American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst
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Every Secret Thing, published in 1982, was an elaboration of her testimony at her trial—a vivid recounting of her ordeal from her kidnapping in 1974 to her release from prison in 1979. In the book, she described herself as a helpless victim for her year and a half with the SLA, living perpetually in fear of Donald DeFreeze and then Bill Harris. She wrote of Willy Wolfe with loathing, Steve Soliah with disdain. She portrayed Jack Scott as a greedy hustler who wanted Patricia and the comrades to sell a book so that he could stash the proceeds in a Liechtenstein corporation. (After publication of the book, Jack Scott sued Patricia for libel; she paid him a $30,000 settlement.) In the book, she did write with some warmth about Lydia Scott, Jack’s mother, who became close to Patricia during their cross-country journey. In 1984, Patricia had her second daughter, whom she named Lydia.
Every Secret Thing was a best seller, and Patricia found she enjoyed a return to the limelight. She gave many interviews to friendly and for the most part under-informed journalists. In the mid-1980s, Patricia and her family moved cross-country to the Connecticut suburbs of New York, where Bernie took a job as the head of security for the Hearst Corporation. (Generations of Hearst journalists have cheerful memories of Bernie taking their pictures for their photo IDs.) More settled and relaxed on the East Coast, Patricia let the madcap side of her character show when she agreed to perform cameos in a series of campy movies directed by John Waters. She co-wrote Murder at San Simeon, a roman à clef mystery based on an actual murder that took place there during her grandfather’s lifetime. She also hosted and narrated a documentary about her family’s extraordinary estate.
Still, even though Patricia settled into a contented life with a healthy family, she continued to feel wronged by her conviction and her status as a convicted felon. So, in the 1990s, Patricia decided that she wanted a presidential pardon, also known as executive clemency. It is a measure of her sense of grievance, and of entitlement, that she set off on this quest even though no one in American history had ever before received a commutation from one president and a pardon from another. Moreover, Justice Department guidelines state that executive clemency is traditionally given only to those defendants who accept responsibility for their actions. “A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication,” the rules state. But Patricia never acknowledged any wrongdoing on her part. The effect of the pardon would mostly be symbolic—including a restoration of certain rights, such as the right to purchase and possess firearms—but Patricia still ardently sought the relief.
In the late 1990s, toward the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the reaction in the law enforcement community to Patricia’s pardon was very different from what it had been two decades earlier to her commutation. Robert S. Mueller III, then the U.S. attorney in San Francisco (and later director of the FBI), wrote a scathing letter of objection. He said that Patricia was counting on the passage of time to allow her to rewrite history. As for the Hibernia robbery, Mueller wrote, “The record at trial was clear that Hearst’s gun was loaded and that she was not only a willing participant in that robbery, but participated with zeal because of her commitment to ‘revolutionary’ causes. The people who wrote in support of her pardon application obviously know nothing about the bombing of police vehicles by Hearst and her associates or her involvement in the Carmichael robbery and murder. Hearst’s claim that she was forcibly raped by William Wolfe and Donald DeFreeze is no more credible now than in 1976.” Mueller noted that in later investigations of SLA crimes, Patricia had been singularly unhelpful, pleading a faulty memory and busy schedule. In sum, Mueller said, “Any further grant of executive clemency will be characterized by Hearst and her supporters as vindication and proof of her innocence. The attitude of Hearst has always been that she is a person above the law and that, based on her wealth and social position, she is not accountable for her conduct despite the jury’s verdict.”
