Robert Riggs:
A surveillance camera recorded the shocking image of Patty Hearst wielding an M-1 military carbine during a San Francisco bank robbery in 1974.
Two months earlier, members of the violent radical group the Symbionese Liberation Army, the (SLA) had kidnapped the 19-year-old granddaughter of the late media baron William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the 1941 film Citizen Kane.
During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, William Randolph Hearst's media empire practiced sensational yellow journalism and swayed public opinion. It was said he could start wars.
His granddaughter, Patty Hearst, a college student born into wealth and opulence, appeared to have been transformed into a guerilla warrior after two months of captivity. She called herself “Tania” as she barked orders to customers during the bank robbery.
Now in 2024, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hearst kidnapping, the debate continues about whether she became a willing member of the SLA or was brainwashed.
A primary reporter covering the story was journalist Roger Rapoport.
He is here with insights into one of the most bizarre and polarizing crimes in U.S. history.
Rapoport has written a book titled simply, Searching for Patty Hearst.
I began our interview by asking why the SLA targeted 19-year-old Patty Hearst.
Roger Rapoport:
Well, the kidnappers were looking for someone that could get them money and media coverage. And they hit on this idea, which they got from the Tuperamos, another revolutionary group, that if they kidnapped the daughter of a media celebrity, that that would be a huge boost for them, obviously, they would get a big ransom. They'd also get a lot of publicity, and that would inspire other revolution groups around the country who wanted to get a jumpstart without having to do a lot of a lot of the, you know, the legwork that's required to sell a point of view. And that was the idea. So when they've learned that she was engaged to marry a philosophy student at the University of California named Steven Weed. They decided that she would be an easy hit, there wouldn't be much security around her which was true. And she was a 19-year-old who had met Steve Weed, her fiance, when he was her math teacher at a private school near San Francisco. At the time of the kidnapper, she was 19. And nobody, basically nobody knew who she was.
Robert Riggs:
And had Steve Weed and he started their relationship when she was much younger.
Roger Rapoport:
She was a junior at Crystal Springs school for girls, and Hillsborough, where she lived. And they fell in love had this secret affair. Then she finished high school a year early, went to junior college, and then together they moved to Berkeley. Her mother really wanted to go to Stanford. And if she listened to her mother, we wouldn't be talking right now.
Robert Riggs:
Rapoport says Patty Hearst's mother, Catherine was a socialite who met Randolph when he was the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. She was a wealthy Georga debutante in 1938
Patricia Campbell Hearst was one of five daughters. A plain Jane. Little makeup. Preferred T-shirts and cutoff jean shorts.
Five foot, three inches tall. 110 pounds. Long straight light brown hair parted down the middle, three inches below her shoulders.
Fair complexion. Brown eyes. A wide grin. Looked like the average college girl of the 70s.
Indistinguishable from most girls of her age.
Roger Rapoport:
They lived in a 19 room house. They vacation everywhere. But the family was going a lot, both for business and obviously, pleasure trips as well. So she had a lot of independence very early. She also went to boarding school, a Catholic boarding school, and that was kind of a rough ride. She had some struggles there and eventually decided to come home and go to this private school in Hillsborough. But at the time she was kidnapped. If she was definitely a political I know this is true, because I wrote a book in 1974 with her fiance after she was kidnapped. And he lived in my house for many months, while we wrote this book. And of course, he had access to the family and was involved after the kidnapping in her ransom effort. And one of the things we know for sure about Patty was that she crossed the United farmworker picket lines. She thought her father's attempt to help the Latino community in the San Francisco area was kind of a joke. And she definitely had gone to school at Menlo College, in the middle of the student strike, she just went to class. So our politics really weren't weren't present.
Robert Riggs:
According to Rapoport, Patty Hearst was not a spoiled rich girl. She paid her own rent while attending Berkley. Bought her own groceries. Did her own cooking. Took a semester off to work.
And her father Randolph had taught her to shoot.
Roger Rapoport:
So, you know, the, the California world, the San Francisco world, was far to the left of where her where her parents were. And this was a tricky thing, because obviously, as a newspaper publisher, you want to be in touch with your community. And at one point, she said to her dad, you know, Dad, nobody reads the San Francisco Examiner who's under 80. So she definitely understood that that is privileged world that she'd grown up in was something that she didn't want to just remain in that, in that, that situation.
Robert Riggs:
Berkley was the hotbed of America's leftist radicalism.
By the early Seventies, after years of protest and resistance, some fringes of the Left were developing a sense of urgency.
