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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Scott’s curiosity turned to frustration. “Fine,” he said finally. “O.K., don’t disarm. I’ll just go back to the hotel.”

  No, Scott was icily informed, that would not be possible. You know we’re here, Bill said, we can’t let you go. Scott was now almost a hostage himself. He thought the best thing he could do was simply to go to sleep on the floor of the apartment and hope that the morning would bring some agreement. Six people—the Harrises, Patricia, Kilgore, Soliah, and Scott—spent an uneasy few hours in a kind of half sleep sprawled around the apartment in North Berkeley.

  Shortly after dawn, they heard a crash outside. Bill—as General Teko—barked orders to his comrades. Emily and Patricia took up their weapons and released their safeties. Scott cowered and waited. And waited some more. At last, he defied orders and peeked out the window. He saw that a dog had knocked over a garbage can. The negotiations continued.

  —

  Morning brought more Dagwoods, which was the only food in the apartment. Kathy’s siblings Steve and Josephine Soliah also joined the deliberations. Both were more levelheaded than Kathy, and the younger Soliahs recognized that Jack Scott represented the only real option for the SLA trio. First Bill, then Emily, began to buy into Scott’s plan. But Patricia held firm, insisting that Scott was a police agent who would lead them into an ambush. “Tania, he’s a do-gooder,” Emily explained. “He’s not a cop. He’s sort of a Peacenik. He’s not one of us, but he’s O.K.” The Harrises gave some ground on the weapons. They would leave the carbines behind and take only their pistols. Scott held firm—no guns at all.

  “Let me tell you how I was raised,” he said. “My mom is from Ireland, and her father was Thomas Brennan, one of the founders of the IRA. The British used to come to their house looking for IRA soldiers, and my mom’s mother would greet the soldiers and ask them not to disturb her sleeping children. The soldiers always left, and there were always IRA soldiers hiding underneath my Mom’s bed. This is what we do in our family. We protect our friends. Trust me. This is how I was raised.”

  This story gave Scott an idea. He said that Patricia was obviously the most recognizable of the three, even in her wigs and makeup. Her transportation would represent the biggest challenge. His parents now managed a small motel in Las Vegas, but he said he could persuade them to come to the rescue. He would ask his parents to drive Patricia (and him) across the country to Pennsylvania. It would be the perfect cover—an elderly couple out for a drive with their young son and daughter-in-law. What cop would regard them suspiciously?

  The Harrises, and eventually even Patricia, folded. They agreed to disarm for the trip to Pennsylvania.

  Scott left the apartment and wandered off to the dirt running track at Berkeley’s school for the deaf. He sat down on the infield and pondered what to do. He could walk away and let these strange people fend for themselves. Or he could follow through with his plan. Later, Scott justified his decision as keeping his word to desperate people; after all, in lobbying them for his plan, he had compared himself to Harriet Tubman, who led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. But it seems just as likely that Scott hungered for the adrenaline rush of consorting with the most wanted outlaws in the country and perhaps making a fortune as an author in the bargain. It was typical of Scott’s manic arrogance that he overlooked his own criminal culpability for harboring fugitives.

  In any event, Scott returned to his motel outside Berkeley and called his parents. He explained his bizarre overnight encounter with the SLA trio and asked for their help. Both John and Lydia Louise Scott drew the same parallel that Jack did—to the efforts by Lydia’s family to shield the IRA back in Ireland. They agreed to serve as couriers and to head out to Berkeley that evening.

  In a frantic twenty-four hours, Jack arranged transportation for the fugitives. Jack and his parents would take Patricia. He activated his sports network to locate Phil Shinnick, a 1964 Olympic long jumper who became radicalized, in part, because he felt track and field officials had unfairly denied him a world record. Shinnick would drive Emily. Jack Scott would fly back to San Francisco and then drive to Pennsylvania with Bill.

