American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The events leading directly to the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst in February 1974 began the previous fall, when DeFreeze fixated on a different perceived rival in Oakland—Marcus Foster, the city’s superintendent of schools. Foster had no idea who Donald DeFreeze even was, but Cinque imagined that they were in a death struggle for control of the destiny of the city. In his messianic way, DeFreeze vowed that only one of them would survive.

  Marcus Foster’s life once looked as if it were heading in the same direction as Donald DeFreeze’s. Born in 1923 and raised in the ghettos of Philadelphia, he drank wine as a boy, fought more than he read, and hung out with peers who were destined for the penitentiary. But steeled by the example of his mother, who named him after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, he developed an unyielding belief in the value of education. He graduated near the top of his high school class and went on to the only nearby institution of higher education that would welcome a striving but poor African American, the all-black Cheyney State Teachers College. He graduated near the top of his class in 1947 and much later went on to obtain a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania.

  During his two decades in the Philadelphia public school system, Foster offered students both an example and a lesson. His own life story showed that anyone, including an African American, could achieve success. As a principal, he turned around an elementary school, then the city’s main school for children with disciplinary problems. As an administrator, he steered a middle course between the city’s right-wing mayor, Frank Rizzo, and the ascendant black power movement. In the words of Foster’s biographer John Spencer, “Above all, Foster wanted his students to fit into and excel in the mainstream—not to vindicate themselves to disapproving whites, but to claim a birthright.”

  Once, at a meeting of top school officials about gang violence, ten actual black gang members burst into the room and began firing guns. “Hey, what are you doing?” one shouted. “Talking about gangs? We’ll show you what a real gang is!” After the intruders were pushed from the room, Foster admitted that he had set up the demonstration. (The guns fired blanks.) Foster told his colleagues he wanted to show them “how you might feel if you were a kid and you didn’t know when or where something like this would happen to you.” Marcus Foster was an unusual man. Later in 1970, he was named Oakland’s school superintendent.

  —

  In the fall of 1973, the SLA had a constitution and exactly three members: DeFreeze, Soltysik, and Ling. Still, the trio had a group of friends who had the potential to be converted into more active supporters. Willy Wolfe had moved out of Peking House and into an apartment with Joe Remiro. Angela Atwood, an aspiring actress from Indiana, had split with her husband and started a romance with Russ Little, before she moved on to an even more torrid affair with Remiro. Thero Wheeler, an eccentric BCA member at Vacaville, escaped over the summer and spent time with DeFreeze and the two women. But the SLA as an entity had done exactly nothing, nor had it given any sign that it would do anything in the future.

  DeFreeze and his roommates followed the news obsessively, and Mizmoon Soltysik used her time at the library to provide DeFreeze and Ling with research material to craft the SLA polemics. They all clipped newspapers, including the thriving underground press, and filed stories, indexing each by name and subject matter. They were political pack rats, and even though DeFreeze rarely left the apartment, much less participated in the life of his community, he always let his acolytes know what he thought about the outside world. In 1973, Marcus Foster was much in the news. Through Mizmoon, Cinque closely followed, and passed judgment upon, the superintendent.

  Oakland had a third as many students as Philadelphia but perhaps twice as many problems, as well as perhaps the most divisive municipal politics in the nation, which whipsawed Foster and his deputy Robert Blackburn (also from Philadelphia) as soon as they arrived. On the one hand, Foster had to appease the conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and his local ally William Knowland, the publisher of the Oakland Tribune, who stood for low homeowner taxes and tough discipline in the schools. On the other, Foster was confronted by a militant and growing black power structure, led by Bobby Seale and others in the Black Panthers, which was based in Oakland.

