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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Before the robbery could take place, though, the SLA had to go about the business of informing the world that Patricia—that is, Tania—was now one of them. They did this in an extraordinarily cruel way.

  —

  With her blindfold gone for good, Patricia had a chance to explore the Golden Gate apartment for the first time. She was not impressed. The place was filthy. The comrades remained pack rats who hoarded news clippings (especially about themselves) and seldom threw anything away. They washed their clothes, when they washed them at all, in the bathtub. (Still, DeFreeze prohibited the comrades from wearing blue jeans, or dungarees, because he said black people disdained them.) Thanks to his work at the post office, Bill Harris had developed considerable expertise in stealing credit cards and other forms of false identification, so the comrades all had several alter egos. In a further effort to obtain useful documents, the SLA also made a practice of stealing unattended purses, which was especially important, given the gender breakdown of the group. Patricia also saw an extensive collection of wigs and theatrical makeup, which Angela (the former actress) had assembled to use for disguises. And there were weapons—lots of them. Shotguns (some sawed-off), handguns, carbines, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were jammed into the closet near the Murphy bed.

  In light of DeFreeze’s obsession with publicity, he wanted a photograph of Patricia to go with the announcement of her conversion. He set the scene with care, even employing a gender-based division of labor to create the right backdrop. He assigned a sewing project to the women, who carved a large black-felt version of the seven-headed cobra and stitched it onto a red blanket, which they hung on the wall. The group had a primitive Polaroid camera and an aspiring photographer in Mizmoon Soltysik.

  For the photograph, the comrades dressed Patricia in combat-style fatigues and handed her a sawed-off M1 carbine. Between her father’s lessons and her drills with the SLA, Patricia had developed a level of comfort with the weapon, and she cradled it with ease. DeFreeze choreographed the session as Mizmoon snapped a few precious frames of instant film. Patricia’s complexion is clear, and her hair still fashionably shoulder length, with a beret perched rakishly on the side of her head. The rope with Willy Wolfe’s Mexican charm is barely visible around her neck. Another long gun is perched on the floor against the flag. When DeFreeze approved, Mizmoon snapped the official portrait. For the 1970s, this image of Patricia Hearst became a kind of Mona Lisa, and nearly as famous. Her expression is inscrutable, as subject to as many interpretations as the larger tale of her captivity. She looks steely or terrified; her lips are pursed in determination or defeat; she could be battle ready or battered. (Shortly after the photograph was taken, DeFreeze ordered Mizmoon and Ling to cut Patricia’s hair; the woman known as Tania then mostly wore wigs out of doors.)

  Later, DeFreeze directed all the comrades to pose for Mizmoon’s camera in front of the same flag. The resulting image is overexposed and a little out of focus, but the personalities do assert themselves. Five comrades stand in front, while three kneel below; all wield weapons. With her tidy shoulder-length hair and polo shirt, Emily Harris looks like the open-faced midwestern college student she recently was, albeit one with an ammunition belt slung across her chest. Willy Wolfe is next to her, the tallest by far, his boyish face with a half smile suggests that he understands, at some level, what a ridiculous enterprise he has joined. In the middle is DeFreeze, doing his best to scowl and suggest leadership. Next to him is Bill Harris, wearing a comically fake mustache and beard, and on the far right is Camilla Hall, clearly out of place, looking as if she had never held a weapon before (which might well have been the case).

  In the front row, Patricia kneels on the left, her hair now shorn and wrapped in a bandanna, her gaze directed off camera. In the middle is Angela Atwood, the former actress, who looks graceful and cheerful, even in what must have been an uncomfortable crouch. Finally, on the right is Nancy Ling, the bantam-sized terror, whose face is fuzzy but whose energy is apparent. At one level, the overall effect is more comic than sinister, for the group appears like a collection of cartoon radicals or guests at a Halloween party who threw their costumes together at the last minute. But such an idea is misleading, too, because the group, for all their vanity and ineptitude, had killed before and would kill again.

