Infamous America - PATTY HEARST Ep. 5 | “The End of the The SLA”

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Patty Hearst and the other two surviving members of the SLA connect with new recruits and flee to Pennsylvania to hide from the police. Before long, the group returns to northern California and conducts a bank robbery that has fatal consequences. The FBI picks up the trail of the elusive fugitives and finally arrests Patty Hearst. 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 winter of 1975, there were eight active members of the SLA. This included Patty Hurst and Bill and Emily Harris, who had been part of the original group. Then there were siblings Kathy and Steve Celia and Kathy's boyfriend Jim Kilgore. Finally, there were Mike Borton and Wendy Yoshimura. The SLA's founder, Donald DeFries, died by suicide the previous May in Los Angeles. Five other founding members died alongside DeFries in a house fire caused by a sustained firefight between the SLA and the LAPD. When 27-year-old Kathy Salehia gave a public eulogy for the dead, she caught the attention of Hearst and the Harris's, who had escaped the firefight only because they'd started trouble in another part of town and had to hide out.

After a weird summer in the Pennsylvania countryside, the reconstituted SLA decided to head back to California. They'd have to try even harder to disguise themselves, but it was their home turf and where they felt most comfortable. The only problem was, as usual, they had little money besides what the Salyas scrounged up for them. So, on February 25, 1975, a little more than a year after Patty Hsieuels, Hurst was kidnapped. They robbed a bank outside Sacramento. They netted $3,700, which wasn't nearly enough to support eight people, especially since only five of them could show their faces in public and work menial jobs. Only Borton and Kilgore had gone into the bank, and they had worn disguises, so law enforcement didn't connect the robbery to the SLA. The success emboldened the group to try again.

set their sights on a bigger heist. They figured, with a good infusion of cash, they could recruit others and figure out a plan for the coming year. But even the best laid plans are only as good as their weakest link, and whatever bad luck is in the cards. In April 1975, the SLA robbed Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California, and the heist went bad. It was one of those times when, If any one of the things that happened had gone differently, the tragedy might have been avoided. The Crocker National Heist changed everything. For more than 15 months, the FBI had made no progress in finding Patty Hurst. After the Crocker robbery, the dominoes started falling. The FBI found an informant, and after that, the end of the SLA happened fast. But it wasn't the end for

Patty Hurst. It was just another new beginning. 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 1970s. This is episode five, the end of the SLA. Between the two robberies in 1975, four days after the one that netted $3,700, and six weeks before the Crocker National heist. The SLA made headline news once again. Two of the original members, Joe Romero and Russ Little, had been in prison for more than a year. They were awaiting trial for the murder of Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster and the attempted murder of his colleague.

Though the evidence showed they didn't pull the trigger, they'd been part of the plan, and the only ones who had been caught thus far. The state of California wanted to make an example out of them. The two were tired of waiting for the SLA to bust them out, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. They had been moved from San Quentin Prison to the Alameda County Jail, and on March 1, 1975, they met with their attorney in a conference room. Russ Little lunged at a guard in the room and drove a sharpened pencil deep into his neck. Joe Romero overpowered the other guard and beat him severely.

Romero then grabbed the guard's key ring and ran out of the room. He was turning the key to the weapons locker when the first guard, even with a pencil sticking out of his neck, managed to hit a panic button. Other guards swarmed and subdued Little and Romero. The injured guards were hospitalized and survived. But the escape attempt put more publicity on the search for Hearst and the rest of the SLA.

And out of sight of all of that publicity, the FBI finally found its first solid leads. Jack Scott was a journalist who wanted to write the SLA's story. He had helped the core group hide in the summer of 1974 by moving them from California to Pennsylvania and setting them up on a couple farms. Predictably, the experience turned sour. Patty Hurst and the others didn't care about providing Scott

with a story for a book. They still wanted revolution. So they cut ties with Jack Scott and moved back to California. Then in January 1975, while they laid low in Sacramento, Scott's brother walked into a police station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at 2 in the morning with a wild story. He was drunk, but the cops let him talk. He told them that the previous summer,

his brother had babysat the SLA on a farm property. The FBI learned of the report and rushed to the property. It was long abandoned, but the forensics team identified prints belonging to Wendy Yoshimura and Bill Harris, and dogs responded to the scent of Patty Hurst. From that point forward,

