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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  In light of these confirmations, the FBI turned the full force of its attention on the comrades’ hosts on the Pennsylvania farm, Jack and Micki Scott.

  —

  By the time the FBI confirmed the Scotts’ role in harboring Patricia, it was the spring of 1975. Jack had dropped off Patricia in Las Vegas in the fall of 1974. That was the last he had seen or heard of her. He had no current knowledge of her whereabouts. Still, Jack and Micki Scott had no desire to help the FBI. They were classic examples of the problem that Charlie Bates was referring to in his complaint about public hostility to the FBI. Still, their refusal to give information presented them with a thorny legal dilemma.

  When Jack and Micki learned that the FBI was looking for them, they went underground, but only briefly. They had no real hope of disappearing, and besides Jack loved the attention. And there was another reason a low profile was impossible. By this point, the Scotts were living with Bill Walton, who was one of the most famous athletes in the country and, at six feet eleven inches, with red hair, one of the most conspicuous. The two Scotts and Walton wanted to avoid testifying and also to avoid jail, which would not be an easy trick to pull off. So Jack called Michael Kennedy, a San Francisco lawyer known for representing counterculture figures.

  To this point, the Hearst kidnapping had from a legal perspective been a one-sided affair. Cops, agents, and prosecutors had massed their efforts for months, albeit with little to show for it. But the Hearst case would also come to include squadrons of defense lawyers, who confronted a series of knotty and in many ways unprecedented legal challenges. Like their adversaries in the government, the defense lawyers would reflect both the best and the worst of their profession and meet with greatly varying degrees of success.

  Kennedy told the Scotts to meet him at his Victorian house in Pacific Heights. Kennedy told Jack that his situation was precarious. If he went into the grand jury, he could take the Fifth and refuse to answer questions, but if he took the Fifth, the prosecutors would surely give him immunity, which would mean that he’d have no choice but to testify. If Jack refused to testify after receiving immunity, he could be found in civil contempt and jailed immediately. That, obviously, was a scenario to avoid.

  Kennedy suggested one option to allow Jack to avoid both testimony and incarceration. If Scott could persuade prosecutors that he would never testify, even if he were jailed, that changed the legal calculus. An individual who refuses to testify under all circumstances is only subject to a charge of criminal contempt, not civil contempt. Civil contempt is automatic for a defiant witness; he goes immediately to jail, to coerce him to change his mind and provide evidence. In order to charge Scott with criminal contempt, on the other hand, the prosecutors would have to take the case to a grand jury, secure an indictment, then try to convict Scott in a public trial before a jury. That process takes months, and prosecutors try to avoid it. So Scott had to persuade prosecutors that a subpoena was futile—that he would never testify under any circumstances.

  Kennedy suggested a press conference where Scott would announce his plan to defy a subpoena—forever. This was risky, because a public challenge from a witness like Scott might embolden prosecutors to call his bluff. But Scott loved making a public spectacle of himself. Kennedy summoned the media to Glide Memorial Church on April 9. (The location was no accident; Glide often served as a counterculture sanctuary, and the previous year it had been part of the coalition of groups in the People in Need food giveaway program.)

  Jack and Micki Scott, alongside their lawyer and the towering presence of Bill Walton, announced at Glide that they would never cooperate with the investigation into Hearst’s kidnapping. “The events of Watergate, and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the present economic situation and the almost daily revelations about the FBI and CIA have convinced us that we are confronted with a morally bankrupt government,” Jack Scott told the overflow crowd. “We believe a position of total non-collaboration with this government is our moral responsibility. We have no intention of talking with the FBI now or in the future.” (Scott also invited a photographer from People magazine to shoot Jack, Micki, and Bill on their morning jog.)

  Remarkably, the gambit worked. Prosecutors did not force the issue with Jack. As Kennedy hoped, the U.S. attorney preferred to avoid getting caught up in a quasi-political sideshow. Also, investigators could tell that even if they did succeed in questioning the Scotts, they could not deliver what the FBI most wanted—Patricia’s current location.

