Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders

by Paul Krassner

  Further, if any of the apprehended individuals should make bail, they would only act upon the “hit list” at the instructions of their leader, who is not and will not be in a position to give such instructions.

  The above information is furnished for your personal use and it is requested it be kept confidential. At your discretion, you may desire to contact the local police department responsible for the area of your residence.

  Very truly yours,

  Charles W. Bates

  Special Agent in Charge

  But I was more logically a target of the government than of the Emiliano Zapata Unit—unless, of course, they happened to be the same. Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI? Did the handwriting on the wall read COINTELPRO Lives? (COINTELPRO was their Counter-Intelligence Program.) Questions about the authenticity of the Zapata Unit had been raised by its first public statement in August 1975, which included the unprecedented threat of violence against the Left.

  When a Safeway supermarket in Oakland was bombed by the Zapata Unit, they claimed to have called radio station KPFA and instructed them to notify police, so they could evacuate the area, but KPFA staffers insisted they never received such a call. Now The Urban Guerrilla, aboveground organ of the underground NWLF, commented:

  Without offering any proof, the FBI has claimed that [those arrested] were members of the Emiliano Zapata Unit and mistakenly claimed that the Zapata Unit was part of the New World Liberation Front. These FBI claims and lies have been widely repeated by the media.

  As soon as they were arrested, Greg Adornetto, whom we knew as Chepito, was separated from the others and disappeared …

  A close analysis of all the actions and statements … by Chepito leads [us] to the inescapable conclusion that he is not just a weak informer, he is a government infiltrator/provocateur. No other conclusion is possible when one considers that he led our comrades to a house he knew was under surveillance … carrying along things like explosives and half-completed communiqués …

  He recruited sincere and committed revolutionaries who wanted to participate in being a medium for dialogue with the underground, got a bunch of them in the same room with guns, communiqués and explosives, or even got some of them involved in armed actions, and then had … Bates move in with his SWAT team and bust everybody …

  In addition, a communiqué from the central command of the NWLF charged that “the pigs led and organized” the Zapata Unit. “We were reasonably sure that it was a set—up from the beginning and we never sent one communiqué to New Dawn because of our suspicions.”

  After publishing the FBI’s warning letter to me in the Berkeley Barb, I received letters from a couple of members of the Emiliano Zapata Unit in prison. One stated:

  I was involved in the aboveground support group of the Zapata Unit. Greg Adornetto led myself and several others to believe we were joining a cell of the Weather Underground, which had a new surge of life when it published Prairie Fire. I knew nothing about a hit list or your being on one, and can’t imagine why you would have been. When we were arrested, FBI agent-provocateur Adornetto immediately turned against the rest of us and provided evidence to the government.

  Another Zapata Unit prisoner advised:

  You shouldn’t have believed the boys in the black shiny shoes (FBI) about being on a Zapata hit list. They just found some addresses, and Bates and his running partner Hearst wanted to build up some sensationalism to take the heat off of Patty’s trial. They had over 75 people (politicians and corporate execs) under protection, thinking all of us didn’t get arrested.

  Jacques Rogiers—the aboveground courier for the underground New World Liberation Front who delivered their communiqués—told me that the reason I was on the hit list was because I had written that Donald DeFreeze was a police informer.

  “But that was true,” I said. “It’s a matter of record. Doesn’t that make any difference?”

  It didn’t.

  “If the NWLF asked me to kill you,” Rogiers admitted, “I would.”

  “Jacques,” I replied, “I think this puts a slight damper on our relationship.”

  While the jury was deliberating, I had taken my twelve-year-old daughter Holly to the empty courtroom, and she sat in Patty Hearst’s chair. But when Mae Brussell phoned me, worrying that our daughters might be kidnapped, I passed her message on to Holly and offered to accompany her to school.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “that’s not necessary. Mae’s just paranoid.”

  Holly then bought a gift for me—a plastic clothespinlike paper-holder labeled Threats. But now, in the face of Jacques Rogiers’s warning, I had to find another place to live and not tell him my new address, where I kept the FBI’s hit-list letter in that Threats holder.

  On one hand, there was Mae Brussell, dedicated to documenting the rise of fascism in America. On the other hand, there was Holly, standing on her best friend Pia Hinckle’s front porch, yelling, “Hitler! Hitler!” That was the name of Pia’s cat, so named because of a square black patch under its nose, just like the mustache on Adolf Hitler’s face.

  I asked Holly, “Do you know who Hitler was?”

  “Didn’t he lead the Jews out of Germany?”

  “Well, not exactly …”

  In the summer of 1977, I got a magazine assignment to cover the trial of Roman Polanski. Holly was now thirteen—the same age as the girl Polanski was accused of seducing (I didn’t know yet that it was actually rape)—and she had decided to come to Santa Monica with me, sit in the front row of the courtroom, and just stare at Polanski. She also planned to write an article about the trial from her point of view. However, Polanski pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, then fled the country on the day he was supposed to be sentenced.

  I told Holly, “I’m gonna write about the trial anyway.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I’ll just make it up as if it actually occurred. Roman Polanski’s defense will be that the statutory rape laws are unconstitutional because they discriminate against kids.”

