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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  —

  News of the shoot-out at Mel’s hit the airwaves on the evening of May 16. The comrades heard the news on the radio that night, and DeFreeze issued an order to vacate the Eighty-Fourth Street house. By the time the remaining comrades packed up—and they left a great deal behind—it was after midnight on May 17, so there was no point in trying to meet up with the Harrises and Patricia at the fallback location at the drive-in. It was a moment of maximum desperation for the remaining six—DeFreeze, Mizmoon, Nancy Ling, Angela Atwood, Willy Wolfe, and Camilla Hall. They had no contacts and no idea where to go. They took off in the two remaining vans and just drove around South Central in the middle of the night. They stopped at 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street for the most basic of reasons: the light was on.

  The house resembled many in the neighborhood—built in the 1940s of stucco, framed with wood, with two bedrooms, all on one floor. This model happened to be painted yellow, though not recently, and its condition was dismal. The house was elevated about three feet off the ground, and the entrance was from a wooden porch. The most distinctive feature of 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street was the sturdy stone wall in front of the porch, facing the street. The house was unusual in another way, in that it had a rotating cast of residents. Many houses in the neighborhood were occupied by struggling but stable working-class African American families. In 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street, men, women, and children came and went at all hours of the day and night. It was a flophouse, so when Donald DeFreeze knocked on the door at about 4:00 a.m. on May 17, the intrusion was less bizarre than it might have been elsewhere.

  Christine Johnson and Minnie Lewis, both in their mid-thirties, answered the door. Freddie Freeman, Johnson’s boyfriend, and a seventeen-year-old girl were also awake in the front room. They had all been drinking wine, playing dominoes, and listening to the radio. DeFreeze got right to the point.

  “I saw your lights, sisters. My name is Cinque. I need your help,” he said. He said he and some “white friends” were being pursued by the police, and they needed a place to stay “for a few hours.” Seeing the women hesitate, Cinque offered them $100, which was accepted. Cinque then introduced his comrades to their hosts as “soldiers of the SLA.” As Patricia and the Harrises had done with the stolen car victims the previous day, DeFreeze made no attempt to hide their identity. A collective fatalism had come over the whole SLA enterprise. They were who they were, and they would not pretend otherwise. For weeks, if not months, DeFreeze had preached that surrender was not an option, and his subordinates had internalized his position. So they joined him in barreling forward, trusting that they would somehow continue to foil their pursuers or die in an honorable conflagration.

  After handing over the cash, DeFreeze began unloading the two vans; the comrades produced an extraordinary arsenal. (The amount was especially remarkable because they had just left another significant amount of weaponry behind at Eighty-Fourth Street.) They brought more than a dozen guns and more than four thousand rounds of ammunition to Fifty-Fourth Street. Specifically, the SLA stash included the following:

  • four M1 .30-caliber carbines, all illegally converted into machine guns;

  • a Browning .30-caliber semiautomatic rifle;

  • a Remington .244-caliber semiautomatic rifle;

  • seven sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns;

  • two Mauser double-action automatic pistols;

  • a military model Colt .45 automatic pistol;

  • two .38-caliber revolvers. One, a Smith & Wesson known as the blue steel “Chief’s Special,” was DeFreeze’s personal sidearm. The other, a Rossi, was the gun used to kill Marcus Foster. (At the time, Patricia still had possession of the group’s other .38-caliber revolver, which had been liberated from the security guard at the Hibernia Bank.)

  In addition, there were boxes and bandoliers of ammunition, some with cyanide tips, as well as cardboard boxes full of documents, suitcases, and sleeping bags. The people inside the house might have been shocked by the size of the arsenal, but they quickly turned their attention to making money off DeFreeze, who had a lot of immediate needs. Shortly after dawn, he gave the seventeen-year-old $20 for a quick trip to buy sandwich ingredients, beer, and cigarettes. Two young children materialized from a bedroom, and they were given sandwiches to take to school. DeFreeze and Willy Wolfe (the only male SLA members on the premises) took half-hour turns monitoring the sidewalk in front of the house, while the four SLA women chatted up the residents and took catnaps. All morning, people came and went, and DeFreeze never hid his identity or his goal—to “start a revolution,” as he informed one visitor.

