On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst (above), the 19-year-old
granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph
Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley,
California, by three armed strangers. Her fiancee, Stephen
Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbor who
tried to help.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA),
a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a local
radio station that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of
war.” Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst
family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from
Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA,
negotiation would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst.
In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when
a surveillance camera took a photo of Hearst participating
in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank (below), and
she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los Angeles
store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities,
that she had joined the SLA of her own free will.
Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the
SLA, Hearst was arrested on September 18, 1975 and
convicted of armed robbery on March 20, 1976. She was
sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months
before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.
After leaving prison, she returned to a routine existence
and later married her bodyguard who died in 2013. She
was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.
Patty Hearst will be 67 years old on February
20.
