Infamous America - PATTY HEARST Ep. 6 | “The Truth of Patty Hearst”

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

More than a year and a half after Patty Hearst was kidnapped, her legal saga plays out in court and in the media. In court, she portrays herself as an innocent victim who was forced to participate in criminal activities. In early media encounters, she sounds like she genuinely joined the revolutionary group and was a willing participant in all its illegal exploits. No one knows the truth, and the debate continues to this day. 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

Before Patty Hurst was arrested in September of 1975, her life had started to look a lot like it had just before she was kidnapped 19 months earlier. Back then, she and her fiancé, Stephen Weed, would go to work and school. Patty would cook dinner at their Berkeley apartment, they'd watch TV and go to bed. Now, Patty Hurst was in a relationship with Steve Celia, her second SLA boyfriend after Willie Wolfe had been killed in the L.A. shootout. Steve would go off to work as a painter. At night, he'd come home to their San Francisco apartment. Then, Patty would make dinner, they'd watch TV, and go to bed. The pattern was roughly the same, but nothing else was. Hurst couldn't leave the apartment because she was a fugitive.

After 19 months with the revolutionary group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, Hurst was wanted on more than a dozen felony charges, including assault, and bank robbery. The Habernia bank robbery had happened just two months after she was kidnapped by the SLA. She was caught on security cameras wielding a gun. The event signaled her public conversion to a revolutionary named Tanya and her becoming a full-fledged member of the very group that had kidnapped her. The law did not yet make a connection between Hearst, the SLA, and two other bank robberies, including one in Carmichael that caused the death of innocent bystander Mernal Opsil. But that was on the way. The FBI tacked on a kidnapping

charge for her participation in carjacking teenager Tom Matthews the year before. The fact that Matthews had a great time during their camp out on Mulholland Drive was of no concern. The young man had been held against his will by Patty Hurst, Bill Harris, and Emily Harris. The day after the carjacking, six of the original members of the SLA, including its leader Donald DeFries, died during a shootout with the LAPD. After that, Hearst and the Harris's had restarted the SLA with the help of a revolutionary figure named Kathy Salia. Hurst's current boyfriend, Steve, was Kathy's brother. Kathy, Steve, and another sibling joined Hurst, the Harris's, and a few others to revitalize the SLA. A couple months before they were caught, they had killed a woman during a bank robbery

and had tried to kill police officers, sheriff's deputies, and civilians with bombs. The FBI had trailed behind the group for a year and a half and made very little progress. But then, in a final flurry of activity, the agency sprinted forward. They followed a series of leads provided by witnesses and discovered two apartments that were being used by members of the SLA. Agents quickly arrested Bill and Emily Harris while the married couple were out jogging. Then, agents and San Francisco police officers

surprised and arrested Patty Hurst and fellow SLA member Wendy Yoshimura at one of the apartments. On the day of the arrests, the FBI agent in charge held a press conference about the exciting developments. Steve Salia, Patty's boyfriend, heard the news and rushed to the apartment,

to warn Patty. He was immediately captured. And so, after 19 months of no progress, five SLA members were arrested in a single day. Before, we're still on the loose. The FBI made a strange mistake during the big day. They didn't send agents to the address where Kathy Salia, her sister Joe, Mike Borton, and Jim Kilgore were working as painters. The only reason the FBI knew about the two apartments was because agents had surveilled the site of the painting job and followed members of the SLA back to their homes. But now, half the gang was in custody and half was on the run. The four painters heard on the radio about the arrests of their comrades and they fled the area. They went underground and that led to a series of sequels that played

out far more quietly than the media spectacle of the trial of Patty Hurst. 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 six, The Truth of Patty Hurst. Patty Hurst and the Harris's were first taken to a federal courtroom in San Francisco. As the car drove up and flashbulbs started going off, Hurst shook a clenched fist at reporters, giving them a historic photo of her defiance. She was booked under federal bank robbery and firearm charges. Later, as a jail guard filled out forms related to Hearst's booking,

the guard instructed Hurst to state her occupation. Defiantly, Hurst said, urban gorilla. Randy Hurst, Patty's father, had already hired a powerhouse attorney for his daughter. The lawyer was extremely aggressive and came from a family steeped in leftist activism. Randy figured his daughter might view the man as an ally. The attorney tried to get bail for Patty Hurst using two arguments.

One, she was arguably the most recognizable woman in America and abroad. At this point, fleeing wouldn't do her much good. There was nowhere she could hide. Second, she had effectively been in a drug-induced haze for the entire 19 months.

