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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Thus, according to the SLA, began a tender love affair between two young people thrown together under extraordinary circumstances. In light of the bond between them, they also decided it was time for Patricia to have her own code name. (In the first days after the kidnapping, the SLA referred to her as Marie Antoinette; later, they called her Tiny, which was fitting because her slender frame shrank to under a hundred pounds in captivity.) Willy bore a passing resemblance to Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary who had been executed by the Bolivian military in 1967. An East German woman named Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider fought by Che’s side in Bolivia, and she too lost her life in the struggle. Bider had taken the nom de guerre of Tania. So, Willy Wolfe decided, would Patricia Hearst.

  —

  Patricia’s version of her relationship with Wolfe, recounted in her later testimony and her book, differs in every significant particular.

  One day, about three weeks into her captivity, Angela whispered to her, “Cujo wants to get it on with you. You know, he wants to fuck you.” Later in the same conversation, Angela turned the proposal into a fait accompli. “You’ll be getting it on with Cujo,” she said. Still blindfolded in front of the comrades, weak from her confinement in the closet, Patricia felt powerless to protest. She had thought that the SLA’s much-touted adherence to the Geneva Convention would prohibit such a thing, but now, to her horror, she realized that was not the case.

  Later, she was brought to a group session, with the comrades seated in a circle on the floor, to discuss the issue of her relationship with Wolfe. In her version of the meeting, the conversation was precisely the opposite of the SLA account; the group was addressing Willy’s desire to have sex with Patricia, not her wish to have sex with him. “Free sex was one of the principles of the cell,” she was told. “No one was forced to have sex in the cell. But if one comrade asked another, it was ‘comradely’ to say yes.”

  “So we want you to know,” Angela said, “you can fuck any of the men in the cell that you want to.”

  “Or any woman!” Camilla Hall said, to raucous laughter.

  Patricia, in her account, complied wordlessly, and Willy followed her into the closet that night. “The door was shut, we took our clothes off, and he did his thing and left.”

  But worse was in store. Three days later, Angela informed her, “Cin wants to fuck you.” Patricia wrote in her book that she had dreaded this moment above all. Appalled as she was, Patricia offered no protest to this either. “I would have been accused of racism, for I had unprotestingly submitted to Cujo, and I knew that among these people there was nothing worse than being guilty of racism.” She submitted to the two men for a simple reason. “My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival.” (The members of the SLA who are still alive deny that DeFreeze ever had sex with Patricia.)

  —

  Patricia’s description of the beginning of her relationship with Willy Wolfe is more persuasive than that of the SLA. At the time, which was the beginning of March, Patricia had been a hostage confined to a closet for about a month. At that point, she had seen none of her captors’ faces, including Wolfe’s. She was weak and emaciated. Advocates for the SLA version of events point out that the group consisted mostly of women, all committed feminists, who would never have countenanced any kind of sexual assault in their presence. But these women had already participated in a kidnapping and prolonged detention, so the idea that they scrupulously followed other laws seems dubious. Even Angela Atwood, Patricia’s ostensible friend, might have seen what she wanted to see in Patricia and Willy’s relationship, rather than recognize the power the SLA held over its captive. In short, according to modern conceptions of consent, it is difficult to imagine how anyone in Patricia’s situation could be deemed to have voluntarily slept with one of her kidnappers. Everyone agrees that Patricia had sex in the closet with Willy Wolfe, and it seems equally clear that the sex was not consensual, at least at first. If Patricia had sex with DeFreeze, that too was surely nonconsensual, but the evidence is less clear about whether such an encounter took place.

  Also around the one-month mark of her captivity, Patricia’s behavior, in private and in her taped statements, changed. She had a television in her closet at this point, and she was able to follow the coverage of her kidnapping. She saw her parents’ press conferences. (Thus, her admonition to her mother to stop wearing black.) She saw the food riot in Oakland. She heard Attorney General Saxbe embrace the idea of an FBI raid. One day, frustrated by the media circus that her kidnapping had become, she told Angela, “I don’t wanna go home.” At first, Angela paid the remark little heed, thinking it was just a reaction to the raucous media scrum outside the mansion in Hillsborough. But then Patricia said it again. At the same time, she was speaking of Steve Weed with nothing but contempt. Her ties to her former life were fraying. At first, no one in the SLA took Patricia’s words literally; they believed she did want to go home but was just expressing frustration about how the people in her former life were handling her release. But then Patricia kept saying it—I don’t wanna go home. Her evolution from empathy to sympathy to comradeship was gradual, but that evolution did take place.

  On March 13, Governor Reagan announced he had reappointed Catherine Hearst to a new sixteen-year term on the Board of Regents. Even though Reagan disdained the Hearsts’ accommodating approach to the kidnappers, the governor knew that he could needle the outlaws by keeping their captive’s mother on his team. As Reagan intended, the members of the SLA were appalled by Catherine’s reappointment. But so was Patricia. Her mother embraced the right-wing governor who had disdained the food giveaway in such ugly terms. Patricia saw the reappointment as another sign that the family had abandoned good faith negotiations and, thus, her.

