Abstract:
On the night of February 4th, 1974, Patricia Campbell Hearst, newspaper heiress and Berkeley student, was kidnapped from the home she shared with her fiancé, Steven Weed, on Benvenue Street by a group later identified as the Symbionese Liberation Army. What followed were a series of ransom demands, and, most unsettlingly, Patty's induction as an apparently willing member into the group. Patty's conversion was announced, as was characteristic of SLA communications, via a tape recording on April 4th. This announcement was followed by Patty's participation in robbing a branch of the Hibernia Bank on April 15th, captured on security camera. On May 17th after several other incidents, including Patty providing covering fire for a get-away, the police cornered several members of the SLA in a house on 54th Street in Compton. The ensuing battle between police and the SLA members was broadcast live on television. The house was set on fire by police and burnt to the ground with the SLA members still inside. It was several hours until it was confirmed that Patty was not among them. Timeline: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, 2005, Available: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/guerrilla/timeline/index.html.
During this time, the media were camped outside the Hearst home. Joan Didion recalls 'the potted flowers on the steps changing with the seasons' Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) 582. as a backdrop to successive interviews with Patty's parents, Randolph and Catherine Hearst. It was not until September 18th 1975 that Patty was found and arrested.Timeline: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst. The subsequent trial, and even her memoir of the events, published in 1982, would not resolve the many ambiguities of the case. This series of events brought a wide-reaching visibility to the ineffectiveness of traditional power forces, as Patty and the SLA continued to evade capture. It was this visibility that was one the factors that made, and still makes, this case so compelling and so unsettling.
