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

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The power and talent of the Hearst family had receded since the beginning of the twentieth century. But the campaign to free Patricia recalled William Randolph Hearst’s grandest, and most notorious, crusade. In 1898, relying on his newspaper, his connections, and his will, the Chief tried to hasten the nation into the Spanish-American War. The great publisher understood that the right narrative before the right audience mattered as much as, if not more than, its underlying truth. Eighty years later, his descendants used the same methods to free his granddaughter. On both occasions, the great gift of the Hearsts, including Patricia herself, was to shape the perception of reality, if not reality itself. Everyone from beat cops in San Francisco to the president of the United States found reasons to trust the Hearsts. As before, the Hearsts’ tale was believable, if not exactly true.

  AFTERMATH

  In and around San Francisco, the music stopped when the 1980s arrived. There was, essentially, no more counterculture; the term became obsolete. Radical outlaws like the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, who even in their heyday were stragglers from the 1960s, virtually disappeared altogether. The FBI finally learned how to identify and prosecute politically engaged criminals, many of whom had turned to conventional crime, like drug dealing. Some were caught; others drifted away. In San Francisco, the AIDS plague arrived, decimating the gay community and sapping, for a time, the political energy of the city. The notion of revolution, which was never appealing to more than a handful of Americans, became absurd. Young people looked for inspiration not to the barrios of Uruguay but to the garages of Silicon Valley, across the bay from Berkeley.

  The surviving members of the SLA, and their allies, struggled to find a place in this unwelcoming world. Joe Remiro and Russ Little, who were arrested in Concord the month before Patricia was kidnapped in 1974, were tried together for the murder of Marcus Foster. Without eyewitnesses to the shooting itself (which was done by Donald DeFreeze, Mizmoon Soltysik, and Nancy Ling), the case against Remiro and Little as conspirators was a close one. After lengthy jury deliberations, both men were convicted and then sentenced to life in prison. But an appeals court ordered a new trial for Little on the ground that the judge had coerced the jury into reaching his verdict. In a second trial, Little was acquitted, and he was released in 1981. He spent decades working in information technology for schools. At the age of sixty-nine, Remiro has spent more than forty years as an inmate in the California prison system. The parole board recommended his release in 2015, but as of mid 2016 Remiro remained in custody.

  For the most part, the ragtag gang of supporters who sustained Patricia during her months on the lam disappeared. Wendy Yoshimura, who was arrested with Patricia, was convicted of charges relating to the bombing operations of her former boyfriend Willie Brandt. She served less than a year in prison. In subsequent decades, she became a familiar figure in Berkeley as a server at the Juice Bar Collective, a worker-owned organic vegetarian restaurant. She sells her watercolor paintings through a website and at local shows. Jack Scott went on to become a successful physiotherapist for elite athletes. His early work about the commercialization of college sports, and the medical risks to athletes, proved prescient. In 2000, he died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven.

  Steve Soliah, Patricia’s lover and roommate in the Morse Street apartment, returned to his life as a housepainter following his acquittal in Sacramento for the Carmichael bank robbery. He lived quietly in Berkeley until his death from a stroke at the age of sixty-four, in 2013. Steven Weed, Patricia’s former fiancé, gave up his graduate studies in philosophy and became a real estate agent in Palo Alto. He and Patricia never spoke or saw each other after February 4, 1974.

  Three of Patricia’s associates—Jim Kilgore, Michael Bortin, and Kathy Soliah—became fugitives after the FBI busts in September 1975. Kilgore fled to South Africa, where he spent twenty-seven years as a teacher and anti-apartheid activist. He was extradited to the United States in 2002, where he pleaded guilty to charges relating to explosives and the Carmichael robbery. He was released in 2009, moved to Illinois, and recently published a book called Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time. Michael Bortin surrendered in 1984, served eighteen months in prison on a parole violation, then moved to Portland, Oregon, where he married Josephine Soliah, Steve and Kathy’s younger sister. He runs a business called Zen Hardwood Floors.

