DESCRIPTIONS

*Includes pictures<br />*Includes Heart's own accounts of her kidnapping and case<br />*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading<br />*Includes a table of contents<br /><br />“For me, my awakening came when I was kidnapped.” – Patty Hearst<br /><br />"I finally figured out what my crime was. I lived. Big mistake." - Patty Hearst<br /><br />For most of the 20th century, the name Hearst was most closely associated with one of America’s most famous (and infamous) newspaper magnates, William Garrison Hearst, whose life was the inspiration for Citizen Kane. But in the 1970s, his granddaughter Patricia made headlines thanks to a series of events that would wind up being one of the most bizarre chapters of the 20th century. <br /><br />In 1974, Hearst was a 19 year old college student at Berkeley when she was kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an obscure left-wing group with ties to the local area. In fact, the SLA abducted Hearst in part because she lived nearby, and it was hoped that her famous lineage would help them ransom her, either in exchange for imprisoned members of their group or for money that could be donated throughout the community. Those plans would never come to fruition, and as the SLA got more and more frustrated, they continued threatening their captive. Hearst recalled that the group’s leader, Donald DeFreeze, “told me that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing me or me staying with them, and that I better start thinking about that as a possibility."<br /><br />The Heart kidnapping helped propel the SLA into the headlines, but what followed was almost too much for anyone to believe. Whether through coercion or some other factors, Hearst became the SLA’s most high profile member, and she was involved in the group’s robbery of the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Surveillance photos of Hearst carrying a gun shocked the nation, and Patty immediately became