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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  In his awkward way, Randy tried to signal to the SLA that his consciousness was being raised as well. “My own feeling is that this can be quite successful,” he said of the food giveaway. “However, I do feel that the real problems go much deeper than food and go into jobs and job placements. Possibly later we can do something about that, but at this time we’ll look into some of it.”

  —

  Kramer and Maze spent their first couple of days in San Francisco working out of the offices of the Hearst Foundation, but they knew they would need a major facility where they could collect and then distribute the food. Maze asked for help from Joseph Alioto, the mayor of the city and an old acquaintance, who directed them to a cavernous, unused World War II–era warehouse on the bay, in a neighborhood known as China Basin. (The warehouse is close to the current site of the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark.) Maze also contacted the distributor she had used in Seattle, who began ordering food to be sent to the warehouse and then distributed to the poor.

  Like everything regarding the Hearst case, the creation of People in Need, and its location in China Basin, had received a great deal of publicity. The walls were plastered with photographs of Patricia bearing the words “This is what it’s all about.” In short order, the warehouse became a magnet for people: volunteers, who wanted to pack boxes; donors, who wanted to drop off food; and curiosity seekers, who just wanted to be part of the scene. More to the point, because it was common knowledge that Kramer and Maze had $2 million to spend, that money became a magnet for every hustler in the city.

  Soon after Maze settled into her office at China Basin, a trio of men, all wearing dark suits and dark glasses, arrived unannounced. The leader introduced himself as the Reverend Jim Jones, who ran an organization called the Peoples Temple.

  “You’re an outsider,” Jones told Maze. “This operation should be run by local people.” With a slight edge of menace, Jones said he should be the one to run the program and manage the $2 million.

  Maze, who happened to be a San Francisco native, told Jones that she was fully capable of running the giveaway, and she showed Jones and his colleagues to the door.

  Another pair of early visitors were Joseph X Polite and Leonard X Vaughn, two members of the Nation of Islam. They informed Maze that they served as local distributors for several food providers and expressed the view that PIN should buy food through the Nation of Islam. Maze passed, explaining that she was using her distributor based in Seattle. But the two men declined to take no for an answer and made their way to Hillsborough, where they secured an audience with Randy Hearst, who had an open-door policy for almost anyone who purported to have a connection to the kidnapping. Without saying so directly, the two men suggested that a congenial relationship with the Nation of Islam might ingratiate the Hearsts with the kidnappers and their allies. Randy responded by calling Maze and ordering her to buy some food from the two men. Maze bought some eggs, which was only the beginning of her problems with the Nation of Islam.

  The human traffic in the China Basin warehouse reflected the raffish mix of San Francisco in the mid-1970s—from hippies to Teamsters. Cigarette and marijuana smoke drifted toward the ceiling of the hangar-like building. For this reason, the most unusual early visitor to the warehouse was a woman who appeared out of place in this environment, if not in the rest of the United States. She looked to be in her mid-forties, and she wore her hair in a prim bob and had on a skirt that draped well below her knee. She approached Maze, who was briefing half a dozen or so new volunteers.

  “God sent me,” the woman said.

  All the heads swiveled toward her at once.

  She explained to Maze that she was an accountant who wanted to serve in that role for PIN. Her conversation, like her initial remark, was just a little off-kilter. Her professional background, like her appearance, appeared to be entirely conventional. Her most recent job, she said, was to keep the books at a country club. She lived in Danville, a distant suburb of San Francisco, but she was willing to make a full-time commitment to the work of PIN. She also mentioned that she had a son, and his father was a “Hollywood movie star” whom she was not permitted to name. At this point, Maze could not be too picky, especially for those with real skills, like this woman. PIN was already a cauldron of eccentricity, so what was one more odd duck in the mix?

  So Sara Jane Moore, who would attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford nineteen months later, was kept on to tend the books of People in Need.

