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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  In any event, Browning was never going to dismiss the charges outright. For starters, he believed that Patricia was guilty—that she made a knowing and voluntary decision to participate in the robbery. Her behavior after her arrest reinforced Browning’s confidence. His ego played a part, too. Few prosecutors would walk away from the chance to try such a celebrated defendant, particularly against the most famous defense lawyer in the country.

  The political zeitgeist, as reflected by the Ford administration’s Justice Department, also compelled the government to bring Patricia to trial. By that fall, the legacy of the 1960s had grown even more toxic; San Francisco was crazier than ever. When Patricia was arrested, there had already been fifty bombings in California alone in 1975. After-hours explosions at power plants, government offices, and corporate headquarters became so routine that they scarcely received any news coverage. And it wasn’t just bombings. On September 5, 1975, two weeks before Patricia was arrested, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed a .45-caliber handgun at President Ford as he walked through a park to the state capitol in Sacramento. A member of Charles Manson’s crime “family,” Fromme was wrestled to the ground by a Secret Service agent before she could get off a shot.

  Then, on September 22, just four days after Patricia was arrested, Sara Jane Moore came a great deal closer to killing the president. The matronly bookkeeper volunteered to become an FBI informant while working with Randy Hearst’s food giveaway the previous year. Still obsessed with the Hearst case, she circulated among the activists she had met in the China Basin warehouse and then provided leads to the FBI. Moore purchased a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and waited for President Ford outside the St. Francis hotel, in the heart of downtown San Francisco. As Ford walked from the hotel to his limousine, Moore fired a shot that just missed the president’s head. She tried to get off a second round, but a Vietnam veteran named Oliver Sipple knocked her down, potentially saving the president’s life. (In the ensuing publicity, Sipple was outed as homosexual. He came to feel that this disclosure ruined his life, an illustration that San Francisco, in the mid-1970s, had yet to become a fully welcoming haven for gay people.)*

  Patricia’s saga was caught up in the backlash against the violence and disorder of the era. In the weeks after her kidnapping, in 1974, she was portrayed sympathetically, as the tragic victim of political zealots. But her voice in the communiqués and her role in the bank robbery transformed her into an outlaw. Saxbe, the attorney general at the time, spoke for many when he said he regarded her as a “common criminal.” As she remained on the lam for month after month, sympathy for her withered. By 1975, she was no longer a symbol of wounded innocence but rather of wayward youth. Many people of her generation had disappeared from good homes and resurfaced in communes and cults. They had rebelled and blamed society for their troubles. Now society was blaming them. Patricia was just another privileged youngster who had turned her back on all that was wholesome about her country. She just happened to be kidnapped first.

  —

  Most top trial lawyers have lesser-known deputies. They handle the gritty details of courtroom work, make sure the right motions are filed and deadlines are met. They hold the hands of the clients (and their families) after the top man rushes through town on the way to another engagement. Bailey’s surrogate was J. Albert Johnson, a lifelong friend as well as an enduring colleague. For Patricia, Al Johnson became more than a lawyer; he became a confidant, mentor, and father figure.

  Bailey and Johnson grew up, literally, on opposite sides of the train tracks in Waltham, Massachusetts. Johnson was raised by aunts and uncles in a sprawling and impoverished Irish Catholic family. To make a few cents, he would prowl the tracks with a burlap bag, collecting stray lumps of coal to sell. On these rounds, Johnson would sometimes look up at a big white house on a hill, where a boy stood silently in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. The rich boy was Francis Lee Bailey, whose father edited the local newspaper and whose mother ran nursery schools. Most exotically, for Al Johnson, Lee Bailey was a Protestant, among the first he had ever met. In winter, they both found their way to the frozen ponds, and they bonded over hockey.

