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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Catherine couldn’t bear to participate in the vigil. She retreated to the music room, where she played Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on the piano.

  —

  At 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street, the first surrender announcement came from a police bullhorn at 5:44 p.m. In the following eight minutes, the eight-year-old boy and then Clarence Ross left the house, while the LAPD kept repeating instructions to the SLA to leave the house peacefully. There were no responses.

  The LAPD had a decision to make: whether to attack or to wait. It was clear that the SLA comrades were heavily armed. It was getting dark. Crowds were gathering. Given the rocky relationship between the LAPD and the black community, there was risk to the officers when so many were sitting in place for so long in South Central. A broader conflagration was always possible. The Watts riots of 1965, which were triggered about five miles away, were less than a decade in the past. In the end, the decision might have been dictated, simply, by the DNA of the Los Angeles police. Another department—perhaps the one in San Francisco—might have opted for caution. But aggression, not patience, fueled the L.A. cops.

  At 5:53 p.m., a SWAT officer named Kenny Rice fired two 509 Flite-Rite CS tear gas projectiles through a side window of the house. The flash from the gun lit up the entire street. Other SWAT team members could hear the canisters bouncing around the walls and then the hiss of the gas disbursing.

  Suddenly automatic weapons fire began pouring from the house.

  The biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil had begun, and it was on live television.

  —

  Most of the bullets, in both directions, were flying directly over Al Preciado’s head. Kneeling behind the stone wall in front of the porch, he heard the SLA machine-gun fire aimed at the officers hidden behind cars and buildings on the far side of Fifty-Fourth Street. The return fire by the police headed toward the front windows. A similar exchange of fire was taking place in the rear.

  In those days, LAPD officers had to purchase their own weapons, and Preciado had invested in an Armalite AR-180 semiautomatic assault rifle, a civilian version of the M-15 carbine that was used by American troops in Vietnam. (The AR-180 was especially popular with the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, which dubbed the gun “the widowmaker.”) The magazines for the gun held twenty rounds, and Preciado had stashed five of them in his uniform before approaching the house. When the bullets started flying, he inched toward the corner of the stone wall and managed to point his gun toward one of the front windows. In short order, he had exhausted his ammunition—one hundred bullets.

  “I need more ammo!” he shouted to his colleagues who had taken over the house next door.

  Along with the gunfire, the police continued to lob tear gas into the house, to no effect. In light of the failure of the gas to chase out the criminals, the officers assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that the comrades possessed modern military-grade gas masks, like the ones they left behind in the house on Eighty-Fourth Street.

  In a matter of minutes—that is, by 6:00 p.m.—the SWAT teams were running low on ammunition, especially tear gas canisters. The FBI SWAT agents, who were waiting impatiently at the Compton Avenue command post, volunteered their tear gas projectiles, but a quick inspection revealed that their 37-millimeter projectiles would not work in the LAPD’s 40-millimeter launchers. So the LAPD allowed the FBI team to take a position across the street from the house and fire sixteen gas projectiles at the house (and about sixty rounds of regular ammunition as well). Nothing succeeded in suppressing the fire coming from the house, and after a few minutes LAPD officers hurried the FBI agents off the scene.

  At the command post, the volume of shooting from the house prompted a new worry. What if the SLA busts out and starts shooting up the street? There were still many civilians in the area, and large numbers of spectators—looky-loos, in LAPD argot—had assembled by the police barriers. (The LAPD later estimated the crowd in the area at four thousand.)

  In light of the continuing, violent standoff, the SWAT team members on the scene decided they needed to escalate the confrontation. “We need fragmentation grenades!” they told their on-site commander, John McAllister.

  At that moment, Daryl Gates, who had overall charge of the SWAT teams, was in a police car speeding from headquarters to the scene. Hearing the request for the grenades, he thought, Jesus…

  A fragmentation grenade is a military antipersonnel weapon that sends metal shards flying in all directions upon detonation. The LAPD did not possess them, as Gates quickly informed his subordinates, but the request itself underlined the desperation of the situation.

