Patty Hearst Kidnapping

Case background and investigation

On the evening of February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Patricia Campbell Hearst, granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted at gunpoint from the Berkeley, California, apartment she shared with her fiance. Her captors were the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small, self-styled urban guerrilla group led by escaped convict Donald DeFreeze, who used the name "Cinque." The kidnappers initially demanded the release of two jailed SLA members, Joseph Remiro and Russell Little, and later pressed the wealthy Hearst family into distributing millions of dollars in food to the poor.

Roughly two months into her captivity, the case took an extraordinary turn. In an audiotape released on April 3, 1974, Hearst announced that she had joined the SLA of her own free will and had taken the revolutionary name "Tania." On April 15, 1974, bank surveillance cameras captured her wielding an M1 carbine during an armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco's Sunset District. Weeks later, on May 16, she fired an automatic weapon outside Mel's Sporting Goods in Los Angeles to help two fellow SLA members, William and Emily Harris, escape a shoplifting arrest.

The next day, May 17, 1974, police surrounded an SLA safe house in South Los Angeles. In a televised shootout in which thousands of rounds were fired, six SLA members, including DeFreeze, died from gunfire, smoke inhalation, and the fire that engulfed the house. Hearst, the Harrises, and others were not present and remained fugitives. During this period the group committed further crimes, including the April 21, 1975, robbery of a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, near Sacramento, during which customer Myrna Lee Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, was shot and killed.

The FBI arrested Hearst in San Francisco on September 18, 1975. Her trial became a national spectacle centered on a single question: was she a willing revolutionary or a victim who had been kidnapped, isolated, and coerced into compliance? Her defense, led by attorney F. Lee Bailey, argued she had been brainwashed and acted under duress. Prosecutors portrayed her as a willing participant. On March 20, 1976, a federal jury convicted her of armed bank robbery and using a firearm during the commission of a felony. She was sentenced to 35 years, later reduced to 7 years.

The debate over coercion versus consent shaped the aftermath. President Jimmy Carter commuted Hearst's federal sentence on February 1, 1979, after she had served about 22 months in prison. On January 20, 2001, his last day in office, President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon, restoring her civil rights.

The surviving SLA members eventually faced justice for the Opsahl killing. In 2002, William and Emily Harris, Sara Jane Olson (formerly Kathleen Soliah, a longtime fugitive arrested in 1999), and others pleaded guilty to second-degree murder; sentences were handed down in 2003, with Emily Harris, who admitted firing the fatal shot, receiving eight years. Patricia Hearst, meanwhile, rebuilt a private life, married her former bodyguard, raised a family, and later appeared in films and became known as a champion show-dog breeder. Her case remains one of the most cited real-world examples in discussions of coercion, captivity, and the psychological phenomenon sometimes called Stockholm syndrome.