  That still left the question of Bill Walton, who had not yet been served a grand jury subpoena. Just to be on the safe side, Kennedy thought Walton should stay out of sight for the week or so after the press conference. But lying low, as it were, presented a challenge for someone of Walton’s fame (and height). Kennedy invited Walton to stay in his town house, which meant sleeping diagonally on a king-sized water bed in his guest bedroom. Walton only ate vegetarian food, which was a challenge for Kennedy and his wife to obtain in that more primitive culinary era. In the end, the prosecutors also left Walton alone, and he returned to the Portland Trail Blazers in time for the new season.

  —

  No one followed the Scott sideshow with greater interest than Randy Hearst. By this time, the crowds of reporters had long since disappeared from the house in Hillsborough. So, in a way, did the man of the house. The relationship between Randy and Catherine, fragile to begin with, broke under the strain of Patricia’s kidnapping. Randy had long maintained discreet side relationships in San Francisco, and he began spending more nights in the city in 1975. He changed in other ways as well. As part of his efforts to free his daughter, Randy had talked with prisoners, radicals, journalists, lawyers—anyone who might have a clue about Patricia. Randy had always been more open-minded than his wife, and these explorations widened the gulf between them. With his old-fashioned diction and British tweeds, to say nothing of his famous name, Randy might appear to have been the last person who could penetrate the counterculture. But his curiosity, his decency, and above all his love for his daughter created allies for him in worlds very different from his own.

  Immediately after the press conference at Glide, Randy tried to make contact with the Scotts. Randy reached David Weir, a reporter for Rolling Stone, who put him in touch with Michael Kennedy. When Jack heard of Randy’s interest, he was intrigued but wary. In their time together, Patricia had denounced her mother to Jack the same way she did to everyone else. But she spoke with some warmth about her father. Despite his sour parting with Patricia and the Harrises, Jack wanted them to survive, and he understood how difficult the situation must be for Randy. Still, Jack worried that Randy’s approach might be some kind of FBI trap, to elicit admissions that might allow the bureau to make a case against him for harboring a fugitive. Reassured through Weir that Randy would keep their conversation to himself, Jack agreed to the meeting. He was never one to shy away from an adventure, even if this one was just dinner.

  Both Jack and Micki Scott went to the dinner at the Kennedys’ town house, and it was an awkward occasion at first, but sports and alcohol lubricated the proceedings. Jack was well practiced in using jock talk to disarm his political opposites, and Randy played along in a self-deprecating way. “I was a pretty fair athlete myself,” Randy said. “Look where it got me.” They were several hours, and many vodkas, into the conversation when Randy turned to his real subject of interest. How was Patricia?

  Jack decided to answer carefully. If the woman he had last seen six months ago was in fact Randy’s daughter, he said, she was in good health.

  What about her being pregnant?

  She wasn’t pregnant when he last saw her, Jack said. Her padded belly had been a disguise.

  Randy pursued his real worry. Are you sure Cinque—Donald DeFreeze—didn’t get her pregnant? Jack was sure. She was not pregnant from Cinque or anyone else.

  Randy wanted to know if Patricia had really joined the SLA.

  Both Jack and Micki said Patricia appeared tota
lly committed to the revolution. This was not a matter of fakery or compulsion. She had joined the SLA.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” her father said. “She’s always been a rebel.”

  Because Patricia had made common cause with her former captors, Randy was convinced he had to get her out of the country. “I can’t let her go to trial,” he said. “She is going to call the judge a fucking pig and then she’ll be in jail for the rest of her life.”

  Randy offered the Scotts money to spirit Patricia out of the country—maybe to Cuba. It didn’t matter where, Randy said, just to a place where she could not be retrieved and then put on trial by the U.S. government.

  Jack demurred. He wasn’t going to take that kind of risk for Patricia, and besides he did not even know where she was, much less how to get her to Cuba.

