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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  “Do you know any divorce lawyers?”

  Patricia knew Al Johnson to be a man of starchy rectitude, as well as an observant Catholic. So at first she wouldn’t tell him why she was asking. Before too long, though, she confessed that the lawyer was for Bernie Shaw and that they had become a couple.

  —

  After Patricia’s romance with Shaw became public, the press made much of the unlikelihood of the union between the cop and the heiress. Patricia herself liked to joke that her parents gave them a vacuum cleaner as a wedding present because they were so sure the union wouldn’t last. In fact, their relationship, if not their marriage, seemed almost preordained. Like many people, Patricia had a type; she was drawn to men in authority—including a teacher (Steve Weed), kidnapper (Willy Wolfe), protector (Steve Soliah), and, finally, bodyguard (Bernie Shaw). A romance with a cop was also another way for Patricia to repudiate her life with the SLA. Nothing was more central to the worldview of the comrades than the belief that all cops were “pigs”; Patricia (as Tania) always referred to the police that way. Now she had fallen in love with one.

  Al Johnson was appalled. He thought Patricia was still too emotionally fragile to engage in a serious relationship, and he felt betrayed by Shaw, whom he had hired in part because he was married. In so many words, Johnson informed Patricia that he thought her bodyguard had his eyes on the Hearst fortune. Understandably, Patricia thought Johnson should mind his own business. All she wanted was the name of a lawyer. Johnson came from Boston, so he didn’t know many lawyers in San Francisco, but he told Patricia that he’d met one named George Martinez, and he seemed like a good guy.

  Patricia’s relationship with Shaw deepened as she awaited word from the court of appeals. Bailey pretty much ceased communicating with her after the verdict (leaving the task to Al Johnson), but Bailey did argue her appeal. Bailey claimed that Judge Carter sandbagged Patricia on the witness stand—that he had issued a ruling barring Browning from asking questions about her other crimes but then changed his mind once she started testifying, leading her to take the Fifth. But in a decision issued on November 2, 1977, a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Patricia’s conviction and sentence. On the sandbagging issue, the judges stated (correctly) that “the record does not show a firm, unequivocal ruling by the trial court” that limited the prosecutor’s questions. Bailey asked the Supreme Court to hear Patricia’s case, but on April 24, 1978, the justices declined to hear it. Judge Orrick set her return to prison for May 15. Patricia had been out of jail for six months—November 1977 to May 1978.

  On the afternoon that she reported back to federal prison in Pleasanton, the scene at the gate was raucous. She arrived in a three-car caravan that included all the main figures from her new life: Bernie Shaw, of course, who was now her fiancé, George Martinez, the lawyer, Janey Jimenez, Trish Tobin, two of Patricia’s sisters, and four bodyguards. Journalists, who didn’t know the precise date that Patricia was supposed to arrive, had staked out the scene for more than a week, and they stampeded when they saw her get out of her car. Jimenez got a black eye, Tobin cut her leg, and Patricia had to fight her way through the crowd. Later, she observed ruefully that she was one of the few people ever to break into prison. This time she brought with her something even more important than her entourage—a plan that would have done her grandfather proud.

  —

  In short order, George Martinez went beyond simply representing Bernie Shaw in his divorce to replacing Bailey and Johnson as Patricia’s lawyer. Martinez recognized that Patricia’s legal options had run out. She could petition Judge Orrick for a reduction in sentence, but that was a long shot. Her only real hope was so audacious that it would not have occurred to most convicted felons—a commutation of her sentence by the president of the United States. But most convicted felons lacked the resources and connections of a Hearst.

