Fifty years after the heiress to the Hearst newspaper empire was kidnapped by a radical left wing group, one of its members has come forward to share chilling new details about the heinous crime.
Patty Hearst was a 19-year-old art history student at UC Berkeley when two armed confederates with the Symbionese Liberation Army broke into her apartment, beat her fiancé senseless and stuffed her – bound, gagged and blindfolded – inside the trunk of a Chevy Impala.
William ‘Bill’ Harris was the man who carried Hearst on the night of February 4, 1974.
He went on to spend a year and a half on the run from authorities, taking refuge in various safehouses with the young woman still in his clutches. But months later, Hearst’s allegiances switched and in a bizarre turn of events, she denounced her wealthy parents as ‘pig Hearsts’ and joined the group that kidnapped her.
‘I thought, “Why would you want to go from being an heiress to being targeted for assassination by the government?”‘ Harris told the Los Angeles Times. ‘I spent hours trying to convince her that staying with us was a bad idea.’
Patty Hearst, left in 1983 and right in 2012, was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a Bay Area radical socialist group. She was targeted because she was the heiress to the Hearst newspaper fortune, making her a symbol of the bourgeoise to them. She eventually joined up with the organization and committed acts of terror
William ‘Bill’ Harris, once a member of the SLA, claimed in a new interview that he tried to convince Hearst to leave the group. He also says she did what she did of her own free will
Harris claims the SLA was not planning to keep Hearst forever. The group was inspired to kidnap her in the first place by the Tupamaros, Uruguayan Marxists who frequently staged eye-catching abductions.
Harris has previously said the SLA kidnapped Hearst because she ‘was a symbolic target, she was an heiress.’
‘Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the US government.
‘We had already determined that Hearst was a particularly easy target and that the propaganda that could be generated from it was perfect.’
One goal they had was to do a sort of prisoner swap, trading Hearst for two SLA members who had been arrested for fatally shooting an Oakland school superintendent with cyanide tipped bullets.
This scheme apparently went nowhere.
‘She was gonna go home and explain her captivity in the People’s Prisons we set up for her,’ said Harris, a Vietnam veteran with an undergraduate degree in theater and a masters in urban education from Indiana University. ‘That would have been good propaganda. That’s what I thought it should be.’
Hearst is pictured alongside her fiancé Steven Weed, who struck up his romance with her when she was 16 and he was 23
Pictured: The Chevy Impala that was used by SLA members to kidnap Hearst
But the group’s plans never came to fruition and Hearst began to identify with them.
‘She hated her mother,’ Harris explained, saying she was upset then-California Governor Ronald Reagan had reappointed her mother Catherine Hearst to the UC Board of Regents.
‘She didn’t want to go home,’ he added.
Before Hearst’s unexpected transformation into a fervent member who was willing to commit armed bank robberies for the group, the SLA used her as a bargaining chip to advance their own socialist ideals.
The SLA immediately claimed responsibility for kidnapping Hearst and issued threatening demands to the Hearst family via audio tapes – such as feeding the poor with their vast wealth.
Her father Randolph Apperson Hearst, the then-publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, funneled $2 million to the People in Need program in a desperate act to save his daughter.
Hearst is pictured holding a gun in front of an SLA banner displaying its symbolic seven-headed cobra
On February 22, People in Need began distributing the high quality meats, produce and dairy products bought with Hearst family ransom money. Because of how disorganized the organizers were, a riot formed
On February 22, People in Need began distributing the high quality meats, produce and dairy products bought with Hearst family ransom money.
The streets of San Francisco were soon flooded with rioters as unprepared organizers flung food from the back of trucks to the mobs of people surrounding them.
Reagan reportedly bashed these handouts at a private luncheon with Republican leaders in Washington D.C.
‘It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism,’ he was quoted as saying.
Organizers continued to hand out food until March 27, when the Hearst money finally ran out.
The family’s plan to free their daughter was all for naught, because on April 3, the SLA released a video tape of Hearst, who said she had joined their fight to free the oppressed, according to the FBI.
This is when she first started going by her alter ego: ‘Tania.’
Harris is pictured leaving the Alameda County Courthouse at night on Thursday, August 31, 1978 in Oakland, California after he and his wife, Emily, pleaded guilty to kidnapping Hearst
Harris, pictured during the Vietnam War, would later be convicted for robbing Hibernia Bank in San Francisco
The SLA then took matters a step further and staged a robbery of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco that led to two passersby being shot and wounded.
They picked this bank because they knew its security cameras would pick up Hearst invading the lobby with a M1 Carbine machine gun.
Images from the heist went a long way to convincing many that Hearst had truly abandoned her privileged roots in favor of a philosophy directed by youth revolt and leftist militancy.
To further bolster that view, the SLA released yet another tape featuring Hearst, only this time she was bragging about the crime.
‘Greetings to the people, this is Tania,’ her voice began. ‘On April 15, my comrades and I expropriated $10,660.02 from the Sunset branch of Hibernia Bank. Casualties could have been avoided had the persons involved kept out of the way and cooperated with the people’s forces until after our departure.’
Her allegiance to the SLA only became more clear a month later, when a clerk at an Inglewood sporting goods store attempted to handcuff Harris for trying to steal an ammunition belt.
As he and the employee tussled outside on the sidewalk, Hearst sprayed bullets at the storefront from a get-away van, allowing Harris and his wife, Emily, to escape.
