Escape From The SLA

Escape From the SLA

(in Memory of Dr. Frederick Hacker)

By Paul Morantz
© March 2011

I’ve looked at Patty from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It’s Tania’s illusions I recall,
I really don’t know Patty, at all.

Mizmoons and Wolfe and SLA wheels,
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real.
I’ve looked at life that way.
But now it’s just another show,
You leave ’em laughing when you go.
And if you care, don’t let them know.
Don’t give yourself away.

( an alteration from a 60’s Joni Mitchell song)

It was not the best of times. Gas lines wrapped around the block, truckers were on strike, the Vietnam war still raged, the events of Kent State still hovered and the daily news was all Watergate. For many, particularly, at University of California at Berkeley, where the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had led a youth revolution the prior decade the 60’s was still on going.

The year was 1974 and I was 29 years old living in an old Culver City complex of 4 units that each came with a yard for those of who had to rent but had an outdoor dog. I had two border collie males, Tommy an Devon, and was just staying afloat doing legal projects for lawyers and my brother while I free lance wrote.

It was also the year my life would change as Rolling Stone Magazine bought my story on Jan and Dean which gave me some national visibility as a writer. It was the planned cover story until Richard Nixon’s resignation took center stage.

At the same time fate led me to a case of kidnappings of skid row alcoholics to sell to a nursing home chain as part of a Medicare/Medi-Cal fraud scheme (see Escape From Golden State Manor). In turn this would lead me away from writing and into a legal career.

And in l974, while I had no idea the role brainwashing would play in my life, the concept of brainwashing suddenly splurged upon the world as the biggest media question of its time–all because of a black Charles Manson want-to be, some middle class white former 60’s hippies and a confused 19 year old aloof from her Mom and sisters with daddy issues and daydreams of being more than a rich heiress.

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Publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst had long ago taught the world it could be run by a media giant and was the figure that inspired the immortal Orson Welles 1941 movie Citizen Kane. His son Randolph followed those footsteps as did the Hearst clan. Except for one. The third of five daughters.

Granddaughter Patty had instead gotten the message of the 60’s –revolt–and rejected being just a legacy. She voted McGovern, smoked dope, did acid and snuck out of the family estate in Hillsborough—wealthiest community in America—where they were neighbors to the Bing Crosbys–to attend rock concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore auditorium in faded blue jeans. She refused to accept Catholic school discipline that required her to scrub toilets for breaking “petty rules” and would lie to the Nuns to get out of doing things, forcing her parents to break tradition and send her to a nonsectarian school.

It was at the later, at age 16, she met 23 year old Steven Weed, a math teacher and her personal tutor—in more ways than one– who while was arguably the school’s most eligible bachelor he was a liberal in opposite to Hearst expectations and frowned upon by the family. Patty in response not only moved in with the older man when she reached 18, she agreed to marry him and quit school for a $2.25 per hour department store job so she could help pay the bills. After four months Dad gave in and paid for the out-of-wedlock apartment to get Patty to resume her education.

Of course, she chose Cal, Berkeley.

On February 4, 1974, just 15 days before her 20th birthday, and four months before the planned June wedding, Patty was in her kitchen when a stolen 1964 Chevrolet Impala convertible pulled up in front and dimmed its lights. Donald DeFreeze, Willie Wolfe and Nancy Ling Perry were inside. Their comrade Emily (Yolanda) Harris had taken a job at the university that allowed her access to find Patty’s address, 2603 Benvenue Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704, in hope of pawning her for the release of two jailed comrades charged with the shotgun murder of an important school administrator.

Patty and Steve around 9 p.m. were watching the TV show The Magician starring Bill Bixby when they heard an unexpected knock and Patty opened the door. Perry said they had hit a car downstairs and asked if they could use the phone. Then DeFreeze and Wolfe charged into the apartment forcing Patty down, gagging and blindfolding her while her fiancé Steven Weed was beaten unconscious with a wine bottle.

Her Neighbor Brenda Wurzell heard the sudden gun fire and dropped to her own floor. She listened as Patty pleaded before she was gagged –“Please no, not me.”

Patty was a Prisoner of War—a private war by a very small and relatively never heard of Symbionese Liberation Army.

Her captors stuffed her in the chevy car trunk and drove off. They had no idea of their ideal package.

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A few days after the shocking news of the kidnapping an audio tape recording was dropped off at a local radio station. Patty spoke:

“Mom, Dad–I’m OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff but they’ve washed them up and they’re getting OK… I’m with a combat unit that’s armed with automatic weapons and there is no way that I will be released until they let me go.”

She said it was depressing to hear so many assume she is dead.

Then General Field Marshall Cinque introduced himself to the world and spoke to Randolph, “Whatever happens to your daughter will be totally your responsibility and the responsibility of the authorities which you represent.”

The authorities were aware of the group and its symbol of a 7-headed cobra. Left over leftist 60’s revolutionists from the Berkeley movement they were known responsible for the murder of Oakland School superintendent Marcus Foster, who Cinque condemned for plans to introduce identification cards into Oakland schools and accused of being a CIA “fascist.” The hollow-point bullets used to kill Dr Foster had been packed with cyanide. Taking Patty was the ticket to notoriety and a possible get out of jail card for two SLA members accused of the Foster’s murder, Joseph Remiro (Bo) and Russell Little (Osi).

While perhaps the nation’s most ever mobilized woman hunt was coming up empty (the SLA to some was Robin Hood) negotiations were going on for her release.

First the SLA offered up Hearst for Ramiro and Little but authorities said no. Afraid Patty might be hurt in a shootout if police found their hiding place, Randolph Hearst tried to negotiate directly with the kidnappers. He announced, “We don’t have any desire for revenge on anybody if she is returned unharmed.”

The SLA responded by demanding the Hearst family distribute $70 worth of food to all of California’s poor, an estimated $400 million. Randolph immediately donated $2 million worth of food to the poor but it turned into chaos and violence as people fought for the food and riots broke out as volunteers rode on trailer trucks tossing chickens and produce into crowds. After the SLA demanded that a community coalition be put in charge of the food distribution 100,000 grocery bags were handed out at 16 locations over the next month. The SLA refused to release Patty claiming the food was of poor quality. On a tape Cinque said, “This amount is not at all a good faith gesture, but just throwing a few crumbs to the people.”

Cinque also turned down Randolph’s $4 million ransom offer.

Meanwhile more SLA taped recordings announced demands and conditions, and by the 13th day following capture, Patty is heard expressing SLA ideology. In each subsequent tape Patty is increasingly supportive of the revolutionists, disappointed with Dad’s efforts to free her, and finally on April 3, 1974, just two months after her kidnapping, having been constantly lectured on “Amerikka,’ her shoulder-length blond hair cut, as well as losing 15 pounds, she was heard stating:

“I have been given the choice of being released in a safe area or join the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight.

“I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia for the people of Bolivia.”

She said some will think she has been brainwashed, but the 20 year old socialite denounced the idea.

Could this young girl really have joined in underground Guerrilla terrorist group? The media questioned if she had grown up too sheltered or possibly too rebellious. Some were now wondering if the kidnapping was a hoax. Experts on the other hand pointed to the Stockholm Syndrome phenomena, named after captives in a Swedish bank robbery six months earlier who aided their captors when surrounded by the police for 5 days. It was described as a defense mechanism survival reaction.

To me I didn’t see why everyone was taking the tape so seriously. How can anyone doubt that a gun was being held to her head as she spoke?

But well known psychiatrist, Dr. Frederick Hacker, a former escapee of Nazi Germany, who had written a book on the 72 Munich Olympics Arab-Jew Hostage crises crusading terrorists, and negotiated with negotiations for Vienna with 2 Arab terrorists, counseled the State Department and testified before the House Committee on Internal Security, had warned the Hearst family that Patty may have converted.

Of Patty, he would later tell People Magazine, she was an average, intelligent girl living an unspectacular life. She was more liberal than her family but still relatively conservative, totally sheltered and without political interests. She was never very close to any of her sisters. Patty, he said, had a bad relationship with her mother, but a fairly good one with her father.

“In spite of everything, the sense of close proximity among these people gives a feeling of family, of community and caring. There is shared danger and a sense of strong commitment that is very impressive to the uncommitted.

“… Let’s look at it this way. She’s kidnapped, and she’s frightened and inclined to believe these people are really monsters. Then they treat her very nicely. She begins to talk to them, to the girls. She finds they are very much the kind of people she is—upper-middle-class, intelligent, white kids. She finds a poetess, a sociologist. They tell her how they have found a new ideal and how lousy it was at home. Perhaps she started to think, “Well, at my home it wasn’t so hot either… There is a strong possibility, of course, that she was brainwashed. ..I think this was the result of brainwashing, or rather “brain impressing…. To convert someone, you don’t clean the brain out. You put something in it. The brainwasher impresses his victims with his own superior fanaticism and honesty…righteousness…the idea of remediable injustice.”

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Then came shock. 12 days after her announcement, on April 15, 1974, at 10 a.m., the SLA hit the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. The bank was owned by the family of Patty’s close friend Patricia Tobin. Two people were shot as the SLA got away with over $10,000. And there Patty was on the bank video for the world to see, standing alone in the rear, moving about, barking orders, wielding an M1 carbine. Worse, a guard quoted her as saying she would shoot the first SOB that moved or did anything out of line.

