The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Searching for Patty Hearst: A True Crime Novel by Roger D. Rapoport

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Searching for Patty Hearst: A True Crime Novel by Roger D. Rapoport https://amzn.to/4b5jRq8 On the night that Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, journalist Roger D. Rapoport, was a short drive away in his El Cerrito home. He quickly became one of the primary reporters covering the saga as it unfolded in real time. His reporting gave local and national readers a window into one of the most bizarre and polarizing crimes in U.S. history. Now, fifty years later, he has written a novel, Searching for Patty Hearst, that draws heavily from that time. In this compelling new book, he explores alternative theories of the crime and delves into the complex psychology of many of the key actors in a drama that kept the country riveted. Using the techniques of fiction, Rapoport gives voice to much of the story that fell outside of the bounds of journalistic coverage. “I wrote this novel because I believed the American public deserved nothing but the truth,” he says. With a wry sensibility and insider knowledge that Rapoport is one of the few people to possess, Searching for Patty Hearst, goes beyond the tabloid headlines to tell the story in all its depth. Rapoport takes on such questions as: Why did Patty participate in the kidnapping of a high school student hours before six of the SLA kidnappers were killed in a firefight with the Los Angeles police department? Did celebrity coroner Thomas Noguchi, whom Rapoport interviewed, mishandle the autopsies of six SLA victims? Why did Patty’s lawyers dump her fiancée Steve Weed as a key witness at her trial at the last minute? It’s often said that fiction can offer insights into the truth that reporting can’t. If that is the case, the story of Patty Hearst, the SLA, and the kidnapping that carved them into the American psyche just may be told for the first time with Searching for Patty Hearst.

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if you will. We collect all these amazing stories and have the most amazing guests. We have another one on today. We'll be talking to him about his hottest new book that comes out January 16th, 2024. In the meantime, we just ask for you to go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, linkedin.com, Fort. In the meantime, we just ask for you to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast,

linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1 on the LinkedIn or tickety-tockety and chrisfastfacebook.com and refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. See, that was painful? Painless? Painless? Painful? I don't know. It's Tuesday, folks. He is the author

of the latest, newest book to come out. Searching for Patty Hearst, a true crime novel. Roger D. Rapoport's on the show with us today. He'll be talking to us about his amazing work that he has been focusing on for 50 years. And he originally covered the Patty Hearst case in 1974 through 75. He wrote a book with her fiancee steve weed that was never published weed got cold feet about sharing intimate details of their love story that began when she was his 16 year old student at the private high school where he taught he did the first long interview

with her kidnapper bill harris after he was released from prison, as well as the Los Angeles coroner who autopsied the six Symbion Lebanese Liberation Army. I want to make sure there's a camera in front of me. Hearst captors who died in a firefight with the LAPD. A relative, Mark Brandler, was the judge in the trial where Patty Hearst pled guilty to joining the kidnapping of a 17-year-old high school student. He's the author of many books, three award-winning feature films, and a journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Atlantic. And he's with us today for an exclusive interview on his book, Searching for Patty Hearst, being published today. Welcome

to the show. How are you, Roger? I'm great. Today is the publication date of the book, so the timing is pretty good, Chris. Yes. Nice to start at the top, and I'm happy to be here. We're honored to have you as well. And give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to look you up on the interwebs? PattyHearst.com is the publisher's website. For those members of the audience who know just a little bit about Patty and would like to know more, there's a great timeline that my publisher, James Sparling, did, and also a hilarious piece he did on the AI covers that didn't make the cut. You'll really enjoy it. It's really a funny take on book covers that AI thought might work and didn't.