the FBI kept an eye on Jack Scott and his girlfriend. On the day of Romero and Littles attempted jailbreak, a rental car company filed a complaint against Scott for not turning in a vehicle. For many reasons, law enforcement figured Scott had rented a getaway car for the two prisoners. The FBI tried in vain to get Jack Scott and his girlfriend Mickey to cooperate and tell them what they knew about the SLA. The pair refused, and the FBI did not have enough evidence

against them to get a warrant. Though Jack and Mickey didn't have much money for their own legal help, they were living with a friend of Jacks who did. In just one of the many bizarre coincidences in the story of Patty Hurst, that friend was Bill Walton. He had been a star basketball player at UCLA and was now a star player for the Portland Trailblazers in the NBA. He was also an anti-government activist who was able to enlist an expensive lawyer in San Francisco to help Jack and Mickey.

In turn, the lawyer arranged for a meeting with Bill Walton, Jack Scott, and Randy Hurst, Patty's father. Randy asked him, huge favor, which was, could he pay Jack Scott to spirit his daughter out of the country? Randy was worried Patty would go to jail for the rest of her life. Scott was usually the first to insert himself into a situation for attention, but he shied away from the favor. He wasn't going to take that kind of risk for Patty Hurst. And for the FBI, Scott was a dead end as far as locating Patty Hurst. But Jack's brother wasn't,

and he was still talking to the FBI. The brother told the FBI that Jack had brought an intern to the farm the previous summer. On March 11th, FBI agents cornered the intern, and he told them everything he could remember, including the fact that fugitive bomber Wendy Yoshimura was at the farm in Pennsylvania. Agents looked up prison visits to Yoshimura's boyfriend and saw the name Kathy Salehia. They quickly pinpointed her as the woman, who gave the emotional eulogy about the SLA at that Berkeley Park in the previous summer.

They realized the key to finding Patty Hurst was probably to go through the Saliah family. After Ramiro and Little tried unsuccessfully to break out of the Alameda County Jail, the reconstituted SLA wondered if they should cancel their heist plans and lay low. The hesitation only lasted a few days, mostly because they desperately needed money. They renewed their plans in earnest. Together and separately, the group surveyed, diagramed, and considered 15 different banks as potential targets. Ultimately, they decided on one in Carmichael, about seven miles beyond the Sacramento City limits.

They bickered about how many people should go inside the bank. As rivals for leadership of the SLA, Mike Borton and Bill Harris each thought they should go with maybe one one. wingman or woman, and that was it. The women of the group argued for equality, and Emily Harris thought she should be the lead inside the bank. Borton argued that she wasn't intimidating enough. Bill Harris didn't get along with his wife, but he still felt that since she found the bank, she should have a lead role. Separately, Jim Kilgore had reservations about Emily's training. He told her that her choice of weapon was a mistake. A shotgun, wasn't necessary inside a bank. He also pointed out that her particular shotgun had a hair trigger.

In the end, the group decided that four members would go in and four would remain outside. On the morning of April 25, 1975, this new version of the SLA started their carefully choreographed robbery of Crocker National Bank. Unfortunately, 42-year-old Merna Upsal also headed to Crocker National Bank that morning. She and her husband had worked as missionaries before settling in Carmichael to raise their four children. Her husband was a doctor at a local hospital, and Myrna was a homemaker who was very involved in her local Seventh-day Adventist Church. Every Monday morning, Myrna's volunteer group at the church took turns depositing Sunday's cash donations at their local bank, which was Crocker National. On this particular Monday, it was someone else's turn,

but the woman couldn't make it, so Myrna volunteered. Murna and two friends arrived at the bank just as it opened at 9 a.m. As they approached the front door, one of her friends noticed something strange. Four young people, two men and two women, were approaching the bank from the other direction. They wore what seemed to be heavy hunting jackets, which was odd on a warm spring morning in California. But aside from their clothing, nothing else seemed to miss. One of the young men opened the door for the three women from the church. The women walked into the bank and were followed by the four young people,

Mike Borton, Jim Kilgore, Kathy Celia, and Emily Harris. Borton screamed for everyone to get on the ground, as he and the others put ski masks on and waved their guns around. Kathy Celia moved toward the tellers to start grabbing cash. Jim Kilgore stood guard at the door. Emily Harris pulled her sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun from under her coat and started to yell out a countdown to keep her comrades on their 90-second timeline. She whipped around to the stunned trio of churchwomen and ordered them to get down. Myrna hesitated. She hadn't counted the cash for the deposit, and she had brought an adding machine with her to do the task at the bank.

