. People were not angry all the time. Most of them took on regular jobs. Steve Soliah, Jim Kilgore, and Mike Bortin restarted their painting business. Kathy Soliah, using a fake name, began waitressing at the Sir Francis Drake hotel downtown. Wendy Yoshimura moved in with other friends, and Jo Soliah found work as well. No one saw signs of the FBI or the police. There was the usual musical chairs among the apartments, but the sense of domesticity was nearly serene.
The women enjoyed an especially positive summer. This was a moment when the feminist movement was taking hold everywhere, especially in the counterculture. Starting back on the farm in Pennsylvania, Wendy Yoshimura had introduced Patricia to the liturgy of women’s liberation. Their bible was Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, a dense and at times nearly incomprehensible analysis of feminism in Marxist terms. The SLA had always been dominated, at least numerically, by women, and they now began to assert themselves more directly. For example, Kathy Soliah tried to start a kind of underground railroad for women fugitives. To make sure that they were dealing with bona fide fugitives, Soliah put out the word that a special greeting was required. Callers should ask, “How many worms grow on your worm farm?” The answer would be “Two hundred an acre.” The response would be “That’s a lot of worms.”
During this summer, Emily Harris and Kathy Soliah also established a feminist study group. As Patricia later recalled, “We had developed our own combat skills, were equal to the men in that respect, and therefore we no longer needed them to lead the revolution.”
The women reevaluated their thoughts about sex, too. “Our position on equality in sexual relationships held that sex should be the end result of natural friendships,” Patricia wrote. “A woman should not feel inhibited about sleeping with a woman she liked any more than she would sleeping with a man for whom she cared.” Emily and Kathy became lovers during this time, though, as Patricia noted, their “relationship did not stop Bill Harris from sleeping with each of them from time to time and upon occasion with both of them at the same time. However, that did not last for very long and they sent him packing.” Patricia was such a thoughtful participant in the discussions of female empowerment that the group designated her their scribe, and she occupied her days writing a manifesto of female liberation, sexual and otherwise.
The gentle musings about sexual rapture did not distract any comrades from their main goal of revolutionary violence. Indeed, the relative quiet of their new bases in San Francisco gave them a chance to regroup and restock, thanks to the remaining funds from the bank robberies. Chastened by the experience in Carmichael, the group decided to go back to bombing.
20
FEMINIST BOMB-MAKING
The feminist revolt among the comrades broadened the women’s ambitions in the summer of 1975. Emily Harris, Wendy Yoshimura, Josephine Soliah, and Patricia Hearst wanted more than just equal and respectful treatment from their male colleagues; the women sought to establish their bona fides by demonstrating they could build bombs that were as deadly and effective as the explosives crafted by the men. Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore had already established themselves as prolific bombers, but the other women wanted to prove themselves, too. As usual, though, there was a complication, and also as usual it involved the combustible personality of Bill Harris.
Still unable or unwilling to find a real job, Bill spent his summer in San Francisco reading The Anarchist Cookbook, a famous underground best seller at the time. First published in 1971, the “cookbook” contained specific instructions for how to make bombs from scratch, as well as guides to other counterculture obsessions, like home brewing LSD and “phreaking” (making free phone calls). For all his bluster about revolutionary violence, Harris had a lot to learn, because he had never, up to that point, made a bomb. So Bill spent weeks studying and experimenting with this how-to guide and in short order fancied himself an expert.
The arrival in San Francisco of the former SLA soldiers gave Kilgore and Kathy Soliah new allies and options for their bombing campaign. The SLA team also gave their work a sinister new twist. Mindful of Donald DeFreeze’s contempt for late-night attacks on empty offices, Bill Harris wanted to bring a new level of menace to the bombing campaign. His goal wasn’t just to damage property. He said he wanted to kill cops.
The new priority was sealed in a late-night meeting at the Geneva Avenue apartment with Bill and Emily Harris, Kathy, Steve, and Josephine Soliah, Jim Kilgore, Wendy Yoshimura, and Patricia Hearst. As Harris explained, in his twisted logic, killing cops would prompt a general police crackdown that would lead to a mass uprising against the whole corrupt American system. Later, Mike Bortin breezed into the conversation and, as usual, managed to annoy Bill Harris. “If you want to kill some pigs, why don’t you just walk up to a pig in a uniform, put a gun to his head, and pull the trigger. It’s no big deal.”
Harris, the ex-marine, could not resist rising to Bortin’s bait. “We’ve got to plan it. If you’re such a hotshot, you come up with a plan, and we’ll do it.”
Bortin took up the challenge, and a few days later he took Kilgore and Patricia on a drive through San Francisco. He showed them a coffee shop called Miz Brown’s, which Bortin described as a police hangout. If the comrades wanted cops to kill, Bortin said, this was a good place to start. Patricia sketched a map of the area, while Bortin went inside to check it out. The next day, though, Harris and the rest of the comrades reje
cted the idea. It was too risky. Bortin stormed off, complaining that all this group of revolutionaries ever did was have meetings. Bortin wanted action.
Kilgore’s fanaticism was more refined—he didn’t advocate machine-gun massacres—but he too was frustrated. Unlike Bill, Kilgore had actually done bombings, and he bridled at Bill’s presumption of command. Kilgore proposed what he regarded as a simpler way to accommodate everyone’s priorities. Why not bomb police stations? Kilgore said they should start with the Mission and Sunset (also called Taraval) outposts of the SFPD. This time, the comrades agreed: they decided to aim for a pair of simultaneous bombings on August 7. As Patricia remembered, the building of the bombs generated team spirit. “The components were easily purchased in separate stores. We all got busy devising and testing them in the Geneva Avenue safehouse. A new esprit de corps set in among us. At last we had something ‘revolutionary’ to do. A common purpose served to bind us together and to let us forget, at least for a while, our personal conflicts.”
The comrades took to the task with enthusiasm. In particular, the female comrades made a special effort to show that they could contribute as much to the action as the men. Wendy Yoshimura, who had learned to make bombs with her former flame Willie Brandt, took the role of lead designer. She envisioned simple pipe bombs, which would consist of gunpowder stuffed inside two-inch pipes, attached by wires to a battery for a spark and an alarm clock as a timing device. Kilgore and Kathy Soliah spent a day driving around Marin County buying the components.
True to form, Bill Harris had a different approach. Based on his study of the cookbook, he decided he could improve on Yoshimura’s design. Bill and Emily worked on his idea at Geneva Avenue—which paralyzed Patricia with fear of an accident—and then experimented with detonation devices on some old mattresses in the tiny backyard. Bill’s test resulted in a small, smoldering fire and a summons to the fire department. According to Patricia, Emily told the firefighters that local kids smoking cigarettes had started the little blaze.
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Page 28
