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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  “There was a strike?” Bailey asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And during the strike, what did you do?”

  “I went to class.”

  Patricia gave a terse but vivid description of her kidnapping. “I was in the kitchen,” she testified, “and Angela Atwood came up and I screamed, and she grabbed me and put a pistol in my face and told me to be quiet.” Bailey took her from the scene at Benvenue to the car on Tanglewood Road and then to the long drive to the closet in Daly City. Blindfolded, she listened to DeFreeze rant about her parents. Bailey played the jury her voice on the communiqués, and Patricia described how DeFreeze “started telling me what to say.” At one point, she said, DeFreeze came to the closet and said he had heard Patricia was not cooperating.

  “What did he do to you?”

  “He pinched me.”

  “Where?”

  “My breasts and down.”

  “Your private parts as well?”

  “Yes.”

  Through tears, she told of a pair of rapes. Bailey asked what Willy Wolfe did.

  “He came into the closet and he closed the door and—”

  “Did he make you lie down on the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what did he do?”

  “Had sexual intercourse,” said Patricia.

  A week later, according to her testimony, DeFreeze did the same thing.

  The comrades told Patricia that her parents botched the food giveaway. “I was told that my parents weren’t doing anything except trying to humiliate people and trying to provoke the SLA to kill me,” she said. In time, she was placed in a garbage can and transferred to the apartment on Golden Gate Avenue, in San Francisco.

  Bailey asked why she wanted them to think that she had joined the SLA.

  “So I could stay alive.”

  “Were you convinced in your own mind at the time that if you did not join, that they would dispose of you?”

  “Yes.”

  She described the Hibernia robbery, before which DeFreeze “said that he was going to keep an eye on me and that if I messed up in any way, that I’d be killed.” After the robbery, Patricia described the comrades’ flight to Los Angeles. Here, Bailey breezed by a clear weakness in her story—the shoot-out at Mel’s Sporting Goods. “When you saw the struggle with Bill Harris on the ground, what did you do?” Bailey asked.

  “I picked up his gun and started firing,” Patricia said.

  “Did you fire at anything in particular?”

  “Well, I was trying to fire, like, up at the top of the building.” Bailey elided the key question why she fired to free her comrade.

  As for Tom Matthews’s testimony, Patricia didn’t try to refute it. Bailey asked her why she smiled at the young man.

  “Because whenever I met someone, I was supposed to smile,” she said, “so it would be easier for them to recognize me from the photos that had been printed.” The truth might have been simpler than this tortured explanation. Maybe she smiled because, as Matthews suggested, she was enjoying herself.

  Patricia described how, after the death of the six comrades on Fifty-Fourth Street in Los Angeles, she fled with the Harrises to Costa Mesa and then back to San Francisco. She taped her final communiqué, which described Willy Wolfe as “the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

  Bailey asked her, “Did you have anything to do with the authorship of what you said on that tape?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything on there that’s your own words?”

  “No,” Patricia said. “I might have changed a phrase to make it easier to read but none of it was my own words.”

  Bailey rushed through Patricia’s experience from her trip with Jack Scott and his family across the country in June 1974 to her arrest in San Francisco in September 1975—what the press came to call “Patty’s lost year.” The themes of her testimony remained the same—that she made no judgments independently of her SLA masters and that she lived in constant fear of being killed for disobedience.

  —

  Prosecutors rarely cross-examine. Defense lawyers generally call few or any witnesses, preferring instead to make their cases by cross-examining those witnesses offered by the government. Defendants themselves rarely take the stand. So a career prosecutor like Jim Browning had little experience cross-examining a defendant, which is what he began to do on February 19—the day before Patricia’s twenty-second birthday. Browning was dreadful.

  The U.S. attorney began by asking about the books in Patricia’s apartment on Morse Street. “These books were predominantly, at least, about social and political problems, weren’t they?”

  Patricia agreed, and the jury could only have concluded, so what?

