Original subtitles

She commutes 20 miles to court each trial day

and remains a puzzle to the last.

She tells the jury of the horrors of kidnapping,

of being terrified, brainwashed. Her lawyer says, by the sla

is that the truth, or is she lying?

It sent shock waves around the world,

and the repercussions are certain to be felt

for years to come.

When the children started talking about robes and candles,

you could see that it had to be satanic.

We are continuing to examine evidence

following up on a substantial... -Wanted by the FBI

as a criminal instead of a victim.

The shocker. It was stunning.

I have seen ambulances.

I cannot tell you if there have been any injuries.

It's an evil act of terror.

I was 15 years old.

My dad was a surgeon

and my mom was trained and worked as a nurse,

but was a homemaker.

We attended Carmichael seventh-day adventist church.

My mom was actually a volunteer clerk for the church.

That day, my mom had been called from the church,

saying that one of the other volunteers that was scheduled

to do the bank deposit wasn't able to make it,

so if my mom would fill in for her, that'd be great.

She went to the church, met two other volunteers there

to prepare the deposit, and made their way to

Crocker national bank in Carmichael.

I was about 19, and I was a loan officer assistant.

I was extremely conservative.

You know, I liked The Beach Boys,

I liked The Carpenters.

I didn't have aspirations to do much more

than be a secretary assistant and just live my life

and have the white picket fence and have my kids.

I was standing at the back counter,

fairly close to the back door.

They opened the door for Mrs. Opsahl.

She came in.

I knew her as a customer.

I just remember her as a very quiet, nice, older lady.

And then a woman came through the back door

and several other people in black ski masks

with military jackets on, with a 12-Gauge shotgun.

The woman wielded the shotgun around,

and it went off...

...and shot Mrs. Opsahl.

She was about five feet from me.

And then the violence started,

so I dropped, and I laid there with my eyes shut.

They literally were saying,

"we're going to blow your mother heads off.

You need to get down,

or we're going to kill you all right now."

They were clicking shotguns on the back of your head,

to make it sound like you were gonna get your head blown off.

And then they were gone, and they told us

to keep our heads down and count to 60.

Mrs. Opsahl was moaning on the ground next to us.

We went to the kitchen and got a bunch of towels

to try to stop the bleeding.

A 12-Gauge shotgun at fairly close range...

Will take out most of the person.

When we got the towels to put on the wounds,

they just went through her.

We were the first bank in the state of California

that someone was actually murdered at.

They didn't even have cameras in the bank.

They didn't have guards in the bank,

so they got away with it.

No, now we have no identification of anybody.

We do not have a suspect at this time.

We're receiving a lot of information

that's being sorted through,

but as of this moment, we have no suspects.

The only people robbing banks in those days

was automatic weapons were the sla

the sla was formed by a group of people who were very upset

about the way the government in the country was being run.

They wanted to start a revolution.

We thought that it might have been the sla,

but again, because we were so remote,

we thought, "there's no way that this terrorist group

is going to come all the way to Carmichael."

The sla came from white people

who wanted to help people in prison.

They were an odd mix of people, but very typical of the left.

It was post-Vietnam,

so a lot of people my age were pretty despondent

because the revolution had not come.

You know, we expected to change the world in 1968,

and it didn't happen.

We were very despondent with the country.

There were people who believed in armed struggle.

Every other day, it seemed like bombs were being set off.

It was a crazy, crazy time.

The sla became totally isolated and only heard

their own rhetoric, and that's a deadly, deadly combination.

The father of 19-year-old Patricia Hearst said today

that he hopes that his daughter still is alive.

19-year-old Patricia Hearst lived in this apartment.

Police say about 9:00 last night,

a young woman knocked on her door

saying her car had been in an accident.

When she opened the door, two armed men burst in.

Well, I heard a scream, and then I heard

what were gunshots.

Well, I heard her pleading, "please, no. Not me."

