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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  One evening in early December, Bill and Emily Harris were blindfolded and driven to the house at Sutherland Court for a sort of audition. Bill had met Joe Remiro at an Oakland supermarket, where Bill was registering voters for Bobby Seale’s campaign for mayor and Joe was handing out leaflets in support of farmworkers. Both had been loosely affiliated with Venceremos, one of the many radical groups in the Bay Area. They became friends, and Joe felt Bill out on joining the SLA. After DeFreeze approved them, Bill and Emily quit their jobs and joined the comrades.

  —

  If one could pinpoint a nadir for the American spirit in the 1970s, that moment in late 1973 might represent a fair choice. The nation watched in astonishment all summer as the Senate Watergate Committee, led by North Carolina’s Sam Ervin, revealed the depth of Richard Nixon’s corruption. The economy was cratering, thanks to an energy crisis. After Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, starting the Yom Kippur War, motorists had to wait in long gas lines to pay prices that had quadrupled. On October 10, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in a separate scandal. On October 20, Nixon led the Saturday Night Massacre, when his own attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, quit rather than follow the president’s order to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. In San Francisco, three thousand gas stations closed for three days to protest rising prices from their suppliers. America at this moment combined international turmoil, economic collapse, and high-level depravity. The historian Rick Perlstein wrote of this period, “America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history.”

  The union of the Harrises with the rest of the SLA reflected the sour spirit of the time. Though they had read their Debray and could articulate the notion of a revolutionary vanguard, none of them had any realistic expectation that their actions would set off a broader rebellion. They were shaking things up, stirring the pot, proving to the world that the counterculture was still active. They wanted to shock the system and the people who lived by its rules. Beyond that, they had no goals, no agenda.

  So the question remained of what exactly the SLA would do next. DeFreeze wanted a kidnapping but had no target and no plan. Harris had a different idea that reflected his roots in guerrilla theater. (Harris had studied theater as an undergraduate.) Christmas was coming. Why not hijack an eighteen-wheeler full of turkeys and give them to the poor? Why be the Tupamaros when you could be Robin Hood? That would give people a different impression of the SLA. It was a typically zany idea from Harris—completely impossible to accomplish. Where to find the right truck? Who would stop it? And then how to distribute the turkeys? The whole plan made no sense.

  Then, on December 19, 1973, the San Francisco Examiner announced the engagement of Randolph Hearst’s middle daughter. The article began,

  This is a week of special family significance for the Randolph Apperson Hearsts of Hillsborough.

  Today they are announcing the engagement of their daughter Patricia Campbell Hearst to Steven Andrew Weed.

  And on Friday, another daughter, Anne, will be presented at the annual debutante Cotillion at the Sheraton Palace Hotel.

  Displaying his usual rapacious appetite for news, Bill Harris read both local papers’ stories about the engagement. He noticed that the Chronicle included a detail that was omitted in the Examiner:

  Patricia graduated from Crystal Springs School, studied at Menlo College, and is a junior in art history at UC-Berkeley.

  The last part caught Harris’s eye: a junior at Berkeley. (She was actually a sophomore, but no matter.) A student and a Hearst! What a splash that would make! The Tupamaros had kidnapped a mere editor, but this was the most famous name in American journalism!

  Bill knew that there was a directory of students’ home addresses, available to the public, in the university administration building. Harris found his way to a secluded nook where an ancient-looking ledger book, with handwritten entries, held the information he sought:

  Patricia Campbell Hearst, 2603 Benvenue, Apartment 4, Berkeley.

  This was promising. Harris reported back to his cell and then to DeFreeze. They agreed to start surveillance of the apartment, to see if they could identify Hearst’s regular movements and determine when best to grab her. In her notebook, Nancy Ling added her name to the list of possible kidnap victims. “At UC,” she wrote, “1) That daughter of Hearst.” Elsewhere, she wrote out the full name, as noted in the engagement announcement: “Patricia Campbell Hearst.” The plan was set in motion.

