The exact methods by which DeFreeze recruited and organized his small band of loyal followers have not been established, yet DeFreeze's extensive criminal record and his revolutionary goals bear surprising similarity to both the background and the visions of Charles Manson. Many of his techniques -- including intimidation, isolation, a conman's charm, and the use of intense sexual experiences -- may indeed have been the same as Manson's. DeFreeze's motivation was also similar to Manson's: through a campaign of carefully targeted violent acts, he hoped to set off an uprising of the underprivileged. And like Manson's string of ritual murders, DeFreeze's calculated plot to kidnap Patty Hearst misfired from the start. Patty's father, Randolph Hearst, in his sincere response to SLA ransom demands, hurried the distribution of several million dollars' worth of food to California's poor, setting off riotous outbreaks and a backlash of black resentment of the SLA.
In those first weeks after the kidnapping, DeFreeze also failed to exploit Patty for the purpose of freeing several other SLA members imprisoned on earlier charges. Before long he enacted an even more daring plan for capitalizing on his newly acquired and valuable asset, as he put the finishing touches on a scheme that may or may not have been his intention all along: that of making Patty Hearst a highly visible and apparently willing member of the SLA.
His methods in this effort are now well known: the conversion was accomplished by means of classic brainwashing techniques -- and much, much more. For the first two months of her captivity, as she has consistently described the period, Patty Hearst was kept blindfolded on the floor of a cramped closet in the SLA's headquarters, repeatedly abused both physically and sexually by DeFreeze and other members of the group, further traumatized by never-ending threats of death if she did not cooperate with their instructions, and informed that she had been abandoned by both her parents and society. In April, 1974, Patty re-emerged from this assault as Tania, brandishing a submachine gun during an SLA bank robbery in San Francisco. For more than a year she kept up a fugitive existence, after the lies she had been told were seemingly confirmed when her six captors burned to death in a police raid on their Los Angeles hideout. Then, finally, in September, 1975, she was apprehended by the FBI.
The trial that followed, on federal charges of bank robbery, stands as perhaps one of the most contestable legal proceedings in recent American history. In what many charged to be his attempt to court the overwhelming consensus of public opinion against Patty and her family's wealth and social position, U.S. attorney James L. Browning, prosecutor in the case, called as his expert witness Dr. Joel Fort, described in the New York Times as a "maverick," neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, who had testified in over 260 criminal cases (including the original Manson trial). Fort, whose professional practices have raised numerous questions of propriety, argued that Patty was a "willing participant" in the bank robbery, that her personal history clearly established her as a "rebel looking for a cause," and that she was not raped by SLA members but surrendered willingly -- if not happily.
The defense contended that Patty had been a "brutally victimized prisoner of war." But the three expert witnesses called by defense attorney F. Lee Bailey -- among them brainwashing expert Robert Jay Lifton -- repeatedly contradicted one another's testimony, arguing in favor of both conversion and coercion, and were so strongly opposed in their views that, as Browning told the jury, "they wash each other out." Lifton's analysis was thorough and well-grounded, comparing point by point the SLA's tactics to those of the Chinese thought reformers he studied in the fifties. But he and Bailey's other experts were unable to give the jury any much-needed insight into Patty's plight as something altogether new on the American social, political, and psychological scenes. To add to the bewilderment of the jury, attorneys on both sides of the case engaged in endless rounds of bickering. Bailey's attempt to bring Fort's questionable medical background to the attention of the jury was denied, yet one assistant prosecutor did succeed in suggesting to the jury that Lifton had a vested professional interest in finding a clear-cut case of "domestic" brainwashing.
The result was that no one, neither the jury nor the American public, ever got from either side a comprehensive and comprehendable explanation of what happened to Patty Hearst. The significance of her purported initial ordeal in the SLA closet got lost, along with the predictable impact of the techniques used by the SLA in their program of alternating brutality and sympathy toward Patty. The outcome of the trial was a verdict of guilty for Patty Hearst, and dim prospects of acquittal in an upcoming trial on eleven more counts of kidnapping, robbery, and assault.
What about Patty? From most accounts, following her capture she became something of a legal fiction herself, playing whatever role her lawyers or psychiatrists deemed most advantageous at the time. For seven months following her conviction she remained in jail, pending appeal, and then was reported to have suffered a severe emotional breakdown. In the wake of that incident, Randolph Hearst posted the $1.5 million bail that freed his daughter, only for her to become a prisoner once again, this time in her family's lavish Bay Area surroundings, guarded around the clock until her legal fate was resolved.
While on the West Coast, we attempted to contact Patty Hearst. We wrote to her father, exchanged telephone messages with his secretary, and then, finally, wrote directly to Patty herself to explain the nature and purpose of our investigation. All our efforts proved unsuccessful. Randolph Hearst was refusing all interviews, and we never found out if Patty even received our letter. Eventually, we were forced to admit that the barrier around her was impenetrable. We did, however, talk with several people who had spoken with Patty or the Hearsts (among them, Ted Patrick, who had discussed with her parents the possibility of deprogramming Patty on her release from prison, a plan that was tabled when Patrick's own legal problems landed him in jail in Orange County).