We had visited Hearst castle not too long before then,

and we learned about the publishing empire

that Patty Hearst's grandfather had built.

I understood that the person kidnapped was

the granddaughter of the builder of that empire.

I couldn't imagine something so bizarre

happening so suddenly,

and what would I do in that situation?

It wasn't until Thursday that communique was received

from the symbionese liberation army.

It said they are holding Ms. Hearst a prisoner of war.

The letter said Ms. Hearst was unharmed,

but would be killed if authorities tried to rescue her.

The media's response was the most sensational response

we've ever seen, I think, at least in the bay area.

Everything they did was major, major news all the time,

and I've never seen a media response to anything like that.

And the sla, at least,

knew that they were getting media attention

and had the floor with these communiques

that would be played to the country.

Finally, the sla demands arrived,

and along with them, a document

containing the symbionese liberation program.

It's a declaration of revolutionary war

that states their agenda to fight and die

to win the freedom of oppressed poor people.

It rallies them to unite as a fighting force

that will destroy the capitalist state and all it stands for.

The manifesto says they will help women

find new and better roles and live as free people.

The prison system should be destroyed

and the prisoners welcomed home with love.

The sla also calls for all state lands and buildings

of the capitalist class to be returned to the people

and for the rent system to end.

In a letter to Randolph Hearst, the symbionese liberation army

said it would hold his daughter until he provided

each of the nearly two million poor people in California

with $70 worth of free food.

The letter was accompanied by

a tape recording from Patricia Hearst.

We love you, Patty, and we're all praying for you.

I'm sorry I'm crying, but I'm happy you're safe.

Mr. Hearst said he took the recording as proof

that his daughter is alive,

and he said he would try to meet the demands.

It was good to feed people

and have the Hearst family do that,

but again, the way it was done, by kidnapping his daughter,

was kind of not good, obviously.

She clearly moved towards the group

as the communiques progressed.

8th grade history class, we would have a current events,

and over that course of the year, I just gravitated towards

the story of Patty Hearst and the sla

when I first was reporting on the story, I sympathized,

and then the sympathy quickly turned to anger

and just bewilderment -- like, how could someone make

that kind of change in their world view?

I had no idea that I was going to

soon become part of that story, tragically.

I think even the left that didn't support the sla

thought it was a triumph,

because the Hearsts represented the essence of capitalism

and then many of the things we thought

that were wrong in the world,

and the fact that one of their own could change sides --

there was a sense of romanticism in this,

of her joining her captors.

Looking now, I think that's ludicrous,

but I think many of us, including me,

felt it was a good thing that she joined.

I'd say she was a member of the sla, in my opinion.

Voluntarily? No.

I think they turned her into somebody else by torturing her.

We were pretty sure that she had Stockholm syndrome,

where a victim identifies

with the perpetrators of the kidnapping.

Hibernia bank robbery. That was a publicity stunt.

It was a big deal, in the sense that

Patty was put front and center with a submachine gun

as their poster girl for the revolution.

You absolutely saw the hand ready to pull the trigger?

I would say the stance would say that she did

have her hands on the trigger

and ready to shoot anything you got in her way.

Eyewitnesses say the girl identified as Patricia Hearst

stood right about here, with her gun pointed so,

her right hand either

near the trigger of the gun or in her pocket,

and they say her gun was aimed at

between five and eight bank employees and customers,

who were ordered face down on the floor of the bank

behind these counters.

When Patricia Hearst got kidnapped,

I felt like that was a horrible thing,

so I didn't understand why Patty Hearst

was in that bank holding a weapon

and pointing it at people and threatening them.

It angered me, because it was such a terrible thing,

and yet here she was, doing that.

They escaped. The FBI was looking for them.

The FBI and the LAPD figured out

through this parking ticket where the sla was in L.A.

And people in the neighborhood,

the African-American, poor neighborhood,

told the police that there was this group

of weird white people there.