In the ever-present debate between non-violent and violent actions, the idea of terrorism was gaining ground.
Enter Donald DeFreeze, the founder of the Symbionese Liberation Army, known as the SLA, who had escaped from prison.
The SLA’s Marxist mission included ending racism, monogamy, and the prison system.
Roger Rapoport:
They were in Berkeley. I mean, everything was going on there. This was the final years of the Vietnam War. Watergate was happening. That was a big story. There was an energy crisis, there was a war in the Middle East. And, you know, the 60s had been, as you point out, you know, a transitional time for San Francisco. So she was, you know, certainly part of that culture. Yeah,
Robert Riggs:
I had a friend that was there at that time period. And he called it bizarrely, not Berkeley. Right. And exactly, where there are a number of radical, you know, overthrow the government type groups popping up at that time.
Yes. And the SLA, which was founded by a escapee from Soledad prison, had, in fact, been working with one of those groups, a number of radicals from the Berkeley area had been involved in a prison reform group that was protesting the conditions in the prison. And so they had met a number of convicts. During their trips to the prison in Vacaville, and also Soledad where DeFreeze escaped. So when he got out of prison, you know, when he literally just disappeared, one night, he went back to Berkeley and hooked up with mostly these middle class white kids, and formed the SLA, their first attempt to strike was the assassination of the Oakland School Superintendent, who they felt was engaging in profiling of students with UCLA, psychiatrists who were doing a study trying to figure out who was the most likely to become a criminal, that kind of profiling really got them upset. And that move was a disaster. Basically, they were denounced by everybody, including the left.
Robert Riggs:
The SLA’s slogan was "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."
It was a small band of violent misfits.
Before kidnapping Hearst, They murdered Marcus Foster, the first African American Superintendent of Schools in Oakland, California, with cyanide-tipped bullets and they wounded another school official.
Armed with stolen weapons and funded by robberies, the group trained in military maneuvers in the Berkeley hills.
The SLA saw in Patty Hearst the means to catapult their cause into the national consciousness.
She was a 19-year-old sophomore art history major at the University of California Berkeley.
On the evening of February 4, 1974, around 9 PM, Hearst and her fiance were watching TV when there was a knock on the door of apartment #4 at 2603 Benvenue Street in Berkeley.
Robert Riggs:
A trio of SLA members, described as commandoes in newspaper coverage, burst into her apartment with guns drawn and beat her fiance Steve Weed to a pulp.
Three months earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story her parents commissioned, announcing the Hearst heiress's engagement to Steven Weed.
In the newspaper photo, Hearst sits with Weed standing behind her with his left hand on her shoulder. He looks like a professor, wearing a sports jacket and abstract patterned necktie.
Wire-rim glasses frame his eyes. He has a manicured light brown mustache. He is slim and slight. The age difference between the teacher and his former high school student was apparent.
The newspaper article also disclosed Hearst's address. That caught the attention of the leader of the SLA, Donald DeFreeze, who was looking for his next target.
Roger Rapoport:
Well, believe it or not, despite who she was, there was basically no security at this house, almost none. And what happened was a one of the members who Angela Atwood who happen to be an actress knocked on the door and claimed that her record broken down and right behind her was Donald DeFreeze and Bill Harris. And they they beat weed who was started screaming, and then they Bill Harris carried Patty out into a car and then that was the beginning of her captivity period.
Roger Rapoport:
She was bound and gagged. But she was much more under control. They were worried about Steve, because his screaming they felt was going to alert the neighbors. And they were all going to, you know, and some of them actually did come out. But they fired some rounds to get them back into their apartment. But the crime scene was they they tore the house up, basically. Which is interesting. I mean, they severely damaged the house, in the process of kidnapping, Patty.
Robert Riggs:
And how long is it until they issue the ransom demand? And what do they want? How much money?
Roger Rapoport:
Well, the initial demand was $4 million. Now, at that point, I suppose the family was in a position to just write the checks. It's a billion dollar, multibillion dollar corporation.
Robert Riggs:
48 hours after the abduction, the SLA sent a hand-scrawled ransom note to Randolph Hearst, threatening to kill little Patricia unless you pigs let the pair of SLA members arrested for the murder of the Oakland school superintendent out of prison.
The ransom note insisted that quote, “I want you to put this in the news and in your paper, and if you don’t, you might be our next victim.” end quote.