  Randy and Catherine had formally separated around the time Patricia returned to prison, but they found common cause in the effort to win their daughter a commutation from Jimmy Carter. They formed an organization called the Committee for the Release of Patricia Hearst, under the nominal leadership of the Reverend Ted Dumke, an Episcopal priest whom Patricia had known back in Berkeley. The family did bipartisan political outreach, with Catherine appealing to Republicans and Randy to Democrats. Catherine made the case to Ronald Reagan, her old sponsor, that Patricia was the victim of the evil counterculture; to Democrats like Leo Ryan, the congressman who represented the Hearsts’ district, Randy argued that her punishment was excessive. Both ultimately endorsed a commutation. Charlie Bates, chief of the local FBI office, who had kept vigil with the Hearsts in Hillsborough, retired from the bureau and became an outspoken advocate for Patricia’s release. Bernie Shaw persuaded dozens of his fellow cops to sign a petition on Patricia’s behalf.

  The key to the strategy, however, was Patricia herself and the news media. She learned that under the rules of her federal prison, she could give two press interviews a month, and she started filling her quota as soon as she arrived in Pleasanton. Patricia chose her outlets with care, mostly women’s magazines and soft-focus columnists. She spoke to McCall’s, Look, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and several times to Bob Greene, a syndicated columnist who often told stories about strength in the face of adversity. “She is wary of being hurt, and at the same time seems to think that she cannot be hurt any further,” Greene wrote. “When it was all happening to me, it was hard for me to accept that there were so many people who didn’t care,” Patricia told Greene. “I never want to publish a book. I don’t ever want to write down what happened to me. I don’t even talk to anybody about it anymore.” The stories consisted of interviews with Patricia and her family, with few other sources consulted, and the pieces were accordingly highly sympathetic. Many dwelled on her romance with her bodyguard. “Bernie has been visiting her on the average of three times a week,” the Look story recounted, “and has been writing four to seven letters a week as well, including ones from Arrow, her German shepherd, which he’d had the dog sign with the aid of an ink pad.” None of the reporters explored her activities during her year-plus as a fugitive. Neither Mel’s Sporting Goods nor Myrna Opsahl was mentioned.

  The goal of the media offensive was to turn Patricia’s image from convicted felon to wronged victim. But she needed something more than just sympathetic press coverage. So George Martinez convinced her that she had been betrayed by her own lawyers. He took the extraordinary step of filing a motion before Judge Orrick asking that her conviction be overturned because Patricia had received ineffective assistance of counsel from Bailey and Johnson, in violation of the Sixth Amendment. Specifically, Martinez claimed that Bailey had put Patricia on the witness stand with reckless disregard for whether she would have to take the Fifth Amendment in front of the jury. Even worse, he claimed that it was unethical for Bailey to present Patricia the waiver of her right to publish a book just two days after the verdict and, further, that Bailey’s interest in writing a book represented a conflict of interest. As Martinez wrote in his motion, “Entering into a literary rights contract created a situation which prevented him from devoting the requisite undivided loyalty and service to his client.”

  The ineffective assistance motion—against the most famous criminal defense attorney in the United States—was outrageous. It was true that Bailey made a bad gamble in putting Patricia on the stand, but that was the kind of risk that trial lawyers took. It was not the kind of error that merited a new trial. Moreover, Bailey’s arrangement for Patricia to cooperate on the Carmichael robbery was a savvy move on his part. His behavior about his book deal, while greedy and insensitive, created no conflict of interest; just the opposite, in fact. The chance for a book deal created an incentive for Bailey to win Patricia’s case, not to lose it. That point became clear when Putnam canceled the book contract after Patricia was convicted. The publishing house figured that no one wanted to read a book written by the losing lawyer in wha
t was called the trial of the century.

  There was also a measure of poignancy in Patricia’s motion based on the alleged incompetence of her lawyers. Bailey was never anything more than a mercenary, and he accepted Patricia’s salvo with his customary cynicism. Al Johnson, on the other hand, was heartbroken. He had sacrificed years with his wife and children. He had regarded Patricia as a surrogate daughter, and she, for a time, saw him as a father figure as well. The motion meant that Patricia regarded Johnson as a mere tradesman and an inept one as well. The attack on Bailey and Johnson represented another declaration of independence by Patricia. In keeping with her return to her family, the motion was also the haughty gesture of an aristocrat who claimed that she was convicted because of a failure by the help—not, certainly, because she was in fact guilty of crimes charged.