Everything happened in a frantic two hours

just before sundown last night.

500 policemen and FBI agents.

It was a massive operation.

And then the shooting began.

We need all the ammo that we've got in the safe.

We're taking automatic fire

front and back from this location.

They're much better-armed than we are.

These people had a veritable arsenal inside that home.

That was probably the most rounds

fired in a firefight

in the United States, in its history.

Seven barrages of tear gas, and still no surrender.

Then the house burst into flames,

perhaps from a tear gas grenade.

It was no effort to put out the fire.

The gun battle continued.

It looks like the Los Angeles police have

indeed found the hideout of the symbionese liberation army,

and there's not much left of it now.

Apparently, they haven't been able

to get any of the suspects out of the house.

I watched the shootout.

I think almost everybody I knew did.

It was surreal.

It was really sad that this was gonna be the ending of...

We didn't know who was in the house.

One white woman still has not been identified.

The big concern was,

was Patty Hearst killed in the firefight?

Tonight, may 18th, reported by Tom Brokaw.

Good evening.

Patricia Hearst was not killed in a police raid

on a symbionese liberation army

hideout in Los Angeles last night.

The fact remains that Patricia Hearst

has been missing now for 104 days,

and her whereabouts are still unknown.

Patty Hearst is now listed by the FBI as a fugitive,

armed and dangerous.

She is believed still in or around Los Angeles.

Police, for the last couple of days,

have been moving from stakeout to stakeout,

following one lead then another, trying to find her

and the few other sla members who remain.

Two of the remaining fugitive members

of the symbionese liberation army

are William Harris and his wife, Emily.

Bill Harris was a marine,

and Emily was a schoolteacher from Indiana.

Bill and Emily and Patty came back to the bay area,

hooked up to a group of people

who were the second organization of the sla.

Kathy Soliah, her brother Steven,

her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, and Michael Bortin.

The new group of people that came in had

a very clear pattern of behavior to steal from

the corporate infrastructure that they despised so much

and use that stolen money to afford weaponry,

and then to eventually build bombs and set them off

to send the messages that they wanted to set.

There was a lot of tension in the group,

from what I understand.

People wanted different things,

yet the decision was made to Rob a bank in Carmichael.

How'd this group of regular people do these horrendous acts?

How did people of my generation kidnap a girl

and murder a wonderful woman and mother in a bank?

How did that happen?

The police identified who the person was on the floor

in a pool of blood, called my dad at the hospital.

So he drove to the bank, but by that time,

my mom had already been taken away by the ambulance,

and he just saw a pool of blood

and then turned around, went back to the hospital.

And he was one of three or four doctors

that was actually working there in the E.R.,

trying to regain a blood pressure and pulse.

These were other doctors that knew my dad,

of course, very well, knew my mom --

and the others, one by one, gave up,

and didn't know how to --

you know, get my dad to realize that

she was brought in dead on arrival.

One of them intervened

and just had to pull my dad away.

Then I show up at the principal's office,

and my older sister Sonia and my younger brother Roy

was pulled in, and they were as bewildered as I was.

So we go to American river hospital

and we're escorted up into the emergency room,

and in there, you know, my dad's all red-faced and puffy-eyed.

And then my dad just kind of mutters out,

"it's mom, and she's --" and he says she's been shot.

We go, "no. What? Shot? Who would shoot mom?"

And my dad says, "she's dead."

And then, yeah,

that just shatters every neuron in your brain.

So my dad came home later that day

and turned on the news to find out,

you know, what's being reported, or have they found out anything?

Who were the bank robbers? Had they caught them?

But they just reported a woman in the bank was shot and killed,

and then the news anchor saying that she was taken

to the hospital where her husband worked,

and then they said, "but his efforts to save her failed."

And I remember taking that wording of the report like,

"what, are you trying to blame my dad for my mom's death?"

The sla worked on these things constantly.

