Patty's Long Ordeal on the Stand

There was just too much evidence against her--not only films showing that she was present but tapes and documents in which she told how she had willingly, even eagerly, taken part in the crime. If Patty Hearst was to convince a jury that she was innocent, she would have to do it herself--sitting alone on the witness stand. Last week Patty got her chance to tell how she had been forced by the death threats of the Symbionese Liberation Army to take part in the robbery of a branch of San Francisco's Hibernia Bank. Then came the climactic moment of the trial as U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr. began cross-examining Patty to try to show she was a liar.

The duel was a dramatic test for both. A conscientious but colorless prosecutor, Browning had been overshadowed throughout the trial by Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey. Browning had not tried a case in six years; instead, he administered the work of his assistants. San Francisco lawyers tended to dismiss him with faint praise ("Jim--well, he's a nice guy"). But the prosecutor was stubbornly confident he would win: he had the facts, he liked to say. Bailey himself had posed the problem that would face Browning when he began the cross-examination that lasted two days. If Browning pressed Patty too hard, thus making her a sympathetic figure, warned Bailey, "he will be cutting his own throat."

Browning started quietly--a tall (6 ft. 1 1/2 in.), serious man looming over the small, pale young woman, who was demurely dressed in a light grey pantsuit and a peach-colored blouse. Getting Patty to describe her abduction on the night of Feb. 4, 1974, Browning unearthed a fascinating detail: a police car had cruised up alongside the getaway car, but the officer only warned the woman driver, Patricia Soltysik, to turn on her lights.

Patty was a composed witness, meeting the questions headon, never saying too much in reply and thus giving the prosecutor a new lead. At one point, Browning took up a line of questioning that seemed to work for Patty rather than against her. He got her to repeat in more detail earlier testimony in which she told how she had been sexually molested by Donald DeFreeze, the self-styled "field marshal" of the S.L.A. who was known as "Cinque." Asked Browning: "Did he pinch one or both of your breasts?"

"I really don't remember," Patty replied. For the first time during that session, she began to cry, wiping the tears away with a tissue she kept clenched in her fist.

"Was it under your clothing?" "Yes."

"In both places?"

"I don't think the other was under my clothing."

"All right. Your breasts he pinched by touching your skin.

The pubic area he did not touch your skin--is that true?"

"That's right."

The jury followed that exchange intently. Not only were there seven women in the box, but the number of children per juror averaged 3.5--a fact that had pleased Bailey. He assumed that such a jury would be sympathetic to the plight of a girl who was 19 when she was seized.

Patty seemed to be controlling the interrogation when Browning raised the question of her relations with William Wolfe. On one of her Tania tapes, Patty had said that she loved Wolfe, whom she had called "Cujo." Under Bailey's direct examination, however, she testified that Wolfe had raped her while she was imprisoned in a cramped closet in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

Asked Browning: "Did you, in fact, have a strong feeling for Cujo?"

"In a way, yes."

"As a matter of fact, did you love him?"

"No ..."

"Well," said Browning, "you answered my earlier question, Miss Hearst, that it's sort of correct that you thought highly of him. Can you enlarge. .."

Bailey, interrupting: "She didn't say that."

Patty: "I didn't say that at all."

Browning, with growing exasperation: "Well, what did you say?"

Patty: "I said I had a strong feeling about him."

Browning then violated one of the basic rules of a trial lawyer: he put a question without knowing how it would be answered.

"Well," asked the prosecutor, "what was that feeling?"

"I couldn't stand him," she coldly replied.

Browning seemed to have more success when he concentrated on the opportunities that Patty passed up to escape from the S.L.A. The prosecutor stumbled on what was perhaps the most important example, which occurred after she was allowed out of the two tiny closets where she said she had been confined for some two months. Questioning her about life in the terrorists' hideout in Apartment 6 at 1827 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, the prosecutor discovered that the members of the group took turns standing guard.

"I take it you did not stand guard," said Browning.

"I did, finally, yes."

"You did?" asked Browning, unable to hide his surprise.

Patty added that she had not been armed, but conceded that weapons were easily available to her. Browning drove the point home: "So you could have, had you wanted to, gone into the closet and gotten a weapon at almost any time that the others were asleep, is that right?"

"And then do what with it?" Patty asked, echoing her basic defense that she had been afraid that the S.L.A. would have hunted her down if she had tried to leave. But Browning had established that the S.L.A. members so trusted Patty that some two weeks before the bank robbery, they would go to sleep while giving her access to guns.

Browning asked why she had not taken DeFreeze up on his offer to let her go free, which he made on two occasions before the bank robbery.

"Because they wouldn't have let me go," said Patty.

"How do you know that?"

Patty was close to tears again when she answered. "Well, I mean maybe I should have taken the chance."

The prosecutor brought out that Patty had been allowed to go off jogging or walking on her own from the Pennsylvania farmhouse she occupied in the summer of 1974 with S.L.A. Members William and Emily Harris and Wendy

Yoshimura, a fugitive radical. Patty admitted that her companions had taken to calling her by a new nickname: "Pearl." Browning was trying to show that Patty was a relaxed and willing member of the group, not a captive who --as she had claimed--had frequently had her eye blackened by Harris.

