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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  On her relationship with Willy Wolfe:

  My personal relationship with Cujo was based on a political and military relationship. The strong personal relationship did not develop, could not develop, until after I joined the cell because there would have been no common understanding and therefore no basis of trust between us….Cujo was an incredibly patient, loving and dedicated person. His experiences with the brothers in California’s concentration camps played a very important part in his political development….Before I got a reading light in the closet, Cujo read Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism and some other essays to me. He explained everything as he read, and never got frustrated if I asked a “stupid” question….Cujo was a beautiful and gentle man and at the same time he was a strong and ruthless guerrilla soldier.

  On sexual exclusivity in the SLA:

  People in the cell didn’t have exclusive relationships. There was no room for bourgeois types of personal relationships. The cell couldn’t function like that on a military/political level….After a while the comrades realized that our personal relationship was working well in the cell situation. Both Cujo and I were becoming stronger.

  On her comrades:

  We live for the people, and some of us died for the people. It was horrible to watch our closest comrades burned alive, but the people were able to see just how fascist this government really is, and what kind of determination revolutionaries must have to bring this motherfucker down. Our own deaths do not frighten us, for death is a reality of life, and we no longer run from reality.

  Hoch made some progress with his interviews, but the comrades didn’t care for him, and the book project withered.

  For a time, at the New York farm, Bill and Emily stopped fighting, but then Phil Shinnick showed up for a visit. Shortly after his arrival, Emily and Phil went for “a walk.” According to Patricia, Bill confronted Emily after Phil left.

  “I went out for a jog, you know, and there you were with him, like animals, fucking on the side of the road!”

  “Well, you found what you were looking for,” Emily shot back.

  “Yeah, well, you know, that was a breach of security, doing that in the woods, don’t you?”

  “Well, fuck you,” Emily said. “I enjoyed myself for once.”

  —

  Bill became increasingly paranoid, especially about the tapes for the “book.” What if they fell into the wrong hands? What if Jack took them? What if Jack put the tapes in the wrong hands?

  As summer faded, Bill raised a serious question. Would he have to kill Jack Scott? Did Jack know too much? Fortunately, there was always a lot more talk than action when it came to Bill Harris and violence. But even the discussion of the issue illustrated how far things had deteriorated. Late in the summer of 1974, Bill destroyed Paul Hoch’s tapes. Only the typed transcripts, with hand-scrawled corrections, remained.

  For his part, Jack Scott was getting fed up as well (though violence was not part of his repertoire). He had practically run through his entire severance from Oberlin, and his investment in the SLA showed no sign of paying off. And there was a new reason why Jack was eager to have the comrades out of his hair. His friend Bill Walton had been drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers and had invited Jack and Micki to share his home in Oregon. Jack needed to resolve his unfinished business with the SLA before heading west.

  The rental in Jeffersonville was shorter term, and Jack and Micki told the comrades they would have to leave. Jack was so frustrated with the Harrises at this point that he left his wife to do most of the talking to them. Micki returned to the dairy farm and again suggested that Patricia would make everyone’s life easier, including her own, if she surrendered. She would get a great deal more attention if she spoke out publicly as opposed to living in secret as a fugitive. But Patricia refused, telling Micki that she and her husband were “liberal pacifist pigs” for suggesting that she give up her life as a revolutionary. Bill and Emily suggested that they return to the farm in Pennsylvania. Not possible, Micki said. The farm had been sold.

  But Emily didn’t believe Micki. Using an assumed name, Emily called the owner as a prospective buyer and learned that the farm was not even on the market. Micki was just trying to push the comrades out on their own. Emily confronted Micki about her lie, which poisoned relations even further. Because they knew the Pennsylvania farm was still vacant, the Harrises, Patricia, and Wendy moved back there.

  But they were stuck again—isolated on the East Coast, with only their frayed relationship with the Scotts to sustain them. In Pennsylvania and New York, the comrades had no prospects of recruiting new comrades or raising money. The claustrophobia had become overwhelming. Risky as they knew it would be, they had to return to their roots on the West Coast. Using phone booths near the farm, Emily spoke with Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore in Berkeley. Her message was simple. We need to get out of here. Find us a safe place on the West Coast.

