- A surveillance camera recorded the shocking image
of Patty Hurst wielding an M1 military Carine
during a San Francisco bank robbery.
In 19 74, 2 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.
Hearst was the inspiration for the 1941 film, citizen Kane.
During the late 19th
and 20th centuries,
William Randolph Hurst media empire practiced sensational
yellow journalism and swayed public opinion.
It was said that his newspaper empire could start wars.
His granddaughter, Patty Hurst,
a college student born into wealth
and opulence, appeared
to have been transformed into a gorilla warrior.
After two months of captivity, she called herself Tanya
as she barked orders to customers during the bank robbery.
Now, in 2024, on the 50th 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 Rappaport.
He's here with insights into one of the most bizarre
and polarizing crimes in US history.
Rappaport has written a book, simply titled, searching
for Patty Hurst.
I began our interview
by asking why the SLA targeted 19-year-old Patty Hurst.
- Well, uh, the, the kidnappers, uh, were looking
for someone that could get them money and media coverage,
and they hit on this idea, uh,
which they got from the Remos, uh,
another revolutionary group that if they, uh,
kidnap the daughter of a media celebrity, that
that would be, um, a huge boost for them.
Obviously, they would get a big ransom,
and they'd also get a lot of publicity,
and that would inspire other, uh, revolutionary groups
around the country who wanted to get a jumpstart, uh,
without having to do a lot of, a lot of the, you know,
the legwork that's required, uh, to sell a point of view.
And that was their idea. So when they learned
that she was engaged to marry a philosophy student at
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, uh, she was a 19-year-old that had met Steve Weed,
her fiance, and he was her math teacher at a private school
near San Francisco.
Uh, at the time, the kidnapping, she was 19,
basically. Nobody knew who she was
- And had Steve Weed
and her started their relationship
when she was much younger.
- Yeah, she was 16. She was a junior at Crystal Springs
School for girls in Hillsborough, where she lived.
They fell in love, uh, had this secret affair.
Um, then, uh, 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.
- Rappaport says Patty Hurst's mother Catherine was a
socialite who met Randolph when he was the publisher
of the Atlanta Constitution.
She was a wealthy Georgia debutante.
In 1938, Patricia Campbell Hurst was one
of five daughters, a plain Jane, little makeup.
She 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.
Uh, she looked like the average college girl
of the seventies indistinguishable
for most girls of her age.
- They lived in a 19 room house.
They vacationed everywhere,
but the, the family was gone a lot, uh, both her business
and, and, uh, you know, obviously,
uh, pleasure trips as well.
So she had a lot of independence very early.
She also went to a Catholic boarding school,
and that was kind of a rough ride.
She had some struggles there
and eventually decided to come home and,
and go to this private school in Hillsborough.
But at the time she was kidnapped.
Um, she was definitely apolitical.
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, uh, was involved, um, a
after the kidnapping in, in her ransom effort.
And one of the things we know for sure about Patty was that
she crossed United Farm Worker picket lines.
Um, she thought her father's attempt
to help the Latino community in the San Francisco area
was kind of a joke, and she definitely, uh, had, had gone
to school at Menlo College, uh, in the middle
of the student strike, she just went to class.
So her politics really weren't, weren't present
- According to Rappaport,
Patty Hirsch was not a spoiled rich girl.
She paid her own rent while attending Berkeley,
bought her own groceries, did her own cooking,
took a semester off to work,
and her father, Randolph had taught her to shoot
- 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 wanna be in touch with your community.
And, 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 this privileged world
that she'd grown up in was something
that she didn't wanna just remain in that situation.
- Berkeley 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 Def
Freeze, the founder of the Symbo Liberation Army, known
as the SLA who had escaped from prison.
The SLAs, Marxist mission included ending racism, monogamy,
and the prison system.
- 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 sixties had been, you know,
a transitional time for San Francisco.
So she was, you know, certainly part of that culture. Yeah,
- I had a friend that was there, uh, at that time period,
and he called it bizarrely, not Berkeley. Uhhuh.
