Chambana Sun

CHAMPAIGN – Soldier James Kilgore of the Symbionese Liberation Army fled the country, changed his name, came back to serve time for murder, and grew old teaching University of Illinois students that no one belongs in prison.

He nearly lost his job in 2014, after a newspaper connected him to the SLA, but the faculty rallied to rescue him.

The university no longer pays him to lecture as it did through 2021, but as faculty affiliate he can keep library books longer than students and use any space he needs in the library.

He calls himself an abolitionist, which once applied to abolishing slavery and currently applies to abolishing prisons.

He asserted in a 2019 article that prisons don’t make us safe in any way.

He renounced his violent ways but hasn’t renounced the Marxist ideals beneath a violent past.

He established his credentials in 1971 and 1972 as a bomb maker.

He hadn’t yet joined the SLA when its soldiers famously kidnapped Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, in 1974.

Kilgore and girlfriend Kathy Soliah reinforced the army four months later, after six soldiers died in combat with Los Angeles police.

In 1975, after Kilgore took part in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a customer, he fled to Africa and assumed an identity as Charles William Pape.

South African police detected his actual identity and arrested him in 2002.

He pleaded guilty in California and served six years in prison.

The university hired his wife Teresa Barnes in 2008 and hired him as contract scholar in 2009.

In 2021, the university paid Barnes $109,276 as associate professor and paid Kilgore $3,500 as adjunct lecturer.

Barnes recently wrote, “Joe Biden is an experienced politician and party insider who is universally described as decent.”

The SLA introduced itself to California in 1973 by assassinating Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster.

Soldier Nancy Ling sent a statement to radio station KPFA declaring, “Warrant order execution by cyanide bullets. Warrant issued by the court of the people.”

On Feb. 4, 1974, the army kidnapped Patricia Hearst.

Ling sent KPFA a statement identifying Hearst as prisoner of war and her father Randolph Hearst as corporate enemy of the people.

Ling next announced that Hearst joined the army.

Ling provided a photograph of Hearst holding a machine gun beside the army’s flag.

A week later, army leader Donald DeFreeze, Ling, Hearst, and soldiers Mizmoon Soltysik and Camilla Hall robbed a bank.

Hearst placed herself in view of a security camera and held a machine gun.

Soltysik grabbed $10,600, they all jumped into rental cars, and they switched to other rental cars for a clean getaway.

The Berkeley Barb newspaper celebrated.

It stated, “Patty Hearst has said her last goodbye to America’s ruling class, to a life of privilege, wealth, and power, and has joined the guerrillas of the Symbionese Liberation Army in their war against the fascist corporate state.”

The FBI circulated posters and DeFreeze decided that he and his eight soldiers should move to Los Angeles.

They rented a house in South Central for $70 a month.

After eight days DeFreeze sent Bill, Emily, and Hearst out in his red VW bus to buy heavy clothes for combat.

They parked at a sporting goods store and Bill and Emily each hid a gun.

Hearst stayed in the VW while Emily shopped and Bill slipped a bandelier into a pocket.

Emily brought items to the counter and Bill started out the door.

The clerk and his boss tackled Bill on the sidewalk.

Emily tried to pull them off Bill but they held him tight and he dropped his gun.

Hearst grabbed a gun in the VW, pointed it at the store, and emptied the ammunition clip.

Bill, Emily and Hearst sped away, ditched the VW, and hijacked a series of cars.

Police traced Bill’s gun and learned that Emily bought it in Oakland seven months earlier.

When soldiers at the house heard about the shooting on radio, they packed up and took off.

They drove for hours in two vans and at 4 a.m. they stopped at a house with a light on.

DeFreeze gave two women $100 to let his friends stay for a few hours.

The soldiers filled the house with machine guns, rifles, shotguns, pistols, and about 4,000 rounds of ammunition.

DeFreeze tried to hide the vans but police found them and started questioning neighbors.

Police identified four possible hideouts and started assembling officers and equipment.

At 5:53 p.m. an officer fired tear gas through a window and the SLA started shooting.

Police fired about 5,000 rounds in the next hour and the army fired about half as many.

When the house began burning Ling fired from a crawl space and police shot her dead.

Hall entered the crawl space with a gun in each hand and they shot her dead.

Walls and roof collapsed at 6:58 p.m. and the shooting stopped.

Soltysik and soldiers Angela Atwood and Willy Wolfe died from burns and smoke.

DeFreeze died from a bullet to the temple.

That left Bill, Emily, and Hearst as a remnant army reviewing their options as notorious suspects who had spent almost all their money.

They decided to go home.