  Bailey went to Harvard for two years, dropped out to fly planes for the Marine Corps in Korea, then returned, without a college degree, to start Boston University School of Law. Johnson’s career was more earthbound. He went to Northeastern, then worked his way through Boston College Law School as a state police officer. After Bailey graduated first in his class, he joined the law firm where Johnson was working but then struck out on his own. They started working together again on higher- and higher-profile cases. Together, in 1971, they won an acquittal in the court-martial of Captain Ernest Medina, who was charged for his role as the commanding officer of the unit that committed the My Lai massacre. (Bailey then hired Medina to be a supervisor in his helicopter factory in Michigan.)

  Johnson was a first-rate lawyer in his own right, often trying cases by himself for high stakes. In September 1975, he gave the closing argument in a first-degree murder case in Dedham. At the time, most people in the Massachusetts legal community knew that Johnson’s most celebrated role was as Bailey’s second-in-command. So once the summation in the murder case was over, the judge took it as his duty to summon Johnson to the bench and report that he had just received a phone message from Lee Bailey, saying he had been hired to defend Patty Hearst and wanted Johnson to join him right away. Al did.

  Bailey and Johnson played off each other. Bailey’s face was set at a perpetual sneer. He regarded everyone, friend or foe, with a sort of icy disdain. He repelled intimacy and wore his finely cut suits, and their vests, like armor. Johnson, with his round face, made everyone a friend, even when he fought them in court. (In San Francisco, he became a drinking buddy of Monte Hall, the FBI agent who ran the day-to-day operations of the Hearst investigation.) Bailey viewed his clients as a means to an end—their exoneration and his glory. Johnson, in contrast, sometimes fell in love with his clients, especially with Patricia Hearst. In a tape-recorded visit to Patricia’s cell, Catherine Hearst raved about Al Johnson. “Al is really crazy about you,” she said. “He really likes you. He hates himself for being emotionally involved, you know.”

  After Steve Soliah was denied a bail reduction because of Patricia’s comments in the jail visiting area, everyone knew that the government recorded the conversations there. Still, these tapes provide a vivid picture of Patricia’s relationships as her life took a major turn. In a way, her time in jail before her trial mirrored her time in the closet in Daly City. In both circumstances, she was confined in a small physical space and exposed only to those who wanted to impart a specific understanding of the world. And in both situations, at the ages of just nineteen and twenty-one, respectively, Patricia’s will bent to the wishes of her interlocutors. She responded to benevolence; it was the kindness of Willy Wolfe and Angela Atwood, far more than the bluster of Donald DeFreeze, that led Patricia to join the SLA. To put it another way, she responded rationally to her surroundings in Daly City, and she did the same in San Mateo.

  This was not a matter of proselytizing by her family and friends. Mostly, they just showed Patricia a lot of love, and this was especially true of her mother. Before and during her time with the SLA, Patricia groused endlessly about her mother, and much of what Catherine heard on the communiqués was painful. But none of it dimmed her love for her daughter, which came through in her frequent visits to jail. At one point, Catherine was complaining about some inaccurate news reports regarding Patricia’s younger sister Anne. In her soft southern accent, Catherine said, “They don’t care about the truth. Nobody does anymore. You have to learn that the thing in life is that nobody except for maybe your ever-loving Momma and Poppa care about the truth.” Patricia absorbed this love and, in short order, returned it. This, too, was a rational choice, not least because the looming court case made clear that staying with Steve Soliah would lead to prison; the path of her parents would, they all hoped, bring her
freedom. In the closet, she became a revolutionary; in the jail cell, she became a Hearst.

  The conversation was mostly family chitchat. They talked a great deal about the many family dogs. (Dogs would be a recurring interest in Patricia’s life.) There were occasional catty remarks about other Hearst relatives. Regarding one of Randy’s brothers, Patricia asked, laughing, “What does Uncle Dave do, by the way?” Her father answered, “Oh, well. He doesn’t do much, really.” Another time, Patricia’s younger sister Anne recalled making a faux pas on Randy’s recent birthday. She bought their father a copy of The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, by Marion Davies, who was the Chief’s mistress. Anne recalled, “I thought, well, he’ll never buy it himself, but maybe he’ll just want to look through it, you know, and look at the pictures and stuff or something.”

