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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  “Right,” said Tobin.

  “Obviously,” Patricia said, laughing. “And so this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense.” Still, Patricia said, she was very happy with her lawyer. “He’s good,” she said. “Like, I really trust him politically and personally and he, like, I can tell him just about anything I want and he’s cool.” She said Hallinan was working to get her out on bail, but “I don’t want to have the bail thing where I’m a prisoner in my parents’ home.”

  In her first letter to Steve, Patricia recounted her meeting with Trish—“I have seen Trish Tobin & she is so together!”—and said she’d be sending him the two books. Patricia then added, “I love you so much—you know that. I’m glad for all the times my eyes went darting around all over your face, and for the times I told you I love you. As long as we stay strong and free those pigs can’t fuck with us. They can imprison our bodies but not our hearts & minds. I look forward to a lifetime of struggle—there will be a revolution in Amerikkka and we’ll be helping to make it. Myself, in particular, helping to make a Feminist Revolution—meaning, of course, a revolution that will be both socialist & cultural at the same time.”

  —

  The question of bail generally turns on two questions: Is the defendant a danger to the community? Is the defendant a flight risk? By both standards, Patricia Hearst was a poor candidate to be released on bail. On danger, she had been found in an apartment with several weapons, and she was closely tied to the Harrises, who had bomb-making equipment to go with their own large stash of guns. On flight, Patricia had been a fugitive for a year and a half, when she evaded one of the most extensive manhunts in the history of the country. In light of those considerations, no judge was going to release her.

  Still, lawyers make difficult arguments all the time, and it was certainly appropriate for Kayo Hallinan to request bail for Patricia. He could say that in light of her fame and notoriety she was unlikely to flee and under the circumstances she wasn’t a threat to anyone either. If Hallinan had limited himself to those arguments, he probably would have lost, but it would have been a reasonable effort. Five days after Patricia was arrested, Hallinan did make those arguments, but he went a great deal further.

  To go with his motion for bail, Hallinan submitted a sworn affidavit by Patricia, which amounted to her first public statement about what happened to her during her year and a half with the SLA. She began by describing how she was kidnapped on February 4, 1974, and then placed blindfolded in a closet. For ten days, she said, “she was unable to eat…and unable to dispose of her body wastes.” She was given liquids to drink, and “when the blindfold was removed, she felt as if she were on some LSD trip; everything was out of proportion, big and distorted.” She received constant threats on her life. “After a month of this sort of treatment, she was in such condition that she could stand for only sixty seconds or so, and would then fall to the ground….During all this time, she was in a constant state of fear and terror and expected at any minute to be murdered by her captors.” Patricia went on,

  Under the pressure of these threats, deprivation of liberty, isolation, and terror, she felt her mind clouding, and everything appeared so distorted and terrible, that she believed and feared that she was losing her sanity and unless soon freed would become insane. Meanwhile, after each meal, she felt an aggravation of this condition, and all sorts of fantastic shapes and images kept coming and going before her eyes, so that the faces of the kidnappers and jailers appeared to her as weird and horrible masks; that she was able to properly comprehend only the reiterated statement, “We are going to kill you.” Finally under these pressures, her mind became more confused and distorted. Further weird concepts and images appeared before her, and she was unable to distinguish what was real and what was imaginary.

  In short, according to Patricia’s affidavit, she had spent more than a year in a drug-induced haze. Her recollection of everything that happened between the bank robbery (April 15, 1974) and her arrest (September 18, 1975) was “as though she lived in a fog, in which she was confused, still unable to distinguish between actuality and fantasy, and in a perpetual state of terror.” Patricia swore to the truth of the affidavit “under penalty of perjury” on Monday, September 22, the day after her first letter to Steve Soliah.

