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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The information was tantalizing but confusing for the FBI agents. The three Soliah siblings seemed to have ties to both apartments, but it was not clear who lived where, and it was equally uncertain if any of the other fugitives were located at either location. Most important, there was no sign of the biggest prize of all—Patricia Hearst.

  —

  September had brought the comrades a measure of calm. Patricia’s breach with the Harrises appeared to be final. The move to 625 Morse with Steve Soliah and Wendy Yoshimura allowed her to cut off contact with Bill and Emily. The Harrises never even visited the Morse Street apartment, and by the standards of San Francisco geography the Harris home at 288 Precita was far away. They were never going to run into each other by accident, which was fine with Patricia. She spent most of her days curled up in the apartment with Wendy, reading and talking about feminism and working on the manifesto for the women’s group. When Steve came home from his painting job, they would enjoy quiet dinners and then head off to bed. If the routine had continued, it might have started to resemble her household with Steve Weed, which was so violently disrupted nineteen months earlier.

  Bill Harris, in contrast, had turned Precita into a veritable bomb factory.

  There were dozens of two-inch pipes (several drilled to house bomb wires), blasting caps, six alarm clocks, and a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, with a hand-typed insert headed, “Explosives Can Be Divided into Two Main Categories.” There were two shotguns, two carbines, half a dozen pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. There was a library of radical literature, which included two copies of George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye and one copy of Patty/Tania, an instant book about the kidnapping. The living situation on Precita was less stable than the one on Morse, too. The place was home base for Bill and Emily, but Jim Kilgore as well as Kathy and Josephine Soliah and even Michael Bortin sometimes stayed there as well.

  The agents decided to focus on Kathy Soliah, who seemed to be the key link among the players. She also appeared to be living on Precita Avenue, which was located in a busier part of the city and thus easier for the agents to watch without being detected. On the morning of September 17, the agents set up round-the-clock surveillance at 288 Precita, to monitor the comings and goings. In the morning, Kathy and Jo Soliah left for the painting job. At 10:30 a.m., the agents saw two new faces, which looked like Bill and Emily Harris. They were both short and fit, and they were heading out for a jog. After they returned, the man brought a load of dirty clothes to the local Laundromat.

  At this point, Larry Lawler, the lead FBI agent on the assignment, decided to take a chance. Pretending to be a customer at the Laundromat, he walked directly by the man—the possible Bill Harris. The man didn’t make eye contact with the agent, but Lawler noticed something about the man, who was still wearing shorts from his run. He had a large scar on his left knee. Lawler radioed that information back to the San Francisco field office, where Bill Harris’s medical records from the Marine Corps were on file. A quick check revealed that Harris had had surgery on that knee. It looked as if the FBI, at last, had its man.

  That night, the agents reconvened at the field office to decide how to proceed. There was no question in their minds that they had Bill Harris, and almost certainly Emily too, but the question was how to arrest them. In light of the bombing offensive under way, the agents were worried that the apartment at 288 Precita might be booby-trapped. If the Harrises were approached there, the agents worried that they might try to go out in a ball of fire. So the agents bet that Bill and Emily would go jogging again. They would be a lot less dangerous in T-shirts and shorts.

  By 9:00 a.m. on September 18, Lawler had assigned fifteen agents to follow and arrest Bill and Emily Harris. At 10:02, Kathy and Jo left for work. At 12:50, Bill and Emily emerged in jogging clothes. Agents in the area kept each other posted on the progress of their run. At 1:12 p.m., an agent reported that the couple was heading for home. As the man and woman walked toward their front door, a car pulled up behind them, and four agents got out. “We’re the FBI,” Lawler said. Bill stood still and said nothing. Emily bolted, but she was grabbed after about ten steps. “You motherfucking sons of bitches,” she said. “You sons of bitches.” A specialist inked Harris’s fingers while he was still in the backseat of the car and did a rough comparison to a known sample. He had no doubt. “We got him,” he said.