But Patricia had two important allies in her quest for a pardon: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. On December 4, 2000, as the recount fight to determine the new president raged, the former president wrote to Clinton. “While I am sure there are a number of meritorious applications pending, there is one in which I have long had a keen interest, and that is the application of Patricia Hearst Shaw,” Carter wrote. “The act of pardon, representing the nation’s forgiveness of her actions that occurred during her captivity, has enormous significance to her personally. As I understand her desires, she seeks to relate the ultimate meaning and the nation’s recognition of those traumatic events 27 years ago, when she was a young woman, to her two now nearly grown daughters.” A month later, with just ten days left in Clinton’s term in office, the former First Lady faxed a handwritten note to Clinton, which said, “She made a mistake, but she has led an exemplary life for 20 years now. For her sake, and especially for the sake of her daughters, I hope you can find it in your heart to pardon her.” On the fax cover sheet to Rosalynn’s letter, Clinton wrote in his distinctive left-handed scrawl to Beth Nolan, his White House counsel, “I think I should do this.—BC.” On January 20, 2001, Clinton’s last day in office, he included a full pardon to Patricia Hearst among the 140 he issued that day.
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Patricia Hearst was a woman who, through no fault of her own, fell in with bad people but then did bad things; she committed crimes, lots of them. Patricia participated in three bank robberies, one in which a woman was killed; she fired a machine gun (and another weapon) in the middle of a busy city street to help free one of her partners in crime; she joined in a conspiracy to set off bombs designed to terrorize and kill. To be sure, following her arrest in 1975, she was unlikely to commit these kinds of crimes again. If the United States were a country that routinely forgave the trespasses of such people, there would be little remarkable about the mercy she received following her conviction. But the United States is not such a country; the prisons teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia. These unfortunate souls have no chance at even a single act of clemency, much less an unprecedented two. Rarely have the benefits of wealth, power, and renown been as clear as they were in the aftermath of Patricia’s conviction.
Still, at each stage in her life, Patricia used the tools at her disposal. She was a straightforward person, and starting on February 4, 1974, she reacted to her challenges in rational ways. Surrounded by passionate, charismatic outlaws who told her that the police were out to kill them all, Patricia joined with them in a pact of mutual self-defense; when the police did in fact kill nearly all of them, Patricia hit the road with her comrades to try to escape. Little wonder that in such emotionally fraught surroundings a young woman would have fallen in love—twice. But when she and her comrades were caught, Patricia was rational once more. A jail cell, and the prospect of many more years in one, prompted her to make haste to embrace her former life of privilege. A clear thinker, if not a deep one, Patricia understood that for her rich was better than poor and freedom was better than confinement. She chose accordingly.
Bernie Shaw died on December 18, 2013, at sixty-eight, after a long battle with cancer. Patricia herself was just short of sixty at the time, and after losing her husband, she embraced a more fully private life. She rejoiced in her first grandchild. In her dowager years, she found solace in her lifelong love of dogs. In 2015, her shih tzu named Rocket won first place in the toy category at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. “People move on,” she told reporters, smiling at Rocket. “I guess people somehow imagine you don’t evolve in your life. I have grown daughters and granddaughters and other things that normal people have.” Still, Patricia admitted that her daughters preferred cats. “I don’t know what I did wrong,” she said, joking. In the end, notwithstanding a surreal detour in the 1970s, Patricia led the life for which she was destined back in Hillsborough. The story of Patricia Hearst, as extraordinary as it once was, had a familiar, even predictable ending. She did not turn into a revolutionary. She turned into her mother.
Patricia Hearst chose not to cooperate with the publication of this book. I contacted her directly several times, and also through friends, and I regret that she chose not to participate in any way. Because she is the central figure, and because I attribute statements and sentiments to her throughout the text, I think it’s appropriate for me to explain how I did the research for American Heiress.
As detailed below, I had access to Patricia’s perspective from a variety of sources. Her memoir, Every Secret Thing, was the starting point. I also read her testimony at her trial and before several grand juries investigating other crimes. I examined dozens of FBI summaries (302s) of her interviews with agents. I reviewed her many press interviews and media appearances over the years. In addition, I interviewed people who knew Patricia and who were with her during the relevant periods. I also reviewed an abundance of documentary and physical evidence about Patricia’s conduct, statements, and views. These included her letters, communiqués, and statements to others that they later recounted to investigators, as well as photographs, recordings, and videos.
