Newspaper heiress and wanted fugitive Patty Hearst was
captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for
armed robbery on this day in 1975.
On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old
daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst,
was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley,
California, by two men and a woman, all three of
whom were armed.
Her fiancé, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along
with a neighbor who tried to help.
Witnesses reported seeing a struggling Hearst being
carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk
of a car.
Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to
take cover after the kidnappers fired their guns to cover
their escape.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA),
a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a
Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as
a “prisoner of war.”
At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition and helped rob
a bank.
In 1976, she was convicted for the crime of bank robbery and
sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to seven years
Her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and
she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
Patricia Campbell Hearst is now 72.
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