Infamous America - PATTY HEARST Ep. 1 | “The SLA”

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

On February 4, 1974, strangers burst into the college apartment of Patty Hearst and kidnap her at gunpoint. While she begins her stay in captivity, she learns about her kidnappers. They are a ragtag collection of hopeful revolutionaries who call themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. They are led by charismatic Donald DeFreeze, an escaped convict who helped the group execute a high-profile murder in Oakland, California. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons:  blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Hit “JOIN” on the Infamous America YouTube homepage.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4V_wVD7N1gEB045t7-V0w/featured For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the evening of Monday, February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Patricia Hurst sat down at the kitchen table of her Berkeley, California apartment. She and her fiancée, Stephen Weed, opened their books to study. Around 9 p.m., the doorbell rang. Stephen got up and answered the door. Patty couldn't see the doorway from where she sat, but she could hear a woman's agitated voice. The woman said she had been in a car accident, and she asked her. to borrow their phone. Just then, from behind the woman, two men pushed their way into the apartment. One was a short, somewhat stocky white man. The other was a thinner black man. Both of them pointed

guns at Stephen Weed. The woman produced a pistol, pointed it at Patty Hurst, and backed her into the kitchen. The woman clamped her hand over Patty's mouth and told her nobody would get hurt if she was quiet. Then the stocky white man took over. He pushed Patty onto the floor and tied her hands behind her back. Stephen Weed begged the intruders to just take whatever they wanted. Patty tried to yell, but her captor thrust a dirty rag into her mouth. Then he wrapped a blindfold around her eyes and yanked her up to her feet. As she was pushed past the living room, she heard Stephen scream in pain. Patty managed to spit out her gag and scream at the top of her lungs as her abductors pushed her outside. Neighbors came out to see what was going on, and for a split second, Patty thought she might get help.

But then one of her captors fired a few bursts from his rifle. Glass shattered and doors slammed shut as her neighbors took cover. After that display, no one was going to risk leaving their home to help Patty Hurst. One of the men struck Patty on the left cheek with a rifle butt and she crumpled to the ground. She was just conscious enough to know that two of her abductors were dragging her down concrete stairs to the carport below. She could hear and feel the vibrations of a running car motor and knew that if she got into the vehicle, it was game over. Patty broke free for a moment and tried to back away from her captors. But the black man picked her up and threw her into the trunk of the car.

As it sped away and she lay there in the darkness, college student Patty Hurst asked herself the two questions anyone would ask. What the hell was going on and why? From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the incredible true story of the kidnapping of Patty Hurst and her possible transformation into a revolutionary of the 1970s.

This is episode one, the SLA. Just five minutes passed between the time the doorbell rang at Patty Hearst's apartment to the time Hurst found herself tied up in the trunk of a car. The teenager wriggled around and managed to get the rope off of her wrists and the blindfold off of her eyes. Then she had an idea. There were exposed wires right in front of her on the inside of the trunk. If she pulled them, she might be able to disable the taillights.

Then the police might pull them over and she could scream for help. But before Hearst had time to do anything, the car stopped. Someone opened the trunk and yanked her out. She was surrounded by several people whose faces she couldn't make out. Then one came into focus. It was the black man who had forced his way into her apartment. As Hurst cried to be let go, he screamed obscenities at her. He commanded another man to throw her onto the floor of another vehicle, a station wagon.

As the station wagon took off, she had a new piece of information. She had heard the others call the black man Sin Q, or Sin for short. But aside from that, all the other questions remained. Who was he? Why did he want to hurt her? Who were the rest of these people who took orders from him? It would take weeks for Hearst to learn the answers. And the story of those answers started two years earlier in the spring of 1972,

during some of the most chaotic events of the Vietnam War era. Hearst and her abductors came of age in the 1960s, when America was heavily embroiled in a war in Southeast Asia. There were several high-profile and terrifying political assassinations. There was President John F. Kennedy, then civil rights leader Malcolm X, then civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and then presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. On the flip side, there was optimism, too.

