Starting at Page 443 THE VOICES OF GUNS ACCOUNT OF CROCKER BANK ROBBERY
The following is an unedited OCR SCAN of the Crocker Bank Robbery from "Voices of Guns" by Vin Mclellan and Paul Avery. 1977 The book is out of print. (NEW MAY 10, 2001: [WATCH SHIPPING COSTS AND TIME FOR FOREIGN BOOKSELLERS] TO PURCHASE THE LOWEST PRICED COPY OF "VOICES OF GUNS" FIRST TRY HALF.COM THEN TRY ABEBOOKS.COM Try Barnes and Noble rare and out of print books (usually costs more) to obtain a copy. BN.com search "voices of guns"
On the night of April 12, at a large drop-in party in Oakland. A guest discovered her purse missing.--and with it, the keys to car. Outside, the car--a 1967 Firebird--was also gone. Two days later, on the fourteenth, "Janet White" parked the Firebird--"Mother's car"--in the Sacramento garage. Landlord Roller watched her padlock the door, then drive off with a young man (A different one this time, he noted) in a newly painted Chevy station wagon. He jotted down both the licence numbers of the (the car bought the day after the Guild Savings and Loan robbery by "Elliott Burton") and the Firebird, and rang up Officer Cooke. Cooke punched the license numbers into the stationwide police computer system and got an instant hit on the Firebird:
stolen . . . Oakland . . . April 12. Roller asked what he should do. Nothing, he was told; the police would handle it.
The Sacramento PD put a "loose surveillance" on the garage (passing checks by patrol units) and hoped to catch the gang when they came back to strip the car. They missed. On the evening of April 20 the Firebird was moved and parked overnight on a residential street about a mile from the branch office of the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, a suburb seven miles out of Sacramento. Early on the morning of April 21, a Monday, it was driven to a shopping-center parking lot, just behind the bank. The Carmichael Crocker branch had just recently begun to open for business at 9 A.M. (as had the Hibernia Bank shortly before the SLA holdup in San Francisco a year before). The trial of Remiro and Little was going into its fourth week at the Sacramento county courthouse.
At precisely 9 A.M. the bank doors opened. A minute later Mrs. Myrna Opsahl, forty-two, mother of four teenage sons, got out of a car and, with two women friends, walked across the bank parking lot to enter. The three women were all members of the Carmichael Seventh-Day Adventist Church and had volunteered to deposit the weekend church collections for their pastor. Mrs. Opsahl was carrying a small plug-in adding machine with both hands.
One of the women noticed four figures ducking through a large hole in the cyclone fence separating the shopping center from the bank lot. She noticed, with mild curiosity, that all four seemed to be wearing bulky, heavy coats"hunting clothing," as she described it laterand wool knit caps. Odd attire, she thought, for such a warm, though cloudy, spring day.
One of the church volunteers, the eldest of the three, held the door for Mrs. Opsahl and her other friend. The four others had walked up just behind them. The woman glanced toward them. The first of the four, Mike Bortin, said Patty, reached out and grabbed the door, holding it for her to enter. Surprised and pleased at the courtesy, she nodded, smiled and said, "Thank you," as she bustled past him and into the bank.
It was but a long instant laternow in the bankshe heard a harsh, woman's voice behind her shout out, "Everybody hit the floor. . . . Move!"
All three of the church ladies spun around, shocked, to stare at the four bandits who had followed them inside. The robbers three men and a woman, it seemedwere now masked. Each held a gun. Three were wearing' ski masks; the woman had a knit watch cap pulled low on her forehead and a green scarf covering her mouth and nose, cowboy-style.
