Extract from ABC News
Until she was 19, American heiress Patty Hearst lived a life so charmed, you could only conclude that she was born under a lucky star.
Her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, was a millionaire newspaper magnate whose wealth, power and appetite for luxury inspired the movie Citizen Kane.
When he died, he put his immense fortune into a trust so his descendants would never have to worry about money again.
He also left behind a sprawling castle on 6,360 square metres of California coastline.
Hearst wrote in her memoir Every Secret Thing that she enjoyed a childhood of "rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming pools and tennis courts and riding horses".
Her boyfriend Steven Weed had recently proposed, and while her wealthy parents initially disapproved, they consented to the match and ran a splashy engagement announcement in her father's newspaper.
But on the night of February 4, 1974, Hearst's luck ran out.
She and her new fiance were watching TV in their Berkeley apartment when a young woman knocked on the door.
She claimed she was having car trouble and asked to use their phone.
In her memoir, Hearst wrote that in the days leading up to her kidnapping, she had a "heavy, oppressive feeling" she couldn't shake.
She had no idea that she was being stalked by an American terrorist organisation, and that the woman with car trouble was, in fact, an actress who had recently been radicalised by a left-wing guerilla group.
Once she had opened the door, armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) burst into Hearst's home, bashed her fiance with a wine bottle, bundled her into the boot of their car, and drove away into the night.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched what it called "one of the most massive, agent-intensive searches in its history to find Hearst and stop the SLA".
Her father, Randolph Hearst, held multiple press conferences during which he pleaded with the SLA to free his daughter.
But two months after the kidnapping, everything changed.
The heiress announced that she was switching sides and joining her captors.
"I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people," Hearst said in a tape released April 3, 1974.
"I have chosen to stay and fight."
What followed was one of the most confounding crimes in American history, a case that would lead to a dramatic bank heist, a deadly shootout involving 9,000 bullets, and a year-long hunt for Hearst.
The transformation of Hearst from victim to revolutionary would spark a 50-year debate about whether she was a willing accomplice in her crimes.
But what has been lost in the last five decades is the story of a terrified young woman who experienced the limits of free will.
Our minds are far more fallible than we're willing to admit, according to Hearst.
"We all think we're pretty strong and that nobody can make us do something if we don't want to do it," she told CNN's Larry King in 2001.
"That's true — until somebody locks you up in a closet and tortures you and finally makes you so weak that you completely break and will do anything they say."
How a band of misfits pursued an American princess
In the early 70s, America was gripped by a strange fever.
The last remnants of the free-loving hippie movement had metastasised into something sinister, and suddenly, underground terrorist groups were rising up.
The FBI estimates that over 18 months from 1971, there were 2,500 bombings on American soil — almost five a day.
The west coast seemed to be crawling with serial killers — the Zodiac Killer had mysteriously vanished, but Ted Bundy and the Golden State Killer had just begun campaigns of terror that would last years.
The Watergate scandal was in full swing, the Vietnam War was coming to an end, and an oil embargo had just triggered an energy crisis.
Amid the chaos and violence, it felt like the nation had lost its collective mind, like anything could happen next.
This was when Americans started locking their doors at night.
But Hearst, a wealthy teenager studying art history at university, was blissfully unaware of the simmering mood in the nation.
She had recently gone to war with her parents so she that could marry her former maths tutor, Steven, who was five years her senior.
They had finally relented and the couple moved into a small flat in Berkeley and they started planning a summer wedding.
Berkeley had long been the centre of America's counterculture, and it was here that Hearst would cross paths with the SLA.
The group was founded by Donald DeFreeze, a charismatic fugitive who had busted out of prison in 1973 and changed his name to General Field Marshal Cinque.
His band of domestic terrorists aspired to be like other militant organisations, including the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.
In reality, they operated more like a cult, luring about 10 teenagers from white, middle class families, into a dingy San Francisco apartment to discuss ways to overthrow the capitalist state.
Their slogan?
"Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."
By 1974, the SLA was hell-bent on freeing two members of their gang from prison.
Two SLA gunman had recently been jailed for murdering a local superintendent with cyanide-tipped bullets because he wanted to introduce student ID cards at Oakland schools.
