Infamous America - PATTY HEARST Ep. 4 | “The L.A. Shootout”

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

The SLA feels heat from the FBI and law enforcement in northern California, so the group moves south to Los Angeles. Patty Hearst and two other members drive to a sporting goods store to buy supplies, but the simple errand takes a dramatic turn for the worse. The trio ends up on the run through L.A., and their error leads the police to the location of the SLA hideout. The revolutionaries engage the LAPD in a firefight that leads to the end of the original gang. 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

In the early evening of May 17, 1974, LAPD SWAT teams surrounded a little house in south-central Los Angeles. Inside was the majority of the leftist guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had committed three major crimes in the past seven months. They had murdered Oakland School District Superintendent Marcus Foster. They had kidnapped Patty Hurst, and they had robbed a bank. For nearly every day of those seven months, law enforcement had been clueless to the location of the group. The group had started in San Francisco and then moved down to L.A., and the cops had been none the wiser. But the previous day, May 16th, Patty Hurst, Bill Harris, and his wife, Emily Harris,

had gone to a sporting goods store to buy clothing in preparation for the group's next bank robbery. Bill Harris had tried to steal a bandolier for shotgun shells. and the spontaneous petty theft had turned into a shootout outside the store. Patty, Bill, and Emily had escaped by stealing a series of cars, but the cops had found a critical clue in the original van they left behind. A parking ticket with the address of the group's hideout was inside the van. Law enforcement descended on the area around the address and eventually found six members of the SLA in a run-down flop house.

And now, as SWAT teams surrounded the house, they could hear the SLA's leader, Donald DeFries, yell instructions to never surrender and to fight to the death. The teams threw tear gas canisters into the house, but no one came out. The SLA had military-grade gas masks, and they followed DeVries's instructions to fight to the death. And as a historic gun battle was about to erupt in South Central, Patty Hurst and the Harris's were holed up about 30 minutes away in Anaheim in a motel across the street from Disneyland. Like the rest of America, they were about to watch on live TV the biggest gun battle to take place on American soil up to that point. From Black Barrow 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 19th. This is episode four, the L.A. shootout. After the first round of tear gas was fired into the house, there were tense moments of silence while law enforcement waited for a reaction from the SLA. The SLA's reaction was to open fire on the roughly 500 members of law enforcement who had surrounded the house. A gun battle raged on a small side street right off of Compton Avenue, about four miles straight south of downtown Los Angeles. The firefight dragged on for an hour. Crowds were forming around the area,

and the police were worried about errant gunfire hurting innocent people. They were also concerned for any innocents who might be in the house, against their will or not. As the standoff approached the one-hour mark, the LAPD SWAT teams were running low on both tear gas and ammunition.

The officers at the back of the house decided to escalate the situation. They threw two canisters, of a different model of tear gas into the home. It was riot tear gas and was much more toxic than what they had been using. They needed a type that would overwhelm the gas masks which they theorized the SLA were wearing.

But the trade-off with the more powerful tear gas was that it was also more flammable. It's hard to know exactly what started the first spark. It could have been the SLA's huge weapons cash or Molotov cocktails, or obviously the gunfire that had, hit the house from all directions. Whatever it was, the house caught fire almost immediately after the gas was tossed in. With a bullhorn, the LAPD warned all the occupants to come out because the

house was on fire. One officer climbed up to the roof of the house next door to try to fire a tear gas canister into the house. As he climbed down again, he saw three female civilians huddled on the floor of the now smoking house. He lifted all three and their dogs out the winter. A few minutes later, at 6.45 p.m., one of the residents staggered outside. It was a young woman who was so drunk that she had, somehow, allegedly, slept through the gun battle and woke up only when her bed caught fire. The LAPD continued to warn people inside that the house was on fire and to throw out any weapons. All they got in response was more gunfire. At 6.50 p.m., flames started to engulf the second story of the house.

