On September 18, 1975, newspaper heiress and wanted fugitive
Patty Hearst is captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed
robbery. On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of
newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in
Berkeley, California. Her fiancé, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along
with a neighbor who tried to help. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling
Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk of a car.
Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the
kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a
small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station
that it was holding Hearst as a "prisoner of war." Four days later,
the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy
person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA, negotiations
would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst. Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave
away some $2 million worth of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and
asked for $4 million more. The Hearst Corporation said it would donate the
additional sum if the girl was released unharmed. In April, however, the situation
changed dramatically when Patty Hearst declared, in a tape sent to the
authorities, that she was joining the SLA of her own free will. Later that
month, a surveillance camera took a photo of her participating in an armed
robbery of a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during the robbery of
a Los Angeles store. On May 17th, police raided the SLA's secret headquarters
in Los Angeles, killing six of the group's nine known members. Among the dead
was the SLA's leader, Donald DeFreeze, an African American ex-convict who
called himself General Field Marshal Cinque. Patty Hearst and two other SLA
members wanted for the April bank robbery were not on the premises. Finally, on
September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country for more than a year,
Hearst, or "Tania," as she called herself, was captured in a San
Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. Despite her later claim
that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March 20, 1976,
and sentenced to seven years in prison. Her prison sentence was commuted by President
Jimmy Carter and she was released in February 1979. She later married her
bodyguard. In 2001, she received a full pardon from President Bill Clinton.
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