But to free their friends, they would need a powerful bargaining chip.
And who could be a better hostage than a beautiful blonde heiress whose family sat atop the largest media empire in the nation?
Best of all, this American princess lived just down the road from their terrorist lair.
After the SLA's Angela Atwood talked her way into Hearst's apartment on that fateful February night, two men stormed in with guns.
"They started firing machine guns," Hearst recalled in an interview with NBC's Dateline in 1997.
"I was blindfolded but I could hear the neighbours screaming."
Atwood, DeFreeze and a third SLA member, Bill Harris, took Hearst to a safe house in the suburbs, and then to their apartment in the heart of San Francisco, where she was locked in a closet.
'I just hope that you'll do what they say, Daddy'
Two days after her kidnapping, a tape was sent to Hearst's father and to a local San Francisco radio station.
"Mum, Dad, I'm okay," Hearst could be heard saying in the recording.
"I'm not being starved or beaten or unnecessarily frightened. I just hope that you'll do what they say, Daddy, and do it quickly."
Hearst was the apple of her father's eye — so much so, she was given the nickname "Randy's spoiled brat", according to Rolling Stone.
Despite his wealth and influence, Randolph Hearst couldn't convince San Francisco authorities to swap the two imprisoned SLA members to save his daughter.
The SLA, however, came back with another offer: They would free Hearst if her father held a food drive for the poor.
Pouring in $US500,000 of his own money, as well as a $US1.5 million donation from his late father's trust, the food drive occurred in Oakland on February 22.
It ended in disaster.
As huge crowds converged to collect the free food, the volunteers began to panic and started throwing the goods from the back of their trucks.
Fights broke out, windows were broken, a police officer was stabbed, and the food drive quickly devolved into a riot.
It soon became clear to DeFreeze and his gang of followers that they were not going to be able to leverage Hearst the way they wanted.
And so they started whispering to her through the door of the closet — telling her that her family was doing nothing to save her, explaining their political ethos and their plan for a post-capitalist utopia.
Hearst said SLA men began to rape her, with the group claiming she needed to experience "sexual freedom".
"If you are going to break somebody down, you clearly use everything that is at your disposal — and obviously sexual molestation is a really powerful way to attack a woman," she told Dateline.
After two gruelling months blindfolded in the closet, subjected to what she called "rape and torture" and repeatedly threatened with death, the SLA came to Hearst with an offer.
They would release her if she wanted, or she could stay and join them.
Hearst later told the jury in her trial that she didn't believe DeFreeze's offer of freedom was genuine, and so she took the option that she knew would buy her a little more time.
When she acquiesced, they took her blindfold off so she could see captors for the first time.
They also stripped her of her important name, and she emerged from the closet with a new identity.
She was Tania, the urban guerilla.
"What followed was a series of events that were the direct result of a child having been destroyed both inside and out," Hearst said in 2018.
How Hearst went from hostage to fugitive in the eyes of the law
Just two weeks after the SLA claimed Hearst had switched sides, a young woman burst into a San Francisco bank, armed with a semi-automatic rifle.
"I'm Tania. Up, up, up against the wall, motherf***ers," she shouted at the tellers, customers and security guards.
Hearst and the several SLA members shot and injured two men during the robbery before fleeing in a getaway car with $US10,000 in cash.
The heist was also caught on security camera, which meant that images of Hearst wielding a rifle in a black trench coat and bell bottoms were soon on the cover of every American newspaper.
Sympathy for Hearst's plight began to evaporate.
The US attorney-general William Saxbe said Hearst was clearly "not a reluctant participant," and labelled her a "common criminal".
Her panicked father described the comments as "irresponsible".
"It's terrible! Sixty days ago, she was a lovely child. Now there's a picture of her in a bank with a gun in her hand," he told TIME.
With the media in a frenzy and the FBI hot in pursuit, the SLA decided to flee San Francisco and head south to Los Angeles.
When her family said she was committing these felonies under duress, she released more tapes insisting she had joined the SLA freely.
She also broke off her engagement with Steven, describing him as a "sexist, egoist pig".
"As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief," she said.
The most violent shootout in LA history
In May 1974, Hearst made one move that would inadvertently lure police to the SLA's Los Angeles safe house and leave most of her "comrades" dead.