There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. And you may need to give us a little bit of foundation for maybe people that are older, younger than 50 years that need to remember what the story was. February 4th, 1974 was the night that Patty Hearst was kidnapped. And believe it or not, this is a great story, Chris, they actually blacked out the biggest story probably in the world for some hours to give the FBI a head start on what would become one of the largest manhunts in Bureau history. Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a group that was very little known called the Seminies Liberation Army, led by Donald DeV defries most of the members of the

group uh were white radicals defries was an escaped black convict two of their members were already in jail for assassinating the alleged allegedly assassinating the superintendent of the oakland schools in the fall of 1973 and when patty was kidnapped, her fiance, Steve Weed, was badly beaten but escaped. And it became, if you can believe this, it actually, the story became so big, the hunt for Patty Hearst,

that it actually knocked the Watergate scandal off the front page. Wow. That was when it was going full steam, I'm sure. Now, who is Patty Hearst, for those who don't understand why it was important that she was kidnapped?

Just to give you a snapshot, the Hearst Corporation, which was founded by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper titan who built a castle in San Simeon, she was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. Her father was chairman of the company running the San Francisco Examiner. And at the time she was kidnapped, the SLA was broke and they were looking for a high profile victim that would inspire similar actions around the country. And they picked her off the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle when they saw her engagement photo with Steve Weed. Not only would the Hearst rapidly ransom her and give them the money they needed to resupply,

they were very well armed, but they were broke, hijacking cars and basically stealing everything they could get their hands on. They were scraping by. And also they figured they would get the front page automatically because this was a celebrity kidnapping. And remember, the Hearst empire didn't just happen. Her grandfather figured out that the so-called damsel in distress, particularly a young white woman, was a true circulation miracle. And in one case, the Hearst empire even sent a reporter to Cuba to liberate a young woman from jail and then brought her home

and wrote a story about it. And that was how the Hearst empire just knocked off the competition pretty much all over the country, those kinds of stories. Wow. The tables were turned, Chris. The tables are turned, as it were. Now, there was a lot of this stuff going on in the early 70s, right? A lot of revolutionary, anti-government sort of stuff.

Oh, sure. You had the Weathermen, and there were a lot of bombings going on. Of course, kidnapping was terribly frightening to the Hearst family, because guess what? It's a big family, and they were worried that there might be another attempt to hurt the family. So on the advice of the FBI, Governor Reagan, the Attorney General, and hostage consultants, including, by the way, FBI agents that were bunking in the Hearst house, actually living with them. And, of course, Steve Weed, after he got out of the hospital, was there. They decided to not ransom Patty. Big mistake.

Wow. What happened was Patty decided after the, believe it or not, her kidnappers gave her a gun when she told him she was going to stay and fight. They believed in her. And she went public in a communique on April Fool's Day saying, look, you know, my family's not going to ransom me. I think I'm going to stick around because guess what she didn't feel safe just walking uh because the fbi and the police were pretty well armed so the first thing they did because again they were still broke because

they didn't get that four million dollar ransom they went out robbed a bank not just any bank they robbed the bank owned by the father of one of her childhood friends trish tobin wow so now she was a wanted criminal with her wanted poster up on every post office a billboard in the country so overnight she got went from the situation where people were making charitable donations to the $30 Hearst Corporation to try to pay for her ransom, which didn't happen, to one of the most wanted criminals in the country. And this project had a huge manhunt. And to make it even worse, when they fled to Los Angeles after the bank robbery, they made a little mistake, actually a pretty big mistake. And the L.A. police tracked down six of the kidnappers,

including their leader, Donald DeVries. And in the biggest firefight on American soil ever, 9,000 rounds, they exterminated six of the eight captors. Fortunately, Patty had gone shopping with two of the other members, Bill Harris, her actual kidnapper, the guy who physically put her in a trunk in Berkeley. And now she was really reluctant to turn herself in because she'd seen exactly how the LAPD and the FBI handled these fugitives. Yeah, that's crazy. And she became infamously the poster child for what people call the Stockholm syndrome.

Right. And the story actually gets a little worse from Patty's lawyer's point of view, because during this time in LA, while they were shopping, Bill Harris decided to shoplift and was being tackled by security guards. Fortunately, Patty was in a van across the street, had two automatic weapons and fired off about 30 rounds, liberated Bill. But there was a problem. The van was hot. So they had to basically carjack another vehicle.