  The issue of school violence underscored the dilemmas Foster faced. A grand jury report in July 1973 showed that there had been forty-two assaults and one murder on school property in the past year, as well as almost $1 million in property damage. Foster responded by ordering the placement of armed security guards (but not police officers) in the schools. Republicans denounced him for coddling criminals; the Panthers said Foster was a tool of the oppressors (and volunteered to be hired to handle school security themselves). Foster tried to walk the line between demands for more security and calls for more community control. In the summer, he said he was studying a plan, funded by the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, to make the schools safer. It was a routine request for federal help from a superintendent in a big city school system, and while Foster received criticism from both sides, he nevertheless became a popular figure in the city. In 1973, Oakland renewed his contract for four years, which was cause for celebration, because it was widely known that other cities were looking to poach him.

  Still, in one small apartment, fury against Foster grew. DeFreeze assigned Ling to draft an indictment against Foster and Blackburn, drawing on the fringe underground publications that Soltysik had gathered from the library. The core accusation involved the use of federal funds to pay for security guards in the Oakland schools. The document charged the two men with “the forming and implementation of a Political Police Force operating within the Schools of the People.” It said that they were compiling “Bio-Dossiers through the Forced Youth Identification Program” to build files for the “Internal Warfare Identification System.”

  The language was incoherent, but the underlying rage was real. Thero Wheeler remembered a discussion at the apartment that fall. “We were sitting around at the house one day drinking wine,” he recalled for Vin McLellan and Paul Avery, the authors of The Voices of Guns, “and somebody started talking about this dude Foster. At the time there was a lot of feeling against him in the community. Bobby Seale was raising hell about him and all. All of a sudden DeFreeze sits up and says, ‘Man, we are going to waste that nigger!’ ”

  —

  November 6, 1973, was a typical, exhausting day for Foster and Blackburn. They had become close friends, despite the differences in their background. Blackburn was white, an idealistic former Peace Corps member from a middle-class background. There were signs, at that moment, that they had turned things around in Oakland. The school security crisis had eased, and the two men had just finished a negotiation with the teachers’ union over a new contract. “I tell you, Bob, the Lord’s in this thing,” Foster had once teased his less religious friend as they bounded cheerfully from one meeting to another, and Blackburn replied, “Yeah, he’s saving us for some really indescribable misadventures.”

  At a city council meeting that afternoon, Foster urged the members to restore funding to keep school gyms open for after-school activities. From the council chamber, the pair raced back to the administration building for an uneventful school board meeting. Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the two men gathered their belongings and headed to the parking lot, in an alleyway behind the building. The sun had set, and the asphalt was slick from recent rain. Blackburn noticed three people waiting there, and he quickened his pace to reach his Chevy Vega so he could drive Foster, and then himself, home.

  Nancy Ling fired first, with two flashes coming from the muzzle of her handgun, a Walther PP .380 automatic. She missed with the first and hit Foster’s leg with the second. Donald DeFreeze stepped forward next and fired two blasts from a 12-gauge Remington shotgun. The pellets raked Blackburn’s back, and he spun and staggered but remained upright. (He had twenty-three entry and exit wounds and might have been saved by a leather appointment book in his breast poc
ket.) Then Mizmoon Soltysik walked calmly toward Foster, who was lunging for the car door. In her hand was a .38 Special Rossi revolver. She fired as she walked closer, hitting Foster repeatedly. After he fell to the ground, facedown, Soltysik stood over his unmoving body and fired a final shot into the back of his neck, severing his spinal column. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Blackburn survived.

  DeFreeze, Ling, and Soltysik raced two blocks to a getaway car, where Remiro and Little were waiting to drive them to safety. The “action,” as the SLA called the assassination, was completed. The next day, a document written by Nancy Ling arrived at Berkeley radio station KPFA.

  SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY WESTERN REGIONAL YOUTH UNIT

  Communique No. 1.

  Subject: The Board of Education, Implementation of Internal Warfare Identification Computer System

  Warrant order Execution by Cyanide bullets

  Date: November 6, 1973

  Warrant Issued By: The Court of the People…

  On the afore stated date, elements of The United Federated forces of The S.L.A. did attack the Fascist Board of Education, Oakland, California, through the person of Dr. Marcus A. Foster, Superintendent of Schools, and Robert Blackburn, Deputy Superintendent.