  —

  Reading the SLA’s pompous and impenetrable communiqués was bad enough for Randy and Catherine Hearst, but enduring the silence from their daughter’s captors, through almost the entire month of March, was worse. They reacted in different ways. Catherine withdrew—to her church, to visiting priests and close friends, and to the bottle. She rarely said a word to the press, though she did volunteer one day to a reporter, “They can hide her from everybody else but not from Almighty God.”

  Randy self-medicated as well, but he otherwise took an opposite tack, exploring worlds that had scarcely existed in his gilded life. He went to Vacaville several times, to meet with prisoners who professed to have some influence on DeFreeze. One time at the prison, Randy even sat down at a typewriter and took dictation from a prisoner who claimed that his message would prompt DeFreeze to free Patricia. (It didn’t.) Randy engaged in weeks of fruitless negotiations with prison officials in an effort to allow Little and Remiro to make a live broadcast, as the SLA had demanded. Randy also met with the volunteers who were packing boxes at the PIN warehouse in San Francisco, as well as with the community groups that formed the coalition behind the PIN food giveaway. The leaders of these groups were as skeptical of Randy as he was of them. When Hearst hosted Russell Means and Dennis Banks, of the American Indian Movement, for lunch at a downtown hotel, the two men insisted that their bodyguards taste the food first, to make sure that they weren’t being poisoned.

  After the last PIN distribution, on March 25, Ludlow Kramer and Peggy Maze returned to Seattle, shell-shocked by their surreal month in San Francisco. But Randy still wasn’t willing to give up on using food for the poor as a lever to win Patricia’s freedom. He traveled to New York, to persuade the Hearst Corporation to put $4 million in escrow for a further food giveaway, which would take place in the event Patricia was released.

  On March 29, after Randy returned home from a long day at Vacaville, Sara Jane Moore (and her five-year-old son) showed up at his front door in Hillsborough. Unbeknownst to Randy, the erstwhile bookkeeper for PIN had had a stormy departure from the program. Unnerved by Moore’s increasingly imperious behavior, Ludlow Kramer and Peggy Maze asked a beefy apprentice private investigator named Jack Palladino to fire her and escort her from the China Basin warehouse, which he did. The next day, however, Moore returned and locked herself in her office. Several hours of negotiations, which included threats to break down the door, finally prompted her to surrender. Moore then nominated herself to go to Hillsborough to present Randy and Catherine with a collection of news reports about the PIN operation as a kind of tribute to them and their daughter. Her real agenda for showing up uninvited was to ask for a job in any of the Hearst enterprises. When Randy put her off, the matronly eccentric filibustered, while her son wandered around the big house. It took almost three hours, but the Hearsts eventually managed to shoo Moore out the door. Her visit was just another annoyance for Randy in his full-time effort to free his daughter. In the process, he became something that he had studiously avoided, even with his famous name: a public figure. Still, none of Randy’s efforts seemed to matter to the SLA.

  Then, finally, out of the blue came a breakthrough, or so it appeared. On April 1, Nancy Ling (in disguise) went to a florist and ordered a bouquet delivered on that day to John Bryan, the editor of an underground newspaper called the San Francisco Phoenix. Ling also provided an envelope to be included with the flowers. It contained two documents, as well as half of Patricia Hearst’s driver’s license. The first document came in the now-familiar communiqué format. The subject was “negotiations and release of the prisoner,” and the text was brief:

  Herein enclosed are the C
odes of War of the Symbionese Liberation Army, these documents as all SLA documents are to be printed in full and omitting nothing by order of this court in all forms of the media. Further communications regarding subject prisoner will follow in the following 72 hours. Communications will state the state, city and time of the release of the prisoner.

  Signed: I.I. Unit 4

  General Field Marshal Cin, SLA

  The codes of war themselves were also included, consisting of typical long-winded SLA gibberish—stating, in essence, that betrayal of the comrades would be punished by death and that lesser offenses (such as “tortures or sexual assault on either a comrade or people or the enemy”) would be subject to unspecified “disciplinary action.” The florist’s truck broke down, so the bouquet and envelope were not delivered until the following day, April 2. Still, the message seemed clear. Within seventy-two hours, the SLA would announce the release of Patricia Hearst. In Hillsborough, there were cautious celebrations. Anne Hearst moved out of Patricia’s old bedroom, to make room for her homecoming. The cook prepared matzo ball soup, Patricia’s favorite.