  Randy understood the political dynamics of the situation better than Catherine, and he worried that her acceptance of the reappointment would put Patricia at risk. But Randy never discussed the issue with his wife, much less insisted that Catherine turn down the job. Still, the night of the reappointment, he grumbled to a group assembled at the house, “Reagan’s a jackass. That’s like a slap in the face to the SLA and it could make them angry enough to hurt Patty.” Catherine had not consulted her husband about her decision to accept reappointment, and it became an early sign of how Patricia’s kidnapping drove her parents apart.

  When Patricia started expressing her reluctance to return to her former life, late in her first month of captivity, Angela was the only comrade who paid much attention. But as the days passed and Patricia repeated the sentiment, others also took note. Angela talked it over with Ling and Wolfe, the two other comrades who knew Patricia best. They saw from the beginning that Patricia was nothing like her mother. In their view (and they were far from wrong), Patricia was a kind of rebel even before they kidnapped her. They talked to DeFreeze about her. Look, they said, this is a girl who did drugs, who fucked her high school teacher, who chose Berkeley over Stanford. Maybe she really could be one of us.

  DeFreeze was intrigued. He had no interest in Patricia as a human being, but he saw her through the prism of his obsession with public attention. If Patricia joined the SLA, it would be a monumental propaganda coup, which DeFreeze pronounced coop. In Blood in My Eye, George Jackson had singled out the Hearst newspapers for criticism. (“It’s really annoying to hear blacks express right-wing traditionalist political ideals. I mean, the same kind of spiel that you get from…Hearst.”) And now here was the prospect of a Hearst in the SLA! The negotiations with the family, such as they were, were going nowhere. People were losing interest in the story. If Patricia were to change sides, DeFreeze thought the potential for media coverage was enormous.

  But as usual with the SLA, there was an absence of orderly thinking, especially on the part of their leader. At the same time that DeFreeze was considering whether to recruit Patricia into the SLA, he was still obsessing with the group about ways to spring Little and Remiro from San Quentin. (The pair was actually housed
in the prison’s death row for a time, which they viewed as an intimidation tactic.) During the all-day and all-night conversations among the comrades, the topics ranged inconclusively between Patricia’s future, Little and Remiro, and the dire need for cash. Then, with characteristic impulsiveness, DeFreeze made a decision. No one was sure why, but the general field marshal suddenly became convinced that a raid on the house in Daly City was imminent. They had to move—right away.

  —

  DeFreeze gave Camilla Hall the assignment of finding a new apartment, with one specific instruction. There was no more need for the walk-in closet for Patricia—that is, for Tania. She would live among the rest of the comrades now.

  DeFreeze wanted to move to the city, where the SLA might be able to blend in and circulate as they could not in suburban Daly City. At least in theory, that meant the comrades could recruit new members, in service of the uprising that was supposed to follow their insurrection. Camilla found a shabby two-bedroom apartment (with a Murphy bed) at 1847 Golden Gate Avenue, in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco. (To the amusement of the comrades, the apartment was only a little more than a mile from FBI headquarters, at 450 Golden Gate Avenue.)

  On the night of March 21, the SLA members folded Patricia’s diminutive frame into a newly purchased thirty-gallon garbage can for the ten-mile drive into the city. When they reached the apartment, DeFreeze decreed that the Murphy bed would belong to Tania, while the rest of the comrades could make do with whatever combination of beds, couches, and floor space they could find. (Later, Patricia would describe the Murphy bed as being in a closet, but it was clear that the nature of her captivity had changed dramatically.)

  By the time the group moved, Patricia was becoming a full-fledged member of the SLA. But there was still one problem. As Willy and Angela told Patricia, Bill and Emily Harris still opposed the idea of Patricia’s joining the group. Patricia had to convince the Harrises that she belonged. So one evening, shortly after they settled into Golden Gate, Bill sat by the foot of the Murphy bed and listened to Patricia make her case for membership. Still wearing a blindfold so she could not see the comrades, she told Bill her old life was gone. Her mother was a drunken reactionary. Her father betrayed her. Steve Weed was a clown and a parasite. According to Bill and Emily, Bill tried to talk Patricia out of her infatuation with the SLA. As long as she was with them, he said, the group was an all but certain target for an FBI raid. That was bad for Patricia and bad for them. If she were to go home, she would save her own life, and the SLA members would have a chance of fading into the woodwork. Eventually, though, Bill gave up in frustration.

  A day or two later, according to Patricia’s recollection, DeFreeze sat down by the Murphy bed and said, “Tiny, you remember what I told you about the War Council thinking about what to do with you?”

  With her blindfold still in place, Patricia said yes.

  “Well, the War Council has decided that you can join us, if you want to, or you can be released and go home again.” (Patricia and the surviving members of the SLA confirm that this conversation, as well as several others like it, took place.)

  So DeFreeze gave Patricia the choice to leave. But did he mean it? In her book, Patricia said no, that the offer was just a ruse. The real choice he was offering was “to join them or to be executed. They would never release me. They could not. I knew too much about them. He was testing me and I must pass the test or die.” Nonsense, said her captors. She had a real choice, and she chose to stay.

