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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  In the end, the comrades decided to go with Bill’s design, but they settled on two all-women teams to conduct the actions themselves. Late on the night of August 7, Patricia and Jo Soliah took one bomb to the police station in the Mission, and Yoshimura and Kathy Soliah drove to the one in Sunset. Radical groups had previously attacked the Mission police station, so the cops there had prepared for the assaults by reinforcing the doors and windows and constructing a low wall around the main building. Under the circumstances, the comrades decided that the best options were symbolic attacks, in the form of bombs placed under police cars in front of the stations.

  Both plans fizzled. Jo and Patricia set their timer for twenty minutes, and Jo slipped the bomb under a police car in front of the Mission station. Kathy and Wendy couldn’t find an appropriate target in Sunset. The Mission bomb failed to detonate. It is a sign of the chaos in San Francisco at the time that the discovery of a bomb, albeit a dud, underneath a police car received scant mention in the news.

  Determined to improve on these dismal results—and to wrest the bomb-making duties from Bill Harris—Yoshimura, Kilgore, Patricia, and Steve Soliah went up to Sonoma County to improve their skills and demonstrate the results. A day of explosions in the wilderness boosted their hopes for better results next time. Confident they had solved their design problems, they returned to San Francisco and set their sights on a new target—the police station in Emeryville, a small city nestled between Oakland and Berkeley.

  The bomb was meant as an after-the-fact punishment for a police shooting of a fourteen-year-old boy in Emeryville in November 1973. Emily Harris and Steve Soliah placed their bomb under a police car on August 13, 1975. This time the comrades succeeded. The car was demolished, though there were no injuries. The next day, they returned to writing communiqués, claiming responsibility in the name of the New World Liberation Front, which served as a kind of place-holder name for all bombers in the Bay Area. “The explosion at the Emeryville Station of Fascist Pig Representation is a warning to the rabid dogs who murder our children in cold blood,” the message began. Still, the comrades couldn’t resist a nod to their former celebrity. They concluded their message with the words associated with the heyday of the SLA: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

  Back on track, the comrades decided to pick up the pace and raise the stakes. It was time, they believed, to stop destroying cars and move on to destroying lives. Emily Harris led an expedition to the sheriff’s office in Marin County, which was located in Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous civic center. The plan was to stagger the explosion of two bombs, the first to blow up a police car and the second to attack the officers who came to investigate the first blast. At the same time, the group decided to launch another attack, this time against the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers had killed their six comrades fifteen months earlier. Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah went south to pick a target in Los Angeles, and Bill Harris, trying again to put his newly acquired skills to work, built an especially large pipe bomb for the occasion.

  On August 20, Patricia and Steve Soliah drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to place the first bomb by the door to the Marin County complex. (Jo Soliah put the second bomb under a car in the parking lot.) The idea was for the officers to rush to the bombed car and then be immolated by an explosion next to the front door. Steve set the timer, and he and Patricia left the scene. Both bombs exploded, but in the wrong order—that is, first by the door, then under the car. No one was hurt.

  As for the bomb in Los Angeles, Bill Harris built it out of three-inch pipe (instead of the standard two inches), and he filled the pipes with more than a hundred three-quarter-inch concrete nails. The nails would enhance the damage wrought by the bomb by spreading deadly shrapnel over a broad area. (Kathy Soliah bought the blasting caps to set the bomb off.)

  Placing the Los Angeles bomb turned into a fiasco, however. Jim Kilgore and Bill Harris originally thought they would set off the bomb at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in a hotel downtown. But when they arrived with the bomb in an attaché case, they drew the attention of the guards, and the two comrades decided to leave. They began cruising the city with Kathy Soliah, whose relationship with Kilgore had hit the rocks. Indeed, as Patricia heard the story, Kathy made a disparaging remark about Kilgore’s sexual prowess, and he punched her. Harris, who was driving, took Kathy’s side, and Bill and Jim started brawling.

