Patty's Terrifying Story

She arrived from jail shackled as though she were an accused ax murderer. Her manacled hands were chained to a heavy belt that was buckled tightly around her slim waist. But by the time she walked into the crowded courtroom, the chains had been removed and she looked harmless and vulnerable. The rather wan, unsmiling young woman bore little resemblance to the gum-chewing, self-professed revolutionary with the giddy grin of bravado who was arrested last September. Now, at long last, she took her place on the witness stand and sat demurely, just as she had been taught years ago. Her name, she told the hushed assembly, was "Patricia Campbell Hearst--H-e-a-r-s-t."

Waiting for this moment, crowds began lining up every morning hours before the trial began. Security was so tight that spectators had to pass through a metal detector before entering the teak-paneled courtroom. All were hypnotized by the now familiar question: Could an attractive Hearst heiress really willingly have joined her kidnapers, the tiny violent sect known as the Symbionese Liberation Army? And--as the Government charges--did she willingly help rob a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco on April 15, 1974? Patty's defense, announced weeks ago by Attorney F. Lee Bailey (TIME cover, Feb. 16), was that she had been brainwashed. The central issue was once put succinctly by Federal Judge Oliver J. Carter, who is presiding over the trial in San Francisco: "Legally it boils down to a question of whether you believe her, and how much you believe her."

Patty, who will turn 22 this Friday, got her chance to make her story believable to the jury on the day her defense began. Weeping and straining for breath, she gave a horrifying account of her abduction by the S.L.A. from her apartment in Berkeley on Feb. 4, 1974. She said she was seized by William Harris, who was later to become her traveling companion, and Donald DeFreeze, the man known as "Cinque" and the self-styled field marshal of the group. A woman, Angela Atwood, held a pistol in her face. When Patty screamed, she was struck in the face with what she thought was a rifle butt, and she was bound, gagged and blindfolded. For a while, she lost consciousness. When she came to, she was being dragged down the stairs and thrust into the trunk of the getaway car.

" 'Bitch,' " Patty said DeFreeze growled at one point, " 'better be quiet, or we'll blow your head off.' "

After riding for an hour or two, Patty was taken into a building and, still blindfolded, placed in a small, confining chamber. For a moment she thought she was going to be buried alive. "I was really scared . . . I must have started to do something because right away . . . they told me it was a closet." DeFreeze said she was a "prisoner of war" in the revolutionary struggle of the S.L.A. with American society and that she would be safe as long as nothing happened to two members, Joseph Remiro and Russell Little, who had been jailed on charges of murdering Marcus Foster, Oakland's superintendent of schools. "If I tried to escape, I'd be killed," Patty said DeFreeze warned her. "If I made any noise, that I'd be beaten or else they'd hang me up from the ceiling. He said that they had cyanide bullets, and if I tried anything I'd be killed."

As Patty talked on, the five men and seven women on the jury turned their chairs in her direction and listened spellbound. Her parents--Randolph and Catherine Hearst--and her four sisters quietly followed her testimony. At one point a tear appeared on her mother's cheek. Patty described how four days after her capture, DeFreeze had forced her to make a tape that included the passage "Mom, Dad, I'm okay." DeFreeze had gone to the closet with a flashlight and a tape recorder and told her what to say.

Patty then recalled how DeFreeze had said some of the S.L.A. women felt that she had not been cooperating enough with the group. "He pinched me," she said.

"Where?" asked Bailey.

"My breasts and down . . ."

"Your private parts as well?"

"Yes."

At that point Patty was obviously distressed and Judge Carter recessed the trial. Bailey intends to call the defendant again this week to continue her story of her 19 months with the S.L.A. She is expected to elaborate on testimony that she gave earlier last week during some preliminaries. The procedure--a kind of trial within a trial--was caused by the plan of U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr. to introduce the famous tapes from Tania and an "interview" with Patty while on the run. Browning also wanted to call witnesses of events that occurred after the bank robbery. Bailey resisted strenuously, but Browning claimed such a presentation was necessary to give the jury a true impression of Patty's state of mind the day she stalked into the bank carrying a sawed-off carbine.