  It was a good day for the FBI, but not a great one. They had been hoping to find Patricia, their real target, but no one else was inside the apartment at 288 Precita. Charlie Bates scheduled a press conference for 3:00 p.m., but he knew that the reporters would focus less on the capture of Bill and Emily Harris and more on the continuing failure to find Patricia Hearst.

  Almost as an afterthought, two pairs of agents went to check out the apartment at 625 Morse. A San Francisco police officer and an FBI agent guarded the front door, while SFPD inspector Tim Casey and FBI special agent Tom Padden went around the back. Through a back door on a porch, Padden could see two women sitting at the kitchen table. Wendy Yoshimura was showing Patricia a letter she was writing to Willie Brandt, her long-ago boyfriend, who was still in prison. Wendy rose to get a glass of water from the sink. When Patricia stood up, she heard a crash—Padden breaking down the door—and the words “Freeze! FBI!” The comrades had warned her about this moment, when the FBI would come to kill her as they did Cinque and all the others. She thought about racing to the bedroom, where a shotgun was stashed against the wall. Maybe she could make a last stand the way the six others did.

  In the kitchen, Padden yelled at Patricia and pointed his gun at Yoshimura. “Freeze! I’ll blow her head off!”

  Patricia froze. There would be no shoot-out.

  Padden’s eyes widened as he realized who was standing before him.

  “Are you Patty Hearst?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Wendy identified herself as well.

  “Are there any explosives in here?” Padden asked. Patricia said no.

  Any weapons? Yes, Patricia said. Two carbines in the closet. Wendy said there was a shotgun in the bedroom, too. Both also had pistols in their purses.

  Patricia had a request of the agent. She had wet her pants. Could she change before they left? Padden agreed.

  Patricia Hearst left the apartment, and her weapons, behind.

  PART FIVE

  22

  “THERE WILL BE A REVOLUTION IN AMERIKKKA AND WE’LL BE HELPING TO MAKE IT”

  Patricia’s crew-necked striped shirt and corduroy pants hung loosely as she stepped into the FBI car for the trip downtown. By the time they reached the federal building, on Golden Gate Avenue, the word of her arrest had leaked, and the street was swarming with reporters and photographers. The journalists, and their audience, had a single question: Who was Patricia Hearst at this point—kidnapping victim or defiant outlaw?

  As Patricia stepped out of the car, she had an initial answer for the crowd. Turning away from the FBI agents, she flashed a big smile for the photographers. She raised her clenched right fist as high as her handcuffs would allow and flashed the revolutionary salute.

  Inside the building, Patricia was rushed through the initial stages of the criminal process. She was fingerprinted. A booking photograph was taken. She was presented a form advising her of her right to remain silent, and she refused to sign the form acknowledging that she had seen it. Foremost in her mind was the admonition she had received long ago from Cinque: “Never sign anything, never say anything, when the pigs’ve got you.” In nearby cells, Patricia heard Bill and Emily Harris talking about their own arrests, which had taken place about an hour before Patricia’s.

  Terence Hallinan, a lawyer, and her young cousin Will Hearst appeared, and they escorted her to a courtroom, where she was arraigned on charges of armed bank robbery and use of a firearm in a felony, in connection with the robbery of the Hibernia Bank the previous April. During the brief proceeding, Patricia removed her chewing gum and st
uck it under the table. Hallinan entered a plea of not guilty on her behalf.

  After court, Patricia was hustled back into a car for a trip to the San Mateo county jail, about twenty miles south of San Francisco, where she would spend the night. She arrived shortly before 8:00 p.m. She was approached by a deputy clerk named Stephanie Marsh, who began another booking procedure.

  “Name?” Marsh asked.

  “Patricia Campbell Hearst,” she said.

  “Do you use any other names?”

  “Tania,” Patricia said.

  “Any other names?”

  “None that I would tell you,” Patricia replied.

  Patricia then gave her address as 625 Morse Street, in San Francisco, where she had been arrested.

  Height and weight?

  Five feet two inches, one hundred pounds.

  “Occupation?” Marsh asked.

  Patricia looked at Marsh blankly.

