Patty Hearst Arrested: Kidnapped Heiress Found

FBI agents arrested Patty Hearst in a San Francisco apartment on September 18, 1975, nineteen months after the newspaper heiress had been kidnapped from her Berkeley home by a tiny revolutionary group and twelve months after she appeared on a security camera carrying a carbine during a bank robbery. The case had transfixed the nation, raising questions about brainwashing, privilege, and the boundaries of criminal responsibility that remain unresolved. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag band of self-styled urban guerrillas led by an escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze, abducted the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst on February 4, 1974. They locked her in a closet for weeks, subjected her to physical and psychological abuse, and demanded that her family distribute millions of dollars in food to the poor. The Hearst family complied, funding a chaotic food giveaway that devolved into near-riots. Then, on April 15, a security camera at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco captured an image that stunned the country: Hearst, now calling herself Tania, brandishing a weapon alongside her captors during a robbery. Audiotapes released by the SLA featured Hearst denouncing her family as "the corporate ruling class" and declaring her allegiance to the revolution. The question of whether she was a willing participant or a victim of coercive persuasion became the central drama of the case. Six SLA members, including DeFreeze, died in a televised Los Angeles shootout with police in May 1974. Hearst and two surviving members went underground, living in safe houses across the country. After her arrest, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey argued that Hearst had been brainwashed through isolation, terror, and indoctrination techniques comparable to those used on Korean War prisoners. The prosecution countered that she had multiple opportunities to escape and chose not to take them. A jury convicted her of bank robbery in March 1976. She served twenty-two months before President Carter commuted her sentence, and President Clinton issued a full pardon in 2001.