  When Scott’s parents arrived in Berkeley two days later, they repeated their willingness to serve as couriers, but they wondered if it would really be necessary. John and Lydia (who was known as Lou) shared their son’s iconoclastic politics, but they also had a great deal of sympathy for Patricia’s parents, their generational peers. “If you bring her to us, I bet we can persuade her to go home,” John Scott told his son. Lou agreed. “If the Harrises will let that little girl go with us across the country, we’ll be able to get her to go home and end all this,” she said. Jack told his parents he would honor Patricia’s wishes if she wanted to bring the whole macabre adventure to an end. That would be up to her.

  The next morning, Jack brought his parents to the apartment to meet Patricia.

  At the meeting, Jack pulled Bill aside and explained that his parents were going to try to persuade Patricia to return to her family. “Fine with me,” Bill replied. “We’ve had a ‘Ransom of Red Chief’ situation with her for a while.” Harris was referring to a famous short story by O. Henry where two men kidnap a child who is so spoiled and unpleasant that the criminals wind up paying the boy’s father to take him back. “If Tania goes home, all the cops who are looking for her will quit. That’s cool for us,” Harris told Scott. “But if she does go back, call us, so we can get out of here.”

  That evening, John and Lou Scott, with Jack in the backseat, returned to the apartment building in their Ford LTD, a sturdy boat of a vehicle. Patricia Hearst, reluctantly disarmed, slid into the car next to Jack.

  Just before John Scott pulled onto the highway, to begin the long journey east, he pulled off San Pablo Avenue and stopped the car without warning.

  “Patty,” he said, turning around from the driver’s seat.

  “Tania,” she said, correcting him.

  “We can take you wherever you want to go,” John continued. “We can take you into San Francisco. We can take you to your parents, or to an uncle or aunt. We can go to a hospital. Anywhere you want. Or we can get on the highway and go across the country.”

  Patricia Hearst—Tania—replied, “Take me where-the-fuck you’re supposed to, or you’ll be dead, not just me.”

  John Scott gunned the engine and headed for the entrance to Interstate 80, heading east.

  17

  ROAD TRIP

  First stop, Reno.

  The gambling mecca, though not as rollicking as Las Vegas, was still a place where people could check in to a motel at four in the morning without drawing much notice. That’s what the people in the Ford LTD did. Two couples booked two rooms.

  The arrival at the motel meant that Jack and Patricia, purported husband and wife, had to settle their sleeping arrangements. “I just lost the man I love,” Patricia told him, closing off any advances. They slept in chaste proximity for the rest of the journey.

  John Scott insisted on doing all the driving, hour after hour. Jack, who talked almost as much as Bill Harris, kept up a running commentary. Among other topics, he described his plan for a joint book with the SLA comrades, and according to Patricia, he detailed an elaborate plan where he would stash their proceeds in an untraceable account in Liechtenstein. (Jack later denied making this offer.) Patricia mostly sulked in silence. She felt very alone. She never cared for Bill or Emily Harris; she was repelled by Bill’s belligerence and sexual demands and by Emily’s haughty fanaticism. But Patricia had spent nearly every moment of her life with them from May to July, and she had managed to survive harrowing misadventures in their company. Now, though, Patricia was with strangers, and she had no idea what further horrors awaited her. So, during the road trip, she displayed a heightened sense of paranoia. Passing a construction site, she’d notice a worker glancing at their vehicle. “Why is he looking in the car?” she would say. “He’s a pig.” She tensed at the sight of highway patrol cars, even though Joh
n stuck to the speed limit and the right lane. When they stopped to refuel, Patricia hid her face when the attendants approached the car. (No self-service gas in those days.)

  They stuck to I-80 nearly the whole way, taking the great northern route across the country for a trip of nearly three thousand miles. Hearst mostly ignored the two Scott men. She told them what she wanted to order at meals and not much else. She ate little, smoked a lot.

  But Lou Scott’s warmth and generosity won Hearst over. Patricia insisted that John and Jack call her Tania, but she did not protest when Lou (and only Lou) called her Patty. Lou confided that the Scott family had seen more than its share of problems. John’s alcoholism had cost him the family business as well as their home in Scranton. Their other son, Walter, Jack’s brother, was an erratic presence in their lives who claimed to work as a freelance mercenary. Lou said they would never tell Walter about Patricia, because he could not be trusted to keep their connection a secret.