She was a victim of hunger, sleep deprivation, and general mistreatment. In short, she had been driven to insanity and had no idea what she was doing. The lawyer convinced her to sign an affidavit that summarized all the points. The problem was, before it was submitted to the court, Hurst had a visit from her childhood best friend. The visit was recorded. During the visit, Patty Hurst told her friend that she had no desire to go home to her parents,

and that she now considered herself a revolutionary feminist. The federal judge refused bail. In one week of captivity, Hurst had offered the clinched fist salute, had given her occupation as urban guerrilla, and described herself as a revolutionary feminist. Worst of all, she admitted in the affidavit that she had participated in the bank robbery that killed Myrna Opsol. Randy and Catherine Hurst decided their daughter needed a

a new attorney. They fired the first and brought in a 40-year-old lawyer named F. Lee Bailey. Bailey had saved from execution, the presumed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, and Bailey had successfully argued a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court that won a new trial for convicted killer, Dr. Sam Shepard. story was believed to have inspired the TV show The Fugitive in the 1960s, and then the smash hit movie starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the 90s. F. Lee Bailey looked at the surveillance tape of the Hibernia Bank robbery. It was pretty damning. Patty Hurst looked like she was behaving purposefully, voluntarily, and even enthusiastically. The U.S. attorney thought Bailey might make some kind of overture toward a plea deal and was poised to consider

a lesser charge for her. Instead, Bailey told the U.S. attorney that he should drop the case against Hearst altogether. If he did, Bailey said, Hurst would agree to testify against all the remaining SLA members. The U.S. attorney said no. Public opinion was strongly against Patty Hurst, and the intertwined cases against all the SLA members were already so messy that having Patty testify could backfire on the prosecutors. So F. Lee Bailey brought in the psychiatrists and let them go to work. Bailey felt strongly that it would be obvious that Hurst had been brainwashed by the SLA. At first, according to her own memory, Hurst distrusted the doctors enormously. She thought they were uncaring, they talked down to her, and they were a little obsessed about all the sex that

happened between the SLA members. But over time, even though, though it was painful, the doctors drew out memories she had repressed. She was able to discuss the torture and the chronic depression the SLA had forced upon her. Bailey brought in a Freudian psychiatrist. Hirst later recalled that he seemed to be leading her to certain statements and conclusions, but his final report was helpful. The Freudian psychiatrist said Hirst had gone through a terrible ordeal, complete with abuse and sensory deprivation by being tied up and blindfolded in the closet at the start of her captivity. He said it was amazing. Hearst didn't simply curl up and die, and he pronounced her a survivor. F. Lee Bailey and his

defense team were now armed with better ammunition, but they were under no illusions. The trial would be an uphill climb. Even with reports of Hearst's alleged physical and mental damage over the course of 19 months, a jury might not see her as a victim. And, unfortunately for Bailey, Patty Hurst would become her own worst enemy. 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. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN.

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In jail, Hearst was a celebrity. Female prisoners and guards wandered into her isolation wing to get a glimpse of her. bagfuls of mail arrived, and the letters were predictably mixed. Some condemned her for being so ungrateful for her upbringing. Some were from radicals or wannabe revolutionaries urging her to keep fighting. There was even a letter from convicted murderer and cult leader Charles Manson, urging her to write back so he could help her. Manson had been in prison for four years after his conviction for his role

in the infamous Tate La Bianca murders in 1969. Two weeks before Hearst's arrest, a member of the so-called Manson family pointed a handgun at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. Just four days after Hurst was arrested, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at Ford in San Francisco and barely missed him. Law enforcement and the public quickly made the connection

between Moore and her work as an accountant for the PIN food program from 18-months. earlier. And by the fall of 1975, when Hearst was arrested, there had already been 50 bombings in California alone. In short, Patty Hurst had a big public relations problem on her hands, as she prepared for trial for her role in the Hibernia bank robbery and other charges. A year earlier, Patty Hurst was known as the victim of violent political zealots. But now, she was often called an outlaw or just another youngster who had turned her back on society. President Ford's Attorney General called her a common criminal. Whether she was common or not, Patty Hurst trial started on February

