Vanessa Richardson (16:22)
On February 4, 1974, 19 year old Patty Hearst, heiress to the Hearst newspaper empire, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. On February 12, the Hearst family received an audio tape which outlined the terms of Patty's release and warned that any failure to comply would result in her immediate execution. The SLA had two main demands. First, Russell Little and Joseph Romero were to be immediately released from jail. Second, the Hearst family was to donate $400 million worth of food by establishing a distribution program in the Bay Area. They were given just four days to accomplish both. By that point, the Hearst had gotten the FBI involved and the bureau was stunned by the SLAs unusual and essentially impossible demands. Despite the vast Hearst fortune, much of the family's wealth was locked away in trusts. In practical terms, Randolph Hearst couldn't simply release Russell and Joseph overnight, nor could he produce $400 million, roughly $3 billion today in liquid assets, in just four days. What Randolph did have was an excellent legal team, which he sent to represent Russell and Joseph. He also managed to get his hands on about $2 million in cash to launch the food distribution program. The Hearst family used that money to create a program called People in Need. But organizing a large scale food distribution network in just four days was a logistical nightmare. Way more people showed up at the distribution sites than anticipated. In the confusion, workers began tossing boxes of food into the crowd. At one point, people were beating each other with frozen turkeys. What was supposed to be a gesture of goodwill had descended into mayhem. By this point, Patty had been locked in the closet for two weeks, cut off from the outside world and dependent on the erratic voice of a cult leader for any scrap of information. Instead of telling her that her father was attempting to meet his impossible demands, Singkyu insisted that her family simply didn't want her back. He also demanded that she never even think about her parents or or imagine her rescue. He claimed her brain waves could be monitored Although in reality, this was nothing more than a coercion tactic designed to break her down. Under that constant psychological pressure, Patty became convinced that her family was simply debating how much she was worth to them. To make matters worse, Patty caught a glimpse of her mother on the news, dressed in black and talking about her in the past tense. To Patty, this felt like confirmation that her family was already mourning her. She couldn't escape the feeling that in their eyes, she was already gone. And slowly but surely, her entire mindset began to shift. What started as outrage toward her captors became outrage toward her family. Following the disastrous rollout of the food program, the SLA allowed Patty to speak on one of the recorded messages that they were sending to the Hearst family. On the tape, Patty blasted the food distribution and said it was obvious that her parents didn't care if she lived or died. Her statement stunned the public. Some people even started to think that Patty had orchestrated her own kidnapping, all because she wanted to join the sla. But inside the walls of the SLA safe house, her apparent change in tone was rewarded. She was finally allowed to leave the closet. Though she gained a measure of physical freedom, she remained in psychological captivity. Hsing Kyu immersed her in SLA ideology at all hours of the day. And the more she embraced his teachings, the more freedom she gained. Gradually, Hsinghu's strategy began to work. Patty started to accept the narrative that her parents and the economic class they represented were responsible not only for her suffering, but for the suffering of others. And after seven weeks of isolation, alleged sexual and physical abuse, and repeated threats on her life, Patty made a decision, perhaps the biggest of her entire life. She asked to join the SLA. On April 3, 1974, two months into her captivity, Patty made a fifth tape recording. This one was sent to the San Francisco radio station KSAN and and shared with authorities. This was a message to her parents, which was delivered to several media organizations in California. In it, Patty declared, quote, I have been given the choice of one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay in and fight. End quote. She even denounced her given name. She said Patricia Hearst no longer existed. In her place was Tanya. This was in honor of Tamara Bunk, commonly known as Tanya, the 1960s revolutionary fighter who took part in the Bolivian campaign alongside Che Guevara. Under this new name, Patty began intense training. She was taught to coat bullets in cyanide, construct pipe bombs from Scratch and operate an assault rifle with confidence. Before long, the lessons would give way to action Patty. Now Tanya was about to take on her first mission with the SLA. On April 15, 1974, the SLA staked out the Hibernia bank in San Francisco. They were there for two reasons. They were running dangerously low on cash, and they wanted to show off their newest recruit. That day wasn't just Patty's official initiation into the group. It was also the first time she'd stepped outside in over two months. But all the excitement was also mixed with fear. Sinque had warned Patty that a gun would be trained on her at all times. She was expected to face the cameras as Tonya perform her part and follow the script without hesitation. Unfortunately for the sla, that script unraveled the instant they walked into the bank. One member dropped her ammunition, scattering bullets across the floor and throwing the operation into chaos. A customer bolted for the door. A bystander rushed toward the