The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  No less serious was the problem of abuse and neglect of the aged, and I believed we should investigate nursing-home deaths. At the time, the law forbade this, but some years later my colleagues and I succeeded in getting the law amended, and the Medical Examiner’s Office now has the jurisdiction to investigate suspicious nursing-home deaths.

  Thus I participated in the dedication day ceremonies with great pride in the new Forensic Science Center. But at the same time I was thinking of the future. Whatever the accomplishments of the Medical Examiner’s Office in the past, there was still so much left to be done. For the life and work of any chief medical examiner are science and leading a scientifically motivated organization in the search for innovations and in the development of new technology that will expand the horizons of his profession.

  10

  * * *

  Is Patty Hearst in There?

  The afternoon of May 17, 1974, three heavily armed SWAT teams moved into position around a one-story stucco house in south Los Angeles. They had traced a van to the area, a van that had been used by the radical group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, kidnappers of the twenty-year-old heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst. An elderly black woman in the neighborhood, Mrs. Mary Carr, had informed a patrolman that a black man, a white man and some white women were in the house at 1466 East Fifty-fourth Street.

  The long search for Patty Hearst was over.

  The SWAT teams were taking no chances. They were armed with automatic rifles in addition to shotguns and tear-gas weapons. But they knew that the SLA was also heavily armed with automatic rifles, capable of firing a thousand rounds a minute, as well as an arsenal of other rifles, shotguns and pistols.

  Still, the police believed, the SLA must know it could not escape. The house was surrounded front and back, and the whole area sealed off. They would have to listen to reason. At 5:44 P.M., a SWAT team leader called to the SLA members over his bullhorn.

  “People in the yellow stucco house with the stone porch, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up, and you will not be harmed.”

  A minute passed, then another. Suddenly the front door opened and a small boy stood blinking in the sunlight. A man followed him out. Both lived in the house which had been taken over by the SLA.

  When the two were clear, the SWAT team leader repeated his message. No response. A helicopter circled overhead, throngs of neighbors crowded against barricades, reporters and television crews waited tensely for the door to open again—and for Patty Hearst, the most celebrated hostage of the century, to emerge with her captors.

  But there was no sign of any activity. The shabby yellow bungalow seemed almost empty. The SWAT team leader made one more bullhorn call, and when there was still no response he gestured to a flak-jacketed team member, who knelt and fired a tear-gas cannister through a front window of the house. A crash of glass, and then choking white smoke billowed outside.

  Incredibly, the tear gas had no effect.

  “They must have gas masks in there,” the SWAT commander said to his deputy. “This is going to be tough.” He gave the signal to launch a second tear-gas cannister, hoping that the gas might saturate and overwhelm the niters in the masks.

  The tear-gas grenade crashed through a second window—and then what the newspapers called a “war” suddenly erupted. Automatic rifle fire from the house poured out in deadly waves. Police and spectators dove to the ground. Others scrambled for cover. Hundreds of bullets struck cars and houses across the street. The SWAT teams returned fire, riddling the house, and live television transmitted the battle scene throughout the nation.

  In San Francisco, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and his wife watched the scene in horror. Their daughter was in that house—and the police were firing hundreds of bullets into it!

  The nightmare which had begun for the Hearst family months before, when their daughter was dragged screaming from a Berkeley apartment by two men and a woman, reached its agonizing climax one minute later when they saw the little house in which Patty Hearst was a hostage of the SLA suddenly explode into flames.

  The self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army had first come to public notice in connection with the murder of Dr. Marcus Foster, superintendent of the Oakland schools, who was slain on November 6, 1973. A few days later the SLA took “credit” for the murder and announced the existence of its “army” in a bristling declaration of war: “We of the SLA do now by the rights of our children and by the Force of Arms, and with every drop of blood Declare Revolutionary War against the Fascist Capitalist Class… .”