They pretended that they were shopping for a car. A high school kid took him for a test drive. His name was Tom Matthews, and they kidnapped him. So Patty suddenly was now a kidnapper and a bank robber. And to make it even worse, after they fled to the East and lived in Pennsylvania and they lived in New York, they lived on a farm, they went skinny dipping, they kind of hid out, they worked on their plans, they were still broke.

They decided to come back West, another big mistake. They went to Sacramento and in a bank robbery there where Patty was the getaway car driver, they accidentally shot a woman bringing in a church collection to that bank, and she died. And now she was, there were three cases going on. So that really gave her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey,

a really tough case. Got that murder one. This is what happens when rich girls go bad. No, I'm just kidding. You can see that on Lifetime TV. Rich girls go bad. No, and always be nice to your family because they might not pay your ransom. Make sure they like you. So one of the interesting stories I found about this is how you played into the story 50 years ago. Tell us how you got entwined in this. Well, at the time I was writing for a magazine called New Time. So I covered it for them. I lived in Berkeley.

And fortunately, my wife knew a teacher who had worked with Steve Weed and introduced me to him. And I wrote an article about him talking about his search for Patty Hearst. You realize that they were living at his place. She was coming over every night, supposedly for math tutoring. By the way, Steve knew this family pretty well. He had actually flunked her sister in math. So it was kind of a family joke. But anyway, Patty fell in love with him.

And then they eventually wound up moving in together at Berkeley where she was going to school and he was a philosophy PhD. But that relationship began when she was 16. And I interviewed Steve and he told me their story. And then we ended up writing a book together. So he moved into my house. At what point in the story does he move into your house? So while they were searching for Patty, he was doing his best to find her.

And by the way, a little wrinkle in the story, Patty decided that she wasn't going to come back to Steve. The wedding that they were planning for June was off. Wow. And she basically said, she kind of accused him of being a gold digger. You know, he paid the rent. You know, she did all the shopping. She did all the cooking. And he just kind of hung out with his friends.

And she just said, you know, I decided, and actually she had been talking about breaking off the engagement, thinking about it. And she'd actually, the week of the kidnapping, she told both later, later told both the prison psychiatrist and remember Tom Matthews, the kid she kidnapped, she told both of them that she'd had dreams that she was going to be kidnapped. So you can think about why she was dreaming of this. She was sitting in class one day and started dreaming, just daydreaming, having this fear that she was going to get kidnapped. So Steve and I wrote this book. And what I didn't know at the time was I would give him a chapter and then he'd go home and rewrite it.

Not, of course, not tell me about it. And then when I basically was done with the book, we had a big advance from Ballantyne. He announced that the book was a little too personal, you know, even though that's what the publisher wanted. He'd been a drug dealer at Princeton. They did things like he would steal exams from the geometry teacher's file cabinet and give them to her so she could pass in geometry. Spent three hours tutoring her on all the questions so she could pass this exam. And, of course, she only got an 80 in the course. So he didn't want those kinds of details in the book because guess what? He was hoping that when she came back, the fact that she had declared in the communique that she was dumping him and running off with one

of the kidnappers, Willie Wolf, who unfortunately died in that LAPD firefight. So her personal life got pretty complicated. Was he worried that maybe the 16-year-old thing might be a thing, too? Well, yeah. I mean, obviously, in today's world, that would be treated much differently than it was. Yeah. She would say things to him like, I hope my parents die in a plane crash.

And that was in the book, you know. Oh, wow. Stuff like that. And, of course, he was a drug dealer at Princeton. He would fly cross-country country get your weed from weed so this was starting to get a little you know dropping acid you know and obviously you know he he was in love with being a hearst he had he still had some of the rugs which he brought over to my he brought over for safekeeping things like that you know family heirlooms things like that they were getting

a deep discount on family heirlooms that were being kind of auctioned off at a 90% discount to family members. So this story falls like right in your lap. You're living down the block from your, you write this book. The guy's crashing your place. You get the advance. You got this story. So how did, what's parlayed over the last 50 years with this book or potential

book is the book that you're releasing now, how does that play into it all? So Steve did go ahead and did his own version of the book and published it. And actually, believe it or not, the PR campaign opening day for the book was just before Patty went on trial for bank robbery in San Francisco. And he was doing a round of press conferences. So obviously that didn't exactly endear him to the Hearst family. Meanwhile, I was able as an Oakland Tribune reporter to get Bill Harris, after he was paroled, the kidnapper, to give me a long interview about Patty. And they were stunned. They thought the Hearst would write them a check for $4 million. They'd have a big bank account.

