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At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second, nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
She missed.
As we heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted La Times reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner with her husband. He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't talk to him until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen come up to San Francisco? She caught the last plane a reminder, Sarah Jane was going by the name Sally at the time.
What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto, and what I had worked out as a deal with my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would help her by drafting a statement as she wished it to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind of help her to draft it, but that that would be included in a real news story that I would write as I interviewed her in prison.
So it was a deal where she'd get.
Her manifesto, but I would get my professional job done, but without exploiting her. She would have her statement and I would have my story. And she apparently agreed to this through her lawyer. So the next day the arraignment occurred.
September twenty third, was a wild day at the courthouse. Sarah Jane and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did SLA member Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbs coverage of that day in court.
With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner. Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below. At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick.
Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse, got in there, and then when she was brought into the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so, wanting to give her a signal that I was there and was going to talk to her, I jumped up, waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down.
It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal that I was there.
Walter.
That night on CBS News had a report that a supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose. And when I talked to Carol Plogash about this recently, she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that. So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing, but.
Either no one noticed or no one could be bothered to do anything about it. It was just another odd moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from the Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty Hurst's hearing ended.
The scene became a little confused. At that point, one hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or
someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically for telephones and unlocked doors.
And then I went back and waited in the hotel room and a call came, and her lawyer called me and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in, but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes. This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of
paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's all I could take into the interview.
Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there. The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of the jail's news celebrity inmates.
There are five singles set and the maximum security corridor of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said, one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it, one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across the corridor from each other. It has been reported here that the two women discussed that episode that touched both
their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said.
So I go in there and the first thing I say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater, I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said, because the FBI killed your story on me. I said, what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the paper this morning.
I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to run today.
It's supposed to run Wednesday.
And she said, oh, and looked downcast. Can you imagine how amazing and terrible and weird that whole thing was. I said to myself, Okay, so my story didn't run, and that's why she tried to kill the president. I state, wait a minute.
But I understood that she believed that story.
Was going to save her life. And I, now, having thought about this for all these forty some years, understand that by trying to kill the president, and she was mentally unstable. Okay, she was emotionally ill. This was not a well person, and I didn't understand that at the time, but she clearly wasn't She believed that if she did something really dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view, then they wouldn't kill her.
I'm Toby Ball and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Nay, she was a lovely child. And sixty days later, I bet you're ever in a bank where the gun that I had you. I don't think anybody.
Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that only kooks do it.
Americans who saw the dramatic Conversions from Middle American to Radical Young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to try to understand what had happened. The first was a series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War.
My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that made people more persuadable, and people started doing un accountable things that were just difficult to explain.
In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live in communists China rather than return home. In between these two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts. The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty and it now was used to try to explain what
had happened. Timothy Melly professor of English at Miami University told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question why would anybody become a communist. It is a story that we tell to explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even allow complete control over them.
So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress, force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them, isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for coercion and persuasion.
The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a returning Korean War soldier whose conditioned to commit an assassination when he receives a signal allow me.
To introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand that the new American work.
The second incident was the attempt by a parolee named Jan Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit Banking in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and a partner held four hostages inside the bank for six days before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault. None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers, and in fact began to raise money to aid in their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their
captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look back even further a century ago to the earliest observation of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning. Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in
this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose. The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually, Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic for the dogs, and.
What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation was so extensive that the dogs were never the same. They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius. He could teach a dog to respond to middle C on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of
a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used to like hated serge thereafter. So massive stress seems to shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans, in a way that causes people to forget.
This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design, can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this was not the case in the mid seventies. But before we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
After we did the interview, I went back to my hotel room in draft of the statement, and I would call a lawyer and read it to him and over and over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it. I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it. So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that.
And it's important to me to note that I really tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in any way. But the story that came out in the Times, the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact that she had thought a story was going to run about her, and that she thought that was going to
save her life. It was just that she wanted to prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece that she had said to me about why she had done it. I now look back on it as she
probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I did my interview with her was it ran the next day in the La Times, and it ran in every paper all around the world because it was an exclusive jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had access to her.
Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on forward within the framework and language of the radical movement. These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison.
I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid I would go around shooting people. And then it was kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did not want to kill somebody. But there comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.
In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow force the radical movement to unite, to.
Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I wanted them to face the realities of some of the things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things. But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven to act.
The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye.
I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls. I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about what had happened, and again I thought that I might have been able to stop it, and it just killed me that I hadn't taken that call.
Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There was no question that she had fired at the president. The only hope for her lay in some kind of mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she
suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree that she was competent to stand trial while she met the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash.