After the robbery the S.L.A. moved to an all-black area in San Francisco where the white S.L.A. wore Afro wigs and black-face disguises. They left behind for authorities a bathtub filled with SLA papers, acid and excrement and a spray-painted sign that read: “Here it is, pigs. Have fun getting it.”

Nine days later another tape arrived:

“Greetings to the people, this is Tania… I want to set the record straight… My gun was loaded, and at no time did my comrades intentionally point their guns at me. As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief. …. Neither Cujo (SLA member Wally Wolfe) nor I had ever loved an individual the way we love each other.”

At the time I was heavily investigating a whole group of kidnappings of my own clients following county jail releases after serving time for being drunk to a chain of nursing homes where they were imprisoned in locked nursing facilities some said were connected to the Philippine Mafia. But you couldn’t help being more engulfed by the news reports of the Hearst kidnapping. And at no time did I believe she was not forced. I was certain they posed her there; told her they would shoot her if she didn’t act it out or threatened to start killing her sisters. And if she was brainwashed, whatever that was, it made sense she would laugh at the idea of it.

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As the police heat in San Francisco grew intense, General Field Marshal Cinque decided to move his tiny army south to Los Angeles.
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But on May 16, 1974 plans went array when SLA members William and Emily Harris ran out of Mel’s Sporting good store at 11425 Crenshaw Blvd in Inglewood after a botched shoplifting. They had purchased $31 worth of clothes but owner Bill Huett and an employee suspected the Harris’s were walking out with more and grabbed them as they stepped outside. In the struggle Harris’s .38-caliber handgun fell from his waistband. Seemingly nabbed– a handcuff was slapped on Bill Harris’s hand — bullets from a semi automatic rifle went pop- pop- pop, drawing a line on the outside concrete wall above the mele, knocking out a window and a ricochet cutting the forehead of Huet’s wife.

The firing came from a red Volskwagon Van—the vehicle of choice for 60’s peace loving hippies. Firing the semi-automatic rifle was a woman in a black, curly wig with sunglasses. It was so hard for me to believe. It was little Patty Hearst.

The bullets freed the Harris’s who jumped in the van with Patti and fled. A 20-year-old store employee gave chase from his own car until William Harris aimed his rifle.

Someone in the van, I concluded, must have had a gun on her or she was still doing what she had to in order to prevent retaliations on her family.

But that night more happened.

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Tom Matthews, a high school senior who played baseball, had a van outside with a forsale sign on it. He had finished dinner when he responded to a knock on the door and found a woman standing wanting to test drive the van. So he gave her the keys and got in the back seat. She drove a block and then asked if her friends could come along. He said sure but when the man entered he opened his coat to expose a machine gun hanging down. The man said they were LA and they needed to “borrow” the van.

Like in the movies Tom was told if he cooperated he wouldn’t be hurt. He immediately went Stockholm Syndrome and said, “As long as I don’t get shot, I don’t care what happens.”

The man, Bill Harris, then bragged the girl who got in with the black curly wig was “Tania.” Tom thought it was cool and that his friends were not going to believe this.

Patty and the Harris’s went into their believed Robin Hood story and Tom gobbled it up. They were, they said, fighting a civil war against the United States and they needed to fund their movement. Patty made it clear she was a willing participant in the Hibernia bank robbery.

The SLA then treated Tom to a double feature at a drive- in theater where they were supposed to meet up with the rest of the SLA. But given the Mel’s shootout had pinpointed Inglewood, the other members no-showed and instead fled to Los Angeles.

Back in Lynwood, Tom’s father and his girlfriend, Susan, began thinking this was an awful long test drive take. The elder Mathews then thought of the nearby shootout earlier and called the police to report he feared his son had been abducted by the SLA. The police laughed.

At sunrise Tom’s new SLA buddies hijacked another car and Tom drove his van home. At first Tom did not tell the FBI Patty was in the Van. He thought they didn’t harm him so why talk?

Patty, he later said, told Tom how proud she was to fire and save her “comrades” while the van drove to a store to buy a hacksaw to cut off the handcuff from Harris’ hand. While showing Tom how to handle a gun the SLA talked to him about robbing banks. In return Tom spoke of the championship baseball game he had the next day.

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The irony was that when Patty sprayed Mel’s Sporting Good Store with bullets the life she saved was her own. The act disclosed their whereabouts and Cinque and the others instead of going to the drive-in went straight to a “safe house” in Los Angeles.

If Patty had not fired they would have all met up and Patty would have been the next day in Los Angeles where her father’s worse fears would have become a certain reality.

The world– long before watching the Iraq invasion on TV and approximately a decade from seeing Lee Harvey Oswald shot live on camera– watched the great SLA shootout.

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The Police found evidence of the Los Angeles location—parking tickets– in the SLA van Patty and the Harris’s abandoned after the sporting good store firing and taking Tom’s Van. And the next day an anonymous phone call to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stated that several heavily armed people were staying at the caller’s daughter’s house. The Field Marshall and five comrades heard of the discovery on the news and fled but were cornered in a bungalow occupied by Christine Johnson and Minnie Lewisin only blocks away.

A visiting neighbor, 17-year-old Brenda Daniels, was sleeping on the couch when she woke up around two A.M. and saw four white women and three males–two blacks and one white—and guns spread all over the floor. Cinque introduced her to everyone.
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On May 17, 1974 the SLA was surrounded by police, FBI, California Highway Patrol, and Los Angeles Fire Department armies and a mass of media cameras bringing it all live into the nation’s homes. LAPD officers, alone exceeded 400 in number, under the command of Captain Mervin King of SWAT who used a bullhorn to announce:

“Occupants of 1466 East 54th Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up!”

Out came Brenda and the house owner who stated that no one else was in the house, but Brenda said no, there were several people in the house with guns and ammo belts. SWAT fired tear gas projectiles into the house. Then they all ducked as heavy automatic gunfire roared in response. Like at the Alamo, the SLA believing in their cause, would not surrender and unleashed everything it had.

Two hours later, the house caught fire. Two non SLA women managed to escape.

After the shooting stopped and the fire was extinguished, 19 firearms—including rifles, pistols, and shotguns—were recovered. 9,000 rounds had been fired and most everyone had missed.

As we watched we all assumed Patty was in the house. It was obvious the LAPD and FBI didn’t care if she was there or not. That anything psychological had happened to Patty and she was worth saving was not an issue.

Three SLA members beliefs and comradeship were so strong they willfully burned under the house in a crawl space rather than give themselves up. DeFreeze, as so many cult leaders would, got his martyr’s wish, but saved himself from the horror of burning up by shooting himself in the head. It had never been a cause for Cinque. His jargon had just been his sales pitch to convince others to do his bidding. For Cinque, it was about hate, notoriety and robbing banks. He knew the fun was over.

Nancy Ling Perry and Camilla Hall also did not burn. When they exited the back door the police shot them both dead immediately, claiming both came out firing.

. I swear I cried for Patty. I still believed there was an explanation. She shouldn’t die.
Then the news surfaced. Patty was not part of the body count. But her lover Wolfe, Angela Atwood, and Mizmoon Soltysik rounded out the dead, choosing to burn.

The next day Tom Mathews told the FBI the more complete story of what was said in the van; that Patty stated she was a willing participant. The FBI filed 19 counts against Patty Hearst. Officially she was no longer a victim but a fugitive. Her photo could be now seen in Post Office’s on the most wanted list.

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Donald DeFreeze, the founder of the SLA, was the black flip side of Charles Manson. While Manson used followers, mainly women (See Escape from Cielo Dr.) to start a race war against “blackie,” DeFreezze, a black man, sold the idea of a black militant revolution against whitey government ironically fought by white yuppies who still thought they were in the 60’s.

Like Manson, DeFreeze spent most of his life in and out of jails, a prison nobody, all the while developing a hatred for society. His life was a carbon copy of Manson and the results were the same. He was doing five years-to-fifteen for armed robbery of a prostitute, when, at age 31, he escaped from the Soledad State Prison on March 5, 1973 by walking away from work duty in a boiler room located outside the perimeter fence.

He then founded the SLA and was reborn Cinque Mtune, named after the leader of the historical mutiny aboard the famed slave ship Amistad. He recruited his middle-class white army from the most natural of resources–the UC Berkeley campus –which had been the center for the 60’s revolution ideology. His followers included a former Goldwater campaign worker, teachers, dramatists and an African missionary–and he predictably, gave them new names to go with their new lives, much as Manson did with his family.

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But the founding of the SLA had really more to do with a young Willie Wolfe (Cujo) who had a pedigree quite similar to Patty and together they would form their own romantic version of Bonnie and Clyde.

Wolfe was the son of a wealthy anesthesiologist and attended an exclusive prep school but, like Patty, rejected it for the hippie lifestyle immediately after college and enrolled in Cal Berkely in 1971. Gifted in math, school was not as important growing up as were his summers digging with anthropologists in Wyoming, working on an east coast commercial fishing boat or catamaran racing in Puerto Rico. After his parents divorced, when he was 15, Wolfe boarded at Mount Hermon, a Massachusetts prep school, where he went out for long-distance running, swimming and crew.