  But DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Nancy Ling—the dark heart of the SLA—had sprung a macabre April Fools’ Day joke. The communiqué, which was supposed to arrive on April 1, operated exactly as designed—to raise the hopes of the Hearsts, only to crush them in short order. This was SLA guerrilla theater at its most sinister. For when Ling delivered the communiqué to the florist, Patricia had already recorded her statement that would shock the world. In keeping with the SLA practice of delivering written statements to newspapers and tape recordings to radio stations, Patricia’s tape went to KSAN on April 3.

  —

  She began by protesting too much: “I would like to begin this statement by informing the public that I wrote what I am about to say. It’s what I feel. I have never been forced to say anything on any tape. Nor have I been brain-washed, drugged, tortured or hypnotized or in any way confused. As George Jackson wrote, ‘It’s me, the way I want it, the way I see it.’ ”

  As the rest of the recording made clear, there was no way that Patricia wrote it all herself. The passages of pidgin Marxism, in tone and structure so similar to previous communiqués, bore the stamp of the SLA theoreticians—Nancy Ling, Mizmoon, and to a certain extent Angela Atwood, all interwoven with the paranoia of Donald DeFreeze. At the same time, there was little doubt that the voice on the tape revealed a different Patricia Hearst from the haunted young woman who barely possessed the energy to read her first recordings in captivity. Gone, too, was the bored monotone of her previous life. Her speech was firm and clear, her cadence brisk. Many of the words sounded like her own. And they were, in every sense, revolutionary.

  Her statement, as shocking an utterance as any made by an American during the 1970s, defined the terms of the debate over Patricia’s state of mind. Had she really enlisted with the SLA? Was her behavior voluntary, or was she brainwashed or otherwise forced to join with her captors? Were her denials of coercion by the SLA believable—or more proof that she’d been coerced? Complicating matters further, the SLA possessed considerable sophistication in manipulating the media. DeFreeze and company recognized what the arguments about Patricia’s state of mind would be and sought, in advance, to preempt and refute them.

  On the tape, Patricia denounced those who were once closest to her, each in turn, starting with her father. “Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to supposedly secure my safety. The PIN giveaway was a sham. You attempted to deceive the people. You were playing games—stalling for time—time which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements.” Of course, this was both wrong and unfair. Randy never stalled for time but rather wanted her home as soon as possible. Then Patricia turned to her mother. “My mother’s acceptance of the appointment to a second term as a U.C. regent, as you well knew, would have caused my immediate execution had the SLA been less than ‘together’ about their political goals. Your actions have taught me a great lesson, and in a strange kind of way, I’m grateful to you.” Fairly or not, Patricia’s snide sarcasm about her mother had the ring of sincerity.

  Next she moved on to Steven Weed, and here the words appear closest to Patricia’s own: “Steven, I know that you are beginning to realize that there is no such thing as neutrality in time of war.” She expressed a measure of sympathy for the repeated FBI interrogations that Weed had undergone: “We both know what really came down that Monday night [February 4]. But you don’t know what’s happened since then. I have changed—grown. I’ve become conscious and can never go back to the life we led before. What I’m saying may seem cold to you and to my old friends, but love doesn’t mean the same thing to me anymore. My love has expanded as a result of my experiences to embrace all people. It’s grown into an unselfish love for my comrades here, in prison and on the streets. A love that comes from the knowledge that no one is free until we are all free. While I wish that you could be a comrade, I don’t expect it. All I expect is that you try to understand the changes I’ve gone through.”

  And here Patricia came to the crux of her statement: “I have been given the choice of (one) being released in a safe area, or (two) joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight.”

  But Patricia wasn’t finished, though her statement at this point meandered into a bizarre rant about automation, of all things. Addressing her father, she said, “You, a corporate liar…tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do, warn black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman and child….Tell the people that the entire corporate state is…about to totally automate the entire industrial state, to the point that in the next five years all that will be needed will be a small class of button pushers.”