She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred to any of us that she would act on it. She was this nutty person who none of us took seriously until we had to.
But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial, her defense would have to be that she had not been competent at the time of the assassination attempt on December ninth. Her lawyer at the time, a man named James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot
at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here, Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams.
The government has to believe that any political act of that sort, they would likely one to believe that.
Only kooks do it.
That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they must put it down to kooks. They must say that these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels me to say that it was an an out that was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy. That's your that's your your route to freedom.
You mean the government offered you, yes, who Well, in terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it was as overt.
As that.
Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty. Journalist Ellen Hume.
When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the judicial system because here was a person with mental illness. She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that meant she's just going to be in prison for the rest of her life, which she pretty much was.
Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I know a lot of this poilet game, but it was pretty obvious manipulated it into pleading.
Lawyer Peggy Garrity.
I's been a lawyer for about five minutes.
At this point. There was a woman who was very involved in feminist organizations in the office I was renting a space from, and she was contacted and she didn't want to deal with it, and something about Sarah Jane was not getting access to her child.
This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son by John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her. After Sarah Jane's arrest, Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four.
I was so excited about being in the practice of law. I was dying to go out to the federal prison. So I went out and talked to her and left, thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child. So I talked to her about everything, and I decided I could do basically effectively hate this corpus to help her not get out, I guess, but get a trial. She would talk to me like she didn't talk to
other people. So I just said something fun, like a new brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god, an assassin, a real assassin.
Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Jane's loneliness.
But I went to visit her in Long Beach because that's where one of the prisons where she was being held and surprisingly they let me in as if I were a family member, and we hugged each other because you know, I always was kind of supportive of her in many ways, and just in terms of listening to her, not because I supported her ideas. She was glad to have somebody visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know. I did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness.
But I realized after that she was so unstable. She could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me in the back as I hugged her, and I thought I better not go back there again. And I didn't.
This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out to be well placed.
So I spent a lot of time going back and forth, and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something. So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. I'm like, I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's in there is not a good thing. And even the rookie years I am.
I'm like, oh nope.
So I when I leave here. I don't go through the metal detector, I go around it. I get back to my office and I open up and it shived that big, it's like twelve inches. I kept it for a long time and it disappeared. I don't know where it went.
So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued to maintain that she was completely saying her time in the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that it was all because the FBI had used her as an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never have become involved to that degree with the radical movement
and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a number of times, Women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife, doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in
her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion to the radical young but were there other contributing factors. We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch
to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst, she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation, indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her
sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to know for sure, of course, but it may explain her actions and her assessment of her situation in the radical underground. When feeling she had no recourse, she took the shot. The judicial course following Lynette's and Sarah Jane's attempts denied the opportunity to find out more about their conversion experiences. Sarah Jane pled guilty and wasn't brought to trial. Lynette was brought to trial, but managed to turn it into
a farce. She initially tried to serve as her own defense attorney, but was unable to abide by the rules of the court. After that, she essentially refused to attend the trial, and on the occasion she did refused to walk so had to be carried by a deputy to the court room. She provided minimal cooperation with her defense attorney, and at one point threw an apple at the prosecutor, hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses. You get the picture. She was found guilty and sentenced
to life in prison. With that a real examination of how she had come so thoroughly under Manson's sway. But this was not the case with Patty Hurst. In fact, her trial revolved primarily around this question, did Patty actually become a revolutionary and if so, did she become one of her own free will or was she brainwashed? After the break, Joan Beck joined the Chicago Tribune as one of the very few women working in the newsroom in
nineteen fifty. She worked her way from lifestyle beat topics such as fashion and cooking, to harder news focusing on topics such as education and medical research. In nineteen seventy five, she became the first woman to serve on the Tribune's editorial board and began writing a commentary column. On Friday September twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, a week and a day after the capture of Patty Hurst, Beck wrote a column titled many Parents study Patty for Answers.
In it, she wrote, one of the most fearsome aspects of this long, tragic story has been trying to explain in some rational way why a beloved daughter of what may seem to be good, caring parents could turn as harshly and hatefully on her family and their lifestyle as
she seemed to have done. Patty's public rejection of her family in the taped Pighirst messages differs only in degree in drama from the kind of rejection many other parents have been getting from young adult children whose behavior they can no longer understand, and they are desperately hungry for
any crumbs of understanding. Too often, there seems to be no family pathology, no social trauma sufficient to account for some of the young adults who are spoiling their lives with drugs, or losing their bearings in sexual experimentation, or dropping out of college aimlessly, or generally balking at growing up into responsible adults.
