Kidnapper Bill Harris on Patty Hearst

“The spontaneous act of a true comrade.” The media heiress’s kidnapper on the day she may have saved his life.

By Roger Rapoport with Francine Brevetti

Bay City News/Local News Matters

Half a century ago, kidnapper Bill Harris and his victim Patty Hearst robbed banks, carjacked and kidnapped a Lynwood, California high school student, eluded SWAT teams and swarms of FBI agents, survived on horse meat, fled cross country, and may well have saved each other’s lives. 

Today, after both served jail time, were paroled and rehabilitated, all they have in common are their dogs: Bill’s small Hawaiian mutt Cisco and Patty’s French bulldogs that have highlighted kennel club contests at venues like Madison Square Garden. 

Fifty years after the crimes that made them infamous and helped turn Stockholm Syndrome into a pop psych phenomenon, Hearst, 70, shuttles between homes in the New York area and Charleston, South Carolina.  

An actress, author and philanthropist, she has tried, with the help of her daughters and siblings, to find a way to break open her famous grandfather’s top secret will without being disinherited. 

Although I’m still waiting to hear back from her, Bill, 79, wrote me tongue in cheek in January about the artificial intelligence cover for my new book, “Searching for Patty Hearst,” that made his former Symbionese Liberation Army comrade drop dead gorgeous. 

“How come she got the makeover?” he asked.  “I’m the one who needed it.” 

A computer-assisted image of Patty Hearst looks good on the cover of Roger Rapoport’s book. (Courtesy Lexographic Press.)  

On a California book tour, my publisher James Sparling and I met Harris in Berkeley. Later he showed up near the end of my Green Apple Books talk in San Francisco, where the spouse of a lawyer he worked for spotted him instantly.   

Turns out Harris was a receptionist at her law firm and a dependable babysitter for their children. 

During a series of subsequent conversations, Harris, in his only interview on the 50th anniversary of the Hearst kidnapping, spoke about subjects that were off limits when I last interviewed him for the Oakland Tribune in 1988.  

The former SLA member and Vietnam War vet was quick to thank Hearst for her rapid response on May 16, 1974. As he was being tackled by security guards for allegedly shoplifting at an Inglewood Sporting Goods Store, Hearst opened fire from a van in his defense. 

“Of all the people in the SLA who could have covered me and helped me escape, she was my first choice, a great shot. She saved my bacon. As we fled the scene she asked me, ‘What the f— was that about?’” 

While I was covering the kidnapping story, Hearst’s fiancé Steve Weed, a University of California, Berkeley philosophy graduate student, lived with Patty’s family. In the summer of 1974, he moved into my Berkeley home where we spent months working on a book for Ballantine that was never published. 

Today, Bill’s files, and memory, supplemented by my own research, other interviews and documents, shed light on Hearst’s decision to reject more than a year of easy opportunities to flee the SLA and return home armed. 

“There were many factors that influenced Patty’s decision to ‘stay and fight,’” says Harris, who had a ringside seat to the case beginning on the Feb. 4, 1974 evening he kidnapped the 19-year-old UC Berkeley art student. 

“What we didn’t know when we kidnapped her was that she had rejected her mother, a gold-digger and right-wing ideologue.” 

She was also having serious doubts about marrying Hearst-in-waiting Steve Weed, who was fascinated with the precious Hearst rugs and artwork that had become a kind of dowry ahead of their June wedding. 

“Talking with the feminist women of the SLA confirmed her fears about going back to Weed.” Harris said. “She fell in love with one of the SLA men, Willie Wolfe.” 

Harris believes the failure of Patty Hearst’s father Randy [Randolph A. Hearst], chair of the multibillion-dollar Hearst Corporation, to ransom her for a sum in the low millions, was one of the reasons she decided to run with the SLA. 

“Patty was the son Randy never had. They had always been close. Listening to the radio, she couldn’t believe he refused to meet our demands. 

“Our group trained her on a sawed-off shotgun that would have been given to her to defend herself if we were encircled by the FBI. Releasing her would have been good propaganda for the SLA. Our intent was to not have her stay with us. I spent hours trying to convince her that remaining with the SLA would get her killed. 

“Her problem was she couldn’t go back to the damaged apartment she shared with Weed, who she chose not to marry. The last thing she wanted to do was go to the macabre Felliniesque media spectacle at her home where Weed and the FBI agents were staying. 

“On March 31, the group chose to let her make her own decision. After Patty chose to remain with us, we took off our face masks and she saw all of us for the first time. 

“There was something else that most people don’t know. We were, with the exception of doctor’s son Wolfe, pretty much middle class. 

“Patty enjoyed an ultra-privileged background. She taped devastating communiques published on the front page of her father’s San Francisco Examiner and broadcast, per our demands, on television and radio stations verbatim.  

“It was a publicity bonanza for our cause, the ‘liberation of colonized, marginalized, and oppressed people everywhere.’ 

