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Seventies radical Olson to go free
Ed Harris17 Mar 2009
A SEVENTIES radical who assumed a new identity as a housewife and spent a quarter of a century as a fugitive was due to be released from prison today.
Sara Jane Olson, 62, has served seven years - half her sentence - after admitting placing pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars and taking part in the robbery of a Sacramento bank in 1975, in which a mother of four was shot dead. She was released by mistake a year ago after California prison officials miscalculated her parole date, joining her family for five days before she was re-arrested. Authorities now say she has served the proper seven-year sentence. If she is allowed to return to her Minnesota home, Olson will resume the middle-class lifestyle she once denounced as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army in California. The group was a band of young people best-known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
Fugitive Olson was arrested in 1999 while driving a minivan after she was profiled on TV show America's Most Wanted. She left her radical past behind when she settled in Minnesota, volunteering for social work and acting in community theatre while raising three daughters. One of her lawyers, David Nickerson, said she was now likely to check in with her parole agent in Los Angeles County.
She will then be allowed to fly home with her husband, Dr Gerald Peterson, to St Paul, unless officials want Olson to serve her parole in California. Critics say she should finish it where her crimes were committed. Olson was due to be freed from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, about 150 miles south-east of San Francisco.