To decide the issue, Judge Carter barred the jury and Patty got her first opportunity to tell her story to him. Led gently by Bailey, Patty explained away her bizarre conduct by insisting that she had been coerced by the S.L.A. from the moment she was kidnaped. At one point, she said, "I was put in a garbage can that was tied up and put in the trunk of the car." She related how she had been confined for "a month, month and a half in a stifling closet. During part of this time she was bound and gagged.

On one of her tapes, Patty had said she was in love with "Cojo"--S.L.A. Member William Wolfe. But she told Bailey: "He assaulted me sexually . . ."

"Was he the only one?"

"No."

"Was it in the closet?"

"Yes."

William Harris had threatened her constantly and blackened her eye four times. (Harris and his wife Emily, who are awaiting trial in Los Angeles on a variety of charges, issued a statement saying that Patty "was never harmed in any way.")

At one point Bailey asked his client if she could estimate the number of times that S.L.A. members had threatened to kill her if she did not cooperate. "Hundreds of times," she answered, brushing away a tear.

Because she feared for her life, Patty said, she had done anything the S.L.A. had asked. That was why she had made the tapes damning her parents as "pigs" and scoffing at the idea that she was brainwashed. That was also why--three months after her kidnaping--she had rescued the Harrises from a melee after a botched shoplifting venture at a Los Angeles sporting-goods store. She had leaned out of the window of the group's van and sprayed the building with a burst of shots from an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon. "If I had not done it and if they had been able to get away," said Patty, "they would have killed me."

Fear of the Harrises also explained her extraordinary conduct that evening when she and the Harrises briefly kidnaped Thomas D. Matthews, then a high school senior, while commandeering his 1969 Ford Econoline van. Put on the stand by Browning, Matthews recalled how the four had spent a surrealistic evening--cruising around for a while, going to see a drive-in double feature and then spending the night in the Hollywood hills. Matthews told how Patty had been so concerned about his welfare that she would frequently "pat me on the head and ask if I was all right." He told how expertly she handled her gun and how she had told him that she had willingly taken part in the bank robbery. And far from showing fear of the Harrises, said Matthews, Patty had told him that after she shot up the store, "it was a 'good feeling' to see the Harrises come across the street."

(There was no question that Patty could handle firearms. Asked to identify a carbine handed to her by Browning, she admitted it was the one that she had carried into the bank, and then, with the instincts of a Marine marksman, she opened the chamber to see if the gun were loaded.)

On the stand herself, Patty maintained that it was still fear of the Harrises that led her to join them after they had fled all the way to a secluded farmhouse in northeastern Pennsylvania. She said she had been driven across the country by Jack Scott, the left-wing former Oberlin athletics director, who is a caustic critic of the U.S. sports establishment. Patty told how Scott and the Harrises wanted to produce a book that "was supposed to be some kind of propaganda thing about the S.L.A., and what they had done, and how great they were." To appease the Harrises, Patty said that in the farmhouse she had taken part in an interview for the proposed book. The Harrises, she said, not only put the questions to her but also outlined suggested replies and then corrected her responses. In these "answers," Patty again condemned her parents as "pigs" and flatly denied that she had been brainwashed by the S.L.A. The FBI found the manuscript when Patty was captured.

In her "interview," Patty also was quoted by the Harrises as saying she had heard that the FBI wanted to kill her and blame the crime on the S.L.A. Then, with outraged public opinion on its side, the FBI presumably could have mounted a ruthless attack on all revolutionary groups.

Patty had many chances to escape. The Harrises had left her alone outside the sporting-goods store; Scott had occasionally left her alone while allegedly driving her back west; she and Wendy Yoshimura, another S.L.A. member, were actually living apart from the Harrises when the quartet was finally arrested. Browning asked Patty why she had not simply fled to a San Francisco police station and said, " 'I am Patricia Hearst. Protect me from the Harrises.' You could have done it, could you not?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't feel it was possible to do that."

