Former US fugitive Sara Jane Olson and four one-time militant comrades have been charged with a 27-year-old murder during a bank heist in which heiress Patty Hearst took part, prosecutors said.
The four who were arrested yesterday and a fifth suspect who is still at large, were members of the revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) which kidnapped and "turned" billionaires' daughter Hearst in 1974.
Olson turned herself in at her lawyer's office here on her 55th birthday, just two days before she was due to be sentenced for attempting to blow up two police cars in 1975, after prosecutors announced the surprising new charges.
The new charges against radical-turned housewife Olson - arrested in 1999 in Minnesota where she was living quietly as a suburban "soccer mom" after 23 years on the run, appeared to scupper her hopes of a short jail term amid a US crackdown on terrorism.
"Based on review of both old and new material, I believe that there is now enough evidence to file charges and begin criminal proceedings for the murder of Myrna Opsahl," Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully told reporters.
Ex-husband and wife Emily and Bill Harris and fellow ex-SLA member Mike Bortin, who is Olson's brother-in-law, were arrested at their homes in the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland.
The last suspect, James Kilgore has remained at large since the robbery in which mother-of-four Opsahl, 42, was shot in April 1975 in a bank in the Californian city of Sacramento as she paid in church funds.
All five suspects face life sentences with the possibility of parole if convicted. All except Kilgore were in custody awaiting their first court appearance.
But Hearst, who was locked in a cupboard for two months before joining her SLA captors under the nom de guerre Tania, will not face charges for her involvement in the robbery - during which she waited in the getaway car - as she was granted immunity from prosecution for that crime in the 1970s.
The granddaughter of press tycoon William Randolph Hearst, she cooperated with police and claimed in her 1980s autobiography that the five suspects took part in the robbery and that Emily Harris shot Opsahl.
In the book, Hearst quoted Harris as saying: "She's dead, but it really doesn't matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway." Both Harris and Olson have denied involvement in the robbery.
Hearst was convicted of involvement in another bank robbery and served 23 months of a seven-year jail term which was commuted be then president Jimmy Carter. She was pardoned last year by outgoing president Bill Clinton.