  —

  Then, shortly before the SLA could conduct the kidnapping, disaster struck. In the early morning hours of January 10, 1974, David Duge, an alert local cop in Concord, noticed a car out of place on the quiet residential streets. Thinking the vehicle might be tied to some local burglaries, Duge pulled it over. Russ Little, the driver, gave him a license in the name of Robert Scalise. Duge also asked the passenger, Joe Remiro, for identification, and Remiro gave the officer his own license. Duge noticed that the back of the van was surrounded by black curtains, making it impossible to see what was inside. He asked “Scalise” what he was doing in the area at that hour. The driver said that he was looking for the home of a friend named DeVoto, who lived on Sutherland Court. (In a way, this was true. Little was trying to find the safe house that he and Nancy Ling had rented in that name, but he had gotten lost.) Duge retreated to his car and ran a quick check of the names.

  Finding nothing, but his suspicions still aroused, Duge walked back to the car, tapped on the glass, and asked Remiro to get out of the car. “Do you have any guns or knives on you?” the officer asked. “I’m going to frisk you.” Duge reached toward Remiro, who took a quick step back and pulled open his jacket, revealing a bulge near his waist. Recognizing the outline of an automatic pistol, Duge raced back toward his car and crouched behind it, just as Remiro fired off two blasts. Duge fired back twice; Remiro shot two more times. The flashes from their guns lit the pitch dark. Little, meanwhile, restarted the van and took off. Remiro bolted on foot.

  “Concord eleven-ninety-nine,” Duge shouted into his radio, “officer in trouble! I’ve been shot at!” But by the time Duge’s backup arrived, the scene was quiet.

  Then, all of a sudden, the van with “Scalise” at the wheel came barreling back. Little had become disoriented in the tangle of streets and wound up where he started. Duge’s backup swung his vehicle in front of the van, which the driver brought to a screeching stop. The backup cop inside pointed a shotgun at the driver. “Police!” he said. “Come out with your hands up!”

  The officers ordered “Scalise” to lie on the ground and found his pockets stuffed with .38-caliber bullets—fourteen in one pocket, thirteen in the other. He had no weapon, but an empty pistol holster was on his waist. “Where’s the gun?” the officers asked, and Little gestured toward the driver’s seat, where there was a .38 Colt as well as a rifle. As they were pulling “Scalise” to his feet, they noticed he was bleeding. He had been grazed on the right shoulder by Duge in the initial exchange.

  The officers pushed the curtains in the back aside and found a stack of hundreds of newly printed leaflets bearing the SLA’s seven-headed cobra. For more than two months, police in the area had been searching for any clues to the murder of Marcus Foster. Now they had a major break in the case, but the passenger in the van, the one who fired on Duge, was gone. (The van itself was registered to Nancy Ling, but it contained an engine that had been removed from a different van that had been hijacked by Joe Remiro.)

  Police from Concord and other departments in the area swarmed into the neighborhood, looking for the gunman who had fled on foot. Hours passed—nothing. Then, at 5:31 a.m., just before dawn, more than four hours after the initial confrontation, a patrol officer saw a figure dart between two nearby houses. After the officer loaded his shotgun, he heard a voice saying, “I’ve had it….I give up….I’m coming out.” Joe Remiro emerged from the half-light and lifte
d his hands to be frisked. “It’s in my right pants pocket,” he said. The officer reached in and found a Walther PP .380 automatic—one of the guns used to kill Marcus Foster.

  The SLA safe house—1560 Sutherland Court—was about two blocks from the site of the initial confrontation and the place where Remiro was arrested. During the course of the morning, word reached the house that the two men had been busted. Remiro himself had actually drawn up plans for responding to a possible confrontation there. It called for the SLA members to station themselves in the crawl space beneath the house or behind barricades of bundled newspapers upstairs. The plan continued as follows:

  — Keep your hand gun with you at all times.

  — Keep your amo and rifles, etc. together and ready to carry out immediately.

  — Always know where your shoes are.

  — Always know where your Molotov cocktails are.

