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Voices of Guns, Chapter 10
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Kidnap (of Patricia Hearst) February 04,1974
STEVE WEED and his lover, the girl he was to marry, Patricia Hearst, lived by a quiet routine. They were a close couple who preferred each other’s company; “almost to an absurd degree domestic,” Steve would say later. They spent most of their evenings alone at home in their comfortable two-story town house apartment, in one of more prosperous graduate-student ghettos close by the sprawling Berkeley campus of the University of California.
It was a way of life by now close to domestic ritual, a routine easily discovered by anyone who watched the couple. But the Symbionese had double-checked.
Two days before the kidnapping, Saturday evening, two strangers knocked on the door about 9:30 P.M. ostensibly to ask about available apartments in the building. The porch light was out, but through the frosted-glass sliding door, Weed could dimly make out two unfamiliar figures. Patty, curious, came up behind him in the hallway. Weed hesitated, then slid the door open.
A young woman, wearing jeans and an oversized sweater, stood at the door; behind her, a tall, thin black man hung back in the shadows. The woman—Weed would describe her as “wasted looking” to police—began to ask nervously about the apartment. She claimed the landlord’s realtor had told her that the couple in apartment 4 (Weed’s) would be moving out soon and she and her friend had come by to see if they could look at the place. Weed, mystified, said there must be some mistake—the wrong address or apartment number, perhaps—but he answered several questions about the neighborhood and the going price for local apartments.
The woman thanked him and the couple left.
“What do you think they wanted?” asked Patty after Steve had closed the door. Weed didn’t know—but neither he nor Patty accepted the apartment story. The incident left both uneasy. The man had looked “creepy,” said Patty. “I could have knocked that guy over with one hand,” Steve assured her. (Weed later identified the woman as Emily Harris, but the man was never identified. He was not one of the two male kidnappers, said Weed.)
The following evening, Sunday—a little after 9 o’clock—Weed answered a ring of the apartment telephone. “Is Mary there?” a woman’s voice asked. Weed said it must be the wrong number; the woman apologized and hung up.
Monday, February 4,1974, had been a typically uneventful day for both Patty and Steve. Weed had walked home alone after his late-afternoon class, Professor Myro’s lecture on rudiments and philosophy of logic. Tomorrow, he thought, he would meet with his smaller section of the undergraduate class and help them analyze Myro’s lecture. Weed was a teaching assistant in the Philosophy Department at Berkeley, a graduate student who conducted discussion groups for underclassmen. He liked working with students; the honed precision of the formal structures of logic intrigued and excited him. But that was tomorrow. Patty was waiting for him when he got home, and tonight Steve planned nothing more strenuous than turning the TV knob. They ate leisurely; a simple meal, but with wine, always with wine. They watched television through the meal—Star Trek followed by Mission: Impossible.
Patty was in her bathrobe, doing something in the kitchen, when the doorbell rang. It was 9:17 or so. Steve rose and left the tube, going to the door. No one was expected. Patty came out and followed him down the hall. He remembers she was standing just behind him when he unlocked the sliding door, pulled it open a few inches, and peered out into the courtyard.
Before him stood a young woman, shabbily dressed, her right hand covering part of her face. “I’ve been in an accident,” she said excitedly. “May I use your phone?” There was no pause, no time to reply. Suddenly the glass door was jerked fully open and two men darted around the woman and into the hallway. The first plowed into Steve, knocking him to the floor. The second rushed to Patty, grabbing her and clamping a hand over her mouth just as the scream broke from her throat.
Weed had been knocked flat on his back. He started to flip over and rise when he was kicked in the side of the face, first by the man who had bowled him over, then again by the woman who had followed the two in. He lay there, stunned but conscious, while his hands were roughly secured behind his back with a length of nylon rope the woman had produced. He was lifted by the armpits and dragged back from the hall into the living room. In a dazed glance, Weed could see Patty struggling with her assailant, and for the first time he noticed that both men were armed, one with a pistol, the other with a short-barreled rifle.