  In their desire to do something with the bomb rather than simply return with it to San Francisco, Bill, Jim, and Kathy found a police car sitting outside an International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The car was parked next to the restaurant’s plate glass window, which had diners eating on the other side. Kilgore quickly rigged the bomb to explode when the police car drove away. It was the comrades’ biggest bomb to date, and it would surely have killed the two officers in the car as well as several diners at the restaurant. But the bomb fizzled. It would have detonated if two screws had touched, but they remained separated by one-sixteenth of an inch. Kilgore, Kathy, and Bill made the long drive back to San Francisco—each refusing to speak to the others.

  —

  Again it seemed like the worst of times for the comrades. Most of their bombs had failed, and the ones that went off—in Emeryville and Marin—caused little damage and no injuries. Poisonous all-night arguments raged. Bombings and bank robberies were taking them nowhere. Their leases were expiring, and they needed new places to live. The Harrises moved into an apartment at 288 Precita, in a largely Hispanic area. Patricia and Steve Soliah took the opportunity to look for a place for themselves. One night, driving around with Jim Kilgore, they got lost in the city’s twisting streets, and they stumbled on a little one-way street called Morse. At 625 Morse, they found a “For Rent” sign and wound up booking the place.

  The apartment turned out to be the best living arrangement of Patricia’s year and a half on the run. Wendy Yoshimura often stayed with them, but Patricia and Steve wound up living as a more-or-less-normal couple. Steve worked as a housepainter, and his earnings plus the remainder of their shares of the bank robbery money meant that they could live decently, without resorting to horse meat. More important, though, Steve treated Patricia like an independent adult, giving her space to develop her own interests, especially in feminism. In this way, the contrast to the old Steve in her life—Weed—could scarcely be clearer. Patricia complained that Steve Weed lectured her and made them spend time only with his friends; Steve Soliah listened to Patricia, and they spent time with both of their friends. (Admittedly, being a fugitive limited Patricia’s social circle.) Both Steves offered Patricia escapes—from her parents, with Weed, and from the Harrises, with Soliah. Despite the privations of life on the run, Patricia was happy in the shabby little apartment on Morse Street.

  During this period, in the late summer of 1975, Patricia could finally see for herself that she was accepted as a full-fledged comrade. In addition to the bombing campaign, the group wanted to keep up their marksmanship skills. Ever since DeFreeze first handed Patricia a shotgun, it was clear that she had a great facility with weapons—long and short guns. Her father’s training on hunting trips had taken root. Thanks also to long hours studying gun manuals, Patricia easily learned to use the motley collection of weapons that the comrades possessed. Not surprisingly, Bill Harris fancied himself the crack shot in the group, but during that summer Patricia was chosen over Bill to lead refresher courses in the remote town of Guerneville, in Sonoma County. Patricia never gained back much of the weight she had lost, but with a gun in her hand, she projected a strength that transcended her petite size. She showed a softer side too. When Emily Harris said she was going to put her aged cat to sleep, Patricia and Steve adopted the animal, and she joined the family on Morse Street.

  Patricia also worked on the manifesto for the women comrades’ study group. Her work expressed the spirit of sexual liberation that was ascendant in the counterculture. “We began
to destroy the attitudes that had made us think that we had to be monogamous—fear and passivity, the false sense of security, jealousy and power trips,” she wrote. Mostly, though, Patricia expressed herself in the dialect of pidgin Marxism that made all SLA communiqués, whether written by Nancy Ling, Angela Atwood, or DeFreeze himself, nearly unreadable. “As oppressed people, women have a real stake in revolution (much more than white men) and can, therefore, better identify with and understand Third World and class struggles,” Patricia wrote. “Although the pig media characterizes the Women’s Movement as white and middle-class, and, to a great extent it is, we consider Feminist Revolution to be a unifying platform for all races and classes of women.”

