Monday, March 24, 2008

Her Name is Kathleen Soliah

The name she's known by, Sara Jane Olson, is an identity she had stolen from a baby who'd died. In February of 1974 she and her buddies in the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped W.R. Hearst's granddaughter Patty to hold for ransom. In the course of a bank robbery in 1975 Kathleen kicked a pregnant teller in the abdomen, causing her to miscarry. She also contributed to the death of Myrna Ospahl, depriving her four children of a mother. Kathleen wasn't sorry about it, either; far from it. She said Ospahl deserved to die for being a "bourgeois pig."

She went what the fashionable call 'underground' for twenty-three years, married a doctor, had three daughters, a five-bedroom house in the classy part of St. Paul, traveled the world, expressed herself through community activism and community theatre, and generally lead the life she stole off Myrna. And when she finally got picked up the neighbors had a fit. Why, she was one of them, and that was decades ago, and look at all the good works she's done since, and how can they take a mother away from her children who need her?

So they let her out a little early thinking that no one would notice. D'oh. After five days of her hanging around L.A. they pick her up again to serve out the rest of her time. Imagine how awful that must be for her. I hope they do Mrs. Doctor from St. Paul like that every month or two, myself. Bourgeois pig.