When Atwood and other core members of the SLA were killed in 1974 during a standoff with police near Watts, Los Angeles, following their murder of Marcus Foster, Oakland school superintendent, the Soliahs organized memorial rallies, including a rally in Berkeley’s Willard Park (called Ho Chi Minh park by activists) where Soliah spoke in support of her friend Atwood, while being covertly filmed by the FBI. At that rally, Soliah said that her fellow SLA members had been:

On April 21, 1975, SLA members robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California, in the process killing 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four depositing money for her church. Patty Hearst, who was switch getaway driver during the crime, provided the original information that led the police to implicate the SLA in the robbery and murder; she also stated that Soliah was one of the actual robbers. According to Hearst, Soliah also kicked a pregnant teller in the abdomen, leading to a miscarriage.

On August 21, 1975, a bomb that came within 1/16 of an inch of detonating was discovered where a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car had been parked in front of an International House of Pancakes restaurant earlier in the day. After the bomb was discovered, all Los Angeles police were ordered to search under their cars, and another bomb was found in front of a police department about a mile away. Soliah was accused of planting the bombs in an attempt to avenge the SLA members who had died a year earlier in the standoff with LA police.

Soliah was indicted in 1976 for setting the police bombs along with five other SLA members, but vanished before the trial could commence. When Soliah was eventually brought to trial years later, the evidence against her was not considered by prosecutors to be a “slam dunk”, although enough to convince a jury of her guilt. Two witnesses who had originally testified in her grand jury indictment had died by the time she was found and brought to trial: a plumber who had sold materials used in the bomb had picked Soliah out of a lineup as one of the buyers, and a bomb expert had stated the explosive could have been built in Soliah’s apartment. Police could not identify any fingerprints on the devices other than those of the officers who had disarmed them; however, Soliah’s fingerprint, handwriting and signature were identified on a letter sent to order a fuse that could only be used for bomb-making purposes, and components matching those used in the police car bombs were found in a locked closet at the Precita Avenue hideout that Soliah lived in with the other members of SLA.

In February 1976, a grand jury indicted Soliah in the bombing case. Soliah went underground and became a fugitive for 23 years.

She moved to Minnesota, having assumed the alias Sara Jane Olson; the surname chosen being one of the most common names in Minnesota due to the state’s large Scandinavian-American population. In 1980 she married the physician Gerald Frederick “Fred” Peterson, with whom she would have three daughters. Olson and Peterson spent time in Zimbabwe, where Peterson worked for a British Medical missionary group, before settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where Olson resumed her acting career. She was active in Saint Paul on community issues. Her husband described the family as interested in progressive social causes.

On March 3, 1999, and again on May 15, 1999, Soliah was profiled on the America’s Most Wanted television program. After a tip generated by the show, she was arrested on June 16, 1999. Soliah was then charged with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of explosives, explosion, and attempt to ignite an explosive with intent to murder.

On October 31, 2001, she accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder. As part of a plea bargain, the other charges were dropped.

On December 3, 2001, Fidler offered to let Olson testify under oath about her role in the case. She refused. He then wondered “I took those pleas twice … were you lying to me then or are you lying to me now?”—and denied her request to withdraw her plea. Observers expected her to serve only three to five years, but on January 18, 2002, she was sentenced to two consecutive 10-years-to-life terms. Fidler warned that according to California law, the Board of Prison Terms could later change the sentence to a lesser term. Olson’s lawyers asserted that due to discrepancies between 1970s laws and current California laws, their client would most likely serve only five years, which could turn into two years for good behavior. The Board of Prison Terms did later change the sentence.

Several rounds of 9 mm ammunition spilled on the floor and found in Opsahl’s body during the robbery bore manufacturing marks that matched that of ammunition loaded in a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol found by police in Soliah’s bedroom dresser drawer at the SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco. In 2002, new forensics technology allowed police to link these shells definitively to those found at Crocker Bank prior to charging the former members of SLA, including Soliah, with the crime. Prosecutor Michael Latin said that Soliah was tied to the crime through fingerprints, a palm print, and handwriting evidence. The palm print was found on a garage door from a garage in which the SLA kept a getaway car.

At Soliah’s 2002 sentencing hearing on the bombing, police officer John Hall, who had been in the car on top of the bomb described a little girl who stood feet away with her family:

On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Olson and four other SLA members: Emily Harris, Bill Harris, Michael Bortin (Olson’s brother-in law who had married her sister Josephine), and James Kilgore, who remained a fugitive. Judge Fidler arraigned Olson on the murder charges immediately following her sentencing hearing on January 18. Olson pleaded not guilty to that charge at the time. On November 7, along with the other three defendants, she pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second degree murder. She was sentenced on February 14, 2003, for the maximum term allowed under her plea bargain, which was a six-year term concurrent to the 14-year sentence she was already serving.

The state Board of Prison Terms had scrapped her original sentence in October 2002 in exchange for a longer 14-year sentence, saying Olson’s crimes had the potential for great violence and targeted multiple victims. In July 2004, a judge said there was “no analysis” of how the state Board of Prison Terms had decided 14 years was appropriate, and threw it out. Her sentence was instead converted to five years, four months.

Olson was released on parole from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla on March 17, 2008. For five days, she stayed at her mother’s home in Palmdale, and spent some time hiking with her husband.

On March 21, 2008, she was rearrested when it was decided that she had been mistakenly released a year early from prison due to a miscalculation by the parole board. Her attorney claimed that the action was a political move. Olson was taken back into custody by the California Department of Corrections and placed in the California Institution for Women in Corona for an additional year.

After serving a total of seven years, about half of her sentence, Olson was released from prison on March 17, 2009, to serve her parole in Minnesota. Police unions in both Minnesota and California protested the arrangement, stating that they believe her parole should be served in California, where her crimes were committed.

Olson’s 28-year-old daughter, Sophia Shorai, was a contestant in the 2011 season of the talent show American Idol.