It was their entire life's mission.

It's not like they haphazardly showed up at a bank

and ran in to steal money.

These things were extremely well-planned,

and so was the escape route, and that's why they got away.

It's an Avenue, an extensive Avenue of investigation

that we have to consider.

But this is not to imply that it's the sla, no --

but we have to consider that it might be

a group type of activity.

Because it was a bank,

the FBI took over the investigation.

They took prints from inside the bank.

They took witness statements.

Sacramento sheriff's department was responsible

for investigating the murder of Mrs. Opsahl.

They collected her dress.

They did forensics on the bullets,

but I don't think they could get specific

into batches or trace metal analysis of the actual pellets.

Back in the days when this happened,

there was no DNA evidence.

My dad went through a long period of grief.

He essentially cried himself to sleep every night for a year.

I mean, the rest of us just were encouraged to get on with life

and trust that the justice system would do its job.

So, with Patty Hearst now officially wanted

by both the FBI and Los Angeles county

as a criminal instead of a victim,

southern California's largest manhunt continues.

The FBI is definitely looking for them

in every post office across the United States.

The pictures of Bill and Emily Harris

are there, along with the pictures of Patty Hearst.

I remember thinking, "jeez, why can't you get them?"

There was an sla wanted poster for all of them,

so I made about a dozen of those posters

and would take it out and practice shooting my pistol

and then skeet shoot, and it helped me get through it,

because I did have frustration about it,

and I'll admit it, I was angry.

As a result of that bank robbery, the sla got money.

That money allowed them to buy bomb supplies.

Very shortly afterwards was they came down to Los Angeles

and built these bombs to murder police officers.

The two bombs in Los Angeles were both discovered

before they were triggered.

If the officers had gotten in the cars and driven

and the bombs were detonated,

many people would have been killed.

The running is over for Patricia Hearst.

Who's in the hands of federal authorities tonight

in San Francisco, California.

On her way to jail in a t-shirt and reddish shag haircut.

She smiled for photographers and appeared at ease.

Mrs. Hearst, you must be greatly relieved.

Yes, all our prayers are answered.

We can hardly believe it.

Held on half a million dollars bail.

$500,000 bail.

Accused of bank robbery, unlawful possession of weapons,

and those are only federal charges.

Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Hearst visited Patty in her jail cell,

and then said, "she was happy. She really wants to come home."

Asked if he would put up the money to free her,

Mr. Hearst said, "I think so."

I do remember being relieved that,

"good. Maybe this crazy saga is gonna be over" --

that the truth would come out, that we'd learn the facts,

get the evidence, and hold the people responsible

in a court of law, and we'd have justice.

She commutes 20 miles to court each trial day,

and remains a puzzle to the last.

She tells the jury of the horrors of kidnapping,

of being terrified, brainwashed, her lawyer says, by the sla.

Is that the truth, or is she lying?

Judge Orrick admonished the 22-year-old,

"Ms. Hearst, the nature of your conduct cannot be condoned.

You are committed to seven years."

She should have won that trial, for the hibernia bank robbery.

I felt that she deserved to be acquitted.

At the time of the bank robbery, she was innocent.

It's really hard to describe her in any way other than a victim.

I mean, at some point she joined,

overtly involved herself in acts --

that doesn't make her responsible.

I mean, she never asked to be kidnapped,

and being kept in a closet 50 days can make you change.

There are techniques that are used to brainwash people

and to turn them to your side, and the sla

had people aboveground that knew those techniques

and got training from them. I know that.

There's no way that she wanted to go underground with the sla

for the hibernia bank robbery.

Patty Hearst did more time than any of her kidnapers,

which is a crazy fact, and just tells you

of how topsy-turvy the entire saga of the sla was.

It still baffles me today,

but I think a lot of it had to do with public opinion.

She was just a spoiled, rich kid that turned her nose up

at everybody that was worried about her for all that time.

