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This is a rip Current bonus episode. You don't need to listen to follow the Rip Current storyline, but it provides more information, context, and analysis to enhance the main podcast. Enjoy.
To get an overview of the Symbionese Liberation Army's brief history, I spoke with Rachel Hannell, author of the book Not the Camilla We Knew One woman's path from small town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army. We talked about the group's formation, the internal dynamics, and the fierce and tragic gunfight in Los Angeles.
The last days of the SLA will be covered in episode eleven of the main podcast.
So.
I'm Rachel Hannel. I'm a writer and I also teach creative nonfiction at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
What's got you interested in writing a book about Camillo Hall.
Yeah?
So I'm a history person. I have an undergraduate degree in history as well as a master's degree in history, and when I was working on my master's degree. This was back in nineteen ninety nine. There was a major story here in Minnesota, and it actually was national as well, where a woman named Sarah Jane Olsen was arrested in Saint Paul.
And here it.
Turned out that she had been in hiding for twenty four years and she had been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. And this was a huge story because she was living just kind of this quote unquote normal, quiet life. Her husband was a doctor, she was a volunteer, they were raising three children. She was actually pretty active in her community. So when the arrest happened, it was really huge news. And alongside one of the main news stories, there was a smaller story about the SLA to remind
people what the SLA was. And there was a little picture of Camilla Hall next to that article. And Kamilla Hall was from Saint Peter, Minnesota, and I'm from Mankato, Minnesota. And Camilla had been a member of the SLA, and she was killed in a shootout with police in nineteen
seventy four with five other SLA members. But I was really struck by her picture because she looked just again, quote unquote normal her dad had been a pastor and a theology professor, and I had never heard of her, and so that was really the surprising thing to me, where a woman from small town Minnesota had gotten caught up in this what we would call a domestic terrorist organization out in the Bay Area, and I just wanted
to know how did that happen? And so that really sent me down a rabbit hole.
What was her sort of first content tackt with anybody that would lead eventually to the SLA.
Yes, so Camilla moved to California in nineteen seventy originally to Los Angeles, and the next year she ended up in Berkeley. And so it was right away when she moved to Berkeley, she moved to an apartment on Channing Way, and there was a young woman in a neighboring apartment named Patricia soul To Sick, and so those two became fast friends, and they quickly became lovers as well. And it was really Patricia soul To Sick who was the
main architect of the SLA. So once the SLA started really performing in nineteen seventy three, by late nineteen seventy three, Camilla was in the fold.
So a character who's I think is really interesting, who I don't have in the main podcast at all is Colston Westbrook and the program that he was running in Vacaville. Can you talk about that a little bit?
What I will say is that Westbrook is a really fascinating character, and I think there's a lot of mystery surrounding him. I think maybe his full story is not known or people aren't talking. So there's some speculation that he had worked for a company that was in Vietnam during the war doing something. I'm really sure if it was some kind of CIA mission.
You know.
Again, it's all very mysterious. But he comes back to the States and is organizing these groups and prisons, which again kind of on paper, you know, this is good, like any kind of education or any community orientation in prisons would be a good thing. But there is definitely speculation because of his kind of mysterious background. Was he a plant of the government?
You know?
Was he put into prisons to kind of like discredit the far left, or to kind of rile things up so they could be discredited for to kind of spy on what's going on in the prisons. Again, a whole lot isn't known. You have like the official story, and then you have kind of all of these conspiracy theories that go along with him.
And so is his program which was where Defreese met Willie Wolf and I think Russell Little is that is that correct?
Yeah? Several on them.
I think the Harrises were also in those prison groups as well.
So what is their sort of first activity.
So the SLA is forming in early nineteen seventy three, and so they're writing manifestos, they're writing these guiding principles and again on paper, you know, it looks good like they want equality, and they want less division between rich and poor, and they want a racial harmony and gender equity like all of these things that we would say, yeah, okay,
you know that sounds good. But they definitely had the more militaristic view like if this can't happen through kind of regulated channels, then we are willing to take up arms and basically have a revolution to fight for these things.
So their first main action was in November nineteen seventy three, and they killed the Oakland School superintendent Marcus Foster and they seriously injured his deputy superintendent, Robert Blackburn, and the thing was though Foster was a black man, he had come from Philadelphia, he had done great things for the Philadelphia School District, came to Oakland doing great things for the Oakland School District, like really turning these districts around
to have a lot of student success. So right away, I mean from the very beginning, almost everyone after this happened is saying, what the heck, what are you doing? Like, by all accounts, this guy is doing really great things. And plus he's black. You know, if you want racial harmony, this is not going to be the way to do it. So it was a really kind of bizarre first move that the SLA undertook.