  Mostly, though, Lou talked to Patty about Patty. Through the long days on the road, and especially during private chats at meals, Lou kept urging Patty to go home to her parents. Lou said she understood political passion; after all, she grew up in a household filled with it, and she respected anyone who was willing to fight for the rights of others. But there came a point when the price was too high. You’re a nice girl….You don’t want this kind of life for yourself….Your parents are heartsick with worry about you. Don’t do this to them….You’re not the kind of person who should be around guns and violence. Lou pleaded with Patricia to give up and go home.

  Patricia was more willing to listen to this advice from Lou than from anyone else she had met since February 4, but she was steadfast in her insistence that she wanted to lead the life of a revolutionary. “There is nothing for me anymore in Hillsborough,” Patricia told the Scotts. “The thought of seeing Steve Weed makes me sick….I don’t care if I ever see my mother again. She’s a pill-popping drunk and a tool of Reagan….The pigs killed the only man I ever loved. I want to make them pay for what they did to Cujo.”

  Hearst pointedly did not invite Jack to participate in these conversations with his mother, so he picked up most of his clues about Patricia’s thoughts secondhand. On one occasion, though, Jack heard for himself another version of Patricia’s reasoning—one that left him reeling in astonishment.

  It was one of the last nights before they reached the East Coast. Jack was in the kitchenette of a motel preparing dinner. John was watching television. Patty and Lou were having an intense conversation on a sofa. Jack strained to eavesdrop.

  “Lou, I was part of this thing from the beginning. I can’t go back to my old life.”

  Jack’s mother asked what she meant.

  Patricia told Lou she had staged her own kidnapping. Nancy Ling had been her pot dealer in Berkeley. They became friends, and Patricia disclosed her true identity to her. Ling, in turn, introduced Patricia to DeFreeze, who came up with the idea of a fake kidnapping. Patricia had agreed to the kidnapping scenario because it offered her a way out of her engagement with Steven Weed. According to Hearst, Ling and DeFreeze never shared this secret with the other comrades. “Cinque was always testing people,” Patricia explained. Knowing this secret allowed DeFreeze to play the puppet master with his comrades as well as the public.

  Not surprisingly, Lou was baffled by this story. The kidnapping itself had been violent, and Steve Weed was obviously not in on the plot. “Weren’t you afraid that Steven would get shot if he resisted?” Lou asked.

  “Steven Weed?!” Hearst replied. “He was too much of a coward to resist. I knew he wouldn’t.”

  A staged kidnapping was a win-win, Patricia explained. The SLA would get publicity and millions to feed the poor. Patricia would get out of her engagement, and Steve wouldn’t get hurt.

  “If Steve was so terrible, why did you get involved with him in the first place?” Lou asked.

  “Two years ago, I was in high school,” Patricia explained. Her peers thought Steve was a real “catch,” and she became caught up in their expectations.

  But Lou asked, sensibly, “Why not go to your parents about the failed engagement? Wouldn’t that have been a lot simpler than getting yourself kidnapped?”

  Patty said Lou wouldn’t understand. “You don’t know my parents,” she said. “They are not like you.” Randy and Catherine had never approved of Steve, and she couldn’t stand the humiliation of admitting to them that the engagement had been a bad idea. Thus, she said, the kidnapping.

  Jack never let on to Patricia that he heard this conversation, and he kept her account of her kidnapping to himself for a long time. He wondered, as anyone would, whether her story was true. Did Patricia Hearst stage her own kidnapping?

  The answer is no.

  The scenario that she outlined for Lou Scott could not have happened and did not happen. The documents seized from the house in Concord show how Patricia’s name came to the attention of the SLA comrades. Bill Harris then looked up her home address in the Cal student directory. Unhappy as Patricia was with Steve, she would never have concocted a violent plot that risked her own life—or done so with the people who had just murdered Marcus Foster. It is possible that Patricia bought pot from Nancy Ling—though Steve did most of the buying and smoking—but that alone wouldn’t prove anything about her kidnapping. Moreover, Ling and DeFreeze were bumbling and ineffectual, as well as malevolent, so it’s extremely unlikely that they could have thought up such an elaborate double cross, much less pulled it off. And if they did, they would have told their comrades.

