I KIDNAPPED PATTY HEARST!
SLA leader reveals what really happened
RADICAL urban guerilla Bill Harris — who kidnapped Patty Hearst — is breaking his silence after 45 years and revealing the heiress made the perfect patsy!
Former Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) member Harris says the 19-year-old granddaughter of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst lived “in an ideal location” for the violent February 1974 abduction in Berkeley, Calif., that stunned the world.
“There was no security,” recalls Harris, who helped conduct surveillance on Hearst’s home before the vicious break-in.
“Her apartment was blocked from the street so there wasn’t going to be side lights for people to see what was going on — or even hear.”
Patty was “scared s***less” when Harris and other heavily armed SLA thugs broke down her door.
Her fiancé, high school teacher Steven Weed, was “flummoxed” during the savage assault, according to Harris, who says Hearst was grabbed because she was “a symbolic target.”
“Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the U.S. The propaganda that could be generated from her abduction was perfect.”
After the incident, Weed recalled a “sketchy” couple showed up on their doorstep a few days before the abduction.
“In retrospect, obviously they were checking us out — but we weren’t at all paranoid,” he says in a documentary, The Radical Story of Patty Hearst, which also details Harris’ confessions.
Patty was subjected to intense physical and psychological torture during her captivity. Two months after the kidnapping, Hearst denounced her former life and referred to the SLA in a tape, saying: “These people aren’t just a bunch of nuts.”
In April 1974, the gun-toting heiress joined SLA members and renamed herself Tania while robbing a San Francisco bank. The SLA was essentially wiped out in a 1975 gunfight with police in Compton, Calif. Hearst was not there at the time, but was captured months later.
Harris, now 73, became the SLA’s leader and was known as General Teko. He was also caught and served eight years for kidnapping Patty, now 65.
She was convicted of bank robbery and using a firearm during the commission of a felony.
She was given the maximum sentence — 35 years’ imprisonment. Her sentence was later commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did 0 wasted 30 years of h e. — Muhammad Ali