  Now morose, and well into his cups, Randy moved on to another subject—his bitterness toward his wife. Specifically, Randy brooded about Catherine’s decision to accept reappointment to the Board of Regents of the University of California in March of the previous year. He believed Patricia might have been released if Catherine hadn’t provoked the kidnappers by accepting Governor Reagan’s offer. “I’m going to get rid of [Catherine] as soon as this thing is over,” Randy said.

  —

  Walter Scott’s tips to the FBI only began with the link to his brother. Walter also gave agents the name of Jay Weiner, the college student and newspaper intern who had been treated to a bizarre birthday party at the farm the previous July.

  Weiner always somehow suspected that the authorities would come calling, but he did not expect to be sandwiched between two unmarked vehicles on March 11, 1975. By this point, Weiner had transferred to a different college, but he happened to be visiting Oberlin when FBI agents slammed on their brakes in front of and behind him that evening. They asked to speak with him in a way that, in his naïveté, gave him the impression that he had no choice. They went to the office of the campus security director to talk.

  Weiner laid out the story of his relationship with Jack Scott. He had been Jack’s protégé, and this relationship earned him the invitation to the farm. There he had immediately recognized Patricia Hearst as one of the residents, but at first he only knew the other three as Alan (who was Bill Harris), Judy (Emily Harris), and Joan (Wendy Yoshimura). Weiner told the agents that Jack later confirmed the true identities of the three others, and Scott had told Weiner a detail about Yoshimura. She was Willie Brandt’s girlfriend.

  Tying Yoshimura to Brandt gave the FBI an important lead. At the time, Brandt was still locked up for his role in the Revolutionary Army bombings in Berkeley. In response to the information from Weiner, the FBI checked the log of Brandt’s visitors in prison and found the names Josephine and Kathy Soliah. Someone at the FBI then figured out that Kathy gave the emotional eulogy for the SLA dead in Ho Chi Minh Park, in Berkeley, on June 2, 1974. The agents realized—at last—that the Soliah family was crucial to unraveling the whole story.

  The failure to pursue the Soliahs earlier might have been the biggest mistake of the entire FBI investigation. In her speech at the park, Kathy Soliah had hardly been subtle about her ties to Hearst’s kidnappers. She went on at length about her close relationship with Angela Atwood, and Soliah had said, “I am a soldier of the SLA”—which was a breathtakingly obvious clue. After Kathy’s speech, agents did track her down to interview her, but she told them nothing of substance. There the matter ended, for more than a year. There was no follow-up, no investigation of Soliah’s other contacts, no examination of her phone records or history. She was just another name crossed off a list.

  But the agents now recognized that they had to learn more about Kathy and her sister Josephine. They knew Kathy had done more than just give a speech. Kathy had gone to visit the convicted bomber who was the boyfriend of the woman who had sheltered Patricia and the Harrises. A cursory check revealed no trace of Kathy or Jo or indeed of their brother Steve—no addresses or phone numbers. (Of course, their invisibility to the police had been very much intentional on their part.) This time, though, the agents showed some more initiative and paid a call on their father, Martin Soliah, the schoolteacher and coach, in his home in the desert town of Palmdale, California.

  The agents first showed up on August 18, and they began a delicate cultivation of the father, who had his own complex emotions about his children. Martin was an old-school conservative, a World War II vet, who had watched with bewilderment, as many parents did in this era, as his children slipped away from him. He was appalled that Kathy was living in sin with Jim Kilgore. Martin knew just enough about his kids’ politics to know that he abhorred them. But at the same time, he loved his three children, and the notion of any FBI inquiry about them was deeply upsetting to him and his wife, Elsie. Still, he cooperated with the agents, largely because they told him that Kathy was in no trouble; they just wanted to talk to her about some other people.

  Martin and Elsie had very little information about Kathy, Steve, and Jo. (They had two other children who had no political involvements.) The Soliahs had an address in San Francisco for Kathy, 625 Post Street, which turned out to be a mail drop. They had a phone number in Oakland for Steve, but the person who answered said Steve didn’t live there anymore. The agents kept returning to the Soliahs’ home in Palmdale, asking more questions about their kids. On August 23, the Soliah parents received a letter from their daughter Jo. It was reassuring in its informality—it mentioned that Jo and Kathy had been on a camping trip—but it still listed the mail drop as the return address.

