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CNN Live Event/Special

The Radical Story Of Patty Hearst. Aired 10:00-11pm ET

Aired February 18, 2018 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[22:00:00] JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN REPORTER: Patty Hearst turned her back on a life of privilege.

BILL HARRIS, FORMER SLA MEMBER: We had to prove that.

PATTY HEARST, FORMER SLA MEMBER: Guns loaded, I am a soldier in the people's army.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She must have been forced to do it.

HARRIS: She could have escaped if she wanted to. She saved my life. I think she was spectacular.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't know where she is.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: LAPD, they were closing in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It will make our day.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I did what I had to do. If she was in there, god willed it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The grand daughter of William Randolph Hearst was abducted by two men and girl in a bizarre kidnapping.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No ransom note, no phone calls, no word, nothing.

HEARST: The SLA is the people's army and we fight in their interests.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The FBI said the girl in the way with the automatic rifle was Patricia Hearst.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Which girl turned armed terrorist in a matter of weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Southern California's largest manhunt continues.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For someone my age I've been through an awful lot.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't know where she is.

HEARST: Mom, Dad, I'm OK. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Coming off now, the chopper is overhead observing the fire is raging. Now, we've got a better advantage point. And you can hear the officer, I don't know if you can hear the officer yelling at us, but he just yell that we are in the line of fire. And the police now are broadcasting to the people in the house to cease fire. I can hear their megaphone.

HARRIS: As soon as we turn on the T.V. we see cops screwing around and we hear gun fire.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The area is still definitely sealed, that automatic weapons fired is from what we can gather here coming from the police officer's weapon. There are more police now. This place is getting filling up with police.

HARRIS: I remember her saying at one time, she thought she heard Willy's gun. She thought she identified Willy firing back at them. She was in this still in this bad ass mode.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're trying to bring you these live pictures as they occur. We're using the car here as a cover.

BILL DEIZ, REPORTER KNXT: We thought all the other stations were competing with us for picture. We didn't know we had the only exclusive picture from the scene and that we were starting to share it with all the stations in the area and then across the country.

So, we didn't know it. But we were ushering in a new age. We were basically saying, good-bye to the age of television news on film. And hello to the age of television news on video tape and live.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is still fire coming from inside the target house, which is across the street as I've said before from us right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AL PRECIADO, LAPD, SWAT RET.: The house is burning and there's still shooting.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But there was smoke every where. And we couldn't see the house and somebody said, hey, they're shooting out of the crawl spaces. And so they have kicked out the floor furnace and going under the house.

PRECIADO: Two females exited the back of the house.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nancy Perry got out. She had a gas mask on. She had a gun on either hand, pistols. And she was shot and killed. Camilla Hall was just inside. And I know she was shot in the head because I saw it. Then somebody drag her back inside underneath.

So we began to put rounds in the crawl spaces and they were all killed in the crawl spaces. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And of course the obvious conclusion is that the Los Angeles Police have and they found a nesting place of Symbionese Liberation Army and there's not much left of it now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's like 62 minutes from first to last, you know, where we were giving the announcements and didn't take long once the house started on fire that ended. We just stood there and -- we were just, you know, pretty shocked by how this whole thing ended.

It was found that there was a can of gas and it was bullet ridden. Those tear gas grenades hit that puddle of gas that was created by the gas can leaking and that really caused the fire.

DEIZ: I've never seen anybody not try to escape a fire. I think they were that committed I mean or that crazy.

HARRIS: We're watching this for a couple of hours.

[22:04:59] And really, there's very little dialogues going on between us. There was really nothing to say. We all knew. And we didn't have to talk about it, that what was happening before our eyes on the television was our responsibility.

That we got initiated at Mel's (ph) pouring the store and all of our subsequent escapades trying to stay a little bit ahead of the police had caused them to end up being in circle. We realized it's our fault. I mean it's really kind of on me. I'm the one that got stopped coming out of the store.

DEIZ: We will continue to monitor the scene here and get -- bring you back reports o you as they're occurring. It's getting too dark to get a picture. This is Bill Diaz in South Los Angeles.

For the history of Los Angeles Police, it is the longest, the most intense shootout in the city's history.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: LAPD fired over 5,300 rounds. SLA fired an estimated 3,000 or 4,000 rounds some of them were cook-offs, 83 tear gas (inaudible) were fired by LAPD.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There were 18 weapons recovered from the fire. Two pipe bombs were found unexploded in the location after the fire. Twenty-three homes were damaged in the shoot out.

PRECIADO: No police officers were shot and no innocent bystanders were injured at all.

The coroner arrived at the scene and they were looking at the bodies and tried to determine. Everybody wanted to know if Patty Hearst was there.

STEVEN WEED, PATTY HEARST FORMER FIANCE: I actually going down to L.A., a few days before to get away from it all, where the bullets and saying, that's the SLA corner down to somewhere Compton. I got on the car and drove up. We got there the place was just smoking ruins. You know, for a while it was devastating. And really, we had no idea who was there.

