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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Patricia had a different relationship with each of the three SLA members assigned to her. Ling spoke to her the least but made an important point: Patricia had more to fear from the FBI than from the SLA. This might have been true. In a press conference shortly after the kidnapping, William Saxbe, the attorney general, acknowledged that the FBI might launch a raid to free Patricia. It was true, too, that except for DeFreeze’s growls at Patricia on the first day or two, the SLA never threatened to kill her. She was always told that she would be used as a bargaining chip; the terms of a prospective deal would never be clear to Patricia (or to the SLA), but the idea was always to use her to advance the SLA’s goals, not to do her harm. But Ling and the others repeatedly asserted that they would defend themselves if the FBI or other law enforcement sought to extract Patricia by force. In such a gun battle, the cross fire could prove lethal. DeFreeze had also told her on the night of her capture that the FBI was the real threat to her safety. The SLA was not going to kill Patricia, but she might well die in an FBI raid.

  The SLA was so obsessed with the idea of an FBI invasion that one day DeFreeze came to Patricia’s closet with a bizarre idea. She dreaded his visits, because he was the most confrontational of her captors and the most contemptuous of her parents. (“Your Mommy and Daddy are insects,” he said once. “They should be made to crawl on their hands and knees like insects if they want you back.”) On this occasion, though, DeFreeze had a gift for Patricia. In light of the probability of a confrontation with the FBI, DeFreeze said Patricia deserved a chance to defend herself. He presented her with a sawed-off shotgun, and for the next three days she was given instructions on how to break it down, hold it, and shoot it. (Thanks to her outings with her father, Patricia already had a good idea about how to use a shotgun.) DeFreeze also presented her with a gas mask, to use in case the FBI lobbed tear gas into the house. He didn’t give her ammunition at this point, but he said when the time came, he would provide her with the special SLA shells that were laced with “Ajax,” which was his code word for cyanide. What to make of this gesture? Patricia was terrified at the idea of an FBI raid, especially at the thought of participating in a gun battle. But what kind of kidnapper gives his hostage a gun? The simultaneous hostility and trust from DeFreeze—the idea that she was both an enemy and a comrade—proved predictably unsettling.

  By comparison, Patricia’s time with Angela Atwood was a relief. Angela sat by the closet door and jabbered—“gesticulating, rolling her eyes and making like an actress playing to the galleries.” As Patricia recalled, “She was full of joy, in contrast to all the others, who always were so intent and serious about their revolution.” After Patricia’s baths, Angela would dry her hair and then comb it out and style it, as if they were a couple of kids at America’s most surreal slumber party. One night, when Patricia was still blindfolded, she was awoken by loud noises outside her door—the sound of a radio playing Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” a big hit at the time. Angela opened the door a crack and whispered, “Oh, I wish you could see this. We’re all having so much fun.”

  “What’s happening?” Patricia asked.

  It was Willy Wolfe, Angela said. “Cujo is wild! He’s dancing naked all over the place! He’s so marvelous, you should see him!”

  Angela listened to Patricia’s complaints about her mother, whom she described as domineering and reactionary as well as addicted to pills and booze. (Catherine’s politics had never previously been of particular interest to Patricia.) For her part, Angela spent a lot of time talking about her boyfriends, Little and Remiro (whom she called Osceola and Bo), and how much she missed them. Angela fixated on the injustice of their arrest for the murder of Marcus Foster. The government’s announced theory was that Little and Remiro had been the gunmen, which they were not. (Patricia didn’t learn the truth about who killed Foster until much later.) By dwelling on the government’s mistaken scenario for the killing, Angela and the others avoided the larger point that Little and Remiro had been part of the conspiracy to murder the school superintendent. Still, as with the claims about the dangers of an FBI raid, the SLA’s statements to Patricia about Little and Remiro had a measure of truth.

  And then there was Willy Wolfe, who spent the most time of all with Patricia. He was tall, gawky, and clumsy, especially in the tight confines of the house, but he was strong, too, his limbs sinewy from scaling mountains. Wolfe wore his earnestness without the ferocity of Mizmoon and Ling or the menace of DeFreeze. He talked politics with Patricia, explaining the process of his own radicalization, which came about largely through his visits to Vacaville prison. He told how he smuggled clandestine literature, like George Jackson’s work, to the prisoners. Wolfe’s family didn’t have the wealth or notoriety of the Hearsts, but Willy and Patricia—alone among the people crammed into the small house—shared a social class.

