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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  So, following Patricia’s testimony, the trial bogged down in lengthy and confusing testimony from a series of psychiatrists, who all offered their own jargon-laden analysis of Patricia’s state of mind. One phrase that was never uttered during the trial was one that came later to be closely associated with the Hearst case: Stockholm syndrome. The event that gave the syndrome its name took place on August 23, 1973, less than six months before the kidnapping. It took some time for the events in Stockholm to circulate around the world, so it was not a focus of the trial.

  Still, then as now, the story of the bank robbery in Stockholm resonated with the Hearst kidnapping. On that summer day in Sweden’s biggest city, an escaped prisoner named Jan-Erik Olsson, armed with a submachine gun, walked into the Sveriges Kreditbanken in Norrmalmstorg square. He successfully demanded that the police release his friend Clark Olofsson from prison, and the pair took four hostages into the bank’s vault, where they were held for six days. In a series of phone calls from the vault, the hostages made clear their support for their captors, in words that foreshadowed Patricia’s own in the communiqués. For example, in a conversation with Prime Minister Olof Palme, one hostage said, “I fully trust Clark and the robber. I am not desperate. They haven’t done a thing to us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But, you know, Olof, what I am scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.” Another hostage said, “This is our world now, sleeping in this vault to survive. Whoever threatens this world is our enemy.” Eventually, the authorities pumped tear gas into the vault, and the captors surrendered. The hostages suffered no serious injuries.

  Even though the psychiatrists for the defense did not use the phrase “Stockholm syndrome,” their appeals to the jury rested on that rationale. Louis “Jolly” West, the chairman of the Psychiatric Department at UCLA, was Patricia’s first witness, but his testimony was as confusing as all that followed. Bailey asked him about brainwashing. “Brainwashing is a term that has become a sort of grab bag to describe any kind of influence exerted by a captor over a captive, but that isn’t very accurate from the scientific or medical point of view,” West said. Still, he told how in one study of air force pilots captured during the Korean War, in thirty-six of the fifty-nine pilots, “the behaviors desired by the captors was, in fact, acquired.” West said Patricia endured a similar experience.

  West spent twenty-three hours with Patricia, and he said “as soon as I began to ask her for any information about her previous nineteen months’ experience, it became extremely difficult. She would begin to cry.” After her kidnapping, “as Cinque repeatedly threatened her with death, she became numb with terror.” Later, he said, “Little by little, she was given to understand that to become a member of the group would mean to get out of the closet and to get out of the blindfold and to be relieved of the constant threats of death, at least from them. And since that was the most immediate threat, this was what she was drawn to do. It was a pretty classical example actually of what we would call coercive persuasion.” As for the shooting at Mel’s Sporting Goods, West quoted Patricia as saying, “I can’t believe I did that. I don’t understand why I did it.”

  In cross-examination, David Bancroft noted first that while the Korean Communists made a specific effort to change the mind-set of their captives, the SLA comrades did no such thing. They were neither organized nor experienced enough to conduct a brainwashing. Rather, her three principal minders—Willy Wolfe, Angela Atwood, and Nancy Ling—simply talked to Patricia, who eventually came around to their way of thinking. Bancroft focused on the period after Patricia came out of the closet, and especially after she hit the road with the Scotts in June 1974. “The defendant was not forthcoming with you with respect to her activities after Los Angeles, that is, after the Mel’s store shoot-out until her apprehension,” Bancroft said. “She did not give you a full description of the details of what she had been doing for the past year and a half, isn’t that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” West said.

  Bancroft went on, “In view of the fact that the defendant has taken the Fifth Amendment as to that period, and having in mind, in addition, that she had provided you with only the most sketchy information for that period of time…my question to you is how could you tell that the defendant was suffering from a survivor syndrome without knowing in detail what happened to her within the previous year and a half?”

  West said the conclusion was his reasonable medical judgment.