  Written in the radical cant that would become familiar in the months ahead, the document explained the Foster assassination as a protest against the practices of “Amerikan financed puppet governments in Vietnam, The Phillipines [sic], Chile and South Africa.” It went on, “The Black, Chicano, Asian and conscious White youth in our communities recognize the importance of the Oakland-Berkeley area to the liberation struggle of all oppressed people.” The communiqué also made specific references to the federal funding of Oakland school security as a justification for the assassination. After several more paragraphs of similar harangue, the document concluded,

  DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT

  THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE

  OF THE PEOPLE

  S.L.A.

  —

  Three months later, when Patricia was wrenched from her apartment by DeFreeze, Bill Harris, and Angela Atwood, she had no idea about their motives. As she lay in silence in the back of the station wagon on February 4, the shock began to wear off and her adrenaline rush receded. In the course of the kidnapping, she had been hit in the cheek with a gun butt, and the concrete steps scraped her legs. Her wounds oozed and throbbed as she lay under the blanket. Still dressed only in her bathrobe and underwear, her slippers now gone, she was somehow both cold and hot. Her injuries burned, but she shivered. She murmured a question about what happened to Steve Weed, and DeFreeze growled at her to shut up.

  Later, she heard DeFreeze say the words for the first time—that she had been taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army. At first, Patricia couldn’t place the name. What? Who? Then it hit her. These were the people who killed Marcus Foster. These people were not just kidnappers; they were killers. Her fears redoubled.

  4

  THE POINT OF NO RETURN

  Beneath the blanket in the back of the station wagon, Patricia had no idea where they were going. Their destination was an SLA safe house in Daly City, a blue-collar suburb of San Francisco. Under normal circumstances, the trip from Berkeley took about forty minutes. But in planning for the action, the SLA thought that the authorities might be checking the traffic coming off the Bay Bridge, which is the most common route out of Berkeley. So the kidnappers took a long detour south to the less traveled San Mateo Bridge and then drove north to Daly City. The trip dragged on for more than an hour.

  On the way, DeFreeze’s group referred to each other only by code names, and Cinque—DeFreeze—took the lead in establishing discipline. “Shut up or we’ll kill you!” he shouted from the front passenger seat as soon as they took off. Bill Harris, on the other hand, was impressed with Patricia’s composure, especially compared with the panicked reaction of her fiancé, and he wanted to comfort her. Bill was in the backseat, with Patricia curled up and silent behind him. As Cinque bellowed, Bill Harris—Teko—reached under the blanket and held Patricia Hearst’s hand. She was threatened and reassured at the same time.

  The unplanned juxtaposition of terror and kindness in the station wagon would prove typical of Patricia’s time in captivity. The SLA comrades lacked the skills, or even the inclination, to attempt anything as ambitious as a brainwashing. Their schizophrenic treatment of Patricia reflected the muddled thinking within the SLA. Literally and figuratively, the comrades didn’t know what they were doing. But this non-strategy turned out to be a strategy itself, and so the body and the mind of their captive were whipsawed accordingly.

  —

  In the assassination of Marcus Foster, the SLA did deliver on the most bizarre claim in its communiqué—“execution by Cyanide bullets.” Allan McNie, the pathologist who conducted Foster’s autopsy, confirmed it. One of the bullets had passed through Foster’s body and come to rest inside his front shirt pocket. McNie removed the bullet and brought it toward his nose. Then he invited two other people, his assistant and an Oakland police sergeant, to sniff the bullet as well. They shrugged, detecting no odor. But McNie had a genetic disposition that allowed him to recognize the smell of cyanide, which resembles burned almonds.* The other two men lacked that inherited gift. But McNie was certain: the bullet was spiked with cyanide.