“Where’s the safe . where’s the money?” the woman demanded “I told them—I found it difficult to talk because of the kicks in the face I’d received said we didn’t have a safe, that the only money was in my wallet,” Steve said later. “That seemed to infuriate him,” said Weed. “He grabbed a bottle off the wine rack and hit me over the head with it, four times, as hard as he could. I thought my head was going to cave in. ‘Take anything you want,’ I told them.”
Weed does not believe he ever lost consciousness during the episode, but he pretended he had been knocked out by the blows from the bottle. “1 lay there, terrified, trying to figure out something 1 could do. At that point I still assumed it was just a robbery.
The men didn’t say much at all. The woman seemed to be giving the orders,” he said.
While Weed was feigning unconsciousness, one of the men left the apartment scouting to see if the noise had roused neighbors. It hadn’t. Steve Suenaga, a UC Berkeley student living directly across the interior courtyard, did not hear a thing, but just then was on his way out to visit a girlfriend. He closed the door, heard a noise behind him, turned. A black man was aiming a carbine at him. “Get inside, motherfucker” the man ordered, pointing across to the open doorway of Steve and Patty’s apartment.
Suenaga didn’t argue; he didn’t say a word. As they entered and started down the hallway he saw Weed facedown on the floor. A moment later, Suenaga, too, was prone, hands tied behind his back.
When he tried to rise—believing he was about to be killed—some one struck him repeatedly with a rifle butt.
Weed was not aware of what had happened to his neighbor, and other than the muffled scream she had gotten out while being grabbed, he had heard no sound from Patty. He debated whether he should open his eyes. He decided it would not be a wise move.
He had no idea of how much time had passed since the three had burst into the apartment. Probably only a few minutes, he figured.
“Let’s go,” said one of the men. For a moment Steve thought it was over; that he and Patty had survived; the “robbers” were leaving. Then the woman spoke: “We’ve got to get rid of them, they’ve seen us.”
The next thing Weed remembers was hearing a metallic thwack, a rifle bolt, he thought. In that moment of total terror, “1 figured l had nothing to lose,” recalls Weed. He leaped to his feet, “screaming, screaming like I was crazy. I ran around the room yelling my head off,” said Weed. “I don’t know why they didn’t shoot. I guess it surprised them as much as it did
~
Somehow Weed managed to free his hands from the tangle of the rope. He raced across the living room, yanked open a large sliding-glass door and, still bellowing, dashed onto the patio, which was enclosed by a six-foot-high fence. Weed didn’t hesitate:
He swerved to the left, reached for the top of the wood-slat fence, jerked himself up and over, and fell into the yard of the neighboring house. Behind him he heard gunfire. Across that yard was another fence. He got up, ran, scaled that, then a third, finally finding himself on the sidewalk of Parker Street at the end of the block, shouting, “Police! Call the police!” He didn’t even notice the car in which Patty was being carried away as it swerved past him, around a corner, and disappeared. Weed ran up on a porch, pounded on the door, trying to rouse help. Nobody answered.
Dazed, staggering, he made his way to the corner and around onto Benvenue Avenue toward the town house, before his legs buckled and he collapsed to the pavement. Neighbors carried him home. There he realized, for the first time, that Patty was gone.
The shooting had begun in the courtyard. As the kidnappers were leaving—one of the men dragging the blindfolded victim by her arm—a woman living in the adjoining apartment opened her door to see what the commotion was. Susan Larkey was dumb- founded. Men with guns. Patty in only a bathrobe, kicking and screaming. The man with the rifle spotted her, turned, and snapped off three shots. One slug shattered the glass door, missing her by no more than a foot. It was either a very good shot or she was very lucky.
Patricia was dragged along a narrow cement walkway leading to the driveway, where the white convertible getaway car was parked, motor running, facing the street. “She was screaming hysterically, struggling, trying to pull free,” said another neighbor, who had rushed to a window overlooking the driveway when she heard the shots. By now half naked, her blue robe having slipped off her shoulders, exposing her breasts, she was sobbing, crying,
“Let me go . . . please, let me go.”