After Bill Harris was released from prison, he set out to obtain the legal and investigative files from the defense teams in all the prosecutions of SLA figures. He also worked on some of these cases as a private investigator. He collected the files in the cases against himself and Emily Harris, Joe Remiro and Russ Little, Wendy Yoshimura, Steve Soliah, and Kathy Soliah (Sara Jane Olson). When I met Bill, his plan to sell the collection to the library of a major university had just fallen through. Instead, I purchased them. The collection consists of approximately 150 boxes of material, and it served as the most important resource in my research. Following the publication of this book, I will donate the collection to the library of Harvard Law School, which has all of my papers.
The collection includes the following:
• the full transcripts, with exhibits, of all the trials
• legal documents, including motion papers and court rulings, in the trials
• transcripts of witness testimony before all relevant grand juries
• FBI reports (302s) of interviews with hundreds of witnesses, including Patricia
• thousands of pages of evidence in the cases, much of it obtained by the FBI and produced to the defense in discovery, and also evidence generated by the defense’s own investigations
• research memoranda from private investigators based on their interviews with witnesses and examination of evidence
• memoranda from defense attorneys about trial strategy and legal issues
Two parts of the collection deserve particular mention. In preparation for the trial of Sara Jane Olson, following her arrest in 1999, two of her private investigators, Jacqui Tully and Josiah “Tink” Thompson, prepared a narrative history of the SLA from its origins in 1973 to the arrests in September 1975. It is based principally on interviews with Bill and Emily Harris, as well as Russ Little, and it also relies on the investigators’ examinations of FBI interviews, grand jury transcripts, and other investigatory material. It runs more than sixty single-spaced pages, and it provides an extremely useful account of the story from the perspective of the SLA members themselves. The investigators’ narrative includes extensive descriptions of Patricia’s behavior, statements, and demeanor from the kidnapping in February 1974 to the period immediately after the arrests in September 1975, as it was described by the SLA comrades.
If Olson had gone to trial, Patricia Hearst would have been the principal witness against her. (Olson pleaded guilty, so there was no trial.) To prepare for Hearst’s testimony and ultimately for her cross-examination, Olson’s attorneys and investigators attempted to collect all of Patricia’s prior statements to law enforcement and the public. This part of the collection alone runs to thousands of pages. It includes transcripts of Patricia’s trial and grand jury testimony; the FBI 302s summarizing her interviews; her book, Every Secret Thing, as well as rough drafts and outlines; and dozens of media interviews. (The endnotes in my text cite only secondary sources, including Every Secret Thing, but for simplicity do not refer to other source material.)
Over the years, the FBI has released thousands of pages of material from its investigation of the Hearst kidnapping (code-named HERNAP) and its aftermath, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. There is considerable, but not total, overlap between the FBI material in the Bill Harris collection and that in the public FBI files. My thanks to John Fox, the FBI historian, for guiding me through this material, especially the photographs.
Patricia also spoke for more than twenty hours to Lawrence Grobel for an interview that ran in the March 1982 issue of Playboy. The version that ran in the magazine was edited and condensed, but I obtained from Grobel the full transcript of all of his interviews with Patricia.
I also conducted interviews with more than a hundred people connected to the case, including principals, witnesses, government and defense investigators, prosecutors, and defense lawyers. Many of these people recounted their impressions of and conversations with Patricia. These interviews covered the full arc of Patricia’s life, from her childhood to the present day.
In short, though I was unable to speak with Patricia, I feel I had ample access to her perspective on the events described. On certain matters, as I describe in the text, the evidence about her behavior and feelings is contradictory. On the central issue in Patricia’s case and this book—whether, following her kidnapping, she made a voluntary decision to commit crimes with the SLA—there is conflicting evidence. In sum, I have reviewed as much evidence as I could find about Patricia and made my conclusions in good faith. I trust that readers will do the same.