Choking Emotion. When she returned to San Francisco, Patty testified, she had stopped living with the Harrises and rented an apartment with Wendy Yoshimura. Even under those circumstances, Patty said, she had not tried to escape because she was afraid the Harrises would find her and kill her.

Discussing Patty's stay in San Francisco before her capture, Browning appeared to stumble when he asked if she had tried to reach her parents. Patty's eyes again filled with tears as she looked at her parents in the front row.

"No," she said, choking with emotion, "because ... I felt if my parents..."

"Pardon me?"

"I felt that my parents wouldn't want to see me again."

In full view of the jurors, Catherine Hearst buried her face in her hands and wept.

Taking another tack, however, Browning scored when he asked Patty if it was true, as she had said on a tape, that the theory that she had been brainwashed was "ridiculous beyond belief."

"I guess so," said Patty. "Yes."

Browning should have left the matter at that, but he weakened his point by asking one more question.

"Do you now feel that you had in fact been brainwashed at any time, Miss Hearst?"

"I'm not sure what happened to me."

When court recessed at noon, Bailey did his best to offset Patty's admission. He explained that "brainwashing" was a "media" term he had adopted while dealing with the press. He would not use the term during the trial, because "it has no medical meaning." Bailey's defense for the bank robbery would be "extreme physical coercion" and "thought reform" to explain why she continued to stay with the S.L.A.

As the trial resumed the next day, Browning got Patty to admit that her testimony that she lived in constant fear of her captors was exaggerated. "You had convinced them you were with them, that you were part of the S.L.A., didn't you?" asked Browning.

"Yes."

"So to a large degree you were acting at that time, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"Are you a good actress?"

"Not particularly, no."

"Are you acting now?"

Bailey jumped to his feet and snarled, "I object to that!"

Judge Oliver Carter sustained the objection, but cautioned the defense attorney to show "a little less heat and a little more light."

Browning won one duel with Bailey, only to throw the victory away by committing the worst gaffe of his crossexamination. With the jury out of the room, he persuaded Judge Carter to bar the defense from discussing the threats against the Hearsts that have occurred since the trial began, and the bombing on Feb. 12 at San Simeon, the former estate of Patriarch William Randolph Hearst. (At week's end, the FBI and local police arrested six people with alleged connections to the New World Liberation Front, the terrorist group that has claimed responsibility for the San Simeon bombing.) Bailey wanted the jury to hear about these incidents, arguing that they showed the pattern of intimidation to which Patty had been subjected over the last two years.

Later, while questioning Patty, Browning sarcastically suggested that she could have escaped from the Harrises by anonymously turning them in to the police by telephone. Patty said she had thought of making the call, but had not because she was afraid that the Harrises could get her killed even if jailed. When Browning expressed his skepticism, Patty said: "It's happening like that now on the street."

"What do you mean?" Browning snapped, and then, realizing what he had done, tried to withdraw the question. But Bailey was on his feet demanding that his client be allowed to answer, and Judge Carter ruled in his favor. Patty then proceeded to tell the startled jury, which had been shielded from the facts, about the bombing at San Simeon, adding that "my parents received a letter threatening my life if I took the witness stand, and they wanted a quarter of a million dollars put into the Bill and Emily Harris Defense Fund."

After Browning completed his cross-examination of Patty on Friday, Bailey introduced a witness who supported her story. Ulysses Hall, a tall, athletic black man, told the jury that DeFreeze, whom he had met while they were both in jail, had invited him to join his organization. Hall said that he declined the offer, but spoke to DeFreeze after the bank robbery. DeFreeze, he said, told him that he had had three ways of handling Patty: to kill her; to turn her loose; or to adopt the course that he chose--"put her in a position where she'd become a part of the gang--'front her off to where the FBI, CIA, whoever, would be looking for her as well as them, and the only people she could look to help her would be them." Hall also said DeFreeze had told him that he had decided a gun would be pointed at Patty's head during the robbery, and that "if she did anything funny, she'd be shot."

Before the crossexamination, the week had begun with typical bits of spectacular stage-managing by Bailey to drive home to the jury the horrors that his client faced while being held captive by the S.L.A. The jurors were taken to see the two closets that Patty claimed had been her tiny prison cells after her abduction. The expedition turned out to be a mob-and-media event that might have been conceived by Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust).

Visiting the second of the closets first, the entourage drove to a predominantly black neighborhood in northern San Francisco, where ungraciously aging Victorian structures line the streets. Some 150 newsmen and photographers were already waiting at 1827 Golden Gate Ave. when Patty arrived in a green Plymouth. In the crush, U.S. marshals formed a flying wedge to lead Patty.

Churning Mob. Patty was escorted up to No. 6 on the third floor--an unoccupied studio apartment that had been rented to the S.L.A. for $125 a month. One by one, the jurors walked into the closet that Patty said had been her jail for about four weeks. It was 19 in. wide and 60 in. long. Albert Johnson, Bailey's portly assistant, could not squeeze inside. Patty briefly entered the chamber. "She cried, she sobbed," Johnson reported. "I had to hold her up. I thought she was going to faint." White as death, Patty was hustled out of the building by marshals, escorted through the churning mob and virtually thrown into the waiting Plymouth.

