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‘Searching for Patty Hearst’
As Patty Hearst turns 70, a new book about her kidnapping and the bank robbery
Patty Hearst turned 70 in February. That might not mean a great deal to some of you. But to a generation, the name of the granddaughter of US newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst will bring back images of a rifle-toting young woman at the center of one of the most colorful and extensively reported crimes of the last or any century.
On the morning of February 4, 1974, she was a 19-year-old student at University of California at Berkeley when she was kidnapped from her apartment near campus, less than three months after a November 1973 San Francisco Chronicle story had announced her engagement.
What’s she been up to? Well, she is now known as Patricia Hearst Shaw and for many years has been in the news, mostly for her dogs. A couple of her French bulldogs (Tuggy and Rubi) won prizes, including some at the prestigious and televised Westminster Kennel Club dog show.
What was she up to 50 years ago? She was taken by a group of armed men and women who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), intent on starting a war against the United States government.
The SLA was a far-left US organization, active in 1973-1975, considered the first domestic terrorist group. Six of its members died in a May 1974 shootout with police in Los Angeles. Although three surviving terrorists went on to recruit new members, they were nearly all arrested in 1975 and prosecuted.
The gang knew that since Hearst was from a wealthy, powerful family, the kidnapping would make front-page news and constant TV coverage. It sure did, day after day after day.
The SLA released audiotapes demanding money and food in exchange for Hearst’s release and kept up the heat by releasing a wild tape on which she claimed to have joined the SLA’s fight against the US.
On tape, she denounced her family, claimed allegiance to the SLA, and said that she was to be called by her new name, “Tania.” Days later came a film of Hearst participating in a robbery with the SLA at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco.
Hearst and her new “pals” kept on the run until September 18, 1975, when FBI agents nabbed her and others.
She was tried for robbery and other crimes. Her attorney F. Lee Bailey – considered one of the greatest lawyers of the 20th century – had used the Stockholm syndrome (symptomized by loyalty to the abductor) argument in her defense, saying that she had been kept locked in a closet with barely enough space for her to lie down, drugged, raped, and was regularly threatened with being killed. Nevertheless, she was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. In 1979, US president Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after she had served 22 months. She was pardoned decades later, by president Bill Clinton.
Hearst drifted off into a comfortable life of marriage to a cop who had been a member of her security detail, Bernard Shaw, their children (girls Lydia and Gillian), and her dogs. She did charity work, appeared in a couple of movies, some documentaries, and even wrote a book, with Alvin Moscow, 1982’s Every Secret Thing. Shaw died in 2013.
But Patty Hearst never left the mind of Roger D. Rapoport, who has published the fascinating and entertaining new novel titled Searching for Patty Hearst. This is not merely some rehashing of the story – and there have been plenty of those (one of the best is legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst in 2016).
Rapoport’s book is a knowledgeable reimagining, cleverly plotted, stylishly told.
As he writes, “The ‘facts’ of the Patty Hearst case... have been the subject of both a legal and journalistic debate for many decades. Today the ‘true’ story as presented from many points of view continues to raise just as many questions as it answers.”
Rapoport has been closely involved with the case since he was a young reporter, and he has had contact with some of the principals, even writing his own, unpublished non-fiction version.
I am reluctant to spoil the many twists and surprises of this book.
Here’s a small sample, set the day of the kidnapping: “Patty sat, tied up and gagged in a Daly City safe house closet on Northridge Drive, just a few miles from the epicenter of the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A portable radio turned up full blast made it impossible for her to follow the kidnappers’ discussion.”
It is a quick and satisfying read. As Rapoport writes, “I wrote this novel because I believed the American public deserved nothing but the truth. Very sorry about the delay. This book took a lot longer than I expected. Hope it was worth the wait.”
It was indeed.