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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  —

  Carole Westrick was the only woman on the Hearst prosecution trial team. A twenty-three-year-old paralegal, she at first identified more with the defendant in the case than with her colleagues at the counsel table. She was haunted by the thought of Patricia, her near contemporary, confined to a closet. But Westrick’s job involved keeping track of the voluminous documents in the case—as well as dealing with the press—and her immersion in the evidence led her to believe that Patricia had made a genuine commitment to the SLA. Still, she worried that her team had never quite made its case about Patricia’s state of mind. They needed something more.

  The prosecutors passed the Harrises’ interview among themselves, reading with half an eye as the psychiatric testimony droned on. The New Times reporters had pressed Bill and Emily about their insistence that Patricia, rather than being sexually assaulted by Willy Wolfe, had actually initiated the relationship. Westrick was drawn to one comment in particular from Emily Harris:

  Once Willy gave her a stone relic in the shape of a monkey-face that he had bought when he was in Mexico—he called it an Olmec or something. He had fashioned a macramé chain for it out of some waxed brown string that was lying around the house, sort of a thick thread used for sewing on leather. Anyway, Patty wore it all the time around her neck. After the shootout, she stopped wearing it and carried it in her purse instead, but she always had it with her.

  Westrick went to Browning and said she thought this was potentially significant evidence. Browning wasn’t sure. What was the big deal? Westrick pointed out that Patricia had claimed that Willy Wolfe raped her. In one of the most dramatic moments of her testimony, she said she “couldn’t stand” Wolfe. Westrick passed a note to her boss: “No woman would carry around a memento from a man who raped her and couldn’t stand for over a year!” Browning told Westrick to summon the FBI agent who booked Patricia’s purse into evidence following her arrest. During a break in the trial, the agent led the lawyers to the FBI evidence room, where he dumped the contents of the purse on a table. There was a smooth black stone charm carved into the shape of a face—the Olmec monkey. Emily Harris was right.

  But there was more. Westrick and the lawyers recalled a line from Patricia’s “eulogy tape,” which had already been played for the jury, with a transcript prepared by the FBI. Originally, the transcript read, “The pigs probably have the little Old McMonkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night.” The passage had never made any sense to the government team. What was an Old McMonkey? But shortly after the tape was played in court, David Kessler, a psychiatrist who was working with the prosecution, happened to ask Bancroft if anyone had ever found the item. No, said Bancroft, the agents had looked, but they found no Irish or Scottish figurine. Kessler corrected him: Patricia had said “Olmec monkey,” not “Old McMonkey.” (The FBI transcribers, like many people in law enforcement, were probably Irish Americans.)

  Suddenly the evidence for the prosecution looked even more promising. Not only had Patricia saved a gift she had received from Willy Wolfe, but her Olmec monkey might have matched one that Wolfe wore to his death. What a romantic gesture! What proof of her true feelings for Willy! The prosecution moved swiftly to track down the Los Angeles police officers who had sifted the burned-out remains of the house on Fifty-Fourth Street. In short order, they found the LAPD sergeant who had removed the macramé cord and monkey charm from Wolfe’s lifeless body. The prosecutors had the evidence shipped to San Francisco. Wolfe’s Olmec monkey provided a haunting reminder of how he died. The face of the charm was charred, and the string that held it around his neck was burned.

  What made the last-minute discoveries especially sweet was that the prosecutors didn’t have to disclose the new evidence to the defense team. Prosecutors have to reveal in advance their initial evidence, known as their case-in-chief, but they don’t have to provide notice of evidence they plan to use in rebuttal, after the defense has presented their witnesses. Browning relished the chance to spring a surprise on Bailey. In this, however, he was disappointed. Browning was so excited about the Olmec monkey evidence that he shared his discovery with his fourteen-year-old daughter, who was living with her mother at the time. Evelyn Browning was so impressed that she repeated the tale to a girlfriend who, in turn, told her mother. Unbeknownst to anyone, the mother was following the trial closely and rooting for an acquittal. She tracked down Bailey at his hotel and warned him that the two Olmec monkeys were about to be introduced in the government’s rebuttal case.

