Word: opsahl
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...Opsahl's website there is a photograph of his mother Myrna. She wears a sensible bob and a dimpled smile. Her gingham blouse is buttoned all the way to the top. The grainy black-and-white image is a throwback to an earlier time. But her son's words running beside it are both clear and current: "We know who was there when she was shotgunned to death... Twenty-six years is long enough to have waited...
That wait finally ended last Wednesday, when police charged five former figures in the Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent band of '70s radicals, with the murder of Myrna Opsahl. In February 1974 the S.L.A. entered the lexicon of domestic terror with the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, who was later caught on a bank security camera toting a gun; in May of that year, the group was nearly wiped out in a fire fight with Los Angeles cops. But there were still plenty of hangers-on, like, allegedly, Sara Jane Olson, a Minnesota doctor's wife arrested...
...which has languished ever since the government tried but failed to convict one S.L.A. figure in the robbery 25 years ago. It was revived with the 1999 arrest of Olson. According to the Sacramento district attorney, the FBI has used new forensic techniques to link the lead pellets in Opsahl's abdomen to shotgun shells recovered from an S.L.A. safe house. Olson's guilty plea in the bombing plot reportedly confirmed what Hearst told the FBI decades ago--that the loot from the robbery helped finance subsequent S.L.A. crimes...
...Twilight Zone." More of the past may surface if Hearst, who served two years on a different robbery charge, is called to testify. Granted immunity years ago, Hearst described the carefully choreographed heist in her 1982 book, Every Secret Thing, writing that Emily Harris confided she had shot Opsahl, saying "it really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway...
...that second robbery, a blast from a shotgun, fired by one of the raiders, killed a customer, Myrna Lee Opsahl. If Patty was a member of the gang that hit that bank, she could be charged with murder. And agents are already convinced that she took part at least in the preparations for the raid...