From outside her ivy-covered stone house, Sara Jane Olson seemed to have the perfect suburban life. She and her doctor husband lived in one of St. Paul, Minnesota's nicest neighborhoods with their three accomplished daughters. She was a stay-at-home mom who filled her days with long-distance runs, volunteer jobs and acting gigs in community theater. She was active in her church and dazzled friends with her gourmet baking and endless energy.

But as she ferried her children to sports practice and took casseroles to sick friends, Olson carried a secret with her. The civic-minded soccer mom was a fugitive wanted for the attempted murder of Los Angeles police officers. Her real name: Kathleen Soliah. And in the 1970s, she was affiliated with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the violent radical group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.

Soliah on her wanted poster

For 24 years, Olson kept that part of her past hidden, but on June 16, 1999, as she drove to a community center to teach a citizenship class, FBI agents surrounded her minivan and arrested her at gunpoint.

"Kathleen, it's over," an agent told her.

More than two years later, the agent's words seem more like a wish than a statement of fact. Rather than accept the charges and work out a plea deal, as some other radical fugitives have done, Olson, 54, chose to fight the prosecution. She said she was completely innocent, and legally changed her name to Olson. She allied her cause with those of convicted killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. Her supporters bombarded the district attorney's office and police with anti-establishment rhetoric more protest rally than PTA meeting. Her lawyers called the case a "political trial" and her defense committee passed out buttons reading, "Jail the real criminals, the LAPD."

After several fits and starts, Olson's trial is finally scheduled to get underway October 15 in Los Angeles. More than a simple proceeding to determine whether Olson plotted the pipe bombing of police cruisers, the trial is shaping up to be a long, bitter rehashing of the culture wars of the 1970s.

"A forum for a trial of the political events of the '60s and '70s — the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the anti-war movement, Nixon and Watergate years, the killings at Kent State and the nonviolent as well as violent activities of the left," the defense predicted shortly after Olson's arrest.

The trial — which the defense claims will be more complex than the Oklahoma City bombing cases or the O.J. Simpson trial — is likely to stretch six months and include exhaustive testimony about the SLA and Olson's ties to it. Jurors will hear two very different histories of the tumultuous world of radical California in the '70s. Hearst, who joined the group after her kidnapping but later said she had been brainwashed, is expected to paint Olson and the SLA as murderous criminals, while the defense is likely to argue that the real villains were '70s law enforcement agents who used lies, fear and violence to silence voices outside the mainstream.

The stakes could scarcely be higher. If convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, Olson faces a mandatory life sentence.

NEXT: A bomb at the IHOP