Segregation was fading. Women's rights were getting more attention than ever, and the economy boomed. The space race put men on the moon in 1969 and gave Americans a sense that anything was possible. Richard Nixon ran for president and gave assurances that he would stop the war in Vietnam. But when Nixon entered the White House in 1969, he didn't end the war in Vietnam as the country had hoped, but rather escalated the conflict into Cambodia. On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen fired on students during a protest rally at Kent State University,

killing four and severely wounding nine others. Radical groups emerged and took center stage in the media. One, called the Weather Underground, bombed several banks and government buildings to protest the Vietnam War and what it considered to be America's imperialist goals. The Black Panthers challenged police brutality against the African American community. They regularly took the top spots on the FBI's most wanted lists for bombings, gun running, and robberies.

And no place in America was more central to all the colliding forces than the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1967, San Francisco's Summer of Love featured a combination of music, drugs, and sex that established the city as the epicenter of American counterculture. In nearby Berkeley, the free speech movement at the University of California made at the center of student activism. Hundreds of thousands of young people poured into the region, looking for adventure and inclusive politics. But with the ever-increasing crowds came problems,

like crime, violence, and a lack of affordable housing. Worse, a bizarre killer kept the Bay Area, in the national spotlight. A man who portrayed himself as some sort of perverse counterculture figure killed at least five people and probably a lot more. After his cryptic communications

to a San Francisco newspaper, the press dubbed him the Zodiac Killer. It made sense that anybody in the early 70s who wanted to get lost somewhere in the excitement, politics, and violence of the time would head to San Francisco. And that's exactly what happened in 1972, with Donald DeFries.

Though Patty Hurst didn't know it yet, DeFries was the man called Sincu, who directed her kidnapping. Unlike so many others who ran to San Francisco to find something, Donald DeFries ran to San Francisco to get away from something. He was running from the law, and his goal was to reinvent himself as the leader of a violent movement that was designed to radically change American society.

Before he and his followers settled on, a plan to kidnap the granddaughter of one of the wealthiest men in American history, they made several other bloody attempts to achieve their goal. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then of course I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies.

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Mood.com promo code infamous. On the night Patty was kidnapped, she lay shivering and disoriented on the floor of the backseat of a station wagon. She kept asking what they planned to do with her. Finally, DeFries told her to shut up or he would blow her head off. A woman in the backseat reassured Hearst that they didn't plan to kill her. This reassurance, plus the fact that they'd kept her blindfolded, did give her a small sense of calm. She belonged to one of the wealthiest families in America. She figured they'd call her parents, demand a ransom, and then let her go.

But Donald DeFries and his followers had far bigger plans in mind. DeFrease was told. 30 years old and had run away from home at 14. He was arrested several times over the next couple years and then sent to reform school, which didn't do any good. Throughout most of the 1960s, DeFries traveled around the U.S. working odd jobs, mostly as a house painter and short-order cook, and formed an addiction to plum wine, which he drank incessantly. Law enforcement repeatedly picked up DeFries for theft of firearms and possession of bomb-making material. For reasons that aren't clear, he was always placed on probation and never received any serious punishment.

DeFries' criminal acts often showed his disordered thinking. In New Jersey in 1969, he and an accomplice kidnapped a caretaker at a synagogue. They wanted $5,000 from the rabbi for the legal fund of a Black Panther inmate. Strangely, they only demanded that the caretaker give them the rabbi's phone number, which was already listed in the phone book. In California, DeFries got arrested for paying a prostitute $10 for sex and then pulled a gun on her to get the money back. Next, he pistol-whipped a Hawaiian tourist in Los Angeles.

He stole a check from her purse and got caught when he tried to cash it two days later. After defending himself in court with predictably disastrous results, DeFries finally went to prison. He was sent to Vacaville about the three. 35 miles southwest of Sacramento. Vacaville prison was ground zero for DeFries' terrorist group. More specifically, it was a tall, awkward, 20-year-old white Berkeley student named Willie Wolf, who introduced black Vacaville prisoners, including DeFries, to several white student radicals.

