Thus began what the press would call Patty’s “lost year,” a period when she and what remained of the Symbionese Liberation Army vanished from view. By this point, Patty wrote years later, she had abandoned any hope of leaving the group or escaping; she thought of herself as an SLA soldier and was resigned to whatever fate that brought. Those first few months they spent on the East Coast. Scott and his wife rented a farm in the Pennsylvania countryside, outside Scranton, where Patty was joined by the Harrises and a new recruit named Wendy Yoshimura, a Berkeley radical who had helped detonate several bombs in the Bay Area in 1971 and 1972. Back in California, Kathy Soliah was promising to gather new SLA members; once she did, Harris said, they would return west and renew combat operations. In the meantime they busied themselves doing calisthenics, reading, and arguing; Harris was a volatile martinet, forever screaming at Emily and the others over slights real and imagined. The Scotts visited every week and several times actually brought along friends, including a Canadian writer who began interviewing them all for the book Scott hoped to write but never would.
At the end of July the Scotts suddenly announced that the farm was no longer safe. Everyone moved to a second farmhouse, this one outside the remote New York village of Jeffersonville, which, as it happened, was barely fifty miles south of the vacation home where Jeff Jones and Weather’s New York cell were hiding. They remained there for two months, out of sight, until word finally arrived from Soliah. She had the recruits ready; better yet, the trial of their onetime SLA comrades Joe Remiro and Russ Little had been moved to Sacramento. Harris approved a plan for everyone to rendezvous in the California capital. There they would try to break their friends out of jail.
In the last week of September the Scotts took Patty and drove west. The trip was uneventful, save for a traffic stop one night in Indiana. In Utah they turned south for Las Vegas, where Scott deposited Patty at a motel until someone could fetch her. Two days later Kathy Soliah’s boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, arrived, a .38 pistol jammed in his belt. They took an overnight bus to Sacramento, where Soliah had rented a house—“basically a wooden shack,” Hearst called it—in a rundown neighborhood near downtown.
There Patty met the new recruits Soliah had rounded up. In addition to Kilgore, they were Soliah’s laid-back brother Steve, her sister Jo, and a pugnacious Berkeley housepainter named Mike Bortin. Everyone was warm and kind, which Patty needed after four months stuck with the bickering Harrises, and for two weeks she was able to relax. Everyone sat around talking, hashing over the SLA’s errors; the Soliahs felt strongly that the group needed to read up on conventional Marxist texts to craft a message to win the hearts and minds of the Bay Area Left. They fed everyone by shoplifting.
Everything changed the moment the Harrises arrived. Bill, the little general, antagonized everyone by spouting orders and excoriating anyone who questioned him; he was Donald DeFreeze’s anointed successor, and he expected his “troops” to give him the respect they had given their fallen leader. When Wendy Yoshimura returned from the East Coast, a screaming match with Harris ensued, and she left for a time. The Harrises fought constantly, and more than once Bill punched Emily, blackening her eye. Between arguments the group did its best to plot the escape of Remiro and Little. But for weeks not much happened. The new recruits shuttled between San Francisco and Sacramento; when visiting the capital, they debated targets, strategies, and politics. As for Patty Hearst, she was just happy to still be alive.
• • •
The FBI’s inability to find Patty and the Harrises, in the wake of Watergate and accompanying leaks and investigations into the Hoover-era black bag jobs and abuses, was yet another blow to its faltering reputation. At every press conference, at every dinner, Director Clarence Kelley was pelted with questions: Why couldn’t they find Patty Hearst? Where was she? The Bureau tried everything, prevailing on the Journal of the California Dental Association to publish the fugitives’ dental records, even printing wanted posters in Spanish—a first—which it distributed to police in Mexico and Central America. By the end of 1974, however, they hadn’t uncovered a single significant lead.