  “What is your occupation?”

  “Urban guerrilla,” Patricia said.

  —

  Randy Hearst had been hoping for his daughter’s safe deliverance, but he had also been planning for it. Well before the calendar turned to 1975, he knew that she would be facing arrest if she surfaced, so Randy set about lining up a lawyer. His choice reflected both the new world that Randy had come to explore during the past year and a half and, in a broader sense, a father’s belief in what his daughter had become.

  So he did more than hire a lawyer. He invested in a clan, the Hallinan family, whose fame in San Francisco rivaled that of the Hearsts, albeit on an opposite ideological pole. The patriarch, who still presided, was Vincent Hallinan, who had made his name decades earlier, when leftist unions controlled the San Francisco docks. Vincent defended Harry Bridges, the famed leader of the longshoremen, in a perjury case that landed Hallinan himself in jail for six months for contempt of court. Disbarred and then reinstated as a lawyer, Hallinan ran for president of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 and finished third nationally. The next generation of Hallinans—six sons—proved just as combative. Their mother, Vivian Hallinan, a veteran activist herself, wrote a family memoir called My Wild Irish Rogues.

  Vincent Hallinan had been a frequent target of the Examiner’s editorial page over the years, but Randy Hearst, in characteristic fashion, took a liking to the old man during Patricia’s time on the lam. Given her political transformation, Randy thought she would have a rapport with the radical hero. Vincent was nearly eighty years old in 1975 and rarely appeared in court anymore, so Randy also hired his son Patrick, who was a skilled trial lawyer, to represent Patricia.

  When word reached Hillsborough that Patricia had been arrested, a Hearst representative called the Hallinan law offices. The family had long owned a tumbledown Victorian mansion at 819 Eddy Street, where they ran their law practice and rented space to other left-leaning lawyers. The message from the Hearsts was that Patrick Hallinan needed to get over to the federal courthouse right away for Patricia’s arraignment. As it happened, though, Patrick was at the moment at an assignation with a woman friend in Napa Valley. His brother Terence Hallinan was in the office, and he volunteered to handle the job. Lawyers pinch-hit for each other all the time, especially for routine appearances, but when Terence arrived at the courthouse, he said nothing to Patricia about her father’s decision to hire his brother. Terence told her that he would be her lawyer—her only lawyer—and he began interviewing her and learning her story. In other words, Terence stole the biggest client in America from his brother.

  Given Vincent Hallinan’s notoriety, and the family’s contentious nature, the six boys learned to use their fists to defend themselves. None of the brothers fought as much as Patricia’s new lawyer, Terence, who earned the nickname Kayo, as in knockout. By the time he graduated from law school, in 1964, he had been arrested in so many brawls and in so many antiwar and civil rights demonstrations that the California bar refused to admit him. The family took Kayo’s fight all the way to the California Supreme Court to win his law license.

  Kayo’s aggressiveness extended to the courtroom as well as the ring, and he decided his first fight would be to get Patricia released on bail.

  —

  After Steve Soliah heard on the radio that the Harrises had been arrested, he rushed to 625 Morse Street to warn Patricia that she might be next. He was too late, however, and he was collared as well. On the day of the arrests, the FBI neglected to secure the site in Pacifica where the other comrades were painting. As a result, Kathy and Josephine Soliah, as well as Jim Kilgore and Michael Bortin, heard the news and took off for new lives underground. It would be decades until some of them were recognized again in public.

  In the meantime, Steve also needed a lawyer, and Emily Toback, a sometime girlfriend of Steve’s, showed up at 819 Eddy Street, which was what counterculture figures often did when they were looking for legal help. A young lawyer named Steve Imhoff happened to be in his office, and Toback entreated him to meet with Soliah.

  At first, Imhoff thought he might have an easy case. The only charge against Soliah at this point was that he had harbored a fugitive—Patricia. A quick investigation revealed that it was Jim Kilgore, not Steve, who signed the rental papers for the apartment at 625 Morse Street. How could Soliah be charged with harboring if he didn’t even rent the apartment where Patricia stayed?