DEIZ: Five bodies were found initially.

PRECIADO: The sixth body was not found until the following day. When they recovered that body, everybody thought that was Patty Hearst.

DEIZ: And that's when everybody took a kind of a breath like, my god is it Patty, would she -- was she really there.

PRECIADO: There were six SLA members inside the house.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nancy Ling Perry, Camilla Hall, Patricia Soltysik, Willie Wolfe, Donald David Defreeze, Angela Atwood.

DEIZ: The new story became, where is Patty Hearst, what's happened to her?

HARRIS: Considering everything I've been through until that time in my life, through Vietnam in May 17th, 1974 is the worst day of my life. I don't remember truly what anybody really did or what any was said. Other than the fact I remember that Patricia wanted to retaliate immediately.

She was devastated and angry. She dropped somebody that had just been murdered by the government. It was necessary to keep going, you know, to stay alive. But I realize that, you know, we just had to get the -- out of L.A. We had to live to fight another day.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:12:02] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: FBI agents and California police hunted for Patricia Hearst today as an armed and extremely dangerous fugitive.

HARRIS: With few resources, little money we had to figure out what we were going to do next. We realized that our only option was to go back to where we just escaped from.

Well, we had to wait awhile. We waited about two weeks, until that Memorial Day. There going to be a lot of people on the road. It's going to be more difficult for them to isolate us in that traffic. We had just bought a car, kind of old car that Patricia laid down in the back seat because they were looking for three people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We request that citizens assessing any information relating to the whereabouts of these badly wanted armed and extremely dangerous fugitives, Patricia Hearst, William Harris and Emily Harris, immediately contact the FBI.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, we had hundreds of agents covering leads. So we're looking in parking lots, it's a strong deal for reports, anything unusual. At the end of the day after the shootout in Los Angeles, if as though they disappeared.

TOOBIN: As always, with the SLA, they are drawn ultimately to Berkeley because they feel that's the only place that they can find any sort of support.

HARRIS: Then we get down into Hay in the panhandle and the car just dies. We happened to be right in front of the house of some people that we know. We knock on the door. And they come to the door and they go, oh, shit, we don't believe it. The FBI just left here man.

Next morning, they fed us and they gave us a bunch of cash that they had in their savings. Emily found us a place in East Oakland and we got to get to East Bay. We don't have a car we had to ride muni now together, public transportation, buses and trollies.

Emily left her shotgun with me and her. So between us we had one most big shopping bags. It was long enough to keep all the weapons in. It looked better for this woman to be carrying a big shopping bag so Hearst is carrying a heavy thing.

I mean, I remember thinking about it, it was funny. We're riding -- and we are riding to San Francisco muni, bag full of guns, into the city of where we had to go in a safe house. It's insane. This is crazy shit. We had a unique capacity for survival.

We had to try to, you know, get some people to help out us. And we needed to get some money without to rob banks to do it. And we didn't need any more drama that we couldn't deal with because we're down to three people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KATHY SOLIAH: Thank you, Willie, Camilla, Ms. Wood, and Patricia.

[22:15:00] We're viciously attacked and murdered by 500 people in L.A. while the whole nation watched. And now the media is trying to say --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TOOBIN: There was one political rally and it was in Berkeley and it was organized and hosted by a woman named Kathy Soliah. Kathy Soliah was an actress and she was Angela Atwood's best friend.

HARRIS: And we saw Kathleen Soliah's picture in the newspaper while she was giving the memorial for Angela and the rest of the comrades who died.

Kathy, I met Angela. And I know her a little tiny bit. Normally she would have not been a person that I would look up because there was too much of a connection in the recent past with Angela. But we were desperate.

SOLIAH: And SLA grows a lot. I know it's not necessary to say, keep fighting, I'm with you. We are with you.

HARRIS: We ended up having this meeting with her. Kathy brought Jim, her boyfriend. I think her sister, Josephine was with her. She wanted to help us. She wasn't afraid that we were going to get her in trouble. They gave us enough money to keep us going for a minute. TOOBIN: Bill, Emily and Patricia are like hunted animals. They are running from the law, running from what they regard as certain death. But they have one thing they want to do. They want to memorialize the six of their comrades who died.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At approximately 6:30 this morning the radio station received an anonymous call stating, you know, in a fact that the SLA had to communicate for us.

HARRIS: The SLA ceased to exist after everybody got killed, the people that helped us stay alive, were not in the SLA. The SLA was murdered. We had to kind of send our last communication. We had to eulogize our comrades. And Patricia, she wanted to do the eulogies.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

HEARST: Greetings to the people, this is Tania. I want to talk the way I knew our six murdered comrades because the fascist pig media has of course been painting and typically distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers.

Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man, I've ever know. We loved each other so much, neither Cujo or I had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other, probably because our relationship wasn't based on -- that value attitudes and goals. It's because of this that I still feel strong and determined to fight.