After graduating, Willie took a yearlong trek to the Arctic Circle before entering University of California in 1971 which had its own student version of political education. He became a Maoist and in l969 joined Venceremos, a radical left Chicano political group organized in Redwood City, Cal. and dedicated to overthrow of the United States. It took its name (“We will overcome”) from the battle cry of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a revolutionary communist leader from Argentina and high ranking member of Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba. The root’s of Patty’s renaming as Tania.

Wolfe became involved with a prisoner-education group at Vacaville, a psychiatric prison. In March 1972, Wolfe started connecting student activists with prison militants and met DeFreeze who was active in the prison Black Convicts Association. Wolfe quit college.

After escape, Cinque sought refuge among Wolfe’s contacts, and ended up at a commune known as Peking House in the San Francisco Bay area, sharing living quarters with Wolfe and Russ Little. Then Cinque moved in with lover Patricia Michelle Soltysik and founded the “Symbionese Nation.”

The name “symbionese” was taken from the word “symbiosis” and defined as a body of dissimilar organisms living in deep and loving harmony in the best interest of all.

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Bill and Emily Harris (Teko and Yolanda) learned radicalism at Indiana University before moving to where it was not considered so radical, Berkeley, Calif.

Born February 11, 1947 Emily Montague Schwartz , Emily was the daughter of Frederick Schwarz, an engineer, and had a middle-class upbringing, a BA in language arts, having earned straight A’s, and had worked as a junior high school English teacher.

Bill Harris was born in 1945 in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He gave up college for the Marines in 1966. When he returned from Vietnam he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He tried majoring in acting at the University of Indiana and met his future wife Emily Schwartz as well as Angela Atwood, another theatrical student.

Atwood moved to the San Francisco Bay area and married political activist Gary Atwood. The Harris’s later moved to the Bay area and after Atwood’s marriage fell apart Angela moved in. She won a role in a local production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler where she became friends with another actress named Kathleen Soliah. Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah into the SLA, but the other members thought her too “flaky.” Soliah and Jim Kilgore, along with her brother Steve and sister Josephine (who later married SLA member Michael Bortin) followed to the SLA.

Nancy Ling Perry (Fahizah) was born Nancy Devote in San Francisco also to an upper middle-class family. She had been a cheerleader, a Sunday school teacher and a campaign worker for Barry Goldwater before arriving University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley she majored in English.

Nancy Ling married African American jazz musician Gilbert Perry but after six years their “love-hate affair”ended. For awhile she worked as a topless blackjack dealer in SF while using psychedelic drugs.

Camillo Hall was born March 24, 1945 in Minnesota, daughter of a minister in the Lutheran Church . Her mother helped found Gustavus Adolphus College’s Art Department and was department head.

In 1952 the Hall family moved to what is now Tanzania in East Africa where her parents did mission work. On return Camillo went to Washburn High School in Minneapolis where she was involved in many school and service projects while voted class clown. In 1967 Hall graduated from the University of Minnesota and became a social worker in Duluth, Minnesota. In 1968 she supported the Eugene McCarthy Presidential Campaign. She became active in the peace movement and so moved to Berkeley in February 1971where she met at an apartment complex Patricia Soltysik with whom she began a lesbian relationship and who was the object of Hall’s love poem “Mizmoon.”

Camillo was one of the activists who took over Berkley park (the People’s Park) in the summer 1972. Then after traveling in Europe she returned and joined the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Patricia Soltysik, born in l950, the daughter of a pharmacist, third of seven children, the oldest of five girls, grew up in Goleta, California, and graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in 1968 in the top 10 percent of her class. She was the student body treasurer.

Soltysik got a scholarship to University of California, Berkeley but gave up dreams of being a lawyer for radical feminism and self avowed revolutionary. In 1971 she dropped out of school and joined the radical ex-convict group United Prisoners Union.

James Kilgore was an honors graduate from San Rafael High School in California. In 1969, he graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in Economics. Fear of Vietnam turned his attention from sports to revolution and he found his way to the SLA.

Michael Bortin became associated with the organization when Kathleen Soliah (Sara Jane Olson) was finally accepted in 1974. As a student, and SDS member, at U.C.B., he participated in riots, takeovers and flag burning. He liked turning over police cars, lighting them up and throwing bricks at cops’ faces.

He was first arrested – along with two other members of the Revolutionary Army on weapons charges stemming from the discovery of a large cache of weapons in fellow Revolutionary Army Wendy Yoshimura’s garage.

Wendy was born in 1943 at the Manzanar Internment Camp for Japanese Americans where her American-born parents were incarcerated. After the war the Yoshimuras moved to Eta Jima, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima, where her father worked for the Allied Occupation forces. The family returned to US when Yoshimura was 13 and she graduated from California College of the Arts in 1969 before becoming a terrorist.

Yoshimura left California in 1972 to avoid arrest on the Revolutionary Army weapons charges and lived under an alias in New Jersey until 1974 when the SLA called her to duty.

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None, say perhaps Bortin, had a history of real violence until their radical conversion which while today may seem outstanding it was not so unique for the times and their generation. What was unique was each was subjected to the charisma of DeFreeze, his sold rap and each participating in group meeting where their childhood pasts were denounced and the future of society was placed in their hands as directed by Cinque. As each member confirmed loyalty to the cause the euphoria trickled down to the others. It had begun in the commune known as Peking House where Cinque sold members Wolfe and Little and Soltysik on plans for founding the Symbionese Nation.

Although the SLA considered themselves leaders of the black revolution, DeFreeze was its only black member. His seven-headed SLA cobra symbol was based on seven principles, with each head representing a principle. They are: Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith).

The seven-headed cobra was copied from the ancient Sri Lanka carved stones depicting a seven-headed cobra believed to have been placed there as guardians of the water. The particular graphic of the seven-headed cobra used by the SLA may have been copied from an illustration in The Lost Continent of Mu by James Churchward.

Cinque preached the idea that the majority of African American convicts were not criminals but political prisoners. His white followers adopted Black power ideology. He mesmerized with tales of an army among the people risking their lives fighting the establishment while hidden by the poor and downtrodden. One day statues of them would be built in their honor.

”Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people,” was the S.L.A. motto Just as Manson had say he could payback for what was done to him, Cinque decried, “I am that nigger you have killed hundreds of times…I’m that nigger that is no longer hunted, robbed and murdered. I”m the nigger that hunts you now.”

Like Manson, Cinque used the class he hated the most—whites—to do his bidding (with Manson it was women) and like Manson he boasted of being a prophet God had sent to start a revolution for the oppressed. He kept his followers isolated and, like Manson, often quoted what be believed were special messages in songs alluding to the revolution. Political power, he said, grows out of the barrel of a gun and he put cyanide in their bullets. His favorite source to quote was Mao Tse Young, not a coincidence the creator of modern brainwashing techniques (See Common Characteristics of Totalist Movements).
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Patty later claimed she lived in a closet for 56 days after her kidnapping, lectured inside and out, raped and brutalized. The SLA denounced Patty’s prior life as nothing more than potted plants and nail polish. Like the prisoners in Korean War, she was told that they all had once lived like her, but had come to see the exploitation of such an existence. They were ready now to fight and die for the people. Her father was denounced and when the elder Hearst would not totally meet the extreme ransom demand of Cinque the criticism of her father– her parents loved money more than her– seemed valid.

She lived, she said, often blindfolded in a stuffy small room with a bare light bulb and a portable cot. There were no windows and it was hot. She lost track of time and didn’t feel like eating. DeFreeze kept up the berating of her and her family for being part of a ruling class sucking blood from the common people. She would say she would be killed if her parents did not meet S.L.A.’s demands.

Patty grew impatient. “I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth…Like they figured I was worth $2 million but I wasn’t worth $10 million. It was a terrible feeling that my parents could think of me in terms of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over.”

Her mother accepted appointment as a regent of the University of California from then governor Ronald Reagan who complained the food distributors were aiding and abetting a kidnapping. Did her own mother, Patty thought, care whether the S.L.A. shot her?

Cinque could see it with great satisfaction. His ultimate prize. By degrees Patty started participating in daily group discussion, confessing disillusionment with her parents and finally sympathy for the S.L.A.

Cinque rewarded her by allowing her to roam about the apartment. She listened to the S.L.A. national anthem, a jazz composition created by Cinque and his constant rap–less than ten percent of the U.S. population controls 90% of its wealth. Some have inheritances, like her family while others rot in jail.

Even Steven Weed, her lover of 3 years, now seemed a disappointed. Not only had he not daringly tried to rescue her, his former attractive radicalism paled against Wally Wolfe who now replaced Weed as her lover.

On tape she asked Weed to join her. Instead Weed said on Dick Cavett’s show Patty was brainwashed and would come to her senses if he had a chance to be alone with her.

The S.L.A. , on each act of cooperation hugged her and called her sister, perhaps something she never felt from her real sisters. They said she asked to join and commenced guerrilla training the others had, learning to use rifles and crawl through Cinque’s homemade obstacle course.

So Patty on April 3rd announced in a communique that hereafter she was an SLA soldier. Her parents were liars concerned with money and power, not their own children.
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“Frankly,” she declared, “Steven is the one who sounds brainwashed.”

