dictionary

Hearst: 'Totally prepared' to testify in SLA trial

Hearst: "This has to happen. You just can't let people go because they stayed hidden for 25 or 27 or 37, whatever years."

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Patty Hearst said Tuesday she is "totally prepared" to testify against five former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army charged last week with the murder of an innocent bystander during a 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael, California.

"I feel that now there can be closure in this case," Hearst said in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live."

"There is a feeling of relief. Something is finally happening where these people are going to at least stand trial for their acts."

"I'm not looking forward to a trial. There's nothing to look forward to. This is a very, very unhappy situation all the way around. It's the result of a hideous crime," said Hearst, who was kidnapped by the SLA in 1974 and later went to prison for helping her captors rob a San Francisco bank.

Five former members of the SLA, a self-styled leftist group that espoused violent revolution, were charged with the slaying of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing money for her church at the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb, when it was robbed on April 21, 1975.

Hearst, who was driving the getaway car, is expected to be the star witness in the trial. She was given immunity for the crime in return for grand jury testimony in 1990. She also wrote about the heist in a 1981 book.

Hearst said she was frustrated through the years that authorities did not seem interested in pursuing charges against SLA members in Opsahl's slaying.

MORE STORIES • SLA fugitive arraigned on murder charge  • FBI steps up its search for last remaining SLA fugitive      LEGAL RESOURCES Latest Legal News Law Library FindLaw Consumer Center Select a topic Bankruptcy Discrimination Divorce Estate Planning Landlord-Tenant Personal Injury Taxes

"To me, as I was trying to tell the government what had happened, it just didn't seem to matter," she said. "I just never felt before this and these charges that there was any seriousness about bringing the murderers of Mrs. Opsahl to justice."

Among the five people charged in the Opsahl murder is Sara Jane Olson, who spent more than two decades on the run from charges related to her past with the SLA. She was living as a housewife in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota when she was captured in 2000.

Olson was sentenced last week to 20 years to life after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the attempted bombing of two Los Angeles police cars.

On Tuesday, Olson, smiling and wearing a pale blue jail jumpsuit, made a brief appearance in a Sacramento courtroom on the murder charges. A public defender was appointed to represent her, and a bail hearing was set for February 1.

Olson, who was born Kathleen Soliah before changing her name while a fugitive, has insisted that she had only peripheral association with SLA members. Hearst said Olson's involvement with the radical group went much deeper.

"She's a very forceful personality, a very determined person. This is a woman who was able to drag her brother and her sister and as many friends as she could into the SLA with her," Hearst said. "There are people who look for trouble, and trouble is very easy to find when you go looking for it."

Hearst's kidnapping by the SLA from her Berkeley apartment in 1974 touched off one of the most sensational criminal cases of the 1970s.

She later joined her SLA captors in a series of armed robberies and was eventually captured, convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Throughout her trial, Hearst maintained she had been brainwashed into participating. She spent less than two years in prison before President Carter commuted her sentence; President Clinton later pardoned her.

In addition to Olson, the others charged in the Opsahl murder include Bill Harris and his former wife, Emily Harris, who pleaded guilty to kidnapping Hearst in 1978 and were released from prison in 1983; Michael Bortin, who is married to Olson's sister; and James Kilgore.

The Harrises and Bortin were arrested last week; Kilgore remains on the run. Bortin, who lives in Oregon and was arrested there, vowed to fight extradition to California. The Harrises were being held in a Sacramento jail.

Two other people who have admitted participating in the robbery, Steven Soliah and Wendy Yoshimura, were given immunity after their grand jury testimony. Soliah is Olson's brother.

In her interview with CNN, Hearst would not discuss what happened during the robbery. "I want to wait until I'm in court." She was in a car outside the bank and did not witness the heist itself, she said.

In her 1981 book, Hearst identified Emily Harris as the person who shot Opsahl and quoted Harris as saying Opsahl, the wife of a doctor, "was a bourgeois pig anyway."

"It was a very strange group of people bound by the SLA codes of war, and they followed them very religiously," Hearst told CNN. "It really was their own little jihad."