Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On February 4, 1974, 19 year-old Patty Hearst, the granddaughter
of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her
apartment in Berkeley, California. Her boyfriend, 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, negotiation would
begin for the return of Hearst. Patty’s father, Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave
away some $2 million worth of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and asked
for $6 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 a
surveillance camera took a photo of Hearst participating in an armed robbery of
a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los
Angeles store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she
had joined the SLA of her own free will.
On May 17, Los Angeles police raided the SLA’s secret
headquarters, 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 claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March
20, 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months before
her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. After leaving prison, she
returned to a more routine existence and later married her bodyguard. She was
pardoned by President Bill Clinton in January 2001.
Check back every
Monday for a new installment of “This Week in Crime History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author
of seven nonfiction books that includes the soon to be released In the Company of Evil Thirty Years of
California Crime, 1950-1980 and the award winning Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.
Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
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