Now she had a shotgun pointed at her, and she panicked as she looked around. for a place to put down the adding machine. Equally panicked, Emily Harris raised her shotgun, presumably to fire a warning shot. Instead, the weapon discharged early. There was a huge explosion, and Myrna Opsol fell to the ground, with blood pouring from a big hole in her side.

As blood pooled around Myrna Opsul, no one moved and no one said a word. Her church friends lifted their heads to look at her, but Mike Borton shouted at them to put their noses on the carpet. He leapt up on the teller's counter and yelled at the tellers to get their drawers open. Kathy Salia crawled over the counter and started grabbing money. She demanded Traveler's checks and kicked a teller when the woman said they didn't have any. Emily Harris yelled, 60 seconds gone.

After emptying the drive-thru teller's drawers too, the four robbers headed for the exit. They stepped around Myrna Opsall. Patty Hurst waited outside in a van. When she saw the four robbers load into the getaway car and peel out ahead of her, she followed them to a deserted street. The vehicles stopped and the robbers jumped in the van. Hurst kept her cool and drove only the speed limit, even as Borton yelled at her to drive faster. When she felt they were in the clear, they pulled over to count the money. They stole $15,000, far short of the $100,000 they'd hoped for. As they peeled off their disguises, Emily said, maybe she'll live, referring to Myrna Opsol. Jim Kilgore said no. By the size of her wound and the amount of blood pouring out, he knew she wouldn't make it.

Back at the bank, an ambulance arrived and took Myrna 20 blocks to an emergency room at a Carmichael hospital. In a difficult coincidence, the ER doctor on duty was Mearnah's husband. When he raced to her side, he could see that she had no pulse, no blood pressure, her eyes were dilated, and she wasn't breathing. They removed her from life support shortly thereafter. And she wasn't the only casualty. The bank teller whom Kathy Salia had kicked was pregnant and later suffered a miscarriage. The news of Myrna Opsal's death quickly went out over the radio, so the SLA knew of it by the time they reconvened at their apartment on Capitol Street. They explained the situation to Patty Hurst, who had been in the van.

Jim Kilgore blamed Emily's gun and its hair trigger. But he also said that if Opsal hadn't been in the way, the blast would have killed him instead. Emily Harris was even more callous, as she explained that it was an accident. She was quoted as saying, so what if she got shot? Her husband is a doctor. She's a bourgeois pig. Mike Borton flew into a rage. Emily Harris had jeopardized all of them with her incompetence.

On the radio, police did not squarely place the blame on the SLA because they didn't have the evidence, but they did call it an SLA-type operation. Between the robbery murder and the escape attempt by Romero and Little, law enforcement would be crawling all over Sacramento. And for some reason, the robbers didn't wear gloves or wipe down surfaces. All of their fingerprints were on the first getaway car that they had ditched before jumping into the van with Patty Hurst. As Bill Harris pointed out, Governor Ronald Reagan had, just three months earlier,

restored the death penalty in California. Since they had all participated in a robbery that resulted in a death, all of them, including Patty Hurst, could be tried for felony murder and could be executed if found guilty. They used the money from the heist to rent a pair of apartments in San Francisco. There, as spring turned to summer, they played the usual musical chairs in terms of partners and sleeping arrangements. For the most part, things cooled off, and they settled into a sort of strange domesticity. Steve Salia, Jim Kilgore, and Mike Borton, started a house painting business that they had been operating before joining the SLA.