The hibernia bank robbery --

I was angry that she didn't get more than a couple years.

I was very, very frustrated about it.

When Patricia was in custody

and while she's going through the hibernia bank robbery trial,

she is being interviewed by agents from the FBI

about Crocker, and Patricia Hearst told them factually

the information about who pulled the trigger,

who was a participant in the Crocker national bank robbery.

It didn't benefit us,

because the investigators didn't trust her.

The FBI was so set against ever believing

anything that Patty Hearst said,

because they were prosecuting her

and discrediting her on the stand.

Murder is a separate crime.

They didn't have the information to charge the murders.

All they had was the uncorroborated word

of a co-defendant, what Patricia Hearst told them.

I remember asking my dad the questions like,

"how is bank robbery more important than murder?

Why wouldn't they charge him with murder?"

And my dad just explained that

these are federal bank robbery charges,

and they don't have jurisdiction to try people for murder.

That's a state jurisdiction,

and that our local district attorney just

wasn't ready to file charges of murder on any of them yet.

I was very hopeful that the truth would come out,

that we'd hold the people responsible in a court of law,

and we'd have justice for my mom's murder.

When I testified at Steven's trial,

I did not think I would get justice,

that was the whole frustration for me,

because nobody believed me but the defense,

and they were only using me.

The police did come right away and interview us.

I was adamant to describe to them

that it was a woman that did the shooting,

and they said, you know, "how could you possibly know?"

I knew it was a woman that did it,

but I didn't know who the woman was.

I was subpoenaed by the defense,

then had to go to court to testify for Steven,

and then there were three other tellers

that were brought to contradict me by the prosecution.

The Steven Soliah trial was a debacle.

They tried to prove that Steven Soliah

was one of the people inside the bank.

He wasn't, and Patty Hearst had told the FBI that

when they interviewed her.

They chose not to believe her.

When the sla was coming into the bank,

there was an individual that was right there

at the same place that the perpetrators were,

and that person, by coincidence,

was the spitting image of Steven Soliah.

So the case was prosecuted,

and who does the defense call as their first witness?

They call that guy.

Steven Soliah was acquitted today of helping

the symbionese liberation army Rob a Sacramento bank.

So the case was lost.

It was lost because they tried to make Patty Hearst out

to be a liar, and she wasn't,

so they proceeded with a theory which

they had information was not true.

It was simply bungled.

We were driving in the car when some news came up.

I remember my dad turning up the radio and saying,

"this is the verdict that they're going to announce,"

that maybe justice in some way could be done now,

and then it just said that Steven Soliah is acquitted

of the bank robbery at the Carmichael national bank

in which a woman was killed.

And my dad's just shaking his head,

and I remember having to ask my dad,

"what does acquitted mean?"

He just said, "it means they got away with murder."

If Steven had been convicted, then the Sacramento D.A.

Would have figured that proves the sla committed the murder,

and then they would have gone ahead and prosecuted

all the other sla members for the murder.

But when Steven Soliah was not convicted,

I think the Sacramento D.A. Wanted no part of it.

This office has completed its investigation

of the bank robbery and murder which occurred

at the Crocker bank located in Carmichael.

We are satisfied at this time that there is

insufficient evidence to prove the identity of the person

who actually fired the shotgun that killed Mrs. Opsahl.

Opsahl: It's like my mom's life didn't matter.

It was so frustrating and so sad,

because you felt like there was no --

nobody paid for what they did.

When someone is killed in a bank robbery or any violence,

what some people don't really realize, maybe,

is that there's many other victims.

It's not just the person that got killed.

God forbid, that family is destroyed,

but there's a lot of other people

that'll never be the same, and some people don't recover.

They put it to bed. Myrna was a victim of the sla.

She was a victim of politics, and unfortunately,

she was a victim of some very bad decision -making.

So the years passed, you know, one after another.

Finished high school and went on to college and medical school

and, you know, life just went on.