  But Remiro and Little were gone, and the remaining people in the house—Nancy, Mizmoon, and DeFreeze—had no stomach for a last stand against the police. They decided to flee. Still, they knew that they had to get rid of the incriminating evidence in the house. But how? They could burn the paper in the fireplace. Or pack everything into the car and take it away.

  But Nancy Ling—twisted with demented passion—had a different idea. She decided to burn 1560 Sutherland Court to the ground.

  Nancy and Mizmoon worked through the afternoon, buying gasoline and spreading gunpowder throughout the rooms. DeFreeze, as always, left the real work to others. They set a six-inch fuse leading to a puddle of gasoline and streaks of fuel that were meant to spread the fire throughout the house. This, they thought, was sure to destroy both the house and its contents. Mizmoon and DeFreeze left first. Ling then lit the fuse and bolted in a 1967 Oldsmobile that Willy Wolfe had left behind. The fire started with a great bang but extinguished itself almost immediately. Ling had forgotten to open the windows, starving the fire of oxygen. The trove of evidence in the safe house was scarcely singed.

  In short order, the police had it all. Unused to processing major crime scenes, the Concord authorities failed to secure the premises, allowing journalists and curiosity seekers to rummage through the partially burned interior. The investigation of the SLA would include many such failures by law enforcement. When Marilyn Baker, a local television reporter, arrived on the scene, the residence had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere; “as kids and neighbors paraded by clutching their Symbionese trophies, I kept pulling more papers from under the pile on the bed.” Paul Avery of the San Francisco Chronicle described some of what was inside:

  The house was furnished in crash-pad modern: mattresses on the floor and wooden crates. There were several typewriters, a mimeograph machine, and boxes and handfuls of bullets all around—.30 caliber, 9 millimeter, .38 special caliber, .45 caliber, .30-06 caliber, and 12-gauge shotgun shells. The walls were covered with posters, Mao and Stalin, and pinned with photos of police officers and slogans signed “Cin.” Taped to three walls were well over 100 newspaper and magazine clippings about the exploits of foreign guerrillas and revolutionaries. There were gas masks, bandoliers, stacks of gun and ammo catalogues, stolen license plates, and three BB guns.

  There were also .38-caliber rounds with hollow points filled with cyanide, a drill, and a plastic container marked “CYANIDE WATER.”

  Nor was that all. There were books—Who’s Who in American Industry and the California International Business Directory—as well as the usual radical tracts. There was ammonium nitrate and other bomb-making ingredients. There were boxes and boxes of documents and notebooks, mostly written by Nancy Ling and Joe Remiro. And there were the lists of potential kidnapping targets, mostly local corporate executives but also Patricia Campbell Hearst. The police never warned any of them.

  —

  DeFreeze summoned the remaining comrades to an emergency meeting in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, far from their blown suburban hideout. Because Bill and Emily Harris were less seriously compromised than the rest of the SLA members, DeFreeze designated them as “runners”—intermediaries with the outside world. In this capacity, Emily and Mizmoon found the next SLA safe house, at 514 Winchester Street, in the suburb of Daly City, on the other side of the bay from Concord. But when the landlord made clear that he would keep his own key to the house, the SLA crew decided to move out after just a couple of days. Next, on January 20, Emily and Mizmoon, posing as TWA flight attendants, rented a three-bedroom stucco house at 37 Northridge Drive for $265 a month, plus a $50 cleaning fee. The landlord thought that for a pair of flight attendants, his tenants were unusually concerned about security. They installed a heavy-duty bolt-type lock on the front door (to which the landlord did not have a key) and something even more peculiar. In the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, the new tenants changed the knobs so that the door could not be opened from the inside.