Yeah, and that's sort of connected to some sort of conspiracy theories that Dufreeze had about like a central database that was going to get information from kids because of their ID cards.
That was exactly it. There was a talk in some circles, and you know, there were people at school board meetings
because they were really curious about this program. That it did seem that Foster wanted to implement a student identification program, mostly because there had been violence on school district property perpetuated by people who were not students, you know, So it was kind of like, hey, we just want to know, like you're going to be on school property, we need to know that you are actually part of this school, so let's give you a badge. So it was kind
of more for safety measures. But yes, there was a small population that said, oh, you're just going to feed these students and their pictures into these databases and they might be troubled students. And so they really saw the quote unquote school to prison pipeline is what they thought of this plan.
So they claim responsibility for the killing, right, and then so how does that kind of change, you know, their situation.
Well before the murder of Foster, again just kind of through their manifestos and communicats, you know, I think they could have gotten maybe decent support, not a ton of support. I mean, it's still very militaristic, but you know, we are in the Bay area that is really quite left of center. But as soon as they murdered Foster, there was hardly any support whatsoever to be found. And the group's really tiny at this point to maybe ten people
that are part of the SLA. So if they really did want to have a revolution and an army, you're not going to do that with ten people, but after they kill Foster, nobody wants to sign up to be a part of this group.
So sort of the next sort of beat in their story is that the arrest of Ramiro and Little, or is that the bank.
It would be the arrest of Ramiro in Little. So in January nineteen seventy four, there's traffic stop and Russ Little and Joe Ramiro are in a car or a van and it's the middle of the night, so the
police officer is pretty suspicious what's going on. I think one of them gives a false ID, and I can't remember if they search the vehicle or what happens, but they find a gun and then that gun is linked to the Foster murder, and so Little and Ramiro are arrested right there where it gets back to the safe house where the SLA had been staying, so they have to abandon that safe house right away. So basically anybody who's part of the ESLA at this point is going underground.
So what's going on with Camilla Hall at this point?
Yeah, So Camilla's only entry into this group is through Patricia Souldasik, who later changed her name to Miss Moon. So people might remember that name. By all accounts, it's sketchy. In terms of documentation, Camilla is dead. Anybody who knew her well is dead. So as far as when she actually became part of the group little mysterious. But as far as what I can tell, she was not part of the group during the Foster murder and a couple
of other people who would eventually be members. There was a meeting on New Year's Eve in nineteen seventy three, and it looks at that point the SLA really coalesced, and I believe, as far as I can tell, that's when Camilla says, Okay, I'm all in. Because then two days later, on January second, she buys a gun.
That was an interesting scene actually in the book. Yeah, she goes in and the guy is selling guns. Is like trying to process like this young single woman coming in to buy a gun without like a man at her side and stuff.
Exactly when you think about it, you know, you think of gun shops in the seventies, I mean even today, right, I don't think a lot of single women are marching in the guns shops and signing up to get guns.
So at what point do they decide and why to kidnap Patty Hurst.
Yeah, so the kidnapping, like a general plan to kidnap someone does seem to have been a conversation in the months leading up to the actual kidnapping in those prison groups, just in terms of attention and in terms of possible you know, monetary gain by kidnapping somebody who has some wealth.
So it looks like there.
Was a fairly lengthy list of people who were possible targets for kidnapping when Ramiro and Little were arrested in January and police could get into the house after everyone had fled, that's where they're finding these lists, and it looks like Hurst was on that list and some other people. Strangely enough, I don't know why, but nobody who was on that list was notified that they might be a potential kidnapping target. So something got lost in translation there.
But as far.
As why Hurst, the group is starting to kind of scope out her residence. You know, she's living with her fiancee. They're just in this regular apartment in Berkeley. I mean, yeah, she's very wealthy, but it's not like she's ensconced in some gated mansion or anything like that. So she's very accessible, and she's very young too, right, So I'm sure that all of those factors combined is why they thought, Okay, let's make her armin target.
So they kidnap Patty Hurst and they take her to a safe house and they put her in a closet. So do you have a sense how that affected the dynamics within the group now that they have high profile hostage and then be you know, suddenly the entire country is paying attention to them.
Yeah, I mean that stealed their fate, right, nobody's going anywhere at those points. I mean, if you're in the SLA, you are in hiding. With the exception of Camilla again, because she really wasn't connected to the other people in the group, She's the last one to go around, so she manages to stay above ground about three weeks after the kidnapping, by the time the FBI is finally closing in on acquaintances. But yeah, they're not going anywhere. They
certainly have to be very very careful. Now, how are they going.
To get supplies?