4, 1976, exactly two years to the day after her kidnapping. U.S. Attorney James Browning laid it all out. Hearst had robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with five others. There was no question about it. Then, a month later, she fired a hail of bullets at workers of Mel's sporting goods in Los Angeles to help her partner in crime Bill Harris. A large amount of the prosecution's case rested on eyewitness testimony, like that of bank tellers, victims of the carjackings, and bystanders. But a lot also came from Hearst's own mouth. The government introduced what were called the Tanya tapes. Those were Hearst's recordings of her own misdeeds and her vitriol against the government, her parents, and her former fiancé Stephen Weed. There were also transcripts

of Jack Scott's book interviews with her. Bill Harris was a pack rat, and he kept all the tapes. The FBI seized them when they arrested Bill and his wife Emily. After that, F. Lee Bailey introduced what would be the cruxed of his defense for Hearst. It was going to center around her state of mind, and it was a gamble. According to Bailey, the SLA used mind control techniques to force Hurst to become a bank robber against her will. Therefore, she lacked the criminal intent to be convicted for it. Similar to the way confessions are thrown out if arrestees are not given a Miranda warning, or in common terms, read their rights, Bailey argued that all of Patty's tapes and communicates,

should be kept from the jury. About a week after the trial started, Bailey persuaded the judge to stop the prosecution's presentation of its case. He wanted a hearing on whether or not Hurst's statements were voluntary. The judge granted the hearing, and the first witness was Patty Hurst.

In clean, conservative clothes, styled hair and makeup, Hurst was almost unrecognizable as the same person in her booking photo. She took the stand in a courtroom that was packed with family, reporters, attorneys, and lucky citizens who'd managed to get a seat. The overflow room was packed too. Hurst didn't want to testify at the hearing, but Bailey felt they had no choice. What followed was a disaster.

One of the first things Bailey asked Hurst was why she said on the tape that she had robbed the Herbernia Bank and said it again in the SLA book manuscript. And also, why did she brag about it to teenager Tom Matthews? Hurst explained to the courtroom that she never had a choice. Donald DeFries and then Bill Harris constantly threatened her if she didn't do what they said. U.S. Attorney Browning jumped on the answer. He asked why she didn't simply walk away or call for help when the Harrises were in Mel's sporting goods.

He gave other examples too, such as when Jack Scott brought the SLA to Pennsylvania. Hurst had driven with Scott cross-country while the others took different cars and routes. Why didn't she find a way to escape during the trip when she was separated from the other SLA members? Hurst struggled to respond, but she did. She felt it would be no problem for the SLA to find her and kill her. And at a certain point, she felt the FBI would kill her if they'd kill her if they'd found her because that's what DeFries and the Harris's made her believe. In essence, she testified that she felt trapped by the SLA. For Hearst, the worst part of the two-day hearing was when

Browning produced a document that she had written. It was a description of a bank she had cased for robbery before discarding it in favor of the Crocker Bank and Carmichael. Like an episode of Law and Order, Bailey saw where it was going and jumped up to object. He realized that Browning was trying to get Hearst to open the proverbial door to question her about the robbery in which Myrnal Opsil lost her life. It would incriminate Hurst and subject her to even more charges. But the judge let Browning press on. Bailey had no choice but to advise Hurst to invoke her Fifth Amendment right

not to incriminate herself. Ultimately, the judge decided that all of Hearst's statements on tape and to strangers like Tom Matthews and in Jack Scott's booknotes were made voluntarily. Thus, they could all be used in open court with the jury in attendance. They were used, and the prosecution rested after nine days of testimony. Bailey regrouped. He called to the stand a neighbor who lived next door to Hearst when she was kidnapped. Since the SLA beat and tied him up when they took Hurst,

he made a very effective witness. He underscored the fact that Hearst had been the victim of a terrifying crime. Then, the famed defense attorney gambled again. He thought he understood a ruling of the judge as one that limited the ability of the prosecutor to cross-examine Patty if he put her on the stand again. So, she took the stand a second time, and Bailey gently asked her about her seemingly lost year in captivity, where she was too scared to do anything except what she had been indoctrinated to do.

Among other things, he got Hearst to talk about the rapes that she had endured by Willie Wolf and Donald DeFries. She made a very compelling victim. That was, until U.S. Attorney Browning cross-examined her. It turned out that Bailey had misunderstood the ruling, and the prosecutor was free to attack. Bailey watched helplessly as Browning started tearing into her on February 19th, the day before her 22nd birthday. Browning accused her of exaggerating her injuries in the kidnapping.

No one could refute the accusation because she wasn't seen by anyone outside of the SLA for the first couple months. He also asserted that her engagement to Stephen Weed had been troubled, insinuating that she had either faked her own kidnapping or was so. somewhat happy to be removed from her life. But the most damaging part of Hearst's cross-examination was when Browning waded into the Carmichael robbery that killed Myrna Opsil.