Dr. Hacker told People Magazine the chances Patty returns to her family on her own are very remote. “Let’s face it,” he said, “she’s in legal jeopardy. She would have to have a psychiatric defense. There is no other.”
*…………………………………………*………………………………………….*
After the shootout, the SLA army was reduced to three. Then Kathy Soliah took the role of SLA spokeswoman with the underground press and led protests of the shootings. Two weeks after the shootout she organized in Berkeley a memorial rally for the SLA dead. Several hundred people turned out. Soliah said, “though I know it’s not necessary to say–keep fighting. I’m with you and we are with you.”

From then on it seemed, the FBI was a step behind the latest move, tracing after the fact by subpoenaing witnesses to grand juries.
*……………………………………………..……*……………………………………………………*

The SLA survivors had only $400 and Bill Harris used $350 to buy an old dented car. They drove all night with Patty in the back under a blanket. They were too tense to sleep, each grappling with the aftershock of the fiery deaths. When the car battery went dead they abandoned the car, walking the streets with duffel bags that concealed weapons and disguises. They found refuse in a crawl space of an old Victorian house. A party later started above them.

For the next two weeks Bill dressed as a wino, Patty and Emily old street women. They made it back to Berkeley and were joined by Wendy Masako Yoshimura, a fugitive since March 30, 1972 for possessing explosives planned to blow up the naval architecture building at UCB.

Then on April 21, 1975 at a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, just north of Sacramento, four people wearing ski masks burst in ordering everyone to the ground while taking wads of bills from the tellers. Ms. Myrna Opsahl was shot in the abdomen and bled to death as the culprits escaped in getaway cars.

*………………………………………………….*………………………………………………….……..*

John (Jack) V. Scott, 33, wrote a book claiming college sports programs were racist and militaristic. Seven years earlier during a “Stop the Draft Week” in Oakland he and his wife Micki had used their van to treat students who had been clubbed and bloodied by the police in a typical 60’s confrontation. Since then they gave aid to draft resisters and others on the lam. Scott had been the captain of his city championship high school football team in Scranton, Pa., in the late 1950’s and a sprinter at Stanford University. He held a Doctorate in sociology from the University of California.

After being been let go as a sports director by Oberlin college in Ohio he entered a period of depression before deciding to write a book on the SLA. He went to Berkeley where he made contact through radical friends. When finally given the address Jack walked into an apartment that had mattresses piled against doors and windows and saw rifles converted to automatic machine guns along with stacks of grenades.

The first time he saw Patty she was frowning and holding her weapon.

Jack offered money and help but demanded in return they get rid of the weapons which Patty responded to with anger. But finally the SLA agreed. Jack would later state alone with Patty he offered to take her “anywhere” she wanted to go but she responded she wanted to be with her “friends…I loved Cujo too much…” Patty, he said, kept using word “pigs” to describe anyone who did not support the SLA.

Jack drove Patty to New York City to his apartment on West 92nd Street where his wife Micki waited with Emily. Bill’s driver, however, had backed out and Teko was still stranded in Berkeley. It was the Scotts who secured the assistance of fugitive Wendy Yoshimura to assist.

Jack flew back West, borrowed a car and bought Bill back to an isolated farmhouse, 87 acres, near South Canaan, Pennsylvania, 25 miles from Scranton, an area still occupied by hippie communes on abandoned farms, (as so popular in the 60’s) where they would not stand out. Micki picked it out after inspecting 11 farms and Scott paid total rent of $1,200 to a retired NY fireman. The Pennsylvania farmhouse stood on a bluff overlooking miles of rolling farmland.

Poorly cared for the farm was isolated and few, if anyone, paid it attention. They ate berries, fished and Patty enjoyed a hammock and her political study sessions with Emily and Micki. The military drills continued daily including target practice with a BB gun they found in the barn. They crept under chairs and leaped on dining-room table while dodging invisible gun fire. Patty practiced her disguise of teen-age freckles with a pillow stuffed under her dress. They talked of more political executions, like Foster, Patty, claimed Jack, pointing to media pictures of potential political enemies.

In the fall they headed back West. A highway patrolman who stopped them for speeding bought Scott’s story they were celebrating Iowa’s big football game win that day. The trooper was excited too. The Hawkeyes had been a 21-point underdog to UCLA.

Three days later they reached Las Vegas. Jack dropped Patty at a prearranged motel and went to visit his parents who live in Las Vegas and managed an apartment complex.

Always a step behind, FBI used bloodhounds, given a piece of Patty’s clothing, to lead them too late to her bed in the farmhouse. They found fingerprints.

Jack and Micki would not tell the FBI anything, nor would they testify before a federal grand jury. “Our activities of the past year are completely defensible,” said Micki. “If we somehow acted to avert bloodshed and killing, we certainly find that nothing to apologize for.”

. Jay Weiner, a 20 year old student at Philadelphia’s Temple University, but knew Scott at Oberlin and was called upon to assist, also refused to say anything to the grand jury, but afterwards through the media sent his greetings to Tania and “my comrade Jack (Scott) and my dearest sister Micki,” who he hoped all had escaped the “monster’s belly. ”
* ……………………………………………*……………………………..…………………….*

Enter Bill Walton.

Walton was a basketball player from San Diego who became probably the most dominant center in college basketball history. Over 7 feet tall, but listing himself at only 6’11 so not to be seen as a freak, the three time college player of the year was not only totally coordinated but incredibly strong. He had an around the hoop bank shot that rarely missed and a motor that never stopped, defense, quickness and an uncanny ability to know where the rebound was going. He could snatch the ball and before coming down, turn and bullet it down court starting a fast break. With Walton UCLA won two national championships, Walton making 21 of 22 shots in the second title game, before losing champion game his senior year. They were 30-0 the first two seasons and won by average margin of over 30 points in 1971-1972. In 1973 he was named the top amateur athlete in the United States.

Walton was also a Grateful Dead groupie and told John Wooden, the most successful head coach of all time in any sport, that the coach did not have the right to decide if Walton could grow facial hair. Wooden agreed but said, “I do have the right to determine playing time.”

Despite his accomplishments the gawky, weird sounding (The Times called him “eccentric”) star wasn’t happy. Insecure, he stuttered and wanted to be known for something other than being a super jock. Walton had a want-to-be-campus-radical longing for the sit down strikes of the UC 60’s, was always trying to link himself with causes and project an image of being someone who was in the know when in reality he had about as much common sense as Tom Mathews.

When the Portland Trail Blazers offered Walton $2.5 million to sign he said, “I don’t believe in capitalism…wealth should be spread around.” But he took the money.

What role he played with the SLA he would not admit or deny, but it was suspected he not only met Patty but assisted in her movements.

What is known is in August of 2004, Walton, having read Scott’s book criticizing college sports, called Scott in New York with an invitation to visit Oregon. They had corresponded for two years but never met. Scott accepted Walton’s invitation, leaving the SLA and flew to Portland where they hiked, talked sports, diets and the role of radical athletes.

They went together to the Marin County Courthouse to watch the trial of six San Quentin prison inmates accused of murder during a 1971 escape attempt. The Scotts expressed sympathy for the prisoners.

When finally confronted by law enforcement, Walton publicly supported Scott and his wife in their refusal to give information to the grand jury about the SLA, refused to disclose his own role and called his experience with the Scotts the most beautiful in his life.

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After returning to New York, Jack and Micki decided to move to Portland and work with Walton. But first they had unfinished Robin Hood business.

At the start the SLA remainder had only Wendy and the Scotts helping them. But now there was Kathy Soliah, Angela Atwood’s and Soliah’s brother, Steve. They in turn convinced other Berkeley radicals S.L.A.’s guerrilla tactics should be resumed — perhaps by bombing carefully selected targets, such as police cars. They had Wendy for experience.

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The plan was for Patty to send an identifiable item of hers to be planted in a Los Angeles apartment as a decoy while returning to the San Francisco Bay Area where Patty was raised, kidnapped and converted into “Tania.”

The four then spent a year in the Sacremeto area. Patty, it has been said, had an affair with Steve Soliah.

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On August 21, 1975 Kathleen Soliah failed to murder LAPD officers when pipe bombs she put under a police car did not detonate but came within 1/16 of an inch of doing so. The patrol car had been outside an International House of Pancakes. Another bomb was found in front of a car at the police department about a mile away. Each bomb was designed to explode when the car was driven, i.e. occupied. Soliah was accused of planting the bombs in an attempt to avenge the SLA members who had died in the great LA shootout.

Kathleen took off for Rhodesia, then in Minnesota under the alias Sara Jane Olson. She married a doctor and had three daughters.”

Kathleen first took off for Seattle with James Kilgore where she did local “B” theater under the name “Nancy Bennett” advising that she may have to leave the show “on short notice.’ She them moved to Minneapolis, MN, and under her name–Sarah Jane Olson–met her husband Dr. Fred Peterson; they were both joggers and hit the the western end of the lake chain of Minneapolis which was virtually all public shoreline with a very good running path system. She worked as a cook at a University of Minnesota fraternity and got to know some black students from Zimbabwe, now renamed Rhodesia.