  The message back was a puzzling one, but Bill, Emily, and Patricia had to accept it: meet us in Sacramento. There, among other things, Patricia Hearst would fall in love.

  * * *

  * At the time, I was fourteen years old and lived with my parents on the same block. To my knowledge, none of us ever saw Patricia or her comrades.

  18

  THE STREETS OF SACRAMENTO

  Bill, Emily, Patricia, and Wendy spent the first two weeks of September packing up and making arrangements for their trip to California. (Their efforts to wipe the place for fingerprints were less thorough than the job done by the Scotts and Jay Weiner after their first departure.) Working out the details of the transfer to the West Coast was a cumbersome process because it required Bill and Emily to arrange pay-phone-to-pay-phone calls with Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah. Then, one afternoon, without warning, Jack and Micki Scott showed up at the farm to whisk Patricia away.

  Jack had agreed to take Patricia west, but only as far as Las Vegas. He still thought she should surrender, and he believed California—where the search for her was focused—was the worst place she could go. He refused to deliver her into that kind of danger, so he chose his parents’ place near the strip as a sort of compromise. From there, he said, Patricia could make her own plans. Accordingly, the Harrises arranged for Jim Kilgore to pick Patricia up in Las Vegas and take her to Sacramento.

  After Jack dropped Micki in Cleveland to visit friends, Jack and Patricia again became a faux married couple on a cross-country road trip, albeit this time without his parents as chaperones. Jack had rented a van for the journey, stowed the files for his sports institute in the back, and planned to continue on to Portland after dropping Patricia. The trip nearly came to an early conclusion, however, when the pair crossed the border into Indiana.

  A police cruiser flashed its lights to signal the van to pull over, apparently for speeding. Patricia was wearing her usual red wig, her face was painted with freckles, and she had a towel around her midsection, to suggest pregnancy. If she had been looking for a safe way to surrender, this traffic stop was a perfect opportunity. Scott abjured weapons, so there was no physical risk to her. She could simply have identified herself to the officer and turned herself in. But as she later acknowledged, she wanted to do the opposite. She was desperate not to be caught so she could continue her work as a revolutionary. “I had to do everything in my power to stop myself from shaking with fright,” she wrote. For his part, Scott remained cool and put his sports expertise to work by bantering with the officer about football. The cop sent them on their way. The traffic stop provided a vivid window into Patricia’s state of mind—that of a woman who preferred the drama of guerrilla war to the safety of a police cruiser.

  Jack and Patricia arrived in Las Vegas to find an unsettled scene at Jack’s parents’. Their eccentric son Walter had just announced that he was returning from a tour in Libya as a soldier of fortune. None of the Scotts wanted Walter to see that the family was sheltering the infamous Patricia Hearst, so they hustled her off to a motel, to awai
t her pickup by Jim Kilgore. She waited there for two days, staring at the television, watching reruns of a long-canceled series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Patricia was alone for two days and could have done anything she wanted—called home, summoned an old friend or family member, turned herself in. But as before, she wanted to keep fighting.

  Kilgore finally retrieved her, but he couldn’t afford to rent or buy a car for the trip. So they had six hours to kill before their bus left for Sacramento. Kilgore was an anomaly among the comrades. He had actually read the turgid Marxist texts that the SLA used mostly as decoration in their hideouts. A former graduate student in economics, as well as a sportswriter, Kilgore had an eclectic intellect to go with his bomb-friendly politics. He treated Patricia with a slightly distant kind of respect. Kilgore was also carrying a .38-caliber handgun, so he didn’t want to venture into a casino or hotel, where security guards might stop him. In the end, the two of them basically wandered the streets, until they made their way to the shabby Las Vegas bus station.