  7

  THREE HUNDRED BALD MEN

  Improbably, in just a few days, the warehouse at China Basin began to fill up with food. Teamsters driving forklifts dodged ex-cons loading cartons of milk on pallets. Several dozen Cal students volunteered out of solidarity with their kidnapped classmate. (This gesture had some poignancy because none of these volunteers actually knew Patricia; her closed-off life with Steve Weed did not allow for friendships with fellow students.) DeFreeze originally demanded that the giveaway start on February 19, but Patricia’s subsequent tape recording indicated some flexibility on the date. The PIN leadership planned the first deliveries for Friday, February 22. The project was coming together.

  Then, again, the impulsiveness of DeFreeze crushed hopes of a smooth beginning. On February 21, he released a new tape that excoriated Randy Hearst’s $2 million plan. This was, of course, unfair and irrational, especially because Patricia’s last tape had all but endorsed a modified version of DeFreeze’s original $400 million proposal. But the general field marshal, marinating in anger and plum wine, operated by his own rules, and he threw the whole PIN plan into doubt. “The Hearst empire has attempted to mislead the people and to deceive them by claiming to put forth a good faith gesture of $2 million,” DeFreeze said. “This amount is not at all a good faith gesture but rather is an act of throwing a few crumbs to the people, forcing them to fight over it [sic] among themselves.” He also revised his earlier demand to limit distribution to certain specified groups, like welfare recipients. Now, he insisted, the food should be given to anyone who asked for it.

  DeFreeze then repeated much of what he had said in earlier communications about the Hearsts’ assets. “The Hearst Foundation is a front for the Hearst fortune,” he said. “The foundation donates $3 million a year to established charities to maintain its legal status as a foundation. The $1.5 million proposed to be coming from the foundation is nothing more than half of what the foundation is legally required to donate annually.” Here, again, the Berkeley Barb backed the SLA cause, writing, “Randolph has been willing to undertake a heartless deception concerning the extent of his wealth, even at the risk of his daughter’s life.” Of course, DeFreeze didn’t know (or didn’t care) that Randy Hearst’s personal wealth was a great deal less than he imagined; nor did DeFreeze acknowledge that the foundation might have had other priorities besides paying off his extortionate demands. Still, for the moment, Patricia’s presence in the Daly City closet gave DeFreeze the leverage in the standoff.

  His new demand was for an additional $4 million for PIN—for a total of $6 million. In addition, DeFreeze tied Patricia’s fate even more directly to those of Little and Remiro. If Hearst did not provide the additional $4 million, DeFreeze said, “all further communications shall be suspended,” and Patricia would remain a prisoner of war “until such time as the status of our captive soldiers is changed.”

  DeFreeze was so mercurial—alternately enraged and disengaged—that it was often difficult to see why anyone paid attention to him. He often seemed like a drunken fool. But his statement on February 21 contained a peroration that had an undeniable, if malevolent, power, and it helped explain why, for all his faults, he could still captivate his followers. During the previous week, press reports had identified Cinque as the escaped convict Donald DeFreeze. But DeFreeze, in his tape, used his blown cover as a metaphor for his place in the world. “You know me,” DeFreeze said, so you think you can dismiss me. “You know me,” so you think you don’t have to repent for your o
wn misdeeds.

  “To this I would say yes—you do indeed know me,” DeFreeze went on. “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 my people in a vain hope of finding. I’m not that nigger that is no longer just hunted, robbed and murdered. I’m the nigger that hunts you now.

  “Yes, you know me. You know us all, I’m the wetback. You know me, I’m the gook, the broad, the servant, the spic.

  “Yes, indeed, you know us all, and we know you—the oppressor, murderer and robber. And you have hunted and robbed and exploited us all. Now we are the hunters that will give you no rest. And we will not compromise the freedom of our children.

  “Death to the fascist insect.”

  —

  Still, if the SLA had had to rely only on DeFreeze’s intermittent eloquence alone, its reach would not have extended beyond his bedroom. What made the SLA something more than a product of DeFreeze’s imagination were the women by his side: Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik and Nancy Ling Perry. They were the muscle behind the assassination of Marcus Foster, the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, and the “actions” that followed.