Roger Rapoport:
So the kidnapping was very easily done. And they, but I think they guessed wrong on the Hearst. And what happened was the Governor, the Attorney General, the hostage consultants, all said to Patty’s father look, you ransom her. And you know, they will be after other people's daughters and they'll be bombing the Hearst headquarters, they might even go after San Simeon, which is the castle that her grandfather built. That's, you know, a major tourist attraction. And so this fear persuaded Randy Hearst not to answer. And that was the breakdown that basically contributed to Patty's decision to join the SLA.
Robert Riggs:
The SLA issued a new demand for Hearst to give away $70 worth of free food to everybody in need in California.
Roger Rapoport:
But that turned out to be a disaster, some of the food was spoiled, people got attacked, TV reporters, got attacked, and so on. So it was kind of a riot. And that that went very badly. So even though the hackers tried to comply with that part of their incident, so that's when things began to break down
Roger Rapoport:
And one of the things that I've learned since I started doing my author tour is that Randy actually was trying to do a back channel negotiation with some of the prisoners that knew the SLA leadership, with the goal being that they would somehow put pressure on the Sell a to let Patti out. And so he was doing, you know, working quite hard in that regard. It didn't it didn't work. The dream was that Russell Little and Joseph Ramiro, who were the two SLA members who were arrested in, in San Quentin for the murder of the Oakland School Superintendent. The deal was that they went to the judge in that case, that is Randy, Randy himself in the head of the department of prisons, to try to get Little and Ramiro on a national television broadcast, where they would actually appeal for Patty's release, and then talk about their own case. But the judge said, No, so Randy was trying to do it, you know, quietly, you know, through the back door. But that didn't work. So as time went on, Patti began to realize that, that the money wasn't forthcoming. And of course, you know, from her point of view, having grown up a Hearst with information that was shown to her by the SLA kidnappers, you know, for a multibillion dollar family. $4 million was like, you know, petty cash. So she just couldn't understand it, you know, and she saw it in the various communicates that she wrote, under her own name. So both the SLA members and Patti issued communiques, and she very articulately kind of took down not just her family and the Hearst Corporation but the entire power structure.
Robert Riggs:
59 days after the kidnapping, Patty Hearst denounced her family in an audio recording called a communique, sent to a radio station. She claimed allegiance to the S.L.A. She took the name "Tania."
Tania or Tania the Guerrilla, was a communist revolutionary and spy who played a prominent role in the Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution and in various Latin American revolutionary movements.
Roger Rapoport:
And because she was an insider, she had grown up in a privileged family, she had a lot of insight that these middle class kidnappers did not have. And that was part of what resonated, you know, when her communique went up on the front pages of the Hearst newspaper, and television and radio, even though there was no social media at the time, she in effect was one of America's first social media stars, every channel that you can imagine, all over the world was endlessly covering Patty Hearst, I think there were seven Newsweek covers. And the story was so big, this crime story was so big, that it knocked Watergate off the front page, it's hard to believe it was bigger than the impeachment of the president.
Robert Riggs:
Rapoport says the kidnappers did not like the heat that the Patty Hearst abduction was bringing down on them with her communiques.
Roger Rapoport:
And they told her, they said, Listen, we just want the money and we want the publicity. We don't want you because you're a liability. You know, if you stay with us, the FBI. You know, the search is gonna get bigger and bigger. And you know, we're much more vulnerable. But when she started writing these communiques, explaining her point of view, and why she was going to stay in fight, they all read them and said, Listen, you know, this is crazy. I mean, what you're saying, attacking the pig hurts, it's, nobody's gonna believe it. You know, they're gonna think we wrote it for you. You've got to tone it down. So they did, they actually convinced her to rewrite her her communiques, which if you read them today, a lot of what she talked about, particularly on the feminist side, echoes the me to movement. Obviously, prison, prison rights was in there, the Vietnam War.
Robert Riggs:
Patsy Hearst issued a series of audio communiques on cassette tapes left at radio stations and flower shops. Rapoport says Hearst denounced her fiance and announced that she had fallen in love with one of her kidnappers.
Roger Rapoport:
And everybody in the media thought, Oh, this is just a, you know, contrived bunch of communicators. They're using her as a mouthpiece. But then a few weeks later, she was on camera in a bank robbery. Or the SLA successfully raided a bank owned by the father of a close childhood friend, and locked off with $10,000. So now her picture was on post office walls.
Robert Riggs:
The story which was garnering national and international attention took a shocking turn in April 1974, two and half months after her kidnapping.
Hearst, AKA Tania, and four S.L.A. members held up a branch office of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco for $10,000.