They moved around a lot, so anytime they felt like, oh this safe house, you know, we feel like we're under target here, you know, let's pick up and let's move to another one. So it was just a matter of just consistently kind of having to scurry from place to place.
I mean. The next sort of public action, that's a Hibernia bank right, yes, yes, can you talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, So they need money, so they decide to conduct a bank robber. So this is April fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, about two and a half months after the kidnapping. A couple of weeks before this, though, is when we get the famous message from Patty Hurst herself and the famous photograph of her holding a machine gun in front of the SLA flag that says, I'm a member of the SLA. My name is Tanya. They told me I could leave. I didn't want to leave. I've decided to stay and fight.
So by the time they do the bank robbery, Hurst is by all accounts a member of the SLA, and indeed she is in the bank. We can see the surveillance tapes from that day and she's holding her machine gun right there in the bank. So five members had gone into the bank, they got about ten thousand dollars, and the four other members were outside in a getaway car, and so it all happened very very quickly, but they were able to escape and nobody caught them right away.
After this, I think is when they start of split up into three different like quote unquote cells. I guess I thought that was kind of an interesting little insight into the interpersonal dynamics that were going on there. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I mean it's all just so strange, you know that it's nine people living in one apartment and they're never leaving.
They're never going out, you know. So if we think of the.
COVID lockdowns and how terrible that was, I mean, this is just like that on steroids, to think of you're never leaving anywhere, and so yeah, I think about that a lot. Kind of the group dynamics group psychology, so kind of in terms of like military tactics, they decide to split into three different cells of three people just to move around a little bit, you know, differently, especially as they have to move from place to place instead of all nine of them being together, they kind of
do this separation. So there was a little controversy there because Patty Hurst was considered a week member and Camilla was considered a week member.
So it's like nobody wanted them on their teams.
But somehow it had to work out that way, so they were able to find their places.
Yeah, they were both on Bill Harris's team, and then Bill Harris was angry that he wasn't with Emily, so they basically traded.
Yes, Bill did not want both Patty and Camilla, but the idea was, well, you didn't want the husband and wife together because you weren't supposed to have those kind of relationships. But he went out yes, and so it was he and Emily and Patty and that.
Sort of you know, foreshadows later events, what's important that happens next or between this and then when they go to La.
Yes, it's relatively quiet for them in the Bay Area right after the bank robbery, but they are feeling very, very pressured and they're getting increasingly paranoid. So anytime they see a police car, anytime they hear helicopters, and for a while I think they're in East Oakland where there was a pretty major police presence on a daily basis. Anyway, they're always hearing sirens and they're always hearing helicopters, so
they're getting very very paranoid. I'm not sure how close the FBI was to getting them at this point, but they really felt like something was going to happen, and so they decide to leave the Bay Area and go to Los Angeles because Donald Deafries had spent years in LA so they feel like he's familiar with that city, all right, So they.
Go to Los Angeles. Why aren't the Harrises and Patty Hurst with the rest of the group when the shootout happens.
So they do go to LA in the three separate vehicles, but then they all get to the same place when they're looking for a place to rent where on May sixteenth, Now it's determined that they need some supplies, so one of the groups has to go get supplied, and so that task is given to the Harrises and Patty Hurst. So the other six are remaining in the house that they found in south central LA to hide out, and the Harris is in Hirst going to a sporting goods store to get some supplies, and.
That being a fairly fraught shopping.
Expedition, it sure does.
So they're going to get supplies and they are buying everything. They're going through the checkout line. For some reason, Bill Harris decides to put a pair of socks in his shirt to steal them, you know, like a dollar pair of socks, and the clerk sees them. I think the clerk has a gun. So the clerk decides to chase them out of the store and confront Harris, and Harris has his gun, and so there's a scuffle, and Patty
Hurst is in the van watching this whole thing. While she said she's been trained to step in, you know, if she sees any trouble for a member, and so she starts to shoot at the scuffling pair. Paris manages to get away, get into the van, and the van.
Takes off, all right. So while this is going on at the safe house which they found, which is actually they sort of pick it almost randomly. It's because it has its lights on way way in the wee hours of the morning. What's going on there?
Yeah, So the rest of the group is at this safe house, the Harris's and hearst are in this van. Well, they have to get rid of the van because everybody witnesses have seen this van. So they get rid of that van. They hijack another car to take but in the van. When the police get to the van and look through it, there's parking ticket. And so that's how the police are able to get to where the other six SLA members are hiding out.
It's all about the details.