  Browning accused her of exaggerating her injuries in the kidnapping. He asserted that her engagement with Steven Weed had been troubled. He showed her the sworn affidavit, prepared by her first lawyer, Terence Hallinan, in which Patricia claimed that she had been drugged by her captors. Under Browning’s questioning, she admitted that the affidavit was largely false. But she asserted that she simply signed what Hallinan wrote down for her. Regarding her statements on the communiqués, to Tom Matthews, and on the Tania tapes, she maintained her insistence that she made them all under threat of death. As for why she never simply called her parents or tried to return to them, Patricia said, “I felt that my parents wouldn’t want to see me again.” Patricia became almost cocky on the witness stand, displaying a savvy understanding of the rules of evidence.

  When Browning asked her an open-ended question about the dangers she faced, she knew how to volunteer information that the prosecution wanted kept away from the jury. “San Simeon was bombed,” she said, referring to an incident that took place just days earlier on February 12, in the middle of the trial. “San Simeon was bombed, my parents received a letter threatening my life if I took the witness stand,” she testified. “They wanted a quarter of a million dollars put into the Bill and Emily Harris defense fund.” As Patricia knew, this information was technically irrelevant, but it was also likely to generate sympathy from the jurors, who were sequestered and sheltered from news coverage. (A letter from the New World Liberation Front took credit for the San Simeon bombing, in which no one was hurt. In this era, many people used the NWLF name, and the bombing was never solved. There is no evidence that the Harrises, who were in jail at the time, had anything to do with it.)

  The only effective moment for Browning was nonverbal. At one point, he handed Patricia the weapon she had carried inside the Hibernia Bank. She took the weapon in her manicured hands and inspected it like a skilled marksman. Her proficiency drew an astonished “wooo” from the courtroom. Unintentionally, Patricia proved she was no naïf when it came to guns. Browning asked her how she knew this weapon was her own.

  “By the stock and by the bolt,” she said. Patricia knew the lingo too.

  On several occasions, Browning made the classic trial lawyer’s error—asking questions to which he did not know the answers. Trying to minimize her hardships in Daly City, Browning said, “You were given a toothbrush, I take it?”

  “It was just the same toothbrush that everyone used,” Patricia said, drawing a sympathetic murmur in the courtroom.

  Likewise, Browning walked into a trap on the subject of Willy Wolfe and displayed antediluvian attitudes about sexual violence in the process. “Was it a forcible rape?” Browning asked.

  “Excuse me,” Patricia said.

  “Was it a forcible rape? I mean, did you struggle? Or was it one in which you submitted because of your fear?”

  “I didn’t resist, no.”

  Pursuing the issue, Browning said that Patricia had said she “thought highly of him.”

  Bailey jumped up to say Patricia had never said that about Wolfe.

  Patricia agreed. “I didn’t say that at all,” she stated.

  “Well, what did you say?” Browning asked.

  “I sai
d I had a strong feeling about him.”

  “Well, what was that feeling?” Browning said, unwisely.

  “I couldn’t stand him,” Patricia said.

  At the defense table, the lawyers tried to suppress their smiles.

  —

  Reeling from the evident failure of his cross-examination, Browning struggled to recover the momentum he had established during the prosecution’s case. Patricia had successfully batted away all of his questions about the Hibernia robbery itself. Browning’s only hope was to expand the range of questioning to include such subjects as the fatal bank robbery in Carmichael and the bombings across Northern California. Bailey had already announced that Patricia would refuse to answer any questions on those subjects. The issue, then, was whether Judge Carter would allow the prosecutor to ask them.

  The judge had earlier temporized on this issue, but on February 23, a week into her testimony, he came down in favor of the government. Browning could ask Patricia about her criminal activity during her year on the run. The ruling was clearly correct. A defendant who takes the stand puts all of her behavior at issue; she can’t pick and choose what she wants to answer. During a brief recess, Patricia suggested to Bailey that she just answer the questions about her lost year; she thought the jury would understand her predicament. But Bailey believed that the risk of any admissions tying her to the fatal bank robbery was simply too great.