- . Right. And exactly.
- Were there a number of radical, you know,
overthrow of the government type groups
popping up at that time?
- Yes. And the SLA, which was founded by
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, uh,
trips to the prison in Vacaville,
and also Soledad were to freeze escaped.
So when he got out of prison, you know, when he,
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, uh, the assassination
of the Oakland School superintendent, who they felt was, uh,
engaging in, um, profiling of students, um, with UCLA,
uh, psychiatrists who were doing a study trying
to figure out who was the most likely,
uh, 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.
- The SLA slogan was death to the fascist insect
that pres upon the life of the people.
It was a small band of violent misfits.
Before kidnapping Hurst, they murdered Marcus Foster,
the first African American superintendent
of schools in Oakland, California with cyan tip bullets,
and 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 4th, 1974, around 9:00 PM
Hearst and her fiance were watching TV
when there was a knock at the door of apartment number four
at 26 0 3 Ben Venue Street in Berkeley.
A trio of SLA members described as commandos
and 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 Hess 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,
an abstract pattern, neck tie,
wire rim glasses, frame his eyes.
He has a manicured light brown mustache.
He is a slim and slight figure.
The age difference between the teacher
and his former high school student was a parent.
The newspaper article also disclosed Hearst address
that caught the attention of the leader
of the SLA Donald Def Freeze, who was looking
for his next target.
- Well, believe it or not, despite who she was,
there was basically no security at this house.
Almost none. And what happened was, one of the members who,
Angela Atwood, who happened to be an actress,
knocked on the door and claimed that her, uh,
Herric card broken down.
And, uh, right behind her was Donald d Fries
and, uh, bill Harris.
And they, they beat, uh, we who started screaming.
And then Bill Harris carried Patty out into a car.
And, and then that was the beginning
of her captivity, period.
She was bound and gagged,
but she was much more under control.
They were worried about Steve
because his screaming, they felt was
gonna alert the neighbors.
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, they tore the house up,
basically, which is interesting.
I mean, they, they severely damaged the house in the process
of kidnapping Patty.
- And how long is it until they issue their ransom demand,
and what do they want, how much money,
and what do they wanna do with it? Well,
- They, the, 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, it's a billion dollar
multi-billion dollar corporation.
- 48 hours after the abduction,
the SLA sent a hand scrawled ransom note to Randolph Hurst
directing 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 newspaper,
and if you don't, you might just be our next victim.
- So the, the, the kidnapping was very easily done,
but I think they guessed wrong on the hearse.
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'll be after other people's daughters
and they'll be bombing the hearse headquarters.
They might even go after Sam Simeon, which is the castle
that, uh, her grandfather built.
That's a, you know, a major tourist attraction.
And so this fear persuaded Randy Hurst not to answer her.
And that was the breakdown that basically contributed
to Patty's decision to join the SLA.
- The SLA issued a new demand for Hearst
to give away $70 worth of free food
to everybody in need in the state of California.
- But that turned out to be a disaster.
Some of the food was spoiled, people got attacked, uh,
TV reporters got attacked and so on.
So it was kind of a riot,
and that that went very badly, even though the Hearst,
you know, tried to, to comply with that part of the ransom.
So that's when things began to break down.
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 SL eight leadership, with the goal being
that they would somehow put pressure on the
SLA to let Patty out.
And, um, so he was working quite hard in that regard.
It didn't, it didn't work.
Uh, the dream was that Russell Little
and Joseph Romero, who were the two, uh, SLA members
who were arrested, and 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 himself
and the head of the Department of Prisons to try
to get little
and Romero 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 quietly,
you know, through the back door.
Uh, but that didn't work.
So as time went on, Patty began to realize
that the money wasn't forthcoming,
so she just couldn't understand it, you know,
and she saw it in the various communications that she wrote
under her own name.
So both the SLA members and Patty issued Communiques,
and she very articulately kind of took down
not just her family and the Hearst Corporation,
but the entire power structure.