  Just over two months later, January 10, 1974, San Francisco police fought a highway gun battle with Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, whose van they had stopped. The van was filled with SLA literature, and the material led police to a house which had been set on fire just before they arrived. When the fire was extinguished, the police discovered stacks of pamphlets on urban guerrilla warfare, boxes of ammunition—and a device used to cap bullets with cyanide. A variety of acids and poisons, gas masks, makeup kits, disguises and maps were also found, as were notebooks with names that would eventually lead to the identification of the members of this strange revolutionary army: Nancy Ling Perry, William Wolfe, Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood, Patricia Soltysik—and Donald DeFreeze, a black convict who had escaped from Soledad Prison.

  Scrapbooks also found in the house contained, in alphabetical order, the names, resumés and photographs of prominent Bay Area businessmen who were targets of the SLA, including William Randolph Hearst, Jr. And in one of the notebooks were these lines, to which no one paid any attention at the time: “At U.C.—daughter of Hearst—that bitch’s daughter—junior art student. Patricia Campbell Hearst. On the night of the full moon … can you make up a teamwork game?”

  The trappings of a full-scale underground army in that house caused the FBI to begin to investigate the SLA. Still, there was official skepticism. Since the Manson murders in Los Angeles, the hippie movement had faded away. San Francisco and the neighboring University of California at Berkeley, which had been the spirited center of the movement, were now quiet. No riots. No class boycotts. No militants threatening to burn buildings. So the emergence of the SLA puzzled the FBI. Was it just a few crackpots with grandiloquent ideas, who called themselves an “army”? Some even doubted that the so-called SLA had anything to do with the killing of Marcus Foster. After all, Foster, a respected black leader, was hardly a member of the “Fascist Capitalist Class.”

  So the police did nothing to alert the targets named on the SLA hit list, nor did they warn Patty Hearst.

  On February 4, 1974, a “night of the full moon,” the SLA struck. At nine-thirty that night, Steven Weed, a young graduate student, and his fiancée, Patty Hearst, were studying in the apartment they shared. There was a knock on the door. A young white woman in a trench coat stood in the doorway, her head downcast. She said she had just had a car accident and wanted to use their telephone. Before Weed could answer, two black men armed with rifles shoved the woman aside. “Down on the floor,” one of them commanded Weed, pointing a gun at this head. Weed went down on one knee and was kicked, and kicked again, until he fell prone. The woman tied his wrists behind his back.

  Meanwhile Patty Hearst had been shoved into the kitchen, where the intruders demanded she tell them the location of her “safe.” She said there wasn’t any safe. Then a Japanese-American student in a neighboring apartment, Steve Suenaga, heard the noise and came over. He was dragged into the apartment, thrown to the floor, and tied up next to Weed.

  In the commotion Weed jumped to his feet, charged into one of his captors, and then ran through the living room yelling. At any second he expected to be shot. But his shouts caused a different reaction. The intruders let him escape through the back door while they kidnapped the prize, Patty Hearst.

  Outside, Weed managed to untie his wrists, but by the time he ran up an alley to the front of the building it was too late. The three abductors were c
arrying Patty Hearst, kicking and crying for help, out of the house, and were spraying the building with automatic gunfire. As they threw Patty Hearst into the trunk of a convertible, one of the men saw three students run out onto the porch of a house and sent them to the floor with a round of automatic fire. Then, tires squealing, the car raced off into the night.

  The SLA had chosen its first hostage wisely if it wanted publicity. For Patty Hearst was a member of a very rich and socially prominent family. Her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, had been one of the most famous and flamboyant newspaper publishers in this country’s history. A movie classic, Citizen Kane, had immortalized him on film. His sons, one of whom, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., was Patty’s father, were less flamboyant but still active in the management of the family’s vast communications empire.