The smoke billowing out of the house was so thick the SWAT teams could barely see through the windows. The SLA had collectively decided to do something that Joe Romero had taught them before he went to prison. Ramiro was an early member of the SLA, but he, along with Russ Little, were sitting in San Quentin on murder charges. Ramiro had done two tours of combat in Vietnam, and he had instructed the SLA, if they were ever involved in a police standoff, get to a crawl space and shoot from there. So, the SLA members hacked through the floorboards on the first story, jumped down, and crawled to the back of the house. The SLA sprayed gunfire from air vents underneath the house. But since they only had about a six-inch range of motion through the slats,

virtually none of their fire came close to hitting any of law enforcement. Then officers saw some movement. It was Nancy Perry crawling out of a tiny hole under the foundation of the house. She emerged into the yard, rose to a crouch, and aimed a pistol at the line of police. The police opened fire. She was hit seven times and died a minute and a half later. Camilla Hall shimmied out of the crawl space shortly after Perry, with guns in in both hands.

She didn't quite make it to a standing position before a police bullet tore half her head off. She died instantly, and her remaining SLA comrades pulled her body back into the house. At 6.58 p.m., the walls and the roof of the house started collapsing. Officers and onlookers could hear loud popping sounds of unused ammunition exploding from contact with the fire, and those sounds were mixed with the ongoing sounds of the fire. gunfire from the SLA. But then, everything stopped as the crackling mess of a home imploded. It was obvious that no living thing could have survived the collapse, and police gave the go-ahead to firefighters to start extinguishing the blaze. And much of the event played out on live TV.

People across the country tuned in to see a sequence that looked like the end of the SLA. But those people included Patty Hurst, Bill Harris, and Emily Harris in their motel across from Disneyland. As it became clear that none of their fellow SLA members could have survived the fire, the remaining crew sat quietly on the motel room floor and comforted each other. When Bill Harris said he wished they'd died with the others, his wife Emily told him that their leader, Donald DeFries, would want them to live and to fight on. And that was exactly what they planned to do. relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind

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your first order. And they have a 100-day, satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. The battle between the LAPD and the SLA played out in the newspapers and television for weeks. A subsequent investigation showed that the SWAT team fired more than 5,300 rounds of ammunition in less than an hour. They'd used 83 tear gas canisters. The SLA fired somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 rounds. In addition to the hideout house, the homes on either side burned down, and 23 others were damaged. Amazingly, no members of law enforcement were harmed. Nancy Perry and Camilla Hall were killed by police.

Angela Atwood, Willie Wolfe, and Patricia Saltizik were trapped in the crawl space and died of burns and smoke inhalation. Donald D'Fries, the man who had nicknamed himself Sin Q and had given himself the grand title of General Field Marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. As the authorities sifted through the wreckage, they found six bodies of six SLA members,

but none were Patty Hurst. As her family sighed with relief, they and everyone else wondered, where the hell was she? In a dingy motel room across from Disneyland, she was telling Bill and Emily Harris what they should do next. We need to go up there

to do a search and destroy mission on the cops. If we're going to go out, let's go out in a blaze of glory. It had now been 103 days since Hearst was kidnapped. With her words to the Harris's, she signaled that the door had shut to her former life.

She was no longer just a victim. Police and the FBI wanted her in connection with the Hibernia bank robbery and the shootout at Mel's sporting goods store. She was a bona fide fugitive, and the only reason she was alive was because of twists of fate that ended with her and the Harris's in this motel room instead of the flop house. A couple days after the shootout, the trio's cash reserves were so low that they decided they'd be better off on their home turf. On May 27, 1974, they drove a stolen car up to the Hate Ashbury District of San Francisco. The Harrises remembered some friends who live nearby, and, in disguise, the trio knocked on the door of the friends' home and begged for help. The friends agreed to let the fugitives spend one night in a storage space in their basement. The next day, the SLA fugitives went to a rundown motel.