  Bailey prepared for the last-minute evidence as best he could. Patricia told him that she had saved the charm because Wolfe had told her it was twenty-five hundred years old. She cared too much about art history to get rid of it. Affection for Willy had nothing to do with it, she said.

  But Bailey didn’t think it was worthwhile to return Patricia to the stand to respond, so the defense simply had to endure a procession of government rebuttal witnesses on the subject of the Olmec monkeys. One FBI agent introduced a blowup of the SLA group photograph—showing Patricia’s Olmec charm on her necklace. Another agent put the charm taken from her purse into evidence. A third showed the jury the charred remains of the cord and Olmec monkey that had been removed from Wolfe’s body. Browning guessed that Bailey might argue that Patricia saved her Olmec monkey out of a concern for the cultural patrimony of Mexico, so he also tracked down an expert in the field.

  Clement Meighan was surely the unlikeliest of people to appear as a witness in the trial of Patricia Hearst. A longtime professor at UCLA, he was known as a founding father of modern archaeology, with a special expertise in the history of Mexico.

  “Are you generally familiar with the sale of Mexican objects, both authentic and simulated, to tourists in Mexico?” Browning asked him.

  “Yes,” said Meighan.

  “Are figurines from ancient civilizations recovered quite frequently in Mexico?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  Browning showed the professor the two Olmec monkeys, and he played the tape of Patricia saying, “The pigs probably have the little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck.”

  Browning asked if Olmec monkeys like the two exhibits at trial were easy to find in Mexico.

  “Yes, they are easy to find,” Meighan said.

  Bailey sneered just a couple of questions on cross-examination. The gist was, You came all the way from Los Angeles for this?

  But the message of Professor Meighan’s testimony was clear. There was no reason for anyone to hold on to the Olmec monkey except out of sentiment, or maybe love.

  26

  THE VERDICT

  Bailey had a final witness. “Now, your honor, we call Mrs. Catherine Hearst,” he said.

  It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, and most men in the courtroom contrived to sport green. Al Johnson, though far from his home in Boston, managed to pull together an entire emerald outfit, including suit, shirt, and tie. So, too, did Judge Carter’s court clerk, and even Tom Padden, the FBI agent who busted through the back door of Patricia’s apartment at 625 Morse Street. Catherine Hearst, in contrast, composed her outfit as she organized her life, with greater restraint. Her brown dress was closely tailored, set off with a pink scarf. She did offer a token nod to the occasion, with a green-enamel shamrock pin.

  “Mrs. Hearst, you are the mother of the defendant in this case?” Bailey asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Catherine said.

  “Now, Mrs. Hearst, you have been present throughout the trial, have you not?”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine Hearst was more exhibit than witness. She was the physical manifestation of Patricia’s return to the fold—proof, according to Bailey, that the defendant belonged with her family, not with the criminals who had seized her. This wasn’t just a show for the jury, either; Patricia’s embrace of her Hearst roots was just as real as her mother’s love for her.

  “Would you tell the jury what kind of girl Patty Hearst was, pr
ior to February 4, 1974?”

  “Well, she was a very warm and loving girl,” Catherine said, “and she always did things together with the family in groups, and we live a very close family life. And she and I shared a mutual enthusiasm for art, so we always had a great deal in common.” There was some poignancy in Catherine’s embrace, especially for those who knew how Patricia had spent the last year and a half running down her mother. The reference to art represented a small attempt to mitigate the damage from the Olmec monkey. The implication, if a rather tortured one, was that Patricia kept the charm for the family collection, not as a romantic keepsake.

  “Was she,” Bailey asked, “sometimes a strong-willed girl?”

  “She was,” Catherine said with a smile. “I wouldn’t want to make anything I say make you think it was an easy job to raise five children, Mr. Bailey.”

  “Was she also, as has been indicated by several of the witnesses, a bright girl?”

  “A very bright girl,” her mother said.

  It was time to move to closing arguments.