  Bancroft summed up the prosecution’s case in a single question: “Is it your view, Doctor, that a person who was politically embarrassed by their family situation, and had particular, negative feelings with respect to their parents, and whose characteristic mode of expression is deep sarcasm, and if that person—prior to their acquaintance with political matters—in addition felt depressed or trapped, could that person not come to a sudden political expression of their own hostilities?”

  West answered maybe, but the point was the question, not the answer. The prosecution was arguing that life with the SLA represented an escape for Patricia. Trapped with Steve and alienated from her family, Patricia found in her captivity a kind of freedom from the pressures of her life.

  And so it went, day after day of speculation and psychobabble. Martin Orne, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, came next, and he too said Patricia had been “quite troubled” by her kidnapping. Speaking in a strong Viennese accent, Orne concluded that Patricia’s flat affect as she recounted her kidnapping was proof that she was telling the truth. “Her failure to make it a good story is what I found so impressive,” he said. “She had a remarkable resistance to embroidering.” In cross-examination, Bancroft had a simple theme: people change. “Let me ask you, Doctor,” he said, “people sometimes become involved in political things where they previously have not been, isn’t that possible?”

  “Of course,” said Orne.

  “You’ve heard the expression, ‘found religion’?”

  Orne had.

  “So it’s not always the case, then, that looking at a pre-history of noninvolvement in something is any good indicator of whether or not one would become subsequently involved in something?”

  “That’s correct.” In other words, people change.

  The final defense witness was Yale’s Robert Jay Lifton, an expert on the treatment of American prisoners of war by the Chinese and North Koreans. He examined Patricia for seventeen hours. He said his analysis showed that Patricia had been coerced into joining the SLA and robbing the bank. The proof, in his view, was how quickly she switched back to her previous life. “What is impressive to me is the speed with which all of the coercive ideas, that is, the political ideas that were pressed upon her…with the exception of what I would call a moderate feminism which came more in relation to Wendy Yoshimura than with the SLA people, how those ideas were no longer present in her so quickly,” Lifton said.

  Even for a defense witness, Lifton offered an extraordinarily credulous account of Patricia’s activities while she was on the run. Bancroft asked him how Patricia described her months with the comrades. “She did tell me about the main activities in that time which were, in my judgment, the military drills, the struggles and criticisms and the physical training activities that she had,” Lifton said. Apparently, Patricia did not inform him about the time she spent robbing banks and planning bombings, and the doctor didn’t ask about it either.

  —

  Joel Fort, the first prosecution psychiatrist, who also had the opportunity to examine the defendant, portrayed an almost entirely different human being from the Patricia Hearst described by the defense. She was, in Fort’s view, “extremely independent, strong-willed, rebellious, intelligent, well-educated but not particularly intellectually inclined.” She had become sexually active at fifteen and had “a very independent view about sexuality and about rules in general.” She was an “amoral person who thought that laws that she didn’t agree with should be violated.” As a friend of Patr
icia’s told Fort, “She would lie if necessary to get herself out of anything.” Fort’s Patricia detested nearly everyone in her prior life. Her feelings about her parents ranged “from dislike to hatred.” She had had “serious questions” about whether she should go through with her marriage to Steven Weed. Patricia complained about “his expecting her to cook and clean up for him, and to be available for him whenever he wanted sexual relationships, but not responding to her own sexual initiatives when she had those desires. She also found him somewhat boring at times.” In her interviews with Fort, she confessed that “in the month prior to the kidnapping,…she was having thoughts about suicide.”

  To Fort, the kidnapping was, perversely, almost a form of liberation for Patricia. He said seven of the eight kidnappers (all except DeFreeze) “were in roughly the same age bracket and the same class background, white middle class, comparable education, either some years of college or graduation from college, coming from business and professional families, doctors, pharmacists, store owners.” And five of those seven were women, which Fort found to be “a very important point.” He went on, “To put it in kind of cliché of American terms, we could say, how did a nice girl like that or a nice boy like that become an SLA member?…None of them, obviously, were born as adherents to an urban guerrilla philosophy or a terrorist kind of ideology. In fact, more specifically, all of them made that evolution within relatively recent years.” So, in Fort’s view, did Patricia Hearst.