  Why had they chosen Sacramento? The hurried consultations between the Harrises, Kilgore, and Soliah concluded that the Bay Area was simply too hot for the comrades. They were all well-known to the police in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, so any prolonged stay there seemed unduly risky. They could not trust that their disguises would work indefinitely. In contrast, none of the locals in the sleepy capital of California knew the three, and because the city was just ninety minutes away from the Bay Area, their allies could come and go with relative ease. In addition, the upcoming trial of Russ Little and Joe Remiro for the murder of Marcus Foster had been moved to Sacramento because of the abundant pretrial publicity in Oakland. The comrades’ hope, as well as their plan, was to bust the two of them out of jail before their trial began.

  The group that assembled in Sacramento was essentially a combination of two outfits, the remnant of the SLA (Bill and Emily Harris and Patricia Hearst) and the Bay Area–based Revolutionary Army bombing collective (Jim Kilgore; Kathy, Steve, and Josephine Soliah; and Michael Bortin). To the extent the new combination had a name, they called themselves the New World Liberation Front, although, confusingly, they did not always refer to themselves this way. The biggest change for the SLA survivors concerned the focus of their revolutionary efforts: they were now bombers.

  In a way, it was almost surprising that it took so long for the SLA to start using explosives. Among the more extreme elements of the counterculture in the 1970s, which surely included the SLA, the bomb was the most common form of political expression. Dozens were set off every year in Northern California alone. But DeFreeze and his colleagues expressed mostly contempt for bombers, with their preference for after-hours actions that injured property but not people. “We don’t bomb bathrooms,” DeFreeze said, referring to the notorious Weather Underground action at the U.S. Capitol, in 1971. Under DeFreeze, the SLA employed the more sinister methods of murder (of Marcus Foster) and kidnapping (of Patricia Hearst) to make its political points. In time, the SLA did follow the Revolutionary Army in embracing the bomb, but when they did, Bill, Emily, and Patricia gave the technique their own menacing spin.

  First, though, the clan had to gather, which was not a simple matter. When Jim Kilgore and Patricia arrived on the Greyhound, they were met by Steve Soliah. Patricia and Steve had met briefly earlier in the summer, at the apartment in Berkeley where the comrades arranged for Jack Scott to take them to the East Coast. That had been a hurried, almost panicked gathering, and the two had little time to become acquainted. This time, though, would be different.

  —

  Steve Soliah wasn’t tall—perhaps five feet eight inches—but he retained the coiled body of the football player he had once been. He had long straight hair, like his older sister’s blond mane, but Steve’s hair was dark and receding fast at the temples. He had an easy smile and an even demeanor. He was, in Patricia’s words, “an easygoing young man who lived for the day’s pleasures and excitements.” He was political, like all the comrades in their set, but he wore his passions lightly. He listened as well as talked. He played the guitar. For a woman who had spent the summer being bludgeoned by the hectoring of Bill Harris and Jack Scott, the mellow sound of Steve Soliah’s voice was like music. “He had no problem with his own ego,” Patricia wrote, “and did not try to dominate, teach, or make demands. For me, that alone won my gratitude.”

  Kathy and Steve had rented a place on W Street in a gritty neighborhood near Sacramento’s downtown. The plan was for Patricia to move in with them, while Kilgore returned to Berkeley. On her first day in town, Steve helped her settle in, and the two of them talked for hours. She said the summer had been good in many respects. She enjoyed being in the country, restoring her health in the sunshine. But the falling-out between the Scotts and the Harrises meant she had to leave. Steve asked her questions—obvious questions, in a way—that no men had thought to ask her in a long time. What was it like to be kidnapped? Was she scared? How did she feel about her parents? What was she thinking about the future?

  Patricia confessed that the kidnapping terrified her. At the same time, she was disgusted with how her parents reacted to her situation—the way they had abandoned her, as she saw it. She had no interest in returning to them, or to Steve Weed. She resented how no one seemed to believe that she had become an actual revolutionary. Few people understood that was at the core of Patricia’s political awakening. Angela Atwood, Willy Wolfe, and especially her newer friend Wendy Yoshimura had talked ceaselessly about the need for women to control their own destinies. Even during her quasi-isolation with the comrades, Patricia was inspired by the women’s movement, which caught fire in the 1970s the way African Americans’ civil rights had advanced in the previous decade. Patricia wanted—demanded—to be taken seriously, which Steve Soliah, in his quiet way, did.