Kathy Salyah, using a fake name, started waitressing at a downtown hotel. Wendy Yoshimura moved in with other friends. Despite their bravado over the killing of Myrnal-Opsal, the group was still freaked out about it. They decided they should turn to bombings as a means of triggering a revolution. When Donald DeFries was alive and in charge, he had shied away. from bombings. He believed that a daytime bombing when people were around was too risky, and a nighttime bombing was just a basic destruction of property. It was meaningless. After a lot of heated discussion, the group decided to split the difference in a perverse sort of way. They would embark

on a bombing campaign that would involve both human and property targets. But only those that they felt were fair game in their quest for world justice. And that meant bombing police stations and killing the cops when they came running out. Bill Harris spent some of the summer of 1975 reading a book called the Anarchist Cookbook, an underground bestseller. It contained instructions for building bombs from scratch, in addition to things like home brewing LSD. Bill Harris spent weeks experimenting. Then late at night on August 7th, Patty Harris and Josephine Celia, Kathy's sister, took a bomb to a police station in the Mission District of San Francisco. Wendy Yoshimura and Kathy Celia took another one to a different station. Both efforts failed. Kathy and Wendy couldn't

find an appropriate target in front of the station, and Patty and Joe's bomb failed to detonate. In a sign of the times and how much bombing activity there was in the 1970s, Patty Hearst's bomb, under a cop car, barely got any coverage in the local newspapers. Determined to do better, Patty Hurst, Steve Celia, Wendy Yoshimura, and Jim Kilgore spent a day in the wilds of Sonoma County, setting off explosions to test new designs. They found one they liked and set their sights on a police station in Emeryville, a small city between Oakland and Berkeley. On August 13th, they placed a bomb under a police car and set it off, demolishing the car.

No one was hurt, and they wrote a communique taking responsibility and saying it was in retaliation for the police shooting of a 14-year-old boy in November 1973. After the first successful demonstration, the SLA decided to raise the stakes. They believed it was time to stop destroying cars, and move on to people. On August 20th, Patty Hurst, Joe Celia, and Steve Celia drove across

the Golden Gate Bridge and placed a bomb by the door of the Marin County Sheriff's Complex. They also put one under a car in the parking lot. The idea was for the bomb in the parking lot to lure the officers out of the building, and then they would be killed or maimed by the bomb near the door.

Both bombs went off, but in the wrong order, and no one was hurt. Meanwhile, Jim Kilgore, Bill Harris, and Kathy Salia headed south to Los Angeles. They planned to get revenge for the deaths of the six SLA members in the shootout 15 months earlier. Bill Harris built two bombs for the trip. He wanted one of them to be particularly deadly, so we filled it with about 100 nails. They didn't have a target planned ahead of time, so Harris and Kilgore eventually decided to carry one in an attache case toward a downtown hotel entrance, where a Veterans of Foreign

Wars convention was taking place. Two security guards thought the young men looked out of place at a convention of former soldiers. When the guards started walking toward them, the bombers abandoned the target. Next, they drove to East Los Angeles. They put one bomb in a small plastic bag and attached it under a parked police car. they drove past an international house of pancakes restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, where they saw another police car. It was parked next to the restaurant's plate glass window. Patrons were eating right on the other side. Kilgore rigged the nail bomb to explode when the officers

started driving the car away. It would definitely have killed the two policemen in the car and lots of diners in the restaurant. The three decided to spend the night in Los Angeles and watched the news of their handiwork. Their excitement quickly turned to anger and then disappointment. Neither bomb went off. The first one simply dropped to the ground and did nothing as the car drove off. Worse, some little kids came upon it and started to kick it around. Luckily, it still didn't go off. An adult saw what they were kicking and immediately called the police, setting off an alarm to all police stations in Los Angeles. When the bomb under the car at the IHop restaurant was discovered, it was found to have malfunctioned because two screws failed to touch by just one

16th of an inch. That's roughly the width of an American penny or a standard credit card. At the same time, the SLA was experimenting with bombs, the FBI was following their trail. Jack Scott's brother had led them to the young man who met Hurst and the other. in Pennsylvania. That young man told them about Wendy Yoshimura. When agents looked up Yoshimura's prison visitor log, they found the name Kathy Salia. So they showed up on the doorstep of Martin Salia, the father of Kathy, Steve, and Joe. Martin Salia lived in northern Los Angeles County, and he agreed to fly to San Francisco. His mission was to reach out to his kids and ask them to talked to the bureau. Martin left a note at a dropbox that his daughter Joe had once given him to

