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

by Jeffrey Toobin

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  Little by little, Patricia began to return to the outside world. One day in November, Steve took her along on one of his painting jobs. A man named Oscar Mills was renovating his house after a fire, and he found the number for Steve’s painting company in the Oakland Tribune classifieds. When he asked for an estimate, Steve showed up in a multicolored Volkswagen Beetle with a woman whom he introduced—amazingly enough—as Tania. Steve and Tania won the job with a bid of $750, and then the two of them spent a week or so on the assignment. Later, Mills identified the other workers on the job as Jim Kilgore and Josephine Soliah. When interviewed by the FBI much later, Mills said he noticed that Tania didn’t do as much work as the others, but she seemed like a poised, if quiet, member of the crew. When spoken to, Tania tended to look at Steve before answering. At one point, Mills, Steve, and Tania even went to a bank together to cash a check; Mills thought it was odd that Tania chose to stay in the car when the other two went inside, but at the time he never made the connection between the soft-spoken Tania and the famous fugitive by the same name.

  Patricia’s gestures in the direction of a normal life could not camouflage the group’s larger sense of despair. At one level, the problem was simple: money. The comrades with jobs had barely enough to live on their own, much less to support the three SLA survivors. At one point, the comrades bought horse meat, because it was so cheap. They also did a lot of shoplifting, which was even cheaper, and they continued to steal unattended purses. Their best score came courtesy of Bill Harris’s experience as a postal worker back in Berkeley. Bill knew that in the late afternoon letter carriers made the rounds of small businesses to pick up cash payments. One day the comrades followed a postman. At the last minute, Mike Bortin recognized the fellow as a former roommate (who could have recognized Bortin). They decided to run the same trick on another postal route and found a more suitable target. Kathy Soliah stopped at a mailbox and flagged down the letter carrier for a brief chat. At the same time, Steve Soliah rode by on a bicycle and reached into the open postal jeep. He grabbed parcels that contained about $1,000 in cash.

  Mike Bortin had a different idea—an SLA book. Bill Harris told Bortin that they had just spent the summer in a futile effort in that direction, but Bortin, as was his custom, ignored Bill. Instead, Bortin went to Oakland and recruited Dan Siegel, a radical lawyer there, to meet with Bill, Emily, and Patricia about the idea. One afternoon, Bortin blindfolded Siegel and drove him to the Sacramento apartment to meet with the group. As it happened, Patricia was out shopping for groceries, alone, when Siegel arrived. When she returned, Siegel engaged the three SLA survivors in a serious political conversation, in which they laid out their continuing belief in the foco theory—that the bombings and bank robberies of a small vanguard would yet inspire a broader revolution. Emily put forward the theoretical underpinning of the argument, but both Bill and Patricia chimed in to support her. In the end, Siegel had nothing to offer in terms of book contacts, but he left the bizarre encounter with a firm understanding that Patricia was by this point a partner, not a victim, of the SLA.

  Shoplifting and postal scores might tide the comrades over for a few weeks, but by the winter of 1974–75 it was clear that they needed more than these nickel-and-dime operations to survive, much less to advance their agenda. These undertakings involved considerable risk for small payoffs, and besides they lacked political content and received no public attention. They still thought of themselves as urban guerrillas who could at least sow chaos, if not foment revolution. Cooped up in their tiny apartments, eating horse meat, they were doing nothing of the kind. They felt as if they were just waiting around to get caught. Something had to change.

  In the argot of the era, the two factions laid guilt trips on each other. The Revolutionary Army alumni were sick of supplying all the cash and getting nothing in return. Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah were willing to move forward, but they had no sense of where anyone was going. They were ready to resume making bombs, but even homemade bombs cost money to assemble, and there was no cash. Jo and Steve, Kathy’s sister and brother, were less impassioned in their views but also frustrated with the state of affairs. Mike Bortin was always full of nutty ideas—like killing John McCone, the former CIA director, on his doorstep—but he also wasn’t doing anything more than talking. All of them resented feeding and clothing the SLA comrades for months, with no end in sight. Were they supposed to do this forever? What was the point?