  “Miss Hearst, you testified earlier, I believe, that you had come back across the United States with Jack Scott and they dropped you off in Las Vegas,” Browning began. “I ask you now where he dropped you off in Las Vegas, please?”

  Bailey had scripted Patricia’s answer during the recess. “I refuse to answer on the ground that it may tend to incriminate me and cause extreme danger to myself and my family,” she said.

  Browning knew that Bailey had injected the issue of “extreme danger,” even though it had no justification in law. “If Your Honor please,” Browning said, “may the Court advise counsel and the jury that ‘extreme danger’ to herself and her family is not a legal basis for refusing to answer the question.”

  The judge agreed, saying, “I will instruct this witness to answer the question. I’ve already ruled under the circumstances that she’s not entitled to raise the Fifth Amendment in these circumstances.”

  Browning tried again. “Miss Hearst, where were you dropped off by Jack Scott in Las Vegas?”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “Who met you in Las Vegas?”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “How long were you in Las Vegas?”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  In all, Patricia refused to answer forty-two questions in front of the jury, until Judge Carter showed some mercy and told Browning to stop. She had refused to answer questions about Steve Soliah, Jim Kilgore, and the New World Liberation Front. She refused to answer questions about her use of phony identification cards and about her trip to the emergency room with Soliah, to treat her poison oak. Browning once baited Patricia into an answer, when he showed her a page from the Tania tapes transcript. Patricia had crossed out a sentence that said she was “sexually attracted” to Willy Wolfe and substituted “wanted to fuck.”

  Flustered and angry, Patricia said, “That’s not exactly how it happened.”

  Hearing Patricia take the Fifth repeatedly, the jury was left to assume the worst about her behavior during her lost year. In calling Patricia to the stand, Bailey had gambled that Judge Carter would keep those incriminating subjects off-limits, and he had lost. So in the end, Bailey’s decision to call Patricia to the stand backfired. Testimony that began with such promise for the defense concluded in a fiasco.

  25

  THE SEARCH FOR OLD MCMONKEY

  The spectacle of Patricia’s taking the Fifth in front of the jury ruined her testimony, but Bailey still kept his eye on his main priority—protecting his client from being charged with the death of Myrna Opsahl. So in the middle of Patricia’s own trial, Bailey negotiated a side deal for her.

  While she was being tried for the Hibernia Bank robbery, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento charged Steve Soliah with participating in the Carmichael robbery. The prosecutor’s motives in that case were transparent. The idea was to convict Soliah, or persuade him to plead guilty, and then turn him into a witness against the other participants. Three of the Carmichael robbers—Michael Bortin, Jim Kilgore, and Kathy Soliah—were fugitives at the time. Bill and Emily Harris were awaiting trial for kidnapping Patricia. No one had yet made a deal with prosecutors to turn on the others, but Bailey worried about being the last one in line, especially because Patricia was the highest-profile target in the group.

  So Bailey took the rare, if not unprecedented, step of offering Patricia’s testimony on Carmichael to prosecutors while she was still being tried for Hibernia. His client would agree to a full debriefing with prosecutors in the evenings, after her days in court were over. For her statements in these sessions, she would receive “use immunity”—that is, prosecutors could not use her statements against her, but they could use them to prosecute others. In practical terms, the deal amounted to a near guarantee that Patricia would never be prosecuted for Opsahl’s death. In short, Bailey was hedging Patricia’s bets. She might be convicted in Hibernia, but she wasn’t going to go down in the more serious case in Carmichael. All she had to do was go upstairs to the FBI offices, after the end of long days in the courtroom, and tell the agents exactly what happened in April 1975.

