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

by Jeffrey Toobin

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  “I was born on January 14, 1943 in Manzanar, California in a concentration camp which the U.S. government called a relocation camp,” Yoshimura wrote in a personal narrative for her lawyers, some time later. “At birth I was delivered by a medical student as there were no full fledged doctors to assist with medical care.” After Yoshimura and her family were released from the notorious camp, when World War II ended, they took an unusual step for the time. Her parents, who were also born in the United States, were so appalled and fearful of anti-Japanese bias in the wake of the war that they renounced their American citizenship and moved to Japan. They lived on a small island near Hiroshima, where her father worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army and young Wendy heard harrowing tales of the atomic bomb. Once the American occupation of Japan ended, work became scarce, and the family moved back to the United States in 1957.

  Wendy’s father started out as a farmworker, outside Fresno, and eventually opened a garden store. Wendy was behind her peers academically—she didn’t start high school until she was seventeen—but she was a skilled artist. A teacher at Fresno State encouraged her to apply to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she began studying in 1965. Like so many young people (and all of the SLA comrades), Yoshimura had a political awakening in the Bay Area, in her case when she took a philosophy course. “I met a man who opened my eyes to social injustice. (Obviously, it usually is a man, isn’t it?)” she wrote. “Then I met another man (again!) who had the time and patience to help me understand about the Vietnam war, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, classicism, sexism, etc. etc.” The second man’s name was Willie Brandt.

  Yoshimura and Brandt became a couple, and they made a pilgrimage together to Castro’s Cuba, via Mexico, which was a difficult thing to do in the early 1970s. They also turned to even riskier pursuits. On March 30, 1972, police responding to a report of gas fumes discovered what they called a “massive” bomb factory in a Berkeley garage, which had been rented by a woman named “Anne Wong,” who was later identified as Wendy Yoshimura. In the space, police found hundreds of pounds of explosives, gunpowder, fuses, blasting caps, a three-gallon oil-ammonium-nitrate bomb as well as ammunition, pistols, and rifles (including an AK-47 machine gun). Police staked out the garage and the next morning arrested three people who arrived there: Willie Brandt, Michael Bortin, and Paul Rubenstein, who was a roommate of Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah. In their car, police found a communiqué from the Revolutionary Army regarding a bombing of the Berkeley Naval Architecture Building, which had apparently been scheduled for that night.

  It was following the arrest of Brandt, Yoshimura’s boyfriend, that Jack Scott helped her flee the Bay Area. (Bortin and Rubenstein pleaded guilty to minor charges and served brief prison terms; Brandt also pleaded guilty and served longer.) Following the busts, Jack drove Wendy to Los Angeles, where the two of them flew to Philadelphia. There friends from the movement agreed to take her in, and she obtained phony identification in the name of Joan Shimada. She spent the next year or so as an itinerant, living in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Texas, working for sympathetic families as a nanny, and returning to California once in a while.

  In July, Jack Scott tracked Yoshimura down in New Jersey, and he proposed a deal for her. He would replace her decrepit car and pay her $600 if she would serve as the babysitter for the Harrises and Patricia at the farm for the rest of the summer. Yoshimura was a fugitive, too, of course, because she had also been charged in connection with the bomb-filled garage. A job caring for the most notorious fugitives in the country was a considerable risk. But she had few options, and she remained loyal to Jack for spiriting her away after the bust in March. She agreed and joined Micki, Emily, and Patricia in the apartment on West Ninetieth Street. A few days later, the four women headed for Pennsylvania. Jack Scott brought Bill Harris from California a little while later.

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  The farm was owned by a New York City fireman who charged Micki Scott $2,000 for the summer rental. When the comrades arrived in tiny South Canaan Township, about twenty miles east of Scranton, the thirty-eight acres looked like a slightly weather-beaten version of paradise.