  Within months of her arrival at the penitentiary, she engineered a successful transformation of the narrative about her case. Public memories of the trial, with its abundant evidence of her guilt, faded, replaced by Patricia’s unrefuted account of her travails. The machine-gun-toting Tania was replaced by the innocent-eyed bride-to-be—of a police officer, no less. Her cause had been embraced by Republicans and Democrats, priests and cops. “I just try not to be bitter,” Patricia told Bob Greene. “I try to look at the good side of this. A lot of things have happened to me that I don’t suppose will ever happen to anyone else. And because of that I’ve grown. I’m a lot more tolerant of other people.” Still and all, the change in imagery didn’t change her status. She rose every morning to cook breakfast in forty-gallon steam kettles for her four hundred fellow inmates.

  But Patricia’s case was about to take a final turn in her favor. At one level, the source of her salvation was bizarre and unpredictable. At another, it was almost fitting that the crucial event was another episode of San Francisco madness—like the ones that led to her kidnapping in the first place. Leo Ryan Jr., her congressman and advocate, had become a pen pal as well. His last letter to Patricia was a short one. “Off to Guyana,” he wrote. “See you when I return. Hang in there.”

  —

  Back in the winter of 1974, the Reverend Jim Jones showed up at the China Basin warehouse and asked to distribute the food. Spooked by Jones’s air of menace, the proprietors of the People in Need program declined his services. But Jones’s fanatical dedication and that of his followers to a kind of ersatz socialism made them a disciplined and powerful force in San Francisco politics. Jones mobilized the largely African American flock in the Peoples Temple to elect George Moscone mayor of the city in 1975. Then, the following year, Jones was privately courted by Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate. Rosalynn Carter met with Jones after she became First Lady. At a testimonial dinner, California’s governor, Jerry Brown, said Jones “became an inspiration for a whole lot of people. He’s done fantastic things.”

  Still, there were always hints of darker forces at work in the Peoples Temple. Some members died under mysterious circumstances, and others reported that Temple leaders pressured them into sexual relationships. Former followers contacted journalists, who began describing the Temple as a cult. Under new scrutiny, Jones complained about government conspiracies. Press coverage turned more critical in 1977 as members told reporters of kidnappings, extortion, and abuse by church leaders, including Jones himself. Earlier, Jones had rented thirty-eight hundred acres of land in the small South American nation of Guyana for use as an agricultural outpost. As pressure on the church mounted, Jones began demanding that his followers pick up stakes in San Francisco and move there. Hundreds of his acolytes and their families streamed into Guyana, and they founded a rugged community that they called Jonestown.

  During this period, reports began filtering back to San Francisco of appalling conditions in Guyana. Jones decreed that his followers were to create a socialist paradise in the jungle, and these former urban dwellers found themselves working long hours for little or no pay, with few opportunities to contact their relatives in California. The reports reached Congressman Leo Ryan, who decided to conduct a fact-finding mission to Jonestown in November 1978. Ryan was also Patricia’s leading advocate in Congress, and he jotted her the note just before he left on his mission to Guyana.

  Ryan, accompanied by a small group of journalists and aides, made it to Jonestown on November 17. After one of Jones’s followers attacked Ryan with a knife, the congressman’s group fled to the small local airport. There, the group was set upon by Temple members and Jones’s paramilitary force, and Congressman Ryan and four others were shot to death when they boarded their plane. Later that day, Jones and his assistants laced vats of Flavor Aid with cyanide and demanded that his followers commit what he called revolutionary suicide. In all, 909 members of his flock, including 304 children, died in the course of this episode of mass hysteria. The catastrophe generated massive press attention back in the United States, and the fallout from Guyana proved to be strangely helpful for the cause of Patricia Hearst’s freedom.