  —

  Browning summed up the same way he tried the case, with dogged exactitude and without much flash. It didn’t help that he was fighting the flu, too. For the most part, Browning let the evidence speak for itself. He opened with the bank robbery and the security camera photographs, which the jurors had already seen about a dozen times. There was never any dispute that Patricia participated in the bank robbery, but as Browning acknowledged, the key issue in the case was the defendant’s state of mind. “In dealing with intent,” Browning said, “we can’t unscrew the top of a person’s head and look in.” Intent must be proven by outside factors—by circumstantial evidence.

  The most important evidence of Patricia’s intent, according to Browning, was her gunfire at Mel’s Sporting Goods. “I suggest it is reasonable to believe that a person who is in fear of being killed by her captors does not, when confronted with an opportunity to escape from the captors, fire weapons in the direction of other persons in order to free the captors and does not fail to try to escape,” Browning said.

  Browning didn’t rev up his rhetoric until the end of his remarks, when he discussed Patricia’s turn on the witness stand. “In short, ladies and gentlemen, we ask you to reject the defendant’s entire testimony as not credible,” he said. “She asks us to believe that she didn’t mean what she said on the tapes. She didn’t mean what she wrote in the documents. She didn’t mean it when she gave this power salute, the clenched-fist salute after her arrest. That was out of fear of the Harrises, she tells us. She didn’t mean it when she told the San Mateo County Deputy Sheriff that she was an urban guerrilla, that that was her occupation. She says her statement was simply a sort of shrug-of-the-shoulders type of thing. She says the Tobin conversation [about revolutionary feminism] wasn’t the real Patricia Hearst. The Mel’s shooting incident was simply a reflex. The untruths in the affidavit [about being drugged] were simply some attorney’s idea. She was in such fear that she couldn’t escape in nineteen months while criss-crossing the country, or even get word to her parents or someone else. The confession to Matthews was recited out of fear. She couldn’t stand Willy Wolfe, yet she carried that stone face with her until the day she was arrested.” It is notable that Browning’s climax referred to the Olmec monkey, which had just come to his attention a few days earlier.

  “It’s too big a pill to swallow, ladies and gentlemen,” Browning said. “It just does not wash. I ask whether you would accept this incredible story from anyone but Patricia Hearst, and if you wouldn’t, don’t accept it from her either.” Browning spoke for a little more than two hours, and Judge Carter recessed the trial for lunch.

  “There are many concepts in the law,” Bailey said, reading from a disorderly stack of notes and carrying the microphone like a talk show host working a crowd. “The SLA was so right about so many things that I, as a citizen, am a little bit ashamed that they could predict so well what we would do. But I think an overview of this case is more appropriate than talking just about bank robbery. This is not a case about a bank robbery. The crime could have been any one of a number. It is a case about dying or surviving—that is all Patricia Campbell Hearst thought about. And the question is, what is the right to live? How far can you go to survive…”

  Bailey gestured with his left hand and knocked over a pitcher of water, which dribbled down the front of his pants.

  “A novelist once wrote a most disturbing book—you may have heard about it,” Bailey went on. “It was a best seller and a movie. A man who was condemned to hang for killing his wife killed his executioner to survive, and then it was determined that he had not killed his wife. And a judge had to decide whether or not he could be tried for that second killing. Does one have an obligation at some point to die? It was called ‘A Covenant with Death,’ and we all have a covenant with death. We are all going to die, and we know it. And we’re all going to postpone that date as long as we can. And Patty Hearst did that, and that is why she is here and you are here.”

  Bailey continued in this rambling and at times nearly incomprehensible way for just forty-five minutes, which was mercifully brief considering the circumstances. He barely discussed the evidence at all. He had developed a genuine personal loathing for Joel Fort, one of the prosecution psychiatrists, and he devoted an unseemly amount of time in his brief summation to attacking the doctor—a peripheral figure in the case. (“You may have been puzzled why I was standing here hour after hour letting Dr. Joel Fort shoot his mouth off. Well, I think you found out the answer Tuesday. If you think I was angry, I was.”) Bailey only dealt with the subject of the Mel’s shooting in a glancing way. (“The charge in this case is the Hibernia bank, not Mel’s. You don’t have to sort out whether she was right or wrong, or whether she should be punished for Mel’s. If I told you if it were not for Mel’s, she wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t, either. That is another chapter for another time and for another group.”)