  “Something was missing in her life,” Fort continued. “She was a strong, willful, independent person, bored, dissatisfied, in poor contact with her family, disliking them to some extent, dissatisfied with Steven Weed, with whom she had been for about three years at the time of kidnapping, and the interaction of that, that kind of vacuum, of something missing, a missing sense of meaning or purpose in life with what seemed on the surface to be offered by the SLAers as she got to know them and as she became impressed, as she describes in the Tania interview, with her commitment, and as she described to me, being impressed with their willingness to die for their beliefs. I think that action was very important to her.”

  More specifically, Bancroft asked Fort, “Doctor, what can you tell us from a psychiatric standpoint with respect to the claim that she fired the gun at Mel’s almost involuntarily or instantaneously?”

  “I find it unbelievable,” Fort said.

  And what about the fact that Patricia had a gun in her purse when she was arrested?

  “I thought that was one other additional important piece of evidence, that she was fully aware of what was going on and she was aware that she was a fugitive, that she had a continuing identification as an urban guerrilla.”

  Bailey was nearly beside himself during much of Fort’s testimony, vaulting out of his seat to object, even to demand a mistrial, because the doctor was essentially offering an expert opinion that Patricia was guilty. (Carter denied most of the objections and all of the requests for mistrials.) Bailey spent more than a full day cross-examining Fort, accusing him of exaggerating his credentials and trying to cash in on the notoriety of the Hearst case. Curiously, though, Bailey did little to challenge Fort’s conclusions about Patricia.

  The next witness, Harry Kozol, a psychiatrist from Boston, backed up Fort’s conclusions, saying, “The girl was a rebel. She had gotten into a state where she was ripe for the plucking….She was a rebel in search of a cause.” Based on his examination of Patricia and her background, Kozol said, “I think this was all in her. In a sense, she was a member of the SLA in spirit, without knowing it, for a long, long time.” (Kozol also said Patricia had denied that DeFreeze ever raped her.) Weary of extending the trial, the government never called its third psychiatrist to the stand.

  The battle of the psychiatrists echoed a larger debate that was being played out in the country. As the historian Rick Perlstein observed, “The defense psychiatrists offered up what was essentially a left-wing view of the self—as plastic, protean, moldable—and of human beings as the product of their environment, not quite responsible for their individual decisions and acts.” The prosecution experts, in contrast, reflected a more right-wing view—that individuals were accountable for their own actions and that indulged children, rich or poor, had no right to blame circumstances for their choices in life. This division reflected the earlier debate about Randy Hearst’s decision to fund the food giveaway, which was seen by the Left as a humanitarian gesture and by the Right as a concession to terrorists. By the end of the trial, these cultural crosscurrents yielded a paradoxical result—that the Hearst name, which for decades stood for economic royalty and political conservatism, came to represent flabby liberal weakness in the face of adversity.

  The battle of experts did have one clear loser: the psychiatric profession itself. Putative leaders in the field reached diametrically opposing conclusions based on the same evidence—that is, the contents of Patricia’s head. Psychiatry could scarcely be much of a science, it seemed, if the top doctors could agree on so little. Worse yet, the experts on both sides expressed themselves with a degree of confidence that seemed excessive. How could Orne conclude that Patricia wasn’t embroidering? How could Kozol be sure that the pre-kidnapping Patricia was already “in” the SLA? The gladiatorial atmosphere of the courtroom brought out the worst in the doctors, who sacrificed professional humility for a fatuous certainty.

  Still, Browning by and large achieved his goal; the muddle of conflicting views neutralized the effect of any single piece of testimony. The doctors’ testimony also provided another reason why Bailey had blundered so badly by putting Patricia on the stand. The psychiatrists for the defense testified in detail about the abuse that Patricia recounted. Bailey could have relied on that testimony alone to explain her ordeal to the jury, and he would have spared his client the indignity of taking the Fifth.