Parents confused by their children adopting seemingly incomprehensible political and ethical beliefs probably goes back millennia, but came into particular relief with the emergence of the radical Young in the nineteen sixties. That Patty Hurst had changed, at least temporarily during her time with the sla seemed obvious. But how much free will did she have in the matter. When she heard of Patty's arrest, her mother, Catherine said, thank God,
she's all right. Please call it a rescue, not a capture. To her, Patty was the victim who needed to be saved, not the gun toting revolutionary. The question of which of these two people Patty really was became the crux of her trial.
The story that Patricia Hurst today began telling is a horror story of being captured, tortured, driven to the brink of insanity from which she is only now beginning to return. That is her story that will be her to pace.
She was in court for a hearing today.
Her lawyer is saying she is in too fragile a condition to take the witness in. The judge saying Hilla Point's psychiaprists to examine her because of all she claims to have been proved. She did not speak in court, but her affidavit was admitted, and it told her story of being kidnapped, thrown in the front of a car, taken to a hideout, and forced into a closet for nine weeks.
When Patti Hurst was arrested on September eighteenth, the public had no idea what her experience over the past nineteen months had been. The only clues were the audio communicates that had been released in the early days of her time with the SLA, and then her participation in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Her months with the SLA were a complete void, and given the interest in the case, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that
the nation waited anxiously for the story to emerge. The first inkling came from the affidavit filed with the court by her defense. One of her attorneys, Terence Halenan, read from the affidavit in front of a press gaggle.
She remained in that case with her hands brown, blindfolded and no lights on.
The closet was.
Hot and extremely uncomfortable. When the blind plot was removed, she felt that if she were on an LSD trip. Everything was out of proportion, big and distorted.
The suggestion there that she had been drugged also was so weak by then she could barely stand.
After an interminable length of time, which seemed to her to be weeks, she was released from the closet and seated with the gang of captors who were at that time discussing the robbery of a.
Bank, and the SLA members told Patty that she had to accompany them during the bank robbery. She needed to allow herself to be photographed and to say her name out loud so there would be no doubt she was actively involved in the hold up.
That was the hard Brunnia bank hold up, and Patricia Hurst did exactly as she claimed she was ordered to do, because the epidavit says she held her mind clouding he was losing her sanity.
This was functionally the beginning of her defense, positioning her actions with the SLA as a product of fear and brainwashing, but very quickly a different narrative was also put forward. This came in the form of a Blockbuster magazine article that portrayed Patty Hursts time with the SLA in a very different and more complicated light.
My breakthrough was a big expos of Timothy Leary testifying before grand jury's about how the weather Underground broke him out of prison. But in the process, the sources and the people I got to know throughout the Bay area led me to the hearst situation.
This is retired journalist David Weir. He and his good friend Howard Khne researched and wrote a blockbuster article for Rolling Stone magazine about Patty Hurst and the SLA at a time when the FBI was having no luck in finding them.
I started realizing and that I knew people that knew people that knew people that were the people helping the SLA. So Howard and I told John Winner. He of course recognized it was the biggest story in the world and was excited. But our condition was don't publish it until they catch her, because we don't want to be essentially snitches helping the FBI catch these people whether we agree with them or not.
John Winner was the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone. He agreed to hold off in publishing the article. The article, titled The Inside Story, was released a month after Patty's arrest. They had the biggest scoop on the planet.
We were just valuged with reporters. Reporters came from all directions, and you know, Rolling Stone at that point was on Third Street in San Francisco in a warehouse office and crowded around, and we were both twenty eight and I'd never appeared before the press before. Howard kind of went catatonic. He didn't have anything to say. Joan Wenner, the head of the magazine, was hiding in his office. He didn't want to come out and deal with it. So it
was all on me. And like I say, I'd never done anything like this before in my life.
This is David Weir at that press conference.
Our information is that the political content of their arguments about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country and a lot of things that a lot of us would agree with, did make an impact on Patty Hurst, and that she was receptive to these correct political positions, and that so she did come to have a sympathy with
what the SLA was telling her. Politically, then, as we understand it, her conversion was more emotional in the end then political, in that the SLA people warmed up to her, called her sister, treated her in a friendly way after being at first unfriendly and more threatening to her. That complex sort of three folded says, circumstances led to the conversion, not this sort of simplistic brainwashing theory that I think has been has been spread so far.
We had a different narrative. It's not that we said that she absolutely had one hundred percent sincerely converted into a revolutionary soldier.
It's just that.
We conveyed that that was the impression that all the people were met her during those many months underground came away with. She seemed to be almost the fiercest SLA soldier,
and her actions tended to verify that. When Bill Harris and Emily Harris had shoplifted and were in danger of being caught at Mels Hardware in La, it was Patty in the getaway car who strayed the hardware front and the people there with machine gun bullets, so they escaped, And so actions like that really were hard to reconcile with the kidnap victim.