In 1972, Wolf joined an experimental program called Black Cultural Association, sponsored by a Berkeley professor. The association promoted discussions with inmates about political science, black sociology, and African heritage. The program allowed socializing between inmates and would-be reformers. The idealistic students gravitated toward charismatic Donald DeFries. They went deep into the philosophies of revolutionary figures, and within a couple months they saw themselves as political organizers,

not teachers and students. And then in December 1972, DeFries was transferred from Vacaville to Soledad Prison 160 miles south. For good behavior, he earned a job off the main prison campus. On March 3, 1973, he walked through an open door, scaled a six-foot chain-link fence, and took off. He hitchhiked 130 miles north to Oakland to the crash pad of Willie Wood. For a time, DeFries stayed at Wolf's ramshackle house in Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco. Maybe because the police were overwhelmed by more pressing matters, they made virtually no attempt to find Donald DeFries. But DeFries didn't know that.

Over the next few months, his natural rage and paranoia deepened as he imagined the law was around every corner, even when it wasn't. Thinking at best if he moved around, DeFrease asked one of the white activist he'd met in Vacaville to help him find a new place to stay. He approached a man named Russ Little. In turn, Little steered him to the home of Patricia Soltizig. DeFries knew Saltisic from Vauquiville, too. He moved into her home in Berkeley and immediately began an intimate relationship with her. When activist Nancy Perry moved in a few months later, DeFries started a relationship.

with her as well. DeFries, Perry, and Soltysk stood in their radical political ideas and slept with each other. Soltizek worked at the Berkeley Public Library and gave all of her earnings to the household, as did Perry, who alternated waitressing with prostitution. DeFries came up with a name for a new political movement. He liked the noun symbiosis, so he turned it into the adjective symbionese. The group's goal was freedom. so he added liberation. Another goal was to wage war against the status quo with an army. Thus, the Symbionese Liberation Army was born. Now the army just needed to figure out how to start a war.

The Symbionese Liberation Army, called the SLA for short, came up with a visual symbol in the form of a seven-headed cobra, representing seven principles of African heritage. DeFries, Perry, and Saltizik, needed more people to implement what they thought of as their revolutionary ideas. Enter Russ Little, who had connected DeFries to Saltizik. Next came Little's friend, Joe Romero. Little and Romero both came from middle-class families and were hardly born to struggle.

But like so many other young people at the time, they reached the cusp of adulthood, deeply affected by the Vietnam War. Little was poised to graduate with an engineering degree in Florida, but changed his major to philosophy. He began writing for an underground newspaper and was appalled by the killings at Kent State. Romero did two tours of combat in Vietnam and came home with what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Both men found themselves wandering the Bay Area in the early 70s. They met each other at screenings of films about revolutionaries like Che Guevara. In the fall of 1973, Willie Wolf moved out of his Oakland, house and into an apartment with Romero. Russ Little had a girlfriend named Angela Atwood, an aspiring actress from Indiana. Atwood soon started a torrid affair with Romero, and the three were fined with the arrangement.

All of them spent their time cycling in and out of Saltizek's apartment. Donald DeFries rarely left the place. He was content to stay out of public view and have the others bring him food and his trademark plum wine. So that was the SLA in the fall of 1973. Donald DeFries, Willie Wolf, Patricia Saltizek, Nancy Perry, Russ Little, Joe Romero, and Angela Atwood. DeFrease was the oldest at 29, almost 30. The rest were in their early to mid-20s.

They followed the news obsessively and railed against the actions of the White House and law enforcement. Sometime in October of 1973, DeFries, Perry, and Soltizik rented a house together in Concord, California, a middle-class suburb of San Francisco. It was just 20 miles from Berkeley, but it might as well have been on the moon. The house was in a subdivision that was filled with typical American families who had pets and station wagons and who were not plotting violent revolution. It was a great cover for the SLA's activities.