  On matters closer to home, Patricia told Steve that she couldn’t stand Bill and Emily Harris, who at this moment were on their way to Sacramento. On Steve’s first night in the apartment, Kathy and Patricia shared the only bed. On the second night, Steve and Patricia did. Still, the fluid sexual mores of the SLA remained intact. Steve sometimes also slept with Emily, and Patricia, despite everything, still occasionally spent the night with Bill.

  Bill and Emily arrived in Sacramento shortly after Patricia checked in to W Street. Bill immediately sought to assert himself in his usual belligerent manner, and he had a new adversary in the close quarters of the apartment. Mike Bortin, the bomb maker from the Revolutionary Army, had also moved in, and he and Bill began having epic disagreements. The difference was mostly stylistic. Bortin was one of the few people in their circle who indulged enthusiastically in drugs. (“Let’s do an action on acid!” he suggested, to Bill’s open disdain.) At the same time, Bortin was a physical fitness buff who lifted weights and ran up to twenty miles a day. With wild red hair, two chipped front teeth, and a tattoo of a dragon on his arm, Bortin projected a hippie-style wildness that clashed with Harris’s dedication to discipline. Bill still fancied himself a marinestyle revolutionary, and Bortin’s impulsivity offended him. While Bill talked incessantly, Emily occupied herself with perpetual productivity—organizing the house, buying supplies, practicing quick draws in front of the mirror.

  From the beginning, there were reminders that they were fugitives who could be swept up by the police at any moment. Late one night, not long after the group moved into the apartment on W Street, several police cars, with sirens blazing, pulled up by their house. On this occasion, Bill and Patricia were asleep in the same bed. The street outside was suddenly ablaze with lights, and the sound of police radios crackled for them all to hear. Bill pulled out his arsenal, and Patricia and Emily picked up guns for what appeared to be a Fifty-Fourth Street–style showdown. Listening carefully, though, they figured out that the cops were responding to a murder in the house next door. (Given the neighborhood, this news was not a total surprise; the homicide had been a knifing, so they never heard gunshot
s.) The comrades were relieved to learn that they were not the targets of the police action, but that still left the problem of living at ground zero for a homicide investigation. The cops would surely come knocking. One of Emily’s best disguises was that of a frumpy housewife, and she answered the door in that costume when the police came by the next morning. She told the officers that she’d love to help but knew nothing. The crisis passed.

  By late fall, a larger conflict threatened the group. Bill, Emily, and Patricia relied on the Revolutionary Army alumni—the Soliahs, Kilgore, and Bortin—for their day-to-day living expenses. Steve, Kilgore, and Bortin worked as housepainters, while Kathy and her sister Josephine did odd jobs, mostly waitressing. (Wendy Yoshimura, who came and went from the Bay Area, which is about an hour and a half from Sacramento, also had various jobs.) In contrast, Bill, Emily, and Patricia contributed nothing to their own upkeep. Emily busied herself with errands and household tasks. Patricia read books and issued denunciations of those (like her favorite target, Jane Fonda) who only pretended to be radicals. And Bill alienated everyone by issuing orders, while his benefactors thought of him as a moocher.

  Steve Soliah returned to Sacramento about a month after his first visit and immediately went for a long walk with Patricia. He saw how her conflicts with Bill had worsened, and the tension was starting to affect her health. He arranged for Jim Kilgore to take a blood test from Patricia and submit it to a friendly doctor under an assumed name. The test appeared normal, but Steve decided to propose alternative living arrangements. Wendy Yoshimura and Emily stayed on in the apartment on W Street; Kilgore and Bortin lived on T Street; Kathy and Steve Soliah, along with Patricia, took a new apartment on Capitol Avenue. (Bill Harris rotated among the comrades, based on who could stand him at any given moment.) Steve and Patricia were now an official couple, at least in SLA-style terms.