  During this period, Patricia was romantically fulfilled, too. She shared a passion for the outdoors with Steve Soliah and spent long days on hiking trips through the rugged California countryside. As in Sacramento, they talked about moving together to the backcountry of Oregon. In light of their peculiar circumstances—chiefly Patricia’s status as the most wanted woman in the nation—the couple had some strange experiences together. For example, at one point during this summer, Patricia contracted an ugly case of poison oak. On the evening of August 12, she and Steve presented themselves at the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital. Patricia said her name was Amy Andrews and gave her address as 419 Masonic, which is nonexistent. An intern named Rod Perry saw that “Amy’s” face was so swollen that her eyes were nearly shut. He later recalled she was vague about how she might have contracted the ailment. Over the course of about a two-hour visit, the couple behaved in a relaxed manner, like any other patient and escort, and Dr. Perry sent “Amy” on her way with a prescription ointment.

  At around the same time, another hiking trip ended oddly. Patricia and Steve took a drive about twenty miles south from San Francisco to Gray Whale Cove, near the town of Pacifica. They scrambled down one of the picturesque cliffs, enjoyed an afternoon on the secluded beach, and then began to clamber back up to the parking lot. When they were about halfway up, they heard shouting from three deputy sheriffs. The lawmen asserted that the climb was too dangerous for a young woman to make on her own, so they threw a rope down for her to tie around her waist. Steve vaulted quickly up the steep incline and tried to talk the officers out of helping. His wife was fully capable of climbing up on her own. But the deputies wouldn’t hear of it, and they insisted on throwing the rope. Patricia dutifully wrapped it around her waist, and the deputies hoisted her to the top. There, Steve gave her a big hug and whispered the name “Ann Silva” in her ear. (Soliah had a fake driver’s license in the name of “Victor Silva.”) None of the deputies recognized Patricia in her usual curly wig, and they sent the couple off with some good-natured advice about being careful.

  Between bombings, the comrades achieved something close to a normal life. They were regulars at the drive-in movies that still dotted the region, and on one occasion the Harrises prevailed upon Patricia to go to an anti–Vietnam War documentary. Bill made a spectacle of himself in the theater, bellowing encouragement to the Vietcong forces on the screen. “Eat lead, pigs!” he shouted at the sight of American troops. Even in disguise, Patricia felt compelled to sink down in her seat, out of both embarrassment and fear of being discovered. Still, she had the fortitude to refuse the Harrises’ perverse summons to another film.

  “Ask me to do anything, ask me to rob a bank with you,” Patricia told them. “But don’t ask me to go to a movie theater and get arrested watching Citizen Kane.”

  21

  FREEZE!

  Walter Scott was a figure of mystery even to his own family. By 1975, the known facts about him were remarkably scarce. He was nine years older than his brother, Jack. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. After that, the trail of his life drifted into the unknown. He told his parents that he served as an assassin for the military in Cambodia. Later he said he worked in electronic surveillance for the National Security Agency. More recently, Walter recounted, he was employed as a soldier of fortune, renting out his services as a mercenary in Libya, among other places. On his occasional visits with his parents, the only fact they discerned with some certainty was that Walter suffered from the Scott family curse of alcoholism. John and Lydia Scott loved their older son, but they knew not to trust him. One of the first things Jack’s parents told Patricia during their cross-country trip was that Walter could never know of this secret mission. The Scotts were right to worry, because when Walter did find out that his brother had harbored Patricia and her comrades, the eccentric older brother provided the FBI with the first useful lead in the case.

  The FBI’s investigation of the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst—code-named HERNAP—was a long-running humiliation for the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. For more than a year, the attorneys general, first William Saxbe and then Edward Levi, and the FBI director, Clarence Kelley, were grilled in almost every public appearance about the lack of progress. In response, they offered vague professions of confidence that the bureau would live up to its slogan—that the FBI always gets its man. In truth, neither the top brass nor the agents in the field had any idea when or whether they would catch Patricia and her comrades.

