The Perils of Pauline (episode 2 of 48 parts): Patty Hearst's Armed Journey through Oz, or Patsy's Adventures in Militant Hippie-land

 

NOTE to you Dear Reader:

What follows is a tragic story, mostly for the victims of the SLA, and for the families of those victims.  To be clear:  this 'urban guerilla' organization, filled with Charles Bronson wannabes, were collectively responsible for murder, armed robbery, and the Gods know what else.  

If you're at all familiar with this blog, then you'll know that I have an irreverent take on just about any issue, or person.  If I write in this aforementioned strain, particularly in this final part of the Patty Hearst saga, I mean absolutely no disrespect to the families of the victims.

For those of us who lived through it, the following images were EVERYWHERE:

Or, her Bonnie and Clyde shot:

And now for something completely different:  how did Patty's evolution into urban guerilla occur?  Let's find out.

Patty (although she apparently prefers "Patricia") grew up in the wealthier parts of San Francisco, and had an indifferent education--often reported by teachers as a mediocre, or disinterested student.  When she was 19, somehow, she was enrolled in UC Berkeley.  She was living with her current boyfriend/teacher at her former high school/fiancée Steven Weed.

Wait...what? He was a teacher where?

Dear Reader, no mistake.  Weed was a young teacher for a brief time at Patty's high school, and that's where they met. She was 16.

By 1974, Patty and Steven were living together in Berkeley.  She was studying art history.  By all accounts, the couple were happy enough.  While they were undoubtedly affected by the kaleidoscopic atmosphere of Berkeley in the early 70s, there wasn't really remarkable about them.  They drank the kind of Chianti that comes in a basket-encrusted bottle, just like all the other couples living there.

This was the state of things, on February 4, 1974.  

It was approximately 9:00 pm, and there was a knock on her door.  The door was opened, and a group of strangely dressed armed men and women exploded into the apartment.  They pummeled poor old Steven, and dragged Patty down to a waiting car.  Apparently, she tried to escape when the SLO morons briefly set her down, before stuffing her into the trunk.  She was not well secured and scurried away--only to be quickly found Patty crouching near her garage.  They recovered her, and dumped her into their trunk.

The SLO wasted little time in publicly stating their responsibility for her abduction.  The leader of the  group (cough, gag, wheeze), Donald Defreeze, identified himself and his compadres as domestic terrorists.  Their goal (wait for it, Dear Reader), was to incite a wide spread rebellion against the American state, utterly destroying the "capitalist pigs" in Washington DC.

Like we haven't heard that before.

Take a look at these dolts:

Seriously, you should never give angry children automatic weapons.

I wish I could tell you these kids were harmless.  I wish I could.  They weren't.  These were armed, very dangerous delinquents, intent on committing acts of violence, including murder.  So they did, beginning with the shooting of two local public school officials, Marcus Foster, and Robert Blackburn.  They brutally killed Marcus Foster, yet Blackburn would survive.  Foster died as a result of EIGHT bullets.  But, these weren't ordinary bullets.  Defreeze and his band of evil garden gnomes shot Foster with special ammunition:  hollow point bullets that were packed with cyanide.  The SLA members left printed flyers at the scene in order to claim responsibility.

Later, there were armed bank robberies, one of which ended in the death of a relatively young mother.

But, Dear Reader, we progress too far, too fast.  Let us return to the stuffed olive inside the SLA's trunk.  Once in captivity, Patty found herself in a dark closet.  Immediately, the SLA members sent a letter to a local (Berkeley) radio station, stating that they were keeping Patty as a "prisoner of war."  Further, they demanded that the Hearst family pay a bunch of money to feed the local poor.  Of course, the SLA demanded more, but Hearst's father had difficulty in meeting their escalating demands, because he was not a billionaire.

The SLA kept making insanely unrealistic demands, probably because they had little practical idea of Patty's family financial limitations, or a long term plan of what to do with their hostage.

Patty later reported that she only heard brief snippets from her captors as to her family's inaction.  I imagine that a young girl would have only thought of her situation, and not the reality.  Patty later said that she grew worried, and then angry with her family for not meeting the ransom demands.  The SLA sent tape recordings of her to a local radio station with further demands, which didn't exactly help the situation on either side.

Now, no one knows for certain what happened to her next:  the accepted version is that at some point Patty was let out of her closet for longer periods of time, during which she was exposed to a pastiche of Communist tracts, and her captors.  You can guess what happened next:  Stockholm syndrome, due to a volatile mixture of teenaged angst, innocence, and a bad fashion sense.  Hey! Presto! Instant urban terrorist, fresh from your very own Suzy Homemaker Oven.   

 

My sister used to have one of those, and yes I burned my hand on the bulb.

In all honesty, I don't think that it was a particularly difficult conversion of the poor little rich girl.  Multiple biographies indicate that she was a child constantly in search of something:  excitement? Attention? Love and passion? A purpose?  But, really, what teenager doesn't look for such things?  It didn't help that her parents weren't exactly demonstrative.  It also didn't help that Patty was easily influenced.

One of the troubling aspects of this story, is the sexual relationship Patty formed with a member of the SLA, by the name of William "Willie" Wolfe.  Hearst later maintained that her relations with Wolfe weren't voluntary--in other words, he raped her.  I'm not sure that I believe that, because of her later acquiescence to, and participation in the SLA.  But, that's not a popular thing for me to write, is it? I should say that she was raped and then forcibly brain washed into supporting the 'terrorist' group.  Yeah, I definitely should, but I don't believe it.  Patsy-girl strikes me as a rather average person, who liked to flirt with stardom and controversy. Horrifically for their victims, little Patty's bid for independence from the Gods know what, ended in a tragic, violent, rather trite revolution against convention. 

But, it must have been uber fun for her to rob banks, right? Except for the innocents slain in the progress of those robberies.

While Patty apparently wasn't present at the following robbery, the crime sheds light on the kind of young people law enforcement was dealing with.  In April, 1975, the SLA committed two bank robberies.  One occurred in Hibernia Bank in San Francisco.  Bank cameras caught "Tania" (a.k.a. Patsy) holding a machine gun in her hands.  At another heist, members (allegedly not including Hearst) of the SLA entered a branch of Croker Bank in Carmichael, California.  One of the patrons inside the bank was Myrna Opsahi, a middle aged mother of four children.  It was her tragic 'luck' to be depositing funds for the local church, that day.  The SLA members came in with guns drawn, telling all the customers to fall on their faces, and stay there.  Now, exact details are fuzzy, but the gist is that Myrna made some kind of movement, spooking one of the SLA assholes, and a gun went off.  The poor woman began to bleed out, only to later die at the hospital.

The senseless violence of the SLA's crimes were beyond tragic, leaving behind only grief and sorrow.  Although they espoused supposedly "high" ideals of revolutionary change, in the end the SLA were thieves and murderers using tumultuous times to mask their true objective:  money.

Alright.  So what happened to our poor little rich girl and her bosom buddies? Well, let's see:

After the robberies, the SLA performed still more crimes, such as the robbing of a sporting goods store in LA, during which Patty Hearst in the getaway car peppered the front of the store, in order to help her 'compatriots' get away.  However, time was short, and before long De Freeze and company holed up in a house in LA.  Quite soon, they were found by the LAPD, and one of the biggest gun fights in LA history ensued, ending in 70% of the SLA dying in a burning house.

So, what happened to our heiress? She went on the lam with the remaining members of the group, travelling to the East coast, and later back to San Francisco.  You know what happened next....  

And now, years later, "Tanya" is raising dogs.

Woof.