Patty’s cries were heard by four UC students next door at 2607 Benvenue. George Takahashi, Steve Gausewitz, Mathew Winkler, and Sandy Golden, studying together for an exam, rushed out onto the front porch. They saw the woman kidnapper raise the trunk lid of the convertible and the two men hoist the struggling, screaming girl and literally throw her into the trunk. The woman slammed the lid shut. The two gunmen spotted the students, aimed their automatic carbines, and fired several short bursts; one slug went through a bedroom window where Ed and Ruth Reagan, an elderly couple who owned the student boardinghouse, were watching TV. The students ducked back inside but came out again, down onto the sidewalk, when they heard the convertible, tires screeching, speed off, someone in it still blazing away as the car turned the corner onto Parker. They were even luckier this time. A light green and white station wagon witnesses said it had been double-parked down the block—roared by, someone inside firing wildly. Sandy Golden felt a bullet whiz through her hair, and Takahashi saw sparks fly up alongside him from slugs ricocheting off the pavement. They dived for safety as the station wagon, too, disappeared around the corner.
All along Benvenue, heads were popping out of doors and windows trying to see what was happening. When people realized they were hearing bullets, not firecrackers, most popped their heads back inside. A young woman who lived across the street from the Hearst apartment looked out her door. She saw a blue Volkswagen Bug pull away from the curb fast. It was the same car that had been parked there for a couple of hours, she remembered, the one with that strange couple in it. She ran to the telephone and dialed the Berkeley Police Department. Busy. She dialed again. Still busy. On the fourth or fifth try she got through.
“There’s shooting going on—” was all she got out. A voice interrupted, “We know, we know, cars are on the way.” It was 9:21 P.M.
Berkeley Patrolman Steve Engler was four blocks away taking a routine burglary report when his walkie-talkie squawked: “All cars, all cars, possible two-oh-seven in progress! Shots being fired! The location is Benvenue and Parker.” Engler ran for his cruiser.
He was the first officer to the scene. Someone pointed toward 2603 and yelled, “In the back . . . somebody’s been shot.” He rushed up the walk and pushed through a small crowd at the door of Steve Suenaga’s apartment. Suenaga, still bound hand and foot, was on the floor. Neighbors had carried him home and were just untying him. “Over here,” someone shouted. “Come over here . . . somebody’s hurt bad.” Engler followed the voice into apartment 4.
Inside, Steve Weed was slumped on the living-room floor, a group of neighbors huddled around, one pressing a blood-soaked towel to his head. “For a second I thought he was dead,” Engler recalls. He radioed for an ambulance. “What happened?” “There were three of them—two black dudes and a white girl.” Someone else added, “They took off in a Chevy convertible, a white Chevy.”
Engler radioed the meager descriptions of the kidnappers and their car. The dispatcher put it out over the air and said an ambulance was on the way. Engler glanced over at Weed. Shock had set in, and his face was swollen, huge, the right side an ugly purples the right eye bulging out. His hair was saturated with blood. He looked terrible, badly hurt. “You’re going to be okay,” Engler told the young man.
The ambulance arrived minutes later for Suenaga and Weed. Engler and a handful of other Berkeley policemen began a preliminary search of the apartment. Sergeant Larry Lindenau came down from one of the bedrooms holding a newspaper clipping and handed it to Engler. It was a story out of the December 12 San Francisco Examiner announcing the engagement of Patricia Campbell Hearst, daughter of the newspaper’s president and editor, to Steven Andrew Weed. The two cops looked at each other.
“This is going to be a big one,” said Engler.
Berkeley police had immediately set up a command post for the search. A patrol unit soon found the convertible. It had been abandoned a half mile away. There were no signs of the kidnappers or the girl. Reporters were already calling headquarters. Was it true? Had Hearst’s daughter been kidnapped? Police confirmed, then took the not-unusual step—in cases of abduction—of asking the media to “embargo” the story temporarily. A little lead, perhaps a description the kidnappers did not know the police had, could give them a break. The news blackout held through the night.
The convertible discovered on Tanglewood Road was registered to a Peter Benenson of Berkeley. A sack of groceries was in the backseat of the car, in it a carton of milk still cool to the touch.
At Benenson’ s home on Josephine Street, officers found two more sacks of groceries spilled out on the sidewalk. Benenson’s landlady answered their knock. No, he wasn’t borne. Odd, said the woman, he had gone out awhile ago to do some shopping. She described him; white, thirty-ones not too tall, long-haired~ and bearded; a quiet man, a technician at the Lawrence Radiation Lab, just above the campus.
