Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, granddaughter daughter
of publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley,
California, apartment. Stephen Weed, Hearst’s fiancé, was beaten unconscious by
the two abductors. Soon, a ransom demand came from the Symbionese Liberation
Army (SLA), a radical activist group led by Donald DeFreeze.
DeFreeze had formed the SLA in 1973 after he escaped from
prison. About two years before Hearst’s kidnapping, an SLA bomb-making factory
had been discovered by the police. On November 6, 1973, the SLA shot and killed
Marcus Foster, Oakland’s superintendent of schools, with bullets laced with
cyanide.
The SLA instructed Hearst’s father to distribute $70 in food
for ever poor person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. Hearst agreed to give away
$2 million to the poor in Oakland. The Black Muslims, Malcolm X’s former
organization, were chosen to manage the food distribution, which turned into a
riot when more than 10,000 people showed up and fought for the food.
Afterwards, the SLA demanded an additional $6 million giveaway. Hearst refused
and they did not release Patty.
The Hearst story took a strange and unexpected turn two
months after the abduction, when the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank in San
Francisco. The surveillance cameras clearly showed that Patty Hearst was one of
the machine gun-toting robbers. Soon after followed a taped message from the
SLA in which Hearst claimed that she had voluntarily joined the SLA and was now
to be known as “Tania.”
On May 17, 1974, police were tipped that the SLA leaders
were at a Los Angeles home. With 400 police and FBI agents outside the house, a
tremendous gun battle broke out. The police threw gas canisters into the house
and then shot at them, sparking a fire in which DeFreeze and five other SLA
members died. However, Hearst was not inside the house. She was not found until
September 1975.
Patty Hearst was put on trial for armed robbery and
convicted, despite her claim that she had been coerced, through repeated rape,
isolation, and brainwashing, into joining the SLA. Prosecutors believed that
she actually orchestrated her own kidnapping because of her prior involvement
with one of the SLA members. Despite any real proof of this theory, she was
convicted and sent to prison. President Carter commuted Hearst’s sentence after
she had served almost two years. Hearst was pardoned by President 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 award
winning author of seven nonfiction books that includes In the Company of Evil: Thirty Years of California Crime, 1950-1980.
Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. His book can be purchased from Amazon through the
following link:
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