They could go to Cuba. They could do whatever they wanted. But the main thing is they would show the world how revolutionaries can really get the job done. And Patty just seemed like the perfect target. Kidnap her one day, get the check money. You know, I mean, today the Hearst family is a $21 billion family. Just to give you an idea, Randy, her father,

the guy who decided on the advice of all his consultants not to pay the $4 million ransom, you know, with consulting with his family. When he died, his estate was $1.5 billion. So obviously Patty was a little hurt by that you know she kind of felt oh my goodness you know she should have given better gifts at christmas right right she said the one thing that i've learned is that the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power to maintain their position over of control over the

masses even if this means sacrificing one of their own. That's the way she felt. Of course, her family was convinced these tape recordings were all bogus, you know, April Fool's Day, right? Her mother thought she was dead. And then after telling the press that, they got on a plane to Mexico to go stay with Desi Arnaz and kind of cool out. So all these things, she accepted another appointment, the Board of regents of the university of california where patty was a student under ronald reagan i mean that just really upset her you know the family was not doing the kinds of things she felt they should be doing to convince the sla the kidnappers to take take them seriously and her seriously every time they would put down and claim she was being brainwashed,

the SLA would just, you know, they did a bank robbery, anything they could do to prove that she was, you know, she'd become a revolutionary under the name of Tanya, by the way. Yeah. I remember the pictures of her. She's in the bank holding the gun and she looks like a revolutionary. She got the little thing there. So now this book here is billed as a true crime novel,

Searching for Patty Hearst. Is this part of a true story? Or is this a novel where you've spun it on fiction? Or how does this book lay out? Well, all the things we've been talking about so far, Chris, the events that actually happened are in the book. Okay. The problem is that we don't have clarity about, for example, in the book, I have the Bill Harris

interview, his side of the story. And there's a lot from Patty's side and so on. But there are many, many people, I mean, imagine there were thousands of FBI agents working on this case. There were judges, lawyers, prosecutors, F. Lee Bailey, and they all had their side of the story. Just to give you one example, this is actually a true story. When F. Lee Bailey, who at that time was probably the most famous criminal attorney in the country, as I mentioned, he defended the Boston Strangler. And in fact, the Boston Strangler psychiatrist was flown in from Boston to analyze Patty Hearst. And he insisted as part of his fee deal

that he was going to get the first rights to write the definitive book on the case. And Patty would hold up anything she wrote for 18 months while they were defending her. They're already cutting up the publishing rights to the book, right? Of course, what happened was he lost the case and his big publishing contract fell apart. So that's just one example of how people were playing this thing.

So in the book, I give everybody a chance to tell their side of the story. And of course, because none of us were there at the time and many of these people are no longer with us, this is an opportunity for the reader to decide, essentially what you do every day on your show. Let your reader decide. And one thing I would say about your show is that you do a great job of never just taking one person's word for it. When you have guests on, they present the other side. And you let your audience decide. One of the reasons you have a very successful podcast is that you're encouraging people

when they listen to somebody like me to not just take the guest's word for it, but to do their own homework. And that's a great thing for younger people. Never get different vantage points. And the point of the book is we have situations in this book literally where two people were in the same room at the same moment in this case for months and they have completely different versions of what happened and another example would be steve weed who we've talked about where he was telling me quote the truth i he lived in the hearst house while they were searching

for patty right he was telling me about the swamis and he went he had he got drunk with patty's dad and all these stories some of them were very funny the publisher was just loving it you know all this really gritty you know nuts you know you know all all the the fine details the eyewitness accounts there were other people in the room like patty's mother and and his father who thought steve was a complete jerk you know they hated him they his her dad even said he he really needs to be housebroken you know they finally kicked him out well i had i had a little bit of experience with him telling me all this stuff and then