DeFries wanted to introduce the world to the SLA with a violent act. He set his sights on the new Oakland Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Marcus Foster, and kicked off the series of events that led to the kidnapping of Patty Hurst. Foster took over as superintendent of Oakland School District in 1970. In 1973, Oakland renewed his contract for four more years. A black man who held considerable power to change the infrastructure of a major school system would, on the surface, have been caused for celebration. for someone like Donald D'Fries. Instead, D'Fries began to plan Foster's assassination. Foster's job was a tough one.

He had deftly managed Philadelphia's school district, which was three times larger, but it wasn't nearly as fraught with divisive politics. In Oakland, on the one hand, Foster had to appease Ronald Reagan, the conservative governor of California. On the other hand, Foster had to appease militant groups

like the Black Panthers, who wielded a lot of political power in the Bay Area. To address the problem of school violence in Oakland at the time, Foster announced that he was looking for help from the federal government. DeFries was enraged by the idea. He perceived it as Foster going along with a plan to police kids who were mostly black and poor. After a lot of boozy discussion, DeFries announced they would kill Marcus Foster. Around seven o'clock on the evening of November 6, 1973, Superintendent Marcus Foster and Deputy Superintendent Robert Blackburn left a school board meeting in Oakland. Foster planned to get a ride home from Blackburn, and the two headed toward his car in the dark parking lot. They noticed three figures lurking in the

lot, so they walked faster, but they weren't fast enough. Nancy Perry was the first to open fire on Marcus Foster. She missed with the first shot. but hit him in the leg with a second. Next, Donald DeFries fired twice from his shotgun, blasting Robert Blackburn in the back. Then Patricia Soltizek walked toward Foster, who was trying to make it to the safety of his colleague's car. She calmly fired at him repeatedly with a revolver.

As Marcus Foster lay face down on the pavement, unmoving, Soltizik fired a final shot into the back of his neck. Foster was long dead by the time an ambulance arrived. Amazingly, Robert Blackburn survived, even with 23 entry and exit wounds. DeFries, Perry, and Saltizek ran two blocks away, where Joe Romero and Russ Little waited in a getaway car. The next day, Berkeley radio station KPFA received a communique written by Perry. It said, in part, that the SLA killed Foster. to protest against the school district, and also the practices of American-financed puppet governments

in Vietnam and elsewhere. The communique said the SLA's executions would continue to use cyanide-tipped bullets, something a medical examiner confirmed were used on Foster. Finally, the message signed off with the group's favorite mantra, death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people. killing Superintendent Foster was the SLA's first attempt to put into motion one of DeFries's theories. It had been used by Che Guevara and other Latin American resistance leaders, and it basically centered around the idea that a small vanguard group could set off a larger rebellion by the masses. DeFrease and the SLA hoped Foster's assassination would provoke radical leftist groups all over the Bay Area to take up arms and demand change,

although the SLA could never quite articulate the specifics of the change. In any case, the idea backfired spectacularly. The entire Bay Area mourned Marcus Foster. News cameras captured thousands of people, both black and white, filling memorial ceremonies at churches and schools. Even the Black Panthers,

which had a rocky relationship with Foster, denounced the murder, that law enforcement capture his killers. Depressed by the negative reaction to Foster's killing, DeFries told the group they needed to dial back the violence. Instead of killings, they would plan kidnappings. And he knew exactly the right model to use. All of the SLA members had seen a movie called State of Siege.

The movie focused on a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group in Uruguay called the Tupamaros. The Tupamaros had pretty much fizzled out by 1972, with most of its members dead or in prison. But the SLA thought some of its practices of kidnapping high-profile figures for both propaganda and financial gain could benefit them. In early December of 1973, the SLA made plans in their suburban home. If an outsider were able to see inside, they'd have seen piles of dirty dishes and

laundry, and dozens of different types of guns and thousands of different types of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The group saved all of DeFries's empty bottles of plum wine to use in making Molotov cocktails. And there were lists, so many lists. After the blowback from Foster's murder, the lists were mostly about who they could kidnap to get money and attention. DeFries was most interested in the Tupamaro's kidnapping of the editor of a right-wing newspaper, and that was the inspiration for kidnapping Patty Hurst. In early December 1973, before they'd made up their minds on who to kidnap, the group added two more members to its ranks.