This more complicated story was the focus of the Rolling Stone article, which described Patty's political and emotional indoctrination, her growing sense of betrayal by her parents, and her emerging view of societal problems. The following short excerpts are in the same order they appeared in Weir and Cohene's article, and show how they detailed the process of Patty's conversion.
So Patty grew impatient as the ransom negotiations bogged down. I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth. She later said, like they figured I was worth two million, but I wasn't worth ten million. It was a terrible feeling that my parents could think of me in terms of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over by degrees, her disillusionment with her parents turned into sympathy for the SLA. For a month, she had been kept in a small
isolation chamber approximating a San Quentin whole. She became weak and could hardly stand up. To be able to walk freely from one room to another seemed the world's greatest pleasure. Patty was urged to attend the SLA's daily political study sessions.
She was invited to listen to the SLA National anthem, an eerie jazz composition of wind and strings that Sink had selected, and she was furnished with statistical evidence and quotations from George Jackson and Rochelle McGee that promoted her political development.
George Jackson and Rochelle McGhee were prison radicals whose writings were influential in the revolutionary movement.
Patty was shown a long list of herst family holdings, nine newspapers, thirteen magazines, four TV and radio stations, a silver mine, a paper, and prime real estate. Her parents clearly were part of the ruling elite, and the only power that could fight that money was the power that came out of the barrel of a gun. The SLA's motives made more sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hurst wealth to more needy people. It was her parents and the economic class they represented who were to blame for
her misery and countless authors. The SLA members encouraged her radicalization. They hugged her, called her sister, and ended her loneliness. Patty's conversion was as much emotional as political. Seven weeks after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the SLA.
Patty Hirst's trial for her participation in the Hibernia bank robbery began on February fourth, nineteen seventy six. Again Professor Emeritis Joel Dimmesdale.
Her trial wasn't about who done it? Was why has she done it? And the psychiatric testimony formed the guts of the trial, and it was like a formal struggle between these different expert opinions. So the defense psychiatrist's view was that she was under massive stress, she was isolated, she dissociated, and that in essence, her behavior was coerced.
This defense required the jury to accept the more complicated view of control, that it could be the result of things like the terror of a violent kidnapping, isolation in a closet for weeks, and forced indoctrination. It also tied her participation in the bank robbery to her seeming conversion to the SLA. But the prosecution had a different, arguably simpler view.
The prosecution argued for a very narrow definition of coersion. If I hold a gun to your head, I'd tell you to rob a bank right now, that's coercion. But if I tell you rob a bank tomorrow, is that coersion now? The SLA told Patty that if she didn't join them, they would come after her family, and in fact they did come after her family. They bombed a family household.
This was the bombing of Hurst Castle on February twelfth, nineteen seventy six by the New World Liberation Front, the group who publicly accused Popeye Jackson of being a police informant right before his execution, and who committed this bombing in support of the SLA. It caused about five point five million of today's dollars in damage to the property.
The jury, initially, they were all very sympathetic to Patty. Had thought no kidnapping, no participation in the robbery, she wouldn't have been there. As they went into the details of the case, they rather quickly came to a decision that she was guilty. The second piece of it, of course, is well, should there be mitigating circumstances. It's one thing to say she's guilty, but marked these unusual circumstances. Oddly enough, the court did not decide that there was anything mitigating
about this at all. They said she was a rich brat, and they sentenced her to the average sentence in California at that time for a first time. Bank Robert gave her no extra mitigation consideration at all and set her off to jail.
And so the jury found that despite enduring many of the same conditions as the Korean War, POW's isolation, fear, indoctrination. None of this mattered. She was responsible for the actions. She'd made a conscious decision to become a revolutionary, and this may have been the correct verdict.
When you think about it. The big questions that remain. Did Patty suffer from Stockholm syndrome, from being held in the closet and perhaps fearing she'd be killed and the trauma of being kidnapped, or did she voluntarily convert to becoming an SLA soldier, or are there nuances of this that she may have been initially traumatized but also was
a very rebellious person. She was only a teenager, and she'd been a rebellious girl from very young age, getting into trouble and having to change schools from the age of twelve or fourteen in these private religious schools and things like that.
Even the people within the radical movement weren't sure.