Kathleen and her new-doctor-teacher husband got jobs in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia in l982 with Oxfam, the big British charity. After a couple of years in Africa they returned to Baltimore for Fred to finish up his medical internship at Johns Hopkins. They returned to the Twin Cities, first urban Minneapolis and then a couple of miles east in urban St. Paul, MN. They raised three daughters.

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On a tip from Jack Scott’s brother the police in September of l975 went to a San Francisco apartment on Morse St. where they arrested Bill and Emily Harris as they returned from jogging. Inside, at last, they nabbed Wendy and Tania, aka Patty Hearst.

She was safe at last. Or so I thought.

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When Patty Hearst arrived at the station she defiantly gave a clenched-fist salute to the media and described her occupation on the booking report as “urban guerrilla.” Her purse contained a stone Olmec monkey face on a chain given to her by Cujo and her apartment contained Explosives and Homemade Bombs on the bookshelf.

68% of those surveyed believed Patty should be sent to prison; two-thirds thought she joined the SLA voluntarily and half thought the kidnapping was a fake.

Released on 1.25 million bail, Patty reunited with her sisters and family.

Four experts who worked with the Korean prisoners and a psychiatrist who helped the army develop brainwash resistance training examined her and concluded she had been subjected to coercive persuasion, including Dr. Hacker, Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, the nation’s foremost cult expert Margaret Singer and Dr. Robert J Lifton, author of the bible on brainwashing, Thought Reform, the Psychology of Totalism.

All 4 agreed unanimously and without doubt that Patty Hearst was a textbook victim of a thought reform environment and that in essence her conversion was inevitable.

But in a taped prison conversation before her release with a visiting friend, Patty was something different:

“I guess I’ll just tell you, my politics are real different from way back when Obviously. So this creates all kinds of problems for me in terms of a defense. When I was first arrested, I was still a real mess. I said a lot of crazy things.”

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Long before OJ, and two years from exact date of her kidnapping the trial of the century– United States versus Patty Hearst –begun and at center stage was the attorney who would 20 years later tear apart Mark Furman in the Simpson trial.

His name was Francis Lee Bailey Jr., aka F. Lee Bailey, a former Marine jet fighter pilot now considered by some the best criminal defense lawyer in history having first obtained notoriety defending the infamous Sam Sheppard. Sheppard, a neurosurgeon, was convicted in Ohio in l954 of the murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn Reese, but claimed she was killed by cult-like attackers who knocked him out, oddly a story similar to the Hearst kidnapping.

While Sheppard, who’s claim of innocence is said to be the inspiration for the Fugitive television series (1963–1967), served almost a decade in prison before, in1966, Bailey successfully convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that Sheppard had been denied due process and then won the re-trial.

Bailey was also the supervisory attorney over the court martial of Captain Ernest Medina for the My Lai Massacre, where on March 16, 1968 about 500 undefended Vietnamese civilians, mostly women, babies and elderly were not only killed, but also sexually abused, tortured, beaten, and mutilated. The event was well covered up by the military and its revealing helped influence the public on its pressure to end the war. One commander, William Calley, sentenced to life in prison on March 29, 1971 but then released by President Richard Nixon pending appeal somehow served only about four months. Calley claimed the orders were from Medina who in his own trial was acquitted. Later participants, including Medina, made admissions.

The infamous The Boston Strangler was one of the first known serial murder cases in the U.S. of several women during early 60’s. The crimes were attributed to Albert DeSalvo who Bailey traded confession for a mental ward. But DeSalvo was later convicted of other crimes and sentenced to life.

Some forensic experts years later argue these were separate murders and DeSalvo was not involved but Bailey said DeSalvo was guilty in his l995 autobiography, The Defense never Rests.

Patty’s first attorney, Terence Hallinan, was planning to argue involuntary intoxication, a side effect of which is amnesia, arising from previous experiences taking “acid” with her boyfriend Steven Weed, a defense once asserted by Leslie Van Houten of Manson fame, but clearly here ridiculous.

As trial neared I assumed the jury would remember how this all begun.

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The trial started February 4, 1976 in the courtroom of U. S. District Judge Oliver J. Carter. The charges were armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank.

Carolyn Anspacher, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote:

“The metamorphosis back to Patricia, if indeed there was one, took time and platoons of lawyers, as assembled in desperation by the frantic Hearsts…The young woman … is a seeming replica of the original Patricia Hearst, the soft-voiced Patty who was wrenched from her familiar surroundings by such violence. Her hair, dyed a brassy red when she was arrested, has been toned to a gentle chestnut and coiffed softly around her face. Her tight and revealing sweater and jeans have been replaced by tasteful slacks and jackets. She no longer lifts manacled wrists in black power salute and her eyes are, for the most part, downcast, as if she were sharing a secret with herself.”

The defense experts took the stand and gave a good account, one that might have saved Patty Hearst. Jurors listened to over 200 hours of expert psychiatric testimony. Lifton testified it was a “classic case,” Patty needed about two weeks to shuck off the “gunk” that had filled her mind, as it would anyone at that level of mind control. “If (she) had reacted differently, that would have been suspect” and Hearst was ” the first and as far as I know the only victim of a political kidnapping in the United States.” Dr. Louis West, head UCLA Nuerospychology and also had worked on the brainwashed Korean prisoner of war, firmly asserted while Cinque had used a rather coarse version, the SLA did employ the classic Maoist formula for thought control. Hearst was young and apolitical enough to be at extreme risk and many experienced American soldiers had similarly been broken.

I thought they would acquit.

Unfortunately for Patty, the great F. Lee Bailey did not understand the brainwashing defense sufficiently himself and did not understand that he would have to go outside the box of ordinary legal thought in order to win with such a defense. Although Bailey used the Stockholm Syndrome and thought reform argument in her defense at trial, he was afraid to trust it. On cross-examination the U.S Attorney Robert R. Browning questioned Patty about other crimes. Bailey became concerned she would be confessing to other crimes she could be charged with, and while true, fact was he had to sink or swim with the defense. She was claiming she was forced to becoming a zealot so she had to look the jury in the eye and said yes I did all that because I was psychologically convinced to believe it was necessary for mankind’s survival. Bailey told her to instead take the fifth amendment. The judge ruled she had waived it by testifying to being brainwashed and ordered her to answer. In front of the jury, Bailey rejected the court order and told her to still remain silent. Patty took the 5th 42 times and the judge ordered her testimony stricken.

Bailey also suggested at various times in the trial that his client did only what she had to do to stay alive. This contradicted all of her experts. In the end he expected not to win on theory but on personality. Bailey possessed the book rights. It didn’t help that Judge Carter ruled brainwashing was not a defense and Patty had to be acting out of “immediate fear for her life.”

Patty as well was inconsistent. She claimed after two months in a closet, her mind was no longer her own, which would mean she spoke from now newly held programmed beliefs. But she also said all of her taped communiques were scripted and delivered under duress. She blamed SLA for giving her LSD, but she used acid before she was snatched.

And she denounced Cujo. “He was just as bad as any of the rest of them and, and I think it’s insulting to anyone who’s ever been raped to suggest that that could turn into a seduction and love affair afterward. It’s outrageous.” But the jury knew it had. Falling in love with Cujo could be expected from her experience. A better question really was did he really rape her? Nothing known about Wolfe suggests it.

She also said for a while she thought she was fooling the Harris’s. And if that was her state of mind she wasn’t brainwashed. And it would contradict why she had not run away when that would have been so easy.

Further Dr. Joel Fort, testifying for prosecution, questioned defense psychiatrists drawing conclusions about Hearst’s state of mind at a time fifteen months before they first interviewed her and suggested they had an agenda. Fort claimed Patty Hearst was into radicalism even before her kidnapping, “an amoral person” who thought rules did not apply to her. Fort gave his “velcro theory” for aimless lost souls like Patty who stick to the first random ideology they bump into. It is not at all surprising, Fort concluded, that Hearst would find the SLA appealing. She was of same past as all Cinque followers, who signed on with the sociopath as a form of self-hatred.

The troubling thing about Fort was that he had first offered his services to the defense, and then only to the prosecution when the defense turned him down. Further, his “velcro” theory was right it was not Patty’s fault she was kidnapped by radical terrorisrs rather than a Save the Whales group.

The other prosecution expert on mentally ill criminals, Dr. Harry L. Kozol, claimed Hearst had lied to nuns to get out of doing things, “a rebel in search of a cause” and that the robbery had been “an act of free will.” During one of his pretrial interviews with her, when asked to describe the apartment where the SLA was captured, he said most every detail was given except one–the narrow closet she claimed to have been kept, handcuffed, and brutalized was neglected, yet rooms, the arsenal, and windows were drawn on a map. In Kozol’s view, this omission challenged her story and said the rebel had come out of the closet. When Kozol testified, reporter Shana Alexander wrote Hearst turned “the dead white color of a fish’s belly.”

Problem with Kozol view is that he does say the rebel came out of the closet, so therefore what happened in closet was important. And her leaving out closet on her map was consistent with experience she claimed. Further is Patty guilty because she had a past that made her susceptible to an unlikely kidnapping and radical programming? Experience dictates programming the irrational by controlled emotional settings is easier than programming the rational by attempts at logic.

