In June 1999, a housewife and mother of three was pulled over by the police at a stop sign in St Paul's, Minnesota and addressed by a name she hadn't used for 25 years. Kathleen Ann Soliah had been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary group that kidnapped and supposedly converted the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Six members of the group - among them, its leader, Donald DeFreeze - died in a Los Angeles police shoot-out in May 1974, and a further three (including Hearst) were arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the wife of a suburban doctor. In December 2001, she was sentenced to five years and four months' imprisonment (later extended to 14 years) for attempting to blow up two Los Angeles police cars with a pipe bomb in 1975.

LRB 16 December 2004 | PDF Download