Devastated by Atwood's death, Soliah organized a memorial rally at Ho Chi Minh Park in Berkeley in June, where she delivered an emotional eulogy, calling Atwood "a truly revolutionary woman" and bemoaning her "murder" by "500 pigs." But according to Voices of Guns, her speech was not blindly supportive. She admitted being confused by some of the SLA's actions and said the group had made "serious mistakes" at times. But she concluded with a cry of solidarity — "We are with you!" — directed at surviving members of the SLA. They apparently were listening.

In Patty Hearst's 1982 autobiography, Every Secret Thing, she wrote that she and the two other surviving SLA members, Emily and Bill Harris, were desperate for money and shelter after the shootout and approached Soliah and Kilgore for help.

"Over and over again, she told us how much she had loved Angela Atwood (Gelina) and how disappointed she had been that Angela had not trusted her enough to invite her into the SLA," Hearst wrote. "Kathy responded that she was ready and willing to go underground with the SLA and take part in any actions that were planned."

Hearst claims that Soliah, aided by Kilgore and her siblings Steve and Josephine, immediately gave the SLA money and lodging. She arranged for them to leave the Bay Area for a three-month stay in Pennsylvania and when they returned, she became an active member of the group. According to Hearst, Soliah stole wallets to make fake IDs, helped plan and carry out bank robberies, including a fatal one in suburban Sacramento, and participated in a wave of SLA bombing attempts in August 1975. One of those, according to Hearst, was the one in L.A.

Olson's defense has ridiculed Hearst's account as fiction. Her lawyers say she knew SLA members after the shootout, but are mum about the nature of their relationship. That will come out at trial, they say.

"I believe that Sara was part of a support group," said longtime family friend Andy Dawkins, a Minnesota state representative. "For Sara to have said my friend has been killed, now I'm in this too, and then to have members of the SLA seek her out and say, do you have a place where we would stay for a while?, and to have her say yes, is entirely within the realm of being a supporter but not an active member."

Whatever the case, when investigators closed in on the SLA in September 1975 and arrested Hearst, the Harrises and Steve Soliah, Kathleen Soliah fled. The prosecution says she ran to avoid jail time, while the defense says she reasonably feared the police would kill her for being associated with the SLA.

In 1977, after a stint in Seattle, Soliah arrived in Minneapolis and began living under the name Olson, one of the most common surnames in the city's phonebook, the prosecution has noted.

Dawkins first saw her in 1979, dancing at a show by a local reggae band named Pressure Drop. The trumpet player, he soon found out, was her boyfriend, Gerald "Fred" Peterson, a doctor.

Olson with her husband after she was released on bail

They were a good match from the start, friends say. Both were intellectuals — Peterson, according to one friend, read the dictionary and encyclopedia "for fun" — but they loved to laugh and socialize.

"After the band finished playing we'd show up at their house and dance the night away," Dawkins said.

The couple were married in 1980.

It is unclear how much of her past Olson shared with her husband. She maintained limited contact with her parents in California, and they were often visited by FBI agents searching for their daughter. Soon after her arrest, Olson's parents said her husband had known that she was a fugitive, but Peterson denied it. He now has his own lawyer.

As a couple, they shared a social conscience. They joined a local anti-apartheid group in the late '70s and worked with African refugees in Minneapolis. A year after their marriage and a few months after the birth of their daughter, Emily, Olson and Peterson moved to rural Zimbabwe. Peterson set up a free clinic, and Olson taught English. While in Zimbabwe, Olson gave birth to a second daughter, Sophia.

They returned to the U.S. two years later. After a short stay in Baltimore, where Peterson took advanced medical courses and Olson attended cooking school, they returned to Minnesota.

In the Twin Cities, Peterson took a job as an emergency room doctor at a St. Paul hospital. Olson gave birth to a third daughter, Leila, in 1987.

Olson stayed at home to raise the girls, but she maintained a busy schedule of volunteer jobs and political causes.

"She was active in helping to feed the poor and meals for the homeless ... in planning some of the liturgies at her church ... in the Center of Victims of Torture ... in teaching citizenship to new immigrants ... in reading to the blind," said Barbara Nimis, a lawyer and longtime family friend.

The family's home in the Highland Park neighborhood became a gathering place for what Dawkins termed "the larger peace and justice community in the Twin Cities."

Olson-Peterson home in Minnesota

Each year, the family hosted an enormous Christmas party, where guests marveled at a 12-foot-long table overflowing with gourmet dishes Olson had spent days preparing.

The crowd included neighbors, Peterson's college friends, doctors and nurses from the hospital and activists from Olson's volunteer groups.

"It was a motley crew," said Mary Ellen Kaluza, who met the couple at an anti-apartheid meeting.

There were also actors and directors from the Twin Cities' large theater community. Olson had become a staple of the scene, winning key roles and receiving accolades in the local press.

"She's amazingly good. We used to sit and watch just in awe," said Vicki Cain, who appeared in Lysistrata with Olson. "Whenever she opened her mouth, you'd very much want to hear what she had to say. She was one of those kind of people."

Olson performing in a community theater production of Lysistrata

Wendy Knox, who directed Olson as Hecate, the queen of the witches, in a production of Macbeth, said, "Her picture was in the paper all the time. It wasn't like she was a recluse or hiding all the time. She was very visible."

Acquaintances said Olson never mentioned her radical past, but she never seemed secretive about it either.

"It wasn't like she was hiding anything. I asked her if she was from California, and the story came out that she had grandparents here and had lived in California and gone to school there," Knox said.

But on June 16, 1999, when the FBI arrested Olson in her minivan as she drove to teach a citizenship class, her large circle of friends was stunned.

"They said she's been arrested and accused of being part of the SLA. I said, 'No, no way. It's impossible,'" Dawkins said.

Olson's cookbook

But within a few days, the shock many friends felt had turned to determination to help. About 250 friends raised her $1 million bail with many people putting their homes up as collateral. Her friends formed a defense committee and published a cookbook of her favorite recipes. The book, Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes, has sold 2,000 copies.

"Here's a woman who for 20-something years living in this state has been a model citizen doing all kinds of volunteer work and she has really given far more to the community than she has ever asked of it. People were moved by that," said Kaluza.

Life for Olson — she changed her name legally after her arrest — is much different these days. She still runs every day and reads to the blind, but she no longer acts in local theater.

Olson after her arrest

"No one would cast her in a play in the Twin Cities," said Rachleff.

Her activism is now largely confined to her own case. In fundraisers and book tours, she talks about her trial as one link in a chain of American injustices, including the SLA deaths in Los Angeles and the murder convictions of Peltier and Abu-Jamal.

Olson and Peterson liquidated their savings, their daughters' college funds and remortgaged their home to pay lawyers' fees. Ultimately, however, she was declared indigent, and her defense is being bankrolled by California taxpayers. Her eldest daughter has decided to postpone college, and her younger children are frustrated and confused by their mother's court battle, her friends say.

"In a lot of ways, it brings a family closer together, but in some ways teenagers want to have attention on them, not an external issue about their mother," said Nimis. "It's been very tough."

And hanging over it all is the specter of Olson's future. As her lawyer Chapman noted, "It's incredibly stressful because if she loses, it's life in prison."