While all, save the psychotic, are capable of being brainwashed, there are definitely people more susceptible—the young, those without strong religious or family ties, insecure and recent trauma suffers (See Common Characteristics of Totalist Movements). The question was she victimized by forces she could not affect or control, not that her make-up made her conversion easier.

As I have long written, the key in brainwashing is not so much the charisma of the leader, as it is the bonding with those in the group who are similar…who can say, ” I was like you…I know what you suffer…but I have found the light and purpose, and look at me now that I know the way, look at all of us, happy in our cause.” It works, also, better on a person disgruntled, searching, and who had never been experienced strong religious/political ties.

Out of the closet, Patty met a lot of other ex-well off young women within whom she could see attractive zeal, commitment, cause and comradeship. And in Wolfe her male opposite who was without doubt that he had found life’s goal. All one day would be known as heroes.

But on March 20, l976, after a two-month trial, following only 12 hours of deliberation, Patty was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 7 years to be served in near by Pleasanton. Jurors didn’t believe she could love someone who raped her. Some commented her testimony seemed robotic. The guilty verdict rang around the world.

I disagreed. Didn’t it seem more likely she was brainwashed, whatever that was, rather than true a fable of a young rich college co-ed being kidnapped and then deciding to be a terrorist?
*………………………………………………*…………………………………….*

Patty fired Bailey and her new attorney George Martinez planned to attack the verdict and use the media, of which her family was born, to sway public opinon towards her being a victim, while seeking a presidential pardon.

She felt her trial was itself ridiculous and questioned why she was the only one charged in the Hibernia heist, not considering most of her co-horts were dead and the Harris’s were sentenced per a plea bargain.

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The furthest seemingly impossible occurrence in this saga I followed so intensely is that in a little over a year I would be part of the culminating events leading just the change she wanted in media attitude that might and did lead to her freedom.

In June of 1977 a man came to me asserting that the former first ever self-help drug rehab—Synanon– was holding his wife (See Escape From Synanon I). After securing her release she claimed from a hospital that I had saved her life by preventing her from becoming “one of them.”

Startled by that assertion, I started to research brainwashing and then filed a lawsuit charging just that which was immediately picked up by the media. Brainwashing was back in the news and more stories would follow making that charge against Synanon.

On October 10, l978 Synanon Imperial Marines attempted to murder me by placing a Rattlesnake in my mailbox. As news investigators, especially reporters Connie Chung, Narda Zacchino and Dave Mitchell, suggested that Synanon had become, in essence, a terrorist organization that had brainwashed 1,000 followers to attack many enemies for four years, attempting to murder several, comparisons were made to Manson and questions of the Patty Hearst case were revisited.

Congressman Leo Ryan at the time was gathering signatures for a petition for Patty’s release but then proved the point with his life. On November 1, 1978 (See Escape From Jonestown) Ryan flew to Guyana to investigate story of brutalities in the People’s Temple commune. Jim Jones then ordered the murder of Ryan and his entourage before directing 900 people to kill themselves by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.

Brainwashing was not only a topic but the biggest issue in the land. ABC had me on television six nights in a row to explain it. Newsweek, Time, etc., brainwashing was everywhere and Patty was now talked about as a victim. Patty’s 4 brainwash experts were regularly on TV talking head shows and they reminded the nation about poor Patty.

John Wayne, the Duke himself, summed up public feeling:

“It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash nine-hundred human beings in a mass suicide but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation and confinement.”

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Just three months after my attack Patty was ordered released by President Jimmy Carter. Patty married her bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, shortly thereafter. They settled in Connecticut and raised two daughters. Her crimes were eventually pardoned by Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, the final act of his presidency.
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In 1980 Charles Dederich, Lance Kenton and Joe Musico plead guilty to conspiring to murder me. Kenton and Musico, Synanon Marines, had been involved in many Synanon violent operations (See True Story of Synanon Violence and how it started). By then I had assisted in getting several people out of Synanon who had become my friends. I knew if I had not they might have been the ones who tried to kill me. The true responsibility laid really with one-man, Charles Dederich.

Kenton had been raised in Synanon since a small boy and put into Marines at 18. Musico was an ex-street thug addicted to drugs in Vietnam who came looking for help and was manipulated for his past propensities. I wrote the court each had to go to jail in order to deter and communicate to anyone who believes violence is appropriate, regardless of how they obtain that belief, will go to prison for putting those ideas into action. But at the same time, given their brainwashing, the sentence should not be so long as to destroy their lives, and most important is that be removed from any Synanon contact.

The Judge basically followed my directions.

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In l982, three years out of prison Patty published her book with a writer, ‘Every Secret Thing.”

I read the book looking for how she was brainwashed. It was all there but something about the book bothered me. It was too perfect a story, as if taught to her by her experts. Group talking was labeled struggle groups; she was clearly using the thought reform rhetoric. Her account seemed to fit the theory too tight. Almost as if she had been trained what to write, or had exchanged one jargon (SLA) for another (thought reform). But then the thought passed. I was also momentarily put back when she denied being willing involvement in the robbery in her book. That seemed to contradict the known facts and also suggested she was not brainwashed. The brainwashed does not go around saying, “woe is me…I am brainwashed and have to do this…someone save me” Brainwashing creates an emotional catharsis, the more intelligent, the more resistant, the more gung ho becomes the washed victim.

I have spoken to ex-members of Synanon and Center For Feeling Therapy who try to say they never bought it as bad as others until I show them records of what they did and point out they bought it all the way but that is nothing to be ashamed of. Doing that with Patty, if we ever met, would be easy.

The violence and the alleged rapes caused me concern. Mao Tse Tung developed thought reform programs the Chinese went to voluntarily to be converted as necessary to have one’s own place in the new China. Kindness, at the right moment, was more effective than violence, which can create contra productive fear. While cult experts for the cults, to exonerate their clients, would try to argue brainwashing requires fear and/or imprisonment, when Mao applied it to Korean War prisoners it was less successful than in the general population where Mao convinced all were sick and had to come for the cure. He fared far less in prisons, and those victims deprogrammed in 90 days after pressure was removed. In essence the prison program was a failure.

The Center for Feeling therapy used physical striking to express to people they are of a nature not liked by others and must change, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh used violence in his encounter groups until he needed to end the resulting bad publicity. Charles Dederich and Jim Jones, looking for faster methods of control eventually used public beatings to effect actions of all. It caused in both cases many to leave. A rape or beating theoretically could help strip one’s self worth and sense of identity, softening them for a higher ideology, but it could also cause hate and give strength to underlying resistance. Would Cinque really bother? Was Wolfe a rapist? And if he was would that not interfere in their perfect love.

Patty in her book could not acknowledge there was a basis for her conviction blaming it all on Bailey, calling his closing argument “disjointed” and said during his closing argument, Bailey spilled a glass of water on his pants. She claimed he was drinking alcohol.

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A movie in l988 came out based on Patty’s book, Patty Hearst, emphasizing the distortion her mind was being put through, and that it reverted her back to a more child like state which is what brainwashing does. It tended to solidify forever public sympathy for Patty. Her Dad, Randolph, said he would not see the movie.

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In l988 , the year the movie came out, myself and Ford Greene argued successfully to the California Supreme Court in Molko v. Unification Church that thought reform was real and right to sue for it and seek punitive damages (see Escape from the Unification Church). By then brainwashing was recognized as a defense in criminal cases, although I disagreed on that point

Thought reform does not create a zombie or robot. People still exercise choices, it is just those choices are subject to peer pressure and to one’s beliefs. Change the beliefs and you can change choices. But beliefs, whether forced or not, can never justify knowingly breaking the law which brainwash cult members know they are doing when they commit crimes. If they went unpunished because they believe something, forced or not, it would mean that anyone could commit any act because they decided it was right. One of the purposes of punishment is not just to fit the crime, but to deter.

I always advocated that in a criminal proceeding brainwashing went to mitigation, not to defense.

By 1988 no signs of patty’s Tania life existed.

Patty was now the picture-perfect mother and high society. Arguably what you would expect from someone brainwashed, if this was there before character.

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Patty married her bodyguard Bernard Shaw in April of l979, Shaw having left his wife for her. At the same time mother Catherine who had married Randolph in l938 moved out, ending the 40 year marriage due to stress from Patty and years of an unfaithful husband, as the family’s home in Hillsborough went up for sale.

Karen Jakovich, who had been covering me and Synanon months earlier for People Magazine, quoted in People in April of 1979 a friend saying Catherine was exhausted from the kidnapping and developed a drinking problem. She wrote Mrs. Hearst confided to a reporter Randolph was enraged by one of her regent statements and told her he did not want to see her name in the papers again until the obituary notices.

Jakovich also quoted a former family cook as saying, “Sometimes Mrs. Hearst was too strict if the girls didn’t get good grades…or spoil them too much.” Ms. Jakovich quoted a Patty classmate as saying Catherine and Patty didn’t get along at all when Patty was in high school but Patty was very close to her father. The class mate thought Catherine made Patty feel she was the black sheep of the family.

Catherine died at age 81 in 1999. Randolph Hearst, who married two more times, died on December 18, 2,000.