  On their next visit to Palmdale, the agents made a specific request. They wanted Martin to travel to San Francisco to try to track down his children, to ask them to speak to the FBI. Martin revered the FBI, and he convinced himself that Kathy and Jo might be in danger. Talking to the FBI, he thought, would make them safer. So on August 28, Martin and an agent flew to San Francisco. Martin left a note at the drop box and went to a hotel to wait for a return call. A day passed. But then, late on Friday, August 29, Jo called him at the hotel. He invited her to dinner and told her to bring her brother and sister along.

  The FBI paid for Martin’s trip and booked his hotel room, which was adjacent to one for a bureau agent. It also gave Martin an invented cover story to explain why he traveled to San Francisco, but he didn’t use it. Instead, Martin told Kathy, Steve, and Jo the truth. He said the FBI was looking for them, he was worried about them, and he wanted to know what the hell was going on. Each of the three younger Soliahs reacted in characteristic fashion to the news that Martin had been in touch with the FBI. As Martin later recounted to the journalist Paul Avery, Josephine began to cry. Steve said nothing. And Kathy exploded in anger. “Daddy! How could you do such a thing?” she said. “Don’t you know you can’t trust the FBI?!”

  The Soliah family dinner turned into a seven-hour marathon of eating, talking, and wandering around the city. The kids assured their father that they were not involved in anything illegal, but they were vague about their lives. Most important, none of his three children would give their father an address or phone number where they could be reached. Steve said that he painted houses for a living. Martin urged them to return to their childhood home in the desert, to get away from the craziness of the Bay Area. Martin alternated between fear for his children, anger at them, and guilt about his own role—“the Judas goat,” he called himself.

  When they finally parted, Martin reported back to the agent who had accompanied him. The agent was disappointed. The Soliah kids provided few leads for the agent to follow up. The agent anticipated, correctly as it turned out, that they would never return to the mail drop at 625 Post Street, where their father had found Josephine. The number of agents assigned to the HERNAP investigation had dropped from dozens to about ten. They had to select their targets with care. So they decided to go with their last remaining lead—about Steve’s career as a housepainter.

  —

  Shortly after Labor Day, Mont
e Hall, who ran the investigation day to day, was riding home on the BART rapid transit system, making notes for the next day’s assignments. He came across the name of a nurse who had been tangentially connected to some of the people in the case. He assigned agents to follow her the next day, and they noticed that she had a new car. Through the dealer, the agents found that she had paid for the car by check, and Hall called in a favor at the bank to have them track down the check. It was a third-party check—from a small painting company.

  Calling around, the agents found that the company was working a big job in Pacifica, south of San Francisco. The company had been painting a two-hundred-unit apartment complex since July. Early on the morning of September 15, a pair of agents approached the manager of the complex. They showed him a portfolio of photographs and asked if any of them resembled anyone on the painting crew. The manager identified Michael Bortin as a painter he knew as “John Henderson,” who led the group of “hippie painters.” He recognized a photograph of Steve Soliah, too. The manager went on to say that the crew included two young women, which was somewhat unusual for the time. In fact, the women were due to arrive any minute. The agents asked the manager to keep their visit to himself, and then they stepped out of sight to see who arrived. Kathy and Josephine Soliah showed up to start their day’s work.

  The agents kept up their surveillance throughout the workday. At about 5:30 p.m., Kathy and Jo left the painting site and drove into San Francisco, followed at a discreet distance by three FBI cars. The Soliah sisters got out at 625 Morse, the small one-way street close to the border with Daly City. The agents broke off their surveillance for the night—there was no way to remain unobtrusive on the narrow street—but they picked up again in the morning. There they saw Steve Soliah leave 625 Morse and travel about three and a half miles to 288 Precita, where he picked up Kathy and Jo Soliah. They drove to the painting site in the morning and returned to the same two houses at the end of the day on September 16.