The break finally came on January 31, 1975, when Jack Scott’s tipsy brother, Walter, wobbled into a Scranton, Pennsylvania, police station at 2 a.m. Walter Scott, who was forty-one, was a renowned fantasist in Scranton’s bars, an ex-marine who often claimed to be doing secret work for the government. Even so, police had to listen when he claimed that his chatty brother had been hiding Patty Hearst on a nearby farm. By dawn Walter was being debriefed by the FBI. He knew the farm was somewhere in neighboring Wayne County, and from his description agents were able to find it. When they finally searched it, they found not only Bill Harris’s fingerprints, on a piece of glass, but Wendy Yoshimura’s, on a newspaper stuffed under a mattress. A grand jury began hearing testimony about the Scotts, who swiftly disappeared, but it was the discovery of Yoshimura’s prints that would prove more significant.
Even as news broke of the FBI’s find—the Scott family would be in the headlines for months—the SLA finally turned from talk to action. On February 25, with the group almost out of money, two of the new recruits, Jim Kilgore and Mike Bortin, robbed a branch of the Guild Savings & Loan in a Sacramento strip mall, racing out with $3,729; the police never had a clue it was the SLA. Around the same time the newcomers finally convinced Bill Harris that his plans to free Remiro and Little were suicidal and abandoned them. On March 1, the pair tried to escape anyway, rushing a pair of guards as Little jabbed a sharpened pencil four inches into one guard’s throat; the two were finally tackled and subdued as Remiro was unlocking a gun cabinet.
Afterward Bill Harris ordered that the robbery proceeds be used to buy cars and guns and rent two additional apartments for the group. But the cash, which ran out shortly, did nothing to reduce the growing tensions within the aspiring guerrilla band. Harris seemed to live in a state of constant rage. His primary target was Hearst, whom he endlessly denounced as worthless and unable to shed her bourgeois hang-ups; more than once, she claimed later, he punched her in the face, too. Harris was almost as incensed at Bortin, who refused to give up his LSD habit despite the SLA’s rules against drugs. Sometimes, when Harris was off on a tirade, his target would respond by raising the single criticism he had no answer for: Harris, the others felt, was not a credible field general because he was white. “Only a black or a Third World person can understand the plight of the oppressed masses,” Patty quoted Emily Harris as saying. They would love a black general, everyone agreed, if only they could find one.
But nothing produced more schisms within the group than sex. As they remained marooned inside three grungy Sacramento apartments, the gamesmanship devolved into a kind of sexual Lord of the Flies. When Bill Harris began sleeping with Kathy Soliah, Emily retaliated by sleeping with Steve Soliah. When Harris, in a jealous rage, confronted Steve with a gun, Steve left Emily and started sleeping with Hearst. Emily, in turn, began sleeping with Jim Kilgore. When that didn’t work out, Kilgore began sleeping with Wendy Yoshimura, who flitted in and out of the group. Everyone was having sex with everyone, it seemed, and everyone was angry about it. When they weren’t arguing about sex, they were arguing about what to do next. After they robbed Guild Savings, Harris wanted to hit a larger bank. By Patty’s count they cased at least fifteen Sacramento-area banks before deciding on a branch of the Crocker National Bank in suburban Carmichael. Harris wanted this to be an “SLA action,” meaning they would announce their responsibility, letting the world know that the SLA was again operational. The newcomers angrily resisted, arguing that, with only eight members, they were too weak to confront police. Kilgore and Bortin, their confidence growing, challenged Harris’s ability to lead the Crocker National action. Harris won out by shouting everyone else down.
As they readied for the bank job, everyone buying new guns and firing at targets in a wooded area, news broke of the FBI’s discoveries in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, after almost a y
ear of silence, the SLA was again front-page news. Harris saw no reason to leave Sacramento; not even the Scotts knew they were in the city. Finally, on April 21, after a month of preparations, all eight of them piled into cars and drove toward the Crocker branch. As five of the group burst into the lobby, screaming for everyone to “get your noses in the carpet,” one woman paused. Her name was Myrna Opsahl. She was forty-two that morning, and she had come to the bank with three other women to deposit money from their church. According to witnesses, Opsahl was cradling a heavy adding machine, and rather than fall to the floor, she hesitated. Emily Harris turned and blasted Opsahl with a shotgun. Years later she would claim that the gun went off accidentally. Barely five minutes later the robbers raced from the bank, leaving Myrna Opsahl to bleed to death. Hearst, sitting in a getaway car, joined the others inside a waiting van. When one of them wondered aloud whether the bleeding woman would live, Hearst wrote later, Emily Harris snapped, “Oh she’s dead. But it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway.”