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The Harris’s plead guilty to the Patty Hearst kidnapping in l979 and spent 8 years in prison, Emily the first half in solitary at the women prison in Frontera, California. She studied computer programming in prison and after her release from prison, started a successful computer consulting company, working at MGM Studios
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Emily divorced Bill in l984 and later moved in with a woman in Altadena, California.
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In 1997, Dr. Singer told Dateline that Patty’s conviction had more to do with the times than with the crimes. While true the times were a factor, Dr. Singer’s conclusion Patty should have been exonerated does not necessarily correlate in legal terms. To accept that proposition, followers of Osama bin Laden brainwashed to believe that Allah and virgins await them could not be convicted of a crime.

Dr. Singer told me many little items about the case never disclosed. One was that Bill Walton had driven Patty around.

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Patty took to school, wrote books, loves fashion and does charity work– A real Hearst who has friends and doesn’t like to comment on her gun totting days, although Bernie gave her a gun. She is said to work harder on friendships and the past is rarely discussed.

When she does speak to the media she tends towards Pete Rose style denial and expresses anger, saying, “People must understand how fragile mental states are.” She said her crime was that she managed to live. And, reportedly, said of her critics, “f–k them all.”

She claimed much anger was directed at her because of the war, Watergate and the whole 60’s generation that had disappointed their parents so badly. “I wouldn’t even be charged today,” she not long ago said, “because people don’t charge kidnap victims for crimes they committed while in the company of their kidnappers.”

Wouldn’t they? If John Walker Lindh had been kidnapped would have that made any difference? Is there any difference in being kidnapped or going voluntarily to seek a new religion and then put through a thought reform process?

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25 years later there was an SLA reunion. It was in a Sacramento court room for the Opsahl murder.

It begin in 1999 after America’s Most Wanted aired the Kathleen Soliah story twice. A tip led to her arrest in June of l999. She was active in Saint Paul, Minn. community issues and raised to adulthood 3 daughters who had by then had heard of the Patty Hearst kidnapping but had no idea as to who Mom was. In 2001 she plead guilty to possession of explosives with the intent to murder but then told reporters that she was innocent and plea bargained only do to the climate after “9/11” twin tower attacks.

Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler offered to let Olson testify under oath about her role in the case but when she refused he denied her request to withdraw her plea and sentenced her to 14 years. That was only the beginning.

On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Olson (Soliah), the Harrises, Bortin, and James Kilgore, the latter who could not be found. Modern forensics connected the shotgun pellets in Opsahl’s body to shells found at an SLA hideout. Steven Soliah, Wendy Yoshimura and, of course, Patty Hearst, were granted immunity for their testimony.

The defendants plead guilty to second-degree murder. Bill Harris who had been living a quiet life as an investigator was sent back to prison for seven more years as was Emily for eight more while Soliah got six more years added and Bortin was sentenced to six years.

Patty claimed that Emily, Soliah, Bortin, and Kilgore actually committed the robbery. Patty and Wendy were getaway drivers while William Harris and Steven Soliah were lookouts. Hearst claimed Emily shot Opsahl. Emily said her shotgun went off accidentally. Hearst claimed at the time Emily said, “She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor.”

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Katherine Soliah had lived an exemplary life as Sarah Olson, described as soccer mom, a celebrated cook and pillar of her community. You could feel for sorry for her family and argue how she lived away from the SLA proved the affect they had on her thinking process. As Mao Tse-tung once said the secret is simply to convince the “patient” he was sick and that they had the cure. But a precedent cannot be set giving a criminal credit for the quality of life maintained successfully as a fugitive, and her crimes involving murder and attempted murder are not exonerated even if justifications resulted from coercion.

Bill Harris and Michael Bortin were released in 2008. Katherine and Emily were released in 2009.

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Russ Little who had been sentenced to life in prison for the Foster murder won a re-trial on appeal and 1981 was acquitted of the Foster murder. He had been in jail at the time of Patty’s kidnapping. He now lives in Hawaii.

James Kilgore had alone escaped the LAPD shootout and moved to Zimbabwe. After Nelson Mandela was released in South Africa, Kilgore taught At Khanya College, in Johannesburg, became its director and then moved to Cape Town where he became University of Cape Town professor Charles William Pape, writing a high school text entitled “Making History.” There he married an American woman and fathered two sons.

It is possible the FBI got a tip out of SLA plea bargains following Olson’s l999 arrest or an aged enhance bust of Kilgore displayed on America’s Most Wanted had been recognized. On November 7, 2002, two young South Africans knocked on Kilgore’s door and asked he touch a bottle and he did. They had his fingerprints. At 7.15 p.m. the next evening he was arrested. Kilgore was extradited to the US, where he plead guilty to charges relating to the pipe bomb, second-degree murder and using a dead baby’s birth certificate to obtain a passport.

His wife, Teresa Barnes, became a professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Kilgore had had been the last SLA member to be sentenced and in May of 2009 his wife met him when he was paroled, the last SLA member released ending the saga of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Joseph Remiro remains in prison sentenced for life for the Foster murder.

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Dr. Fredric Hacker later became my expert witness against Synanon and after its infamous attack on me a father figure. While he had a close female companion, he never married and had a family. So I was sort of a son to him. In late eighties we taught a class together on undue influences at USC. He attended my wedding. He became a terrorist victim when police, acting on wrong address information, broke down his door and tore apart his apartment looking for drugs. He chose not to sue and accepted an apology and a new door I got LAPD to pay for. He died in June of 1989 while in Germany.

Dr. Singer and I became more than friends, too. She was my mentor. She referred me cases and I sent brainwashing victims to her for counseling. She had counseled 1000’s of ex-cultists and rarely denied any request for help. When she passed in 2003 I flew to of all places—Berkeley—to attend her funeral. I was quoted in press calling her a national treasure that could not be replaced. I then started doing my own exit counseling and testified as an expert on brainwashing in 2006 even though I have no medical degree.

Dr. West became my friend and expert in several cases, including the Center for Feeling Therapy. In 1999, age 74, Dr. West, suffering from an incurable tumor, committed suicide using prescription medication, an act aided by his son who wrote a book on the experience.

Harry L. Kozol died August 27, 2008, at the age of 102. Patty hated him.
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Tom Matthews, the teenager–spent a night any kid would dream of –riding around with America’s most-wanted fugitive, is today a grandfather. He married his high school girlfriend and moved to Kansas. He told NBC’s Dateline he would like to see Patty again someday and talk about her thoughts as she was a big piece of history. I doubt she is interested.

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Wendy Yahsimura paints watercolors and limited edition fine prints in Oakland. She has a page on line with a smiling photo and says, ”I paint the subtle moments when clear morning light illuminates flower petals, fruit, and glass. These instants touch me deeply—but they’re gone in a flash.”

She makes no mention of her past life as a terrorist and bomb plotter.

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Bill Huett closed Mel Sporting Goods in l979 having found it impossible to conduct business with the flood of tourist constantly in the store, requesting he give detailed accounts of Patty firing away.

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It was not until the 1976–77 season that Bill Walton was healthy enough to play 65 games and spurred the Trail Blazers to the NBA title, leading the NBA in both rebounds per game and blocked shots per game. He won the league MVP next season (1978) despite a season ending injury.

Walton was a reliable backup to Kevin McHale and Robert Parish on the 86 Boston NBA Championship, team winning the Sixth Man Award. His anklw injuries led to retirement in 1990.

Walton was inducted into both the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1993. Walton admitted in 2010 to contemplating suicide due to the constant pain and holds the record for the most games missed during an NBA playing career.

After his retirement Walton overcame his stuttering to become a successful and controversial NBA color commentator who many thought talked too much about great he was.

It is said he has attended more than 650Grateful Dead concerts.

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In 2005 I had dinner with a woman who moved to Los Angeles from Central America. When she asked me to explain what a “cult” was I used the SLA as an example. She said, “Patty Hearst…didn’t Bill Walton help her hide?”

Shocked, I responded only a few people have access to that information and asked how could she, who just moved here a couple of years ago, have such knowledge. She responded, “I dated his son Luke.”

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Patty Hearst has stated she never thought about escaping from the SLA. She was too in despair, feeling she had nothing to go back too. But thought reform is generally a peak experience, people do not think “Oh my God I have these new beliefs and woe is me.” Instead they feel exhilaration, that they have been blessed and re borne in a better identity.

She also has said the SLA were bullies and when she resurfaced it was like cleaning off an icky goo. She became a conservative republican. Her bodyguard Bernard Shaw, a husky ex cop, was the opposite of book worm Weed with whom she never wanted to contact as if he, too, was part of the Patty she wanted to forget.

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Patty’s life continued on with writing books, movie cameos, fashion shopping and charity work, seeming to finally accepting Daddy’s and the Hearst family role which must have seemed much more attractive than prison outfits and food.

Dissatisfied with other documentaries Patty Hearst produced a special for the Travel Channel entitled Secrets of San Simeon with Patricia Hearst taking viewers proudly inside her grandfather’s mansion Hearst Castle.

Patty co-authored a novel with Cordelia Frances Biddle titled Murder at San Simeon (Scribner, 1996), based upon the death of Thomas Ince on her grandfather’s yacht.

She became an actress getting small roles in films including Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, Cecil B. DeMented, A Dirty Shame, Bio-Dome and Second Best.

