Fifty Years Later Patty Hearst Is Still Making News
By Roger Rapoport with Francine Brevetti
Bay City News/Local News Matters
What is Patty Hearst saying today about what happened. How does she explain it?“ asked Jerry Brown, California’s 36-year-old governor when she was arrested, tried and convicted for a San Francisco bank robbery. He remains as curious as the rest of us about the most famous kidnapping victim in California history.
Overlooking olive groves alongside his solar powered ranch house, Brown, 86, is asking the same question heard in homes and libraries, bookstores, police departments, courthouses and just about anywhere true crime stories are welcome. The subject of endless books, articles, documentaries, podcasts and films, the case remains an enigma.
Half a century after Hearst served 22 months in prison, where she dealt with the indignity of discovering rats in her bed, the debate over her guilt or innocence continues. Today it’s clear that no one has all the answers, not even the surviving protagonists. Even small details like the 2018 parole of the last imprisoned United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) member Joseph Remiro were not known to the public until I was told about them a few weeks ago.
Like Brown, everyone I’ve been speaking to on a golden anniversary statewide tour for my new book “Searching for Patty Hearst,” wants to know secrets that might shed light on this case that amounts to a kind of national Rorschach test. Today the public remains divided on the question of whether the 19-year-old University of California, Berkeley art major was brainwashed.
It’s still hard to tell why Hearst joined her SLA kidnappers on three California bank robberies in 1974 and 1975. We still don’t know why she participated in the kidnapping of a Los Angeles high school student.
It remains hard to explain why she covered and possibly saved the life of her kidnapper Bill Harris with over 80 rounds from a pair of M1 carbines, including a fully automatic model she had never trained on.
While Patty Hearst is not giving interviews today, many other eyewitnesses are opening up for the first time. Here are some previously undisclosed details I’ve learned on my “Searching for Patty Hearst” author tour.
During the time she was being sought by a vast FBI network for her participation in a San Francisco bank robbery, Patty hid out on a private Hearst family ranch near San Simeon, the legendary 115-room coastal estate created by her famous grandfather, William Randolph Hearst.
Patty’s father Randy [Randolph Apperson] worked secretly with inmates at San Quentin to put them on national television to plead for his daughter’s release at the same time he refused to pay a ransom.
Randy Hearst also wrote a sizable check as part of an out-of-court settlement with the family of a victim fatally shot during a Carmichael bank robbery Patty helped organize and execute. But she was not one of the shooters.
After being rescued with her lover Steve Soliah from the bottom of a steep cliff above Thornton State Beach near San Francisco, Patty, still on the run, gave authorities fake identification and fled to avoid arrest.
A revolutionary from Weather Underground made a desperate attempt to persuade the SLA to release Patty just hours before six of their members were blown away by the Los Angeles police.
SLA founder Donald DeFreeze tried to recruit University of California students by giving them automatic weapons at secret basement meetings in Oakland.
Documenting these stories from interviews and cross checking with other sources provides insights not found in Hearst’s own 400-page book, tie-in film and interviews she gave to promote them.
Here are more details:
Randy Hearst’s special late-night emissary to SLA San Quentin inmates
Perhaps the most misunderstood figure in the Hearst case is Patty’s doting father Randy, who taught her how to shoot when she was 9. In hostile communiques written after she chose to “stay and fight” with the SLA, she denounced the Hearst Corporation executive for failing to pay a multimillion-dollar ransom drawn from the coffers of this multibillion-dollar corporation. While on the run, Patty never knew about his secret back-channel effort to persuade incarcerated SLA members to make a public case for her release.
This effort, channeled through one of Randy’s attorneys, focused on a deal with two SLA members, Russell Little and Joseph Remiro.
At the time, Remiro and Little were in San Quentin State Prison awaiting trial for the November 1973 murder of Oakland public schools superintendent Marcus Foster. The fate of these two men, who claimed they were innocent, had been a focal point of SLA communiques and one of the reasons Hearst was kidnapped.
While a prisoner exchange was impossible, Randy Hearst attempted to architect a deal via one of the top targets on the original SLA hit list, California Department of Corrections director Raymond Procunier.
To their utter amazement, Remiro and Little received a phone call from a friend at Folsom State Prison, Clifford Jefferson (aka “Death Row Jeff”) on the afternoon of Feb. 21, 1974. He wanted to make a seemingly impossible hour and a half journey to San Quentin for a secret meeting.
Late that night, Little and Remiro were removed from their cells, inexplicably taken to the prison gas chamber for an hour and then driven by FBI agents outside the gate to the San Quentin hobby shop. Both men feared they were going to be shot for trying to escape.
It was there, early on the morning of Feb. 22, that heavily guarded Death Row Jeff and Procunier met with astonished Little and Remiro.
When they asked why the state official had decided to surprise them without notifying their attorneys, the head of the Department of Corrections explained that he was present as “an emissary of Patricia Hearst’s father.”
In the middle of the night, they proceeded to discuss a deal that would give Little and Remiro 15 minutes of national television time. The quid pro quo was Patty’s release in exchange for giving the two SLA inmates a chance to plead for safer jail treatment and a fair trial.
