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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  And so, late on the night of May 8, the caravan set off. They staggered their departures so they would avoid calling attention to themselves, but they all took the same route, shunning I-5, the major north-south highway, and instead taking the less-traveled Route 99 most of the way. Driving through the night, careful to observe the speed limits, they passed through the agricultural heart of the state, the Central Valley, before they hit the sprawl of Los Angeles. Bill Harris took the first turn at the wheel of the battered Chevy van, with Emily next to him and Patricia in the back, next to a small arsenal of weapons covered by a blanket. Then Emily drove. Before dawn, Patricia did some driving, too.

  The three SLA vehicles linked up later in the morning. DeFreeze appeared in his red-and-white van, which had the odd feature of dainty curtains on the windows. Nancy Ling was deputized to find the group a place to live, and she returned to report that she had located a house at 833 West Eighty-Fourth Street, in South Central, for the modest sum of $70 a month. When the comrades assembled there, they saw why the price was so low. Even by the modest standards of the comrades’ living conditions in San Francisco, the place was a wreck—a three-room shack with no electricity and thus no hot water, in the heart of the ghetto. Even with the big score at the bank, the comrades couldn’t help but notice the downward trajectory of their living conditions. They had gone from a comfortable suburban house in Concord, to a modest home in Daly City, to a pair of seedy apartments in San Francisco, to this hovel in Los Angeles. The dismal regression offered a vivid counterpoint to DeFreeze’s promises of imminent victory.

  There was no furniture, no stove, no refrigerator, no cooking utensils. Emily Harris and Camilla Hall snuck out to a grocery store and returned with canned spinach and okra, which they attempted to flavor with another purchase, canned mackerel. The comrades who could stomach the mixture ate it cold. Patricia, her weight already below a hundred pounds, lived on crackers and Kipper Snacks, a different kind of canned fish. As in San Francisco, the black neighborhood made it difficult for anyone but DeFreeze to leave the house without drawing attention. Mostly, they stayed inside, doing their military drills and calisthenics in desultory compliance with their established custom. DeFreeze added instruction in knife fights to their daily ritual.

  Bill Harris didn’t bother to hide his revulsion at the Eighty-Fourth Street house or his frustration at DeFreeze’s increasingly apparent estrangement from reality. “This is just one more reason for leaving this stupid group!” he fumed to Emily. Yet, as with his earlier bouts of dismay, Bill never followed through with his determination to break ranks. Sensing Harris’s disgruntlement, DeFreeze made the only placating gesture he could afford at this point. On the spot, General Field Marshal Cinque promoted Harris to the rank of general in the SLA; henceforth, Harris would be known to the comrades as General Teko.

  After the group settled in Los Angeles, the three-person teams remained intact for brief forays outside the walls of the house. On one occasion, Bill, Emily, and Patricia set out to find a woman named Utommu, who was the mother of the lover Emily had taken during her prison visits, before she and Bill joined the SLA. After a considerable search, they found Utommu, who lived in the area, and Emily went inside to talk to her alone. As Patricia recalled, Emily came out of the house practically skipping with joy. The mother had informed Emily that her lover would soon be released from prison. They would soon be together again. Notwithstanding the Harrises’ theoretical belief in open marriage, Bill seethed at this news.

  After just a few days, he was desperate to find any excuse to leave the shabby house, so he volunteered to take his team to do errands—to buy food, collect supplies, even pay parking tickets. One day, DeFreeze announced that the comrades would need heavy clothing for future combat actions. He wanted them to get long johns, heavy socks, and thick pants. Bill prepared to take his team—that is, Emily and Patricia—on the mission to the store. Just before they left, though, Mizmoon said she thought Patricia should stay back at the house, because she was too weak and too recognizable. Better, Mizmoon argued, to send Angela with Bill and Emily. As Mizmoon said, “Gelina would be much better on this action and safer, too.”

  But Patricia—who was, at this point, very much Tania—protested the idea that she should be excluded from any SLA action. “That’s not fair,” she argued to DeFreeze. “I’m capable enough now to be backup on this operation and I’m on their team and it’s only right that I fulfill my responsibility as a member of Teko’s team. We’re supposed to stay together on all actions and I want to do my part.”

