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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The plan nearly failed at the outset. Wolfe made a left onto Parker Street, with the two other cars following close behind. Suddenly a Berkeley police cruiser appeared from nowhere and flashed its lights at the Volkswagen. The officer walked slowly to the driver’s side to talk to Wolfe.

  Were they caught? The kidnapping itself was over quickly, but the gunfire prompted several calls to the police.

  DeFreeze and Harris, with automatic weapons splayed across their laps in the Chevy, faced a moment of decision. With eyebrows more than words, they asked each other, could we waste a cop? If the officer was questioning Wolfe about the kidnapping, it was only a matter of minutes until the whole plan unraveled. The only way to protect their mission—their “action,” in the military argot they favored—was to kill the cop right now. DeFreeze was a killer, as he had proven just a few weeks earlier. But Harris was bigger on talk than violence; in Vietnam, he’d never even removed the rifle from beneath his bunk. But that was then. In unspoken accord, DeFreeze and Harris prepared to open their doors and turn their guns on the officer who was questioning their comrade.

  Just then, DeFreeze and Harris saw the police officer walk away from Wolfe’s window, return to his vehicle, and drive away. Later, they learned that the officer had only stopped the Volkswagen to tell Wolfe to turn on his lights.

  And so the three cars headed off into a future that was nearly as mysterious to the captors as to their captive. There were just eight of them—Donald DeFreeze, Bill and Emily Harris, Angela Atwood, Camilla Hall, Nancy Ling Perry, Mizmoon Soltysik, and Willy Wolfe—but they called themselves an army, the Symbionese Liberation Army. As they drove off into the California night, with Patricia Hearst as their unwilling passenger, their unofficial motto might well have been “What now?”

  PART ONE

  1

  NERVOUS BREAKDOWN NATION

  The kidnapping of Patricia Hearst is very much a story of America in the 1970s, not the 1960s. From the vantage point of nearly half a century, the two decades sometimes merge in historical memory as a seamless epoch of idealism and change. Generalizations about eras are necessarily imperfect, of course, but these two decades actually look very different in retrospect. The 1960s were hopeful, the 1970s sour; the 1960s were about success, the 1970s about failure; the 1960s were sporadically violent, the 1970s pervasively violent.

  There were assassinations and riots in the 1960s, but the vast majority of protests were peaceful and even, occasionally, successful. After an extraordinary public outpouring from African Americans and their allies, official racial segregation, which had plagued the United States since its inception, faded in the 1960s. Men walked on the moon. The economy boomed. Much of the discontent in the 1960s emerged from a sense of possibility—that blacks and whites could live in harmony, that the Vietnam War could end, that there could be a better future for all. Those hopes, for the most part, were dashed by the 1970s. Richard Nixon became president in 1969 and did not end the war. An oil embargo in 1973 led to gas lines. The economy stagnated. The stock market lost almost half its value between 1973 and 1974. Inflation hit 12 percent a year. Watergate confirmed every cynical expectation about American politics.

  The nature of protests changed, too. Nixon might not have brought the Vietnam War to a close, but he did end the draft. Freed from the threat of conscription, many thousands of otherwise apolitical young people drifted away from the antiwar movement. The marches against the war became considerably smaller. But as the protests shrank in size, they built in intensity. Frustration, especially at Nixon’s reelection in 1972, convinced many that the era of peaceful demonstrations had passed. To a degree that can scarcely be imagined today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression. In 1972, there were 1,962 actual and attempted bombings in the United States, with twenty-five people killed; in 1973, 1,955 bombings, with twenty-two killed; in 1974, 2,044 bombings, with twenty-four killed. The movement was small, but those who remained were the violent core. Membership in the Weathermen, the most notorious bombers in the counterculture, shrank from four hundred in the late 1960s to just fifty in the early 1970s, but their bombings continued.

  No region symbolized the rapture of the 1960s or the venom of the 1970s more than the San Francisco Bay Area. The Summer of Love, a carnival of music, drugs, and sex in 1967, established the city as the center of the American counterculture. This largely spontaneous festival drew about a hundred thousand young people to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and brought the word “hippie” into broad circulation. In a similar vein, the Free Speech Movement, at Berkeley, also began in the mid-1960s. At the time, speakers on campus were only allowed to advocate on behalf of the Democratic or Republican Party, and an earnest young cadre of students began conducting demonstrations arguing for a greater range of expression. In short order, the movement defined Cal as the epicenter of American student activism. These events became magnets drawing young people to the Bay Area—for adventure, for politics, for some fantasy of what the country might become. Yet by the 1970s, both San Francisco and Berkeley were wilting under the weight of so many new arrivals. Politics and music yielded, in significant measure, to drugs and violence.

  And then, in an especially sinister confluence of events, a series of unspeakable crimes beset San Francisco almost simultaneously. A serial killer—who portrayed himself as a kind of macabre inversion of a counterculture figure—taunted police for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He killed at least five and perhaps as many as thirty-seven people and then bragged about the killings in a series of letters to Paul Avery, a crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. The letters contained mysterious codes and symbols that gave rise to the killer’s nickname—Zodiac. He spoke in a kind of hippie argot with its ersatz Eastern mysticism (and poor spelling), but his message could scarcely have been darker. “I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL.”

