THE CRIME

When the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst, Berkeley's wealthiest art history major and the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, they also grabbed the attention of national media. Before snatching up the 19-year-old on Feb. 4, 1974, the SLA's notoriety was confined to the Bay area where they had assassinated the Oakland schools superintendent. In the wake of the kidnapping and Hearst's subsequent conversion to the SLA cause, however, every media outlet in the country seemed hot on the story. Newsweek put Hearst and the ragtag radicals on its cover seven times. Television stations routinely broke into regular programming with updates on the case. And even before the FBI captured the heiress and declared the SLA dead in September 1975, the first of a dozen books on the group was stocked in stores.

But the thousands of pages written on the SLA's two-year existence barely mention the crime for which Olson is being tried. On Aug. 21, 1975, two young LAPD officers, John Hall and James Bryan, were on routine patrol responding to radio calls in the city's Hollywood division. Around midnight, they took a break at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard, parking their black and white cruiser in a space in front of the restaurant's plate glass windows. Forty-five minutes later, after a meal of pancakes and coffee, they returned to patrol.

Only a few minutes passed before an IHOP customer noticed a "long cylinder object" in the parking stall the officers had vacated. The police were summoned and soon identified the object as a pipe bomb. An alert went out over the police radio for all officers in the city to search under their vehicles. Ten miles from the IHOP, at the Hollenbeck Police Station, a second pipe bomb was found under a parked vehicle used by a civilian anti-gang unit.

Police experts concluded the bombs were identical and deadly. Made from three-inch pipe and loaded with more than 100 concrete nails for shrapnel, the bombs were crafted to explode as the vehicles pulled out of their parking spots.

"These bombs were designed to be activated only when the LAPD officers were inside their cars, while the gas lines were full and the engine was running," prosecutors Michael Latin and Eleanor Hunter wrote in court papers filed after Olson's arrest.

The IHOP today

The IHOP bomb malfunctioned, the experts concluded, only because Bryan pulled out of the stall at a severe angle, wrenching two detonating screws "one-sixteenth inch" apart and preventing an explosion.

"The miniscule space between the screws was the difference between life and death, not only for officers Hall and Bryan, but probably for several other innocent citizens just feet away inside the restaurant," according to the prosecutors.

THE PROSECUTION'S CASE

The prosecution will try to convince jurors that the red-haired upper middle class mother at the defense table was part of the terrorist squad that planted the bombs to "further their goal of leading the country into a full-scale revolutionary war."

Despite the normal suburban life she has now, prosecutors will contend, in the mid-1970s she was a "central member of the SLA conspiracy" during its "most brutal and violent period."

"These bombs were simply a link in a continuing and escalating chain of violence launched" by the SLA, the prosecutors wrote in court papers.

The SLA pose in front of the seven-headed serpent that was their emblem

No one, however, suggests that Olson was present for the founding of the SLA. Formed in Berkeley in 1973, the SLA was a tiny band of young white radicals led by a black convict. Most of the dozen or so white members were well-educated and middle class, and all were deeply involved with the city's counterculture. Several of the white members had visited California prisons to lead rap sessions for the inmates on revolutionary topics.

It was the teachers, however, who soaked up information. They came to regard the black inmates as political prisoners and the natural leaders for a counterculture revolution. When inmate Donald DeFreeze escaped from prison and joined his former visitors in Berkeley, the SLA was born. The group name referred to all types of people living symbiotically, and the members took revolutionary names for themselves. DeFreeze adopted Cinque, for example.

The group dabbled in Maoism and Marxism and railed against "the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people." For their first public act, they brutally murdered a beloved black educator in Oakland. Superintendent Marcus Foster, they explained in one of the media communiques that became their signature, was gunned down with cyanide bullets because of his one-time support for a mandatory ID card for students.

Three months later, three members of the SLA kidnapped Hearst and set off a massive FBI manhunt. For ransom, the SLA asked that all of California's poor be fed with money from "the corporate enemy of the people" — the Hearsts. The Hearsts and their family trust spent $2 million on food distribution, but on April 3, 1974, the SLA released a taped communique in which Patty Hearst called the food program a "sham" and said she had "chosen to stay and fight" with the group. The next month, police officers found an SLA safehouse in the Compton section of Los Angeles. In the shootout and fire that followed, six of the nine members — including Olson's good friend Angela Atwood — died.

The Compton safehouse burns during the shootout

Before the six SLA soldiers died, the prosecution claims, Olson was hanger-on to leftist causes, offering support to the radical underground but living in the mainstream. But the death of Atwood devastated her, prosecutors say, and afterwards, she joined Hearst and the two other surviving members of the SLA and became a gun-carrying member. Prosecutors cite her speech to an SLA memorial rally in Berkeley several weeks after the L.A. shootout. Olson gave a short, but emotional tribute to Atwood, decrying her "murder" by "500 pigs." She ended by saying, "SLA soldiers, I am with you, and we are with you."

"It was at this point that Angela Atwood's close friend, Kathleen Soliah, decided to carry the torch and become directly involved in the SLA's violent war against the United States government," according to papers filed by prosecutors.

They claim Olson lived in the group's apartments, trained with their weapons, and helped to plot and carry out dozens of crimes designed to "bring strength and respect to the SLA." Among those offenses, the prosecution alleges, was the bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento, during which customer Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four depositing funds for her church, was killed. No one has ever been convicted in the robbery although Olson's brother, Steven Soliah, was tried and acquitted.

Prosecutors say the SLA bankrolled its bombing operations with money from robberies. In August 1975, the group was bent on attacks that would put the SLA back in the spotlight. They discussed ambushing a restaurant frequented by San Francisco cops. They drew diagrams of courthouses and police stations as potential targets. They bought materials and made pipe bombs. In the town of Emryville, they destroyed a police car. In Marin County, they bombed two cruisers. And August 21, the prosecutors contend, Olson her boyfriend, James Kilgore, and SLA leader Bill Harris drove to Los Angeles and planted the bombs under the squad cars.

NEXT: What evidence do they have?