  Bill and Emily weighed in on Patricia’s behalf. “She’s our comrade, and we trust her,” Bill told DeFreeze. “We’ll be safer with her in case something happens.”

  DeFreeze took Patricia’s side. Tania would go shopping.

  Shortly before 4:00 p.m. on May 16, 1974, Patricia (having donned a curly dark wig) joined Bill and Emily Harris in DeFreeze’s red-and-white Volkswagen bus on a round of errands in nearby Inglewood. On the front seat was an envelope with cash to pay a parking ticket, but perhaps understandably, in light of what followed, the three comrades never got around to mailing it.

  —

  Even through the windshield, the sun felt good. Emily drove, Bill rode shotgun, and Patricia squatted in the back on the floor, next to DeFreeze’s pile of weapons. The windows were open, and a cool breeze lifted the spirits of three people who had mostly been cooped up indoors since February.

  Taking their time and enjoying the escape from the dreadful house on Eighty-Fourth Street, the three comrades drifted from store to store. First, they bought four bags of groceries at a supermarket for $33.06. Next they went to a clothing store, where they bought six pairs of Levi’s jeans for $81.41, thus disregarding DeFreeze’s edict against dungarees. They went to a stationery store, where they bought nine five-by-three notebooks, as well as batteries, chewing gum, aspirin, a newspaper, and cigarettes. (Like most of the comrades, Patricia had become a chain-smoker since her kidnapping.) At all of these stops, Bill and Emily had gone inside the stores, and Patricia had waited in the van, with the curtains drawn. At a stationery store, Bill heard the radio playing the Crusaders’ “Way Back Home”—the SLA national anthem. When Bill reported the news to Patricia, they agreed that it was a positive omen, perhaps even a sign that the SLA was gaining strength.

  Bill noticed a place called Mel’s Sporting Goods, on Crenshaw Boulevard, where he thought he could find the other items DeFreeze wanted. He told Emily to pull the van in to a parking lot on the opposite side of Crenshaw, a busy four-lane street with a concrete divider. Bill checked that the curtains on the van windows were drawn before he and Emily headed toward the store. Both were armed with handguns.

  “Stay in the van,” he said to Patricia at 4:10 p.m. “We’ll be right back.”

  As in the previous three stops on the afternoon of May 16, the Harrises enjoyed the chance to browse in a store, the kind of normal activity that had been off-limits for a long time. They wandered around for a while, eventually going to the camping supplies section and picking up a sweater, sweatpants, several pairs of socks, and a watch cap. Just before they were going to check out, Bill noticed a shotgun shell bandolier for sale. He believed in what he called armed propaganda, and he liked the bold look of a belt of shells strapped across his chest. Still, he didn’t want to call attention to himself by buying anything related to weaponry. So he slipped the item in his pocket.

  Tony Shepard, a clerk on duty at the store, was a twenty-year-old college sophomore majoring in police sciences. As it happened, he used his job as a form of training for his future career in law enforcement. By habit, he glanced up at the convex mirror by the checkout counter as Bill and Emily approached, and he noticed Bill slip the bandolier in his pocket. At that point, though, Shepard did nothing. From his studies, he knew that the crime of shoplifting does not actually take place until an individual leaves the store. So he carefully stepped to a different counter, where he kept a pistol and handcu
ffs just for situations like this one. Once he had armed himself, Shepard sidled close to the counter where Emily was paying the bill of $31.50 with two $20 bills.

  As Bill Harris stepped out the door, Shepard yelled out, “Hey Bill!” Harris turned around, but the clerk was calling to Bill Huett, his boss at the store, to back him up. Shepard then asked Harris to step back inside Mel’s.

  “Are you going to pay for what you have in your pocket?” Shepard asked.

  A wanted criminal armed with a weapon, Bill was determined to be neither arrested nor frisked. He bolted. But Shepard and his boss tackled him on the sidewalk. Emily tried to pull the men off her husband. A third store employee jumped on the pile, then so did a schoolteacher who happened to be passing by. The brawling heap of people rolled into the gutter, in a vaguely comic melee.