  Still, if Patricia did not stage her kidnapping, why did she say that she did?

  Jack Scott later speculated that Patricia came up with the story to get Lou off her back—that is, to persuade her to stop nagging Patricia to return to her family. That’s probably the most plausible explanation, and it appears to have worked. Stunned by the tale, Lou did drop the subject during the remaining hours of the trip. Still, even though Patricia’s story about the staged kidnapping was a lie, there was a kind of truth in it. It was part of her declaration of independence from her former self. Telling the story was an illustration of how far she would go to display her transformation from the person she had been. In a way, too, she was right: she was a very different person. Months earlier, Patricia was the kind of teenager who would care about the pattern of her wedding silver, or at least would pretend to care about it. Now she was the kind of young woman who would conspire with terrorists to stage a kidnapping, even if she did not actually do so.

  —

  Jack and Patricia arrived in New York City shortly after Emily Harris and Phil Shinnick. Jack flew back to San Francisco to retrieve Bill, and Micki remained in the apartment with Patricia and Emily. They would all meet up at the farm in July. So Jack headed for California, leaving Emily, Micki, and Patricia in the Scotts’ third-floor walk-up at 317 West Ninetieth Street.*

  Micki had never before met either of her famous guests, but she had the right temperament to make them feel welcome and safe. Jack might have maintained an athlete’s intensity, but his wife had the mellow bearing of a flower child. As Patricia later wrote of Micki, “Within a few minutes I sensed that she was a nice, warm person. It was more than I had any reason to expect, given all the characters I had been meeting, but it came to me that here was a woman who was straightforward and open.” Emily, too, was in good spirits. She immediately regaled Patricia with tales of her trysts with Shinnick by the side of the road. Patricia relaxed as Micki played her favorite Country Joe and the Fish album. Patricia recalled, “For the first time in months, I had decent food and hot showers and books and magazines to read.”

  For a week or so, the three women established a ritual. After they woke up, Micki would walk to Broadway to buy coffee and the New York Times for Patricia and Emily. Though the setting was congenial, Patricia’s fury had not abated. She would curl up with the newspaper, and a pen, and circle the names of her enemies, especially those she reg
arded as betrayers of the revolutionary cause. Angela Davis and Jane Fonda were favorite targets. At one point, Micki asked Patricia what she was doing. “Making our hit-list,” Patricia replied. She made clear that she was still mourning her great true love, Cujo (that is, Willy Wolfe), and she was plotting revenge, in some unspecified way, for his murder.

  Patricia spent her days reading and smoking, while Emily and Micki came and went doing errands. Of course, Patricia could have walked out the door alone at any time and gone wherever she pleased, but she preferred to remain with her comrades. Micki bought her a new wardrobe, because she had traveled across the country with just a handful of clothes. Emily went to a free clinic at Bellevue Hospital for a pregnancy test (which was negative). Emily made the medical appointment under an assumed name, and the issue of aliases provided a measure of levity for the women. After the shoot-out on May 17, Bill Harris decreed that the group adopt new code names, and he dubbed Emily (formerly Yolanda) as Eva and Patricia (formerly Tania) as Pearl. But the new names never stuck, and Micki, who had no code name, was never sure what to call anyone. Patricia mostly stuck with Tania, though she also answered to Pearl and, with reluctance, to Patty.

  Jack Scott had told Emily and Patricia that he wanted to hire a “baby sitter” for them (and for Bill) at the farm in Pennsylvania. The farm was in a remote place, but it was still part of the United States, and any of the three fugitives might be recognized if they circulated in the small towns nearby. Jack wanted someone who was not well-known to do the shopping and other errands and who also could be trusted to keep the operation a secret.

  Toward the end of Patricia and Emily’s stay with Micki Scott, a new visitor appeared at the door. Small, delicate, and reserved, she was clearly of Japanese ancestry, and she called herself Joan Shimada. She said she would serve as the group’s caretaker at the farm. Emily and Patricia realized almost immediately that “Joan” was in fact Wendy Yoshimura, who would turn out to be another crucial figure in their lives.