She was waiting in a van outside a sporting goods store while two SLA members, Harris and his wife Emily, went inside to do some shoplifting.
But when the pair was caught by the owner trying to steal an ammunition belt, a scuffle broke out.
Hearst said she did exactly what she had been conditioned by the SLA to do: She whipped out two rifles and sprayed the shopfront with bullets.
The Harrises managed to break free, jump in the van, and Hearst sped off.
Fearing the police were now their tail, Hearst and the Harrises hijacked a teenager's car and took him on a joy ride through the streets of Los Angeles for more than 12 hours.
They eventually let him go and the boy said he found Hearst so personable and charming that he initially didn't tell the FBI she had been present during his ordeal.
But it didn't matter.
Authorities found evidence in the car that led them directly to the safe house where six SLA members were sheltering.
Quietly, more than 400 police officers moved in, surrounding the nondescript house in South-Central LA.
"Occupants ... this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up!" an officer shouted over a loudspeaker.
The SLA allowed a child to leave the property, but then barricaded themselves inside.
When the cops began throwing tear gas canisters into the house, they responded with a hail of bullets.
What followed was one of the largest police sieges in Californian history.
The SLA members, who were armed with rifles that had been converted to fully automatic fire, shot more than 4,000 rounds at police. The LAPD responded with 5,000.
Eventually, the house was engulfed with flames.
Several SLA members tried to hide in a crawl space in the basement, where they died from smoke inhalation. Others raced outside for one final shootout police and were mowed down with a spray of bullets.
By the end of the shootout, the house was reduced to smouldering rubble and the SLA's leadership was decimated.
For several agonising days, the Hearsts waited to see whether their daughter's dental records would match one of the charred bodies pulled from the rubble.
But she wasn't among them.
Hearst and the Harrises had rented a hotel room near Disney Land and watched the shootout on television.
For many of Hearst's critics, this was the moment they could never understand.
Most of the terrorists who kidnapped Hearst were dead. Now was the time for her to flee.
But Hearst said the possibility of escape never occurred to her.
"There was no turning back," she wrote in her memoir.
"The police or the FBI would shoot me on sight, just as they had killed my comrades."
A year-long game of cat and mouse
For almost 15 months, Hearst and her two "comrades" stayed one step ahead of the police who hunted them.
"We've had reports that she was in every place, from one end of the country to the other — Canada, down in South America, and everything else," her distressed father told a press conference.
With the help of other underground figures, Hearst and the Harrises crisscrossed the country, spending an idyllic summer at a remote Pennsylvania farmhouse, before returning to California.
Each time police received a tip-off about their whereabouts, they burst into the safe house, only to find they'd just missed them.
Back in California, Hearst and the Harrises began recruiting new members to join the SLA.
With the help of the growing group, Hearst planted improvised explosive devices in two unsuccessful attempts to kill police. She also drove the getaway car in another bank robbery.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, the FBI caught up with Hearst.
They tracked her down to an apartment in San Francisco, and when they burst in, they feared she was rushing into the bedroom, where she had cache of weapons hidden in the closet.
Instead, she surrendered.
"Don't shoot. I'll go with you," she said.
Nearly 600 days after she was kidnapped from her home, Hearst was finally found — and immediately arrested and charged with armed robbery.
When she was being booked at the local jail, she listed her occupation as "urban guerilla".
She also continued to pledge her allegiance to the SLA, asking her lawyer to tell her supporters: "I'm smiling ... I feel free and strong."
But it wasn't long before Hearst started to emerge from the fog which she'd been trapped in.
"I had no free will. I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks," she told Larry King in 2001.
"Then it suddenly, slowly began to dawn that they just weren't there any more. I could actually think my own thoughts."
She explained that she was so deeply under the SLA's command that she believed police could tune into her brainwaves.
"When [DeFreeze] was around, he didn't want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brainwaves could be read ... I was even afraid of that," she said.
Her legal team said she was malnourished and suffering from memory loss and nightmares.
But Hearst had escaped one cage, only to find herself in another.
She was facing 35 years in prison for bank robbery and the court had ruled she was mentally competent to stand trial.