• • •
The murder of Myrna Opsahl, and press accounts that labeled the Crocker National job an “SLA-style” robbery, convinced the group that it was time to leave Sacramento. The new recruits took news of Opsahl’s death the hardest; for the first time, Patty said later, the romance of revolutionary violence began to fade. The decision was made to return to where it all began, the only place most of the SLA members felt at all safe: San Francisco.
Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore took Patty and rented an apartment on Geneva Avenue, above a dry cleaner’s on the city’s southern outskirts. Everyone else followed a few days later, bringing their weapons and belongings in a pair of U-Haul trucks. A game of musical apartments ensued. Emily Harris announced that she couldn’t stand living with Bill anymore, so Bill moved to a second flat, in Daly City; the others took turns living with him. In the end Emily and Jim Kilgore moved in with Hearst. The new recruits, meanwhile, all took jobs, Kathy Soliah waitressing under an assumed name at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel while the others returned to housepainting, eventually securing a sizable contract to repaint a set of apartments in Pacifica, south of the city. Two of Wendy Yoshimura’s radical girlfriends began attending the SLA’s internal meetings, hoping to join.
Once they were settled, Harris announced that they were renewing their war against the fascist U.S. government. In DeFreeze’s honor, he said, they should carry out his dream and begin killing policemen. If they killed enough, he reasoned, the police would crack down on the oppressed minorities of the Bay Area, who would then rise up and begin the revolution. “That’s a terrible, disgusting idea,” one of the prospective members said. “One of the women I work with is married to a policeman, and he is a very nice person.”
“We’re revolutionaries and we should be killing pigs and pigs’ families,” Emily Harris responded.
“You people are sick,” the woman said, and stormed out.1
Mike Bortin just rolled his eyes. “All you people do is talk,” he said. “I think you’re all a bunch of sissies. If you want to go out and kill some pigs, you ought to just go out and do it.”
Harris insisted they needed a plan and challenged Bortin to devise one. A few nights later Bortin took Hearst and cruised past a coffee shop called Miz Brown’s in the Mission District. It was filled with police, on and off duty. At the group’s next meeting Bortin proposed that they walk in with guns blazing; they could kill a dozen cops before anyone knew what was happening. Harris scoffed. They could never win a shoot-out with trained professionals. “You people analyze everything to death,” Bortin said before storming out.
In Bortin’s absence the other newcomers argued that the safest attacks would be nocturnal, Weather-style bombings. The debate raged for days, until Bortin finally returned and plunked down a package of plastic explosives, the kind used on construction sites. “Here’s your explosives,” he told Harris. “All you need is some blasting caps and you’re good to go.”
Later there would be considerable confusion about the rump SLA’s bombings, in large part because they were carried out in the name of the New World Liberation Front, the umbrella group Harris had endorsed a full year before. In the interim a group calling itself the NWLF had already detonated thirty bombs in the Bay Area. Patty Hearst, and much of the press, would later come to believe that the SLA was the only branch of the NWLF, that Harris and his acolytes had carried out all the bombings, but as later events would show, that was clearly not true. It’s all but certain that, as Bortin’s introduction of explosives indicated, the SLA hadn’t yet bombed a thing.
But it would now. Rejoining the group, Wendy Yoshimura served as its explosives expert. Everyone gathered in the Geneva Avenue flat to watch her build a pipe bomb—gunpowder jammed into a two-inch pipe. She and Harris burned the powder in different recipes on a mattress in the rear courtyard until one afternoon when Hearst noticed smoke billowing from behind the building. Apparently they had left something burning. Just then there was a pounding at the door. “Fire department!” a voice shouted. Firemen rushed into the apartment, dragging hoses behind them, and quickly extinguished the fire. When Yoshimura explained she had seen teenagers playing with matches earlier in the day, they left. Afterward everyone was able to laugh about it.