From those conversations and the paltry amount of information that has been made public concerning Patty's current state of health and mind, it seemed clear to us that the destruction of her personality, so deliberately and methodically carried out, had left her in an emotional condition that conformed with our picture of snapping in the most extreme sense of the term. As we had come to understand her condition, more than a year after her trial, following all the psychiatric care and treatment money can buy, Patty Hearst still seemed to be a troubled, unstable young woman, still wondering what had happened to her mind.
The most visible proof of her distress can be found in Patty's own words. In a half-hour interview granted to CBS News shortly after her release from jail, she spoke with surprising lucidity about some of her experiences in the SLA. When it came to her participation in the bank robbery, however, and the trauma of personality change she had undergone, she displayed noticeable confusion.
"I remember so little," said Patty of her performance during the robbery. "I remember what happened inside the bank up to -- well, up to where their man was shot, and then it just all goes blank and I don't remember getting outside, getting in the car, any of it."
She did remember the SLA's death threats if she did not cooperate, and her own feelings when she watched her fellow members burn to death on television. It was then she concluded that everything her captors had been telling her was true: that her parents had abandoned her and that the FBI was out to kill her along with the rest of the SLA. Nevertheless, despite her explanation, like her original jury and so many other Americans, her CBS interviewer still sought an answer to the question of why Patty did not call home during her desperate year on the run. To us, her reply further revealed her own profound confusion as well as the degree to which she has been misunderstood. It was reminiscent of the frustration Leslie Van Houten experienced in her attempt to come to grips with her own thoughts while in prison.
"Well, you know," Patty told her nationwide audience, "I've tried to explain about the not calling home, or going home, the best I can. And I know it's really hard to understand, because it's really hard for me no
w to try to think of what was really in my mi- you know, how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy. It doesn't make any sense at all; and it's something that I'm still working on myself, trying to understand how I could get so twisted around in my own head."
During that interview, almost three years after her kidnapping, Patty Hearst displayed all the characteristics of a cult member who had not been properly deprogrammed. She laughed uneasily and cried sporadically in her muddled attempt to present her story to the American public. The impression she left, however, was that she was at best uncertain and at worst attempting to cover up her guilt. The one point Patty did not address in her interview, which from all recent reports her family seems bent on pushing into the shadow of her experience, was what happened to her mind in that closet during the first two months of her captivity. In our opinion, it was that prolonged and comprehensive assault on her body, her emotions, and her intellect which annihilated the foundations of Patty Hearst's personality, making her every subsequent action problematical from any traditional psychiatric view and unquestionably moot with regard to all charges of criminal intent.
In his testimony, Dr. Martin Orne, an expert witness for the defense, stated that in personal interviews with Patty before her trial, whenever he asked her about her time in the closet, "You would see an immediate collapse. A totally helpless person would appear at that time." Others who have talked with Patty since her apprehension reported similar reactions whenever they brought up the subject of this experience.
Another picture, drawn by New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh early in 1977, provides still more insight into the lasting ramifications of the SLA's all-out assault on Patty Hearst's mind. From her own observations and those of others close to Patty at the time, Fosburgh determined that Patty was in a paradoxical and unpredictable condition, one that signified to us the state described earlier as "floating" -- the limbo of conflicting emotions that often follows an intense snapping experience. Friends described Patty as a "chameleon" capable of assuming a wide variety of personalities, from dutiful daughter to flirting coquette to angry, bitter, spoiled child. A year and a half after her life in the SLA had come to an end, Patty was reported to be still in a state of physical and emotional upheaval: menstruating nonstop for months at a time, her moods alternately anxious, giddy, or withdrawn, and manifesting other signs of distress characteristic of severely traumatized cult members. Fosburgh's description of Patty's appearance completed our sense of this tragically misjudged young woman. She pictured Patty as perpetually tentative, her voice a dull monotone, still tending to lapse into long and frequent periods of silence. "Her eyes are as large as plates," wrote Fosburgh, "and they are as sad as the history of the world."
Without having talked to Patty about her experiences, it is difficult for us to specifically relate her condition to our larger perspective on snapping, especially since the circumstances surrounding her transformation were so extraordinary. From our point of view, as we write, the outlook for Patty is uncertain. In view of the intensity and violence of her experience and its apparently continuing effect, and after having seen many other young Americans in comparable predicaments, we are inclined to agree with the opinion expressed by Ted Patrick that, until she is in some manner successfully deprogrammed, Patty may remain in a perpetual floating state of mind.