  The house was straight out of Norman Rockwell—white-painted wood, with a balcony outside the second floor. The most distinctive feature was the wrought-iron design on the balustrade of the balcony. It spelled out the word “PAIX.” The farm was to be a place of peace, which it seemed to be. The farmland in this part of Pennsylvania was poor, and nothing had been grown or raised on this property for years, but the barn and a windmill remained. Three ponds, one stocked with catfish, dotted the acres. Perhaps most important to the comrades, there were no other houses within view. The privacy was total.

  When Bill arrived, he disrupted, in typical fashion, the serenity that the four women had enjoyed. He demanded that Wendy buy bags of sand and cement. He used these raw materials to make a primitive fitness set for the comrades—barbells and ankle weights—so they could maintain their readiness for self-defense. Bill paced off a one-mile course through the rolling hills, and he made the comrades complete it daily. Bill had reluctantly honored Jack’s demand to leave his weapons at home, so he contrived exercises with broomsticks to simulate his beloved carbines. (The women found these pitiable displays absurd, but Bill did not.)

  Patricia hated Bill’s demands for conditioning. She never regained the weight she had lost in Daly City, but even in her nearly emaciated condition Patricia displayed remarkable toughness. She jumped every obstacle, lifted every weight, and completed every drill. As she approached the five-month mark since her kidnapping, it was clear that she owed her survival in significant part to her strength—physical, emotional, and spiritual. At any number of points along the way, she could have simply given up and yielded to despair, fear, or paralysis. But Patricia was a fighter, and though her alliances were scrambled, her determination to survive never wilted.

  Jack visited the farm about once a week (with Sigmund, his aged German shepherd), and he maintained his optimism about the book project for longer than was justified. He brought steaks for the grill, and he played volleyball with the comrades and went skinny-dipping with them in the ponds. At first, Jack was so euphoric about his connection to the famous outlaws that he couldn’t resist showing them off.

  Shortly after he installed the comrades and their babysitter at the farm, he invited Jay Weiner, a former student of his at Oberlin and a sportswriting intern at Newsday, to celebrate Weiner’s twentieth birthday with him and Micki. Jack said they would go to the Poconos together, but he didn’t say exactly where. After a comedy of errors in New York (Micki’s car was towed and had to be retrieved), Jack, Micki, and Weiner arrived at the farm on the late afternoon of July 2. Jay was not told the names of the guests at the farm, but he quickly figured out who they were. “Are they who I think they are?” he asked Jack, who confirmed their identities.

  The comrades appeared starved for a new companion, and they welcomed Weiner into their midst, even though he was just a kid. (He was between his junior and his senior years in college, and his voice had not yet changed.) Informed that it was Weiner’s birthday, Wendy Yoshimura rushed to the store to buy ingredients for a cake. Emily Harris told Weiner that they “needed someone to back them up” in New York. Weiner explained that he was just a student on a summer internship, and he had neither time nor money to help. Patricia volunteered that perhaps he could learn to forge identity documents. Weiner allowed that it might be possible, but he didn’t want to be involved with guns or anything involving violence.

  In the course of a long, bizarre dinner, Weiner was treated to recitations of the comrades’ obsessions. Patricia went on about her drunken, pill-popping mother. Bill once again displayed his guilty conscience about the incident at Mel’s by stating (falsely) that he had not shoplifted, but just fought back after the clerk tried to frisk him. Making conversation with Patricia, Weiner told her that he had seen the already famous pict
ure of her in front of the seven-headed cobra—“the one with the shotgun,” Weiner said. Patricia thanked him but also corrected him. “It was a machine gun, not a shotgun.” Patricia pointed out that she, too, had just had her twentieth birthday, and she sat by Weiner’s side as he blew out the candles.

  Weiner’s visit was just pointless and weird—a tremendous security risk for no actual benefit to Scott or the comrades. Late at night, just before Weiner was preparing to return to New York with the Scotts, Emily Harris said the most sensible, and prescient, thing to him. “I’m kind of sorry we put you in the position of knowing that we’re here.”

