Word: olson
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...Soliah was linked to both crimes, but vanished before a Sept. 1975 FBI raid that netted four of her conspirators. She was indicted in absentia the following year; by then, she had resurfaced in Minnesota under the Sara Jane Olson. While working as a fraternity house cook, she met her future husband, medical student Fred Peterson. They married in 1980, bore three children, and settled in an ivy-covered stone house in St. Paul...
...During her two-plus decades in Minnesota, Olson revealed little about her past but made no attempt to alter her appearance. She threw lavish parties, became a noted social activist, and even appeared in local productions of Shakespeare. But her past lurked beneath the veneer of normalcy: during the 1990s, the FBI began to close in, and Olson began attempting to contact authorities through a San Francisco reporter to discuss terms of surrender. In 1999, after the TV show America's Most Wanted profiled Soliah on the 25th anniversary of the California bank shooting, she was pulled over by police...
...Olson - who formally changed her name in 1999 - pleaded guilty to both crimes, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempted murder in connection with the pipe bomb incident. In 2008, she was briefly released when California's parole board miscalculated her parole eligibility; Olson spent five days with her family before being returned to prison. Her impending release this week also sparked a kerfuffle, with Minnesota officials - including Governor Tim Pawlenty - petitioning California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to force Olson to serve her parole in California, the state in which she committed her crimes. Those requests were denied...
...Sara Jane Olson has become a symbol of particular kind of politics, a Rorschach test of personal feelings about the 1960s. My sense is her supporters are still very much behind her, while the people who quickly found her guilty haven't changed their minds either." Peter Erlinder, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law (Minneapolis Star-Tribune...
...fled the state, changed her name, and lived a leisurely life of lies and deception in Minnesota, while the children of Myrna Opsahl were forced to grow up without a mother." -Jeff Denham, a California state senator, in a letter to Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, that requested Olson not be permitted to return to her adopted state for parole. (AP, March...