Surveillance video from the Hibernia Bank captured Hearst holding a rifle, just as the SLA wanted
‘I figured she’d be smart and head on back to the safehouse,’ Harris said. ‘She picked up my machine gun, and she fired a burst of about 10 rounds, and some of the bullets hit about two feet from my face.’
This act of loyalty from Hearst only led to the demise of the SLA because police were able to identify the van.
Authorities followed the vehicle back to a yellow house on East 54th Street in South Los Angeles and by the next day, Los Angeles police surrounded the area.
Hearst, along with Harris and his wife, were not at the safehouse during the ensuing firefight between cops and the SLA members. Eventually, the LAPD launched tear gas before the house went up in flames.
Six SLA members were killed, including its leader Donald DeFreeze.
Harris watched the battle from an Anaheim hotel room not too far from Disneyland and has no doubt he and Hearst would have died if they were there.
‘We all made choices to do something that we knew full well was likely to get us killed,’ he said.
The SLA was essentially finished, but the three remaining survivors were still fugitives of the law. And they needed money.
Pictured: The home that burned to the ground with Six SLA members, including its leader Donald DeFreeze
Police sifted through the rubble after the firefight
After the safehouse was destroyed, the FBI launched a manhunt for Harris, his then-wife Emily Harris and Hearst
This led them to rob a bank in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb, in April 1975 – during which Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, was killed by a shotgun blast.
In Hearst’s 1982 memoir, she accuses Emily Harris of deriding Opsahl as a ‘bourgeois pig’ and firing the shot that killed her.
‘I feel horrible about what happened to Myrna Opsahl,’ Harris said. ‘That’s what bothers me most. There’s horrible collateral damage when you embrace tactics like that.’
When the FBI finally caught Hearst in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, she initially held true to her revolutionary persona, calling herself an ‘urban guerrilla.’
But ‘Tania’ quickly vanished once she went on trial in 1976 for Hibernia bank robbery, and instead claimed she had been brainwashed the whole time by the SLA.
The cornerstone of her defense was her assertion that she’d been raped by SLA members Willie Wolfe and DeFreeze.
Harris vehemently denies this to this day and the government did not appear to believe her either.
Harris went on to plead the Fifth 42 times so she would not have to answer questions about her so-called ‘lost year,’ 1975, which included the robbery in Carmichael.
She was convicted and later sentenced to seven years in prison. She only served two after her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter at the behest of the Hearst family.
Hearst, now 70, married her bodyguard after her release, started a family and released her memoir. She also got roles in several movies directed by John Waters.
Hearst’s FBI mugshot after she was apprehended
Hearst is escorted by U.S. marshals while leaving San Francisco Federal building where she was on trial in 1976. Hearst’s sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton
Hearst at the Federal Correctional Institute in California, January 1979. After disappearing for 19 months she was jailed for crimes including an armed bank robbery, but President Carter later signed a commutation order to allow her release in February 1979
Harris served about eight years for his crimes, after which he remarried, raised two boys and began working as a private investigator for defense attorneys in the Bay Area.
He is now retired and living in San Francisco, the city he once terrorized.
‘You can be an ex-terrorist and be rehabilitated, and be appreciated, because s*** like that happens here,’ he said.
More prosecutions would eventually come for the members of the SLA who participated in the Carmichael robbery thanks to the persistence of Jon Opsahl, Myrna Opsahl’s son.
He was only 15 when his mother was killed, and he’s had decades to think over Hearst’s culpability.
Surprisingly, he has concluded that she is ‘probably as much a victim of the SLA as I am.’
‘She suffered big-time in the kidnapping, and the brutality and the rapes,’ said Opsahl, a retired doctor. ‘That must have gone on for weeks, long enough to affect a young, naïve, overly sheltered 19-year-old out of Berkeley.’
When another former SLA member was arrested in 1999, prosecutors decided to take a look at the case files on the group.
For going on 25 years, the effort to bring the Carmichael robbers to justice had gone cold.
Jon Opsahl speaks directly to former members of the SLA during their 2003 sentencing hearing for his mother’s murder during a 1975 bank robbery. A picture of his mother sits on an easel to his left
Harris stands up in court and apologizes to the family members of Myrna Opsahl for his role in her death. He served four years in prison for being the getaway driver
The gang of four had been wearing ski masks throughout the commission of the crime, making it impossible to identify them at first.
In the years since 1975, FBI forensic investigators developed a new technique in tracing shotgun pellets.
Using the technique, prosecutors were then able to tie the shotgun pellets found in Myrna Opsahl’s body to other shotgun shells that were found at a SLA hideout.
Even so, Sacramento prosecutors were reticent to take on the case at first. But thanks to a public pressure campaign led by Jon Opsahl, the case would eventually go forward.
On November 7, 2002, over 27 years after the crime, four SLA members pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Myrna Opsahl, including Harris and his ex-wife Emily.
Emily, herself remarried, admitted to firing the shotgun and got eight years in prison.
Harris copped to being the getaway driver and would ultimately serve four years.
Harris believes prosecutors didn’t want a trial to avoid the spectacle of Hearst taking the stand.
He said he would have been prepared to act as his own lawyer and grill Hearts about the activities during her so-called ‘lost year.’
‘What the Hearsts wanted to do more than anything is preserve the narrative that she didn’t do any of this on her own free will,’ he said.
‘It would be me taking her through every day that she spent with us for 19 months. I knew they would find some way to make us an offer we couldn’t refuse.’
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