  Bailey’s argument included little about the actual evidence that Browning had discussed in his summation—like the bank security photographs, the communiqués, the Tania interview, the clenched-fist salute, “urban guerrilla,” the admission to her friend Trish Tobin that she was a “revolutionary feminist.” “Perry Mason brings solutions to all of his cases, in open court usually from the ranks of his opponent’s witnesses,” Bailey said near the end of his remarks. “Real life doesn’t work that way. We can’t bring home the bacon. We have given you all we have got. No one is ever going to be sure. They will be talking about the case for longer than I think I am going to have to talk about it, whether it occurs to me, or probably the only people in the courtroom I haven’t had to talk about it so far with.” On that puzzling note, Bailey concluded.

  Judge Carter gave his jury instructions on Friday morning, March 19, and the jurors began deliberating just before lunch. Some lawyers believe that jurors will deliberate one day for each week of evidence. By this standard, the eight weeks of testimony in the Hearst case would have produced eight days of deliberations. As it turned out, this jury took less than one to reach its verdict.

  —

  The seven women and five men were a stable, middle-class group. All but one, a flight attendant for United Airlines, were married. Eight had children. All were sequestered, confined to a hotel and cut off from television and newspapers, for the duration of the trial. As a group, they had a great deal of respect for authority, which translated into a clear allegiance to Judge Carter’s instructions. Carter had told them, “Coercion or duress may provide a legal excuse for the crime charged in the indictment. In order, however, to provide a legal excuse for any criminal conduct, the compulsion must be present, and immediate, and of such a nature as to induce a well-founded fear of death or serious bodily injury; and there must be no reasonable opportunity to escape the compulsion without committing the crime.”

  The jurors, led by the former air force colonel and Korean War veteran whom they selec
ted as their foreman, zeroed in on these questions. Was Patricia compelled or coerced to rob the Hibernia Bank? Did she have a well-founded fear of impending death or serious bodily injury if she failed to participate? Did she have a reasonable opportunity to escape? On every issue, they quickly came to consensus in favor of the government. The first vote was 10–2 for conviction, but then one of the dissenters quickly folded. The lone holdout asked to hold the case over Friday night, so he could think further about his vote. On Saturday morning, he quickly joined the others for conviction on both bank robbery and the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

  Two pieces of evidence mattered the most to the jurors. The first was Patricia’s shoot-up at Mel’s Sporting Goods. Her action was completely inconsistent with her claims of being under constant duress and unable to escape. The second was the Olmec monkey. The insight by Carole Westrick, the prosecution paralegal, was repeated almost word for word by several jurors. Patricia would not have held on to the little charm if she regarded Willy Wolfe as a rapist, or even if, as she put it, she “couldn’t stand” him. And because the jurors believed Patricia was lying about Wolfe, that meant they also thought she was lying about her entire relationship with the comrades. For the jurors, Patricia’s decision to take the Fifth, rather than answer questions about her lost year, cast a further shadow over her testimony.

  The jury announced that it had reached its verdict in the morning, but it took several hours to gather all the participants, which was especially challenging on a Saturday. No one—not the lawyers, not the court staff, not the journalists—had prepared for such a quick decision. Patricia’s coterie surrounded her with words of encouragement. Though she was a jailed criminal defendant, she enjoyed a support network consistent with her status as an heiress. Her parents rarely missed a day in the courtroom, and her sisters and cousin Will rotated in and out as well. On weekends, they visited Patricia in the lockup in jail, and so did friends like Trish Tobin. Bailey was her main lawyer in the courtroom, but Al Johnson served more like a family retainer, sacrificing months of life with his family back in Boston to attend to Patricia’s needs. Even Janey Jimenez, the deputy U.S. marshal assigned to Patricia, became more protector than jailer. (“I’ll always remember her gallantry as my prisoner, her warming presence as my friend,” Jimenez later wrote in a book about their friendship.)