  Patricia’s cooperation with the FBI—making her, in effect, a government informant—marked the next step in her political re-evolution. Her version of the Carmichael job never changed. She told the FBI that Bill Harris and Steve Soliah were the lookouts. Michael Bortin, Jim Kilgore, Kathy Soliah, and Emily Harris were inside the bank. Patricia herself drove the switch car, which took the invasion team back to their residence in Sacramento. There, according to Patricia, Emily had acknowledged that her gun killed Mrs. Opsahl, and that Emily had called her “a bourgeois pig.” As Patricia and Bailey knew, the comrades’ collective effort on the robbery made them all potentially liable in a capital case for Opsahl’s murder.

  Bailey’s strategy of separating Patricia from her life in the SLA, and especially from her lover Steve Soliah, continued to pay off. He had stopped the exchange of letters between them, and he made sure Patricia didn’t run into Soliah or the Harrises in jail. The day-to-day nurturing Patricia received from Al Johnson, who acted as almost a surrogate father, also drove home the lesson that she had to return to the Hearst fold. One could say that the lawyers reverse brainwashed her, but the truth may be simpler. Patricia was always a rational actor—with the SLA and now with her lawyers. Even in chaotic surroundings, she knew where her best interests lay.

  So when Patricia began her secret sessions with the FBI, she buried her former allies with icy specificity. To her lawyers, her interrogators, and her family, she never betrayed the slightest misgiving about turning on Steve Soliah, whom she had, just a few months earlier, professed to love with all her heart. The FBI agents were dazzled by the precision of her memory. Her manner never changed; she still sounded like a lock-jawed aristocrat who always seemed about to roll her eyes at the banality of her inquisitors. But Patricia displayed to the FBI the same quiet intensity that her SLA comrades admired about her. Faced with a task—whether planning a bank robbery or, now, recounting one—Patricia simply completed it.

  —

  As March began, Bailey’s arrogance once again came to the fore, notwithstanding his rocky performance in the trial. Every day after court for a week, he flew his plane from San Francisco to Las Vegas, where he conducted a paid seminar for trial lawyers. Drink in hand, he lectured for an hour, then returned to the airport to complete the thousand-mile round-trip. Questioned by reporters about this grueling schedule, Bailey said, “It’s fun to be a superman,” adding, “But that’s a fraud. I attribute my appearance here to a very good physician who knew exac
tly what to prescribe.” Bailey had still another iron in the fire. In the middle of the trial, he was negotiating with the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons to write a book about the case. Bailey lined up his usual ghostwriter, John Greenya, to start work on the book while the trial was under way. To this end, Bailey arranged for the court transcript to be sent to Greenya at his home in Maryland every day, via a brand-new company called Federal Express. Like Steven Weed and Jack Scott, Bailey saw the Hearst case as a vehicle for profit in the then-booming world of publishing. (Weed timed his book, My Search for Patty Hearst, to come out during Patricia’s trial, further alienating him from his former fiancée and her family.)

  As Patricia’s lawyer was scurrying back and forth to Las Vegas, her trial turned to a new and stultifying chapter. In legal terms, Bailey’s defense was known as physical coercion—that is, that Patricia was forced to commit the bank robbery against her will. This was actually a very narrow defense. It was not, strictly speaking, a defense of brainwashing, which doesn’t exist in federal court in the United States. The defense was simply a claim that the SLA comrades compelled her to participate in the bank robbery through threats of physical force. Under this theory, she should not be convicted because she acted under duress.

  To make his case, Bailey wanted to offer testimony from three psychiatrists who had all examined Patricia, each for at least a few hours. Prosecutors objected, saying their testimony was irrelevant, because the doctors could not say whether Patricia was physically compelled to rob the bank. But Judge Carter sided with the defense and allowed the testimony. Browning had anticipated that the judge would rule against him on this issue, so he assigned David Bancroft, one of his assistant U.S. attorneys, to prepare three other psychiatrists to testify for the prosecution in rebuttal. Browning had a fairly cynical view of the whole subject of expert psychiatric testimony. He regarded the experts in terms of quantity, not quality. “If they call two, we’ll call two,” Browning told his assistant. “If they call three, we’ll call three. All I want is a ‘wash transaction.’ ”