A surveillance camera captured Hearst brandishing a semi-automatic.
rifle on a sling over her right shoulder and barking orders to customers.
She did not try to hide her face although she had dyed her hair dark.
Patty Hearst suddenly became America’s most famous revolutionary terrorist.
The FBI had launched one of its most massive, agent-intensive searches in history to find Hearst and stop the SLA.
Roger Rapoport:
So after the things we're getting kind of hot after the bank robbery. So Donald DeFreeze knew a lot of people in Los Angeles where he began his criminal career and he had a safe house there. And they divided into three teams, Bill Harris, told me about this. And by the way, my my interview with Bill was the one I did after you go to jail is in searching for Patty Hearst. And the what happened was that Patty joined a team with the Harris's and they went shopping and during that event, at a sporting goods store in Inglewood. Harris was being tackled by security guards for allegedly shoplifting. And he was in a van across the street on the floor and heard the commotion and jumped up. And with an M-1 that she was trained on and a machine gun that she was not trained on. She fired off about 80 rounds and the Harris’s escaped. But that van was hot. So they went ahead and carjacked a teenager, abandoned the van which had a parking ticket on it. And that parking ticket led the police to the safe house which they had left by that point, but they quickly found the new safe house. So while the Harris's and Patty are on the run, in carjacked, his kidnapper, the SLA was being surrounded, and they checked into a motel, the three of them in Anaheim across from Disneyland and watched their six comrades be exterminated.
Robert Riggs:
The Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team surrounded the SLA’s safe house in South Central Los Angeles.
An officer announced over a bullhorn: “This is the LAPD. Come out with your hands up and leave your weapons in the house.” He repeated the message 25 times with no response, according to police.
The half dozen heavily armed SLA members opened fire.
410 officers officers converged on the scene. Many trying to control 10,000 spectators drawn by live television news coverage.
An estimated 9 thousand rounds were fired during a furious two-hour gun battle.
The house caught fire after officers shot tear gas rounds into it.
Four of the SLA members were found dead beneath the house, including Donald DeFreeze, who founded the SLA. Two others died attempting to escape.
A police officer said, “They had pistols in each hand and went down blazing. It was like the movie ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’ ”
Everyone asked where’s Patty. Was her body among the charred remains?
Roger Rapoport:
At that time, it's hard to believe it but no one knew it yours was in that house whether they they shot and killed Patty or not. It took days because tear gas canisters, canisters set the house on fire, which meant that they had charred remains that they had to examine. So the family had to wait for days to find out if Patty was in fact one of the victims.
Robert Riggs:
The SLA was now down to three members, Patty Hearst, Bill Harris, and his wife Emily.
They split up and went on the run.
Patty Hearst linked up with new converts to the SLA.
The FBI worked six days a week in 12-hour shifts and checked out thousands of leads.
Roger Rapoport:
The FBI figured out that one way to track Patty was to check the records of all the new hookups, because they knew that, you know, potential wherever she was, she had to have, she had to have power. And as they were going through the list of all the new PG and E subscribers. They found this place on Morris Avenue where somebody was stealing power. They hadn't actually, you know, put down a deposit or anything. They were literally pirating off somebody else's power supply. And that turned out to be where Patti was literally. And so they began you know, when they got there. They walked in and she said, you know, don't shoot. She had guns on the kitchen table and the And then the Harrisons were captured on the same day and another in living in another apartment nearby, they were actually out jogging, when they were captured,
Robert Riggs:
The FBI arrested Patty Hearst and charged her with bank robbery 19 months after her kidnapping by the SLA.
When booked in, Hearst listed her occupation as “urban guerrilla” and raised a clenched fist in a revolutionary salute.
At a sensational trial, Hearst high powered defense attorney F. Lee Baily tried to mount a defense that the young heiress was a victim, brainwashed and raped by her abductors.
The prosecutors played a jail cell recording of Hearst talking with a friend in which she was cursing and fully aware of her role with the SLA.
Roger Rapoport:
I was at the trial. Interestingly, I wrote wrote for Hearst Newspapers to believe that and the trial was was kind of a circus. Patty was quite defiant. At the time, she was writing mash notes to Steve Salida, one of the SLA members when she was captured. And it was actually Bailey's probably worst moment, he signed a fee agreement that gave him the book rights 18 months ahead of Patty's book, and then proceeded to just mount a brainwashing defense. So just cratered. In court.