  Three days after she was kidnapped, the SLA formally claimed responsibility for the abduction of Patty Hearst and issued its demands in a tape-recorded communiqué from Donald DeFreeze, the escaped convict who now called himself “Cinque,” after Joseph Cinque, the eighteenth-century African who led a mutiny in Cuba, where he had been delivered as a slave. Cinque demanded that William Randolph Hearst, Jr., donate seventy dollars to every poor Californian and concluded his communiqué ominously: “I am not a savage killer and madman … and we do hold a high moral value on life. But I am quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save starving men, women and children of every race.”

  And then, as millions of enthralled Americans listened to the tape on television, the frightened voice of Patty Hearst was heard for the first time since she had been kidnapped: “Mom, Dad, I’m okay. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up and they’re getting okay. I think you can tell that I’m not really terrified or anything. Try not to worry so much. I know it’s hard. I heard that Mom is really upset and that everybody is at home, and I hope this puts you a little at ease… .”

  DeFreeze had classified as “poor” every Californian with a Social Security, welfare or pension card. It would take more than four hundred million dollars to fulfill the SLA demand. Hearst donated two million in food to the “poor.” But this was denounced by the SLA as “a few crumbs to the people.” In another communiqué, Cinque said that Hearst not only had “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” but was a personal friend of such people as Howard Hughes and the Shah of Iran. Then he finished in an angry voice: “You do indeed know me. You have always known me. I’m that nigger you have hunted and feared night and day. I’m that nigger you have killed hundreds of people in the vain hope of finding… . I’m the nigger that hunts you now… . Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

  The fury in his voice was chilling, but once again it was Patty Hearst’s voice that fascinated people. “Today is the nineteenth, and yesterday the Shah of Iran had two people executed at dawn,” she said. Nothing more than that robotlike statement. But the implication was immediately understood. The Shah of Iran, Hearst’s friend, had killed two people yesterday; the SLA could execute one.

  The SLA demanded four million dollars more for the poor. Hearst said yes, but only if his daughter was released first. And the next tape-recorded communiqué from the SLA revealed for the first time a different Patty Hearst. She sounded angry at her parents and said, “I don’t know who influenced you not to comply with the good-faith gestures… . I no longer fear the SLA, only the FBI and certain people in the government who stand to gain anything by my death.”

  From that moment on, a new mystery emerged. Had a rich young college girl suddenly turned into a revolutionary comrade? It was unbelievable—but the next months would bring one shock after another.

  On April 3, just two months after she had been kidnapped, Patty Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA. Her new name was Tania. “I have been given the choice of being released in a safe area or joining the forces of the SLA and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people,” she said. “I have chosen to stay and fight.”

  Apparently, the SLA needed money to pursue that fight. For on April 15 Patty Hearst, along with seven others, held up the Hibernian Bank in San Francisco’s Sunset district. Bank cameras showed her holding a semiautomatic rifle. A few weeks later the FBI, acting on a tip, raided an SLA hideout in San Francisco, only to find they were too late. On a wall, among other writings, were these words: “PATRIA A MUERTE, VENCEREMOS.” (Country [of] death, we shall overcome.) It was signed “Tania.”

  Then the SLA, and its famous hostage, disappeared, only to surface again in Los Angeles on May 16. A young man and a woman were caught shoplifting in an Inglewood sporting-goods store. An employee followed them out and even managed to put handcuffs on one. But suddenly bullets spattered all around him. Patty Hearst, the new revolutionary, was firing from a van to cover the escape of her SLA comrades.

  The trail of that shooting from one stolen van to another led a day later to the stucco house on East Fifty-fourth Street in Los Angeles, a house that in a matter of moments had been reduced to burning rubble.

  SWAT gunners still crouched behind cars when my staff and I arrived at the scene of the shootout. I saw the fiery ashes of a building that had burned to the ground, and heard the crack! crack! crack! of ammunition still detonating in the ruins. No one could be alive in those ashes, I thought.

  Reporters behind the barricades at the scene were in an uproar concerning one question: Was Patty Hearst in that house? If so, she was certainly dead.