  Kathy Soliah gave the speech in Ho Chi Minh Park, in 1974, memorializing her friend Angela Atwood, that drew Emily Harris to seek her out. Kathy introduced Bill, Emily, and Patricia to Jack Scott, who took them to the farm in Pennsylvania. When the comrades returned west, Kathy was among the most fanatical of them—a key figure in the Carmichael bank robbery and a zealous advocate and participant in the 1975 bombing campaign. After the arrests in September of that year, Kathy fled to Minnesota, where she had spent part of her childhood. Kathy Soliah started calling herself Sara Jane Olson and she took a job as a cook in a fraternity house. Soon after, she met a medical student named Fred Peterson, whom she married.

  Over the next two decades, the couple led a quiet life in St. Paul while raising their three daughters. “Sara Jane” was so comfortable in her new identity that she began performing in amateur theatrical productions in the Twin Cities (like her late friend Angela), and her photograph appeared on posters around town. On May 15, 1999, the syndicated television program America’s Most Wanted ran a feature on Kathy Soliah focusing on her role in the attempted bombing of the police car in Los Angeles. Afterward, the show received nineteen tips, one of them pointing to a fifty-two-year-old soccer mom and gourmet cook named Sara Jane Olson, who lived in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. The FBI followed up, compared photographs of Kathy Soliah with those of Sara Jane Olson, and then arrested her on June 16.

  Sara Jane, as she preferred to be known, reacted with haughty indignation to her arrest. It was as if the passage of time, plus the stated purity of her intentions, absolved her of any responsibility for her behavior a quarter century earlier. She called her arrest “a witch hunt in the guise of a conspiracy case.” Once released on bail, she devoted her energies to producing a cookbook as a fund-raiser for her defense. Serving Time: America’s Most Wanted Recipes included an essay by Sara Jane, where she said, “The uses and perception of food in various cultures is based on wealth and power.” Sara Jane hired Susan Jordan and Stuart Hanlon, two accomplished defense attorneys with long histories of defending radicals, and the case bogged down in procedural squabbling. Delay usually helps the defense in criminal trials, but here the case against Sara Jane was still unresolved when the nation was jolted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

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  In the quarter century after the brief existence of the SLA, the group faded to a historical curiosity. Many of the comrades’ activities, like the bumbling food giveaway, took on an almost comic afterlife, and the tale of the Hearst kidnapping lingered as a popular culture reference point, filed in the 1970s pantheon alongside the skyjacking epidemic and disco. After 9/11, though, terrorism—even inept terrorism—wasn’t so funny. Around this time, too, prosecutors in Los Angeles began to take note of Jon Opsahl’s crusade to hold someone accountable for his mother’s death.

  The renewed scrutiny put Bill and Emily Harris especially at risk. Following their arrests in 1975, the couple had artfully navigated through a great deal of legal peril. They stretched out both cases against them—for the kidnapping of Patricia and for the kidnapping of Tom Matthews and the others in Los Angeles—until the intense press attention had faded. They pleaded guilty to the Hearst kidnapping and were convicted after a short trial in L.A. Based on the two prosecutions, Bill and Emily served about six years in prison each, from 1977 to 1983.

  Most remarkably, perhaps, they stayed married through the years of tumult and the frequent battles between them. Bill remained captivated by Emily’s icy intelligence, and Emily loved Bill’s antic energy. “My love,”
Emily wrote to Bill in prison in 1976, “I miss you so much. I have my favorite picture right on the wall at the foot of my bed so I can go to sleep looking at it and wake up the same way. I love you, I love you, I love you.” Bill wrote, “Dear beautiful you. I love you Emily. There are so many familiar aspects in you! I know in that literal dungeon we still made life. Do they think they will set the revolution back? No way. Do they think they will intimidate us? Never. I reject this evil, uninformed death-oriented state. Your smile is so beautiful.” They exchanged hundreds of ardent, often explicitly sexual letters from prison.