  As 1974 began, Zodiac contacted Avery again with a single, chilling message: he was back. Not surprisingly, in a kind of cosmic refutation of the Summer of Love, San Francisco became synonymous with crime in the 1970s. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, a San Francisco detective, wreaked vigilante justice on the outlaws who afflicted the city. Karl Malden and Michael Douglas played television detectives fighting the same kind of mayhem in The Streets of San Francisco.

  But fictional criminals represented only a minor threat to the city compared with the nest of genuine psychopaths who appeared in late 1973. In October of that year, a group of black Muslims who called themselves the Death Angels began a concerted campaign to kill white people in a series of random, senseless, vicious murders—simply because they were white. They became known as the Zebra killers, after the code name for the radio frequency that the San Francisco police assigned to the investigation, and they probably spread more terror than any set of criminals in modern American history. As with the Zodiac killer, the Zebra marauders represented an evil parody of the world that many had hoped to create in the 1960s. They met at the Black Self-Help Moving and Storage company, which was affiliated with the Nation of Islam, and they cruised for victims in one of its vans. The spree began on October 19, 1973, when a young couple, Richard and Quita Hague, were accosted on Telegraph Hill, where they were taking a walk after dinner. Forced into a van, they were driven to a remote location in the city, where Quita was hacked to death with a machete. Richard was mutilated too, but he somehow survived. Then the killings accelerated. A future mayor, Art Agnos, was shot on the street after a community meeting. Another victim was taken to a warehouse and tortured to death—his hands, feet, and genitals cut off one at a time. In all, there would be fifteen murders and eight attempted murders. “The eruptions of unspeakable violence made this most beloved of cities seem like hostile territory,” the San Francisco historian David Talbot wrote, adding that the “lovely jeweled city became strange and ominous—the way one’s hou
se feels after it’s been broken into and ransacked. Whites saw blood in the eye of every able-bodied black male, and every black man saw fear and rage in white faces….The city’s very identity began to dissolve.” Two more men were killed on December 22, 1973. Another was killed on Christmas Eve.

  The Zebra crisis reached its apogee on the night of Muhammad Ali’s second heavyweight fight with Joe Frazier, which took place in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Ali was a hero to the Death Angels, and after watching his victory in a theater on a closed-circuit feed, they decided to celebrate with a vengeance. On a single night, they shot five people, a random assortment of white San Franciscans going about their business, including a sixty-nine-year-old man celebrating his birthday by buying donuts; a homeless man; a woman on her way to a fabric store; a woman doing her laundry. (She was the only white person among a dozen black people in the Laundromat.) Four of the five died, and the city neared a collective nervous breakdown. The headlines the next day read “Madmen Slay Four on City Streets,” “SF Killing Spree—5 Shot on Streets.”

  These stories appeared on Tuesday, January 29, 1974. Patricia Hearst was kidnapped on the following Monday.

  —

  American movies during World War II usually portrayed combat units as paragons of regional and ethnic diversity; they might consist, for example, of an Italian American from Boston, a Jewish soldier from Brooklyn, and a slow-talking sharpshooter from Texas. The Symbionese Liberation Army represented a kind of devil’s inversion of these celebratory archetypes, updated for a new and very different world. With one exception, they all came from somewhere else and represented part of the great youthful migration to the Bay Area. As it happened, though, they filled distinct niches in the ecosystem of the counterculture. There was a radical black man (Donald DeFreeze) and a crazed Vietnam vet (Joe Remiro). The SLA consisted mostly of women, and they too fit well-known profiles. The group included a militant lesbian (Patricia Soltysik), a scary vixen (Nancy Ling Perry), and an otherworldly poet (Camilla Hall), as well as an empty-headed actress (Angela Atwood). Finally, there was an idealistic young boy (Willy Wolfe). Like all human beings, the members of the SLA were more complex than any stereotype, yet it is still possible, through them, to see how different tribes on the coast formed and related to one another.

  During the brief life of the SLA, its members issued thousands of words in proclamations, communiqués, and interviews. But verbosity did not mean coherence. For the most part, the SLA spoke in a kind of pidgin leftist dialect, with phrases borrowed from the fashionable sources of the era. These included Pan-Africanist solidarity movements; Cuban and South American Marxism, especially the Tupamaros of Uruguay; and samplings from China (Mao Zedong), Germany (the Baader-Meinhof gang), and Italy (the Red Brigades). In truth, the rhetoric meant little. The words were scarcely understood by the SLA members who uttered them and totally ignored by the public who heard them. The infantile spirit of the SLA’s public expression is best captured by the phrase with which the group closed its communiqués: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

  But if the SLA did not have a coherent ideology, it did have a spirit—an anarchic intensity drawn from the chaos of the time and place. Criminals, by and large, avoid attention, but the SLA sought it out, including for its most appalling crimes. Several of the key figures in the group were trained as actors, and there was an unmistakable element of guerrilla theater in their operations. For the SLA, performance was not a means to a goal but often the goal itself.