  Mizmoon Soltysik and DeFreeze were a kind of prototypical couple for their milieu in Berkeley. Mizmoon was white and middle-class, and DeFreeze was black and poor, and they shared something more than their radical politics—a deep loathing for their fathers. (This was common among the SLA comrades.) Born in 1950, Mizmoon was the third of seven children raised in a small house near Santa Barbara, and in her early years she did her best to conform to her parents’ expectations. She excelled as a future farmer in 4-H, as a cheerleader, and as a high school student, earning a 3.83 grade point average. She was even her mother’s designated representative to take her siblings to worship in the local Catholic church. But Mizmoon’s desire to start dating in high school soured her relationship with her father, a pharmacist, and his violent rages about this and other subjects ultimately compelled her mother to seek a divorce, just as Mizmoon was graduating from high school. She rejected her father’s politics but inherited his ferocity.

  She pieced together three scholarships to pay her tuition at Berkeley, but like many students in that era she soon felt more at home in the political scene than in the classroom. Soltysik had a part-time job as a janitor in the Berkeley Public Library, and she found a sense of community there among the researchers, activists, and hangers-on who used the library as their base. Mizmoon learned to use the library as well as clean it, and her research skills defined her role in the early days of the SLA. She dropped out of college as a junior, in 1971. She dated women and men, usually African Americans, but then fell in love with a white woman—Camilla Hall.

  Of all the members of the SLA, Hall represented the least likely revolutionary. She was born in 1945 to a Minnesota family tormented by misfortune. Her father, a Lutheran minister, and mother, a homemaker who also taught art, had four children, and three of them died of childhood diseases—two of congenital nephritis, one of polio. Camilla tried to compensate for her parents’ losses; she was named class clown in her senior year of high school. She went on to the University of Minnesota and did social work after graduation. Her politics, like her personality, were earnest and conventional. She took her work seriously, writing home about her efforts on behalf of a troubled eighth grader, “I’m having a hard time keeping an emotional distance from my client. I’m human and I get emotionally involved.” Noting that her parents were about to sell the family home, outside Minneapolis, she wrote them a letter that might have been more revealing than they realized. She said she had thought about moving back to the house, “but not until I’m married and have some kids—and who knows when that will be? (i.e. don’t hold your breath).”

  Hall was gay. She never came out to her parents, but like untold numbers of closeted young people she moved away, in her case to California. She tried to sell her drawings at a small gallery and wrote poetry for women’s publications. In the Bay Area, Hall no longer had to hide her sexual identity, and her poems displayed her new freedom:

  I will cradle you

  in my woman lips

  kiss you

  with my woman lips,

  fold you to my heart and sing,

  Sister woman,

  you are joy to me.

  Hall found a job as a gardener for a small park in Berkeley and reveled in her communion with the natural world (the subject of several of her poems). She represented what would soon become an archetype: the arty lesbian out to make her gentle way through the galleries and gardens of Berkeley.

  Hall’s downfall began when she fell for Patricia Soltysik, who, for a time, reciprocated her affection. In the joyful first days of their relationship, Hall wrote a poem in honor of her lover, whom she dubbed Ms. Moon and then rewrote as Mizmoon. Patricia was so taken with the appellation that she went to the trouble of legally changing her name to Mizmoon Soltysik.

  They were an odd couple—the brooding Soltysik, who was small and wiry, and the airy Hall, who was zaftig and ungainly. Mizmoon spent most nights in their apartment, which featured a poster of a Vietnamese woman bearing a machine gun, but she was never fully committed to the relationship. Even when she lived with Hall, Mizmoon insisted on seeing other people, including men. Hall tried to talk the language of revolution, but she had trouble even pretending that she was a radical. “Revolution has to be social as much as political,” she wrote to her parents, “but it’s going so slowly that it doesn’t seem like a revolution at all…very gradual consciousness raising would probably be a better term.”