  Bill Harris was quick to remind the Bay Area contingent that he, Emily, and Patricia had done the real suffering. They had watched their comrades die excruciating deaths. They were the objects of a nationwide manhunt. The others had choices about whether to return to civilian life, but Bill, Emily, and Patricia did not. They had committed their lives to revolutionary action. The others were dilettantes, fakes, posers…And so it went, night after night, in what they sometimes called “self-criticism” sessions, even though the comrades mostly used them to criticize each other.

  For a while, the two groups were able to come together around the idea of freeing Russ Little and Joe Remiro. They contacted Remiro’s cousin, who was a frequent visitor to the jail, and the cousin persuaded Remiro to prepare detailed diagrams of the security situation. The cousin smuggled out the diagrams, and Emily Harris hand copied them so that each comrade had a duplicate. In December, Bill Harris set up surveillance outside the jail, and other comrades took turns examining the comings and goings as well. But the idea petered out. The truth was that neither Bill nor any of the others had any idea how to break anyone out of prison. They were stymied again.

  The group finally came around to the idea that their only option was to rob another bank. Back in San Francisco, the SLA had already proved it could do it successfully, even if the Bay Area group had not, so the group had some institutional expertise. To learn more, Jo Soliah took a job as a clerk in a local bank, to get a sense of how the internal procedures worked. The main question, of course, was which bank to rob. Emily Harris located the Guild Savings and Loan Association, on a sleepy street just outside the city limits. It had several advantages. There was no traffic, so a fast getaway would be easy. The small shopping plaza was adjacent to a residential area, so a car could merge into a different neighborhood right away. The county sheriffs, not the Sacramento police, were responsible for the area, and they were a small, weak police force. Few cops were likely to be in the area.

  On February 4, 1975, the one-year anniversary of Patricia’s kidnapping, Bill decided to check the place out and brought Patricia along with him. They took the bus both ways, and on their return trip, as they were walking to their apartment, a car slowed down near them to ask for directions. Bill put the woman off, but then she circled back. She leaned out the window again and said, “Does anyone ever tell you that you look like Patty Hearst?” The wig-and-freckles disguise had finally failed. But Bill thought fast. “Oh, people say that all the time. This is my wife, and you’re right—she does look like Patty Hearst.” The driver nodded and pulled away. When the woman slipped from view, Bill and Patricia bolted for home.

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  Like the Hibernia Bank job ten months earlier, the robbery of the Guild Savings and Loan was meticulously planned. Bill and Emily took the lead, but everyone pitched in. The Harrises drew up an eight-point planning document—euphemistically called the “Bakery” list—which described all the steps necessary for a successful bank robbery. It included guidance on “utilizing the phone book to pick all good possibilities in general selected area” and “time inside (not being greedy).” The final section was called “Assigning people to team positions and designating leadership”:

  A. Responsibilities of each position

  B. Team discussion of responsibilities and coordination

  C. Inter-team rehearsal

  D. Final dry-run—total rehearsal

  Another bit of advice was typed in on the side of the document: “EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED.”

  The tensions betw
een the two camps surfaced even in the lead-up to the joint enterprise. The Bay Area team didn’t object to Bill’s planning the robbery, but they didn’t want him involved in the actual execution. Bill agreed. The plan was for Kilgore and Bortin to conduct the actual robbery, with Steve Soliah driving the getaway car and Kathy Soliah serving as lookout. (Steve Soliah bought a junky 1956 Chevrolet Impala for the job.) Everyone agreed, as in the Hibernia action, that the Guild operation should take no more than ninety seconds. But unlike Hibernia, the Guild was selected because it had no security camera. Profit, not propaganda, was the objective this time.

  The temperature was just climbing into the forties on the morning of February 25, 1975, when Michael Bortin, wearing a Halloween mask and a “Big Apple” baseball cap, and Jim Kilgore, wearing a green scarf, which he forgot to pull up around his face, entered the Guild bank. Bortin had a .45-caliber revolver, Kilgore a shotgun. Bortin announced the robbery to the one teller on duty, and Kilgore told the single customer in the bank to get on the floor.