  It’s unclear where Kayo Hallinan received the information he included in the affidavit. He certainly spoke to Wendy Yoshimura in addition to his first few conversations with Patricia. But he might simply have invented some of the assertions in the affidavit. Whatever its origins, the affidavit turned out to be a gigantic legal miscalculation. Most important, Patricia’s reported statements were untrue. For starters, the SLA comrades did not use the kinds of drugs that would produce the effects described. Moreover, during the period described in the affidavit, Patricia had read communiqués, shot up Mel’s Sporting Goods, helped rob two banks in Sacramento, written out detailed plans to rob others, and traveled back and forth across the country. Patricia later claimed that she was coerced into taking these actions, but she never said she was in the nearly catatonic state described. Further, the affidavit was terrible legal strategy. A sworn affidavit locked Patricia into a version of her captivity before her attorneys had a chance to investigate. It was beyond reckless for Kayo Hallinan to commit Patricia to a kind of insanity defense before he knew much about what his client had done for a year and a half on the run. And the affidavit was prepared in service of a motion for bail that was destined to fail, which it did. Hallinan had taken a huge risk for less than no payoff for his client.

  The disastrous nature of the Hallinan affidavit would reveal itself over time. For the moment, though, Patricia was most interested in communicating with Steve Soliah, and she passed her next letter to him after Steve’s own bid for bail had been turned down.

  —

  In Patricia’s first jailhouse chat with Trish Tobin, she had told her friend that she was willing to put up Steve Soliah’s bail money. She had not known at the time that the authorities recorded these conversations, and prosecutors used Patricia’s statement to deny Steve bail. (Defendants are supposed to put up their own bail money, which they will lose if they fail to appear.) In her next letter to Steve, Patricia apologized profusely for hurting his chances for bail.

  “My dearest Brother,” Patricia wrote, “I heard all the gory details about your bail reduction hearing. I feel like shit! When I talked to Trish (she was one of my first visitors) I didn’t know that they were taping in the visiting room….I found out about ½ hr. later & now my love & concern (I’m sure that didn’t come across) for you turns up as the reason for why your bail shouldn’t be reduced to a so-called ‘reasonable’ amount. I’m so sorry I want to die….Oh, baby, I love you so much & I want to be with you so fuckin’ bad.” Patricia had learned to express herself in the coarse rhetoric of the SLA. Looking ahead to Steve’s further efforts to reduce his bail, she wrote of the prosecutors, “So hopefully, lover, they have indeed cut their own throats & will soon be swimming in their own blood.”

  At this moment, about a week after she was arrested, Patricia began to recognize the enormity of her legal problems and the degree of her loneliness. “I’m going to have to go through a whole lot of shit soon…a whole lot. But I’m doing my best to keep it together. I am smoking like crazy, though, but there’s nothing else to do,” she went on. “Oh shit—why am I talking like this…to you of all people!!!! It’s the isolation from you & Wendy who I love so much & that old SLA guilt trip that we all struggled so hard against to defeat & destroy in ourselves. Power to the people, and Power to those who have the strength to keep their minds free of dogma—to those who do not allow themselves to become slaves to something ‘greater than themselves’ (i.e. guilt tripping & martyrdom) Love you! I guess I can’t say it enough it isn’t the same as showing it, anyway!”

  In light of Patricia’s description of her mental state in her affidavit, the judge in her case, Oliver Carter, ordered an independent psych
iatric evaluation, to see if she was fit to stand trial. (This would be the first of many such examinations Patricia would endure.) In her next letter to Steve, she described the experience. “Hello my beautiful lover,” she wrote. “I’m really going through hell with all these ‘shrinks’ comming to see me. Every interview & psych. exam means that I’m totally drained by the end. After each session I feel like shit!” Patricia complained that she wasn’t able to exercise in jail. “But I tell you, babe…you won’t be feeling a weak, flabby lady in your beautiful arms. And believe me that’s where I want to be. I miss you on me & around me & inside me, and all the pigs in the world can’t take the way I feel away from me. You know…one thing being in here has done for me is to make me not afraid of having a child…the way I love you I can’t put into words. The thought that we may never see each other again or embrace each other…I can’t stand thinking that. I’m doing everything I can so that we can be together again—on our terms…you know what I mean? I love you—Pearl.”