Then, with a portion of the $50, the friends gave them, they rented a seedy apartment in Oakland. By June 3rd, the three were down to $20. Bill Harris talked about mugging people on the street, but for whatever reason they never did it. They constantly checked the newspapers to see what other counterculture groups might be saying about them. They hoped for something positive, so they could find a way to reach out and get financial and moral support. but they were disappointed. Since the murder of Marcus Foster and the violent pin food giveaway,

not even the hardcore groups like the Black Panthers wanted anything to do with the SLA. But then, Bill spotted something hopeful in one of the papers. It said that the previous day, there had been a memorial rally for SLA members at a park near the UC Berkeley campus. Patty Hurst had been a student on that campus

just four months earlier. but that now seemed like a lifetime ago. The rally wasn't a huge gathering by Berkeley standards, but they were about 400 people. The speakers seemed to care about the loss of their comrades and seemed furious about the LAPD's involvement in their deaths. They even had bottles of DeFrize's favorite plum wine lined up in front of the tiny speakers' platform.

The young woman who dominated the photos and quotes in the newspaper resembled popular counterculture feminist Gloria Steinem with her long, straight hair, and large tinted aviator glasses. To Hearst and the Harris's, she looked like an angel. Her name was Kathy Celia, and she had been Angela Atwood's best friend. 27-year-old Celia praised Atwood and the rest, all of whom she referred to by their SLA nicknames. She said Atwood and the others were viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs in Los Angeles, which was a derogatory slang term for police officers. Finally, she read this message for the SLA. SLA soldiers, although I know it's not necessary to say, keep fighting. I'm with you, and we are with you. I am a soldier of the SLA. After reading

the message, Patty Hurst and the Harris's knew they had found a way to regroup. Emily Harris remembered Kathy Celia through their shared friendship with Angela Atwood. Emily and her husband argued about whether Celia could be trusted, and whether or not they should contact her. She reminded him that Celia had once taken shooting lessons from Joe Romero. So, though they didn't know her well, she seemed like someone they could approach. Emily connected with Celia, who was delighted by the outreach. Celia phoned her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore.

Over the next two days, Kilgore drummed up about $2,000 for the Harris's and Hearst. The fact that Salia and Kilgore so eagerly gave them money and emotional support made Hurst and the Harris's figure that the SLA should reboot, even with their small numbers. Bill asked Celia to buy them a tape recorder. Bill did his best to emulate Donald DeFries. He told the story of the May 17th shootout as though it were a herringer. heroic standoff. And like DeFries used to do, Bill made grandiose statements. In the recording, Bill claimed the SLA was now a worldwide force and would soon be bombing utility sites and

corporate buildings across the U.S. When Bill finished, Patty Hurst set a eulogy for her six fallen comrades. It was a long recitation of all the brilliant qualities of the dead SLA members. She singled out Willie Wolf, whom she'd called the most beautiful man she'd ever known. She emphasized that she was not brainwashed, as police reports and her parents were saying. She had renounced her class privilege and would never go to jail. The tape was delivered to a Santa Barbara radio station, which played it on June 7. Despite their sudden influx of cash, the surviving three SLA members knew things were too hot in San Francisco. even with like-minded friends helping them.

As they started to think about where they could go until things cooled down, an opportunity fell right into their laps. The same day that their newest tape was delivered to the radio station in Santa Barbara, Kathy Celia got a phone call from an old friend named Jack Scott. Celia and Scott knew each other from activist work in Berkeley. Scott was a journalist and sports writer and somewhat famous in counterculture circles for helping a woman named Wendy Yoshimura evade capture by police.

Yoshimura belonged to an anti-Vietnam bombing group called the Revolutionary Army. Scott had been living in New York City while trying to work on a book. He was bored and he had seen this South Central shootout on the news. He was horrified but also fascinated. He decided to take a chance and he flew to California in hopes of finding people who knew the SLA and would talk to him. The timing was coincidental. Scott had no idea that Celia had already befriended the remaining SLA.

Around June 15th, she and Kilgore picked up Scott from his hotel, blindfolded him, and drove him to an apartment in North Berkeley. Celia whipped off the blindfold and introduced Jack Scott to Bill Harris, Emily Harris, and Patty Hurst. They were decked out in full military camouflage, scarves, gun belts with ammunition, and firearms. Jack was scared but regained his composure. He asked them to tell their story, and that he would tell the world. Bill Harris told them the last thing they needed was a journalist. What they needed was help getting out of town. Jack's girlfriend had rented a farm for the summer. It was in the countryside of Pennsylvania, and he was familiar with the area because he'd grown up there.