  Bortin instructed the teller to open the safe, and Bortin grabbed a bag of coins (pennies, unfortunately), and then he returned to rifle the tellers’ drawers. He collected about $3,700, mostly in crisp twenties, plus a handful of blank money orders. Bortin and Kilgore bolted out in just about the allotted time, then jumped into the getaway car, with Steve Soliah at the wheel. A few blocks away, they dumped that vehicle for the switch car. Kathy Soliah watched the whole operation from a greeting card store across the street from the bank. As she later reported, the comrades were long gone by the time the police arrived.

  Earlier in the morning, Emily Harris and Patricia had taken the bus to McKinley Park, near the bank, where they were waiting for Bortin and Kilgore. The pair gave the women two bags—one containing the guns, the other with the cash proceeds. Patricia struggled to carry the heavy bag of weapons, but she and Emily managed to get back on the bus for the ride to the W Street apartment. There Patricia and Emily counted the loot and destroyed the bags.

  In short, the Guild action worked to perfection. The take was modest, but so, it appeared, was the risk. Because there were only two people inside the bank, the police never even suspected that the robbery was the work of a team of revolutionaries, much less those affiliated with the notorious Hibernia operation. To the cops, the robbery looked like a routine stickup, and it drew little attention in Sacramento, much less in the broader world.

  The success energized all the comrades, including Patricia. Perhaps, it seemed, they had figured out a way to survive and prosper and to resume bombing operations. The first priority, then, was to find more target banks. Shortly after the Guild robbery, Patricia took on her first solo operation—casing a prospective bank robbery target. She was well suited for the role. At this moment, she was the only surviving member of the SLA to have actually carried out a bank robbery—that is, to have held a gun on customers inside a bank. (Bill and Emily Harris had only helped with the getaway in the Hibernia Bank job.)

  Patricia went all the way to Marysville, a gold rush town about forty miles north of Sacramento. She checked out the local Bank of America branch and drew up a detailed diagram of the place. “There are 2 picture window size openings in the wall separating the work area from the teller area—no glass,” she scribbled; “3 tellers were open during a busy period so the 4th Window may never open…saw 7 employees, 5 women & 2 men, one young and nervous; manager is fat and Black.”

  But in the end, the group decided not to go to Marysville. The better option seemed to be a busy branch of the Crocker National Bank, in Carmichael, which was a suburb just outside Sacramento. The comrades agreed that this bank represented a significant step up in potential spoils. A hundred thousand dollars did not seem out of the question. (This bank had no security cameras either.) The comrades felt that they were, by this point, experienced bank robbers. They were cautious but committed. They had a proven set of plans. They had never been caught. The pickings were there for the taking.

  What could go wrong?

  19

  DEATH OF A “BOURGEOIS PIG”

  The success of the Guild bank robbery came at a moment of revived fortunes for the comrades and their allies. Finally, they were doing something other than running and hiding.

  The first to take action were Russ Little and Joe Remiro, who were still awaiting trial for the murder of Marcus Foster, a year and a half earlier. Frustrated at the time it was taking the comrades to come to their assistance, Little and Remiro took matters into their own hands. On March 1, a quiet Saturday afternoon in the Alameda county jail, Little was meeting with his attorney, John Bain. They requested that Remiro join them in the conference room. One guard brought in Remiro, and a second guard brought in a chair. When the second guard opened the door to the conference room, Little lunged at him with a sharpened pencil and stabbed it four inches into the guard’s neck. Remiro jumped the other guard, gouging his eye and grabbing his key ring. Remiro quickly identified the key to the guards’ gun locker, where all the weapons in the jail were stored. Remiro was turning the key in the locker when the guard with the pencil sticking out of his neck managed to punch the electric lock that allowed the two other officers on duty to come to the rescue. Little and Remiro—Osi and Bo—were subdued and returned to their cells. As it happened, this attempted escape took place without the assistance of the SLA. But it came remarkably close to succeeding. (Both guards survived their grievous injuries.)