communicate with her. Steve, Kathy, and Joe agreed to meet their father for dinner. He told them he was scared that whatever involvement they had with Wendy Yoshimura, they were in over their heads. His children were furious at him for talking to the FBI and ultimately told him very little about their lives. But they did accidentally give him one clue. Steve mentioned that he painted buildings for a living. On the strength of that one item, the FBI went to work. On September 15, 1975, the FBI showed up at the front door of a building manager in Pacifica, a hamlet just south of San Francisco. The agents showed him photos of Steve, Kathy, and Joe Salia. The man confirmed that these were some of the painters who had worked on his building, but none were the man who was in charge of the

crew. The manager then told the agents that they were in luck, because some of them were due to show up any minute. The agents hid and asked the manager not to say anything. Sure enough, a pair did show up, Kathy and Joe Celia. The agents let them work, and then at 5.30 p.m., when the women stopped for the day, three FBI cars followed them discreetly into the city. The sisters got out in an apartment building on Morse Street. It was a narrow one-way street, so the agents knew they couldn't stay and blend in. Early the next morning,

the agents observed Steve Celia leave the same apartment. He drove about three and a half miles to an apartment on Preseda Street. Oddly, he picked up Joe and Kathy. Clearly, the three Celia siblings had tied. to both apartments. The girls must have left the first during the night and gone to the second. Whatever was going on, neither Hearst, no Yoshimura, nor the Harris's were visible at either place. The FBI didn't yet understand the situation, but they knew they were on to something. The reality was that Patty Hurst, Steve Celia, and Wendy Yoshimura lived on Morse Street,

and had pretty much cut all ties with the Harris's. They felt Bill was toxic. and his volatile personality was a liability. Bill Harris, Emily Harris, Kathy Celia, Joe Celia, and Jim Kilgore all lived at the Preseda address, and Mike Borton stayed there sometimes as well. Bill had turned the apartment into a bomb factory and a weapons depot. There were dozens of two-inch pipes, alarm clocks, shotguns, carbines, pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Kathy seemed to be the link between the separate groups, so the FBI agents surveilled her.

On September 17th, agents saw two people leave the Preseda address to go for a jog. The suspects were likely Bill and Emily Harris, but the agents had to be sure. Later, agents followed Bill to a local laundromat. An agent got a close look at a distinctive scar on Bill's knee. The scar confirmed his identity. They now had one of their fugitives. Just before 1 p.m. the next day, agents arrested the Harris's when they went out for another jog. Two hours later, FBI agent-in-charge Charlie Bates held a press conference.

He was disappointed that they didn't find Hearst, but something was better than nothing. And then, almost as an afterthought, two FBI agents and two San Francisco police officers went to check out the apartment on Morse Street. An officer and an agent guarded the front door while their counterparts went around back. Through a back door, Agent Tom Padden could see two young women sitting at the kitchen table. They were Wendy Yoshimura and Patty Hurst.

Yoshimura got up to get a glass of water. When Hurst stood up too, she was startled by the crash of Padden breaking down the door. He yelled, Freeze, FBI. And for a split second, Hearst thought about racing to her bedroom to grab a shotgun. Maybe she could make one last stand the way her six comrades had done in L.A. a year and a half earlier. But Padden pointed his gun at Yershamura and told him again to freeze or he would shoot. Padden looked at Patty Hurst and asked,

Are you Patty Hurst? She said yes. After 19 months with the SLA, Patty Hurst had finally been found. She had gone from a terrified kidnapped victim to an armed robber and bomber who wanted to start a violent revolution. If she was convicted of all the things she had participated in, she would spend the rest of her life behind bars, or possibly face execution by the state of California.

Just like that, it was all over. There was no hope for revolution, and the only thing that remained was how Hearst would play it. Would she maintain her commitment to the SLA, and accept the consequences. Or would she go back to being the victim and claim that she was forced to do all the things she had done over the past year and a half?

Next time on Infamous America, it's one of the biggest legal spectacles in modern American history and a case that is still debated today. Was Patty Hurst brainwashed by the SLA and therefore an innocent victim? Or was she a willing participant in their crimes and as guilty as everyone else?

Some questions will be answered, but not all. 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.

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