  One subject that drew Bill and Emily together was their loathing for Patricia Hearst—or, more specifically, for the post-SLA version of Tania. They both insisted that the SLA had never harmed Patricia and that Tania’s embrace of the comrades was voluntary. In a statement accompanying his guilty plea, Bill said, “Patricia Hearst was not tortured, raped, assaulted, brainwashed, denied food or use of a toilet or any form of personal hygiene….Patricia Hearst was not coerced to reject her family and was not forced to stay with us. We encouraged Hearst to return to her family because we all knew that to stay with us she would risk her life and freedom as well as our own.” In a letter to Bill around the same time, Emily wrote, “Did you see that horrible bitch on TV with her painted on face saying, ‘They were alcoholics, murderers, rapists and they got what they deserved in LA’?”

  After their release from prison, though, Bill and Emily got divorced. While in custody, Emily had become a lesbian, and she felt that her life could no longer include a marriage to Bill, even though the two remained close. Emily had studied computers in prison, and after her release she moved to the Los Angeles area and started a successful consulting business, with several major entertainment companies among her clients. She entered into a long-term relationship with a woman and ended all political involvements. She also changed her last name, hoping to avoid any association with her former notoriety.

  Bill’s first job out of prison was as a receptionist in his lawyer’s office in San Francisco. His work there evolved into service as a private investigator. By the late 1990s, Bill had become a well-known PI for a diverse group of clients throughout the Bay Area. Unlike Emily, Bill clung to his ideological passions but now channeled them into more productive directions, like combating prosecutorial overreach. In 1988, Bill married Rebecca Young, a widely respected defense attorney in San Francisco. They bought a house in Oakland and had two boys, to whom Bill became a doting father. Instead of making bombs, he coached peewee soccer.

  Then, following 9/11, the District Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles wanted to vindicate the Opsahls and close the case of the attempted bombing of the police car, by the International House of Pancakes, in 1975. Mike Bortin, Sara Jane Olson, Bill Harris, and Emily Harris (under her new name), all well along in middle age, faced the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison for acts committed twenty-seven years earlier. Each defendant brought his or her own interests, and neuroses, to the question of how to handle the case. Olson preferred to give press interviews about her martyrdom rather than grapple with the overwhelming evidence of her guilt. Bill, encouraged by his wife, thought he could beat the case at trial, based on the age of the evidence against them. (The Carmichael bank building itself, for instance, had been demolished years earlier.) Bill especially relished planning the cross-examination of the expected star witness for the government—Patricia Hearst. Emily, on the other hand, felt genuine remorse about her actions and wanted to put the whole matter behind her by pleading guilty. In the end, they all cut deals, in return for sentences of six years. (Emily got eight years because she had used a firearm.) When Jim Kilgore was captured in South Africa, he took the same deal after he was returned to the United States. The Opsahl family won a small measure of long-delayed vindication.

  Bill and Emily served about five years each, starting in 2003, and their second stint in prison proved to be tougher than their first. The rigors of American penal institutions fall heavily on men and women in their fifties. After her release, Emily struggled to restart her business in a fast-changing technology industry. For his part, Bill’s marriage suffered during the long separation, as did his relationship with his two sons. Alienated from his family, Bill left Northern California and moved to one of the most remote locations in the United States (near his friend Russ Little). In keeping with his almost supernatural attraction to chaos, Bill moved into a new home that was almost, but not quite, subsumed by the lava from a volcano.

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  After stepping down as U.S. attorney shortly after Patricia’s conviction, Jim Browning ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for California attorney general. He later spent a decade as a superior court judge in San Mateo County, before retiring to Tucson. He died in 2016 at the age of eighty-three.

