This week (May 11-17) in crime history – Marie Besnards’ husbands
body was exhumed in connection to her serial poisoning case (May 11, 1949);
Trial of former Nazi Klaus Barbie began (May 11, 1987); Body of the Lindbergh
baby was found (May 12, 1932); Pope John Paul II was shot (May 13, 1981);
Three-year-old June Devaney was kidnapped from a Blackburn, England hospital
(May 14, 1948); Patricia Columbo and Frank Deluca were arrested for the brutal
killing of her family in Elk Grove, Illinois (May 15, 1976: Celebrity private
detective Anthony Pellicano was found guilty of various crimes (May 15, 2008);
Norma Jean Armistead kidnapped another baby (May 16, 1975); LAPD raids hideout
of the Symbionese Liberation Army (May 17, 1974)
Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On May 17, 1974, Los Angeles police surround a home in
Compton, California, where the leaders of the terrorist group known as the
Symbionese Liberation Army were hiding out. The SLA had kidnapped Patricia
Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, months earlier, earning
headlines across the country. Police found the house in Compton when a local
mother reported that her kids had seen a bunch of people playing with an
arsenal of automatic weapons in the living room of the home.
The LAPD’s 500-man siege on the Compton home was only the
latest event in a short, but exceedingly bizarre, episode. The SLA was a small
group of violent radicals who quickly made their way to national prominence,
far out of proportion to their actual influence. They began by killing
Oakland’s superintendent of schools in late 1973 but really burst into
society’s consciousness when they kidnapped Hearst the following February.
Months later, the SLA released a tape on which Hearst
said that she was changing her name to Tania and joining the SLA. Shortly
thereafter, a surveillance camera in a bank caught Hearst carrying a machine
gun during an SLA robbery. In another incident, SLA member General Teko was
caught trying to shoplift from a sporting goods store, but escaped when Hearst
sprayed the front of the building with machine gun fire. Although law
enforcement officials began talking about the SLA as if they were a
well-established paramilitary terrorist organization, the SLA had only a
handful of members, most of who were disaffected middle class youths.
On May 17, Los Angeles police shot an estimated 1,200
rounds of ammunition into the tiny Compton home as six SLA members shot back.
Teargas containers thrown into the hideout started a fire, but the SLA refused
to surrender. Autopsy results showed that they continued to fire back even as
smoke and flames were searing their lungs; they clearly chose suicide and
martyrdom over jail. The raid left six SLA members dead, including leader
Donald DeFreeze, also known as Cinque. Patty Hearst was not inside the home at
the time. 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 and she 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 author of six nonfiction
books that include 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 book can be purchased from Amazon through the
following link:
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