  “How would you feel if the kid was me?”

  “Well, I’m a liberal father, but … you’re right. I’m not gonna write the article.”

  • • •

  After Patty Hearst was arrested, she had a conversation with a visitor, her best friend since childhood, Trish Tobin, whose family, incidentally, controlled the Hibernia Bank that Patty had supposedly helped rob. Several times throughout the trial, prosecutor Browning attempted to have the tape of that jailhouse dialogue played for the jury, but Judge Carter kept refusing—until the end of the trial, when the impact of its giddiness would be especially astonishing.

  Trish: “I had a lot of fights at Stanford.”

  Patty: “Oh, yeah? About what?”

  Trish: “You.”

  Patty: “Oh—what were they saying? I can just imagine.”

  Trish: “Oh, well, ‘that fucking little rich bitch’—you know, on and on—and they said, ‘She planned her own kidnapping,’ and I said, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t even care if she plans her kidnapping and everyone’s in the world, so you know something, I don’t wanna hear shit out of you!” [Laughter]

  The gossip was that Patty had arranged her own kidnapping in order to get out of her engagement to Steven Weed in as adventurous a way as possible. “I guess I was having second thoughts,” she admitted. “I wasn’t sure he was somebody I could stay married to”—but that she was then double-crossed and manipulated into becoming an informer.

  In any event, Patty’s jailhouse tape appeared to reveal a change in her outlook: “I’m not making any statements until I know that I can get out on bail, and then if I find out that I can’t for sure, then I’ll issue a statement, but I’d just as soon give it myself, in person, and then it’ll be a revolutionary feminist perspective totally. I mean I never got really … I guess I’ll just tell you, like, my politics are real different from, uh—way back w
hen [laughter]—obviously! And so this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense.”

  An accurate forecast. So at her trial Patty testified that she was influenced to say all that because captured SLA member Emily Harris was in the visiting room at the time Patty was talking to Trish Tobin.

  Bailey asked, “Was she a party to your conversation?”

  “Not by any intention of ours, no.”

  On cross-examination, Patty continued: “Emily was also on a phone.” Prisoners and visitors had to converse over telephones while they looked at each other through a thick bulletproof-glass window. Patty said she knew that Emily could hear her talking simply because “I could’ve heard her if I’d stopped and listened.” But jail records showed that Emily was not in the visiting room then.

  While psychiatrist Harry Kozol was testifying in court, Patty was writing notes to Albert Johnson on a yellow legal pad. Later, while I diverted the head marshal’s attention by acting suspiciously during recess, reporter Steve Rubinstein copied those notes, but he wasn’t allowed to include them in his story for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a Hearst paper.

  In one of the notes, Patty described life in Berkeley with Weed: “I paid the rent, bought the furniture, bought the groceries, cooked all the meals (even while working eight hours a day and carrying a full course load), and if I wasn’t there to cook, Steve didn’t eat.”

  In another note, she clearly and concisely described where her mindset really was at in the San Mateo County Jail when she couldn’t blame Emily Harris’s eavesdropping as her motivation:

  “Dr. Kozol kept trying to equate the women’s movement with violence. I repeatedly told him: 1. Violence has no place in the women’s movement. 2. I didn’t feel it was possible to make lasting changes in our society unless the issue of women’s rights was resolved. Kozol kept trying to say things like, ‘Isn’t it more important to solve the poverty problem?’ Any reform measures taken by the government will only be temporary.”

  • • •

  Although news items about the trial were clipped out of the daily papers by U.S. marshals, the sequestered jurors were not immune to media influence. During the trial, they all went out to see a few films, selections which they voted on.

  They saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which, Ken Kesey complained, made Big Nurse the target and omitted the central theme of his book, that people go crazy in this country precisely because they can’t handle the gap between the American Dream and the American Nightmare as orchestrated by the same combination that Patty was forced to experience, where organized crime and organized crime-fighting are merely different sides of the same corporate coin.

  The jury also saw Swept Away … reinforcing the theme that one does not transcend one’s class unless one is already heading in that direction before circumstances temporarily shatter all those arbitrary rules that distinguish the classes.

  And the jury saw Taxi Driver—once again perpetuating the myth of the lone nut assassin, played by Robert DeNiro, who, in this case, attempts to kill a political candidate, not because he has been hired by an intelligence agency, but rather because Cybil Shepherd won’t stay and hold his hand at a porn movie.

  Bill and Emily Harris let it be known that, if called to testify, they would take the Fifth Amendment, but Emily testified, in effect, through the media. After Patty told the jury that Willie Wolfe had raped her, Emily was quoted in New Times: “Once, Willie gave her a stone relic in the shape of a monkey face [and] Patty wore it all the time around her neck. After the shootout, she stopped wearing it and carried it in her purse instead, but she always had it with her.”

  Prosecutor James Browning read that in the magazine, and he had an Aha! experience, remembering that “rock” in Patty’s purse from the inventory list when she was originally captured. He presented it as his final piece of evidence in the trial, slowly swinging the necklace back and forth in front of the jurors, as if to hypnotize them.