  Then, from the bottom of the pile, Bill Harris reached into his pocket, and a voice in the scrum called out, “He’s got a gun!”

  —

  As Patricia waited in the van, she pulled the curtain back and saw Bill and Emily walk across the street toward the store, but then she closed the curtain again. She noticed that Bill had bought an afternoon newspaper at an earlier stop, and she leafed through it while she waited. And waited. The visit to Mel’s seemed to be taking an unusually long time. At last, she moved the curtain again to see what was going on and grasped the situation instantly. Bill and Emily were in trouble. They were being assaulted by a group of men, presumably from the store.

  What should Patricia do?

  The tableau at Mel’s Sporting Goods marked the crossroads of Patricia’s captivity, the moment when she had the greatest number of options before her. The key to the van was in the ignition. She could have slid into the driver’s seat and gone anywhere she wanted—to a friend, a hospital, or home—and left the Harrises to fend for themselves. She could have turned herself in to the police and explained that she had been coerced into participating in the Hibernia Bank robbery. Or, simply, she could have opened the door, walked away, and called for help. She could even have done nothing at all and waited to see how the fight would end. But Patricia Hearst did none of those things.

  Reacting instinctively, she later said, based on her SLA training, she whipped the blanket off the cache of guns next to her. She grabbed the heaviest, most dangerous weapon she could find. It was Bill Harris’s submachine gun, which Patricia had never before trained with or fired. (This was the very gun she had posed with in the famous “Tania” photograph.) Pointing the weapon out the van window, she aimed in the general direction of the fight across the street, pulled the trigger, and sent thirty deadly rounds in the direction of Mel’s store. The first bullet whizzed within inches of Bill Harris’s head. Later fire hit the divider in the middle of the street, and other bullets shattered Mel’s plate glass window. Miraculously, no one was hurt, though it was a very close call. One bullet hit the chest of a store clerk, but it was blocked by the ballpoint pen in the man’s pocket.

  But Patricia wasn’t finished. When she emptied the ammunition clip in Bill’s machine gun, she drew another weapon—this time, her own semiautomatic carbine. Still firing wildly across a busy street, she squeezed off three more shots, trying to free her comrades.

  As the bullets started flying, everyone but Tony Shepard fled for his life.

  “Dude, you better get out of here,” Bill Harris said to him. “You’re going to get killed.”

  “No shit,” Shepard whispered to Harris, who had dropped his gun in the chaos. Shepard released his grip on his captive and crawled on his belly to a position of relative safety behind a concrete telephone pole. Bill raised his head to make sure that Patricia had stopped firing, and then he grabbed Emily by the hand and raced across traffic back to the van. Shepard had managed to apply a single handcuff to one of Bill’s wrists, and it dangled as he jumped into the driver’s seat of the van and gunned the engine.

  Shepard then fired his own gun twice at the van. Then, still determined to pursue an early police apprenticeship, he jumped into his own car, which was parked in the same lot. Harris swung north for a block on Crenshaw, and then he made a hard right onto Imperial Highway, another divided street, with traffic lights. Shepard followed. As in so many movies that were filmed in this area, the chase was on.

  —

  Bill didn’t know Los Angeles at all and had no idea where he was going. The underpowered Volkswagen was wheezing, but Bill kept blowing through traffic lights, his tires screeching. The seats had been removed from the back of the van, so Patricia bounced around on the floor as Bill peeled east on Imperial. Even during this crisis, Bill and Emily found time to bicker.

  “What did you take?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” Bill said.

  “You must have taken something.”

  “Nothing. Just a little bandolier that I thought we could use.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Emily replied. “That was stupid.”

  “How was I supposed to know the store had a fucking junior pig?”

  Determined to ditch the persistent Shepard, Bill made a right turn onto a side street, drove a few more blocks, and then slowed to a stop. Shepard pulled over several car lengths behind them.

  As soon as Bill stopped the van, he grabbed a weapon from the stash in the back and made a menacing procession toward their pursuer. Recognizing that he was outgunned, Shepard fled.

