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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Although the murder of Marcus Foster was considered a state crime, the FBI had still opened what was known as a passive file on the Symbionese Liberation Army. The file didn’t amount to much more than newspaper clippings. Kidnapping, though, was long regarded as a federal offense, so the Hearst case belonged to the FBI from the beginning. The bureau gave the investigation the code name HERNAP. Bates directed an agent to move into the mansion, to provide security and to monitor for ransom demands. But the truth was, after searching the scene of the kidnapping for clues, the FBI had very little idea how to proceed. At this point, the bureau was populated almost entirely by white male agents who wore white shirts and black shoes and had crew cuts; they knew little about the radical underground and had no chance of infiltrating those circles. Who were the SLA? Where were they? Who were their friends and allies? The FBI had no idea and few ways of finding out.

  Still, there was an immediate question to be addressed. The one demand in the communiqué was for newspapers to print it in its entirety. Other publications would almost certainly follow the lead of Hearst’s own Examiner, so the issue was really up to Randy to decide. One could argue that to print the communiqué was to give in to terroristic demands; one could say, further, that giving kidnappers this sort of forum created a bad precedent and a perverse incentive for future politically motivated criminals. Randy Hearst had no interest in those arguments. He wanted his daughter safe back home, and the way to achieve that result appeared to start with printing the communiqué. It ran in the Examiner the next day.

  Back in the safe house, DeFreeze displayed no evident satisfaction that his words had been published around the world. In a pattern that would recur, his attention wandered, and he retreated in silence to his bedroom and plum wine. For Patricia, day two in the closet resembled day one. But then a new figure opened the door. She called herself Gelina, but her real name was Angela De Angelis Atwood, and she would turn out to be another critical figure in Patricia’s captivity. If DeFreeze was the bad cop, Angela was the good one.

  —

  When Jane Pauley, the future newscaster, arrived on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington as a freshman in 1968, her sister Ann was already a junior math major at the school. One day, while the sisters were drinking sodas in the Student Union, a beautiful young woman walked by, followed by every eye in the room. Ann didn’t know the woman personally, but she knew her name. “That’s Angela De Angelis,” Ann told Jane. On a campus of thirty thousand students, Angela—exotic, theatrical, charismatic—had made herself a celebrity.

  Her name meant Angel of the Angels, which pretty well summed up her upbringing. Raised in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey, she was the first and favorite of three daughters. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was business manager of Local 999 of the Teamsters union. A devout Catholic and attentive student, Angela was a prototypical good girl (and head cheerleader). When her mother died when she was fourteen, Angela took over the parenting duties for her younger sisters. Small wonder that her father called her Angel. She went to study acting in Indiana, where her dark-haired good looks stood out among the blondes in the corn belt. In Bloomington, she stumbled on a Life magazine feature on the Mafia. Many of her father’s friends were featured, and Angel started to realize that the world was a more complicated place than she had imagined.

  At Indiana, Angela had an awakening common to students in the late 1960s, but her transformation was a gradual one. Angel, as she was still known, belonged to the Kappa Pickers, the singing group affiliated with the elite Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority that performed on Arthur Godfrey’s television show, where they sang “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” But Angel was not long for such middle-of-the-road fare. The theater world had taken on a political cast at Indiana, where students began performing on street corners and in prisons. The leader of the avant-garde scene was a student named Kevin Kline, and Angela became his assistant, running a guerrilla theater group based in a local coffeehouse. Still, even as Angel embraced a harder-edged politics, there was always a sweetness about her. One weekend, she brought some friends from New Jersey to town, and she fixed one of them up with Jane Pauley for the day. At a party that evening, Pauley’s date had maneuvered her into a bedroom. Sensing her naive young friend was in danger, Angel swooped into the bedroom and freed Pauley from her date’s advances.