  • • •

  Patty Hearst had once told a nun to go to Hell, but during the trial her monkey-face necklace was replaced by a religious symbol. It didn’t help. The jury found her guilty of being a bank robber—that is, a virtual bank robber.

  They also found her guilty of fucking when she was fifteen years old—or why else would such information have been admissible as evidence during the trial? They don’t allow that kind of testimony in a rape trial, but for a bank robbery it was considered relevant.

  Judge Carter sentenced her to thirty-five years, pending the results of ninety days of psychiatric testing. He announced, “I intend to reduce the sentence. How much, I am not now prepared to say.”

  If you were Patty, would you have answered True or False to the following statements:

  * “My way of doing things is apt to be misunderstood by others.”

  * “I am always disgusted with the law when a criminal is freed through the arguments of a smart lawyer.”

  * “I feel that it is certainly best to keep my mouth shut when I’m in trouble.”

  Those are samples from the MMPI, a psychological test Patty had to take. In order to have her sentence reduced, she was required to undergo a psychiatric debriefing extended to six months. Kidnapped again. While Patty was still being probed by the shrinks, Judge Carter died, and the joke was that his replacement would sentence Patty to working as a teller at the Hibernia Bank for rehabilitative purposes.

  Eventually, she faced seven years in prison, but after serving twenty-three months, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

  Graffiti remained as mute testaments to the whole misadventure. With the same passion that some had previously spray-painted Free Squeaky and Gravity Is the Fourth Dimension, others left messages like Jail Rocky and Nixon Not Tania and SLA LIVES, which was then obscured in the enigmatic made-over COLE SLAW LIVES slogan that baffled tourists and convinced one visiting ex-Berkeleyite that a political activist named Cole Slaw was dead because there were graffiti saying he was alive.

  Finally, although James Browning had once informed me that the Black Panthers were “an organization which advocates killing people” and that Groucho Marx’s “utterance did not constitute a ‘true’ threat,” it had since come out that the FBI itself published pamphlets in the name of the Panthers advocating the killing of cops, and that an FBI file on Groucho was indeed begun, and he actually was labeled a “national security risk.” I called Groucho to tell him the good news. “I deny everything,” he said, “because I lie about everything.” He paused, then added, “And everything I deny is a lie.”

  THE CASE OF THE TWINKIE MURDERS

  JIM JONES, FOUNDER OF the eight-thousand-member People’s Temple in San Francisco, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes’ rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), how he could obtain political power.

  She answered, sardonically, “Arrange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs.”

  Jones in turn offered to supply busloads of his congregation for any protest demonstration that COYOTE organized, but Margo declined his offer.

  “I never liked him,” she told me. “I never saw his eyes. Even in the dimmest light, he never removed his shades. He was hiding something. I figured it was his real feelings. I thought he was a slimy creep.”

  Margo’s instincts were correct.

  Potential recruits for People’s Temple were checked out in advance by Jones’s representatives, who would rummage through their garbage and report to him on their findings—discarded letters, food preferences and other clues. Temple members would visit their homes, and while one would initiate conversation, the other would use the bathroom, copying names of doctors and types of medicine.

  They would also phone relatives of a recruit in the guise of conducting a survey and gather other information that would all be taped to the inside of Jones’s podium, from which he would proceed to demonstrate his magical powers at a lecture by “sensing the presence” of an individual, men
tioning specific details.

  When People’s Temple moved to Guyana and became Jonestown, Jim Jones would publicly humiliate his followers. For example, he required them to remove their clothing and participate in boxing matches, pitting an elderly person against a young one. He forced one man to participate in a homosexual act in the presence of his girlfriend. There were paddle beatings and compulsory practice-suicide sessions called “White Nights.”

  On November 18, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan, who had been investigating Jonestown, was slain at the Guyana airport, along with three newspeople and several disillusioned members of the cult. Jones then orchestrated the mass suicide-murder of nine hundred men, women and children, mostly black.

  Jones: “What’s going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of a few on that plane is gonna—gonna shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s gonna happen. They’re gonna shoot that pilot and down comes the plane into the jungle. And we had better not have any of our children left when it’s over ’cause they’ll parachute in here on us. So my opinion is that we should be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take over quietly, because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act.”

  Christine Miller: “I feel like that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. There’s hope. That’s my feeling.”

  Jones: “Well, someday everybody dies. Someplace that hope runs out ’cause everybody dies.”

  Miller: “But, uh, I look at all the babies and I think they deserve to live …”

  Jones: “But also they deserve much more. They deserve peace.”

  Unidentified man: “It’s over, sister, it’s over. We’ve made that day. We made a beautiful day. And let’s make it a beautiful day.”

  Unidentified woman: [Sobbing] “We’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready …”

  Jones: “The congressman has been murdered—the congressman’s dead. Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple, there’s no convulsions with it, it’s just simple. Just please get it before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyanese army] will be here. I tell you, get moving, get moving, get moving. How many are dead? Aw, God almighty, God almighty—it’s too late, the congressman’s dead. The congressman’s aide’s dead. Many of our traitors are dead. They’re all layin’ out there dead.”