  It would be my job to find out just who was in that house, which would be difficult enough, but I immediately recognized the existence of another problem. The house was next to a black community. The leader of the SLA was black. And I knew from reports that the LAPD had poured hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the house, eventually causing an explosion of fire which killed everyone inside. No one could deny that the SLA had fired at the police, but to black citizens the reactions of the SWAT teams might seem excessive and even have a racist aspect.

  Thus I knew I had two important missions on that particular day: not only to identify the bodies, including Patty Hearst’s, but to find out just how the SLA fugitives had died.

  Someone handed me a yellow slicker, and I started toward the burning ashes of the house with my staff and an LAPD officer. Bob Dambacher, my assistant chief investigator, immediately discovered a charred body about ten feet from the southeast corner of the house. The police officer said that a young woman had burst from the house in a ball of flames.

  A painstaking step-by-step photographic documentation of this first body began. And when my staff had finished the job, I crouched beside it and noticed something odd: the melted remains of a gas mask on her face. No identification was possible at that time.

  But the mask showed that the other SLA members might have worn similar equipment. If so, they had prepared for a battle to the death, and that would be a point in justification of the SWAT teams’ actions. I also noticed that a pistol lay beside the body. And the woman wore boots and layers of clothing, not all of which was burned. Had she perished from fire and smoke inhalation, or had she been shot when she ran from the house? I couldn’t detect bullet holes in the blackened body, but an autopsy would reveal the cause of death.

  We walked into the debris of the house, where firemen were carefully removing burned wood, melted iron, and ashes. The sounds of exploding ammunition occasionally came from the smoking wreckage, startling everyone. I knew that the safest plan would be to call off our search until the last smoldering ember had been extinguished. But Patty Hearst’s body might be in those ashes; in fact, there was no doubt that she was one of the victims as far as the LAPD, I myself and all of America were concerned. So, leaving aside the pressure of the media, I decided to continue out of consideration for the Hearst family.

  In the southwest corner of the building another body had been uncovered by the firemen. This too was a female, fully clothed and booted, with a melted gas mask covering h
er face and an M-1 automatic rifle still clutched in one blackened hand. Was this Patty Hearst? I didn’t know. Her face was so badly burned that she was unrecognizable.

  Very carefully, conscious of the live ammunition, firemen continued to remove the scorched debris. The LAPD officer told me the house had been only one story, consisting of two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. No basement—but he said there was a crawl space under the house about eighteen inches high, and some of the gunfire had seemed to come from vent holes in the foundation wall around that crawl space.

  From the corner of the house where the bathroom had been, my top forensic photographer-investigator, Bill Lystrup, who later became chief of the Forensic Support Bureau, suddenly gave us a signal. More bodies, covered with pipes and debris, had been discovered in the crawl space beneath the bathroom. The investigator removed the wreckage, and I observed a bizarre scene. One decedent seemed to be kneeling over a second, totally burned. A third decedent lay sprawled next to the other two with a .38 snubnosed revolver beside them. The kneeling body was that of a woman wearing a cartridge belt which still held live ammunition. She too could have been Patty Hearst.

  It had become dark, and the Fire Department illuminated the scene with floodlights. We were bathed in an eerie twilight as the search went on, while outside the lighted arena the press and a crowd of hundreds still waited.

  I instructed my staff representative, Bob Dambacher, to contact the FBI. “Tell them I want the dental charts on all of the SLA fugitives at my office at midnight. We’ll set up a special office for the FBI in the forensic center.”

  “What about fingerprints?” he asked.

  “From what I’ve seen, the fingers are all burned. But they can check the bodies when we get to the autopsy room, just in case.”

  The firemen searched the ruins for three more hours, with no result. We had recovered five bodies, and I dispatched them in a medical examiner’s van to the Forensic Science Center, where we would begin work immediately. We could not wait. Three of the bodies were women, and either of two of them might be Patty Hearst.