Her voice was used for the character Haffa Dozen, an ex-stripper, appearing on the October 19, 2005 episode of the Sci-Fi Channel’s animated Tripping the Rift. She appeared in an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete as Mrs. Krechmar, the nicest housewife in the world and then played a crack-addicted prostitute on an episode of the comedy Son of the Beach.

Her most interesting role may have been season 3 episode of Veronica Mars where she portrayed Selma Hearst, the granddaughter of a fictional founder of Hearst College, who had faked her own kidnapping.

In 2008 Patty’s pet bull dog Diva won best male at the132nd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

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According to the New Yorker in 1988, an attorney for Bill Harris said Bill says nobody raped Patty (but violence really is not part of brainwashing).

Today science says the brain goes through wiring adaptations and growth to age 25 and can be re-maped.

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Jack Scott died in February of 2000 of throat cancer in Eugene, Oregon at age 57.

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No one anymore, it seems, has anything but pity for Patty and more than anyone she is perhaps most shown as the illustration of what brainwashing can do.

I always thought some day Patty and I were destined to meet. What questions we might have of each other? There were so many people in common that we knew. Both of us victims in different ways of the same phenomenon. I always imagined we would be at some cult awareness function and we would be seated somewhere in a corner engaged in private animated conversation while light bulbs popped freezing the images of us together.

But as years moved on I realized it was not going to happen. It seemed Patty was not an activist in this area, and as I watched her go through time I studied her every comment when she did speak and noted some comments not consistent with theory. Often, I imagined us going through a differebt imaginary conversation.

“Patty,” I would say, “have you ever heard the expression ‘You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.’

“It is certainly unlikely you would have been robbing banks but for your kidnapping, but is that really the whole story? Not everyone who joins after being subjected to brainwashing necessarily joins only because they were brainwashed. Some do for the power, some for particular personal needs. Like maybe Tom Cruise.

“And when it comes to crimes, brainwashing may be mitigation, but it is not a defense. Just because you believe in a revolution, whether of your own volition or forced, it is not an excuse to rob and criminally endanger lives. The freedom to think is not the freedom to do, and doesn’t change because the thinking was forced, assuming in your case that was completely true. If it were, anyone could defend doing anything by saying I had good intentions, I was leading a revolution.

“The SLA murdered people. It was a miracle more people didn’t die and you participated in it all. It does not matter that you thought it was necessary for Amerikka, or whether you so believed that by logical reasoning or coercive persuasion; fact is you knew even if you thought it was a right it was still against the law and the price was prison. Maybe, serving 2 years was the appropriate amount of time.

“Yes, Stockholm syndrome was a factor, yes you were forced to participate in listening to ideology from people who attacked your way of life and family. And they did have backgrounds a lot like yours. But people who come voluntarily believing in ideology will transform them positively are easier to brainwash then prisoners. Experts have known this since the Communist China Revolution and the Korean War.

“And as to your past way of life and family you had already reached negative conclusion before your kidnapping. You were the rebel without cause, maybe in search of one; certainly you were angry at Daddy and then incensed when his ransom offer would not exceed $4 million for your life. All of this surely made your conversion easier.

“ You are always grabbing onto men outside of dad’s world, turning to Weed when you were 16 and to your bodyguard when you were released. You were not only in love with Willie Wolfe, you both shared the same past, a soulmate so different from Steven. You were very much a spoiled child.

“Your book, maybe because it was co-authored, was just too structured to the brainwashing jargon tossed about as if they were your own words when in fact it is what you learned from Drs. Singer and Lifton.

“While it is true that brainwashing victims in later stages re-create their memories to better justify their experiences this often occurs as a reminiscent with past friends and shared purposes. In an NBC documentary you expressed despair over what you were doing while you were doing it.

“But brainwashing is based upon creating an emotional catharsis. What follows is not just a follower, but a zealot. And while to your defense that is what others described, you later tried to say you were not. If you were not, you were not brainwashed.

“If asked, I still say you were. All of the SLA stories were not uncommon to the youth of 60’s, but few picked up a gun, the few subjected to Cinque. But that may not answer all questions. The truth is, Patty, nobody knows you. The title of your book, Every Secret Thing, is more appropriate than anyone could guess.

While your grandfather through the magic of Hollywood gave us the word Rosebud, the irony, Patty, is that no one will ever know yours.”

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Footnote 1. Dr. Margaret Singer, who would eventually counsel Patty, stated most (leaders) don’t recruit in the poor end of town, because “people in the poor end are street smart and know when someone’s out to steal their lunch money,” Singer said. “No, they come off very nice at first, go for vulnerable people who are looking for answers, lonely.” That means educated, open-minded, middle-class people – “what you’d call normal people,’ ” she says. “Like the smart kids that became SLA recruits, Manson’s women, David Koresh’s victims in Texas. “These sharpsters, when they’re very good at what they do, can get people to believe anything,” Singer says. “Anything. You might think you’d never get taken in – but don’t bet on it.”

Footnote 2. While a fugitive it was suggested the SLA go see Citizen Kane, but Patty would not, reportedly saying she couldn’t risk being arrested watching that movie. She said she wanted to be known for something other than being a Hearst.

Footnote 3: Patricia Hearst said she looked forward to testifying against her kidnappers: “I feel that now there can be closure to this case. This has gone on far too long.”

Footnone 4. Myrna Opsahl’s son Jon said Sunday it felt “ironic” and “strange” that James Kilgore was released on Mother’s Day. Kilgore was one of five SLA members to serve time for the murder of his mother.

Footnote 5. Little said Mizmoon killed Foster. Nancy, he said, was supposed to shoot Blackburn, but “she kind of botched that and DeFreeze ended up shooting him with a shotgun.”

Footnote 6: Patty served her time in Pleasanton, a small town I fell in love with in l974 and led me later to choose Pacific Palisades as my home. Ma Anand Sheela would later be imprisoned there, too (see Escape from Rajneeshpuram)
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Footnote 7 The Chronicle, a Hearst newspaper, was sued by Synanon for calling it the racket of the century in 1972. It turned out the author had a history of writing stories without sources. Synanon sued and took days of Randolph Hearst’s deposition during the time the search was on to fine Patty. It has been said that Synanon suggested if Hearst settled, which he did, Synanon because it rehabbed criminals might be able to assist with finding Patty.

Pulitzer prize winner Dave Mitchell (see Escape From Synanon II) later theorized that I coming off my victory in the nursing home kidnapping cases (see Escape from Golden State Manor) and Synanon with its success against Hearst clashed thinking each was unbeatable.

Footnote 8 Investigators working for their parents claimed that Perry and Hall had come walking out of the Los Angeles house intending to surrender when the police shot them.

Footnote 9 While at the Farmhouse Bill Harris claimed a water snake in the pond had nipped him. Patty had learned to like snakes. When she found one curled up behind the farmhouse she would pick it up to show the others. Maybe we wouldn’t have got along.

Footnote 10. When Jack Scott said goodbye to Patty Hearst in SF the date was September 27th, 1974. I was in SF and Pleasanton earlier that month as guest of Rolling Stone Magazne.

Footnote 11. In 2006 I became the first ever attorney to qualify as an expert on brainwashing and testified in court on how it is accomplished. My report–later edited into Common Characteristics of Totalist Movements– reeked of the Patty Hearst story. The defense tried unsuccessfully to recluse the judge because her father, a judge, had been threatened by the SLA. The motion was denied.

Footnote 12. Pres. Clinton upon leaving office pardoned a laundry of list of people he thought were given a raw deal as he thought he was. Clinton was in denial over the pubic affect of his denial under oath of his affair with a White House employee. Thus arguably Monica Lewinsky affected Patty’s ultimate pardon.

Footnote 13. When asked if Patty Hearst had been in the house before the LA shoot out, Brenda Daniels said,

“Man, how can I tell? All white women look the same to me.”

Footnote 14 Jeffrey MacDonald sued writer Joe McGinniss in 1984 alleging McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he came to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald’s cooperation with him. After a six-week civil trial resulted in a hung jury, McGinniss’s publisher’s insurance company settled out of court with MacDonald for an undisclosed amount. I believed MacDonald was guilty and was angry about the suit. MacDonald’s attorney later drafted the Hart v. McCormick defamation suit as a tactic against my clients suing their therapists (See Escape from Center for Feeling Therapy). When I won the Hart case, thinking of McGinniss, I happily slapped the attorney with a malicious prosecution suit.

Footnote 15. Writer Scott Swanton wrote a miniseries on me and Synanon for ABC that was never made. We were friends during that time. Swanton was also a friend of Steve Weed and wrote in his book for him about his relationship with Patty Hearst.

Footnote 16. Donald deFreeze has been accused by some sources of being an informant from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. This unit came to me for help when the LAPD was about to be trained by est in l978. (See Escape from est).

Footnote 17. On February 28, 1993 The Waco siege began which ended violently 50 days later on April 19 with 76 Branch Davidians dying in a fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and the leader David Koresh.

At the time I was angry the U.S. government did not understand this would be the guaranteed result of a siege and had learned nothing from SLA or Jonestown. They apparently did not have qualified experts to advise them and I was disappointed neither the government nor the media sought my opinion as until then I was usually called concerning any cult event. I realized this was now a new generation and—like many of the stories I write herein– I was no longer remembered.