  They talked about their lives, and Patricia’s caustic side emerged in the conversations, especially when she confessed her disappointment with her fiancé. Even before the kidnapping, Patricia told Willy, she had wanted to break the engagement. It gnawed at her that Steve had said, “Take anything you want!” Steve was a wimp, “unmanly,” so he stood in unspoken contrast to the revolutionaries, like Wolfe, who put their principles into action. Willy and Patricia spoke the same language, often deep into the night.

  —

  Willy Wolfe grew up in the bucolic Connecticut town of New Milford, where his father was an anesthesiologist and his mother a homemaker. His childhood had more than the normal quota of troubles. After his mother came down with a mysterious paralysis, his parents went through an ugly divorce. At the age of six, Willy lost part of his foot in a lawn mower accident and walked ever after with a limp. He was a dreamy, inattentive student who graduated number 148 in his prep school class of 194 students. Willy came from a long line of Yale men, but he failed to be admitted. He set out west to Berkeley instead, hoping to study archaeology. Despite his later associations, Wolfe was always described as possessing a kind of sweetness—a soft-spoken, off-kilter charm that made people want to take care of him. He read more Thoreau than Marx.

  While he was still in his first year at Cal, in 1972, he began tutoring at Vacaville and visiting Peking House, where he moved in and became a kind of mascot for the commune. At first, Wolfe knew little about politics and nothing about prisons; he didn’t know much about women either, because he was almost certainly a virgin at that point. Wolfe ingratiated himself with his new roommates by sharing his love of the outdoors, especially mountain climbing. “I wasn’t much of a climber at first,” Russ Little, who lived there, recalled, “but I loved being outdoors with Willy, who, clumsy as he was around the house, was like a goat in the mountains.” In short order, the people of Peking House taught Wolfe about politics; he told them about Vacaville. For the denizens of Peking House, the reelection of Richard Nixon in November 1972 deepened their alienation from conventional politics and reinforced George Jackson’s call for apocalyptic change. They decided they would be revolutionaries, dedicated to the overthrow of the entire structure of American society. Even Wolfe, who had spent the previous summer as an aspiring scientist looking for fossils in Wyoming, now foresaw Armageddon.

  Throughout 1973, Wolfe drew closer to Remiro and Little. They taught him to shoot at the rifle range. After DeFreeze escaped, Wolfe worked as a sort of runner for him, attending meetings of the Oakland school board to keep an eye on Marcus Foster. Wolfe knew next to nothing about the local political scene, and his garbled renditions of the controversy over police in schools contributed to DeFreeze’s decision to go forward with the assassination in November. Wolfe had portrayed the controversy over the police as a life-and-death struggle between black and white Oakland, with Foster on the side of the oppressors. In fact, the issue was far more nuanced, and Wolfe, like DeFreeze, was shocked at the universal revulsion that followed Foster’s murder.

  Shaken by the assassination, Wolfe returned to his father’s home in Pennsylvania over
Christmas and weighed leaving the SLA. Foster’s death jarred his confidence in DeFreeze. But after Remiro and Little were busted in January 1974, DeFreeze told Bill Harris to call Wolfe in Pennsylvania and summon him back. They needed his help, but mostly they needed his cash. (Besides, DeFreeze explained to Harris, Wolfe was weak and privileged, and he might talk to the authorities. It would be better to keep him under their direct control.)

  Harris had mixed feelings about DeFreeze’s demand. At that point, Bill barely knew Cinque (or Nancy or Mizmoon), but he did know Wolfe. He thought Willy was a good kid, kind of naive, and certainly ill-suited for a life underground. He had no experience with the kinds of “actions” that the SLA was contemplating. Harris recalled a conversation with Willy on the steps of Peking House, shortly before he went back east. “I don’t know,” Willy had said. “I think I might be a liability. If someone comes at me, I don’t know if I could shoot them.” Bill had reassured him at the time. “Oh, we’re not going to have to shoot anybody,” he said. “This is just armed propaganda.” But now they had passed that point. Bill was asking Willy to return to a shooting war.