  Cinque also wanted to hide the two vans that brought the comrades to Fifty-Fourth Street. Freeman showed him the secluded alley about a block away that was frequently used as a temporary home for stolen vehicles. DeFreeze and the man hustled the two vans into the alley, but the SLA leader would soon recognize the folly of relying on a drunken stranger for advice on operational security. The police knew about the stash in the alley, and that was where the uniformed officers discovered the vehicles around noon. They radioed in the information, which prompted the arrival of the SWAT team, with its dozens of backups. The vise was tightening.

  By early afternoon, the scene inside the house had turned increasingly surreal and crowded. Minnie’s children returned from school to find Nancy Ling making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen. One of the children, who was eleven years old, recognized DeFreeze, who introduced himself as Cinque, from television. When the boy asked him his name, DeFreeze replied that the boy should go into the bathroom and lie down in the tub if he didn’t want to get killed. The boy fled out the back door instead. An older man named Clarence Ross settled in with a pint bottle of whiskey. At another point, Christine Johnson and a woman named Brenda got into a fistfight. Impressed with the seventeen-year-old Brenda’s skills, the comrades asked if she wanted to join the SLA. A male friend of hers arrived, and DeFreeze asked him to go buy them a car. He gave the fellow $500 in cash, and he never returned with a car or the money. More than a dozen people passed through the house over the course of the day, and DeFreeze disclosed his identity to virtually all of them.

  The presence of the SLA during the afternoon of May 17 was such an open secret that DeFreeze practically became a neighborhood tourist attraction. At one point, an eighteen-year-old woman showed up because she had heard that the SLA was there and she wanted to meet them. She found DeFreeze drinking a jug of Boone’s Farm wine (apparently because plum wine was unavailable). He told the woman there was probably going to be a shoot-out, and he was prepared to die. Still, he said, “We’re going to take a lot of motherfucking pigs with us.” In the middle of their conversation, Christine Johnson walked into the kitchen, started to say something, then passed out, snoring, on the floor. DeFreeze carried her back to the bedroom, and the woman visitor left.

  At about 4:00 p.m., Mary Carr, the mother of Minnie and the grandmother of the children in the house, walked in on the chaos. She had heard about what was going on and wanted at least to extract her grandchildren before they were caught up in violence. When Carr arrived, her daughter and another woman were passed out in drunken stupors. Brenda said the SLA women were making bombs in the other bedroom. Appalled, Carr confronted DeFreeze about the dangers his people were creating. The field marshal tried to mollify the furious grandmother, telling her that black people needed to stick together. But Carr had no interest in DeFreeze’s brand of revolution, and she grabbed her two grandchildren and stormed off. (Unbeknownst to Carr, there was still another child left inside the house.)

  Holding their hands, Carr walked over to Compton Avenue, where the police were assembled. At that point, the cops had narrowed the search for the SLA down to four houses in the neighborhood. Carr settled the issue. She gave the cops the specific information they needed. She said the SLA was holed up in a yellow frame house, which she said was the fifth one in from the corner.

  —

  In response to Carr�
�s information, the SWAT commander on Compton sent two teams to the yellow frame house, one group of nine officers toward the front door on Fifty-Fourth Street, the other of eight toward the back, in an alley. Sergeant Al Preciado, a thirty-four-year-old eight-year veteran of the LAPD, led the team going to the front door. Preciado crouched down and started to make his way along Fifty-Fourth Street toward the fifth house. But when Preciado reached the fourth house, he realized this was the yellow one. Carr had miscounted. Preciado didn’t want to risk being seen and was trapped behind the stone wall in front of the target structure.