  Still, at that late date in the trial, there was no way for the lawyers on either side to know how the jurors were leaning. There was ample evidence before them to support a conviction or an acquittal. The prosecutors, who of course bore the burden of proof, were especially worried that a tie would go to the defendant. The central issue in the case remained whether Patricia had made a voluntary decision to join the SLA. On that question, a last-minute discovery transformed the trial—courtesy of the absent, but still somehow ubiquitous, Bill and Emily Harris.

  —

  When they were all arrested in September 1975, the Harrises were pretty fond of Patricia. True, they lived in separate apartments by that point, but the couple respected Patricia’s political transformation. As Bill told others during the first weeks after their capture, his main issue with Patricia was that she was too reckless and too willing to take chances—that she was too much of a revolutionary. He called her his “Ransom of Red Chief problem,” a reference to the O. Henry short story. Bill and Patricia had fought a lot during their long months together, he acknowledged, but only because he was trying to keep her tethered to reality. When Bill and Emily saw Patricia’s clenched-fist salute and when they heard that she had given her occupation as urban guerrilla, their old disagreements with her faded. Likewise, as a man who appreciated a theatrical gesture, Bill always admired Patricia’s mad barrage at Mel’s. The woman he called Tania saved him from arrest and might have saved his life.

  So when Terence Hallinan came to visit Bill in jail immediately after his arrest—Kayo brought (illegal) Cuban cigars as a gift—Bill said that he and Emily would do what they could to help Patricia. They would testify that she was kidnapped—anything she wanted. But once Hallinan was replaced by Bailey and he cut off Patricia’s contacts with Steve Soliah and everyone else in the SLA, Bill and Emily felt the chill. The breach became official when word leaked that Patricia was accusing the SLA comrades of rape. The Harrises vociferously denied that Patricia’s relationship with Willy Wolfe was nonconsensual and were adamant that DeFreeze had not had sex with her at all. They insisted that the SLA was dedicated to feminism—and it included more wom
en than men—and they would never have stood for rape among their own.

  Shunned now by Patricia, the Harrises set out to defend themselves against daunting legal challenges. They were charged with kidnapping Tom Matthews and were awaiting additional indictments. The specter of charges in connection with Myrna Opsahl’s death also haunted the Harrises. What made their legal problems especially vexing was that they were, in fact, guilty of all these crimes. Still, working with skilled lawyers who were experienced in defending radicals, they had some early successes. They succeeded in persuading a judge that the warrantless search of the Precita apartment was unlawful and that the evidence gathered there could not be used against them. But the lawyers were expensive. The Harrises had no money, and robbing any more banks, at least for the time being, was out of the question.

  Bill and Emily did have one asset: their story. Jack Scott had persuaded the couple, along with Patricia, to try to write a book as a commercial venture the previous summer, but they found that they had neither the patience nor the aptitude for such an undertaking. Likewise, they had plenty of demands from conventional news outlets—the networks and the big newsmagazines—for interviews, but journalistic rules forbade paying sources. Languishing in jail in Los Angeles, they learned of one possible option. Their lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, approached the journalist Robert Scheer to see if they could work out a deal. Scheer wrote for New Times, a new national biweekly that attempted to marry the counterculture sensibility of the underground press with the appearance (and advertising) of a glossy magazine. Unconstrained by the conventional journalistic ethics, New Times offered the Harrises $10,000 for an interview.

  Scheer and his colleague Susan Lyne wound up spending fourteen hours with Bill and Emily in the Los Angeles county jail. True to their obsessive natures, the Harrises not only gave lengthy interviews but also annotated and expanded the rough transcripts of their sessions. Bill, a disorderly man with meticulous handwriting, wrote in his changes, and Emily used a prison typewriter to produce flawless copy. The New Times interview with Bill and Emily appeared in print just before the close of evidence in Patricia’s trial.