  Bill knew, too, that Willy had fallen for a young Swedish woman and was thinking of going overseas to meet her. A trip across the ocean would keep Wolfe out of trouble, and he could put this whole strange episode behind him. Bill had a measure of humanity and a smidgen of common sense. A friend would give Willy a pass. But Bill was too caught up in the revolutionary spirit of the SLA to see himself as Willy’s friend. Bill was now a soldier, and unlike when he was a marine, he believed in the cause. He received orders from his commanding officer, Cinque, and he followed them.

  As for Willy, he had told his father, on January 10, that he was moving to Sweden to get married. But the following day, Wolfe received three collect phone calls from Bill, who had been directed by DeFreeze. Harris talked his young friend into returning to California—to join the battle and, more to the point, help finance it. Willy told his father that instead of going to Sweden, he was leaving immediately for New York, to visit a sick friend. Instead, Willy went west.

  At some level, as Wolfe joined the team that kidnapped Patricia the following month, he knew he was joining a doomed crusade. He had enough sense to recognize the folly of the SLA but not enough sense to avoid being drawn back in. “I don’t like to see you going along with the colossal rip-off of our brothers and sisters around the world,” Wolfe wrote in an eerily prophetic letter to his mother back east. “Please stop kidding yourself. America is heading for either Communism or 1984. I hope you won’t be a passive enemy of the people in the struggle for a decent life, and if 1984 does come, I’m a dead man.”

  —

  In the first hours after her capture, Patricia had told DeFreeze the truth when she denied knowing about the Hearst family’s finances. Catherine regarded the subject as vulgar, and Randy would never have thought to engage with his children on such matters, especially because they were all girls. Patricia knew that her family lived comfortably but not ostentatiously, but that was about all she knew.

  So when Patricia heard her father’s public statements about the limits of his personal wealth, she didn’t know if he was telling the truth. But DeFreeze and Mizmoon had done research, and they assured Patricia that her father was lying. And they had scores of facts—or what appeared to be facts—to back up their view. DeFreeze gave Patricia long disquisitions on the Hearsts’ business interests, and he made it sound as if Randy Hearst had many millions. In contrast, all Patricia knew was gathered from Randy’s vague words, uttered with Catherine by his side. Half a million dollars represents my own sum. This happens to be a substantial part of my personal assets….The size of the latest demand of the SLA is far beyond my financial capability. Angela, Ling, and Willy—the ones assigned to play the role of Patricia’s friends—as well as DeFreeze rolled their eyes at her father’s poor-mouthing. He was a Hearst! How could anyone believe that he didn’t have the money they were demanding?

  Patricia didn’t know what to think, and it wasn’t as if she were in a position to receive a dispassionate analysis of the evidence. The closet door might have opened, but the front door certainly had not. She was a prisoner, and while she was allowed to listen to some news reports, her captors remained her primary source of information. And DeFreeze made such specific assertions on the tapes, claiming, for example, that Randy had “a silver mine and thousands of acres of land in Mexico, acreage in Hawaii, and 70,000 acres of timberland in Northern California valued at millions of dollars.” How was Patricia supposed to argue with that? And though their personal styles differed—from the hard-assed Ling to the sweet-voiced Willy—the message from all of them was the same: that her father was acting like a capitalist pig, that he was nickel-and-diming the SLA, and that his cheapness was taking money out of the mouths of the poor. Patricia couldn’t help but notice, too, that all of the SLA demands were aimed at helping those in need, not enriching themselves. That thought stuck with her as well.

  In all, during the long hours in the house in Daly City, the SLA started saying things that made sense to Patricia. The real danger came from the FBI. Little and Remiro were being framed. The SLA—starting with Cujo—was fighting for a better world. Patricia listened, and she talked, too. She was not what the SLA expected. She was curious and feisty. She laughed in the right places, especially at Weed’s expense. In short order, Angela, Ling, and Willy told their comrades, You’re not going to believe this, but we like her.

  —

  After Randy Hearst rejected DeFreeze’s demand for an additional $4 million on February 22, the two sides said nothing to each other for nine days, the longest gap so far between communications. In typical fashion, DeFreeze had not gamed out a strategy. He had failed to plan what to do if Hearst refused the latest demand. Now that Hearst had done just that, DeFreeze was stumped. Further, thanks largely to the Delancey Street volunteers, the next PIN distribution on February 28 went more smoothly. The third distribution the following week, which expanded to twelve sites, went even better. (PIN stopped announcing the distribution sites in advance, which limited crowds and the potential for unrest.) Thousands were being fed. The absence of chaos, and the silence of the protagonists in the kidnapping, took the story out of the headlines. In addition, the news media were momentarily distracted by yet another plague to beset San Francisco. A strike by municipal workers paralyzed the city, leading, for example, to 426 million gallons of untreated sewage being discharged into the city’s beloved bay.