- 59 days after the kidnapping,
Patty Hearst denounced her family in an audio recording
called a communique, sent to communicate, sent
to a radio station, and she claimed allegiance to the SLA.
And she took the name Tanya. Tanya or Tanya.
The gorilla 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.
- And because she was an insider,
she'd grown up in a privileged family.
She had a lot of insight that these,
these middle class kidnappers did not have.
And that was part of what resonated, you know,
when her communicates went up on front pages
of the Hearst newspaper and, 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, uh, all over the world,
uh, w wa was endlessly, uh, covering Patty Hurst.
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.
Hard to believe it was bigger than the
impeachment of the President.
- Rappaport says, the kidnappers did not like the heat
that the Patty Hearst abduction was bringing down on them
with her communiques.
- 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, the FBI,
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 gonna stay
and fight, they all read them
and said, listen, you know, this is crazy.
I mean, what, what you're saying
and attacking the pig hers, it's, nobody's gonna believe it.
You know, they're gonna think we wrote it for you.
You've gotta 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 Too movement.
Obviously prison, prison rights was in there,
the Vietnam War.
- Patty Hearst issued a series
of audio communiques on cassette tapes,
left at radio stations and flower shops.
Rappaport says, Hearst denounced her fiance
and announced that she had fallen in love
with one of her kidnappers.
- And everybody's, you know, the media thought, oh, well,
this is just a, you know, contrived bunch of communiques.
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 walked off with $10,000.
So now her picture was on post office walls.
- The story which was garnering national
and international attention took a shocking turn.
In April, 1974, two and a half months
after her kidnapping, Hearst, AKA Tanya,
and four SLA 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 shoulder
and barking orders to customers.
She did not try to hide her face,
although she had dyed her hair dark
Patty Hurst suddenly became America's most famous
revolutionary terrorist.
The FBI had already launched one of its most massive
ancient intensive searches in history to find Hurst
and stop the SLA.
- Things were getting kind of hot after the BA robbery.
So Donald d Freeze knew a lot of people in Los Angeles,
where he, he, he'd begun his criminal career
and he had a safe house there,
and they divided into three teams.
Bill Harris told me about this,
and by, by the way, my, my interview with Bill,
the one I did after he got jail,
is in searching for Patty Hearst.
What happened was that Patty joined a team
with the Harrises, 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.
Patty was in a van across the street on the floor,
and heard the commotion and jumped up,
and with an M1 that she was trained on,
and a machine gun that she was not trained on.
She fired off about 80 rounds, and the Harrisons escaped,
but, uh, that van was hot.
So they went ahead and carjacked a,
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 Harrises and Patty were on the run
and carjacked this kidnapper, the SLA was being surrounded,
and they checked into a motel, the three
of them in Anaheim across from Disneyland,
and watched their, their six comrades be exterminated.
- The Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team
surrounded the SLA safe house in South Central Los Angeles.
An officer announced over a bullhorn.
This is the LPD, 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 a fire.
410 officers converged on the scene, many trying
to control the 10,000 spectators drawn
by live television use coverage of it.
An estimated 9,000 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 Def Freeze, who had found 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 then asked, where's Patty was her body
among the charred remains
- At that time?
It, it's hard to believe it,
but no one knew if Patty Herst was in that house,
whether they had shot and killed Patty or not.
It took days because teargas 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.
- The SLA was now down to three members.
Patty Hearst, bill Harris, and his wife Emily.
They split up and won on the run.
Patty Hurst linked up with new converts to the SLA,
the FBI worked six days a week and 12 hour shifts,
and checked out thousands of leads.
- 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,
wherever she was, she had to have power.
And as they were going through the list of all the new pg e
subscribers, they found this place on Morse Avenue
where somebody was stealing power.
They hadn't actually put down a deposit or anything.
They, they were literally piring off somebody
else's power supply.
And that turned out to be where Patty was literally.
And so they began, you know, when they got there,
they walked in and, and she said, you know, don't shoot.
She had guns on the kitchen table.
And then the Harrisons were captured on the same day,
living in another living apartment nearby.
