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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Bill, Emily, and Patricia were immediately taken with their hostage. A big sports fan himself from his Indiana days, Bill took a shine to the lad and quizzed him about his team’s prospects in the championships. Giddy and energized by the chaos of their adventure, Bill decided to share a secret with Matthews.

  Pointing to Patricia, Bill said, “Do you know who this is?”

  Matthews stared.

  “This is Tania!” Bill said. Matthews had been following coverage of Patricia’s kidnapping in the news.

  “Holy shit!” he said.

  Patricia beamed at him.

  The atmosphere in the van turned almost chummy as Emily drove through the city. The three comrades had a problem. Bill still had one wrist stuck in a handcuff, with no key. Did Tom have any idea where they might find a hacksaw?

  Matthews knew of a hardware store nearby, but when Emily went inside, there was no appropriate blade. Matthews then directed them to a Montgomery Ward, where Emily found a tool that she thought could do the job. In the parking lot, she handed the saw to Bill, who struggled using his right hand to saw through the cuff on the left, but all he succeeded in doing was to make the cuff tighter and tighter on his wrist, which started turning blue. “Here,” Matthews said. “You’re going to cut off your hand. Gimme that.”

  Crouching in the back of his van, Matthews used the saw to slice the cuff off Bill’s wrist. When he was finally liberated, the three comrades cheered. Patricia gave the young first baseman a kiss on the cheek.

  Matthews cradled the shredded handcuff. “Can I keep this as a souvenir?” he asked. The comrades agreed.

  —

  The police found the Volkswagen van within minutes of the comrades’ first car theft. The unmailed parking ticket, found on the front seat, gave the authorities a priceless clue. The ticket said the violation had taken place in front of 835 West Eighty-Fourth Street, next door to the safe house. The police also identified the gun that Bill had dropped in front of Mel’s. It had been purchased by Emily Montague Harris, in Oakland, on October 13, 1973. Witnesses to the car thefts informed police that the perpetrators had identified themselves as the SLA.

  So by the time the trio set off in the van with Tom Matthews, the radio was blaring news that the SLA had brought its unique brand of theatrical violence to Los Angeles. The story dominated the airwaves.

  Earlier in the week, DeFreeze and Bill had agreed on a fallback location for a rendezvous in case the comrades found themselves on the run. After Bill was extricated from the handcuff, Emily drove the van to the Century Drive-In movie theater, a landmark for local cinema buffs, which was located in Inglewood. The plan called for a meeting at midnight, when the first to arrive would indicate his location by placing an upside-down cup on a speaker stand. Bill figured that the news reports about Mel’s would prompt DeFreeze and the other comrades to flee Eighty-Fourth Street and activate the backup plan.

  “You’ll meet our friends,” Bill told Matthews. “We’ll join up with them and you can have your van back. You’ll make the game, no problem.” He even offered gas money to the hostage, but Tom declined the cash.

  In the meantime, the four people in the car—including at this point three of the most wanted criminals in the United States—watched a double feature. The first movie was The New Centurions, a drama about the Los Angeles Police Department, and Matthews noted that the comrades cheered each time an officer was shot. They then watched Thomasine & Bushrod, an all-black takeoff on Bonnie and Clyde.

  No one in the group was paying a lot of attention to the movies, and Bill and Emily kept getting out of the car—to buy snacks, to check if anyone was watching them, and to exorcise their nervous energy. This gave Matthews and Patricia a chance to chat as they shared the beanbag in the back of the van.

  Curious and ingenuous, Tom had a lot of questions for Patricia—like what was the deal with the bank robbery? Was she a willing participant, or did the SLA have their guns trained on her to make her behave?

  “I was totally into it,” Patricia said. “No one made me do anything. We rehearsed. I wanted to be a part.”

  How about the food giveaway?

  Oh, she said, my father just used that as a tax break.

  And what happened at Mel’s?

  “I saved my comrades,” Patricia said. “I was so proud when I saw them running across the street.”