Harboring fugitives was illegal, but he couldn't resist. the opportunity to help in the hopes of getting a blockbuster book or article out of it. Patty Hurst didn't fully trust Jack Scott. She told the Harris's she thought he was a police informant, especially when he told them he had a plan to get them all to a Pennsylvania hideaway, but they had to leave their guns behind. Jack reassured Patty by explaining to her that his mother was from a famous Irish Republican Army family and believed in helping friends. His parents would helped them leave town, but they had one stipulation. They first wanted to offer Hurst a way out. Jack's parents were of the same generation as Patty's parents, and Jack's parents felt sorry for Randy

and Catherine Hurst. Jack's parents gave Patty the chance to go home to her family, but Patty made her position clear. Jack would take her to Pennsylvania, or she would kill him. On or around June 20th, 1974. The crew left California for the East Coast. Hurst must have known by then that exactly two weeks earlier, she had been indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco. She was now officially wanted for the April 15th robbery of the Hibernia Bank. By early July, Hearst and the Harris's were tucked into a farmhouse on a 38-acre property about 20 miles south of Scranton, Pennsylvania. They had total privacy,

but they also only had each other, plus a few other trusted friends of Jack Scott's. One of these friends was Wendy Yoshimura, Scott's friend from the Revolutionary Army who was wanted for an attempted bombing. Scott tracked her down in New Jersey and offered her $600 if she would babysit the Harris's and Hearst in Pennsylvania,

and she accepted. Patty Hurst had grown pale and weak from being on the run. The fresh air helped her regain some color and energy, but that was about the only positive thing to happen in the summer of 1974. In just a couple weeks, everyone got mad at everyone else, and everyone's personal agendas clashed with the others. Scott showed off his access to Hurst and the others by inviting a former student of his to the farm

to celebrate the kid's 20th birthday. The kid was dazzled by the meeting, but he grew uncomfortable when Emily Harris pressured him to join the SLA and also to give them money. He went back to New York late that night, leaving them exposed if he decided to talk. Separately, Wendy Yoshimura didn't like the way Bill Harris ordered everyone around, and she had no interest in doing his calisthenics or counter-surveillance exercises. In turn, Bill Harris was angry at Jack Scott. for not allowing the group to have weapons. Bill was also mad at his wife.

They'd been on the rocks anyway, but now things were even worse because Emily had quickly forged an intimate relationship with the friend of Jack's who had driven her across the country. Jack was frustrated by his inability to get the SLA to focus on telling him their stories so he could make headway on a book.

It's not clear how he thought the SLA could repay him for bankrolling their hideout on the farm, but according to Hearst's later recollections, he expected it. Barring repayment, he thought it would be nice if they at least showed some gratitude. He again brought up his parents' sentiment to Hurst, wondering out loud if she should go home to take the heat off of the Harris's. Hurst grew angry about his real or perceived patronizing attitude, and she reminded him that she was a warrior with no interest in surrendering.

Angriest of all was Jack's girlfriend Mickey. She had rented the farm in her own name and had paid the $2,500 deposit. So when Bill Harris got a hold of a BB gun and started taking target practice, she flipped out. Harris insisted he was technically in compliance with Scott's no-weapon rule, because BB guns were not real weapons. But he was missing the point. The noise of gunfire could pique the interest of neighbors, even if. as remote as they were. To be safe, Mickey moved them all to a different farm, this time near a tiny village just over the border in New York State. The second farm was decrepit, with a house

that only had one bedroom and one bathroom that they all had to share. The setup only lasted a couple days, with the SLA members growing angrier at Scott and his girlfriend for various perceived slights. Finally, both the SLA and Jack Scott decided they'd had enough. The SLA wanted more revolution, not to provide book fodder for Scott. And Jack clearly wasn't going to get them to talk, so the SLA decided to move back to California. They used pay phones to work out plans with Kathy Salyah, her brother Steve, and her boyfriend Jim Kilgore. September 4th, 1974, marked seven months since Patty Hurst had been killed. kidnapped, and the FBI and her parents were no closer to finding her than on the day she was taken.