  The firing didn’t stop—from any direction. The comrades were shooting mostly the automatics, from both the front and the back of the house, where the second team of SWAT officers was sending round after round into the structure as well. Still pinned down behind the stone wall, Preciado was being resupplied with magazines that fellow officers slid across the driveway from the house next door. He emptied them almost as fast as he got them—as many as twenty-five magazines, or five hundred shots, from this one officer alone. And still the SLA fought back.

  Stymied, the SWAT officers tried to go over the top. At 6:30, Jerry Brackley (the bullhorn operator) climbed to the roof of the house next door. He tried to fire a tear gas canister into a side window, but the gun misfired. He raised his head to make a second attempt, and a burst from a machine gun missed him by inches. Brackley fell backward to avoid the shots, and a spotter in a police helicopter reported on the LAPD radio band that he had been hit. In fact, Brackley was unhurt, but the report rattled and inflamed his colleagues. In fact, amazingly, despite the intensity of the shooting on both sides, there were no injuries—at first.

  When climbing down from the roof next door, Brackley discovered, to his amazement, that there were still three female civilians, huddled on the floor, who had refused earlier police entreaties to vacate the premises. Brackley insisted that they leave, and he lifted each one out the window on the opposite side from the shooting. “Don’t leave my dogs behind!” one woman yelled. Three terrified dogs were scampering around the house. But the cops refused to remove them, saying they didn’t have time “to go around saving animals.”

  As the standoff approached the one-hour mark, with no end in sight, the officers in the back of the house decided to escalate the confrontation. At great risk to themselves, they rose from behind the concrete barriers that were protecting them and threw two canisters of a different model of tear gas into the house. Federal 555 riot tear gas was both more toxic and more flammable than the CS gas that the police and the FBI had been using. The effect was nearly immediate. Black smoke appeared from a window in the rear of the house. The police held their fire for a moment so Brackley could make another announcement. “Come on out,” he said. “The house is on fire. You will not be harmed.”

  At 6:45—sixty-one minutes after the first announcement—the front door opened. “Okay, we got one coming out,” Brackley said.

  It was Christine Johnson, one of the residents of the house. She was so drunk that she had slept through the gun battle. She awoke only when the bed caught fire. She staggered out the door, and a SWAT officer, gambling with his life, rushed up on the porch to take her to safety.

  Between the fire and Johnson’s exit, most officers on the scene figured that the confrontation was nearing an end. But the gunfire from the house continued, now coming almost exclusively from the rear. At 6:47, Brackley tried again. “Come out,” he said, “you will not be harmed. The house is on fire. It’s all over. Throw your guns out the windows. You will not be harmed.” He received more gunfire in response.

  —

  Months earlier, back in the comparative serenity of the house in Concord, Joe Remiro had drawn up instructions about what to do in case the cops made a direct assault. They called for the comrades to station themselves in the crawl space underneath the house. At the moment of truth,
the comrades appear to have remembered Remiro’s advice. As smoke filled the interior, the comrades pried a floor heater from its moorings, opening a hole to beneath the house. There they kept firing their guns at the police at the rear through the air vents.

  For the six comrades, the situation was now beyond desperate, beyond horrific. Tear gas enveloped them. Fire closed in on them. Gunfire rained down on them. Three of them—DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Nancy Ling—might have known, when they gunned down Marcus Foster, that they would probably lose their own lives. But even their route to this moment seems difficult to fathom. DeFreeze was a low-level hood, Mizmoon an industrious library denizen, Ling a spaced-out sex worker. None seemed destined for an inferno.

  For the other three, their ambush borders on the tragic. Angela Atwood wanted to be a star, not a revolutionary martyr. A year earlier, Willy Wolfe was scouring for archaeological relics, not firing machine guns. And Camilla Hall, the lovelorn poet, was tending the flowers in a Berkeley park. Even at this moment, a chatty letter to Hall’s parents back in Minnesota was in her pocket. (“Dear Mom & Dad, How are you? I’ve been thinking about you a lot & hoping that all is well with you. I get a lot of strength from our love & it really helps keep me going.”) With the fire closing in on them, they could have fled, but the comrades stayed together, fighting, to the end.