  Randy Hearst could not abide the silence, so he tried to break the logjam on March 3, the day before the one-month anniversary of the kidnapping. He had nothing new to offer, just a request for the kidnappers. Back in front of the cameras in his driveway, his still-black-clad wife by his side, Randy asked the kidnappers to allow some kind of direct communication with Patricia. He again flattered the SLA by invoking the Geneva Convention—as if the kidnappers were a national army. He addressed his daughter directly: “Of course, it’s ridiculous to think that under the Geneva Convention we would be allowed to go in and see you…but under the convention, you are allowed to write from time to time to other people. See if they’ll let you send us a note or something to let us know you’re OK.” Catherine added, “Patty, honey, your father’s doing everything in his power, and I want you to know that millions of people all over the world are praying for you. I know it’s been a long time, sweetheart…but keep up your courage, and you keep praying.”

  Though the Hearsts did not realize it, their statement played into DeFreeze’s hands. At this point, he knew he wasn’t going to get Little and Remiro released. He had lost interest in the food giveaway, even though it was finally running smoothly. Despite the rhetoric of the communiqués, the SLA was not a vehicle for social or political change; it was a spectacle, an instrument for getting attention for its own sake. This was why DeFreeze demanded that all the communiqués be printed in full. Randy’s silence deprived the SLA of the oxygen to keep the
story alive. Now DeFreeze had the opportunity to rally his troops to respond to Randy’s statement of March 3.

  Inside the SLA house, DeFreeze whipped up a volcanic reaction to Randy’s latest. As Cinque saw it, Randy was now making demands of his own, instead of figuring out how to comply with the SLA’s. The comrades had already proved several times that Patricia was alive and well. There was no need to provide any letters from her. This was just a stalling tactic or, more ominously, a way for the FBI to track down the location of the safe house. DeFreeze spread the word that they should prepare for an FBI raid at any moment. Training began immediately. As in the Concord house, the comrades ran and jumped around the tiny enclosed space, in a series of drills designed to simulate a gun battle with the authorities. But something was different this time. There was another comrade watching, cradling a weapon, and taking a bead on the imaginary FBI intruders. Patricia Hearst was now part of the army. From her first day in captivity, she had been told that the real threat was from law enforcement; it made a kind of sense for her to join the collective self-defense.

  DeFreeze knew he had the potential for a propaganda coup on his hands, so he directed a kind of symphonic SLA message for the next recording, with four different voices speaking for the group. On March 9, a female caller alerted a local radio station to look for a package taped to the toilet of the women’s room of Foster’s, a well-known restaurant in San Francisco. The package contained a tape recording and Patricia’s automobile club card. The first voice on the tape marked the public debut of Angela Atwood, which was a revealing choice on DeFreeze’s part. He had chosen Patricia’s confidante. As a way of welcoming Patricia into the fold, and easing her way to becoming a public spokeswoman, pairing her with Angela made sense.

  Still, Angela’s part of the recording was an embarrassment. “My name is Gelina and I am a general in the Symbionese Liberation Army,” she began, announcing her rank, just as General Field Marshal Cinque had done. The former actress knew little about politics, so her words served mostly to convey the rage of the leaders—DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and Ling. She began by excoriating those groups on the political left that had failed to rally to the SLA’s banner. When DeFreeze emerged from his bedroom to storm around the house, the perfidy of the Black Panthers (as well as Angela Davis and Jane Fonda, who had both also denounced the SLA) was a favorite theme. “There have been many of the Left who, without a clear understanding, have condemned the actions of the SLA, and the people’s forces who have chosen to fight rather than talk,” she said. “It has been claimed that we are destroying the Left, but in truth an unarmed and nonfighting Left is doomed.” What made Angela’s remarks more excruciating was that this ordinarily well-spoken woman adopted an African American accent. DeFreeze was always defensive about the absence of actual African Americans in the SLA, so Angela’s feigned accent was his dubious attempt to address the problem.