  The bureau was simultaneously burdened with too many clues and too few. At one level, the comrades presented investigators with an abundance of evidence, starting with the communiqués. The FBI also learned the names of the SLA members in short order, right after the fire in the Concord house, in January 1974. The comrades then left behind fingerprints, handwriting, purchases, weapons, and ordnance in their former hideouts in Daly City and San Francisco. In messages scrawled on the walls of the Golden Gate apartment, the comrades taunted “Master” Bates, the FBI’s lead agent on the case. Of course, most of the comrades died in the shoot-out on Fifty-Fourth Street, but that, too, presented investigators with another trove of evidence. Bill and Emily Harris, along with Patricia herself, had been on tens of thousands of wanted posters around the country for more than a year. How hard could they be to find?

  Very hard, it turned out. For one thing, purported “sightings” of Patty Hearst turned into a national joke. She appeared to be everywhere and nowhere, and agents spent a great deal of time checking out random, and incorrect, identifications of her. The people who actually did see Patricia and the comrades generally didn’t know it or didn’t choose to report it. For example, the woman who stopped Patricia and Bill Harris on the street in Sacramento apparently never called in a tip. Still, the bigger problem for the FBI was not lack of information but lack of trust.

  The simple fact was that anyone who did know anything about the location of Patricia and her comrades refused to talk to the FBI. At the time, the bureau’s reputation was still in the free fall that began after the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. It was only after Hoover died that the full extent of the bureau’s abuse of civil liberties became widely known. Senator Frank Church held a series of hearings during the mid-1970s that brought to wide public attention such outrages as the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King. The people the bureau needed most in this investigation—that is, associates of the Harrises or the other comrades—were precisely the group most likely to be appalled by the FBI.

  The situation was so toxic for the FBI that Charlie Bates went public with his distress about the situation. He gave a series of interviews begging for cooperation from the public. In the middle of the search for Patricia, Bates told the journalist Shana Alexander that the FBI had interviewed perhaps five thousand people in the Bay Area alone without finding a single clue to the whereabouts of the nation’s most famous fugitive. “One thing bothers me terribly,” Bates said. “In the sixteen-to-twenty-five age group, everybody’s anti–law enforcement. Nobody will even speak to you! I dunno why…the reasons are more complicated than the problem. You knock and say, ‘FBI, can I talk to you, please?’ And they shout, ‘Bug off!’ and slam the door.”

  Thi
s was an apt description of the course of the Hearst investigation—until Walter Scott walked into the police station in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  —

  It’s not clear how Walter found out that his brother harbored Patricia and the other comrades. The most likely explanation is that Jack told him. Jack was an inveterate talker who liked to place himself at the center of stories. Despite Walter’s obvious shortcomings, Jack wanted to impress his older brother. Against his better judgment, and under the influence of a few drinks, Jack probably could not resist sharing what was, after all, a pretty remarkable tale. It’s also not clear what prompted Walter Scott to go to the authorities. The most likely explanation is that he was offended that Jack exposed their parents to the risk of arrest; of course, by informing on Jack, Walter also increased the risk to their parents. To be sure, determining the reasons underlying Walter’s behavior was always a difficult undertaking. In any event, at around two in the morning on January 31, 1975, Walter Scott staggered into the Scranton police station with a story to tell.

  Walter was drunk, and his story was confused. But the gist was believable enough for the local cops to summon the FBI, and agents wound up conducting an all-night debriefing as Walter sobered up. Walter did not have an exact address for the farm, but he provided enough information for the agents to locate the place within a couple of days. (Crucially, Walter also passed the FBI the names of Jay Weiner and Phil Shinnick, who had visited the Pennsylvania and New York farms.) The bureau’s team staked out the farm in South Canaan and determined that it was abandoned. The agents then ordered in their forensic team, which identified the fingerprints of Bill Harris (on a piece of broken glass) and Wendy Yoshimura (on a piece of newspaper). They flew the dogs trained on Patricia’s scent—the ones that were waiting to inspect the carnage on Fifty-Fourth Street in Los Angeles—to Pennsylvania. The dogs responded to the bed where Patricia had slept.