  In sum, during her first week in captivity, Patricia offered a public clenched-fist salute; gave her occupation as “urban guerrilla”; described her “revolutionary feminist” perspective; and employed the rhetoric and sentiments of the SLA in her letters to Steve Soliah. All these actions pointed to the conclusion that Patricia had become and remained a willing and enthusiastic revolutionary. In her conversations with her parents, she was cordial but guarded. Still, Randy and Catherine had to recognize that their daughter was, at least for the moment, a very different young woman from the one they thought they knew.

  Patricia’s parents saw, too, that her criminal case was off to a rocky start. Kayo had blundered forward with the affidavit to no discernible gain and considerable potential risk. Following that debacle, Kayo had no apparent plan for how to proceed. Even though Kayo had only been Patricia’s lawyer for about a week, it looked to Randy that he was in over his head. Randy also had second thoughts about giving Patricia an ideological soul mate for a lawyer; perhaps, given her continuing and destructive embrace of the SLA, that was the worst thing he could have done. For her part, Catherine Hearst found Kayo’s politics distasteful and his persona vulgar. So Randy started searching for a replacement, and he began with the most famous lawyer in the world.

  23

  “YOUR EVER-LOVING MOMMA AND POPPA CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH”

  The calendar insisted that autumn had begun in Mississippi, but on this September morning in 1975 it was still summer inside the women’s jail in Jackson. Five years earlier, Carolee Biddy had reported her six-year-old stepdaughter missing, setting off a search that involved hundreds of people and transfixed the state. In time, though, Biddy told police she had found the girl dead and then, fearing she would be blamed, hidden her body by a reservoir. After she led the police to her body, she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years. She had exhausted her appeals and was now looking for a legal miracle. So she summoned the lawyer who was sitting in front of her, wedged into a damp three-piece suit—F. Lee Bailey.

  He was only a little more than forty years old at that time, but he had been famous for a decade. Indeed, his name had evolved from proper noun to noun. To be an “F. Lee Bailey” was to be a swashbuckling gun for hire, a skilled legal mercenary, capable of freeing the accused from the most dire predicaments. His cases had titles rather than names—the Boston Strangler, the Fugitive. (Biddy was “the Mississippi housewife.”) Unlike famous defense attorneys of the past (Clarence Darrow, for instance), Bailey had no identifiable politics; his only causes were his clients and himself. He had become a “brand,” before that term came into wide use. Bailey pioneered the use of the polygraph as an investigative tool and later turned that interest into a syndicated television program, Lie Detector, starring himself. By 1975, he had nurtured his growing legend by writing a pair of memoirs, both best sellers, which he promoted on all the major talk shows.

  But there were darker aspects to Bailey’s reputation. He won a lot of cases, especially early in his career. (He saved Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, from execution in Massachusetts, and he persuaded the Supreme Court to grant Sam Sheppard, the Cleveland doctor who became known as the Fugitive, a new trial, which he won.) But Bailey lost a lot too. (Biddy’s conviction and sentence were upheld.) Bailey’s hunger for money dwarfed even his lust for fame and led him into business dealings that might charitably be described as questionable. In 1973, Bailey was indicted for mail fraud with a former client, Glenn W. Turner, who was the creator of the Dare to Be Great self-improvement scheme. The case against Bailey was eventually dropped, but his financial travails continued. A pilot during the Korean War, Bailey bought a troubled helicopter company that, under his leadership, remained troubled. Then there was the matter of temperament. As a group, trial lawyers abound with self-confidence, but Bailey’s belligerent arrogance transcended the norm. In part, this was due to his prodigious thirst for alcohol, which he did little to hide. (The first line of his second memoir is “Heavy trials make me thirsty.”) Bailey’s business partners, and wives, came and went.

  On that morning in 1975, Bailey was in the visiting room talking with Carolee Biddy when the warden interrupted them. “A fellow who said his name is Randolph Hearst is on the phone for you,” he said. Bailey took the call, listened to Randy ask him to represent his daughter, and took off for the local airfield.

