Bright children blessed with responsible parents learn early on that “But everyone’s doing it!” is no excuse for bad behavior. This is a lesson (one of many) that seems to have been left out of textbooks in life studies published when the baby boomers came of age. Consider the case of Sara Jane Olson, née Kathleen Soliah, the fifty-four-year-old middle-class wife of a doctor and mother of three—as well as long-time fugitive from justice and former member of the radical group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

In 1999, after more than two decades on the lam, Ms. Olson (who took her new first name from a Bob Dylan tune) was arrested and charged with a bungled attempt to bomb two police cruisers in 1975. (Other escapades of the Symbionese Liberation Army did not end so happily: in 1975, during a bank robbery near Sacramento, a bystander, a mother of four, was killed. And of course there was the bizarre dra ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase