Free Republic

"Death to the Fascist Insect" Proclaimed the Revolutionary Cohorts of the Symbionese Liberation Army as they Bravely Murdered the Humble Christian Woman, Myrna Lee Opsahl This Day Forty Years Ago.  A photographic exhibition once featured the resolute face of a late 1930s murder suspect as he was marched into a paddy wagon. I ve often searched for that image as an example of dedicated unrepentance. No more. We have the face of Emily Harris and her colleagues in domestic terrorism, waiting in court. We can see arrogant unrepentance, and yet hidden fear in the faces of Myrna's murderers.  Dr. Trygve Opsahl received news of...

James William Kilgore, the last captured member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole Sunday morning from a Northern California prison. Kilgore, 61, was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2002 after almost three decades on the run. He was one of five SLA members who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1975 death of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was killed by a shotgun blast after she arrived at a suburban Sacramento bank. Kilgore apologized to Opsahl's family at his sentencing, saying he wished he could live that day over. He served...

The release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson from prison has angered Jon Opsahl, whose mother was gunned down in a Carmichael bank by the SLA. Myrna Opsahl was shot to death in the lobby of a Carmichael bank during an April 21, 1975, SLA bank robbery. After serving six years in prison for his mother's death and for trying to bomb police cars, Olson is now free. She was released Monday from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. "She's out of prison too soon by far," Jon Opsahl said Friday. "It's another in a series...

Jon Opsahl became an unlikely hero. He never forgot his mom's brutal death at the hands of one of California's most notorious terrorist gangs, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), when he was 14 years old. His relentless perseverance in helping find his mother's killers eventually started police and prosecutors on a 28-year odyssey that ended with the rounding up of the vicious killers: the ringleaders of the SLA. Jon's mother, Myrna Opsahl, was 42 at the time of her death. She was killed during a robbery of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, near Sacramento, on April 21, 1975. Opsahl,...