  While still an undergraduate, Angel married another Indiana actor, Gary Atwood. (Atwood beat out Kline for the lead in a university production of Hamlet.) At that time, Angel and Gary cared more for drugs, especially LSD, than politics, but then Bill Harris, a Vietnam vet who was back at Indiana for a second tour as a student, joined the theater program. He and his girlfriend, Emily Montague, and Angel and Gary Atwood became neighbors and friends. Then the Atwoods, followed by the Harrises, moved out to Berkeley.

  Angel (who now preferred to be called Angela) was still trying to make it as an actress, and she won a leading role in a community theater production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. But community theater didn’t pay the bills, especially after Gary split and went back east. Now single, Angela made ends meet by working as a cocktail waitress at a restaurant called the Great Electric Underground, in the basement of San Francisco’s Transamerica building. She also found a job at the restaurant for her friend Kathy Soliah, who had the title role in Hedda Gabler. The two aspiring actresses became inseparable and even wrote a one-act play to perform together. In Edward the Dyke, Kathy played a lesbian and Angela a psychiatrist who tried and failed to convince her that sex with men would be her salvation. The two also took an adult education class together on radical feminism, which became a touchstone of their own lives and, indeed, the core SLA experience. The names of Angela’s four cats—Lalenya, Abraxas, Chagall, and Vagina—also provided clues about her interests and character.

  After Gary Atwood’s departure, the remaining three refugees from Indiana—Angela, Bill, and Emily—lived together, and they quickly found their way into the radical underground. On the rebound from her husband, Angela fell for Russ Little and then, more seriously, for Joe Remiro.

  Angela was, in short, an unlikely revolutionary and kidnapper—as Patricia quickly came to learn. On Patricia’s second day, Angela offered Patricia a meal, which she declined. How about some tea or water? She could tell that Patricia feared being poisoned, so Atwood made her an offer. “I’ll bring it here, and I’ll drink half of it, so you know it’s OK,” she said. Patricia took a sip of water.

  Atwood, improbably enough, tried to be Patricia’s best girlfriend. She left the door to the closet open and gabbed in girlish monologues, mostly about her love for Joe Remiro. Like an adolescent mooning about a crush, she talked about how handsome Joe was, what a kind person he was…Atwood (as Gelina) just wanted Joe back. That was the only reason Patricia was kidnapped, she said. Angela didn’t care about politics or the revolution; she just wanted her boyfriend back. Alone among the SLA women (and men), Atwood allowed herself some eye-rolling iconoclasm about the self-serious rituals of the SLA. DeFreeze believed in conditioning exercises for the group, even in the tight confines of the house. But Angela drew a line. “I never do push-ups!” she said to Patricia with a giggle.

  Even in her straitened circumstances, Patricia turned out to be a savvy judge of her keepers. Angela remained a ditzy actress. Nancy Ling worshipped DeFreeze as if he were some kind of god. Mizmoon preached revolution and bragged about violence. (Patricia heard Mizmoon boasting that she had killed a chicken with her bare hands in a bathtub.) Emily Harris was grim-faced and withdrawn. Camilla Hall was rarely around the house in Daly City, because the comrades recognized that she was the least known to the authorities and thus had the greatest ability to circulate aboveground.

  After the first couple of days, DeFreeze wanted to set up a structure for Patricia’s captivity. Besides himself, he wanted only three people to have contact with her. That way, if she were released, she would not be able to identify all of them. In addition, DeFreeze recognized tha
t he had no rapport with Patricia, so he thought that others might have better luck getting information out of her. The first was Angela Atwood, of course, because she had already more or less adopted Patricia. The second was Nancy Ling—mostly employed to keep an eye on Angela. DeFreeze wanted to make sure that Patricia always remembered that she was a prisoner of war.

  Cinque’s third designee was Willy Wolfe. This, too, made sense. Wolfe, the physician’s son who had gone to prep school, came from the most similar background to Patricia’s. Their shared social class distinguished them from everyone else at Northridge Drive. DeFreeze figured right on this score.