  Preciado could clearly make out the voice of Donald DeFreeze, issuing instructions. “We are not going to surrender,” he said. “We are going to fight to the death.” Preciado heard furniture being pushed around to block sight lines into the house. (The SWAT team by the back door, near the kitchen, could see a refrigerator being pushed to block the window.)

  At 5:44 p.m., Preciado gave the signal to Sergeant Jerry Brackley, who had a bullhorn at the ready.

  “Occupants of 1466 East 54th Street,” he said, “this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up. Comply immediately and you will not be harmed.”

  The response was silence.

  Brackley made a second announcement.

  A moment later, the front door opened. An eight-year-old boy stepped outside and froze, too afraid to move. After a few moments, he stepped off the porch, and officers hustled him to the command post on Compton Avenue. The boy told the officers that there were two men and four white women, all heavily armed, inside the house.

  Two more surrender announcements followed.

  The door opened again, and the elderly man named Clarence Ross put his hands up and walked slowly down the stairs off the porch. Questioned by the officers, he denied seeing any weapons inside the house.

  In the first nine minutes of the standoff, the police made eighteen surrender announcements, and all were met by silence.

  The LAPD had the house completely surrounded, but the FBI did have one agent on the scene. He was the keeper of a German shepherd “sniffer dog,” who had been primed with the scent of Patricia Hearst. The dog’s assignment was to identify Patricia, alive or dead.

  14

  APOCALYPSE ON FIFTY-FOURTH STREET

  To Patricia Hearst, Disneyland really did look like a magic kingdom. Emily Harris had driven the thirty miles to Anaheim, with Patricia curled up, exhausted, in the backseat. In the passenger seat, Bill kept boasting that they had outsmarted the cops once again. Patricia was disgusted with the newly promoted “general” Teko. It was his imbecilic decision to shoplift the bandolier from Mel’s that started the day’s mad cascade of events. Who was he to brag about anything?

  Still, the sight of Cinderella’s castle filled Patricia with melancholy. Like so many California kids, she had visited Disneyland and had fond memories of the park’s gleaming world of make-believe. The contrast between her last visit and this one struck her as more than bizarre. She wondered if she would ever go to such a place again. She had begun a new chapter in her life, and she could not know if she could ever again show her face in public without a disguise. As committed as she was to her new life, she was now also both a fugitive and a refugee.

  Bill told her to crouch down in the backseat while Emily went to the motel’s front desk to rent a room. This was to keep Patricia from being recognized and also because the police might be looking for a man and two women traveling together. It was also a money-saving move. (Motels charged more for three people than for two.) The three of them were down to their last few dollars, and they had lost the groceries and clothes from their shopping trip when they abandoned DeFreeze’s van, several vehicles ago. All they had were the clothes on their backs and their weapons.

  When Emily turned the key in the door, the motel room looked as good as San Simeon to Patricia. There were clean sheets on the two double beds. There was a shower with hot water. There was no trash strewn on the floor. There was a color television set. Compared with the dumps where they had been staying in San Francisco and Los Angeles, this was paradise.

  Just before they checked in, they heard on the radio that the police had surrounded the SLA. Bill turned on the television in the room, and it looked as if a police siege were about to begin. At first, the three of them thought they were watching film of the raid on Eighty-Fourth Street, which had taken place that morning. But they quickly realized the target was a different house, on a different street, and this broadcast was live. It was just after 5:30 p.m.

  —

  Steven Weed continued his quixotic independent investigation of the kidnapping, even after his efforts only seemed to make matters worse. His journey to Mexico to coax a letter out of Régis Debray had ended in humiliation. Instead of leading to Patricia’s release, the Debray letter prompted her communiqué of April 24, which included her most cutting and hostile rejection of the man she now referred to as her former fiancé. Weed’s arrogant style put off everyone, including the Hearsts and the FBI. But there was no disguising that he was in a great deal of pain. Worried about Patricia’s well-being, stung by her public rejection of him, he traveled California alone, trying to figure out what had happened to his girlfriend.