  Suddenly it was quiet. Bill and Emily were standing alone with their weapons at the ready. They knew dozens of people had seen the shoot-out and surely the plate numbers on the van had been called in to the police. They could hear sirens in the distance. The trio needed a different car—right away.

  They noticed that a couple had just parked a Pontiac Trans Am, a classic California muscle car, a few feet away from the van. Bill walked over and pointed his gun at the occupants.

  “We’re SLA. We need your car,” Harris said.

  “Fuck you,” the man said.

  “Dude,” Bill explained, “I don’t want to do this, but the cops are on their way here to kill us.”

  The man reluctantly handed over the keys, and Patricia moved the rest of the weapons from the van into the Pontiac. (In the frenzy of the moment, no one thought to remove the envelope with the parking ticket.) Bill, Emily, and Patricia jumped in the Pontiac, and Bill drove off.

  Just two blocks later, in the middle of an intersection, the engine died.

  “Shit!” Bill said.

  The trio found a Hispanic father and son standing by a Chevy Nova station wagon.

  “We need your car,” Bill said, waving his gun, the single handcuff still dangling from his wrist. “We need it right now. We’re the SLA.”

  The father said, “Sure, sure,” and handed Bill the keys.

  “Just a second,” the owner of the Chevy said, in heavily accented English. He had a lawn mower in the back. Could he remove it before they took the car?

  Bill agreed, and Emily and Patricia transferred the weapons a second time.

  At least the Chevy appeared to be in decent working order, and for the moment there appeared to be no one in pursuit. Bill drove through the streets of Inglewood, heading nowhere in particular.

  Bill, Emily, and Patricia discussed their situation. They were fine now, but the police were sure to follow their trail from the VW van to the Pontiac to the Chevy. They would need another car to lose the police.

  They took the Chevy to a shopping center, hoping to find another vehicle that might cause the police to lose their trail. They saw a hippie type getting into a camper, which seemed especially appealing because it could serve as a mobile hideout. Bill pulled his gun, and unlike the previous two carjack victims the hippie registered real fear. He started weeping hysterically. Bill gave up on him and his camper. “Don’t call the cops!” Bill instructed, but he realized that the cops would soon know of their latest encounter as well.

  By this point, they had traveled to Lynwood, another small city within Los Angeles County. They recognized th
at just stealing cars out from under people was doing them no good. The victims were surely calling the police as soon as the trio took off. It was nearly seven o’clock, and the sun was beginning to set. They needed a safer ride—soon. Just then, as they cruised the residential streets of Lynwood, Emily spied a Ford Econoline van with a “For Sale” sign in the window. The sign gave a phone number and an address, which happened to be right where they were. Emily knocked on the door and in her most polite midwestern voice asked for a test-drive of the van.

  An eighteen-year-old high school senior named Tom Matthews answered the door. A test-drive was fine, Matthews said, but he had to come along. He was asking $2,500 for the van.

  —

  Emily took the wheel of the van, with Matthews next to her. A pair of benches lined the sides in back, with a beanbag chair plopped between them. Emily steered the van a couple of blocks to where Bill and Patricia were parked in the camper.

  “Do you mind if my friends come along?” Emily asked.

  Matthews said sure.

  Bill and Patricia approached the car, and Bill pulled a machine gun from inside his coat.

  “We’re SLA,” Bill told him. “We need to borrow your van. Just get in the back. If you don’t do anything funky, you won’t get hurt.”

  Matthews’s eyes bulged at the sight of the gun, and he scampered to join Patricia in the back. “As long as I don’t get shot, I don’t care what happens,” he said. He crouched down under the same blanket that covered the weapons.

  It had only been a little more than an hour since the shoot-out, but Bill, Emily, and Patricia now had their fourth vehicle—and, for the first time, a hostage.

  The situation was different in another way, too, for Tom Matthews possessed a rare, almost surreal equanimity. He fit a California archetype, that of the surfer dude, except that he wasn’t a surfer. He was a baseball player, a first baseman at Lynwood High School, and as he told his kidnappers, the first day of the state play-offs was tomorrow. “I just need to be back for the game,” he said.