Romero had met a husband and wife at an Oakland market. They became friends, and Romero thought that Bill Harris and his wife, Emily, would be good candidates for the SLA. DeFries approved, so the couple quit their jobs and joined the group. It was Bill Harris who noticed an announcement in the San Francisco Examiner newspaper. On December 19, 1973, it printed news of the engagement of Patricia Campbell Hearst and Stephen Andrew Weed. Bill Harris then grabbed a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle included a detail that the examiner had not, which was that Hurst was a junior at the University of California, Berkeley.

The daughter of one of the richest men in America, the granddaughter of one of the wealthiest and most well-known, newspaper publishers in American history, lived right down the road. The Tupamarros had kidnapped a mere editor. The SLA could kidnap a member of the most famous name in American journalism. Bill Harris made his case to Donald D'Fries. Dufreys loved the idea. They put Patty Hurst's name at the very top of their list and started surveillance of the college student. But then, before they had barely begun, disaster struck. In the dark hours of the morning of January 10, 1974, an alert police officer in Concord pulled over Russ Little and Joe Romero.

Their van wasn't one he recognized from the neighborhood. Something in the men's demeanors spooked the cop, even though their names cleared a status check. When he asked them to step out of the van, he noticed the outline of a pistol in Ramiro's shirtwaste. As soon as the officer saw that Romero had a gun, he ran back to his car, and he ran back to his car and crouched behind his open door. Ramiro and the policeman exchanged gunfire, but no one was hurt save for some minor grazing on Romero. Meanwhile, Russ Little hopped into the van and sped away. Romero bolted on foot, but then because Little was unfamiliar with the neighborhood, he ended up

driving right back to where the scuffle had started. Police backup blocked him in and arrested him on the spot. A few hours later, they found Romero hiding between two homes, and he came out with his hands up. In the back of Romero and Little's van, the police found rifles, handguns, and hundreds of newly printed leaflets with the seven-headed cobra representing the SLA. This connected Little and Romero to the group that had claimed responsibility for Marcus Foster's murder, but it didn't connect them to the murder itself, not yet, though that's definitely. didn't take long. Both men went to a local jail. Police confiscated everything in the van, including the handgun that had been used in the murder of Marcus Foster. Little and Romero called

other SLA members from jail. The group knew it was just a matter of time before ballistics came back and tied the gun to Foster's murder. The group decided to flee, but there was a mountain of incriminating evidence in their rental home. Nancy Perry got caught up in the passion of the moment, and decided the group should do something spectacular and just burn the house to the ground. That night, she, DeFries, and Soltizek set a six-inch fuse leading to puddles of fuel all around the house. DeFrease and Perry left in one car. Soltizek lit the fuse and then drove away in a separate car. There was a huge bang, and then nothing more. They hadn't opened the windows,

So the fire had no oxygen on which to feed. The piles of papers, dirty mattresses, typewriters, weapons, and ammunition were all left perfectly intact for law enforcement to find. The walls were covered with posters of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin and hundreds of newspaper articles about revolutionaries. There were also 38 caliber bullets with hollow points next to a plastic container labeled cyanide water. There were photos of police targets taped the walls. There were bomb-making ingredients, including ammonium nitrate, and then there were the lists of potential kidnapping targets.

Most were CEOs of big companies, but there was also Patty Hurst. The police never warned any of them. And so, on the night of February 4, 1974, when Hurst was kidnapped, she figured her abducters were just money-hungry crooks who would let her go as soon as her father paid a ransom. She had no idea the SLA was going to use her as a high-profile pawn to publicize their terror. At a new safe house south of San Francisco, the SLA shoved her into a dark closet

just a little over six feet long, where she awaited her fate. Next time on infamous America, Patty Hurst's family tries to follow her kidnapper's demands, but it ends in violence, chaos, and more despair for the kidnapped college student. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials,

and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by Julia Brickland. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and V-Barrell Media on Twitter.

And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.