  He had a compulsion to keep giving interviews to the press, too, and this led to the final breach in his relationship with Patricia’s mother. In May, Weed talked to Newsday about his relationship with the Hearst family. He had said many of the same things before—that Vicki had been a poor student of his, that Patricia had a troubled relationship with her mother—but Catherine decided she had had enough of him. When Steven called the house in Hillsborough to say that he would be visiting friends in Southern California, Randy answered the phone. “What the hell is it with you?” Randy yelled at Weed. Anytime Weed was around a reporter, Randy said, “You just bubble like a yeast cake! I don’t want you coming around here even to pick up your mail. You just aren’t housebroken!”

  As it happened, Weed was in Los Angeles on May 16. He was tracking down psychiatrists who might give him insight on what Patricia was going through as a captive and fellow traveler of the SLA. On that night, he had dinner with a psychiatrist and his girlfriend, and then the pair drove him to a peculiar little hotel nestled along the coast, in the bluff between Santa Monica and Malibu. Sitting alone at the bar after dinner, Weed proceeded to get roaring drunk as the television began showing reports about the shoot-out at Mel’s. As he later recalled, “I was too drunk to know if I had actually heard the bulletin or merely imagined it.”

  Depressed and hungover, Weed spent most of the next morning on the beach, intentionally cutting himself off from news reports. He roused himself to make it to the airport at 3:15 p.m. for a short flight to San Diego, where he was going to visit friends. He read about the shooting at Mel’s while on the airplane. He arrived at his destination in San Diego at around the same time that Patricia, Bill, and Emily checked in to the motel in Anaheim. Like them, he turned on the television around 5:30 p.m.

  —

  On the afternoon of May 16, Randy Hearst took a call from a man claiming to be a former Brazilian police officer with a special expertise in freeing political prisoners. He offered to help free Patricia, if Randy would put up $37,000 to set up an office for him in San Francisco. Randy demurred, though it was by no means the most outrageous scheme he had encountered over the previous four months.

  By this point, the crowds of reporters outside the mansion in Hillsborough had thinned. PIN had closed down. There had been no communiqués since April 24. Randy still talked to almost everyone who had a theory about his daughter—the psychics, the profiteers, the cops, the purported jailhouse informants—but there was less urgency. Patricia’s status had changed. It was one thing to recover a kidnap victim and something very different to track down a criminal. The journalists out front started averting their eyes when Randy and Catherine passed by. Only the rivers of alcohol flowing through the house were unchanged.<
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  John Lester, a local news reporter for a San Francisco station, had quit his job in the spring to work as the Hearsts’ liaison with the rest of the press corps. He spent his days in the mansion, transmitting interview requests and generally keeping Randy and Catherine apprised of what the reporters were thinking. On the night of the sixteenth, the couple had dinner with friends, stopped by their country club, where their younger daughters, Anne and Vicki, were rehearsing a performance for a musical revue, and returned to Hillsborough after midnight. Lester gave them the news about the shoot-out at Mel’s and the possibility of Patricia’s involvement before the couple went to bed.

  In the morning, Catherine and Randy showed up early in the room that they had turned over to the FBI agents who were still living with them. As always, Catherine was immaculately turned out in a black dress. Randy, having suffered a long, sleepless night, appeared unshaven and still wearing his pajamas. They heard the news about the raid on the empty house on Eighty-Fourth Street. According to the FBI, that location had clearly been used by the SLA, but the occupants had vanished. Charles Bates, the lead FBI agent, usually checked in with the Hearsts after any major development in the case, but he didn’t contact them on May 17. To the family gathered in the house, the silence from Bates felt ominous.

  The family spent the day puttering nervously about their home. Shortly after 5:00 p.m., Emmy, the family cook, burst into the room where Randy, John Lester, and the FBI agents were sitting. “Mr. Hearst,” she said, “it’s on the television. A house in Los Angeles is surrounded.” The question hung heavily: Was Patricia inside?

  Randy shook his head and said, “We might as well turn it on.” Lester did, at about the same time as Weed was starting to watch in San Diego and Patricia was doing the same in Anaheim.