he's deciding no he doesn't want to tell it So this book is an attempt to present all sides of the story and then let the reader decide on their own what they think really happened. I like that. I like that approach. And then I imagine by calling it a novel, it kind of absolves you of, you know, any sort of lawsuits or accusations, I guess. Well, it's really interesting. I just want to use this one example, Chris, because you talk about the difference between

fiction and nonfiction. So here's an interesting story. So Patty wrote a book, 400-page book, in which she asserts a lot of things. Many people have disputed. I'll give you one example. Jack Scott, who was running something called the Institute for Sports and Society, with his parents, drove Patty cross-country, pretending to be married to her with the parents being her in-laws. Right. And he basically saved, really saved her life, got her to the Poconos.

They were writing a book together and then, you know, got her back to California. I mean, he basically saved her life when he read her book, he sued her for $7 million. He was literally in the room. So here's another example. Paul Schrader, who's a very famous film director, did the film version of Patty's book, right? He changed the ending. He fictionalized the ending. And Patty was really upset by this.

Paul's the director. He owned the rights, so he got to change it. So there's this very fine line between fiction and non-fiction in the story and i think one of the problems with steve steve's book and many of the books is you're only getting one person's side of the story do you do you do you do you suss out the stuff that mr weed didn't want in the book like all of us oh I mean, it's all sorts of information. So this book sounds like rich with all sorts of great stuff and stories.

Yeah. I mean, I didn't use the earlier book. I wouldn't do that. Yeah. But the information, of course, I did my own reporting too. Yeah. Bill Harris, for example.

And don't forget Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who actually autopsied the six victims of the SLA. I had a long interview with him. And he was extremely angry at the LAPD. Basically, they immolated these victims and it made his job extremely difficult. And guess what? When they opened fire on that house in LA, nobody knew if Patty Hearst was in that building or not. Yeah, I was going to ask that.

Nope. And so that was another reason why Patty was really frightened about turning herself in. And that's part of the reason she lost her case. You know, there'd never been a kidnap victim who stood there and literally saved the life of her kidnapper who was being tackled by security guards at a sporting goods store in Inglewood. I mean, she could have just let him hang and turn the key in the ignition and driven off to the police station. That's what I would have done. Here's what happened in the case. She got convicted of bank robbery. Normal sentences, 10 to 12 years the judge was

a family friend actually he had met patty as a little girl and he he gave her seven years then she went down to los angeles and played no contest in the kidnapping of tom matthews and that was where she became very close to tom and tom said you know because she'd been kidnapped she kind of understood what it felt like. And she was really sweet to me. She kept leaning down and touching my, you know, rubbing my back. She gave me a big kiss when they let her go the next day. So she played no contest in that case.

And the prosecutor, Samuel Myerson, in that case actually went to the judge and said, but she's already in jail for bank robbery. I think we'll just, you know, let's just suspend the sentence, okay? But here's the most interesting one of all. So this woman who died in the Sacramento bank robbery, Patty now was not in the bank when this happened. She's actually Bill Harris's wife,ily who shot shot her accidentally uh there was finally a criminal case brought against five of the sla members patty was not never indicted even though she drove the

getaway car but more to the point there was a civil case brought by the family of this woman and it was settled out of court for three300,000 by the defendants, including Patty. And Patty's dad, Randy, wrote a check on that one as part of the settlement. So she ended up spending about 22 months in federal prison before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. And by the way, one of the people who campaigned for her early release was Cesar Chavez. And Steve told me that when they were together, Patty would happily walk through United Fire Worker picket lines, Cesar Chavez's union, and curse the miserable effing migrants. So she was by no means a leftist when she was kidnapped wow i mean