“She was able to attack the family and the Hearst Corp. from firsthand experience. Much of what she had to say about the Vietnam War, racism, feminism, automation and the corporate power structure resonates today. She became an important, credible and inspiring ally. 

“In these powerful recordings, she voiced outrage about her father’s absurd claims of relative penury leaving the family unable to meet our ransom demands. Patty knew her father was not being honest. 

“She was stunned that [her mother] Catherine was close to [Ronald] Reagan, who voiced the hope that recipients of groceries from Hearst’s multimillion dollar People In Need ransom program would become victims of an ‘epidemic of botulism.’” 

After joining the SLA bank robbery at San Francisco’s Hibernia bank on April 15, Hearst transitioned from being a kidnap victim to a wanted felon. 

“San Francisco was getting hot,” says Harris. “When we went down to Los Angeles the nine of us divided into three units.   She, Emily, and I were a team.  We left the safe house to shop for the SLA at a sporting goods store.  That decision saved her life and ours, but evidence from those events (a parking ticket) ultimately led the Feds and LAPD to our comrades who had set up refuge on East 54th Street. 

“With four weapons and keys in the ignition, she could have driven off while I was being tackled by store security guards for allegedly shoplifting. Instead, she unexpectedly opened fire to rescue us. This was the spontaneous act of a true comrade that put her in great jeopardy.” 

A day later, on May 17, 1974, six of the SLA members, including Patty’s lover Wolfe, perished in a Los Angeles Police Department firefight. In hiding at an Anaheim motel near Disneyland, Hearst and the Harrises joined a worldwide audience watching live television coverage of the biggest shootout to ever take place on American soil.   

“By now, Patty fully understood the risks of trying to turn herself in,” says Harris. “We began traveling separately across the country, a pattern that continued for the next 16 months. For much of that time we didn’t even know where Patty was living. That was done for security reasons.” 

A rendezvous for two April 1975 bank robberies in the Sacramento area was followed by more time apart. This was one of the key facts defeating the brainwashing theory presented by Hearst’s attorney F. Lee Bailey in her San Francisco bank robbery trial. 

“Bailey replaced the Hallinans, the leftist attorneys originally chosen by Patty’s father,” says Harris.  “That was due to family influence, especially her mother’s.” 

After Patty’s parents and relatives sat in on the private jury selection in the courtroom of Judge Oliver Carter, a family friend who knew Patty as a little girl, her defense collapsed. 

Patty concluded that Bailey was drunk during his disastrous closing argument that bombed with the jury. From jail, she worked overtime with the well-financed family lobbying team behind the Committee to Free Patty Hearst. 

Harris says: “The entire case made to President Jimmy Carter for a commutation was built around Bailey’s closing argument that we had somehow ‘monsterized’ Patty, which was not true. The reason the jury convicted her was that under Bailey’s guidance she was a hopeless witness, taking the fifth over and over again.” 

Hearst’s seven-year sentence was commuted by President Carter after she served 22 months.  The Harrises were convicted in Los Angeles on kidnapping and carjacking charges and pled guilty in the Hearst kidnapping case. 

Ironically, they were never charged or tried for the San Francisco bank robbery.  

“Patty was the sole surviving SLA member caught on camera during the bank robbery,” says Harris.  “Emily and I were outside in getaway cars.” 

Bill Clinton, in his last official act as president, pardoned Patty in 2001. The following year the Harrises were back in Sacramento. This time they were indicted with three other participants in a 1975 Carmichael, California bank robbery. All five were sentenced after pleading guilty to second degree murder charges in the death of a customer, Myrna Opsahl, shot when Emily’s gun accidentally discharged.   

Like Bill Harris, Patty was outside the bank during the robbery and shooting. Although she helped plan this bank robbery and rode shotgun in a getaway car, she was never charged in this case. 

After threatening to bring a civil suit, the Opsahl family settled out of court with all involved in the robbery for $300,000. One of the major settlement checks was written by Randy Hearst. 

After our last San Francisco talk ended in the Richmond District, Harris drove me across the Bay Bridge. In the distance I spotted the illuminated Campanile towering above the Berkeley campus like a white exclamation point. 

Due to her kidnapping, Patty never had a chance to graduate from the university her mother helped rule. She never received her art degree at commencement in the Hearst Greek Theatre, gifted by her grandfather. 

This famous venue was inaugurated in 1903 with a performance of Aristophanes’ “The Birds,” perhaps best known for introducing a kind of utopia in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

“There is no question,” Harris said just before dropping me off, “that our decision to kidnap Patty Hearst created an opportunity for her to voice her own misgivings about the power structure continuing to dominate American life. 

“While she was never a revolutionary, the devastating ruling class critiques she wrote about the Hearsts made sense then and still do today.  She articulated what is broken in America and needs to be fixed.” 

https://localnewsmatters.org/2024/03/06/the-spontaneous-act-of-a-true-comrade-patty-hearsts-sla-kidnapper-bill-harris-on-the-day-she-may-have-saved-his-life/

Visit pattyhearst.com for more details on the book “Searching for Patty Hearst.”