  “Well, Mom and Dad both had a fit, right?” Patricia said.

  “It was really disastrous,” Anne replied.

  There were glimpses, too, of 1970s culture in the conversations. Patricia told Anne, “I put on one of those mood rings, you know, that’s supposed to change colors.” She then let other prisoners and even some of the deputies try it on. “The deputy puts it on and it turns blue, and she takes it off and an inmate puts it on and it turns violet,” Patricia said. “And then I put it on. It turns gray.”

  “How rude,” Anne said.

  “It means I’ve got very cold hands,” Patricia said.

  Another time, Patricia told her cousin Will that an instructor had come to the jail to teach the inmates how to do a new dance.

  “What’s the Hustle?” Will asked.

  “It’s this dance,” Patricia answered.

  There were glimpses, too, of the rarefied world in which Patricia’s family and friends lived. To pass the time, Patricia taught herself to crochet, and she began making scarves and hats. “Maybe there’s something I can take on my trip—a muffler or a hat or something,” Trish Tobin said. Patricia asked about the vacation.

  “I’m going skiing for about six weeks in January,” Tobin said.

  “Where are you going to be?” Patricia asked.

  “Switzerland,” Tobin said.

  Such conversations were powerful advertisements for Patricia’s former life. As she weighed her future, Patricia chose between a world where people went skiing in the Alps and one where they ate horse meat and slept in crawl spaces. As in Daly City, Patricia’s transformation did not take long. In her first days in jail, she was writing to her lover that “there will be a revolution in Amerikkka and we’ll be helping to make it.” Less than a month later, she was asking her sister Anne for makeup: “I’ll tell you what I want—liner, mascara, lip gloss.”

  Patricia and her family were venomous whenever Steven Weed’s name came up. After the shoot-out and Patricia’s last communiqué, with its paean to Willy Wolfe, Weed drifted out of the Hearsts’ orbit for good. Ironically, at that time both Weed and Patricia set about doing the same thing—writing books that would exploit the notoriety of the kidnapping. The comrades’ publishing initiative with Jack Scott came to naught, but Weed and a co-author had just about completed a manuscript when Patricia was arrested. Her family, never fond of Weed in the first place, were appalled at what they regarded as a breach of family confidentiality and an attempt to profit from Patricia’s misery. She soon joined in the insults of Steve Weed and also stopped mentioning Steve Soliah to Trish Tobin or anyone else. When Trish said that Weed was trying to get some of his property out of the apartment on Benvenue, Patricia responded, “Oh, wow. You know, it’s going to take one hell of a surgeon to extract his head from his fucking ass, because that’s where it is.” After an excerpt of Weed’s book ran in McCall’s magazine, Patricia told her father, “It’s horrible. You know it’s like about half of it is totally lies, another quarter of it is just half-truths, and then the other quarter of it is just about him.”

  “Oh, boy. Yeah, I know,” Randy said.

  “Jerk,” said Patricia.

  Still, as Patricia rejoined her family and social class over the course of these conversations, her life with the SLA remained a looming, if unacknowledged, presence. There was the time, for example, when Catherine was telling her daughter about a duck-hunting trip that she and Randy had just taken to a rural burg north of Sacramento.

  “Oh, Marysville is the worst town,” Catherine said. “We were driving around to find a grocery store and we went around the block. And there were three stores selling water beds. Can you imagine, in Marysville?”

  Patricia laughed.

  “And there was a dog-grooming thing with a French poodle on the front parlor—really nice looking,” Catherine went on. “And who in the world, up in Marysville, you kept thinking, would bring their dog in here to be groomed?”

  “I’m sure people do, you know,” Patricia said. “I’m not that surprised.”

  “But you would think farmers would have hunting dogs,” Catherine said.

  Patricia answered, “But I mean, it’s not all like that, you know, like they have houses and regular people up there.”