Harris chose the first two targets: police stations in the Mission District and on Taraval Street. Overruling Yoshimura, he insisted on building the bombs himself, packing toilet paper in with the gunpowder, despite Yoshimura’s insistence that there was no need. On the night of August 7, Patty and Jo Soliah took one of the bombs in a plastic bag and strolled by the Mission station; once they were certain no one was watching, Soliah slid it under a parked police car. Yoshimura and the others returned to the apartment with their bomb still intact, insisting there were too many people around the Taraval Street station to plant it. The next morning, when they checked the newspapers, they found a small item about a dud bomb found under a Mission District police car. Harris was apoplectic, his face red and trembling as he excoriated everyone for incompetence and insubordination.
Mike Bortin, always ready to challenge Harris, teased him mercilessly. “Great job,” he smirked. For once Harris had little to say.
The next day they built three new bombs, minus the toilet paper, and drove to a remote area of Sonoma County to test them. They were tiny, only three inches long, but they detonated. Harris announced that they would strike next at the police department in Emeryville, beside Berkeley on San Francisco Bay. Emily Harris and Steve Soliah planted the bomb on August 13, Soliah scrambling up a slope to slide it under a patrol car. Minutes later it went off, destroying the car. Writing the communiqué proved harder than the bombing. Harris wanted to rename themselves the Jonathan Jackson unit of the New World Liberation Front. Kilgore objected, saying that suggested they were black revolutionaries. Eventually they compromised, calling themselves the Jonathan Jackson/Sam Melville unit of the NWLF. “Remember, pigs,” the communiqué read in part. “Every time you strap on your gun, the next bullet may be speeding toward your head, the next bomb may be under the seat of your car.” In the only nod to the SLA, they used DeFreeze’s old signoff line: “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People.”
Bursting with confidence now, Harris announced that their next action would be simultaneous attacks in Los Angeles and at the site of Jonathan Jackson’s death, the Marin County Courthouse. Harris built the bombs, bigger ones this time, gunpowder packed with concrete nails inside a foot-long pipe. He called it an “anti-personnel” bomb and rigged up a contraption that would affix it to the bottom of a car and, in theory, detonate when the car moved. Steve Soliah, riding a bicycle, placed the first bomb at the courthouse, outside the sheriff’s office. Another they slid under a police car. Both went off with no problem. They dropped off the communiqué outside a radio station.
Later Harris returned, incensed, from Los Angeles with Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soli
ah, who was sporting a new black eye. Their “mission” had degenerated into farce. They had gotten into an argument over what to bomb. Sitting in traffic, Kilgore got so mad he punched Soliah in the face, at which point Harris began punching him, even as drivers behind them began honking their horns. Later that night, having calmed down, they managed to slide two bombs under a pair of police cars, one in Hollywood, the other in East Los Angeles; afterward they checked into a motel, switched on the television, and waited for news of their triumphant attacks. Unfortunately, Harris’s new triggering device didn’t work. When the first cruiser was driven off, the bomb just lay there in a trash bag in the street, at which point two young boys found it and began kicking it around like a soccer ball. When the bomb fell out of the garbage bag, an adult saw it and called the police. Rushing to check nearby cars, they found the second bomb before it could explode. “Everything,” Hearst wrote later, “pretty much spiraled out of control after that.”
Back in San Francisco violent arguments broke out, all exacerbated by ongoing sexual tensions within the group. Everything came to a head one long night at the Geneva Avenue apartment when, amid clouds of cigarette smoke, half-eaten pizza crusts, and beer and wine bottles, Harris announced that the only cure for the SLA’s dysfunction was black leadership. He proposed approaching a paroled San Quentin inmate they knew and asking him to take over. The newcomers hated the idea, afraid to bring in outsiders. As Harris and Kilgore screamed at each other, Emily Harris lamented the loss of the clarity DeFreeze had brought to the “old” SLA. Kilgore’s response provided an unwitting epitaph for the group: “That’s all a bunch of crap! What did the old SLA ever accomplish? You killed a black man, kidnapped a little teenaged girl and robbed a bank. What the hell did that amount to?”2
Days of Rage Page 39