The woman, the apparent leader, screamed at them again, adding curses and obscenities. Mrs. Opsahl jerked in a quick turn, flustered. Her friends thought she was trying to put the adding machine down on a counter. She never got the chance. The womanwho still stood by the door as the others had fanned out swung her sawed-off shotgun slightly to the right to cover Mrs. Opsahl's sudden movement, her finger tightened on the trigger, there was an explosion, and Myrna Opsahl flipped backward and fell. The full load of heavy buckshot had caught her in the stomach and left torso, ripped open her body, lifted her slightly and tossed her to the floor like a bleeding rag doll. "I saw the pellets hit her side," the elder churchwoman recalled, "and I just stood there, horrified. . . ." The sudden bloodshed left everyone paralyzed for a moment; then a man shouted, "Get your noses to the carpet!" Mechanically, the bank employees and customers lowered themselves to the floor.
Obviously according to plan, three of the robbers spread out in the lobby and took positions to cover the people on the floor while the fourtha short man with a pistol, dressed all in Navy blue vaulted the counter and began looting the cash drawers. In a husky phony-Southern drawl he demanded of a clerk, "Where are the traveler's checks?" When they were pointed out, he stuffed them, with the cash (some $15,000), into a blue cloth tote bag with a white drawstring. No one went near the fallen woman, who lay bleeding profusely. When several of the men and women facedown on the carpet lifted their heads, craning to see if Mrs. Opsahl was alive, one, perhaps two, of the bandits standing guard kicked at them and growled, "Keep down!"
The woman with the green scarf over her face kept glancing at her wristwatch, giving a countdown aloud: "One minute and thirty seconds . . . one minute and forty seconds . . . two minutes. . . ." At the three-minute count she shouted out, "Time's up . . . let's get out of here!" The four fled through the door they had enteredat least one sprightly leaping over the body of Myrna Opsahl.
Just an instant before the robbers burst from the bank, a blue Ford Mustang parked directly across the street drove off quickly. The manager of a nearby variety store had noticed the driver earlier, dressed so strangely in a bulky, heavy jacket, pacing back and forth beside the car. "He was either mumbling to himself or talking into some type of walkie-talkie," the man recalled. He also remembered, as did several other witnesses, the stolen license plates on the Mustang 916-LBJ. (It was perhaps the most recognizable set of plates in Sacramento; the local telephone area code is 916, and who could forget LBJ?)
Sheriff's cars were already on their way. A woman walking past the bank had glanced inside, seen guns and masked bandits, and dashed to the corner gas station to call the alarm.
The robbers had fled through the bank parking lot, back through the hole in the fence, leaving a trail of fifteen 9-mm bullets which spilled as they ran. From a distance, witnesses outside saw them unmask as they tumbled into the green-and-black Firebird which sped off moments later. The bank had no security cameras, and witness reports were confusing: Three men? Four men? Four men and a woman? Reasons why became more apparent a year later when the convicted Patricia Hearst finally told the FBI of her own role in the murderbank robbery and identified the seven other persons she said had been involved.
According to Patty's account, Bill Harris, with an automatic rifle, had been with Steve Soliah in the backup car, the LBJ-plated Mustang across the street, although witnesses noted only one man. The four robbers inside, said Patty, had been Michael Bortin, Jim Kilgore, Emily Harris, and Kathleen Soliah.* Emily had fired the first fatal shotgun blast by accident, said Patty. Emily and Mike Bortin both wore false mustaches, and the plan was for both Emily and Kathy Soliah to be mistaken for men. Emily's voice, despite its hoarse and harsh inflection, sounded feminine; but Kathy Soliah, consummate actress, had fooled all the witnesses.
*Bortin denied all charges.
Hearst and Wendy Yoshimura had been assigned to drive the "switch cars," said Patty. When Bill Harris and Steve Soliah abandoned their Mustang in an apartment-complex garage about two miles from the bank, Patty said Yoshimara, wearing a blond wig, picked them up in a rented Pinto. Patty was parked, in a rented VW van, by a funeral home only blocks from the bank. When the escaping Firebird, with Bortin at the wheel, passed her, she pulled out and followed in the van. A mile from the bank, the Firebird pulled over and the other four scrambled into Patty's van. One of them was shouting, "Go! Go! Go!" Patty recalled.