I got married, had three kids.

I thought, eventually they'll be caught

and be punished for what they did, but that never happened --

not for a long time.

President Carter commuted Patty Hearst's sentence,

then Patty Hearst's book came out.

It was tough to get through, but we learned who did it.

She identified Emily Harris as the person

that pulled the trigger that caused my mom's death.

When they got back to the safe house

and several of them voiced objection to Emily Harris

saying, you know, "why did you fire your gun?"

...she tried to blame it, I think, on a hair trigger.

She didn't mean to, but it doesn't matter --

"she was a bourgeois pig and her life doesn't matter."

Saying that a woman like Mrs. Opsahl

was collateral damage is insanity, and it's not true.

So I think, at that point, it was really --

it was looked at by everybody I knew

as a really cowardly, horrendous act.

All of a sudden, because Patty Hearst said so,

I was credible, and that irritated me, too, really.

I was thankful and grateful to Patty Hearst,

that she was courageous enough to explain what happened.

I thought, "now they're gonna be punished for their crimes."

The district attorney didn't seem to want to hold

the sla members responsible, and when we even asked,

they said, "well, we know who did it,

but we just can't prove it in court."

And so it was like their hands were tied.

They couldn't do anything about it.

Why aren't they being punished?

Why isn't somebody doing something?

It was 1999, and I was assigned to the major crimes division,

and the head of the unit had this very thin file

and dropped it on my desk and said,

"this is gonna be your case."

And I looked at it, and I saw "Kathleen Soliah."

It was related to two attempted bombings

in Los Angeles in 1974.

I got the case because I was a rookie.

I was the only one polite enough not to say,

"hell, no, I'm not gonna take that case."

I did nothing with it, until one day my pager went off.

Kathleen Soliah had been arrested in Minnesota.

A woman who was on the run from police for nearly 25 years

is being held on one million dollars bond.

Tonight, the FBI caught up with longtime

symbionese liberation army fugitive Kathleen Soliah.

Following an airing of "america's most wanted,"

they ran a special on some of the fugitives that had escaped

when the FBI did the raids on the sla safe houses in 1975.

As a result of the airing of that show,

somebody told police where she was.

Kathleen Soliah was living in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She lived here with her husband, an emergency room doctor,

and three teenage daughters.

She now goes by the name "Sarah Olsen."

She was a middle-aged soccer mom.

She had been a fugitive for approximately 25 years.

Soliah is alleged to have committed

bombings and bank robberies

with other members of the symbionese liberation army.

In reviewing the case, I saw that there truly

was plenty of evidence, an abundance of evidence

from the very beginning

that tied the sla to the Carmichael bank robbery --

fingerprints at the safe houses they had rented in Sacramento.

Stephen Soliah and James Kilgore stole license plates

and switched them on to the getaway cars.

Those license plates were recovered.

Their fingerprints were found on book.

Most significantly, when banks are robbed,

there are certain bills

that have prerecorded serial numbers on them.

The money that was stolen in the bank robbery

was kept in one of the sla safe houses,

in a freezer, wrapped in tin foil.

The bait bill from that bank robbery

was found in the precita street address

when the FBI made the raid on that location.

I realized the FBI have techniques available

that they didn't have back in those days.

We had them compare pellets

that were removed from Mrs. Opsahl body

to pellets that were stored

in the precita street and morse street closets,

and they were a complete match.

Every single thing that Patricia Hearst

says in that book checks out.

There was just a mountain of evidence.

There was no doubt that this robbery

was committed by the sla.

It was almost laughable that they hadn't been prosecuted.

We wanted word to get out

that there was this horrible injustice,

so we reached out to Jon opsahl,

and we showed him the evidence that we had put together,

and I remember Jon shedding a tear.

I was just -- shocked.

Now we learned there was evidence

to corroborate Patty Hearst's story,

and justice could have been done a long time ago,

which was disappointing to learn --

that somebody dropped the ball.