entrance to intervene. The SLA didn't hesitate to shoot both immediately. Thankfully, both men survived. But for all the violence and panic they unleashed, the SLA escaped with just about $10,000. However, the other goal of the robbery, to prove that Patty Hearst had really joined the ranks of the sla, was a resounding success. Within hours, surveillance footage from the bank was broadcast on news stations nationwide. There was Patty, assault rifle in hand, shouting her new name and barking orders at the terrified bank staff. Almost overnight, Patty became something of a counterculture icon. By all accounts, including her own, she willingly embraced her role. Just weeks later, she issued a statement to the press dismissing any suggestion of coercion. She said, quote, as for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief. This sealed the deal. Patty Hearst was no longer seen as a victim or a hostage. She was officially a violent fugitive. Following the Hibernia bank robbery, Sinque relocated the group to South Central Los Angeles, hoping to find fresh stomping grounds. Around this time, he also began splintering the already small organization into even smaller units. The strategy was twofold. Pair stronger personalities with weaker ones and diffuse the simmering sexual tension within the ranks. One of Sinque's main concerns was the relationship between Patty and Willie Wolf. In a cruel twist, Patty had grown close to one of the same men who had orchestrated her kidnapping and allegedly assaulted her early in her captivity. Determined to sever that bond, Sinque reassigned Patty to a unit with the married couple, Emily and Bill Harris. Although Patty resented the move, it would ultimately save her life. On May 16, 1970, 4. Patti found herself playing third wheel as she accompanied Emily and Bill to Mel's Sporting Goods Store in Inglewood. They were tasked with picking up heavy duty gear for the group. At some point, Bill noticed a bandolier. Rather than purchasing an ammunition belt outright, he tried to steal it. A security guard quickly intervened. He knocked Bill's gun from his hand and placed him in handcuffs. Patty watched the scene unfold from the safety of the getaway car. If there was ever a time for her to weigh her options, this was it. She could have driven off. She could have flagged down help. She could have just stayed put. Instead, she opened fire. Patty emptied an entire magazine into the storefront. Miraculously, no one was killed. One employee was hit in the chest, but he happened to have a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. It saved his life. After the trio finally regrouped, they checked into a rundown motel in Anaheim and ditched their car. Along the way. This proved to be a deadly mistake for the entire sla. Inside the abandoned car was a parking ticket with the address of the group's safe house on it. The SLA was now splintered and vulnerable. Half of them were holed up in a motel across town, while the other half was in a location police could trace. And they all had fresh blood on their hands. While Patty, Emily, and Bill sat in a roadside motel, the remaining SLA members watched news coverage of the sporting goods store shootout with growing dread. They correctly assumed that the police were onto them and fled their existing safe house in a panic. The group eventually found themselves at a rundown halfway house in South Central. La Sinque offered the owner $100 to let them stay the night. Twelve hours later, the group's presence was an open secret in the neighborhood. That was when a woman named Mary Carr arrived to find her grandchildren wandering through a house that was now crowded with armed strangers. Horrified, Mary tipped off the LA Police Department. Within hours, more than 400 police officers, FBI agents, and firefighters surrounded the home. When the SWAT team announced themselves, the children were brought out safely. A small mercy amid the chaos. With the miners removed, officers launched tear gas into the house. But the SLA didn't back down. This was the confrontation they'd been waiting for. A violent battle with law enforcement unfolding live in front of a swarm of reporters inside, the SLA poised their weapons. Then they started shooting. After nearly two hours of intense gunfire, the authorities escalated their tactics. Stray bullets were tearing through the neighborhood, and officers worried a civilian would be caught in the crossfire. They began launching more powerful canister blasters of riot grade tear gas into the house. The gas forced the SLA to retreat into the cramped crawl space beneath the house's floorboards. It was this combination of potent tear gas and hundreds of gunshots that ultimately sealed the deal. Within minutes, the house caught fire. Even then, the SLA kept shooting. At some point, Emily Perry emerged and was fatally shot after raising her weapons at police. Eventually, the fire reached the second story and the entire house collapsed. Inside, Angela Atwood, Willie Wolf, and Patricia Soltycic died from smoke inhalation and severe burns. Sinque, aka Donald DeFreeze, died of a self inflicted gunshot wound. This marked the end of the largest police shootout on American soil. A total of 9,000 rounds were fired. Remarkably, no law enforcement officers or civilians were killed. But the SLA was obliterated. By sheer luck, Patty was safe from her motel. All she could do was watch the news in horror. The cult that Patty had grown to love was gone, but her fight was just beginning. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. I wanted to take a brief moment to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes. Hosted by Katie Ring. Each week, Katie takes on a notorious crime, whether unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing nothing, not just what happened, but how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities, Unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes released every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. These are the stories behind the headline. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In a matter of months, Patricia Hurst went from a terrified kidnapping victim to an armed member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. After weeks of isolation and abuse, she renounced her former life and pledged herself to the group's revolutionary cause. Patty stepped into the spotlight during the Hibernia bank robbery of 1974, an operation that left two civilians wounded and cemented Patty's image as a willing fugitive rather than a hostage victim. Then a botched shoplifting attempt led police straight to the SLA's Los Angeles hideout. What followed was a nationally televised siege that ended with five SLA members dead, including their leader, Donald DeFreeze. And things were about to get even worse for the group. A few months after the shootout, two more SLA members, Russell Little, and Joseph Ramiro were convicted of first degree murder for the assassination of Marcus Foster and sentenced to life in prison. In the span of a year, the entire organization had been gutted. Only Patty Hearst and the married couple, Emily and Bill Harris, remained to carry the SLA name forward. Over the next year, the trio worked to rebuild itself. They soon brought in activist siblings Steve and Kathy Solea, who'd been friends with Angela Atwood before her death. But this new SLA suffered from the many of the same flaws as its predecessor. First and foremost, they were broke, so strapped for cash that they resorted to eating horse meat to get by. And they were just as hungry for violence. On April 21, 1975, almost exactly one year after Patty's first bank robbery, she walked into another. This time the target was the Crocker national bank in Carmichael, California. Inside the bank that day was 42 year old Myrna Lee Opsol, a mother of four who had come to deposit church donations. As the other SLA members gathered the cash, Emily aimed her gun at Myrna. Without warning, the weapon discharged. Myrna was struck in the side and later died from her wound. For Myrna's life, the sla netted just $15,000. They used the money to rent two apartments in San Francisco, addresses that would soon become the organization's final refuge. The Carmichael heist and the deadly shootout the year before had pushed the SLA even higher on the FBI's most wanted list. But to track down the group, they knew they had to get creative. Eventually, the Bureau got in touch with the father of Kathy and Steve Solaya, who were the most recent additions to the sla. Their father invited them over to dinner in hopes of getting information about the group. Kathy and Steve could tell what he was up to and clammed up pretty quickly. But Steve did let one detail slip. He mentioned that he worked as a building painter. Agents managed to find the exact building that Steve had painted. As they were leaving the site, Cathy arrived. The FBI found followed her from there straight back to sla headquarters. On September 18, 1975, 19 months after she was abducted from her quiet California apartment, Patty Hearst was taken once again. This time it wasn't by gun wielding members of the sla. It was by armed police officers. And instead of being forced into a dark closet, she was led to a prison cell. Rather than hearing revolutionary propaganda, she was read her Miranda rights. After that, she was charged with armed robbery and using a firearm in the commission of a felony related to the infamous Hibernia bank heist. News of Patty's arrest stunned the nation. What unsettled people even more was that she listed as her occupation on the arrest forms urban guerrilla. This, coupled with an offhand comment to a friend that she was pissed off about her capture, seemed to confirm what many had already been suspecting. Patty was no victim. But in the weeks that followed, something inside Patty began to change. She grew softer and gradually distanced herself from the sla. She began to tell a very different story than the one the public and her family had heard heard on the tapes. Patty soon disclosed that she was held in a closet for two months and allegedly abused and assaulted. She even claimed she had Stockholm syndrome and ptsd. According to her, she had no free will. In other words, Patty said she'd been brainwashed into participating in the robbery. Her lawyer, the prominent attorney F. Lee Bailey, agreed. He argued that for 20 months, she had been approaching prisoner of war whose actions were driven not by ideology but by the instinct to survive. And it wasn't just her attorney who embraced that narrative. Psychiatrist Lois Jolian west described Patty as a classic case of brainwashing and said she met all the same psychological criteria as a prisoner of war. He noted that during testing, her Pulse spiked by 50%. And at the mention of the word closet, it was a visceral response that, in his view, underscored the depth of her trauma. Dr. West argued that Patty had been forced to rely on dissociation, a psychological defense mechanism that allowed her to separate her actions from her identity. And he found no evidence that she actually believed any of the SLA ideology she parroted. To Dr. West, the story was simple. Patty had been violently kidnapped, confined to a closet, and systematically brainwashed. He argued that she couldn't be held criminally responsible for any of her actions afterward. The question was whether a jury would see it the same way. At Patty's trial, which began on February 4, 1976, the prosecution was prepared to dismantle the brainwashing argument. The prosecuting attorney countered the defense with Patty's own words. He read excerpts from her recorded media messages. In one, Patty confidently declared, my awakening came when I was kidnapped. The state called multiple psychiatrists who countered Dr. West's testimony that Patty had been coerced. One characterized her as a rebel in search of a cause. Another testified that she showed no signs of fearing for her life during the bank robbery. But some of the most damning moments for the defense came when Patty herself took the stand. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination 42 times. The judge told jurors they could draw their own conclusions from her silence. But for Patty, the worst was yet to come. Just as the trial was drawing to a close, an observant paralegal noticed something. Not in a legal brief, but in a magazine. The article featured a jailhouse interview with Emily Harris, who mentioned that Patty always wore a specific pendant shaped like a monkey. Emily said it was a gift from Willie Wolf. Prosecutors tracked down Willie's charred remains and confirmed that he had been wearing the same pendant at the time of his death. To them, this suggested that the two shared a bond that went beyond coercion. Patty offered a different explanation. She said she kept the stone because she believed it was an artifact with archaeological significance. But the implication, however misguided, it was hung in the air. Would a victim of sexual assault cherish a gift from her abuser? During closing arguments, the prosecutor held up the pendant for the jury to see. At that point, there was nothing left to say. All Patty could do was wait. After 12 tense hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict. On March 20, 1976, they found 22 year old Patty Hearst guilty of armed robbery and using a firearm in the commission of a felony. She was sentenced to six. Seven years in prison. In response, the Hurst family launched an allout campaign, appealing to every political connection they had in hopes of securing her release. They even convinced US Representative Leo Ryan to circulate a petition on her behalf in congress. The message was clear. The Hursts wanted Patty freed, and quickly. Whether it was the Hurst family's influence or a genuine shift in perspective, the White House eventually agreed to intervene. In February 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty's sentence to time served. She walked free after serving only 21 months behind bars. Two decades later, President Bill Clinton went a step further and granted Patty a full pardon on his final day in office. This decision reignited a lingering question. Would the outcome have been different if Patty hadn't come from one of America's most powerful families? Lots of people seem to think so, Especially because Patty was never charged with any other crime related to her time with the sla. She was granted immunity in Myrna Opsol's murder trial in exchange for testifying against Emily and Bill Harris. There was also the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods, which left several employees wounded. Patty pleaded no contest and received probation, even though she had opened fire on innocent people. In the decades since Patty's kidnapping, the murders of Marcus Foster and Myrna Opshall, and the rise and fall of the sla, the public is still split. Some viewers view Patty Hearst as a wannabe revolutionary who rejected her privilege when it suited her and embraced it when it was convenient. Others see her as a textbook victim of brainwashing. They point to the classic hallmarks of a cult within the sla an authoritarian leader, enforced isolation, rigid loyalty, and total immersion in the group's ideology. And many land somewhere in the middle. They acknowledge that Patty endured intense trauma while also recognizing that her actions placed innocent people in harm's way. I'd love to know what you all think. Do you think Patty Hearst was a victim, a cold blooded bank robber, or something in between? And did the jury get it right? Was Patty guilty? Let us know in the comments. Where Wherever you listen, Wherever you land, the truth is the torment seen in groups like the SLA didn't end in the 1970s. In Cult Watch this week I'm highlighting God's Misfits, a small group based in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Much like the SLA, God's misfits is fundamentally at odds with the U.S. the U.S. government members identify as sovereign citizens, claiming they exist outside of federal authority. God's Misfits have also used violence to achieve their goals. In April 2024, five members were arrested and admitted to murdering two Kansas women, Veronica Butler and Jillian Kelly. Their motive was as chilling as it was personal, a custody dispute involving Veronica Veronica's children. In the eyes of the group, the idea of custody was something the US Government made up to control citizens. God's Misfits used this supposed moral loophole to justify murder. The suspects pleaded not guilty in November 2025. A few have progressed with mixed plea deals and are awaiting upcoming trial dates. Like the SLA decades earlier, God's Misfits became so consumed by their ideology that they were willing to kill anyone who got in their way. And unfortunately, the consequences were deadly. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll decode the episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media crime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free. We'll be back on Friday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Pictures Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Elena Johnson, Leah Roche, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Foreign.