The SLA moved to Sacramento, about 90 miles northeast of San Francisco. It was close enough to the Bay Area so that any supporters could make contact, but far enough away that they wouldn't risk exposure, even when disguised. Also, the trial of Russ Little and Joe Romero for the murder of Marcus Foster had been moved from Oakland to Sacramento. The SLA hoped they could bust the two men out of prison before the trial. Patty Hurst started a love affair with Steve Sulea, Kathy's brother. Seven months earlier, she had been engaged to Stephen Weed.

Within a few weeks of being kidnapped, she was in a relationship with founding SLA member Willie Wolfe. Now she was with Steve Salyah, and that situation was typical for SLA members. Everyone slept with everyone. The Suleas rented a house. and the motley crew of revolutionaries moved in. In addition to Hearst and the Suleas, there was Mike Borton. He was a bomb maker from the Silias old group, the Revolutionary Army.

When Bill and Emily Harris moved in a few days later, Borton and Bill Harris immediately clashed. Both thought of themselves as the alpha males of the group, and both were probably wrong. By late fall, the disagreements gave way to a more festering, underlying resenting, between all the players. There were at least eight people trying to coexist in close quarters, the SLA members, Bill, Emily, and Patty, and the Revolutionary Army alumni, Wendy Yoshimura, Kathy Soleah, Steve Celia, Mike Borton, and Jim Kilgore. People in the latter group

understandably grew tired of listening to Bill Harris tell them what to do. To lessen the tension, they split up. Wendy Yoshimura and Emily Hesonelgher. Harris stayed in one apartment. Kilgore and Borton moved into another. Hurst and the Salya siblings got a place together on Capitol Avenue. Bill Harris rotated among them, depending on who was least annoyed by him at any given time. The new arrangements taxed their already low coffers. As 1974 drew to a close, it was clear that the group needed to do something to get more money. At one point, cash and food were so low that they had to be. to resort to buying horse meat to supplement their diet. The group wanted a shared purpose, too.

For a time, they discussed plans to break out Little and Romero. The SLA and their new friends went so far as to surveil the prison, but the idea fizzled out. It was well beyond their capabilities. This new SLA was in the same position that DeFries's version had found itself in both before and after the kidnapping of Patty Hurst. They had no money and no way to publicize whatever it was they thought they were trying to accomplish. They all circled back to the same idea. They needed to rob another bank. The Harris's might not have had a good marriage, but they knew how to plan a robbery. They drew on their experience from the Hibernia job and studies they'd done of heists by other groups. For this one, they just wanted money. They would worry about

making a statement in the future. So they picked a savings and loan just outside city limits that didn't have security cameras. On February 25, 1975, one year and three weeks after Patty Hurst was kidnapped, Mike Borton, wearing a Halloween mask and a baseball cap, walked into the bank with a 45-calibur revolver. Next to him was Jim Kilgore, wearing a green scarf over his face and carrying a shotgun. There was only one customer in the bank and only one teller on duty. Kilgore told the customer to lie down on the floor, while Borton forced the teller to open the safe. They collected about $3,700, mostly in 20s and money orders. They raced out of the bank and jumped in a getaway car driven by Steve Salyah.

Patty Hurst and Emily Harris met Borton and Kilgore at a nearby park. One took a bag containing the weapons. The other took a bag containing the cash. They got on a bus and went back to their shared apartment where the others met them later. The police never suspected the robbery was the work of the group that had robbed the Hibernia Bank 10 months earlier. To the police, the second robbery looked like a routine stick-up.

For the SLA and their allies, it was just the energizing force they needed. They now had money to buy more weapons, make bombs, and pay rent. The one who seemed the most energized was Patty Hurst. As she liked to remind the others, she was the only one among them who had actually held a gun on customers inside a bank. So she started drawing up plans to rob another bank. This time they agreed they wanted at least 100,000. It was a lofty goal, and they wouldn't even come close to getting it. Next time on Infamous America, the new SLA robs another bank, but this time with devastating consequences.

Despite the fallout, they still believe they can spark a revolution, and they try a new tactic, bombings. But outside of the public eye, the FBI is finally making progress, and the end is very near for Patty Hurst and the SLA. 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. We're on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast.

Thanks for listening.