  The legacy of the SLA itself may be nonexistent, but its story provided a kind of trailer for the modern world. The kidnapping of Patricia Hearst foretold much that would happen to American society in a diverse number of fields. The story illuminated the future of the media—especially television and book publishing—the culture of celebrity, criminal justice, and even sports. The Hearst kidnapping itself had an effect on the politics of the 1970s, including on the career of the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. In other words, even though the kidnapping was an anomalous event, it provided hints of what America would become.

  Above all, though, the story of the kidnapping is the story of a single young woman. Few people in American history have been subjected to as dramatic a transformation of circumstances as Patricia Hearst. In an instant, her life of ease and privilege vanished, replaced by an ordeal of pure terror. And then—most remarkably of all—she responded to this extraordinary trauma by becoming a member of the very group that took her freedom away.

  Or did she?

  2

  FROM INSIDE THE TRUNK

  The three-car caravan, with Patricia Hearst in the trunk of the middle car, inched through the darkened streets of Berkeley. The group maintained a cautious speed, well under the limit, to avoid any further attention from the police. Disoriented, frightened, cold, and alone, Patricia had no idea where they were going or why. Still, it was in her nature to resist. A more timid teenager might have remained frozen in terror, but Patricia, while still in the dark of the trunk, shucked off her restraints and blindfold. As Bill Harris learned when she howled for help and nearly escaped in her driveway, this woman was a fighter.

  Patricia was still just learning the neighborhood. She had the status of a sophomore, but that was because she received a year’s credit for her time at junior college. Then she had spent the fall as a clerk at a department store. She’d only been a student at Cal for a few weeks. In that period, her life was circumscribed by the fifteen-minute walks to and from her classes. Still, she had explored enough of the storied campus to recognize that her family had practically built it.

  One Hearst in particular. Everyone passing by the Cal campus drove by the grand Beaux Arts pile of the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium. The facility contained several gyms and three pools, including a famous one on the roof, which is surrounded by urns and statuary. The building’s main office included an incongruous feature for an athletic facility—a large oil portrait of a woman dressed in fashionable attire for the turn of the previous century: Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Then as now, it is a Cal tradition for university staff and faculty who pass through the gym office to acknowledge Mrs. Hearst’s portrait and thank her out loud for her largesse to the university.

  With her slim build and diffident smile, Phoebe resembled her great-granddaughter Patricia. And though Phoebe is less well-known than many in her family, she established a template for Hearst women. Phoebe never graduated from college or held a full-time job as such, but she set her own goals, pursued them intently, and saw a remarkable number through to conclusion. She was not easily deterred. She had a soft voice and a fierce will.

  Born in Missouri in 1842, Phoebe and her parents moved to California in the gold rush era. Though instructed only briefly in a one-room schoolhouse, Phoebe always placed a high value on education and possessed a firm sense of the rights of women, including their right to vote. When she was just twenty, in the midst of the Civil War, she married a rough-hewn mining prospector named George Hearst, who was two decades her senior. George made and lost several fortunes in quartz mines and other ventures, and his peripatetic life kept them separated for much of their marriage. (He even served briefly as a U.S. senator from California.) George loved to buy land, and through good times and bad he held on to one special parcel, forty thousand acres near San Simeon Bay in the Santa Lucia Mountains, about two hundred miles south of San Francisco.

  On April 29, 1863, Phoebe gave birth to the couple’s only child—William Randolph Hearst. Phoebe devoted herself to her son with singular intensity, toting him with her on trips around the world and trying to direct the boy’s relentless energy into productive pursuits. Her success was mixed—Will was expelled from Harvard for neglecting his studies—but the young man soon discovered he had a talent for the newspaper business. George Hearst had purchased the San Francisco Examiner in 1880, mostly as a vehicle for his political ambitions, but his son saw the paper as the means to his own ascendancy. By the tur
n of the century, the young publisher had parlayed the Examiner into an empire—a chain of newspapers, a major political voice in the country, and the beginnings of a vast fortune. William Randolph Hearst was known ever after as the Chief.

  His mother, during this time, began a project of her own. California had boomed in the nineteenth century, but the state’s flagship university remained a backwater. Phoebe made it her mission to turn Berkeley into a university worthy of the nation’s biggest state. She demonstrated her commitment by financing a master plan for the campus, which was known as the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan and adopted by the regents in 1900. Then, to a remarkable degree, Phoebe set out to build the buildings laid out in her plan. In some cases, she financed the construction out of the funds that George left to her, and in others her son honored her by paying for the construction himself.

  —

  For all of Phoebe’s accomplishments, she was not a celebrity. Her son, William Randolph Hearst, was famous and notorious.

  There has never been an American publisher who wielded power with such zest and swagger. After taking over the Examiner in 1887, Hearst bought the New York Journal eight years later (with Phoebe’s help) and established a ferocious rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Their papers introduced the phrase “yellow journalism” into public discourse, and Hearst, it is often claimed, led the nation into the Spanish-American War as a circulation-building stunt. (In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane instructs a reporter on the ground in Cuba, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war!”)