To free her, Hearst's legal team made an audacious argument, one that had never been tested in court before: That she had been brainwashed by her captors and could not be held responsible for her crimes.
A journey into Hearst's mind
Despite hiring the best lawyer money could buy, Hearst's defence was widely considered a mess.
Her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, told the jury that she was the victim of brainwashing or Stockholm Syndrome — a dubious psychological term recently coined to describe how victims can fall in love with their captors.
But the prosecution dismissed this, describing Hearst as a "rebel in search of a cause" whose bank robbery was "an act of her own free will".
When prosecutors played the CCTV footage from the bank robbery, Hearst stared at the screen and then lowered her head and wept.
Despite telling the jury that she had been raped by several SLA members, the prosecutor insisted Hearst had consented to sex with her captors, and even claimed she'd fallen in love with one of them.
"As a culture, we love easy explanations for things," said Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, who specialises in gender and media.
"The Stockholm Syndrome label and Patty Hearst are going to be forever, inextricably linked, even though it's a complicated and fluid concept.
"It gives us a model to think about, rather than understand, the thoroughly complicated things that people and victims do to survive."
In the end, the jury decided that Hearst had willingly taken up arms and joined her captors, and found her guilty.
The judge sentenced her to seven years in prison, concluding that "rebellious young people who, for whatever reason become revolutionaries, and voluntarily commit criminal acts, will be punished".
As soon as Hearst was moved into a federal corrections facility, her father started mounting appeals.
He became terrified that the SLA were still targeting her and hired dozens of security guards to protect her.
When she provided information on SLA activities to authorities, the Hearst Castle was targeted in a bomb attack that caused $US1 million in damage.
And on the day Bill and Emily Harris were arraigned in court, Hearst found a dead rat on her prison bunk. She was moved into solitary confinement for her own protection.
The Hearsts also called on their famous friends to pressure authorities to release her.
In 1978, 900 members of a US apocalyptic cult called Jonestown died in a mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Hollywood star John Wayne pleaded with Americans to see the parallels between the coerced massacre and Hearst's actions with the SLA.
"It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash 900 human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group ... could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation and confinement," he said.
The support of a beloved, all-American icon dramatically shifted public opinion.
President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and after 22 months in prison, Hearst was finally free.
While Hearst disavowed almost all the things she had said and done during her time with the SLA, she stood by her decision to break up with her fiance Steve.
Instead, two months after her release, she married one of the bodyguards hired to protect her after the trial. They stayed together for the rest of his life.
In 2001, one of president Bill Clinton's last acts in office was to grant her a full pardon.
His move provoked outrage with the US attorney-general in Northern California Robert Mueller (yes, that Robert Mueller), saying "the attitude of Hearst has always been that she is a person above the law".
But Hearst has always maintained her innocence, and she told the Clinton White House she would not accept his clemency if she had to make any admission of guilt.
"I told them flatly I would serve every day of my sentence, that I was happy to do it, in fact, if the alternative would be to say I was guilty," she said.
Re-examining the Patty Hearst fable
For some Americans, Hearst will always be the spoiled heiress who willingly transformed herself into a gun-toting terrorist, and got away with it.
For others, she was a victim who was prosecuted for the crimes committed against her.
When Hearst vanished and then re-emerged as Tania the urban guerilla, she seemed to confirm the fears of the American establishment.
Here was a rich, beautiful teenager, who reaped all the benefits of America's class system, and she had spurned it all to join the underground.
"This was a fear that America was grappling with — this counterculture revolution of young people overthrowing the natural order, and throwing over conservative order, was potent at the time," said Associate Professor Rosewarne.
Fifty years after she was dragged from her apartment in her nightgown and bundled into the boot of her car, Hearst now lives a quiet life that looks nothing like her 19 months with a guerilla gang.
She is a philanthropist, the author of a murder mystery novel set in Hearst Castle, and she regularly enters her French bulldogs in the prestigious Westminster dog shows.
"Patty was a victim of her times," J. Albert Johnson, one of her defence lawyers, said in 1999.
"She was the victim of the rich, who thought of her as impudent and disrespectful, and a victim of the left and the poor who saw her as a spoiled little rich girl.
"But most of all she was a victim of the system that prosecuted her."
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