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On this Day: Newspaper Heiress Patty Hearst is Kidnapped
February 04, 2008 12:10 AM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
On Feb. 4, 1974, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. It was the beginning of a nearly two-year dramatic saga that captivated the nation.
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The 19-year-old Hearst was living with her fiancé in Berkeley, California when armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army invaded their apartment, beat her fiance and kidnapped her. It was the opening act in a multi-year saga that had the nation spellbound.
The kidnapping was soon followed by a public negotation in which the SLA denounced the "corporate state" and made a series of demands for distribution of food to the poor, with which the Hearst family clumsily tried to comply. The SLA sent a series of audiotapes on which Patty Hearst denounced her family's efforts; in early April, Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA and adopted the name "Tania."
On April 15, 1974, "Tania" Hearst, dressed in guerilla garb and carrying a machine gun, participated in a bank robbery with members of the SLA. In mid-May, she fired 27 rounds into a storefront to enable her colleagues to escape after a possible botched robbery. The next day, the drama reached its apogee as a special news bulletin appeared on television sets around the nation, showing an SLA safehouse in Los Angeles engulfed in flames after a stand-off with the LAPD. Until the six bodies were positively identified the next day, it was not known whether Hearst had been killed.
Hearst remained on the run for another 16 months, and was arrested in September 1975. A jury rejected her brainwashing defense, and she was found guilty of armed bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after she served 21 months, and President Clinton granted her a full pardon in 2001.
The saga returned to the headlines in June 1999 when one of Hearst's alleged compatriots was arrested in Minnesota, having changed her name and become a pillar of her community.
The kidnapping was soon followed by a public negotation in which the SLA denounced the "corporate state" and made a series of demands for distribution of food to the poor, with which the Hearst family clumsily tried to comply. The SLA sent a series of audiotapes on which Patty Hearst denounced her family's efforts; in early April, Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA and adopted the name "Tania."
On April 15, 1974, "Tania" Hearst, dressed in guerilla garb and carrying a machine gun, participated in a bank robbery with members of the SLA. In mid-May, she fired 27 rounds into a storefront to enable her colleagues to escape after a possible botched robbery. The next day, the drama reached its apogee as a special news bulletin appeared on television sets around the nation, showing an SLA safehouse in Los Angeles engulfed in flames after a stand-off with the LAPD. Until the six bodies were positively identified the next day, it was not known whether Hearst had been killed.
Hearst remained on the run for another 16 months, and was arrested in September 1975. A jury rejected her brainwashing defense, and she was found guilty of armed bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after she served 21 months, and President Clinton granted her a full pardon in 2001.
The saga returned to the headlines in June 1999 when one of Hearst's alleged compatriots was arrested in Minnesota, having changed her name and become a pillar of her community.
Headline Links: The Patty Hearst kidnapping and trial
Hearst was kidnapped on Feb. 4 from her apartment in Berkley, California. After a series of public negotiations between the SLA and the Hearst family, Patty Hearst began to denounce her family in a series of audiotapes. In early April, she announced that she had joined the SLA and adopted the name "Tania," after a confederate of Che Guevara. On April 14, the nation was shocked to see photos of Hearst, clad in geurilla garb and toting a machine gun, as she participated in the robbery of a bank. According to Court TV, Hearst was recorded as saying, “I am a soldier of the people's army." A spellbound public struggled with whether Hearst should now be considered primarily a victim or a perpetrator of a crime. In mid-May 1974, television programs around the nation were interrupted by news coverage of an SLA safe house engulfed in flames after a stand-off with the FBI. It was generally presumed that Hearst was in the house, but it was later learned that she was not. Hearst remained on the lam for 16 months, and was arrested in September 1975. She was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. After she served 21 months, President Carter commuted her sentence and she was released from prison. At the end of President Clinton's second term, he granted Hearst a full pardon. The trial and the SLA again entered the spotlight in 1999, when a former member of the SLA, Kathleen Ann Soliah, was arrested in Minnesota living under the name Sara Jane Olson.
Source: Court TV Crime Library
According to Time Magazine, when booked into jail, Hearst listed her occupation as "urban guerilla." She asked her lawyer to convey this message to the public: "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there." Time then asks and answers the question that was on everyone's mind: "[w]hy did the granddaughter of Publishing Tycoon William Randolph Hearst become a revolutionary? How could a girl with her privileged background and brimming future change so completely? The deepest reasons may forever remain shrouded, like the full symbolism of the celebrated sled named Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the film classic modeled on the life of Hearst."
Source: Time Magazine
PBS carries a Web site supplementing the documentary “Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst,” produced and directed by Oliver Stone. According to PBS, Hearst said that her childhood was “really pretty perfect,” growing up an heiress in Northern California, and that the “Hearst family's wealth and media power made her a target, and turned her kidnapping into an international news event.”
Source: PBS: The American Experience
F. Lee Bailey’s defense of Patty Hearst claimed that she suffered from "Stockholm Syndrome," in which captives come to sympathize with their captors. Douglas O. Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law says that “under Bailey's theory, Hearst was never a free agent or voluntary member of the SLA, up to and including the time of her arrest.”
Source: The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
Video of the bank robbery in which Hearst participated. Also available on YouTube is a series of videos of appearances by Patty Hearst on CNN's Larry King Live, discussing her pardon by President Clinton and the trial of Sara Jane Olson.
Source: You Tube
Time reports that squads of news reporters and cameramen were tipped off about the impending showdown between the LAPD and the SLA, resulting in the dramatic television coverage and thousands of spectators watching from nearby streets.
Source: Time Magazine
Background: The SLA
'What Is the Symbionese Liberation Army?'
“The SLA adopted its rhetoric from Communists and South American revolutionaries,” according to a 2002 article from Slate. The group of “Berkeley radicals” was very small in comparison to 1960s and 1970s radical organizations like the Black Panthers, and they were not “of real historical significance." A seven-headed cobra was the group’s symbol, and the “Symbionese” name stemmed from “symbiosis,” suggesting “the union of classes and races.”
Source: Slate
The trial of Sara Jane Olson
The 2002 trial and sentencing of Sara Jane Olson, a former member of the SLA, brought new attention to the dismantled group that created so much controversy in the 1970s. A Los Angeles Times piece about the Olson trial says, “there are those who will declare that, three decades after the fact, a generation is being put on trial.” But the article argues that that is exactly the “myth” that the SLA had always tried to “exploit.”
Source: LA Weekly
Patty Hearst is pardoned
In a New York Times opinion piece from February 2002, Brent Staples asserts that in the 60s, “A substantial number of these children of privilege clearly saw 'the revolution' as a fashionable game that would be forgiven once timeout was called.” Staples proceeds to reflect on Bill Clinton’s pardon of Hearst, which occurred at the end of his presidency, and the recent trial of five other former members of the SLA. But, according to Staples, “The only difference between Patricia Hearst Shaw, witness for the prosecution, and those at the defendants' table is that she had more money and influence.”
Source: The New York Times
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