They were actually out jogging when they were captured
- 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 gorilla,
and raised a clenched fist in a revolutionary salute.
At a sensational trial,
Hearst high powered defense attorney f Lee Bailey, tried
to mount a defense that the young heiress was a victim,
brainwashed and raped by her abductors.
Well, 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 ESLA.
- I was at the trial, interestingly, I wrote, wrote
for a Hearst newspaper, if you could believe that.
And, um, the trial was, was kind of a circus.
Patty was quite defiant at the time.
She was writing mash notes to Steve Solia, one
of the SLA members, when she was captured.
And it was Ley 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 mounted brainwashing defense
that just cratered, uh, in court.
And then even worse, uh, Willie Wolf,
who she claimed had abused her, the guy
that she in her communicates, she said she was in love with.
It, turned out that she had a carved ec 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 is she still carrying this love token from a guy
that she claimed abused her?
And that really was devastating in the,
in the case, just terrible.
- Did she testify? - Yes, very badly.
And it was a sort of an architected defense
that Bailey kind of created for her.
But she really had a hard time on,
you know, on, on the cross.
Um, 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, um, that, that it was her Patty,
you know, that, that she in fact, was not brainwashed,
you know, that she had decided to voluntarily join
this bank robbery.
And that that was the argument
of the prosecution, and it worked
- Well.
As a reporter, you're always kind of watching the jury.
What was their reaction
and did they, any of them talk after the verdict?
- Well, you'll love this story.
There's a lot of debate about a lot of things.
But that, that this is absolutely true.
The jury was selected in a private session,
and not just Patty's parents,
but the Hearst family was there on the jury selection.
And the judge was a personal friend of Randy Hearst.
He had known Patty as a, uh, young, young girl.
So the, obviously, the implication was
that she was easily gonna get off,
and that was Bailey's assumption.
That's why he signed this big book contract.
'cause he knew he was gonna make a lot of
money after he won the case.
But the jury, which obviously seemed
to be favorable under a judge who knew the family,
they just weren't buying her story.
- Hattie Hurst was sentenced
to seven years in the Federal penitentiary.
She served two years when President Jimmy Carter
commuted her sentence,
- Well, the committee to Free Patty Hearst,
which was a very extensive
and well financed rehabilitating Patty's image campaign
after she lost in the trial and went to jail.
They didn't just do a, a, like a PR campaign.
They actually got, uh, Caesar Chavez.
Remember I told you that Patty had walked
through a United Farm Workers picket line?
Mm-Hmm, Caesar Chavez was one of the people
who supported, even though she, she defied his union.
He supported her being commuted.
They got the head of the San Francisco FBI office, you know,
that had, um, been involved in arresting her.
He wrote a letter on 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 it.
Now, remember, Patty's mother was a region at
the University of California.
Reagan had appointed her.
So they got a lot of celebrities on board
to support this, uh, commutation.
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, pardon Patty.
- Two months after her release from prison,
Hearst married a police officer
who had 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.
Rappaport did not get an interview with her
during his booked tour.
New information has surfaced from witnesses
to the abduction, which he updates on his website,
Patty hurst.com.
- I was doing a talk in San Francisco,
and this woman had had been writing to me about it.
She came to the talk and then she sent me an email.
She was recruited by the SLA during their time in, in,
um, Berkeley and Oakland.
And she went to a recruiting meeting.
They were trying to get her to join,
and she said it was the 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.
They would mask people, take them
to secret meetings and so on.
So they were struggling to find the right new membership,
you know, everywhere they went, they were very,
very heavily armed.
- All these years later, 50 years later,
what's your summation of what happened here?
- 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, 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.
'cause I think that's the way you need
to approach the world.
And that's what journalists do.
- Now, from my reporter's notebook, some closing thoughts.
Was Patty Hurst a victim or a villain was Patty Hurst.
An impressionable college student 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?
50 years later, the verdict of public opinion is still out.
Patty Hearst image, brandishing an assault rifle
during the bank robbery is forever seared
into any discussion about her.
This is Robert Riggs reporting.