  The full SLA reassembled in the house on Northridge Drive. DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Nancy were joined by Bill and Emily Harris as well as Angela Atwood as they spread their sleeping bags on the floor and awaited a final decision about what to do next. At DeFreeze’s direction, Harris had summoned Willy Wolfe back from a visit to his father in Pennsylvania. Camilla Hall had returned, too. One thing was sure. They had reached the point of no return. All of their names were easily determined from the contents of the house in Concord; their fingerprints were all over the place. The evidence tying the house and the van to the Foster murder was overwhelming, and that was potentially a death penalty case. Before January 10, all the SLA members (except DeFreeze) had been able to work in regular jobs and circulate more or less freely throughout the Bay Area. Now, suddenly, they would be completely cut off from society—until they were arrested or killed.

  The crisis, following the arrests of Remiro and Little, prompted DeFreeze to assume a more military-style form of leadership. In addition to directing Harris to fetch Wolfe, he decreed that the group would henceforth address each other only by their code names. All of them already had aliases but had rarely used them. Some of the names had meanings; others did not. But now they would be used exclusively:

  DeFreeze—Cinque, or Cin

  Mizmoon—Zoya (a Russian name meaning “life”)

  Nancy Ling Perry—Fahizah (one who is victorious)

  Russ Little—Osceola (a white man who became a leader of the Seminole tribe in Florida), also called Osi

  Joe Remiro—Bo

  Emily Harris—Yolanda

  Bill Harris—Teko (Bill wanted Camilo, after a Cuban revolutionary, but DeFreeze insisted on Teko)

  Angela Atwood—General Gelina

  Willy Wolfe—Cujo, or Kahjoh (a Central American Indian word for “unconquerable”)

  Camilla Hall—Gabi

  DeFreeze also recognized that it was time to commit to the next SLA action. He felt the arrests of Little and Remiro forced his hand. They had to prove that they were still a force, still an army. He had earlier suggested that they kidnap two corporate executives, but the SLA, with its diminished resources, lacked the ability to track wealthy adults who lived protected lives. That left Patricia Hearst as the lone viable target.

  Bill Harris was a skeptic—a role he would persist in for the remainder of the SLA’s strange odyssey. It wasn’t that he questioned the revolutionary goals of the SLA (such as they were), but he saw himself as the in-house pessimist about their tactics, the Eeyore of the SLA. Bill understood the appeal of kidnapping a Hearst. After all, he was the one who came up with the idea and then located her home address. Like DeFreeze, Bill loved publicity, and he recognized that snatching a newspaper heiress would be a blockbuster story. But now that the kidnapping might actually take place, Bill had questions: What did they hope to accomplish? What were their ransom demands? Would they ever be met? Sure, it would be great to kidnap a Hearst, but what would they do with her?

  DeFreeze dismissed Harris’s concerns. The goal of the kidnapping would be to free Osceola and Bo—Little and Remiro. But how? The
SLA would trade Hearst for the two men. But what if the government didn’t want to trade? When had it ever traded murder defendants for anyone? Well, if the government wouldn’t trade Little and Remiro, the SLA would tell the authorities to give them safe passage to Cuba. Really? Harris asked. Really, DeFreeze said. Harris relented and joined in the planning.

  The SLA made meticulous preparations for its actions. They surveyed Hearst’s apartment. They knew that she lived with her fiancé, Steven Weed, and that they seldom went out at night, especially on a Monday. They knew that the four-unit apartment complex on Benvenue had no security; they could simply walk up to the door of apartment 4; and they knew there was little traffic in this residential area.

  At last, the night for the action was selected: February 4, 1974. If the larger goals of the SLA were vague, and even if the purpose of the kidnapping was opaque, the plan itself was straightforward and refined. They would arrive at 2603 Benvenue shortly after sunset, which was at 6:37 p.m. Camilla Hall would back into the driveway with the entry team of DeFreeze, Bill Harris, and Angela Atwood and wait for Hearst to be placed in the trunk of their car. Willy Wolfe and Mizmoon Soltysik would park in the VW Bug, on the far side of Benvenue, to lead the caravan away from the kidnap scene. Emily Harris would wait in a station wagon in front of the apartment, with Nancy Ling Perry riding (literally) shotgun.

  There was just one problem. They needed three cars, and they only had two.

  * * *