In that case, she will be a prisoner for the rest of her life, regardless of the eventual outcome of her entangled legal battles. Yet, no matter what she is known to have been through, the courts and the public continue to view her as a criminal. Despite her sworn contention that she was kidnapped, blindfolded, locked in a closet, assaulted, raped, threatened with death, and cruelly remolded in the image of the SLA, apparently most Americans agree with the man in the street, whose opinion was printed shortly after the jury delivered its guilty verdict, that "brainwashing can only be done by experts, not by kooks." Reading these popular and legal judgments in the light of everything we had discovered about snapping, it struck us both how desperately most people want to believe that their individual awareness is invincible, that their personalities, which they consider to be shaped once and for all in early childhood, are not subject to domination, alteration, or destruction. It also called up echoes of the appeals we heard from Karl Pribram, Hans Bremermann, and other scientists -- the complexities of modern life have created an urgent need for bold new ways of looking at the phenomena of our day-to-day world.
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Shortly after we returned to New York last summer, following our failed attempt to see Patty Hearst and a final swing through the Southwest and the Midwest to gather interviews, another shocking series of crimes broke into the nation's headlines, capturing attention unparalleled since the Hearst trial. On August 10, 1977, New York City police arrested twenty-four-year-old David Berkowitz in connection with a year-long killing spree in the New York area which left six persons dead and seven wounded. The assailant wielded a .44-caliber handgun and identified himself as the "Son of Sam."
This slightly chubby postal worker bore no resemblance to the blood lusting, psychopathic figure conjured up by the media prior to the arrest. Neighbors and co-workers described Berkowitz as "quiet," "subdued," and "a loner." No one could imagine what would prompt this meek, clean-shaven, well-fed young man -- if, in fact, he was the murderer -- to prowl the lovers' lanes of the New York area seeking out young couples parked in cars, shoot them in the head at close range, and then flee.
Upon his capture, after what was hailed as the longest and most extensive manhunt in the history of New York, Berkowitz was said to have shown "no remorse." Throughout his arrest and interrogation, he remained placid and uninvolved, a bemused smile on his face at all times. People who saw the suspect remarked, "That couldn't be him. No way. He doesn't look mean enough. He looks so soft." A police investigator who talked with Berkowitz said that he couldn't even feel anger toward the man.
The story grew even stranger. Under questioning, Berkowitz talked easily about his neighbor, Sam Carr, the real "Sam" whose barking dog had tormented Berkowitz and, as he later declared, instructed him to begin his campaign of terror. Throughout that year, in a series of letters to local newsmen, Berkowitz spoke of himself as "Sam's creation," a cryptic reference to the owner of the howling black Labrador retriever, which Berkowitz once wounded in the leg with his famous .44 handgun and which later became the focus of his hallucinations and delusions.
The more facts that emerged, the more clouded the overall picture became. Berkowitz in custody did not conform to anyone's image of a psychopath or mass murderer. In their first round of examinations, court-appointed psychiatrists pursued traditional diagnostic paths in their efforts to establish whether Berkowitz was certifiably schizophrenic or psychotic in a way that could be linked to verifiable disruptions of his brain's normal biological activity. After a battery of medical tests, including a brain scan, doctors ruled out the possibility that Berkowitz had any chemical imbalance, tumor, or other form of physical brain damage. Further psychiatric examinations and psychological tests also failed to establish the exact form of the functional disorder from which he was believed to be suffering.
As we followed the mystery of David Berkowitz, noting the doctors' findings that the machinery of his brain was thoroughly intact, we began to suspect that Berkowitz's condition might be better understood in our new framework as a severe form of information disease. Studying all the available testimony and waiting each day for the latest reports, we were convinced within the tirst few weeks of his capture that Berkowitz was our first clear-cut example of snapping in its most destructive form, outside the context of a cult or mass therapy. As more on his background came to light from published interviews with former friends and letters written by Berkowitz, we came to our own understanding of how he had reached his state of delusion and emotional detachment. Berkowitz had snapped, we discovered, not through an extraordinary cult ritual or therapeutic technique but as the result of a sequence of intense e
xperiences from his recent past.
Unlike Charles Manson or Donald DeFreeze, David Berkowitz was not the typical product of a broken home, misspent youth, or mile-long criminal record. On the contrary, his early years and his teen-age development more closely resembled that of Leslie Van Houten and, in some ways, Patty Hearst. Although adopted, he was raised by responsible, loving parents; yet he grew up in the midst of a social environment torn by the conflicting values of the youth culture of the sixties and early seventies. In our opinion, it was not in a religious or political cult but in the United States Army that Berkowitz underwent the drastic shift of personality that caused him to snap in the most extreme manner. In the army, over a period of several years, Berkowitz set off on a winding road of religion and drugs that left him, in the words of the psychiatrist who declared him mentally unfit to stand trial, "emotionally dead" --- a macabre but absolutely precise description of our delusional form of information disease.
Until he joined the army, Berkowitz had led a relatively normal, if somewhat lonely and disaffected, youth. Although chided in school for being a "fat little Jewish boy," he had numerous close friends both male and female. Growing up in a middle-class Bronx family, he was left, in 1971 at the age of eighteen, with a high school degree, little money, and few desirable alternatives for the future. So during that time of political protest and social upheaval, Berkowitz, by all accounts a straight, conservative, retiring youth, enlisted in the army and was shipped off to basic training in preparation for a tour of duty in South Korea.
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