D.A. Cooley Fires Up an Ice-Cold Case

So why now?

Why is it that in 2002, 27 years after a murder and bank robbery near Sacramento, authorities have finally decided to prosecute former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army?

Here’s why:

About a year and a half ago, Riverside doctor Jon Opsahl began getting calls from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Investigators told him that while trying to make a case against Sara Jane Olson for trying to blow up police cars in Los Angeles, they had made two startling discoveries while nosing through ice-cold evidence files in Sacramento and elsewhere.

First, that an even stronger case could be made against Olson and the SLA for allegedly murdering Opsahl’s mother during the 1975 bank robbery in Carmichael. (New forensic techniques had helped nail down a link between lead pellets and a shotgun found in an SLA hide-out.)

And second, that Sacramento authorities didn’t seem interested in getting off their duffs and rounding up the killers.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office “told me the better case was in Sacramento,” Opsahl remembers. “Evidence was being ignored, justice was being denied, and it wasn’t right.”

Opsahl says he wasn’t exactly pushed by L.A. County D.A. Steve Cooley and his investigators, but their message was clear. If Opsahl raised a stink in Sacramento, the D.A.’s office there might be embarrassed into doing its job.

“They knew I’d be upset and make some noise about seeing justice served,” says Opsahl, who was 15 when his mother was killed by a shotgun blast while making a bank deposit for her church group.

Opsahl willingly turned up the heat, assembling a raft of evidence on a Web site in his mother’s name, granting interviews, and grilling the Sacramento D.A.’s office for falling down on the job.

“If the Sacramento D.A. didn’t do anything,” Opsahl says, “it sounded like Cooley was going to stick his neck out and try to file from outside the jurisdiction where the crime took place.”

That doesn’t happen much, and it might have been more of a threat than a promise. But there is legal precedent.

Cooley was unavailable Thursday, at least on this subject. But one law enforcement source said Opsahl’s version of events is on the money.

I don’t know to what extent, if any, I might be giving Cooley more credit than he deserves. But clearly, his gang did some nifty work in this case, and he’s keeping his head down now because relations with Sacto D.A. Jan Scully are colder than Truckee in January.

“We’re very pleased they’re prosecuting the case and wish them well,” is all Cooley flack Sandi Gibbons would say.

Scully’s office, on the other hand, has nothing to say. I left a half-dozen messages up there a month ago, asking whether they might reopen the Carmichael bank robbery case, but they didn’t return a single one. “No comment,” was all they had to say when I called on Thursday.

I suppose I can understand the policy. If, as it appears, another agency is showing Sacramento prosecutors how to do a job on their own turf, now is not the time to come out of the hole they’ve been hibernating in.

And speaking of doing their work for them, Olson’s guilty plea in Los Angeles, and today’s scheduled sentencing, is a jackpot for Sacramento. It has to be more than coincidence that when Olson pleaded guilty here, Sacramento prosecutors finally found their courage.

“Once the jury finds out she conspired to blow up police cars in L.A., she’s toast,” says former Los Angeles prosecutor Mark Werksman. And given Olson’s admissions about funding SLA activities, the whole crew could go down with her.

Defense attorneys will fight to the death to make Olson’s attempted car-bombing admission inadmissible in the murder trial. But how can they possibly succeed, given the web this gang has weaved?

You can be sure prosecutors will argue that the gang knocked off the bank to finance a field trip to Los Angeles for the sake of blowing cop cars to smithereens. And should the jury doubt such a scenario, prosecutors will point to Sara Jane.

“It would be devastating,” says Werksman.

Olson, despite claims of innocence in the bank robbery, has to see it coming.

Can she save herself?

Let’s put it this way: She won’t be on stage in the fall lineup of her community theater group in St. Paul, Minn. She’s already looking at a minimum of five years behind bars for the attempted car bombing.

But she can try to put a positive spin on the fact that she pleaded guilty in the attempted car bombing. Then she can rat out her friends, including alleged shooter Emily Harris, in return for concurrent sentences and a lesser charge than first-degree murder.

Regardless of whether Olson tries to negotiate, Werksman says a 27-year delay between the crime and the trial will work to the advantage of prosecutors.

“They’ve got all the cards in their hands, and the defense has to play catch-up,” he says. Then there’s the possibility that at the last possible minute, a prosecutor will miraculously discover a devastating piece of evidence in a dusty file.

Jon Opsahl doesn’t dwell on the details just yet. He appreciates Cooley’s efforts, and he supports the Sacramento D.A.’s prosecution, even if the latter was slow on the take.

Just so long as the job gets done.

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com