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One of the pleasures of writing a book, and especially of finishing one, is the opportunity to thank the people who helped me along the way. In the Bay Area, I treasure the friendship and guidance of Sydney Goldstein and Chuck Breyer; John and Tina Keker; David Fechheimer; and Tink Thompson. I am also pleased to have the opportunity to thank Howard Cohen; John Q. Barrett; Jane Yeomans; and Madeleine Baverstam. In Sherman, Connecticut, Annie Swanson and Anne Maitland performed, with great skill, the indispensable task of indexing the contents of Bill Harris’s many, many boxes of documents.
I am grateful to Jim Browning, the lead prosecutor in Patricia’s trial, who shared with me his unpublished memoir about the case. He also allowed me to copy photographs of the Olmec monkeys that belonged to Patricia and Willy Wolfe. I am sorry to report that Jim died suddenly a few weeks after we spoke in early 2016.
I also acknowledge the assistance of my friends at the following collections and libraries: National Archives, Pacific Regional Branch Office, San Francisco/San Bruno, Record Group 118, U.S. Attorney’s Files, Case File 810766 (United States v. Patricia Hearst); Gustavus Adolphus College Archives (Camilla Hall collection), in St. Peter, Minnesota; San Francisco Public Library; Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, in Atlanta, Georgia; and William J. Clinton Presidential Library, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
I am privileged again to be published by Doubleday, and am happy (again) to thank my editor Bill Thomas, as well as Rose Courteau, Todd Doughty, Bette Alexander, and Ingrid Sterner. Thanks (again!) to my agent, Esther Newberg, and to my literary consigliere, Phyllis Grann.
I remain grateful for the opportunity to work at The New Yorker alongside my colleagues and bosses David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and John Bennet. I’m lucky, too, to work with (and for) Jeff Zucker and the team at CNN.
Amy McIntosh and I met some time ago when she edited my copy. I’m delighted that she still does and that she shares her life with me.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: NERVOUS BREAKDOWN NATION
Membership in the Weathermen: Burrough, Days of Rage, 218–19.
The headlines the next day: Talbot, Season of the Witch, 206–18; Howard, Zebra, 182–227; People v. Cooks, Calif. Ct. Crim. App. (1983), http://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/1
41/224.html.
CHAPTER 2: FROM INSIDE THE TRUNK
George loved to buy land: Nasaw, Chief, 11.
Hearst, it is often claimed: On the question of whether Hearst actually started the war, see ibid., 130–33.
Shortly after their birth: Ibid., 253–57.
“The boys, following in”: Ibid., 361.
There Randy fell: Karen G. Jackovich and Dianna Waggoner, “Patty’s Free, but Randolph Left, and Catherine Hearst Wonders What’s Next,” People, April 9, 1979.
In 1965, Randy was named: Nasaw, Chief, 584–85.
“When she did this to me”: Hearst, Every Secret Thing, 11.
“He was everything”: Ibid., 15.
“She judged things”: Weed, My Search for Patty Hearst, 33.
“If you don’t like it”: Hearst, Every Secret Thing, 24–25.
One night at dinner: Weed, My Search for Patty Hearst, 37.
“Shut your mouth”: Hearst, Every Secret Thing, 31–32.
CHAPTER 3: THE SLA
Cinque M’tume: Cummins, Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement, 240.
DeFreeze was thirty: For background on DeFreeze, see McLellan and Avery, Voices of Guns, 307–21; Bryan, This Soldier Still at War, 145–51; Kinney, American Journey, 166–68.
“It’s me they want”: Cummins, Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement, 209.
Black Cultural Association: McLellan and Avery, Voices of Guns, 56–57.
On December 11, 1972: Ibid., 87–88.
Little, a Floridian: For background on Little, see Kinney, American Journey, 149–53; Bryan, This Soldier Still at War, 134–45; McLellan and Avery, Voices of Guns, 180–83.