That was 27 years ago, the morning of April 21, 1975. Myrna Opsahl, 42, had arrived at the Crocker National Bank in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael to deposit that weekend's collection from her Seventh-day Adventist Church. Four robbers in ski masks entered and ordered everyone to the floor. When Myrna didn't move fast enough, say prosecutors, a female robber fired a single shot from a 12-gauge shotgun. The gang fled with more than $15,000, leaving Myrna to bleed to death.
Opsahl, 41, now a physician and father of three, had felt sure for years that his mother had been killed by the Symbionese Liberation Army—the cultlike terrorist group notorious for the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. In Every Secret Thing, Hearst's 1982 memoir of her 19 months on the run with the terrorists, she wrote that four SLA members took part in the heist while she sat outside behind the wheel of one of two getaway cars. But police say they never had enough evidence to successfully prosecute the alleged killers—until recently. On Jan. 16, William Harris, 57, his former wife Emily, 55, Michael Bortin, 53, and Sara Jane Olson, 55—all reportedly former SLA members—were arrested and charged with murder. (A fifth suspect, James Kilgore, remains at large.)
"It was hard to believe all this was happening after so long—it's about time," says Opsahl, who never stopped pushing to have the case reopened—and never forgot the last morning he spent with his mother. Opsahl, a top student at private Sacramento Union Academy, was upset with her. He complained to Myrna, a nurse turned homemaker, that he couldn't find a working pen in the house. "It was very unusual to be upset with my mom," he says, "because she kept such a nice, orderly house." Myrna promised she would buy some pens on her way home. "She said yes to whatever anyone asked of her," Opsahl recalls. Indeed, when another church volunteer was too busy to make the bank deposit that day, his mom volunteered.
According to the Hearst book, Emily Harris fired the shotgun accidentally while using it to prod Myrna, who was carrying a heavy adding machine, to the floor. Hearst also recorded what she says was Harris's chilling dismissal of the killing: "It really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway." Those words disturbed Opsahl for years: "That my mother's life didn't matter haunted me."
In fact, of all the Opsahl family members, Jon, who was particularly close to his mother, took her death the hardest. (His older siblings were soon out of the house, and he says his younger brother was more independent at the time.) At first Jon simply could not accept she was dead. "When I came home, I would call out, 'Mom,' just to see if there was a response," he says. "When I would see a station wagon like hers, I'd look to see if she was behind the wheel." His father, he would later learn, cried himself to sleep each night for a year. Trygve, a surgeon who worked at the hospital where Myrna died, remarried and divorced before marrying his current wife in 1999.
Rather than give in to their grief, Opsahl and his siblings excelled. He went to La Sierra University at Riverside, Calif., attended Loma Linda University School of Medicine and is now a doctor of preventive medicine at Loma Linda University Medical Center. While an undergrad, he met and later married Teresa Sanchez, a business consultant, now 40. They share a spacious four-bedroom home in Riverside with their three children, Lauren, 14, Falon, 6, and Jonathan, 3. Opsahl spends as much time as he can with his kids; in his home there is a strictly enforced family rule, directly related to his own last conversation with his mother: No one can leave the house without saying "I love you." While the children have certainly brought Opsahl great happiness, the loss of his mother "became harder as he became a parent," says Teresa. "He saw the joy that kids bring to life. His mother had these wonderful children, but she never got to see what good parents they got to be. She never got to enjoy her grandchildren."
Over the years, Teresa encouraged her husband to pursue justice for his mother's killers. The only case resulting from the robbery had come to trial in 1976. But reported SLA member Steven Soliah, the sole defendant, was acquitted partly on the basis of testimony that later was alleged to be false, prosecutors say. The Harrises spent eight years in prison for the kidnapping of Hearst but were never tried for the bank job.
Opsahl got a break in his quest to reopen his mother's case in 1999, when the FBI arrested Soliah's sister Kathleen—now known as Sara Jane Olson, she had gone underground and was living as a middle-class mother of three in St. Paul—on charges of attempting to bomb two police cars in Los Angeles in 1975. Spurred by renewed publicity about the SLA, Opsahl retooled a Web site he had started in November 2000, enumerating new evidence and encouraging the public to pressure the Sacramento district attorney to reexamine his mother's murder. In March 2000, officials working on the Olson prosecution showed Opsahl new ballistics and fingerprint evidence they told him could help revive the investigation. "He was stunned," says L.A. deputy D.A. Michael Latin. "He turned the shock into something very positive."
Last October Olson pleaded guilty (a plea she is now contesting in state appellate courts, saying she was coerced by her lawyer). Once her case appeared to be over, Opsahl made public on his Web site what he had learned: Using new technology, prosecutors say they matched the buckshot that had killed Myrna Opsahl with ammunition found in an SLA safe house in San Francisco. They also say Olson's palm print matches a set of fingerprints found in a Sacramento garage where the robbers had allegedly stored one of the getaway cars from the robbery.
On the afternoon of Jan. 15, Sacramento County sheriff Lou Blanas called Opsahl to report that he was about to order the arrest of four suspects. "It didn't sink in right away," says Opsahl. Three days later Olson was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the L.A. bombing attempt. "That she deprived my mother of the life that she herself assumed was a real irony that I found disturbing," says Opsahl.
Now Olson and the other suspects, who all deny involvement in the robbery and shooting, face possible life prison terms for the crime that so drastically altered life for Opsahl and his siblings—Carl, 46, a Navy dentist in Washington, D.C.; Sonja, 44, a pediatrician in Elko, Nev.; and Roy, 39, an anesthesiologist in Sonora, Calif. He is certain that his mother would be happy that justice may finally be served. But, adds Opsahl, "she would be even more pleased that we went on with our lives as a stable, loving family and as productive members of the community."
Thomas Fields-Meyer
Ajay Singh in Riverside
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