Neighbors on Benvenue told police another Hearst, Patty’s sister, lived only a few blocks away. Officers were sent to inform Virginia Hearst Bosworth and her husband, Jay, of the abduction—and to stand by for their protection. Virginia said her parents, Randolph and Catherine Hearst, were out of town, at some function in Washington, D.C., having to do with a U.S. Senate youth program, sponsored by the Hearst Foundation.
Officers went from door to door on Benvenue seeking witnesses; though few people had information of any use, all were anxious to help. The woman with the story about the blue Volkswagen did not wait to be found. She walked up to an officer on the street. “I think I saw something that may be important,” she said.
The woman and her roommate had gone out at about seven. As they walked toward the corner, both had noticed a blue Volks. It was parked, with the engine running, almost directly across the street from Weed’s apartment. Two people were inside, but neither of the women paid them any attention. Not then. But hours later, a few minutes after nine o’clock, they had come home. The Volkswagen was still there, still with two people inside. They particularly remembered it because the engine was still running.
They had wondered aloud if it had been running the whole time.
Yes, she was sure it was the same car. The license plate—she had seen only the front one—was covered with mud, “so you couldn’t read it.” That was strange, she had thought, because the rest of the car seemed pretty clean. She had gone over to the car and asked if everything was all right. The driver told her, “We’re just waiting for friends.” She had not thought any more of it—not until she saw it drive off, just as all the shooting was going on. Descriptions? A blond woman, late twenties, short hair—possibly a wig—partially covered by a scarf; the driver was ‘‘odd—looking. She thought he might be an albino.* No, she had never seen either of them before.
*A composite drawing of the “albino male” by FBI artists later turned out to be a remarkable likeness of Camilla Hall.
She told the story again to an FBI agent. “Probably a ‘scout car,’” he remarked. Officially, the FBI would not enter the case until the following evening. After twenty-four hours it would be “presumed” the kidnappers could have crossed a state line, making the kidnapping a federal crime. Unofficially, by morning, dozens of agents were on the case. The word had come down from Washington upon identification of the victim.
Anne Hearst, the youngest of the five Hearst girls, phoned her parents at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, awakening them with the grim announcement: “Patty’s been kidnapped.” The parents seemed to take the news with astonishing calm. Randolph Hearst quickly contacted Berkeley police for more details, then telephoned his newspaper. The overnight editor told him a team of Examiner reporters was already gathering facts, but no story would be printed until the embargo was lifted. “Be careful, don’t do anything that could get Patty hurt,” Hearst said. He hung up, dialed once again, and made reservations for two on the first flight to San Francisco. Then they began to learn to wait.
In Berkeley, before morning, evidence technicians were going over the kidnap scene with everything from tweezers to a vacuum cleaner. They tracked down and lifted fingerprints throughout the apartment. They plucked up strands of hair, tucking each in its own plastic evidence bag. Outside, lab men searched for shoe prints, collected .30-caliber shell casings—they found ten of them—and took pictures of damage done by the bullets. Witnesses were requisitioned, some three and four times.
Part of the mystery was solved shortly after sunrise. An FBI technician spotted something beneath a bookcase in the entry hallway. It was a box of .38-caliber bullets. He opened it carefully, mindful of smearing prints, and removed one. Something was peculiar. The bullet had a dab of wax on its tip. He examined the others. Ditto. The box was rushed to the Federal Building in San Francisco. An FBI lab man discovered the bullets had been drilled out, filled with some substance, then capped. A chemist quickly determined the filling to be potassium cyanide.
“The SLA,” an agent guessed.
By nightfall Berkeley police, on their own, had also linked the SLA to the abduction. Witnesses picked out a picture of Donald DeFreeze as one of the kidnappers.
Nothing about the finding of the bullets or the link to the SLA and DeFreeze was revealed then. Not even the Hearsts were told. (The family waited three agonizing days until the kidnappersidentified themselves.)