  Imhoff’s optimism vanished, however, when he returned to Eddy Street to meet with Kayo and Vincent Hallinan, his counterparts on Patricia’s defense. The Hallinans had been debriefing their client, and they had learned about the bank robbery in Carmichael, where Myrna Opsahl had been killed. Patricia told her lawyers that Steve had served as a lookout and she herself had driven a switch car. This could be a capital case against both of them.

  The early results of the FBI investigation held even worse news. Agents had executed a search warrant for the apartment at 625 Morse and discovered a wrapper full of cash in the refrigerator. The stack of currency included a single dollar that was a bait bill passed by the tellers to the bank robbers at the Carmichael bank. This bill potentially tied the residents of the apartment—that is, Steve, Patricia, and Wendy Yoshimura—to the robbery and, ultimately, to Myrna Opsahl’s death. The bait bill alone wasn’t enough for a conviction, but it still raised the legal stakes a great deal higher. (Steve and Patricia kept the cash in the fridge because Morse was located in a high-crime neighborhood and they were worried about break-ins.)

  In the meantime, though, Patricia had made a request of her lawyers. She wanted to be able to communicate with Steve, her lover and roommate. Kayo and Imhoff agreed to serve as intermediaries. Kayo would sit with Patricia while she wrote a letter and then deliver it to Imhoff, who would pass the letter to Steve and wait while he read it and wrote one back of his own. With this system, the lawyers would maintain possession of the letters so the government authorities would never have a chance to read them. (Patricia’s letters never came to light until I recently obtained copies.)

  Patricia’s letters from jail offer a unique window into her state of mind. During her year and a half with the SLA, Patricia read any number of communiqués, from her first message (“Mom, Dad, I’m OK”) to the eulogy tape (“Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man”). Patricia later claimed that these messages did not represent her own feelings, that they were written for her, and that she was compelled to read them—all debatable claims. But her letters to Steve provide unmediated, and undisputed, insight into Patricia’s character in the days after her arrest. The letters offer, in her looping private girls’ school handwriting, the real Patricia.

  —

  Her first letter was sent on Sunday, September 21, three days after her arrest. It began, with original spellings intact,

  My dearest Brother,

  I’m so pissed off about what happened, it was so unreal….I am glad that others are safe, though. It looks like we’re in for some heavy shit and long trials. The past problems (interpersonal relati
onships & political differences) are only more intensified now, as you can imagine. We are in seperate cells, in isolation (they tell us that the sisters in here might try to stab us—that’s such shit cuz we only feel support from them). I hope you’re being treated OK….I want to see you so bad, baby. When I saw you in the Federal Bld. you looked like shit, but I guess I didn’t look so happy either. Only twice have I felt like crying 1. when I saw Wendy handcuffed to a leather belt that strapped under her crotch, & with her legs shackeled 2. when I saw you handcuffed & surrounded by pigs. I was just really glad that I got to come up & kiss & be close to you for those few seconds.

  Patricia then told Steve about some of her visitors. On her first night in captivity, in San Mateo, her parents and sisters Vicki and Anne appeared in the visitors’ area, bearing a bouquet of roses from the reporters waiting outside. She was not allowed to keep the flowers in her cell. The visit with her family was brief and awkward, but at least the Hearsts could see for themselves that Patricia had survived, albeit with a thin frame and short hair, home dyed red.

  A more welcome visitor, the next day, was Trish Tobin, Patricia’s longtime best friend, whose father was president of the Hibernia Bank. In keeping with jail policy, the visit was surreptitiously tape-recorded. Patricia began by asking Trish to bring Steve some books. She asked her to take Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown, and “another book called ‘The Bluest Eye.’ He’d like that, too.”

  Tobin trod lightly, trying to get a sense of Patricia’s state of mind. She said her family would not be making any public statements on her behalf until she was released on bail. “I would just as soon give it myself in person,” Patricia said, “and it will be a revolutionary feminist perspective totally. I’ll just tell you, like, my politics are real different from, uh, way back when.”