Wendy Yoshimura

In 2002 five former SLA members and associates were arrested, and four of them pleaded guilty to charges related to the homicide.

In 1991 Yoshimura was granted limited immunity to testify during a grand jury investigation into the 1975 armed bank robbery by the SLA in Carmichael, California in which Myrna Opsahl, 42-year-old mother of four, was killed. One SLA member, Michael Bortin, had pleaded guilty to the robbery. No indictments resulted at the time.

Ultimately, Yoshimura was convicted on explosives and weapons charges and sent to state prison for six months; she was paroled in 1980.

On September 18, 1975, Yoshimura was arrested with Hearst in a second-floor apartment at 625 Morse Street by FBI Special Agent Tom Padden and San Francisco Police Department Inspector Tim Casey. Padden and Casey failed to read Hearst and Yoshimura their Miranda rights, and did not obtain a search warrant until twenty-six hours later. Weapons evidence, including a handgun in Yoshimura's purse and a shotgun in the bedroom, was suppressed because of this oversight.

Yoshimura evaded a police dragnet and fled California. She lived under an alias in New Jersey until 1974. In 1977 she was captured and convicted of unlawful possession of explosives, of a machine gun, and of substances and materials with the intent to make destructive devices and explosives. She was sentenced to a one-to-fifteen years in prison. She was released on parole in September 1980.

Also in 1974, married couple Bill and Emily Harris, with kidnapping victim-turned fugitive Patty Hearst, relocated to rural Pennsylvania. The Harrises were surviving founding members of the Berkeley terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Six of their members had died in a May 1974 shootout with Los Angeles police at a house in Los Angeles. Sports writer and political activist Jack Scott had helped the high-profile fugitives make their way east. He arranged for Yoshimura to join them and handle shopping and other public transactions.

Yoshimura became associated with the Revolutionary Army, a group founded by her boyfriend, Willie Brandt. He used the title in public statements claiming responsibility for violent actions intended to express opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1972, police discovered a weapons and explosives cache in a Berkeley garage which Yoshimura had rented and described it as a "massive bomb factory." They also found letters taking credit for planned future bombings targeting the University of California, Berkeley campus, including the Naval Architecture building. Notes described a specific plan to kidnap or assassinate World Bank President and former defense secretary Robert McNamara at his winter residence in Aspen, Colorado. Brandt and two others were arrested in Berkeley on March 31, 1972, and subsequently convicted.

The family returned to the US when Yoshimura was 13 years old. Because she did not speak English, Yoshimura was initially placed in the second grade in the Fresno, California school system. She learned English rapidly and later graduated in 1969 from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts).

Wendy Masako Yoshimura (born January 17, 1943) is an American still life watercolor painter. She is known for her involvement with the leftist terrorist group, Symbionese Liberation Army, during the mid-1970s. She was born in Manzanar, one of numerous World War II-era internment camp for Japanese Americans, who were forced out of their homes and businesses along the West Coast. She was raised both in Japan and California's Central Valley.