In midmorning Peter Benenson had contacted police. He, too, had been a kidnap victim, he said; on arriving home shortly be- fore nine o’clock the night before, he was just unloading the Chevy, two sacks of groceries in his arms, when he sensed someone behind him. Turning, he found himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol in the hand of a young woman. “Give me the keys,” she said. “We want your car, not you.” Another woman, also armed, and a man appeared. Someone grabbed him by the arm, Benenson said, jerking him around, spilling the groceries to the sidewalk. They tumbled him into the rear seat of the car. One of the women suddenly slugged him—three times with a pistol butt—and he was knocked dazed. He was struck twice more, head blows, when he reflexively stirred as the women pulled his arms behind him to bind his wrists. He was blindfolded and gagged, and he felt a blanket thrown over him. One of the women literally sat on top of him as the convertible drove off, and he could hear the three arguing whether he should be kept in the backseat or transferred to the trunk. It was only a short ride before the car stopped; he was told to stay put, and all three seemed to leave the auto.
Minutes later he heard the first gunshots; the trunk opened and slammed, people tumbled in atop him, and moments later the car jerked forward. When they abandoned the convertible on Tanglewood, Benenson said, one of the women told him he’d be killed if he reported what had happened. After the kidnappers left—in a vehicle Benenson had not seen—he freed himself.
Discovering they had taken the keys, he walked to his sister’s home nearby and spent the night there. He was very frightened. He had only just learned of the Hearst kidnapping. No, he said, he couldn’t identify anyone.
In the car, police had found a single glove, brown-and-beige cotton and leather, size six and a half, a woman’s glove with the label of L. S. Ayers, a Midwest department store chain. Benenson said he had never seen it before.*
*The glove would soon he linked to Emily Harris, who had clerked in the L. S. Ayers store in Indianapolis in late 1969 and early 1970. The store sold identical gloves during that period, police learned, and an Indiana friend of Emily told the FBI she recalled Emily had once lent her a pair of gloves “exactly like” the one the interviewing agent showed her.
At Cowell Memorial Hospital, on the UC Berkeley campus, both Steve Weed and Steven Suenaga furnished descriptions of the kidnappers. Both found it difficult sorting features and trying to recall details, the way the kidnappers had moved and talked.
They groped for anything that might help the police. “I told the police that I thought the guy who came through the door first— not DeFreeze, the other—had probably been to Vietnam,” recalled Weed much later. “It was just the efficient way he came plowing in and then methodically kicking me in the face. I just thought of those Army films, where they’re training men how to hit their victim quickly and incapacitate him.”
More than a year and a half later the identity of the second male kidnapper was still an enigma. Shortly after the September, 1975, arrests of Patricia Hearst, Wendy Yoshimura, and Bill and Emily
Harris, Rolling Stone magazine published an “inside” story about the SLA’s underground travels in the four months following the Los Angeles shoot-out. Rolling Stone’s unnamed source was Jack Scott, a radical author who had helped the fugitives hide, and Stone’s version had Scott being told by Patty/Tania that it was DeFreeze, Willie Wolfe, and Nancy Ling Perry who had stormed into the Berkeley apartment and abducted her. Both Weed and Suenaga dismissed that. Weed, by then well informed about each of the SLA soldiers, was convinced the woman was either Angela Atwood or Emily Harris. “Nancy Perry was just too tiny. She was four feet eleven, and Patty is five feet two. I’m sure I would have noticed if she had been shorter than Patty; she was right in front of me.” The logic of Scott’s version—naming only SLA soldiers who were dead—had, in fact, convinced him that it was Emily Harris, still alive, who was the woman on the assault team. (As for young Willie Wolfe being the second male, Weed almost laughed. “I wish it had been,” he said. “Wolfe was about my size, lanky, with narrow features. The guy who came through that door was big, muscular. I’m sure myself it was two black men. For an instant I was face to face with the second guy. The features, the face, the hair—and later when he spoke—everything made me sure it was a black man.” Steve Suenaga, a Japanese-American and for years a resident in integrated neighborhoods, also had no doubts. Both male kidnappers were blacks, he said. “I live with them, man, and both of those guys were bloods!”
(Two years after being kidnapped, Patricia Hearst testified during her bank robbery trial that it was Donald DeFreeze, Bill Harris, and Angela Atwood who dragged her from the apartment.