  At another point, Bill told Patricia to make sure her carbine was not loaded. He didn’t want any accidental shootings in the car. Patricia took the opportunity, while unloading her gun, to show Matthews how easily she handled the weapon. She pulled out a couple of rounds of ammunition. “See that?” she said, pointing. “That’s where we put in the cyanide.”

  Though she was barely two years older than Tom, she took an almost maternal interest in him, patting his head to make sure he wasn’t scared by the bizarre situation. “I was kidnapped, too, and under a blanket,” she said. “You’ll be OK.”

  Indeed, Matthews seemed a great deal less scared than Patricia had been when she was seized. He even displayed his cheeky humor. At one point, when Bill and Emily returned to the car, Bill groused that he had received a hamburger when he ordered a cheeseburger. Tom was comfortable enough at that point to needle Bill. “You were just involved in a shoot-out and you’re worried about whether you got a hamburger or a cheeseburger?”

  But as midnight passed, there was no sign of the other comrades. DeFreeze had not shown up at the fallback. After the theater closed, Emily took off on a meandering drive through the Hollywood Hills, then on to Mulholland Drive. At some point in the middle of the night, they found a secluded spot, and all went to sleep for a few hours. Patricia made sure Tom was covered with the blanket.

  At dawn, Bill decided that they needed another car, not least because they wanted to return the van to Tom so he could make his baseball game. So on the morning of May 17, Emily and Patricia posed as hitchhikers, and the two attractive young women had no trouble getting a ride. A man named Frank Sutter, driving a late-model Lincoln Continental, picked them up, and the pair engaged him in a provocative conversation about taking them to Las Vegas. Their chitchat with the driver allowed Bill to come up behind them, with his machine gun, and force Sutter into the backseat, under the blanket. (Bill waved to Tom Matthews to return to his van. Matthews made it to his game that afternoon, which his team won, 1–0.)

  Now riding in their fifth car, the trio went to look for a newspaper with classified advertisements to find a sixth. They spent several hours trying to track down a working but cheap used car. Eventually, they found an aged Plymouth Valiant and removed $250 in cash from Sutter’s wallet to pay for it. They returned the Lincoln to Sutter and took off in the Plymouth.

  Bill had heard on the radio news that thanks to the parking ticket the police had raided the Eighty-Fourth Street house but found that it was empty. It was a relief that DeFreeze and the other comrades had not been busted, but they still had no idea where they were or how to reach them.

  Emily had had a summer job at Disneyland, and she recalled that there were motels directly across the street from the amusement park, in Anaheim. She said they would be good places to blend in with the tourists. It was nearly dusk on May 17 before Bill, Emily, and Patricia found one and checked into a room.

  The first thing they did was turn on the television.

  13

  LIVE ON TELEVISION

  At 5:30 a.m. on May 17, the LAPD and the FBI set up a joint command post near 835 West Eighty-Fourth Street, the address on the parking ticket. They began stopping everyone who came from that direction, and one person reported that he saw white people going in and out of the house next door. Several residents also said they had seen two vans parked in front of that house, including one that was red and white. The authorities had identified the SLA safe house in Los Angeles.

  The FBI, hungry to bring its embarrassing failed investigation of the kidnapping to a conclusion, descended on Eighty-Fourth Street in force. The LAPD, ho
wever, guarded its turf more zealously than the local police in San Francisco, so tension between the bureau and the cops became a recurring theme of the events on May 17. For one thing, the only crimes that had taken place in Los Angeles were shootings and car thefts, and those were local matters, not federal offenses. In addition, the LAPD had a reputation for ferocity that far exceeded that of the San Francisco cops or any police force in the nation. This was due, in part, to a special unit, created in 1967, that appeared custom-made for the challenge—a quasi-military detachment called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT. The team included thirty-seven officers in five-man squadrons, dressed in commando garb and armed with AR-180 semiautomatic weapons, AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, 12-gauge shotguns, tear gas guns, a .243-caliber long rifle, and .45-caliber pistols.