  Thanks to the proceeds from the Guild bank robbery, the New World Liberation Front (that is, Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah) could resume bombing. On March 20, Kilgore put a plastic bag of Tovex water gel explosive and nitroglycerin dynamite at the base of a Pacific Gas and Electric tower in San Bruno. A week later, Kilgore and Soliah threw a similar kind of explosive over the fence at a PG&E substation in San Jose. Both bombs exploded, but there were no injuries. Still, they showed that the comrades were back in business.

  The wild escape attempt by the two original SLA prisoners put public attention back on the failed search for Patricia. But the renewed heat didn’t dissuade the comrades from proceeding with their next bank robbery. After all, the FBI and the cops had no idea the group was even in Sacramento, so the comrades thought that a bank in a quiet suburb would be a promising target.

  Their planning was even more meticulous than the preparations for the Guild job. This was a bigger bank, with more employees and likely more customers and cash, so they would need more people to pull off the heist. They would need more cars, too, so the comrades began their preparations by assembling a veritable fleet. On April 12, Kathy Soliah and Jim Kilgore went to a party in Oakland and stole a Pontiac Firebird that belonged to a fellow guest. The next day, they rented an enclosed garage on D Street in Sacramento to store this and other vehicles. On April 15, Kilgore stole the wallet of a Brian Bach, who was jogging in a park in Sacramento. Two days later, “Bach” rented a Volkswagen van. On April 16, Kathy Soliah stole the wallet of a woman named Norma Mulholland from a locker at a Sacramento health club. The next day, “Mulholland” rented a blue Ford Maverick. The group also stole a blue Ford Mustang that was parked near their T Street apartment, and then they put license plates stolen from another car on the Mustang. With the four untraceable cars in place, the comrades set the robbery for the morning of April 21.

  Mike Bortin arrived from the Bay Area a few days early so they could review their plans and do a dry run. A late-night meeting at the T Street apartment exposed the kinds of problems that the comrades had previously managed to avoid. Emily cased the Carmichael bank, and Bill, who had done the planning, proposed that all eight comrades have roles in the new operation. An “invasion team” of four comrades would enter the bank and conduct the robbery. Two others would stand guard outside the bank, to gun down the police if they interrupted the robbery. And two more comrades would drive the switch cars. Bortin thought Bill’s plan was madness—that it involved too many people and thus too much potential for error. Bortin propose
d that he handle the robbery by himself, or perhaps with one other person. He wanted to be in charge of the operation, as he had been at the Guild bank. He was a physically powerful man who said that was what was needed. “You have to have the ability to get people out of the way…to intimidate them…to get them down,” Bortin said. “Emily can’t do that.” Jim Kilgore agreed with Bortin, noting that the use of so many people would mark the robbery as an SLA job and thus draw unwanted attention.

  But Bill was committed to his scheme, and he wanted Emily to be part of the team inside the bank, because she had found the bank and been involved in all the planning. The discussion, in typical SLA fashion, meandered and turned into a debate about feminism. Did Bortin respect women enough to allow them to be in charge? In the end, Bortin and Kilgore relented and allowed Emily to take the lead.

  Early on the morning of April 21, the comrades began a complicated choreography that resulted in eight people in three apartments retrieving the four cars and distributing themselves into the appropriate teams. Bortin, Emily, Kilgore, and Kathy Soliah, who constituted the bank invasion team, took the stolen Firebird. Bill Harris and Steve Soliah, both armed, waited in the stolen Mustang outside the bank. Wendy Yoshimura drove the rented Maverick as one switch car to pick up Bill and Steve, and Patricia drove the van to pick up the invasion team. Patricia parked near a funeral parlor, a few blocks from the bank. Cradling a carbine, she waited for the invasion team to arrive so she could engineer their escape.

  Bortin parked the Firebird by a fence near the bank. He and the three others, all packing weapons, headed toward their target, but Emily hesitated, checking her watch, and by the time they arrived at the front door, they were not the first customers of the day. Bortin held the door open for the first arrival, a woman named Myrna Opsahl.