Roger Rapoport:
And then even worse, Willie Wolfe, who she claimed had abused her, a guy that she in her communiques, she said she was in love with it turned out that she had a carved Olmec monkey stone carving in her purse that matched one that he'd been wearing on a necklace. And this was, you know, like 15 months after he died, why she's still carrying this love token from a guy that she claimed abused her, and that really was devastating in the case, just terrible.
Robert Riggs:
Did she testify?
Yes, very, very badly. And it was a sort of an architected defense, you know, defense that Bailey kind of created for her. But she really had a hard time on, you know, on the cross, because of all these, this evidence that showed that, you know, far from being a victim that was forced to rob this bank, she deliberately, deliberately went in front of the cameras on the security recordings to let people know that that it was her Patty, you know, that she, in fact, was not was not brainwashed, you know, that she had decided to voluntarily join this, this bank robbery, and that that was the argument of the prosecution, and it worked.
Robert Riggs:
Well, as a reporter, you're always kind of watching the jury, what was their reaction? And did any of them talk after the verdict?
Roger Rapoport:
Well, you'll love this story. There's a lot of debate about a lot of things but that this is absolutely true. The jury was selected in a private session, and not just Patti's parents, but the Hearst family was there on the jury selection, and the judge was a personal friend of Randy hers. He had known Patty as a young young girl. And so obviously the implication was that she was easily going to get off. And that was Bailey's assumption. That's why he signed this big book contract, because he knew he's going to make a lot of money after he won the case. But the jury, which obviously seem to be favorable under a judge who knew the family, they just weren't buying her story.
Robert Riggs:
Patty Hearst was sentenced to seven years in the federal penitentiary. She served two years when President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.
Roger Rapoport:
Well, the committee to free Patty Hearst, which was a very extensive, well financed, basically, rehabilitating Patty's image campaign. After she lost in the trial and went to jail. They didn't just do a like a PR campaign. They actually got Cesar Chavez. Remember I told you that. Patti had walked through United Farmworkers picket line. Cesar Chavez was one of the people who supported his, even though she, she defied his unions, he supported her are being computed. They got the head of the San Francisco FBI office that had been involved in arresting her. He wrote a letter in behalf of her. And believe it or not Ronald Reagan, who at one point said during the free food program, I hope all these poor people who get the free food from the ransom effort, come down with botulism. He also supported now remember that his mother was a Regent at the University of California, under the Reagan. Reagan had appointed her. So they got a lot of celebrities on board to support this kind of mutation, and that worked quite well. And then as far as the pardon goes, the book in the movie and a lot of interviews she did. She was interviewing everywhere, telling her side of the story. And it is last official act. In 2001. President Clinton pardoned Patty and his brother.
Robert Riggs:
Two months after her release from prison, Hearst married a police officer who guarded her while she was out on bail. They had two children together.
Hearst turned 70 in February 2024.
She has been in the news in recent years for her dogs, mostly French bulldogs, that have won prizes at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.
Rapport did not get an interview with her.
During his book tour, new information has surfaced from witnesses to the abduction, which he updates on his website Patty Hearst dot Com.
Roger Rapoport:
I was doing a talk in San Francisco, and this woman had me writing to me about she came to the talk. And then she sent me an email. She was recruited by the SLA, during their time in Berkeley in Oakland, and she went to a recruiting meeting. And they were trying to get her to join. And she said it was unbelievably scary. There were weapons everywhere, the rhetoric and so on. And she obviously didn't join. But this was the climate of what they were trying to do. And they would mask people, take them to secret meetings and so on. So they were they were struggling to find the right. New membership, you know, and everywhere they went, they were very, very heavily armed.
Robert Riggs:
All these years later, 50 years later. What's your summation of what happened here?
Roger Rapoport:
Well, in searching for Patty Hearst, I attempt to give the reader an opportunity to come to their own conclusions about what really happened. And that's really the point of the book, is I want the people who listen to your show, to not just take any one person's word, not just for this case, but any case and, and do their own homework, because I think that's the way you need to approach the world.
Robert Riggs:
Now from my Reporter’s notebook, some closing thoughts.
Was Patty Hearst a victim or a villain?
Was Patty Hearst an impressionable college student who had grown up in a sheltered wealthy family more vulnerable to her captors?
Young adults in the midst of forming an identity and seeking a sense of purpose may be more susceptible to the allure of cults. The SLA fits the definition of a cult-like family.
Or did her sense of abandonment by her family turn her into a true believer?
Fifty years later. The verdict of public opinion is still out.
Patty Hearst's image brandishing an assault rifle during the bank robbery is forever seared into any discussion about her.