The car sped off on a 20-minute drive to Daly City. She was taken to a small, neat tract home where she said she had first been held by the S.L.A. after her abduction. Patty and the jurors looked at the first closet, which was 24 in. wide and 66 in. long. (The house is now owned by a family that leases the closet--which is kept locked--to the FBI for an incredible $299 a month. The owner complains that the FBI is in arrears.) Patty was close to collapse as she looked at the cell where she said she was held for around 4 1/2 weeks.

The day after those visits, Bailey put Patty on the stand to tell of her life in the closets. He spoke to her like a father, leaning toward the witness box and questioning her so calmly that the two might have been having an intimate conversation away from the eyes of all the strangers in the room. Patty said that she had lost 15 lbs. in the closets, dropping to a weight of 90 lbs., and that when the blindfolds were removed, the light had stabbed painfully into her eyes. She vividly re-created the tension that she claimed she lived under the all-consuming fear that if she did not cooperate with her captors, "I'd be dead."

Patty said that she had been convinced that the authorities were out to kill her, a belief reinforced, she claimed, when Los Angeles police stormed an S.L.A. hideaway in the famous fiery Shootout that she watched on television. She recalled how the announcers pointed out that she was thought to be in the house that was being blasted with more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition. To strengthen the point, Bailey played the color films of the gun battle before turning his witness over to Browning.

At one point, Bailey heatedly objected when Browning moved to question Patty about her activities between the fall of 1974, when she returned from the East and September 1975, when she moved back to San Francisco. Bailey claimed that Browning was trying to elicit testimony that might be used against Patty in "another criminal proceeding" in the Sacramento area.

Judge Carter excused the jury to allow the lawyers to pursue the point. Nineteen times, at Bailey's direction, Patty invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination as Browning asked questions. The prosecutor was apparently trying to get Patty to testify about any role she may have played in the robbery of the Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, last April 21. During the Crocker robbery, a woman was shot to death. A federal grand jury has tried to determine if Patty was involved in the crime, but no indictment has been brought against her. Judge Carter postponed until this week his decision whether or not to allow the Government to introduce any evidence that might involve Patty in the robbery.

Throughout her testimony before the jury, Patty often contended that she was terrified of two S.L.A. ideologues, William and Emily Harris. Patty testified that Harris was one of the men who abducted her from the apartment she had been occupying with Steven Weed, her fiance. Not only did the Harrises intimidate her throughout the 16 months that they were on the run together after the L.A. Shootout, Patty claimed, but the threats continued even after they were captured. When they occupied adjoining cells in the San Mateo County jail, Patty said, Emily Harris told her "I'd better not talk to my lawyers, and that if I said anything about what had happened that they would be charged with the kidnaping, and that better not happen." Bailey wanted to know what exactly might happen. "Somebody might kill me," said Patty.

Censored Tapes. Her charges are challenged by the Harrises in a copyrighted jailhouse interview in New Times. The Harrises describe Patty as being eager to join the S.L.A. because she was disillusioned with her family and her past. Far from being forced to make her tapes, Emily claims, Patty was so disgusted with her parents that she had to be censored out of fear that the Hearsts would lose interest in trying to ransom their daughter.

The Harrises said that Patty had loved Willie Wolfe, as she said on a tape, and slept with him willingly. They added that neither Wolfe nor DeFreeze ever molested her.

As for Patty's claims of being closely confined, Emily says that "she had freedom from the day she ceased to be a prisoner of war. She rode buses, went shopping, went to movies." Once, the Harrises claim, Patty literally was in the hands of the authorities. A few months before their arrest, the three were walking on a beach near San Francisco when Patty began to climb up a cliff toward the highway. Assuming she was in trouble, two men whom the Harrises identified as "rangers" came to her aid. Because climbing the cliffs was forbidden, the men made out a report on Patty. They did not recognize her, the Harrises guessed, because she was wearing a wig and makeup freckles. Says Bill Harris: "She could have said anything, like, 'I'm Patty Hearst, get me out of here.' But she didn't."

Emily Harris' explanation for Patty's testimony: "She's getting on the stand and lying under oath in order to save her ass."

This week the two sides are expected to call experts in behavior to support their respective views about Patty's conduct. Judge Carter is scheduled to decide not only whether to let the jury hear the evidence about her activities in Sacramento but will rule on the admissibility of a tape surreptitiously made in prison of Patty talking to a visiting girl friend. During their talk, Patty proclaimed herself to have a "revolutionary feminist perspective," and said that she was "pissed off" when she was captured. Understandably, Browning would like to question her about that.

If Judge Carter turns down Browning on both issues, Patty's ordeal on the stand--during this trial at least --may be over. At week's end Bailey said he had not decided whether to call Patty for a redirect examination. "Redirect is to repair damage which has been done." The quote was pure Bailey: breezy, confident, and brushing aside the best efforts of Jim Browning during the long week of his own ordeal.

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