They drove north on May 27 and rented an apartment in Oakland on May 29.

On June 2, hundreds gathered in a Berkeley park to honor the soldiers.

As orator for the occasion, Kilgore’s girlfriend Kathy Soliah, said they “were viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs in LA while the whole nation watched.”

She urged the army to keep fighting and said, “I’m with you and we’re with you. I am a soldier of the SLA.”

She meant it and so did Kilgore.

Author and former CNN personality Jeffrey Toobin described them in 2016 in “American Heiress,” his book on Hearst.

They fell in love on the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California in the 1960s and moved to Berkeley.

“Their group was known to some as the Revolutionary Army, but it never had a formal name like the Weather Underground,” Toobin wrote.

He wrote that their political expression was “to set off explosives, after working hours, in symbolically resonant locations around California.”

“This cell emerged from the same aggressive, frustrated corner of the counterculture as the SLA, and they expressed themselves in similarly theatrical terms.”

He wrote that Kilgore painted houses for a company that his friend Michael Bortin owned.

He wrote that they filled a Berkeley garage with bomb making material and a confederate later admitted they set off about a dozen bombs.

When Emily read about the rally she called Soliah who called Kilgore.

He collected several hundred dollars and Soliah turned it over to Emily.

The next night Kilgore and Soliah gave Bill, Emily, and Hearst $1,500.

Bill, Emily, and Hearst moved east and stayed briefly at two farms.

Emily called Soliah and Kilgore and asked them to find a safe place on the West Coast.

Soliah and Kilgore sent back a message to meet them in Sacramento.

Hearst flew to Las Vegas and Kilgore drove her the rest of the way.

Two more soldiers joined the army and they all settled into three locations.

Kilgore moved in with Bortin and they supported the army by painting houses.

According to Toobin, Kilgore and Soliah were ready to resume making bombs but bombs cost money to assemble and there was no cash.

He wrote that the group came around to an idea that their only option was to rob a bank.

They picked Guild Savings and Loan.

Kilgore entered with a shotgun and Bortin entered with a revolver.

A teller opened the safe and Bortin collected about $3,700.

Bortin and Kilgore dashed out, jumped into a car, and switched to another car.

It worked so well that they decided to rob Crocker National Bank in Carmichael.

At the start of business on April 21, 1975, Emily, Kilgore, Soliah, and Bortin carried weapons to the door of the bank.

Bortin held the door for bank customer Myrna Opsahl, who brought her church’s collection for deposit.

She thanked him.

He entered and shouted, “Everybody down on the ground.”

Emily’s shotgun discharged and Opsahl crumpled and bled from a wound in her side.

Soliah grabbed about $15,000 and the army gathered at an apartment.

According to Toobin, Kilgore called Opsahl’s death an accident and said, “If she didn’t absorb the shot I would be the one who got shot.”

Emily said, “So what if she got shot? Her husband is a doctor. She’s a bourgeois pig.”

They returned to the Bay and decided to go back to bombing.

They slipped a bomb under a San Francisco police car but it didn’t detonate.

They slipped a bomb under a police car in Sonoma County and demolished it.

Toobin wrote that they believed it was time to move from destroying cars to destroying lives.

Kilgore, Soliah, and Bill went to Los Angeles to attack police.

They picked a car and Kilgore rigged a bomb to explode when an officer started it.

Toobin wrote, “It would have detonated if two screws had touched, but they remained separated by one sixteenth of an inch.”

At last police picked up enough clues to start capturing soldiers.

They arrested Bill and Emily, then Hearst, and then Steve Soliah.

Kathy Soliah took off and turned into doctor Sara Jane Olson of Minnesota.

Kilgore took off and turned into researcher Charles Pape at the University of Cape Town.

In 2009, he applied to work in the African studies department at the University of Illinois.

He identified his occupation for the previous seven years as self employed writer.

He got a job that didn’t pay but it provided library access and contacts that led to 13 paying appointments in eight academic units.

In 2014, the Champaign News-Gazette connected Kilgore to the SLA and university officials decided not to renew his contract.

Faculty members organized to keep him and the administration appointed a committee to make a recommendation.

Kilgore stated that people can change and should be given second chances.

Barnes described him as a person who “tried to accomplish social change in a violent way but who, in the intervening 20 years, has completely changed his understanding of how to go about bringing about change.”

The committee recommended renewal, evaluating him as a successful employee who contributed to the scholarly and educational missions of the campus.”

Kilgore told university trustees that, “Many people with felony convictions want to give back to their communities and one of the best ways to do this is to teach young people how to avoid a destructive path.”

They voted to keep him.

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