Yeah, so you know, the police kind of figure out, oh, here's where the SLA is, they start to close in. They're trying to be quiet about it because they want to kind of sneak up on the SLA. But slowly there's more and more police present. The people who are living in the area, they know something's going on. Houses nearby are like quietly being evacuated. They're setting up the
perimeters to take out the people in the house. And so it ends up being over four hundred police officers are on the scene, including what had been a fairly newly established SWAT team. So you have the tactical police officers here too to take on the six people who are in the house.
And what sort of is the culmination of this encounter.
Yeah, So, I mean all we have for the official record is the police report, and so that the police report says that the SLA started to shoot. Then the police throw some tear gas into the house, there's shooting there's about forty minutes of shooting, of back and forth shooting. The tear gas is you know, kind of catching fire in the house, and so quickly there's this inferno. And yeah, it was just completely wild.
You know.
It was just kind of a stunning show of force and just a really horrendous way for these six people to die.
It's interesting that that. I guess it's just because there they were on the liberal side of things. But that's not part of the litany of sort of government overreach in you know, it doesn't fall in the you know, Branch Davidians or Ruby Ridge or any of that stuff. It sort of it seems like it sort of exists outside that. Yeah, and I guess it must just be ideological. I haven't really thought about it that much.
Yeah, you know, and I really compare it to you know, like friend Fred Hampton, you know, how the guy was just you know, they were not going to let this guy live, you know, because he was he was such a firebrand and people loved him and he was so charismatic that they thought, wow, this guy could be a real danger to our you know, existing systems. And I think that's definitely how they viewed the SLA too, Like, no way were we going to let this group continue on,
you know, with their militant revolutionary talk. We got to take them out.
So Camilla Hall, she wasn't found for a couple of days after the shootout.
Yeah, that's right. So apparently she comes out of the house, you know. Some reports will say she came out to surrender. The official police report says that she was shooting at officers when she came out, So she was shot at. Somebody inside of the house grabbed her body and dragged it back inside. And these houses they didn't have full basements, but they had like crawl spaces, so Camilla's body is
in a crawl space. So yes, when police can finally get on the scene after everything's said and done, the five bodies they find right away are just kind of right there, you know, like on that mean level. And they didn't find a six body. So yeah, it was a couple of days before they found Camilla's body.
So it says that she'd been killed by a police gunfire or what she wounded.
And then yeah, I think she was killed right away. It seemed like that they were able to shoot her right away in the head and I realized.
We're starting to get outside the scope of the book a little bit. But what happens to the SLA after the LA shootout?
Yeah, so basically there's three members left of the SLA after the shootout. You have the Harrises and you have Hers. So they want to keep.
Going and they need help.
So they get back to the Bay Area and they do find some people who were sympathetic to their cause, and you know, maybe they even knew them before all of this, but they weren't official members of the SLA. So now they're kind of going to like, hey, who can help us? Who can help us?
And so they do manage to reform with a few new members.
And then the Harrises and Patty sort of go on the lamb in Pennsylvania at a farmhouse.
Yeah, I think they cross the country like two different times. I mean, they are on the move, but there is a period of time that they are yep, at a Pennsylvania farmhouse. It's the three of them, and I believe it's Wendy Yeshimura is the fourth one, who are living in this farmhouse for like three months or something like that.
And then they go back. They end up eventually sort of leaving Pennsylvania, they go back to the Bay Area and that's where they're finally apprehended, and strangely it happens in between the two assassination attempts.
It's a wild time. I mean, I just keep thinking of the seventies and especially in California, just I mean, we live in weird times now, but also that must have been very weird time to live through.
In the end, sort of what did you or kind of your conclusions about Camilla Hall and her whole part in this very brief but violent and high profile existence of the SLA.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that this really made me realize or think more about is that nobody makes a sudden turn. And I think a lot of times in the media it kind of looks like, oh, people just snap, you know, the snap, and you know, one morning they were just great and normal, the next day they're, you know, a radical. And for Camilla, you know that certainly wasn't the case. So it's kind of like anything with history, right, you have to dig deeper and know that there's kind of this.
Huge, full, well rounded story.
But there were just so many factors that went into her radicalization. She had a lot of loss in her life. All three siblings had died before her when they were quite young, so you know, it was a very very grief stricken, very sad upbringing. She was close to her parents, but not especially so. She was gay, but it was a time where you couldn't really be coming out to your parents or family members. That there was a lot of cleariness about that. So she's keeping these secrets and she has.
A lot of grief.
She is angry, you know, I mean people, many people were angry in the sixties and seventies, and so there are things about the government that she doesn't agree with, and I think she just found a group of people that accepted her. And you know, at the surface, we're saying things that she believed in, and I think she just also thought, what did she have to lose?
Thank you to Rachel Hannell, author of the book Not the Camilla We Knew. One woman's path from small town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
I'm Toby Ball.
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