  In his gentle, soft-spoken way, Wolfe (whom Patricia knew as Cujo) set about providing Hearst’s political education. He gave her a copy of the SLA’s urtext—George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. He also talked about the prison at Vacaville—how poorly the inmates were treated, especially when it came to medical care. (He spoke with such intimate knowledge that Patricia at first thought Wolfe himself had been incarcerated there.) Wolfe sat outside Patricia’s closet and read Maoist and Marxist literature to her, including The Communist Manifesto, Carlos Marighella’s manual for guerrilla warfare, and Mao’s Little Red Book. He had a favorite quotation that he recited many times. “All men must die, but death can vary in significance. The ancient Chinese writer Ssu-ma Ch’ien said, ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather, but to work for the Fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.’ ” Wolfe made clear to Patricia that he was willing to die for the people. Hearst couldn’t fathom Wolfe’s goals, but his sincerity was unmistakable.

  Patricia’s moment-to-moment terror ebbed. The death threats subsided. She was not going to be executed, like Marcus Foster. The door to her closet stayed open for longer periods of time. The SLA members no longer blasted the radio so she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Still, the question remained: What were they going to do with Patricia?

  DeFreeze, sequestered in his bedroom, wouldn’t say. Finally, Bill Harris decided to make a suggestion.

  6

  NOT JUST A BUNCH OF NUTS

  Bill Harris still liked his old idea of hijacking a trailer truck full of frozen turkeys and distributing them to the needy. It would have been guerrilla theater at its best, a zany, modern take on Robin Hood. Take the Butterballs from the corporations and give to the poor…Harris also understood that the notion was impractical, maybe even impossible. Still, he gravitated toward the idea of using the SLA to redistribute wealth. Certainly, he thought, that kind of thing had a better chance of rallying public support, to say nothing of generating good press, than, say, murdering an African American school superintendent.

  What, Harris wondered, if they could accomplish the same goal in a different way? What if the SLA didn’t have to steal the food at all? What if the SLA could force old man Hearst to give away the food? Everyone always thought of ransom as something that the kidnappers demanded for themselves. What if the SLA demanded that the ransom for Patricia Hearst be paid…to the poor?

  Harris brought up the idea at one of the long, meandering group rap sessions in the Northridge Drive house, where the SLA members gathered in a circle and chewed over their ideas. DeFreeze was interested, but he also liked to keep his options open, so he didn’t want to commit to just a single ransom demand. He decreed that the SLA would demand that Hearst feed the poor as an initial gesture of good faith. Then, if and only if DeFreeze found Hearst’s effort satisfactory, the SLA would make a true ransom demand.

  In any event, the group decided to proceed and set about refining the demand. How much food? Given to whom? Where? When? There were long meetings into the night about these issues. Meanwhile, Patricia’s parents, as well as the FBI and the waiting world, heard nothing from the kidnappers after the initial, vague communiqué. Again, days passed.

  DeFreeze came to like the idea of a food giveaway so much that he decided to issue the demand himself. He would make a tape recording in his own voice rather than just rely on another stylized Nancy Ling communiqué. Further, DeFreeze combined the demand for the food giveaway with their most powerful propaganda tool—Patricia Hearst herself. There would be two tape recordings delivered to KPFA on February 12: one from DeFreeze, to outline his initial demands, and the other from Hearst, to establish that she was alive, healthy, and well treated.

  Drawing on Mizmoon’s research skills and Nancy Ling’s rhetoric, DeFreeze recorded a half-hour stem-winder. DeFreeze had a powerful speaking voice that belied his diminutive size, and his words, especially at the beginning, had an undeniable punch. “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom. Greetings to the people, fellow comrades, brothers and sisters,” he began. “My name is Cinque, and to my comrades I am known as Cin. I am a black man and representative of black people. I hold the rank of General Field Marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  As usual, the SLA imbued its rhetoric with the faux authority of an imaginary legal system: “Today I have received an order from the Symbionese War Council, the Court of the People, to the effect that I am ordered to convey the following message in behalf of the SLA, and to insert a taped word of comfort and verification, that Patricia Campbell Hearst is alive and safe.” DeFreeze went on, “The SLA has arrested the subject for the crimes that her mother and father have, by their actions, committed against we, the American people, and oppressed people of the world.”