Little and Remiro’s lawyers, who were not at the meeting in the wee hours, presented the offer to the court with the support of Patty’s father. The two judges handling the case shot this offer down.
Details about a secret meeting at San Quentin prison between an emissary for Patty Hearst’s father and incarcerated Symbionese Liberation Army members in February 1974 have emerged. (Courtesy Roger Rapoport)
Hiding in plain sight
While the FBI checked out many remote leads, including abandoned mines in Colorado, Hearst spent much of her fugitive time hiding without other SLA members.
For example, in the San Luis Obispo area, a retired employee who worked at the Hearst ranch disclosed that the family property is one location that a vast FBI task force failed to stake out.
This news that Patty was sleeping and eating on Hearst property close to San Simeon, the 38-bedroom national historic landmark that attracts more than 600,000 visitors annually, suggests we still have more to learn about her flight time.
Giving the left a bad name
Rick Ayers, a former University of Michigan classmate, reached out to me after a Berkeley Historical Society event about his attempt to save the SLA.
Over coffee just blocks from the Berkeley townhouse where Patty was kidnapped, he told me: “I was underground with the Weathermen at the time they fled the Bay Area for Los Angeles. I believed that the SLA killing of Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst were giving the left a bad name. I didn’t know where they were hiding in Los Angeles, and I began driving around trying to find their safe house. My fear was that if they didn’t surrender Patty, it was going to turn out badly.”
On May 17, 1974, six SLA members, including DeFreeze, died in a firefight with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Ranger Don to the rescue
I also spoke at length to California Ranger Donald Scott, who contacted me about his role in the March 1975 Thornton State Beach Park rescue of Patty Hearst, who was on a coastal outing with Steve Soliah, her house painting partner and lover.
(Soliah, his sisters and several others were helping keep Hearst and the Harrises safe and alive after the huge Los Angeles shootout. The Hearst-Soliah romance began after the gunfight, which resulted in the death of Willie Wolfe, the SLA member Patty called the “gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”)
Hearst, who canceled her engagement to Berkeley philosophy student Steven Weed shortly after she was kidnapped, was wearing a disguise and carrying a fake ID when Scott called in the Daly City Police and Daly City Fire Rescue Team to rescue her from a spot 50 feet down a steep cliff.
Scott told me: “She was perched with a dog on a cliff shelf above an abandoned highway near the ocean. While we waited for the fire rescue team, this frantic male (Steve Soliah) ran down the trail next to the cliff and began trying to direct the rescue operation. He tried to call us off insisting they didn’t need help. After she was brought up to safety, the man was nearly hysterical, insisting they had to leave right away. I hiked up the trail to see if the couple had left. They had.
“I asked a police officer if she’d given an address. ‘Yes,’ they had. ‘Better check it,’ I replied. He did so, then said, ‘It’s a phony address.’”
In an email conversation with me on Feb. 19, Patty’s kidnapper Bill Harris added: “We (Harris and his wife Emily) all learned about their close call later that day when they returned to a safe house we were all using. Hearst and Soliah thought it was pretty funny; however, they were criticized for the obvious security lapse that led to their unnecessary encounter with law enforcement. The citation was in the fake name Patty was using at the time and matched an ID she carried in her purse when she was arrested on Sept. 18, 1975.”
A recruiting session
After a book talk in San Francisco, a Berkeley student who wishes to remain anonymous shared this story about driving with a prison reform group to Vacaville State Prison in 1973 to distribute Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book,” and more:
“At the time, incarcerated persons were considered by some to be the vanguard of the revolution. Later that year, I was invited to attend a meeting in West Oakland. It was early evening and I arrived at a small Victorian three-story house and was escorted down to a basement apartment. In the main room were about 20 chairs neatly set up in a U-shape. Soon thereafter, the only Black man in the room emerged. That was the infamous SLA leader Cinque (the alias of DeFreeze) who welcomed all the assembled sisters and brothers. After a speech about the revolution, etc., he introduced us to weapons. There, on my lap, were many types of guns, automatic weapons. I freaked out. I had never even seen a real gun, let alone one anywhere near me. I politely excused myself and got the hell out of there. Next thing I hear is that Dr. Foster, Oakland’s superintendent of education, is assassinated with the ‘group’ taking credit.”
“On Feb. 5, 1974, as I was standing on a bus reading the news that this group, the SLA, had kidnapped Patty Hearst, very close to my office, I got off the bus still shaken. As I’m standing on the corner, a car comes down University Avenue, slows down, a head emerges from the sunroof, and Wendy Yoshimura (one of the SLA stalwarts) shouts, ‘call me!’ I was completely terrified.”
Another leftist activist speaks
Near the end of my author tour, I heard from Bill Ayers, a onetime member of Students for a Democratic Society. In a phone call, he told me he “didn’t think what the SLA was about was exactly right, or good at organizing.”
But he added, “However, I was impressed by their Oakland People in Need free food giveaway.”
Ayers, who was living underground in the Bay Area at the time, says he stood in the People in Need giveaway line and received groceries with two other SDS members while “talking to working class people. I thought the SLA demand that Hearst give food to the people was reparations and (presented) a great image.”
https://localnewsmatters.org/2024/03/06/50-years-later-patty-hearst-is-still-making-news/