  But Jay Weiner was the least of the group’s problems. In relatively short order, everyone was mad at everyone else. Wendy took an instant dislike to Bill, and her disdain hardened with time. She resented that he took his role as General Teko seriously and that he ordered everyone around. Wendy didn’t want to do calisthenics, nor did she feel obliged to participate in Bill’s spying and countersurveillance exercises. Bill and Emily’s marriage was as tempestuous as ever, especially after Bill learned of Emily’s roadside couplings with Phil Shinnick during their cross-country trip. Jack became frustrated by the lack of progress on the book and annoyed that he was bankrolling the farm operation with no prospect of repayment, to say nothing of any gratitude from his beneficiaries. Like his mother, Jack thought that Patricia would make everyone’s life easier if she just went home. With the heat off, Bill and Emily could integrate more easily into the underground, and Patricia could gain greater attention for her causes if she spoke out publicly. Patricia, in turn, regarded Jack’s attitude as patronizing, in that he failed to recognize that she was a warrior and revolutionary with no interest in surrender.

  In counterpoint to the bickering around them, Patricia and Wendy developed a real friendship. “She was calm and friendly and sane,” Patricia later wrote. “It was difficult to keep in mind that this quiet, cheerful young woman was a revolutionary, and a fugitive from charges involving explosives.” At this point, Patricia too was an unlikely revolutionary, and they shared relatively serene temperaments, especially compared with the battling Harrises. Wendy was also a committed, knowledgeable feminist, and she provided Patricia with a stream of readings on the subject. In short order, Wendy came to return Patricia’s affection. Wendy wrote to her boyfriend, Willie Brandt, who was imprisoned at the time, “I hope you’ll have a chance to meet P.H. She is incredible! She amazes me! I swear only the toughest could have come out of it as she did. What an ordeal she went through!!” Wendy also watched with bemused affection as Patricia continued her habit of circling the names of her enemies in the newspaper.

  Wendy’s accommodating nature led indirectly to the end of the summer arcadia. Bill never came to terms with Jack’s prohibition on weapons. He thought the comrades needed them for protection, but at a deeper level Bill felt demeaned, as a self-styled guerrilla, that he was denied the basic tools of the trade. So Bill persuaded Wendy to buy him a BB gun, which he regarded as technically in compliance with Jack and Micki’s wishes. Bill then added target practice inside the old barn to the comrades’ daily round of training exercises. In typical fashion, he layered his personal grievances onto his political activity. For his target in the barn, he sketched a long, tall silhouette—based on the rangy physique of the long jumper Phil Shinnick.

  Jack and Micki were apoplectic when they found out that the comrades were shooting on the farm property. (They did not buy Bill’s argument that a BB gun was not a real weapon.) They thought the sounds of gunfire, from whatever source, might pique the curiosity of neighbors and thus lead to their exposure. Micki, as the signer of the lease for the farm, was especially concerned. So Jack and Micki decided to make a change. They told the comrades that they would have to leave. Micki, this time wearing a disguise and using a false name, rented them another house about an hour away, across the New York border, in the Catskills. (Shortly after they shooed the comrades out of Pennsylvania, Jack and Micki Scott brought Jay Weiner, the sportswriting intern, back to the vacated farm. There the three of them wiped down all the surfaces where police might look for fingerprints. “We’d make good cops,” Jack quipped.)

  The farm in tiny Jeffersonville, New York, followed the customary trajectory for SLA accommodations—worse than the previous one. This defunct dairy operation, with a one-room farmhouse on twenty-two acres, was to be shared by Bill, Emily, Patricia, and Wendy. There was just one bathroom. In the new location, Bill instituted a revised training regimen, which featured team-based search-and-destroy missions. Patricia and Wendy would take a three-minute head start, and then Bill and Emily would chase them through the woodsy terrain and capture them. At night, they worked their way through reading material, much of it sent by Jim Kilgore, from California, via the Scotts. Along with Wendy’s feminist literature, Patricia was particularly impressed with Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, a manifesto that had just been published by the Weather Underground.