  DeFreeze gave a lengthy summary of the business interests of the “ultra-right Hearst Corporation,” including its newspapers, magazines, television stations, and real estate. He then spent nearly as long excoriating Catherine Hearst for her role on the Board of Regents of the University of California, which supports “through its investments the murder of thousands of black men and women and children of Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia, murder designed to destroy the spirit that all humanity longs for.”

  At last, DeFreeze turned to his actual demand. “Before any forms of negotiations for the release of the subject prisoner be initiated, an action of good faith must be shown on the part of the Hearst family,” he said. “This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and the unemployed, and to which the following instructions are directed to be followed to the letter,” which was a reference to a written description of how the food giveaway should take place that was also included in the package for KPFA. The demand (crafted mostly by Nancy Ling) reflected the obsessive, meticulous style of the SLA.

  Hearst was to provide “$70.00 worth of meats, vegetables, and dairy products” to all people in California who had “welfare cards, social security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail or bail release slips.” The food was to be distributed in seven of the biggest cities in the state, and “there must be at least 5 stores as distribution points within each community, we suggest such stores as Safeway and Mayfair.” In addition, “the meat, vegetables, and dairy products must be of top quality.” The food giveaway must begin in one week, on February 19, and last for four weeks so the recipients “will not be forced to stand waiting in long lines.”

  As always with the SLA, there were instructions for the media as well. The SLA symbol of the “seven-headed cobra” must be displayed in all communications. The full texts of the statements from Cinque and Patricia Hearst must be printed. “The news media is warned,” the statement went on, “that all attempts to mislead the public concerning the intentions of the SLA, or to confuse the public by withholding or omitting sections of the tape or SLA documents jeopardizes the prisoner.” (The package for KPFA also included copies of the original SLA constitution from August 1973 and a sixteen-point statement of goals, starting with “to unite all oppressed people into a fighting force and to destroy the system of the capitalist state and all its value systems.”)

  The initia
l demand for the food giveaway was detailed, comprehensive, and completely insane. If taken literally, it would entitle millions of Californians, by no means all poor, to $70 worth of free food. (The demand covered individuals who were receiving Social Security benefits, many of whom, of course, were not impoverished.) The demand called for the Hearst family to obtain millions of dollars’ worth of “top quality” food and then, in essence, to occupy supermarkets in much of the state to give it all away. According to initial estimates, full compliance would cost the family approximately $400 million (more than $2 billion in 2016 dollars).

  Still, the demand for the giveaway, and all the other documents, hardly registered with the public at first because it was overshadowed by the voice of Patricia Hearst.

  —

  Patricia made her recording in her closet cell on February 8—four days after she was kidnapped and three days before the tape was released. (The delay occurred because the SLA took several days to work out the details of its giveaway demand.) DeFreeze held the microphone of the reel-to-reel tape recorder. He didn’t write out a script but gave Patricia paragraph-by-paragraph instructions on what to say in her own words. Her statement was in no way voluntary, but the way she phrased her captors’ sentiments offered hints about her unsettled psychological state.

  Her first four words became famous: “Mom, Dad, I’m OK.” Some people thought her breathy monotone suggested that she had been drugged, but that was the way Patricia always spoke—with a flat affect that gave the impression she was slightly disengaged. (Her voice somewhat resembled that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was also a product of a private girls’ school education.) “I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up, and they’re getting OK….I’m not being starved or beaten or unnecessarily frightened. I have heard some press reports, and so I know that Steve and all the neighbors are OK and that no one was really hurt.” She went on, “I’m kept blindfolded usually so that I can’t identify anyone. My hands are often tied, but generally they’re not. I’m not gagged or anything. I’m comfortable. And I think you can tell that I’m not really terrified or anything and I’m OK.” The diction was distinctly Patricia’s own. And the statement was true. By February 8, she was rarely in any kind of restraints.