Weed, even then, was still certain both men had been blacks, but he conceded, “Well, I could have thought Harris at five feet seven was too short. I’m five feet eleven and I thought he was about my height, but I have a habit of looking at people shorter than I and assuming they’re about my size. If I had to be fooled, which I don’t think I was, I guess I might have been fooled by Harris, who is muscular, with broad features, and—being a former actor— expert in applying makeup. Even with Harris, though, it would have meant they used things like actor’s face putty to broaden his nose and alter other features.”)
Weed, even when he was interviewed by FBI agents at the hospital right after the kidnapping, assumed that the police and he would have different priorities in the hunt that would follow. They wanted the kidnappers and he wanted his girl back. He told them and reporters that he would not identify any suspects picked up or testify against anyone charged if Patricia were freed. “All
I’m interested in is getting her back, alive and unharmed,” he said. FBI agents began quietly, routinely, checking out everyone involved, but they showed particular interest in the background of Steven Andrew Weed. They didn’t like his attitude.
The morning after the kidnapping, the publisher of the Oakland Tribune called the Berkeley Police Department. He said his city desk was being besieged by callers from throughout the Bay Area asking if it was true that a Hearst had been kidnapped. “Apparently,” said former U.S. Senator William Knowland, fuming, “everyone knows about it except the readers of the Tribune. We are not going to honor the embargo any longer.”
Radio station KGO in San Francisco, tipped off about the Tri- bune, put the story on the air at 10:30 A.M.
By mid afternoon both the FBI and Berkeley police had assigned extra personnel to handle the flood of calls coming from concerned citizens, cranks, kooks, and reporters from papers and radio stations in places as far away as Europe, South Africa, and Japan. Tips as to where police could find a white woman in the company of black men piled up. In several communities cops raided suspected hideouts, kicking in doors, guns in hand.
On the flight home Hearst began composing mental drafts of a message to the kidnappers. The United pilot, told of the kidnap- ping, opened one of the Muzak channels and plugged in to news broadcasts. The jet was over the Rockies when the couple heard the bulletin announcing the abduction of Patty. Arriving at the Hearst mansion in exclusive suburban Hillsborough, the Hearsts closeted themselves with Charles Bates, special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI’s San Francisco office.* Hearst then retreated to his study to work out a statement. He went through several drafts, showed it to his wife, polished it a little more. Then he stepped out the front door and solemnly addressed the tangle of microphones and the growing crowd of newsmen. To them—and through them to his daughter’s kidnappers—he said:
“Mrs. Hearst and I pray to God that the men who took our daughter will show compassion and return her unharmed. At this point, their only crime is abduction. For their sake and ours—and especially for Patricia—we plead with them not to make it any worse. We do not believe we are clutching at straws when we say there is evidence that the abductors do have a measure of compassion and are not senseless and brutal. They were heavily armed and could have eliminated all witnesses. They did not. Neither did they harm the owner of the car they commandeered. They held him for a few hours and then released him. In short, there are witnesses who saw the men who took our daughter. Thus, Patricia is no more a threat to them than are the others. Doing bodily harm to her cannot help them. It can only add to the seriousness of their crime. We want our daughter back unharmed. If she is re- leased we will not seek to imprison her abductors. We plead with them to communicate with us directly or through the press.
Please, we beg of you, do not compound your crime by harmingour daughter.”
*Bates, too, had been in Washington when the kidnapping occurred. He re-turned on an earlier flight to head the investigation.
For two more days the Hearsts endured the silence, the quiet, terrible wait; then, on Thursday, the first word came from the kidnappers. At radio station KPFA in Berkeley, a listener-supported station of the Pacifica Foundation, a receptionist slit open a plain white envelope amid the morning mail and pulled out what first appeared to be a news release. Then she saw the name Patricia Campbell Hearst. It was another highly stylized communiqué (“arrest—not kidnap,” Nancy Ling Perry had scribbledin her notebook) from the “Court of the People” of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In full, it read:
SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY
WESTERN REGIONAL ADULT UNIT
Communique No. 3 February 4, 1974
Subject: Prisoners of War Warrant Order:
Arrest and protective
Target: Patricia Campbell Hearst— custody; and if resistance execution
daughter of Randolph A. Hearst corporate enemy of the people
Warrant Issued By:
The Court of the People
On the afore stated date, combat elements of the United Federated Forces of The Symbionese Liberation Army armed with cyanide loaded weapons served an arrest warrant upon Patricia Campbell Hearst.