Browning peppered Hurst with questions about Jack Scott, Pennsylvania, Jim Kilgore, the Salias, and more. He wanted her to open the door to talking about what the press now called Patty Hurst's Lost Year. By talking about those things, Browning hoped to link her to the Carmichael robbery. She had no choice but to keep pleading the fifth, leaving the jury to assume the worst about her.

At that point, F. Lee Bailey decided he had to jump several steps ahead and make a bold move to protect his client. Shortly after the capture of the five SLA members, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento charged Steve Salyah with participating in the Carmichael robbery. At the time of Hearst's trial, no one had yet made a deal with prosecutors to turn on the others. Mike Borton, Jim Kilgore, Kathy Celia, and Joe Celia

were still fugitives and not part of any equation. F. Lee Bailey knew it was just a matter of time before the Harris's tried to make a deal. Bailey worried about them cutting a deal to testify against Steve in order to corner Hearst, a more high-profile prize. So Bailey went first, offering Hurst up to testify against her boyfriend, Steve Salia. At the end of each day of Patty's trial,

she would go into another room in the federal building and meet with Sacramento's chief prosecutor about the Carmichael robbery. She told them everything she knew in exchange for immunity. The government could not use anything she said against her. As far as the Carmichael robbery and Opsel's death were concerned, Patty Hurst could not be tried. Bailey was relieved.

he had good reason to think the Harris's might go first. They had far fewer resources for a good defense, in spite of the help from various leftist attorneys. But the opposite was also true. The Harrises were just as paranoid about what Hurst was going to say about them. Bailey had cut off all contact between Hurst and her former comrades in arms. And as it turned out, it wasn't something the Harris has said during the legal process that nearly sunk Patty Hurst.

It was a single line in a magazine article. Bill and Emily were paid $10,000 for an interview, and the article was printed just before the end of Hearst's trial. The prosecutors read the article, but it was more to pass the time in court while psychiatrists droned on about Hearst's mental state. The catch was made by an eagle-eyed 23-year-old paralegal. She had noticed a passage written by Emily Hale.

Harris. It referred to a gift that Willie Wolf had given to Patty Hurst long before Wolf died in the house fire during the SLA shootout. The gift was a stone relic in the shape of a monkey face that he had bought in Mexico. He fashioned a chain for it and gave it to Patty. She presumably wore it everywhere as a sign of her devotion to Willie Wolf. The police found it in Hearst's handbag when they arrested her. The question became, if Wolf had been raping her, as she testified, and she hated him as she testified, why would she carry around such a reminder? Prosecutors quickly tracked down items that were found on Wolf's charred remains and stored in evidence. Sure enough, he'd been wearing an identical monkey face on a chain.

The evidence suggested the two had a bond that was not forced. U.S. Attorney Browning was so excited by the surprise twist that he shared his discovery with his 14-year-old daughter. and that set off a crazy chain of events. Browning's daughter told her mother, who repeated the tale to a girlfriend, who in turn told her own mother. That mother was following the trial closely and cheering for Patty Hurst. So, she tracked F. Lee Bailey down at his hotel and told him about the two monkeys. Bailey managed to convey to the jury that Hurst saved the monkey because Wolf told her it was 2,500 years old. But Browning provided witnesses who said the little stones were just common trinkets

of the type that could be purchased at any shop in Mexico. The message was clear. The monkeys were romantic talismans between two lovers, and Patty Hurst was lying. On Friday, March 19, 1976, after about six weeks of trial, the judge gave the jury instructions. On Saturday, March 20th, The jury returned a verdict of guilty on both bank robbery and the use of a firearm in a felony. When the jurors were asked later about their verdict, they said there were two pieces of evidence that mattered most. One was that Patty Hurst had the ability and the opportunity to escape during the episode at Mel's sporting goods, but she didn't. The other was the pair of matching monkey necklaces. Before sentencing, F. Lee Bailey argued that Patty's

Hurst had been brutalized, tortured, molested, and many other things, and deserved leniency. The judge said he needed to send a message that violence would not be tolerated. Moreover, he felt that Hearst never showed any remorse for her actions, nor had she appeared to take any responsibility. He sentenced her to the average for bank robbers in San Francisco, seven years in federal prison, and she still needed to face charges in Los Angeles for her role with the Mel Sporting Goods fiasco and the kidnappings of Tom Matthews and another car driver.

In the end, one of Bailey's attorneys cut a sweet deal for Hurst for her role in the L.A. crimes. She pleaded no contest to the charges related to Mel's sporting goods and received probation in return. Charges related to the kidnapping of Tom Matthews were dropped.

