Word: soliah
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...Kathleen Ann Soliah was born in Fargo, N.D., on Jan. 16, 1947 to a close-knit, conservative Lutheran family. In high school, she was a popular student, an active member of the Spanish and Pep Clubs and a powder puff football player. She also served as a volunteer on Richard Nixon's presidential campaign...
...politics began to shift during her time at the University of California-Santa Barbara and radicalized further following her graduation. After moving to Berkeley in 1972, Soliah befriended Angela Atwood, an aspiring actress who introduced her to members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the domestic terrorist sect best known for kidnapping media heiress Patty Hearst...
...weeks after Atwood was killed during an SLA shootout with Los Angeles police in May 1974, Soliah used the pulpit at a Berkeley rally to issue an impassioned speech in which dubbed policemen "pigs," preached solidarity with the SLA and urged the group to "keep fighting." She joined the cause in earnest in 1975. A quarter-century later, she copped to involvement in two crimes committed that year: a bank robbery near Sacramento in which a customer, Myrna Opsahl, was fatally shot; and the planting of two pipe bombs beneath police cars. (They failed to detonate and were successfully defused...
...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...
...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 while driving her minivan...