  Suddenly all of America was asking what would prompt hundreds of apparently ordinary citizens to take their lives in this manner and kill their own children. What kind of mental coercion would lead to such self-destructive, malevolent behavior? In other words, how could Jim Jones have brainwashed so many people? It was at precisely the time of this debate—late 1978—that Patricia’s petition for clemency arrived in Washington, and her supporters made a direct connection between the two cases. John Wayne, the actor, was part of the curiously eclectic pro-Patricia coalition, and he drew the parallel. “It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash nine hundred human beings into mass suicide but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation, and confinement.”

  It was against this backdrop that the Justice Department, and then the White House, began to consider her application for a commutation. Browning had left the U.S. Attorney’s Office after Patricia’s conviction, and his successor, William Hunter, had no investment in the Hearst case. He told the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, who reviewed Patricia’s claim as an initial matter, that he thought a commutation was “the just and merciful thing to do.” Charles Bates also argued in favor of Patricia’s release, and his successor as head of the FBI field office in San Francisco offered no objection either. In a memo to the deputy attorney general, the pardon attorney observed, “This is a very unusual and difficult case.” Patricia’s original status as a kidnap victim rendered her situation unique. He noted further that “the traditional objectives for continued confinement—deterrence, rehabilitation, punishment, retribution, and community risk—have either been fulfilled or are no longer applicable to this case.” With credit for time served, Patricia would be eligible for parole in July 1979, but a commutation would mean release in February. In all, the pardon attorney recommended clemency so that Patricia would be released approximately five months before she would likely have been paroled. Benjamin Civiletti, the deputy attorney general (and later the attorney general), ratified the recommendation of the pardon attorney and sent Patricia’s file to the White House.

  Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser, had some misgivings about a commutation. In a handwritten note to Robert Lipshutz, the White House counsel, Eizenstat wrote, “I’m concerned about granting clemency to Patty Hearst. It flies in the face of the President’s oft-stated remarks about favoring the rich over the poor.” Lipshutz replied, also by hand, that Carter wanted to handle the issue himself, writing to his colleague, “Therefore, it was not ‘staffed.’ ” In other words, Lipshutz told Eizenstat to stay out of it. Lipshutz didn’t talk to Carter about Hearst either, but he followed White House procedure and prepared a four-page memo for the president about the issue. His summary tracked the Hearsts’ description of the underlying events. The Lipshutz memo had a lengthy description of Patricia’s kidnapping and purported ab
use and only a vague reference to her admission to “involvement in a series of criminal activities with other SLA members.” Lipshutz made no reference to Patricia’s participation in the Sacramento bank robberies, no mention of her involvement in the bombings in and around San Francisco, and nothing at all about the death of Myrna Opsahl.

  Presidents are busy. They make many decisions every day based on some combination of instinct, conscience, and calculation. Presidents also rely on their staffs. The Hearsts knew that Jimmy Carter was a religious man with a deep spiritual investment in the concepts of redemption and forgiveness; he was also a politician heading into an election year. They designed their strategy to allow Carter’s head to follow where they thought his heart would lead him. To that end, Carter was presented with a united political front in support of Patricia’s release. Ronald Reagan, his likely opponent in the 1980 election, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office that had prosecuted her and the FBI agents who pursued her all lent their names petitioning for her release. These negated any political risk to Carter for offering leniency. Reagan could scarcely accuse the president of being soft on crime for taking an action that the challenger himself supported. As Carter weighed his decision—with the airwaves full of talk about brainwashing in Guyana—he heard not a single voice in opposition to clemency.

  On January 29, 1979, the president signed a commutation of the remainder of Patricia Hearst’s prison sentence. He made no public comment or explanation for his action. Barbara Walters of ABC News reached Patricia in prison, and Patricia said of the president, “I’m really grateful that he was so courageous. It would have been so simple for him to leave everything the way it was. I thought I’d be spending another February 4 in prison.” That would be the fifth anniversary of her kidnapping. Instead, she ran through the prison gates into the arms of Bernie Shaw on February 1.