  Like most SLA relationships, the union between Mizmoon and Hall was up-and-down. Mizmoon pulled away from Hall in late 1972, writing to her sister, “But, much as I want Camilla to be happy and get what she wants, I’m not into being her lover. Saying yes, though, about sex things, just has to come ‘for real’ from me.” Hall moved out of their apartment and vagabonded around Europe for a while, hoping to get Mizmoon out of her system. Still, when Hall returned from Europe in February 1973, Mizmoon went to Denver to greet her. The reunion went poorly, and they made their ways separately back to Berkeley. A few weeks later, DeFreeze took Hall’s place in Mizmoon’s apartment and in her life.

  By the summer of 1973, Mizmoon Soltysik and Donald DeFreeze had a new roommate—Nancy Ling Perry. More than anyone except DeFreeze, Ling came to be the public symbol and voice of the SLA—a tiny spitfire who backed up her revolutionary rhetoric with gunfire. The trio represented the molten core of the SLA. During that summer, the three of them began separating themselves from the outside world. They spent weeks in seclusion as they began to define their malign creation. They typed up a series of manifestos and communiqués; they created the SLA and planned the murder of Marcus Foster.

  Nancy Ling Perry, who preferred to be called Ling or later by her code name of Fahizah, did most of the writing, which was only one of the paradoxes about her. She was a frantic, prolific propagandist, a writer of great urgency if not refinement, yet she was also a street person, nearly homeless, usually unemployed, except when squeezing oranges at Fruity Rudy’s, a juice stand near the Peking House dumpling cart in Berkeley. Like Mizmoon, she came from a conservative background; her father managed a furniture store in Santa Rosa. Also like Mizmoon, she was a dutiful daughter through high school, a cheerleader and outstanding student; at her father’s urging, she sported a Barry Goldwater button in 1964, the year before she graduated. Unlike the Soltysik home, the Ling residence was serene, and Nancy had warm relationships with her parents and brother. But after a year at Whittier College (Richard Nixon’s alma mater), Ling, again like Mizmoon, made her way to Berkeley and turned her life upside down.

  At twenty-six, Ling was a little older than Mizmoon and significantly more experienced. Shortly after she arrived at Berkeley, Ling fell in love with Gilbert Perry, a talented African American jazz musician. Ling horrified her parents by marrying Perry when she was twenty and their fraugh
t relationship began her descent to the dark side of local life. Perry made little money (while cheating on his wife with a multitude of women), and Ling supported him, at first as a topless waitress and blackjack dealer at a sleazy bar in San Francisco’s North Beach district. She also sold pot, worked as a call girl, and shoplifted. Ling was political in the vague sort of way that most students were in those days, but more than other members of the SLA Ling also indulged in the spiritual side of the 1960s; she became a devotee of astrology and the I Ching. Another difference from her future colleagues was that Ling was more into drugs, including LSD, cocaine, and whatever commercial pharmaceuticals she could find to abuse.

  Ling and Perry didn’t divorce for years, but their stormy reunions became less frequent over time. By the early 1970s, Ling mostly socialized with black men, including one, Chris Thompson, who lived for a time in Peking House. Through Thompson, Ling met Willy Wolfe and through Wolfe became a visitor to Vacaville prison. She was also a lover, for a time, of both Russ Little and Joe Remiro, so it was no surprise that Little suggested she move in with Mizmoon Soltysik and Donald DeFreeze.

  In the summer of 1973, the trio brooded together, their resentments simmering. Mizmoon whipsawed between DeFreeze and Camilla Hall, and between men and women, as she seethed behind her mop and pail at the library. Ling was weary from the long struggle with her husband and her overindulgence in drugs, and she had become alienated from her work at Rudy Henderson’s fruit cart. (She had fallen in love with Rudy, too, and he disappointed her like all her men. When Ling was hitchhiking, a driver offered her a stolen television for $150. She presented the deal to Rudy, who bought it. When the TV turned out to be defective, Rudy insisted that Ling go to San Francisco to turn tricks until she had the money to refund his purchase price.) DeFreeze was the most embittered of the group. As a fugitive, he was trapped in the small apartment, with little prospect of ever leading a meaningful life. He missed his children, who appeared lost to him forever. He had no money, no job, no future.