  As Patricia worked to her conclusion, she introduced a name that would become nearly as familiar as those given to her by her parents: “I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia for the people of Bolivia. I embrace the name with the determination to continue fighting with her spirit. There is no victory in half-assed attempts at revolution. I know Tania dedicated her life to the people. Fighting with total dedication and an intense desire to learn, which I will continue in the oppressed American people’s revolution.” She paid a final tribute to Little and Remiro: “Even though we have never met, I feel like I know you.” In her final words, she invoked the unofficial motto of the Cuban revolution. “It is in the spirit of Tania that I say, ‘Patria o muerte, venceremos!’ ” Fatherland or death, we shall triumph!

  After the tape played, Randy and Catherine could not bring themselves to hold one of their driveway press conferences. They were too upset. Inside, Catherine confessed to a friend, “I think they killed Patty. I know she’s dead already.” Reporters on the endless stakeout in front of the house caught Randy as he was arriving. “We’re more or less shocked over this thing,” Randy said. “And until we know more about it, we don’t have anything to say.” Then he walked inside, and for the first time in his daughter’s fifty-nine days in captivity Randy Hearst wept. The next day, he and Catherine left for a respite at the Mexican villa of their friend Desi Arnaz, the actor and singer.

  —

  This moment at the beginning of April was a high point for the SLA. The comrades had forced Randy Hearst to spend millions to feed the poor, and his daughter had astonished the world by announcing her preference for them over him. Of course, the group still had no long-term goals or plans, but at this time its tactical proficiency trumped its strategic ineptitude. The SLA always planned individual actions with skill and care. So it was with the kidnapping of Patricia on February 4, and so it was with the robbery of the Hibernia Bank on April 15.

  Patricia acted like a full-fledged comrade after her communiqué became public on April 3, and her captors treated her as if her conversion
were sincere and total. Bill Harris taught her how to lace bullets with cyanide. DeFreeze showed her how to assemble a pipe bomb—a frightening undertaking in any circumstance, but especially in a small apartment and with the general field marshal’s unsteady hand. The group conducted daily drills in the apartment, including calisthenics and weapons training with their unloaded guns. (DeFreeze thought the loud clicking of inserting ammunition clips might arouse the suspicions of neighbors.)

  For a target, Bill Harris and Angela settled on the Hibernia branch in the sleepy Sunset district of the city. Wedged between Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean, Sunset in those days consisted mostly of single-family homes populated by Irish and Italian families. (Joe Remiro, the only SLA member from San Francisco, grew up in Sunset.) The business district along Noriega Street was lightly traveled, especially compared with busier parts of the city, and the Hibernia Bank at Noriega and Twenty-Second Avenue had security cameras. Later, much was made of the fact that the president of Hibernia was a local aristocrat named Michael Henry de Young Tobin, whose daughter Trish was Patricia’s best friend in Hillsborough. But there is no evidence that Patricia volunteered this information to the comrades, so this particular coincidence was unintentional.

  The robbery had enormous stakes for the SLA, not least because the preparations consumed the last of their funds. Between April 11 and 13, Camilla Hall and Emily Harris used an identification card in the name of Janet Cooper to rent the four cars to be used in the operation. On the night of the fourteenth, DeFreeze ordered a final splurge for dinner—steak and potatoes for everyone. He did so, he announced, because the SLA coffers would soon be refreshed.

  The primary objective for the robbery was money, but the propaganda value was nearly as important. In casing the bank, Bill had studied the location of the security cameras. The plan was for Patricia to stand the entire time in full view of the lenses. DeFreeze ordered her to wear a brown wig that looked like her hair at the time of the kidnapping. He didn’t want anyone to doubt that it was actually Patricia Hearst inside the bank. What’s more, DeFreeze wanted to make sure everyone knew Patricia’s weapon was loaded; her assignment was to fire a round into the ceiling and shout, “This is Tania!” Even the date of the operation—April 15, tax day—had symbolic significance for what the SLA called an expropriation, not a robbery.