Paul Bryant's Reviews > American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

There’s only one thing wrong with this brilliant book, the title – yeah, oops. What? Was Jeffrey Toobin attempting to win the coveted “Most Exciting Book with the Dullest Title” award? If so, he did it! The award is his!

This book should have been called Absolute Batshit : The Patty Hearst Saga.

So just to be clear : Jeffrey Toobin gathers together an immense amount of detail but he moves this complicated story along like a bullet train.

I’d vaguely heard of this Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army stuff but it seemed almost too crazy to believe. I was right about that. This story is off the scale.

The story begins in Berkeley, the heart of radical California, in the early 1970s. There was a prison education program set up at Vacaville, the prison nearest to Berkeley, and some rad young women got interested in that. There they met a black guy named Donald DeFreeze. A couple of years earlier George Jackson had been killed in Soledad prison and DeFreeze was caught up in the aftermath of that, it was all revolution this, revolution that, and massive amounts of half-baked Marxism.

DeFreeze busted out of prison. That’s putting it too strongly. He wandered out of prison when the guards were looking elsewhere. He hooked up with this disparate group of white female prison visitors and within a week they had conjured up this thing, this imaginary thing called the Symbionese Liberation Army, the goal of which was – well, as ever, paradise on Earth.

Mr Toobin has some harsh words for Mr DeFreeze :

DeFreeze amounted to a junior varsity George Jackson. In almost every respect, DeFreeze was a lesser man – not as intelligent, not as good-looking, not as strong, not as charismatic, not as competent… if George Jackson was tragedy, then Donald DeFreeze was farce…He fancied himself as a leader of the African American people, even though the SLA never had a single black member except for himself.

The first “action” the SLA did was the worst and earned them their mad dog image immediately. They assassinated a black guy. This was Marcus Foster, school superintendent of Oakland. His crime was to introduce armed security guards into schools to combat gang culture. He was gunned down on 6 November 1973. Then they issued a communique :

On the afore stated date elements of The United Federated forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army did attack the fascist Board of Education, Oakland, California through the person of Dr Marcus A Foster, Superintendent of Schools…

DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE

This “action” was supposed to galvanise “the people” to rise up against their oppressors. Instead it galvanised people to rise up against the SLA. The Black Panther Party denounced Foster’s murder and demanded that the police capture his killers.

The SLA sulked and plotted another action. By this time there were nine members. One of them saw an engagement announcement in the local paper featuring Patty Hearst. They saw where it said she was a student at the local university. They then remembered that the university had a directory of students’ home addresses available to the public at the university admin building. So – a Hearst heiress! Lightbulb moment! And they just strolled along and got her address and planned the kidnap.

What they were supposed to do with her after they violently snatched her up on 4 February 1974 and shoved her in the trunk of a car was never exactly clear. And what happened exactly in the weeks and months that followed is the heart of the mystery. But two things were matters of fact. On 12 February DeFreeze sent a tape to a local radio station, explaining that Patty Hearst was now a prisoner of war, denouncing the Hearst family as fascist insects and issuing the following demand :

Before any forms of negotiations for the release of the subject prisoner be initiated, an action of good faith must be shown on the part of the Hearst family. This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and the unemployed

This was followed by detailed instructions about how much, where and how this free food was to be distributed. Randolph Hearst, Patty’s father, took a deep breath and started to comply. It cost a couple of million, it lasted a few weeks, one of the giveaways ended in an unseemly riot with frozen turkeys being used as weapons, but the big free food giveaway was actually done.

After that, the SLA sort of wandered off the idea. Meanwhile, something had happened to Patty. There are two versions. There is Patty’s version, and there is everyone else’s version. Everyone else who survived, that is.

Either a) she gradually got to know her captors, to talk with them at great length (hey, they didn’t have anything else to do), she began to get caught up in their rhetoric, and to find, somehow, that she liked them a whole lot. They were keen to tell her they didn’t want her to come to any harm & that the only risk of her catching a bullet would be if the FBI bust down the door of their safe house. Meanwhile, she was convincing them that she was being converted to their far-out violent utopianism. Patty was merging into the SLA, as the weeks ticked by. And that included merging into the SLA’s sex life, which was fluid and frequent, they were all militantly opposed to bourgeois monogamy.

Or b) she was terrorised form the get-go, threatened with death, raped by two men, denied toilet facilities and eventually forced to comply with everything they wanted her to do. That’s Patty’s version.

This book, presenting as much of the facts as there are, and there are a lot, is respectfully incredulous of Patty’s own account. Well, this flies in the face of the modern mantra believe the victim. So, here we have a tough case.

The proponents of the majority view will say – what happened next? Lay out the facts.

Well, next came the famous bank robbery on 15 April 1974, so only two months after the kidnap. They planned the raid very well and deliberately stationed Patty inside the bank with a big fat gun underneath a security camera, so everyone could see that she was now a fully participating member of the SLA.



In one of the many jaw-dropping turns of events in this saga, Patty’s face then turned up on the FBI’s WANTED poster. From victim to perp in 2 months.

I realise that I could carry on summarising the lurches from tragedy to comedy and back again that characterised the next few years for Patty and the gang – including what Mr Toobin describes as "the biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil" but hell, I should stop now, and simply say this is a true crime CLASSIC and for anyone interested in what happened to the American counterculture and the history of the 1970s this is a MUST READ.