  For the initial action against the SLA on May 17, the FBI and the LAPD reached an uneasy compromise. The scene would be nominally under the control of the FBI, but officers from both departments would take part in the siege. First, they evacuated the entire block around 833 West Eighty-Fourth Street. Then, just after 8:00 a.m., the LAPD SWAT team deployed to the front of the house, and the FBI SWAT group deployed to the rear. At 8:55, an LAPD officer with a bullhorn announced, “To those inside the house at 833 West 84th Street: this is the Los Angeles Police Department. We want you to come out the front door with your hands up. We want you to come out immediately. You will not be harmed.” There was no response.

  After eight minutes of silence, the FBI supervisor ordered the LAPD to launch twelve canisters of tear gas into the house. A few minutes later, the FBI busted down the back door and found the place empty. Clearly, though, the SLA had been on the premises very recently. There was no furniture, but there was plenty of evidence. There were three suitcases containing clothes, as well as gas masks, women’s wigs and handbags, shotgun ammunition, SLA literature, and handwritten notes about how to leave the house in a hurry. The significance of some evidence in the Eighty-Fourth Street house could not be fully appreciated at once. There was a work sheet dividing up lookout duty for nine soldiers as well as a grocery list and prices for dehydrated food with the prices divided by nine. Clearly, then, nine people had lived there and fled in a hurry. But who were they? And where did they go?

  The LAPD immediately put out the word that witnesses had seen a pair of vans associated with the house. Shortly after noon, two uniformed officers on regular patrol on East Fifty-Third Street decided to take a look in an alleyway that was sometimes used as a dumping ground for stolen vehicles. (This was about five miles from the house on West Eighty-Fourth Street.) The officers found two vans matching the description of those used by the residents of Eighty-Fourth Street. The license plates showed that one van had been purchased on May 7 in San Francisco by Ali Bey (who was one of the SLA’s Nation of Islam recruits) and the other had been purchased around the same time by a person using a fake name.

  The neighborhood around East Fifty-Third Street in Los Angeles was even rougher than the one around West Eighty-Fourth. Most of the buildings were one-story frame and stucco houses, many of them abandoned or boarded up. Foot traffic was rare. Suspicion of the police was high. Plainclothes officers began circulating in the neighborhood, trying to determine where the owners of the vans might be staying. In short order, the LAPD identified four houses where the SLA might be holed up. But the information was sketchy, and no one wanted to take any chances with a heavily armed and dangerous group of outlaws.

  There was again the matter of turf. The FBI and the LAPD had collaborated on the raid of the Eighty-Fourth Street house, but the attack had been unsatisfactory, and maybe dangerous. They had different training and different rules of engagement, and neither wanted to be worried about the other if bullets started flying. So at 2:00 p.m., William Sullivan, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, showed up at the local precinct for a summit meeting. By this point, the Hearst operation had been one of the largest and most complex kidnapping investigations in the history of the FBI and certainly one of the biggest embarrassments for the bureau as well. In light of this, Sullivan informed the local police commanders that the FBI SWAT team members would be moving into position near the newly discovered vans, and they would handle any confrontation with the SLA. The LAPD brass on the scene begged to differ. In short order, the two sides were screaming at each other.

  The LAPD officer in charge of the SWAT operation was Daryl Gates, a legendarily gruff figure who would later go on to run the department. At the time, Gates was at Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters, and after he heard of the confrontation, he decided to put an end to it. He knew that the FBI could not handle the situation alone; the bureau would need LAPD officers to block traffic, summon fire and ambulance support, and isolate the confrontation. Gates decided to use that advantage to exclude the FBI altogether. “Tell Bill I understand how he feels,” Gates told his subordinate, who was facing down Sullivan in the precinct house. “But if there is any shooting in Los Angeles, it’s going to be done by the LAPD.”

  With that, Gates ordered two elite units of SWAT officers (totaling seventeen men), backed up by more than two hundred other police personnel, to assemble at a staging area near Fifty-Third Street and await his further orders.