The VW headed for the T Street safe house in Sacramento, where they were to meet the other three. Kathy Soliah was sputtering something to the effect that a "woman teller" had been shot, said Patty, and Patty asked how it happened and who did it.
"I did," said Emily. "Let's not talk about it."
"Maybe the woman will live," Kathy said hopefully.
"No," replied Kilgore. "I looked at her."
An ambulance was then rushing Mrs. Myrna Lee Opsahl to Carmichael American River Hospital, where Dr. Trygye Opsahl, the woman's husband, worked as a staff surgeon. The emergency room frantically paged Dr. Opsahl when the woman was identified, but his wife was dead before he could reach her bedside.
All of the Symbionese had returned safely to the safe house, said Patty, but everyone was upset as they listened to the radio reports. Bortin said angrily that he should have been in charge of the assault team, recalled Patty; that Emily, who had been "operations officer" for the heist, was "nervous and incompetent." Kugore sullenly agreed; he drew a diagram for Patty and explained what the others already knew: When the shot was fired, Jim had already moved around behind the customers, into Emily's line of fire. "If it hadn't been for good oI' Myrna," Bill Harris told Patty, "One of our comrades would be dead; she got all the buckshot."
Teko snapped the expended shell casing out of Emily's shotgun and held it up for the others to see. "This is the murder round," he told them. And now, he said, all of them would be wanted for murder"a gas chamber offense." Harris took the cartridge and went out. When he returned a short while later, he said he had buried it under a tree near the duck pond in Sacramento's McKinley Park.
Through the afternoon they listened to the constant radio reports: the early obits for Mrs. Opsahl; random details from the police, the FBI; there was no mention of the SLA; sheriff's cruisers found one getaway car, then two; a pregnant teller had been kicked; the Firebird linked to the rented garage . . . Myrna Lee Opsahl . . . Opsahl . . . Opsahl. . . . After one report, Patty remembers Kathy Soliah's turning to Emily and quietly saying how badly she felt for her; that she knew how much it must bother her.
Emily tried to explain what had happened. "The safety must have slipped," she said; the trigger lock on the shotgun must have accidentally been snapped off. Then she lashed out angrily: "It didn't matter anyway," she told the others. "The woman who was killed was a bourgeois pig, her husband was a doctor!" An expendable member of an expendable class.
On the LBJ Mustang, police found two fingerprints not identified until months later. (On the back side of the stolen rear plate there was one print from Steve Soliah; on the back side of the front plate, another, from Jim Kilgore. With no suspects and only the two individual prints, there was no way of matching the fingerprints, even against prints on file.) There was no overt connection to the SLA. No flags, fireworks, or revolutionary pronouncements from the underground. The commando style and the fact that a woman had seemingly led the robbers did spur speculation about the SLA, but with no communiqué and the sheriff's investigators stating flatly that they had "no evidence whatsoever" to support an SLA theory, the Symbionese faded as suspectsat least in the public eye. Privately, both the FBI and the locals still considered the SLA a strong possibility, but the Sacramento Sheriff's Department, fearing a panicky public response, decided to underplay the SLA possibility.
When the getaway Firebird was identified as the stolen car the Sacramento police had staked out so loosely a week before, there was a statewide alert for the tan Chevy station wagon Richard Roller had seen his erstwhile tenant drive off in. Roller, as conscientious as he was curious, had noted the car's license plate TDC-315 but could make no identification of the woman. The registered owner, "Elliott Burton," was nonexistant.
A day or so after the robbery, Patty told the FBI, the Chevy wagon was quietly stored in the empty Sacramento garage "Art Peterson," Kilgore, had rented a month before. The car gathered dust, undisturbed for nearly a year, until Patty's FBI confessions gave federal agents a map to the hideaway garage. Month after month, the $15 rent had been promptly paid by mail. Even after the Harrises and Patty Hearst were arrested, in September of 1975, the rent kept coming inright through the Hearst trial, until March of 1976. From within the much sought tan Chevy, FBI technicians lifted nine fingerprints of Steven Soliah's. .