it's such a crazy story i was just a kid at the time and i just have a vague memory of it but i remember i remember how insane it was and so you've been collecting all this stuff for 50 years now as of today is it as of today is the fifth february 4th is the 50th anniversary. February 4th? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you've been collecting all this stuff. What has it been like following this story for 50 years and just being on top of it? You'll be surprised, Chris. But if you go to pattyhurst.com, which is our website that has a timeline of the entire story all the things we've been covering today so for someone who's new to the story pattyhurst.com has the story behind searching for pattyhurst

one of the most asked questions is is pattyhurst still alive and the answer is absolutely she lives in new york her dogs win shows it uh win first prize at kennel clubs she's going on to become a you know very successful she's a philanthropist she's a very proud mom and granddaughter one of her daughters is an actress and she played abigail folger one of the victims in the manson murders so there's an acting group in the family she's shown up at san simeon to autograph her book. She's been in Cannes with her movie. So Patty has a very strong presence as a dog breeder, philanthropist, and actress. There you go.

So has she given any feedback, any endorsement to the book, or has she tried to put this whole part of her life behind her? The latter. And I think she's done a pretty good job of it. She was very front and center doing the Playboy interview, you know, all over the reking, all every show you can imagine. When her book and movie came out, she was very visible, but she's really retreated since then and has not really been front and center since then. She has been involved in the aids you know movement she's

given money to causes the women's movement she's she's spoken out about the me too movement so she's definitely made herself known uh in the new york area obviously where she lives there you go note to self never kidnap crazy rich women I don't know what that means. So it sounds like just a wild story. It sounds like something that could be a movie, actually. Any opportunities you think there may be? I'm so glad you asked because I am a film producer. Yeah.

And I produce three feature films. The most recent one is called Coming Up for Air. It's a mental health film, believe it or not. And so I've worked with a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists in the various events we do all over the country. And the answer to the question is that I think there's at this point in time of the 50 year later perspective, yes, it would be very, you know, kind of looking back on the era 50 years later. And to me, by far the most interesting part of the story, and we talk about this in Searching for Patty Hearst,

is her fling with Willie Wolf. You know, she eulogized these six victims, fallen SLA victims. And she said, she called Willie Wolf the sweetest, loveliest, you know, the sweetest, gentlest man I've ever known. Think about that for a minute. You know, what was their relationship like? I mean, talk about catnip for a film producer. Yeah.

She basically decides not to go back to her fiance, not to go back to her family. She's fallen in love with this kidnapper. And then suddenly he's gone. So it's a, it's a, it would be a wonderful narrative and i think in in fairness to patty it never crossed her mind that you know with class privilege that her family would would not just write the check it just it just never occurred to her that they wouldn't just literally show up you know and drop the money but but it got even more ridiculous they they were they ended up the family got involved not just the parents and why did they do it they were afraid that the hearst empire once they bribed them once they were going to come back

and hit him again guess what happened during the trial these a group called the New World Liberation Front, not the SLA. The Symbiont's Liberation Army was not the instigator of this. They bombed San Simeon, the Casa de Sol guest house, which is where the Hearst family hung out when they visited. These were not idle concerns. There was a real concern

that there could be future action against this company because they're highly visible if you pay terrorists you'll just get more terms and we've seen that kind of thing there was a bombing you know there was a show a terrorist there was a shooting at a paper in baltimore more recently where five people were killed so they just felt incredibly vulnerable. And their idea was the FBI, we'll get them. I mean, this hunt was almost as big as the hunt for Jimmy Hoffa. In fact, they hadn't found Jimmy Hoffa yet.

So now they were really on the hot seat. So they had thousands of agents working this case. And just for an update, they never did. No, they never did no they never did you know when they go in for funding they talk about all the success stories that was that was a tough time for them that was yeah it was a it was a wild time i mean you had so many you know like you i think you mentioned the strangler the hillside strangler i remember when he was running around and i mean it's was just, it was just a crazy time.

Then you had Nixon, uh, tricky dick. So there you go. So I don't know if you're married still. Does, did your wife over 50 years somewhere get you focused on? No, we were divorced years later and I remarried. Did she ever get tired of you focusing on Patty Hearst? Like what's going on? You have this weird obsession with this other woman.