  By 6:50 p.m., the smoke billowing out of the house was so thick that the police could scarcely see the windows. At that moment, the SWAT officers in the back caught their first clear sighting of an SLA member. Nancy Ling had climbed through a small space that family dogs had used to go beneath the house, to escape the heat of the day. She rose from a crouch, fired a pistol in the direction of the police, and was then immediately hit by seven bullets, producing two fatal wounds in her back, four nonfatal wounds in her legs, and one nonfatal wound in her arm.

  Camilla Hall followed Ling out of the crawl space, guns in both hands. Before Hall could get all the way out, a police bullet shattered her skull, tearing off a large portion of her head. She fell to a prone position, and her comrades pulled her lifeless body by the legs back into the house.

  At 6:58 p.m., the walls and roof of the house collapsed. The pop-pop of unused ammunition exploding inside the gutted residence—which made a different sound from ammunition fired from a weapon—continued for a few more minutes. Then the guns were silent. At 7:02, the police decided it was safe for firefighters to begin to extinguish the blaze. By the time they did, not a single wall in the house remained intact.

  —

  “Look!” said Bill Harris, pointing to the television in the motel room. “Look, it’s live! That’s our people in there!”

  Patricia watched, trembling, from the floor. Emily sat on one bed, her faced etched with the horror of the scene. Bill bounced around the room, changing the channel, looking for new angles, swearing at the injustice of it all.

  “We should go up there and help our comrades,” he told the two women. “We could blast the pigs from the rear and fight our way in, so our comrades can escape.”

  “It’s no use, Teko,” Emily, always more levelheaded, said. “We’d be so outnumbered, we’d just be killed and it would serve no purpose.”

  “We should go anyway….We should die with our comrades.”

  “No,” Emily replied. “Cin would want us to live and fight on. That’s what we’ve got to do.”

  “Oh, I wish I was there with them,” Bill said, punching the bed.

  Patricia watched in silence as flames began licking the sides of the house. “Come out,” they heard Sergeant Brackley say, “it’s all over.”

  As the machine guns still roared, Bill cheered.

  But then there was silence as the house disintegrated into ashes.

  Bill and Emily embraced on the bed as Bill wailed. “It’s all my fault….If it weren’t for Mel’s…I killed them….Oh, I wish I were there….I wish I were dead, too.”

  Emily tried to comfort her husband, telling him that they lived to fight on another day.

  Overwhelmed, Patricia went into the bathroom and locked the door. “I was a soldier, an urban guerrilla, in the people’s army,” she thought. “It was a role I had accepted in exchange for my very life. There was no turning back. The police or the FBI would shoot me on sight, just as they had killed my comrades.”

  Emily coaxed Patricia out, and the three watched the postmortems on television. As it happened, they were the only living people on earth who knew the answer to the question that the reporters were asking each other: Was Patricia Hearst inside that house?

  —

  The scale of the battle on Fifty-Fourth Street was enormous. According to a subsequent investigation by the LAPD, the SWAT team fired more than fifty-three hundred rounds of ammunition in a little more than an hour of fighting. The police used eighty-three tear gas canisters. The number of rounds fired by the SLA comrades could not be determined with precision; it was probably between two and three thousand. The fire department could not pinpoint the precise cause of the fire, though it appeared likely that the tear gas played an important role. (A two-gallon can for gasoline was also found with a bullet-hole puncture, which was another possible source of the blaze. Two pipe bombs, with blasting caps, were also found inside the house, but they had not exploded.) In addition to 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street, twenty-three homes in the area were damaged. The houses on either side of 1466 also burned to the ground. The three dogs next door were killed in the fire.