  Bailey flew his own planes from client to client around the country, so he jumped into his two-engine Aero Commander for the long trip from Mississippi to San Francisco. In a cab from the airport that night, Bailey asked the driver what he thought about the Patty Hearst case. “Everybody knows they will bring in some expensive hotshot to get her off,” the driver said. “Like F. Lee Bailey.”

  The cab deposited Bailey at the high-rise in Nob Hill where Randy and Catherine had moved after finally selling the house in Hillsborough.

  Randy Hearst had a clear sense of the magnitude of Patricia’s legal problems. She was under indictment in San Francisco federal court for the robbery of the Hibernia Bank, but that was just the beginning of her potential exposure. There was also her machine-gun spree at Mel’s Sporting Goods and the kidnapping of Tom Matthews. But even that was not the worst of it. In their first late-night conference, Randy confided to Bailey that his biggest worry for his daughter involved the robbery of the Crocker National Bank, where Myrna Opsahl was killed.

  At the moment, the evidence against Patricia and the other comrades was weaker on Carmichael, compared with Hibernia and Mel’s. The presence of the bait bill in her refrigerator on Morse Street was troubling but on its own was not enough for prosecution. The government did not yet have a witness who could identify who did what in the Carmichael robbery. But Patricia had admitted to Kayo that she and the other comrades robbed the bank where Opsahl was killed. Opsahl’s death exposed all of them, including Patricia, who only drove the getaway car, to a potential capital case—that is, to a death sentence. Randy told Bailey that whatever he did as Patricia’s lawyer, he had to keep her potential liability for Carmichael at the center of his thoughts. Bailey agreed.

  The following day, Friday, September 26, 1975, Bailey traveled to the San Mateo county jail for his first meeting with his new client. (In Patricia’s strangely unworldly way, she had never heard of the famous lawyer.) Bailey, in typical fashion, did more talking than listening. He told Patricia that he required complete control of her defense. Neither she, nor her parents, could tell him what to do. Bowled over, as most people were, by Bailey’s self-confidence, Patricia just nodded meekly. One of Bailey’s diktats took effect immediately. There would be no more passing of letters between Patricia and Steve. Indeed, Bailey wanted no contact at all between his client and those people who were part of her life as a revolutionary. Henceforth, her visitors would be limited to family and friends like Trish Tobin, who belonged to her pre-SLA life.

  For his next trick, Bailey would try to work his blustering magic on the prosecutor.

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  Jim Browning, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, was going through a divorce at the time of Patricia’s arrest, and his personal life was in some disarray. A meticulous dresser, Browning liked to keep his shoes well shined, but he couldn’t keep up with the task in his new bachelor life. So Browning switched to patent leather, which Bailey noticed when they met for the first time.

  “Where’d you get the fag shoes?” Bailey asked. In public and private, macho posturing was always part of his rhetorical arsenal.

  Notwithstanding Bailey’s pugnacious opening, the meeting between prosecutor and defense lawyer was cordial. Browning invited Bailey to watch the surveillance tape of the Hibernia Bank robbery. “Patty looks like she is behaving very purposefully and voluntarily, with a lot of verve,” Browning said. The prosecutor half expected Bailey to make some kind of overture for a plea bargain. Given the unusual circumstances surrounding Patricia’s participation in the bank robbery, Browning might have agreed to dispose of the case if Patricia had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge. But Bailey made no move in that direction. Rather, he said Browning should dismiss the case against Patricia altogether. If he did, Bailey promised, Patricia would agree to testify against all the remaining SLA members.

  In a way, each man’s position made sense. Browning saw the Hibernia case as a simple one: Patricia, with a handful of others, committed an armed robbery, as the photographs from the security camera made clear. Federal prosecutors indict, try, and convict bank robbers. At the same time, there was some justice in Bailey’s argument that Patricia’s culpability, if any, was considerably less than that of the people who kidnapped her. Why should Patricia Hearst face a jury before Bill or Emily Harris did? (Bill and Emily were indicted in state court for Patricia’s kidnapping, but their trial was months off; the Harrises were never charged in connection with the Hibernia robbery because of lack of evidence; they did not appear in the security camera photographs.)