Hurst appealed her only conviction and lost and then reported to prison in Pleasanton, California. on May 15, 1978. Shortly after Hurst started serving her sentence, her parents, Randy and Catherine, formally separated. The ordeal had sharpened their already deep differences. But they did unite in one cause,

and that was to lobby President Jimmy Carter to commute Patty's sentence. While in prison, Hurst and her supporters effectively flipped her reputation from a machine-gun-toting, bank robbering, bank-robbing, bombing revolutionary, to that of an innocent victim trying to forget the so-called lost year of her life. Her local congressman, Leo Ryan Jr., wrote to her often with words of support until he was murdered in Guyana while trying to negotiate with cult leader Jim Jones. In the year and a half that Hearst had been with the SLA, Jim Jones had led his people's temple to the tiny South American

nation that's wedged between Venezuela and Brazil. In another strange side show of the Patty Hurst saga, the murder of Leo Ryan and the suicides of more than 900 others spurred public opinion to sympathize with Hearst. The public reckoned, if so many people could be brainwashed into killing themselves at the behest of Jim Jones, it was now easier to imagine how Hurst could have been brainwashed by the SLA. On January 29, 1979, President Carter signed a commutation of the remainder of Hearst's prison sentence. After less than nine months in prison, and a few days shy of the fifth anniversary of her kidnapping, Patty Hurst was a free woman. Her former boyfriend, Steve Celia, was even more lucky. He was tried and acquitted for his role in the Carmichael Bank robbery,

and he went on to live quietly in Berkeley, California, until he passed away in 2013. Others in the saga received varying degrees of justice. Joe Romero and Russ Little were convicted of the murder of Oakland School District Superintendent Marcus Foster, even though they didn't actually do the shooting. Little managed to obtain a new trial, and he was acquitted in 1981.

Romero is still incarcerated. Bill and Emily Harris were convicted of Hearst's kidnapping and served eight years in prison. Wendy Yoshimura was convicted of charges related to the bombing operations of a former boyfriend. She served less than a year in prison, and she is now an artist. Mike Borton, one of the four who escaped capture in 1975, surrendered in 1984. He served 18 months in prison for his role in the Carmichael Bank, robbery and other charges, then he moved to Oregon. There, he married Josephine Salia, Kathy and Steve's younger sister. Joe Salia was also one of the four who were on the run after

1975. Ultimately, she was never charged with anything. Kathy Salia and her boyfriend Jim Kilgore fled to South Africa. Kathy was arguably the most fanatical of the reconstituted SLA, but her relationship with Jim didn't last long in South Africa. They split up, and Jim stayed and became an anti-apartheid activist and a school teacher. He married and started a family. Kathy returned to the U.S. and moved to Minnesota. She changed her name to Sarah Jane Olson and married and started a family. She was so comfortable in her new persona that she acted in amateur theater in the Twin Cities.

She was finally caught in June of 1990. after U.S. Marshals acted on tips from the TV show America's Most Wanted. For 25 years, no one was convicted for the killing of Myrna Opsil during the Carmichael Bank robbery. That changed in November 2002, when shotgun shells from the murder were linked to those found at an SLA hideout. Patty Hurst and Wendy Yoshimura already had immunity from any charges related to the Carmichael case. and Steve Salyah had been acquitted of a role in the crime and couldn't be charged again. Jim Kilgore was found in South Africa after renewed interest in the Opsal case in 2002 and extradited to the U.S. He pleaded guilty to charges relating to explosives and the Carmichael robbery and was sent to prison and was released in 2009.

The Harrises were re-arrested after ballistic evidence tied them to Opsal's death. They each served roughly five more years in prison, and both are now free. Emily Harris leads a quiet life, but Bill Harris was prominent in the 2018 CNN documentary about the Patty Hurst's story. Hearst's lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, was one of the most notorious in the business. 18 years after he represented Hearst, he joined the so-called dream team of lawyers who defended O.J. Simpson in the 1994 double murder case. By the early 2000s, Bailey's law career was essentially done. He was disbarred in Florida and Massachusetts and denied a license to practice in his new home state of Maine. He eventually moved to Georgia, where he passed away in 2021.

Patty Hurst married a man named Bernie Shaw. Shaw had been her chief bodyguard, hired by her family during the chaotic days of her trial. They have a family and live in an unlawful. undisclosed location. She's appeared in a variety of movies and TV shows and other events over the years, but has not given an interview about her experience since 2001. Thanks for listening to the story of Patty Hurst here on Infamous America. Next time, it's the story of one of the most successful bank robbers and escape artists

in American history, Willie Sutton. Whenever officials said a prison was escape proof, Willie proved them wrong. That's next time. 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 B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.