  The barrages of bullets from both sides inflicted little damage on their intended targets. No police officers were hit, and only a handful suffered minor injuries. Ling and Hall were killed by police. Angela Atwood, Willy Wolfe, and Mizmoon died of burns and smoke inhalation, though Mizmoon had also suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds. DeFreeze suffered a fatal bullet wound to the temple. It remains unclear whether he died from suicide or from police gunfire. By the time the bodies were removed from the rubble, all had been severely burned.

  As the battle was winding down, Steve Weed jumped in a car in San Diego and raced to the scene to find out if Patricia had been inside the house. One of his hosts thought it would be safer if she drove, and she gave Weed two Valiums for the trip north to Los Angeles. They were stopped at the security perimeter, and some in the crowd recognized Patricia’s former fiancé from his television appearances. “Tania’s found her brown sugar now an’ she don’t need no more of his shit!” one of them taunted.

  In Hillsborough, Randy heard that Weed had shown up at the scene. Like his wife, Randy had had enough of the young man. “I should go down there and level that asshole,” Randy said to the family and friends who had joined him. “He’s a real jerk. Leveling him would be like striking out the pitcher.”

  Five bodies were initially removed from the scene. Thomas Noguchi, the chief medical examiner for Los Angeles, scheduled a news conference for 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 18, to announce the identities of the dead. (Noguchi, who was known to covet publicity, delayed his announcement so it would not conflict with the Preakness stakes.) As he informed Catherine by phone a few moments before he told the world, Patricia was not among the dead. He identified DeFreeze (aged thirty), Wolfe (twenty-three), Atwood (twenty-five), Mizmoon (twenty-four), and Ling (twenty-six). The Hearsts, and Steve, could be thankful.

  But the following morning, searchers on the scene found a sixth body that had been buried. Another morning of tense waiting in Hillsborough gave way to relief when Noguchi said the sixth corpse was that of Camilla Hall, aged twenty-nine. “They died compulsively,” Noguchi said. “They chose to stay under the floor as the fire burned out. In all my years as a coroner, I’ve never seen this kind of conduct in the face of flames.”

  So Patricia was not dead.

  But where was she?

  PART FOUR

  15

  “THE GENTLEST, MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN”

  This is what we have to do,” Patricia said, after she and the Harrises observed the carnage on television. “We need to
go up there to L.A. and do a search and destroy mission on the cops.”

  “Fuck it,” she said. “If we’re going to go out, let’s go out in a blaze of glory.”

  The shoot-out at Fifty-Fourth Street cemented Patricia’s transformation into a committed revolutionary. She was kidnapped on February 4. On March 31, she convinced the comrades of her worthiness to join the SLA; on April 3, she sent the communiqué in which she vowed to “stay and fight” under her new name of Tania; on April 15, she participated in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank; on April 24, she sent the communiqué that mocked the idea that she had been brainwashed; on May 16, she fired her machine gun (and another gun) at Mel’s to free Bill Harris from the clutches of his pursuers; on May 17, she watched her comrades, including Willy Wolfe, die excruciating deaths.

  Patricia closed the door to her former life. The police were already after her in connection with the bank robbery, and now she would be wanted for the Mel’s shooting as well. Her conversion from victim to perpetrator was complete. And besides, she asked herself, who had her real interests at heart? Starting from the day of the kidnapping, the comrades had warned Patricia that the only real threat to her life came from the police. The SLA was not going to harm her; the FBI, and its allies in law enforcement, were. DeFreeze made the point over and over again. That’s why he gave her a shotgun, way back in Daly City—to protect herself in the event of an attack by the cops or the FBI. Well, the raid happened, just as DeFreeze and the others had predicted, and the police wiped out everyone they found. They would have shot her too if they had the chance. Patricia had every reason to believe that the cops would now keep trying to kill her. Back in Berkeley, the Barb reached the same conclusion. Under the headline “War Has Come Home: The First Massacre,” the paper wrote, “To the disappointment of both the police and spectators, Tania’s body wasn’t found in the rubble. The police were disappointed because she was fast becoming a dangerous, elusive, and identifiable revolutionary symbol.”