  Still, the writing went nowhere. Jack came up with a different idea. He would recruit an outsider to conduct the interviews with Bill, Emily, and Patricia, and this person, in theory, would prompt the kind of expansive candor that they needed to produce a real book.

  Scott summoned his friend Paul Hoch, who was teaching at a small college in Canada. Hoch had a Ph.D. from Brown, and he had earlier been affiliated with Scott’s sports institute, where he wrote a book called Rip Off the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite. His politics were roughly simpatico with those of the SLA. Hoch brought a pair of tape recorders with him so that both he and the comrades could keep copies. This created the first problem. Bill didn’t want recordings of his words out in the world, where they might find their way into the wrong hands, especially those of the police or the FBI. Bill’s discomfort with the tapes reflected his ambivalence about the whole project. As an egomaniac, Bill liked the idea of broadcasting the success (as he saw it) of the SLA to the world. But as a half-baked revolutionary, he believed in propaganda more than journalism. As he later acknowledged, he used his interviews with Hoch to put forth the version of SLA history that he wanted to be true, but often was not. Hoch sensed Bill’s mixed motives and grew frustrated.

  Then Bill made the problem worse. His solution to the security issue was to insist that Hoch leave his tapes at the farm, where the comrades would transcribe and edit them. (Jack delivered them a balky typewriter.) In this way, Bill could make sure to inject his version of the SLA party line into all the interviews. Through the transcription and editing process, the interviews lurched further from the truth and more into Bill Harris’s notion of successful propaganda.

  This was especially true regarding Hoch’s interviews with Patricia. The edited transcripts of her recorded sessions were later recovered, and they became collectively known as the “Tania interview.” Much of the information could only have come from Patricia herself, but the form of expression was usually SLA-style jargon. The sentiments are recognizably hers, but the language sounds like that of the stilted SLA communiqués. The transcript includes handwritten edits by Bill but some by Patricia herself.

  Asked about her parents, she said,

  Everything from my upbringing, due to my class position was trying to make me declare allegiance to my parents’ values and ideas. As a young woman in high school, I was more than anything embarrassed by my parents’ wealth and class position.

  About Steven Weed:

  For about a year and a half, I was content to think about nothing but becoming a “gentle woman” and fitting into Weed’s life. But in spite of reactionary attitudes, I was growing. My relationship with Steve was changing and I was becoming resentful of his patronizing attitude toward me….While part of me was plotting my escape from this relationship, the other part of me was smiling for engagement pictures and cooking dinner—playing out various aspects of a role that I hated.

  About her kidnappers:

  At first I didn’t t
rust or like them….For a while I didn’t trust anything they said to me. But I got over that level of mistrust pretty quickly. I realized that except for security information, I wasn’t being lied to anymore.

  About her decision to join the SLA:

  My decision to join the SLA was the result of a process of political development….After a couple of weeks I started to feel sympathetic with the SLA. I was beginning to see that what they wanted to accomplish was necessary, although at that time it was hard for me to relate to the tactic of urban guerrilla warfare. But how can someone disagree with wanting hungry people to have food?

  Was she brainwashed by the SLA?

  I couldn’t believe that anyone would come up with such bullshit….I feel that the term “brainwashing” has meaning only when one is referring to the process which begins in the school system, and…the process whereby the people are conditioned to passively take their place in society as slaves of the ruling class.

  About the Hibernia Bank robbery (handwritten edits in Patricia’s hand):

  There were two reasons. We needed the money and we wanted to illustrate that [Tania] was alive, and her decision wasn’t a bunch of bullshit….We didn’t go into the bank with the intention of shooting someone. That would be crazy. But we also expected people to cooperate with us and not freak out.

  About a visit with her mother to her hometown of Atlanta:

  Catherine is an incredible racist….She went crazy. It was “nigger” and “we’re in jig town now.” There were no street signs in the black areas of Atlanta, and her comment about this situation was, “Niggers don’t need street signs.”