  Patricia wasn’t just complaining about her mother’s snobbery, for she was actually more than familiar with the commercial life of little Marysville. Just a few months earlier, as Tania, she had cased the Bank of America branch there. Patricia could have informed her mother with certainty that Marysville had more than just farmers; indeed, according to Patricia’s notes for her comrades, the bank alone had “7 employees, 5 women & 2 men, one young and nervous; manager is fat and Black.”

  * * *

  * Moore’s motive for trying to kill the president was never clear. She served thirty-two years in prison before being released in 2007. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

  24

  MORE EXCITED THAN SCARED

  Judge Carter, ladies and gentlemen,” Browning began his opening statement. “The government’s evidence will prove that the Hibernia Bank, the Sunset branch thereof, located at the corner of 22nd Avenue and Noriega Streets, in the City of San Francisco, was on April 15, 1974, at approximately 9:40 to 9:45 in the morning, held up by five persons who went inside the bank. The evidence will show that these five persons consisted of one male and four females, one of whom was the defendant Patricia Campbell Hearst.”

  It was February 4, 1976, coincidentally the second anniversary of Patricia’s kidnapping. After a week of jury selection, the trial had begun. As a courtroom presence, Browning was anti-charismatic. His words sounded as if they came from an interoffice memo (“the Sunset branch thereof”). He mumbled. Still, there was method to his mildness. His message to the jury was that this was a simple case that required no special insight to resolve. He didn’t need charisma; he had facts. Browning described the witnesses who would testify for the government—mostly the customers and employees of the bank. They all saw Patricia inside the bank, wielding her weapon. To Browning, that evidence was the heart of the case.

  “The five individuals were the male Donald David DeFreeze, who later identified himself as Cinque,” Browning said, “Camilla Hall, Patricia Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry and the defendant Patricia Hearst.” Browning said, “The evidence will show that the five entered almost as a group. The evidence suggests that Perry entered first, followed by Hearst, and then Hall and Soltysik and then DeFreeze at the rear.” Browning left unspoken the haunting fact that all the comrades who had been inside the bank with Patricia had been dead for more than a year and a half.

  Browning turned to the incident, a month after the bank robbery, at Mel’s Sporting Goods. Browning added an incriminating new piece of evidence to the bizarre story of Patricia’s fusillade to help Bill Harris escape his pursuers. “The evidence will show that these casings and fragments were fired from the same sawed-off M-1 semi-automatic .30-caliber carbine as was later recovered over a year later in the defendant’s residence at 625 Morse Street, in the City of San Francisco,” he said.

  How would the government prove its case? Browning said mu
ch of the evidence would come from the words of the defendant herself. He said the government would introduce the communiqués in which Patricia boasted about her role in the Hibernia robbery. (“On April 15, my comrades and I expropriated $10,660.02 from the Sunset branch of the Hibernia bank,” she had said. “Casualties could have been avoided had the persons involved cooperated with the people’s forces and kept out of the way.”) The government would also introduce the testimony of Tom Matthews, the high school baseball player whom Patricia and the Harrises kidnapped after she shot up Mel’s. Matthews would recount how Patricia bragged about her involvement in the Hibernia job. Finally, Browning said, the government would show the jury the “Tania tapes”—the transcripts, often in Patricia’s own hand, of the interviews for the aborted book project. (Bill Harris, ever the pack rat, had held on to the transcripts when he moved from Pennsylvania to Sacramento to San Francisco. The FBI seized them when he was arrested.)

  Following his statement, Browning moved quickly through his first witnesses. The manager of the Sunset branch described the interior of the bank and his view of the robbery. An FBI agent explained the workings of the security camera and introduced the images, spliced together, of the events of April 15, 1974. Various customers, employees, and bystanders told the jury about the scene at the bank. Bailey cross-examined little, because he conceded that Patricia was inside the bank during the robbery. His defense was built around her state of mind, and on that issue the case quickly came to a critical crossroads.