  F. Lee Bailey’s career never rebounded after Patricia’s conviction. In 1982, Bailey was charged with driving while intoxicated in San Francisco. He was defended by a Los Angeles lawyer named Robert Shapiro (as well as by Al Johnson), and Bailey was acquitted after what was said to be the longest drunk-driving trial in American history. A decade later, Shapiro recruited Bailey to participate in O. J. Simpson’s defense on double murder charges in Los Angeles. Starting in 1994, Bailey represented a large-scale marijuana dealer named Claude Duboc in Florida, where the defense lawyer had moved. As part of a plea bargain, Duboc turned over $5.9 million in stock to Bailey, who was supposed to hold the money in trust for later forfeiture to the government. During the pendency of the case, the value of the stock grew to more than $20 million. Bailey proposed to turn over $5.9 million to the government and keep the balance for himself. A federal judge ordered Bailey to turn over the full amount, and he refused. The judge jailed the lawyer for six weeks for contempt of court, and Bailey eventually turned over the full amount to the government. In 2001, the State of Florida disbarred Bailey for his role in the Duboc matter.

  In 2010, Bailey moved to Maine and in 2012 passed the bar examination there. The state Board of Bar Examiners voted 5–4 to deny him a law license on the ground that he had failed to prove that he “possesses the requisite honesty and integrity” to practice law. In 2014, the Maine Supreme Court voted 4–2 to affirm the denial of the license to Bailey. As of 2016, Bailey, at the age of eighty-three, was doing business as a “legal consultant” in a single room above a beauty salon in a resort town in Maine.

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  Catherine and Randy Hearst’s divorce came through in 1982, forty-four years after they were married, but by that point they had already been living separate lives for several years. Catherine moved to Beverly Hills, where she lived a quiet life dedicated to church and family. She died of a stroke in 1998 at the age of eighty-one.

  Shortly after the divorce, Randy married an Italian woman named Maria Scruggs, but they divorced after just three years. In 1987, Randy married Veronica DeGruyter Beracasa de Uribe at Wyntoon, the Hearst family estate in Northern California. Veronica was a woman of rather mysterious origin; her mother was said to be a Russian-born princess. Before Randy, her husbands included a Colombian cement magnate. The couple moved to New York City, where they bought a large Fifth Avenue apartment as a wedding gift to themselves. Randy was nominally chairman of the Hearst Corporation but had little to do with management of the company. He still preferred hunting and fishing to office work. Veronica, on the other hand, became an active presence at the company, especially at the magazines Town & Country and Harper’s Bazaar, where she forced out the longtime editor. According to Patricia and her sisters, Veronica also erected barriers between Randy and his daughters. In July 2000, with Randy ill with prostate cancer, he and Veronica paid $30 million for Villa Venezia, a fifty-two-room, twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot mansion in Manalapan, Florida. Randy died on December 18, 2000, at the age of eighty-five.

  Randy’s career, and those of his brothers, proved the wisdom of their father’s decision to leave the management of the Hearst interests t
o professionals instead of family members. Though many old media companies have withered in recent decades, the Hearst Corporation has thrived, thanks in significant part to an early investment in a company that was first known as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Hearst still owns 20 percent of the company now known as ESPN. The stake in the television sports network is a major reason that Randy died a billionaire.

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  Patricia Hearst, then twenty-five years old, married Bernie Shaw on April 1, 1979, two months after her release from prison. She had served about twenty-two months. They lived in a modest home south of San Francisco, where Bernie continued working as a police officer. Patricia was still on probation for the next two years, during which she dabbled in one thing or another. She trained beagles to sniff out termites. She did a little fund-raising for a child care center named for Leo Ryan, the congressman who advocated for her release before he was killed in Guyana. She did a lot of horseback riding. She filled out a form every month for her probation officer indicating that she was unemployed. “The form asks why,” Patricia told People, “and I say, ‘Because I don’t want to’ or ‘I don’t have to.’ ” As soon as her probation ended, though, Patricia did go to work—on a book.

  While in prison, she often told interviewers that she would never write a memoir, but she quickly changed her mind on the outside. Even after the commutation of her sentence, Patricia remained outraged, in her deadpan way, that she had been convicted at all. She blamed the SLA (and her own lawyers), and she wanted the world to know it. Like her father, Patricia was asset rich and cash poor, to her way of thinking, so the prospect of a book deal was appealing. She received an advance of $600,000, one of the largest ever for a nonfiction book at the time. While nursing her daughter Gillian, born in 1981, she sat with a ghostwriter and told her story.