Her death really didn't matter to anybody there in Sacramento?

We were determined to do whatever it took

to make sure that she got justice.

Jon Opsahl became a voice for his mother.

It became his life's mission

to put public pressure on the Sacramento D.A.

To make sure that they prosecuted the case.

We put together a little campaign

called "justice for Myrna Opsahl."

There's a tremendous amount of compelling evidence

supporting Patricia Hearst's accounts,

and felt strongly that

they should be charged and tried as soon as possible.

Public pressure was mounting on the Sacramento D.A.

To file that murder case.

The public knew that the case was prosecutable and winnable.

The FBI went out

at the direction of the Sacramento county D.A.

And arrested all of those involved

in the Carmichael bank robbery.

I'm very happy that my mother's murder

is getting the attention that it deserves,

and I trust that justice will be served.

Mike Bortin was arrested,

along with Bill Harris, of Oakland, and Emily Harris.

Emily Harris was quoted in Patty Hearst's book

as saying that "her death doesn't matter anyways.

She was a bourgeois pig."

Those words have always kind of haunted us.

They didn't seem to have much concern over

what their actions cost.

The things of such immense value,

things that can't be replaced.

They had no idea the destruction that followed their actions

for years and years, and to this day.

Feld there they were, in two separate courtrooms in L.A. --

Sara Jane Olsen in Sacramento, California.

Bill and Emily Harris, no longer married to each other,

but now bound by their past.

And in Portland, Oregon, Michael Bortin,

all charged with the shotgun murder of Myrna Opsahl.

We were getting ready to enter pleas, and Emily said

this is really an important day for her,

because she's been living with the guilt

of what she had done all her life, since it happened,

and somehow pleading guilty

and taking responsibility could lessen that,

and it's something that she really wanted to do.

It certainly reflects her feelings,

and I think the feeling of many of the people involved,

that gets lost sometimes as we talk about the sla,

because they did such up things

and hurt people who shouldn't have been hurt,

the essence being Mrs. Opsahl.

But it wasn't that these were just

cold-hearted, ruthless people --

there were people we could have all known,

who went to colleges and went to Vietnam and came back.

And somehow, by their isolation,

they got caught up in something that took over.

And not that they're not responsible,

but they weren't these poster child for evil.

They did something terrible and it lived with them,

and it ate people like Emily up for a long time.

Emily: The rest of my life, I will continue

to feel a deep sense of remorse and sadness

for my doing in the death of Mrs. Opsahl

and the suffering that that caused her family.

My heartfelt sympathy and apologies go out to you.

Hopefully, today will bring an end to the legal proceedings

and finally bring resolution for the Opsahl family.

Finally, everybody knew that I was right

about it being a woman.

When they were sentenced, and I stood there

and looked at them all sitting in the gallery --

and the second I said my piece, I was done,

'cause now, finally, someone listened to me.

To their credit, they all took responsibility

for the murder of Myrna opsahl.

Kathleen Soliah, Bill Harris, Emily Harris,

Jim Kilgore and Michael Bortin.

They all pled guilty.

The sentences that they got were absurd.

It was the functional equivalent of what what somebody gets

for having a couple of rocks of cocaine on the street.

For nearly 28 years,

I have lived with the fact that monsters do exist,

that homegrown terrorism is real,

that the incomprehensible happened,

and that beyond our family and church,

no one else seemed to care,

including and especially the defendants.

In trying to imagine what she went through --

being shot and bleeding out.

You know, she was a nurse, I think she knew right off

that she's likely to die right there,

on that floor of the bank,

and not ever see us again,

and not be there to help us like she would have wanted to.

She was robbed of all that.

She would have wanted us to continue on with school

and get married and have kids and have that wonderful life

that she was no longer allowed to enjoy.

And so in honor of her memory,

you know, we've all tried to make that happen.