  The assassination of Marcus Foster had been the first attempt by the SLA to put Régis Debray’s foco theory into action. The idea was that an action by a small vanguard group would set off a larger rebellion by the masses. The opposite occurred. All of Oakland mourned. Thousands of people, black and white, filled memorial services. The Black Panthers, which had a rocky relationship with Foster, denounced his murder and demanded that the police capture his killers.

  Shortly before they killed Foster, DeFreeze, Ling, and Soltysik had moved out of their latest apartment in Berkeley. The core trio (plus Remiro and Little) wanted a place well removed from the heat that would be coming down after Foster’s murder. So they selected a location far from the neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland where radicals congregated. Instead, Little and Ling, using the names George and Nancy DeVoto, signed the lease on an ordinary, three-bedroom house at 1560 Sutherland Court, in a subdivision in the middle-class San Francisco suburb of Concord. The sleepy town was more than twenty miles and a world away from the tumult of Berkeley.

  Freed from the confines of small, urban apartments, the SLA comrades could indulge their pack-rat tendencies and build up their arsenal. They collected maps—topographical maps of the Rockies, abandoned silver mines in the Sierras. They rehearsed violent encounters in the closed space of the house. Remiro set up the drills: “For stakeout at restaurant and parking lot: Cin’s room is our base—there are three of us there. Zoya’s [Mizmoon’s] room is Camilla’s pad in Oakland. Osceola’s [Russ Little’s] room is the 24 hr. café,” one document read. Thanks largely to Mizmoon’s obsessive research skills, and her thefts from the library where she worked, there were many boxes full of documents. They also stored thousands of rounds of ammunition. In a closet, there were cyanide-tipped bullets. They were inveterate list makers, too, and Nancy Ling Perry’s to-do compilation reflected her surreal constellation of interests:

  ■ the Communique

  ■ all these papers

  ■ the filing cabinet

  ■ memorize addresses

  ■ make a dress

  ■ Molotov cocktails

  ■ Wood cutting

  ■ Buy bolts of material

  The group saved DeFreeze’s empty bottles of plum wine for use in making Molotov cocktails.

  Stung by the negative reaction to Foster’s assassination, DeFreeze decided to dial back the violence a little—by planning kidnappings as opposed to murders. This idea had its roots in the international radical movement that the SLA fancied itself joining. The Tupamaros of Uruguay were the model. The Sutherland Court house had a well-thumbed set of interviews with their leaders, where they explained ho
w the group used kidnapping as a political tool. All the SLA members had also seen the film State of Siege, which focused on the Tupamaros. In the course of their brief heyday, the Tupamaros kidnapped a score of prominent local figures, including bankers, judges, the British ambassador to Uruguay, and the president of the Uruguayan House of Representatives. They held their prisoners in what they called the People’s Jail and used their captives both for propaganda and for financial gain. In particular, the Tupamaros described, and the SLA members underlined, the story of how the group kidnapped Homero Fariña, the editor of a right-wing newspaper. Their aim in kidnapping Fariña, the Tupamaros said, was to “warn a certain class of newspapers that it was part of the repressive apparatus. We wanted to make clear the role played by the media at the time.” Kidnapping as opposed to murder—this was what passed for moderation in the SLA.

  Who would be their victim? The SLA made lists. There were almost two dozen names—mostly local bankers and corporate executives but also Raymond Procunier, the director of the California Department of Corrections. For some putative victims, the SLA drafted communiqués, in the style of the one sent to media outlets about Foster. One was headed “Kidnap and ransom and/or execution for failure to meet,” and it listed the target as E. F. Trefethen Jr., an executive at the Kaiser Corporation. Another referred to Charles W. Comer, of the T. A. White Candy Company, with a note stating, “kidnap and ransom and/or failure to meet.” As ever, the SLA documents pretended the group was bigger than it was. All the draft communiqués were headed, like the one following the Foster operation, “Western Regional Unit 10”—as if the SLA had additional regions and other units.