It was a very public debate about that, but internally throughout the network of people supporting the SLA and helping the survivors, particularly after the LA shootout, there was a debate among the people who were our sources, I can honestly say nobody seemed to know for sure, and I can say fifty years later, I don't know for sure. Patty Hurst herself may not know for sure. I think this is an incredibly complicated situation. And I remember interviewing
cops doing some other stories. As they drive around the city at bus stops, they would look at the people waiting at the bus stop and the way they would pace and the number of steps they would take and say, that guy was in San Quentin, guy was in Fulsome that guy was in David. They could tell years after freedom, who had been imprisoned where by their pacing, Because prisoners, like animals in the cage, pace the perimeter over and over and over all day long. It gets imprinted in
their mind. So what I'm saying is I think once somebody has been kidnapped, they're always a kidnapped victim. Even after they're free, they're never truly free.
In nineteen seventy three, the top grossing film in the United States was The Exorcist, the story of an adolescent girl possessed by a demon. A famous moment from the film comes when the girl's mother is pleading with a priest to consider the possibility that her daughter is possessed. She says, i'd.
Known my gut.
I'm telling you that that thing upstairs isn't my daughter.
This quote echo the reactions of parents of many of the people involved in this story. In episode two, we heard Manson follower Susan Atkins, father, you.
Can be involved in almost anything because the hypnotic trans you won't do something that is basically against who but you know is right. But under you can do almost anything. I don't know how to stand by her side. I lost her.
In an interview with the La Times, Martin Solia, the father of the three Solia siblings who joined the SLA, said.
They were good kids, good students, and Stephen was an athlete. But they went up north and got screwed up at home. They were good right wing Republicans who got up every morning and pledged allegiance to the flag. How do you figure it?
And Randolph Hurst echoed this sentiment to the press after Patty Hurst appeared as a militant in the Hibernia bank robbery.
You have a reaction though it. Iay, she was a lovely child, and sixty days later the picture over in a bank with a gun in her hand. You know, I didn't think anybody feel.
It's disorienting. When someone undergoes a fundamental change in their perception of the world, the people around them wonder what happened. What caused Lynette from to follow Manson, Patty Hurst to join the SLA, Sarah Jane Moore to become a self styled Marxist revolutionary. Was it mental illness? Was a coercive persuasion? Was it a sudden realization of truths about the country and the world that had been hidden before and were now a parent along with an ideology to direct how
to think about it? And how do you know? It seems to me that any huge shift in a person's understanding of the world will seem to those around them as the product of mental illness or coercive persuasion. People would probably say brainwashing, but the person who has made the change probably experiences it as a lifting of the veil of a burst of understanding. Lynette, Sarah Jane, and Patty each most likely experienced either mental illness or coercive persuasion,
or both. They ended up at the furthest extremes of the radical young. They are not representative of the millions of people who adopted the new ethos that developed during what we call the sixties. They are the exceptions, anomalies whose journeys somehow all ended within a two and a half week period in northern California. This is Paggy Gharrity talking about a prison meeting she had with Sarah Jane.
Well, you're sitting in the prison yard is like patio tables, umbrellas, round tables, and were sitting there and she says, that's squeaky over it. She's staring at us. And I look over and this tiny little person it's glaring, glaring, glaring. It was really creepy, super creepy. Em sitting with one assassin looking at another, and I'm I'm like, okay, yeah, lawyer. For maybe two years at this point, there were moments I thought I'm in this thing too deep.
Ford had his hands out and was waving and had just come from breakfast with the businessman, and he looked like cardboard to me.
Lynette from was released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, on August fourteenth, two thousand and nine. She now lives in upstate New York, And.
I know it's really hard to understand, because it's really hard for me now to try to think of of our what it was really in my mind, you know how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy. This doesn't make any sense at all.
President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty her sentence after she had served twenty two months for robbing the Hibernia Bank. She was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in Dublin, California, on February first, nineteen seventy nine. President Bill Clinton pardoned her on January twentieth, two thousand and one, his last day in office. She currently lives on the East Coast and raises show dogs.
In the very nature of the act that I committed, you know, I made an irrevocable commitment to a cause.
Sarah Jane Moore also served a term at the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin. She was released on December thirty one, two thousand and seven. She lives in a nursing home in Nashville, Tennessee. During Sarah Jane's interview with Playboy magazine, writer Andrew Hill asked if she could what she was feeling on the day she shot at gerald Ford. She responded by reciting a poem she'd written.
Hold hold still my hand, steady my eye, chill my heart, and let my gun sing for the people scream their anger, cleanse with their hate, and kill This monster.
Is the monster in this poem Ford, I don't think so. No one was screaming their anger about gerald Ford. They were screaming their anger about America. In Sarah Jane's own telling, the end of her journey in the Radical Underground was a single gunshot at a symbol of all that she had come to hate about her country, a single gunshot that missed.
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