  —

  Events moved so quickly on May 16 that the news media never caught up. But the shoot-out at Mel’s and the chase that followed gave local television stations the chance to mobilize the following morning. In those days, most local stations sent out camera crews to shoot film that had to be developed back at their studios. But KNXT—which stood for “experimental television”—possessed a new technology that allowed it to broadcast live from the field through a microwave transmitter attached to the top of a small truck. The technology was so new that the team at KNXT is said to have invented its name: the Minicam.

  KNXT (later renamed KCBS) would become a national prototype for local news in America. This happened, in part, because Mary Tyler Moore’s aunt happened to work as the business manager of the station, and she shared tales of the station’s lead anchor, Jerry Dunphy—who served as the model for the hapless Ted Baxter. But the station was also a journalistic and ratings leader, with a strong institutional commitment to securing scoops. For KNXT, the Minicam was a not-so-secret weapon. Bill Deiz, a thirty-year-old correspondent for KNXT, wanted to deploy the new technology when he showed up for work on the morning of May 17 to cover the biggest story the city had seen in a long time: the sudden, thunderous arrival of the Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles.

  The shoot-out the previous afternoon, with the trail of stolen cars, galvanized law enforcement, the news media, and the public. All were obsessed with the same questions: Where was Patty Hearst? Was she one of the gun-toting outlaws who terrorized a sporting goods store? The authorities were inundated with purported sightings of the heiress turned bank robber, but none panned out. The police were being cagey about any leads they might be following, but when it came to tracking the Los Angeles Police Department, KNXT had another distinctive asset at its disposal. In addition to its exclusive access to a Minicam, Bob Long, the assignment manager for the station, and his colleague Jeff Wald had cultivated a local eccentric named Jeff Webreck, who in a later day would be known as a hacker. Webreck lived in the Hollywood Hills, near the crossroads of radio transmissions in the city. He had located the crystals that allowed him to track confidential police transmissions. Webreck permitted KNXT to shadow the cops.

  Deiz began the day covering briefings on the search for the SLA at various police stations around the city. As with all routine stories, motorcycle couriers took the film back to the KNXT broadcast center. He was told to keep in touch with the office, to receive further instructions. (Like most reporters at the time, Deiz kept a pocketful of change to use in pay phones.) Webreck had picked up news that the police were converging on a house at Fifty-Fourth Street and Compton Avenue. Deiz was told to get there to meet the Minicam truck, which was staffed by Rich
Brito, a cameraman, and Rey Hernandez, a technician.

  When the KNXT team arrived, they saw that the police had surrounded a small yellow stucco house at 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street. They set up their truck on Compton, and Deiz took his microphone, with a long cable, and began threading his way between buildings to get as close as possible to the focus of police attention. Through an alleyway, he was able to stand so that Brito’s camera could get a clear shot of both him and the building behind him. The crew on the scene began transmitting pictures back to the station.

  But there was a problem. KNBC, the top competitor to KNXT, had shown up on the scene with an old-fashioned live television truck, the kind used for sporting events and political conventions. KNBC also had one of the early news helicopters hovering overhead. Given KNBC’s late arrival, there was no way that station could get on the air with a clear shot of the scene, but its presence interfered with the KNXT electronic signal, which had to be beamed directly to a tower on Mount Wilson, about thirty miles away. The situation was a journalistic standoff. KNBC couldn’t get its own picture on the air, but it could stop its competitor from doing so. After a few minutes, Bob Long called his counterpart at KNBC and proposed a deal. If KNBC would shut down its operation on Fifty-Fourth Street, KNXT would share its live signal. KNBC agreed, and soon the picture of Bill Deiz crouching in front of the shabby little yellow house was being broadcast on both major stations in Los Angeles.

  Within minutes, other stations in the city asked to receive the KNXT live feed as well, and then stations around California, and then the whole country, plucked the signal from the sky. In less than an hour, the scene in front of 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street became a landmark in the history of television journalism. To that point, networks had only broadcast live events where they could lay cable and plan in advance. Thanks to the Minicam, the Hearst kidnapping led to the first unplanned breaking news event broadcast live around the entire United States. Suddenly modern technology made real one of the famous counterculture slogans of the era: the whole world was watching.