  In any event, she told DeFreeze, “I want to join you.”

  “That’ll mean, you know, you never can go back to your old way of life. You’ll be an urban guerrilla, fighting for the people.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “I want to fight for the people.”

  DeFreeze went on to say that Patricia would have to convince each of the comrades that she was worthy of membership. She could remain only if the vote were unanimous. So Patricia spent the next few days trying to convince each member of the cell of her bona fides. As she made the circuit in the cramped apartment, she heard the comrades’ own reasons for going underground with the SLA. Nancy Ling said DeFreeze had saved her from a life of drug abuse. Camilla Hall said she hoped to organize an army of homosexuals to join the revolution. Willy Wolfe said the SLA represented just a small part of a people’s rebellion that was brewing around the globe. Her friend Angela acted as a kind of campaign manager, advocating among the comrades on her behalf.

  Patricia’s only real problems were the Harrises, who remained skeptical. Emily reminded Patricia of the costs of a life in the shadows. Emily confessed how much she missed her prison lover, whom she could no longer see or contact. Bill, who was miserable in the close confines of the apartment, simply could not believe anyone would choose to sacrifice a life of wealth and ease for this threadbare and perilous existence. Patricia later asserted that her passion for joining was a subterfuge, because she truly believed that the real choice was join or die. But the SLA saw only a woman on fire with revolutionary passion.

  At last, on the night of March 31, eight weeks after she was kidnapped, the comrades gathered for a final decision. Patricia was invited to sit in the circle with them. It was a remarkable scene—the fine-boned heiress waiting in supplication before the collection of bedraggled misfits. The windows were covered (as they always were) by filthy Indian bedspread material. A small arsenal of sawed-off shotguns and handguns, with the ever-present rounds of cyanide-laced bullets, stood in readiness against the walls. A bare lightbulb drooping from the ceiling illuminated the proceedings. With great solemnity, the general field marshal asked, “So you want to be an urban guerrilla and a soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army?”

  “Yes,” Patricia said.

  “Are you ready to renounce your past and become a guerrilla soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The verdict of the comrades had been unanimous. Tania could join them.

  “Okay,” DeFreeze said, “take your blindfold off.”

  Suddenly, for the first time, she saw the faces that went with the voices of her tormentors turned teammates. “As General Field Marshal, I welcome you,” DeFreeze said, “you are now a guerrilla fighter and a soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army!”

  A couple of days later, Willy gave Patricia a memento to welcome her as a comrade. He said an archaeologist friend had given him two charms that he had found on a dig in Mexico. Willy braided and waxed a rope for the charm, which Patricia wore around her neck. Willy made a similar rope for his own charm. The matching keepsakes symbolized their union.

  Now it was time to plan a bank robbery.

  10

  STAY AND FIGHT

  The comrades had never been flush, but before the kidnapping most of them at least had jobs, which allowed them to make ends meet. Bill Harris worked at the post office, Emily at Cal, Mizmoon at the Berkeley Public Library, and Ling at the juice cart. (Of course, DeFreeze, as a prison escapee, couldn’t seek work, and besides he’d scarcely ever held a real job anyway.) But the collective decision to go underground eliminated their regular sources of income. Despite DeFreeze’s hopes, Willy Wolfe’s return from Pennsylvania added nothing significant to the SLA coffers. In short order, the comrades were desperate. They practically lived on mung beans and black-eyed peas—“poor people’s food,” they called it.

  Camilla Hall, the one SLA member who could still move somewhat freely aboveground, was the group’s lone source of funds while they were in Daly City. On March 1, she withdrew the last $1,565 from her savings account at her bank in Berkeley. (The FBI knew both that Hall was affiliated with the SLA and where she had a bank account, but the bureau neglected to monitor the branch closely enough.) Three days later, Hall sold her 1967 Volkswagen, which Wolfe drove during the kidnapping. In an extraordinary coincidence, Hall sold the car to a local dealer who in turn sold it to a clerk in the FBI’s steno pool. The car sat outside the bureau’s offi
ces for weeks before it was finally recognized. Still, Hall’s largesse could only go so far. Even crammed into a single small apartment, nine people generated considerable expenses. So the SLA began thinking about robbing a bank for the most venerable of reasons: that’s where the money was.

  But that wasn’t the only reason. The comrades had been talking about robbing a bank even before the kidnapping, but their rationale evolved after Patricia emerged from beneath her blindfold. DeFreeze recognized what a dramatic statement it would be if she participated in a stickup. Bill Harris and Angela Atwood were deputized to search for an appropriate target, but their checklist included more than just the chances for a quick strike and clean getaway. Unlike virtually all other putative bank robbers, they sought out a bank that possessed a relatively new form of technology: a security camera that could be activated by bank staffers in the event of a robbery. (Security cameras that took video did not yet exist.) If Patricia were part of the team inside the bank, they could show, not just tell, that Patricia had joined the SLA.