"You thought notwithstanding that the Harrises were perhaps a mile away from you, that you could not do that, that they would somehow kill you if you did that?"

"They would or that the FBI would."

Patty claimed that her fear of the FBI had been reinforced when she learned that former U.S. Attorney General William Saxbe had in effect called her a "common criminal." Most alarming of all was the fact that FBI agents on May 17, 1974 stood by during the massive assault on the Los Angeles hideout of the S.L.A. that killed DeFreeze, Wolfe, Atwood and three other members. With the Harrises, Patty had watched the gun battle on TV in a nearby motel. To Patty, the attack was proof that the FBI would not hesitate to kill her. The agency's apparent callousness toward her caused her to fear for her life. She recalled: "The commentator said everyone believed I was in the house."

Summing up, Bailey argued against the submission of the tapes and the "interview" because "she should not be convicted on the basis of statements forced from her." In reply, Browning charged that "everything this court has heard from Miss Hearst of coercion during 1 1/2 years is not true."

Judge Carter needed a recess of only 20 minutes to make up his mind. He declared that despite all he had heard from her he could not believe Patty's claims that she had been coerced by the S.L.A. "I find," he said, "that the statements made by the defendant after the bank robbery, whether by tape, oral conversation or writing, were made voluntarily." With that, Carter allowed the prosecution to enter everything.

The day after Carter's ruling, there was a brief stir in the courtroom when Randolph Hearst received a message and suddenly left. A bomb had badly damaged a luxurious guest house at San Simeon, where Publishing Tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the family patriarch, had built his private Xanadu. The castle, 250 miles south of San Francisco, is now owned by the state. A little-known terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front, announced that it had set off the violent blast. Unless the Hearsts contributed $250,000 within 48 hours to the defense of the Harrises, warned the unit, the "Hearst castle will only be the beginning." The group also brazenly proclaimed that if Patty had been released on bail, "she would never have made it to her trial alive."

As he dealt with the shocks and complexities of the case, Judge Carter not only was relaxed on the bench but seemed to enjoy the proceedings. The enormous pressures had not changed his manner at all. Carter, 64, a longtime member of the political and social establishment in northern California, had known the Hearsts for years. He remembers when Patty was a little girl frolicking through the corridors of the mansion in suburban Hillsborough, where the family lived until recently. But Carter had seen no reason to disqualify himself from the case, telling the New York Times that their "money and power . . . falls off me like water off a duck's back."

Carter kept genial control over Prosecutor Browning and Defender Bailey as they began their long-awaited duel. Browning, 43, had not tried a case in more than five years, preferring, as an administrator, to leave the courtroom work to his assistants. He professed to be unimpressed by the fact that he was facing one of the most famous and flamboyant criminal lawyers. "I've been up against good lawyers before," he said, "but unless you have the facts on your side, it doesn't mean much."

Pounding away at the facts, his voice rarely rising, Browning made his points in excruciating detail. The contrast with Bailey, 42, could not have been greater. They were even physical opposites: Browning, standing 6 ft. l 1/2 in., bustling around the courtroom and wrestling with charts; Bailey, 5 ft. 7 3/4 in., moving with the assured air of a man who is convinced he is going to win. If Browning tended to be didactic, Bailey was dynamic, using his deep, vibrant voice to rivet the jury's attention.

After Patty steps down, the heart of Bailey's defense will remain his insistence that she had been brainwashed into cooperating with the S.L.A. He will call a number of leading psychiatrists to support his thesis, and Browning, in reply, will rely upon his own authorities (see box). If, as expected, the specialists differ about what happened to Patty's mind, the jury of five men and seven women will face a difficult task. They will first have to decide which experts to believe before they can make the key decision of whether or not they believe Patty.

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