It is the order of this court that the subject be arrested by combat units and removed to a protective area of safety and only upon completion of this condition to notify Unit #4 to give communication of this action.
It is the directive of this court that during this action ONLY, no civilian elements be harmed if possible, and that warning shots be given. However, if any citizens attempt to aid the authorities or interfere with the implementation of this order, they shall be executed immediately.
This court hereby notifies the public and directs all combat units in the future to shoot to kill any civilian who attempts to witness or interfere with any operation conducted by the people’s forces against the fascist state.
Should any attempt be made by the authorities to rescue the prisoner, or to arrest or harm any S.L.A. elements, the prisoner is to be executed.
The prisoner is to be maintained in adequate physical and mental condition, and unharmed as long as these conditions are adhered to. Protective custody shall be composed of combat and medical units, to safeguard both the prisoner and her health.
All communications from this court MUST be published in full, in all newspapers, and all other forms of media. Failure to do so will endanger the safety of the prisoner.
Further communications will follow.
S.L.A.
DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT
THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
Paul Fischer, news director of KPFA, immediately telephoned Randolph Hearst and read him the text. There was no doubt it was a message from the kidnappers. The SLA had enclosed Patricia’s Mobil Oil credit card (actually in her father’s name), known to have been in her yellow leather wallet, which the kidnappers had taken.
The absence of a specific ransom demand in the initial message from the SLA bewildered and worried the victim’s father. “I hope whatever demands they make are the kind it is possible to fulfill,”
Hearst told reporters. “If they are political demands, it will be hard to do anything.” FBI Agent Bates pledged the bureau would “not take any action to jeopardize the victim . . . our first consideration is the safety of the girl,” he said.
The Hearsts’ hope that the SLA would quickly respond to their plea for some proof their daughter was alive dimmed as day after day went by with no word from the kidnappers. The search went on. In a remote section of Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies checked out abandoned coal mines after a citizen reported seeing two black men struggling with a white woman in the area. All over the state, police checked out tips.
An FBI sketch artist produced composite drawings of the trio that had abducted Patty. The sketch of one of the men closely resembled Donald DeFreeze; the drawing of the woman in some ways resembled Emily Harris. The drawing of the second man produced an archetypal Negroid face. Police and some reporters guessed it might be Wheeler—but it was a weak identification.
The identity of the second man became more and more of a mys- tery as the case developed.
Weed was released from the hospital on Saturday. He immediately moved in with the Hearst family. In TV interviews he reiterated his promise not to testify if Patty was freed. “I just hope that the Symbionese Liberation Army leadership makes demands that lead to a smooth transaction. I hope they realize that the Hearst family has only a limited ability to effect any political demands that might be made,” said Weed. “What I mean is, if they’re talking of letting prisoners go, the Hearsts look at the situation as a family problem, but California and the FBI see it in a larger context. And it’s the state that has the final word on political demands.”
Weed’s remarks were in response to growing speculation that the next communiqué from the SLA would be a demand that its two soldiers confined at San Quentin prison, Little and Remiro, be released in exchange for freeing Miss Hearst. The idea of such a trade demand seemed—to the Hearsts—painfully likely. There was the broad hint in Nancy Perry’s “open letter,” and already in the hands of investigators were drafts of two “warrants,” discovered in the Sutherland Court hideout, in which the SLA planned to demand the release of the group of prisoners known as the San Quentin Six in exchange for kidnapped business executives.
From Florida another deal for the kidnappers was proposed.
Jack Little, the father of Russ Little, offered to take Patricia’s place as hostage. It was only the first of several well-meaning but almost surrealistic pleas from parents of the SLA members which showed they had no comprehension of what their children were into, no sense of being part of “the People” the SLA spoke for.
Hearst appeared visibly haggard at another news conference on February 1 1—one week after the kidnapping. There was still no further word from the SLA. “If it’s an attempt to make us feel badly,” he said, “they are succeeding very well.”
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LAST UPDATED SEPTEMBER 17, 2002