Yeah. Basically our time together with Steve, where we were feeding him of course and he was living with us and so forth you know when we look back on it it was it was a very difficult time for both of us yeah especially when we asked him to leave and he came back a few days later and asked if he could move back in but it just wasn't working out. Yeah, especially when he's stealing your book, eh? Yeah. He was unhappy that we asked him to leave because he would get up at noon and go out late at night and hang out with friends.

Sounds like a weed professor. I was trying to meet a deadline, and he'd be sitting out in the backyard. Sounds like a weed professor for sure. I don't think things have changed at Berkeley. I don't know what that means. I'm not getting sued now. So what do you hope people come away from when they read your book? Give us the final pitch out on people to pick up your book and order it wherever fine books

are sold. This is the greatest kidnapping story in American history. And it's inspired even authors like Stephen King to fictionalize various aspects of the story. But I think in fairness to the story itself and to your audience, the great thing about the Patty Hearst case and if I may say about searching for Patty Hearst is the open ending. There's so much we still don't know about this case. And I think in the book and to a certain extent on the website we ask all the unanswered questions and what makes this so interesting is the cast of characters we've talked a lot about the lead characters but there's so many other people the tom matthews story i mean

can you imagine this 17 year old kid he basically said after it was over he had a great night he loved meeting panny he got a kiss out of Patty. Talk about the family members who were trying to help. Obviously, her parents. Her mother is absolutely a fascinating character. She would take her. Steve told me this. They would go back to her home in Atlanta.

They'd be walking around Atlanta, showing her those sites. And her mother, who was a regent at the University of California, was using the N-word left and right. It's just a fascinating family, kind of an amalgam. And then, of course, her dad's newspaper. One of my favorite patty lines is to her dad saying, you know, dad, nobody under 80 reads the San Francisco Inferno. I don't think that's changed. Yeah. So they really did have a sense of humor. And frankly, Steve Weed did me a favor because I got an inside look.

I mean, guess what? He lived with her for three years. He was living with her family. So he talked a lot about the Swamis that were, Catherine Hirsch didn't think the FBI knew what they were doing. So she called in Swamis. They had Swami one, Swami two, Swami three, giving them advice, living in the house,

sitting out by the pool. So it's really a wonderful look at what happens to an incredibly influential family when their daughter just decides she's had enough of being a first. Wow. And that would happen with me if I ever got kidnapped. If I went to Mexico and I got kidnapped, they'd call them for the ransom. My parents would be like, you'll actually have to pay us to take him back. So wait a minute. I'm sitting here being a kidnapped victim in a closet.

Willie Wolf is, she was blindfolded. So Willie Wolf was reading her Marxist books about dialectical materialism. And they're off at Desi Arnaz's house in Mexico. I mean, what? materialism and they're off at desi arneza's house in mexico i mean what and by the way on as they got on the plane to go to mexico you know as they're leaving the house to go to mexico her mother is saying you know i think patty's dead well wow i mean so she was a little upset by these public statements wow that is crazy man so everyone can delve into it in your latest book give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs searching for patty hearst's website is patty hearst.com and for those who are new to patty

hearst the timeline is a great way the great introduction to the story gives a good overview. And I'd like to add this one thought about your show. I think we've been pretty careful today to make it clear that there are many points of view on this story. And I think that's the great thing about your podcast is that you encourage people to do their own homework and get different points of view. And that's what I love about your show. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate the comment there. And that's what I love about your show. Thank you. Thank you.

I really appreciate the comment there. And that's the great thing about your book. They're going to get so many of those diverse sort of aspects and you be the judge, as they say on TV. Right. So thank you very much, Roger, for coming on the show and sharing the story with us. Thanks, Chris. It's been great to be here.

Thank you. Great to have you as well. Congratulations on the new book, Searching for Patty Hearst, a true crime novel, out January 16th today, 2024. You can catch up on all the latest stuff and watch for probably more news or maybe some film coming from Roger as well. So you can check that out. Thanks so much for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTok, the chrisfossfaces.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTok, the chrisfossfacebook.com, and chrisfoss on YouTube. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, be good to each other,

stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.