I was ripped off by the pigs when they murdered Cujo. The pigs probably have a little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

HARRIS: She exactly describing as he was. And she encountered him. And much times she talks about Cynthia.

HEARST: Cinque loved the people with tenderness and respect. He helped me see that it's not how long we live that's important, it's how we live, what we decide to do with our lives.

I died in that firearm on 54th Street. But out of the ashes I was reborn. I know what I have to do. While I have no death wish, I have never been afraid of death. For this reason the brainwash/duress theory of the Pig Hearsts has always amused me.

And I would never choose to live the rest of my life surrounded by pigs like the Hearsts. Death to the fascist insects that preys upon the life of the people.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:22:40] HARRIS: We had nothing. We had no other options. Kathy said to us, there was a possibility she couldn't hook us up with a friend of hers name Jack Scott. And I realize who exactly who she was talking about. But I never met him. I knew that he was a sports editor from Ramparts Magazine. MICKI SCOTT: The first time I heard about this Symbionese Liberation Army, Jack and I had moved to New York. It was in media, it was very fascinating, since -- especially since we lived in Berkeley for so long.

And then the massacre in L.A. happened. Jack's first response was, I want to write a piece. I want to write a story about who these people are. You know, these are America's children.

Jim Kilgore and Kathy Soliah were a couple at the time. And they came to him and said, we think we have some people that you might be interested meeting.

And Jack comes out to Berkeley and then he -- they blindfolded him and drove him around for a while. And then they ended up in this apartment upon in North Berkeley.

They took the blindfold off. And they he was sitting there with three very wanted people, lots of ammunition and not much else.

HARRIS: And he, you know, he breaks in a huge grid.

SCOTT: His first response was I really would like to tell you a story. And they said that's not going to do us any good. We have to get out of here.

HARRIS: Jack sold us on the -- his ability to get us out of state. He didn't give us the details at the time. But he said he had the resources to do it. That's all we wanted to hear. Jack insisted that if we were going to be transported across the country we couldn't bring any firearms.

SCOTT: I'm not going to put my family at risk. There'll be no guns and that was a huge argument.

HARRIS: And we struggled with that with him a little bit. We didn't have any real standing. We're pretty much as mercy was taking care of us, right.

The original plan was just to get us to the east coast.

SCOTT: Jack's idea was that he would contact his parents who were in the area. And he and Patty could ride with his mom and dad as a couple sitting in the back seat.

[22:25:06] TOOBIN: Jack Scott's father John is driving, right before the four of them get on the highway, he pulls over to the side of the road. And he says, Patty, listen to me. I'll take you anywhere you want to go. You don't have to do this. You can just go home. And Patty Hearst looks at John Scott and says, get the -- on the road and start driving.

SCOTT: So, he got back on the freeway and headed east. Few days later, Jack and Patty show up in New York. And there they were.

I think I probably was a little star struck. In my recollection is that she was serious. She was on a mission. And she would have me go out and get her coffee and the "New York Times" every morning because of course she couldn't leave the apartment. And she would be by herself for that however long it will take me, half an hour.

I'd go out and come back and she would sit in the living room with her pen and she would circle names in the "New York Times." And when I asked her what she was doing and she was adding names to their hit list or the SLA hit list.

And she didn't appear to be afraid, she was pretty intent on getting back, you know, on continuing on with the revolution. Jack went back out and got Bill. And another friend of ours had gone out to get Emily.

I had found a lovely little farmhouse not very far from where Jack was born and grew up.

HARRIS: They had rented the farmhouse in Pennsylvania. We're not going to be expected to be in the area as grand P.A.. We have none -- none of us have a connection to it. It was a good choice. It was big enough to not have neighbors around.

We cooked together. We ate together. We had conversations. We were covered from the stress of being on the run like we were. And we had a lot of space to roam around in. Here we could go out and be by ourselves.

SCOTT: They were traumatized, I think. I mean they had watched their friends and comrades be murdered live on television. From my perspective, to take a risk to save lives is a risk worth taking. I can't imagine how I would feel if I didn't do it.

HARRIS: Jack had helped Wendy Yoshimura leave the Bay Area when she was wanted. He asked her to come live with us for a while. She had hit it off with Patty from the beginning.

JASON MOULTON, RETIRED FBI AGENT: In 1974 I had working in San Francisco P.D. cases where so many had fled across the state line.

HARRIS: Wendy Yoshimura, her boyfriend, the guys been named Willie Brandt who had been arrested and convicted of a bombing in Alameda County. She was been charged as an accomplice. And so she took off.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I was assigned in Wendy Yoshimura case, we had no information that she was associated with the Hearst investigation until we get a teletype lead in from New Jersey where Wendy might be located.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:32:23] HARRIS: At some point in there, Jack is talking about a book and making it clear that it's, you know, the money that's supporting us is going to soon run out and maybe this will be a way to get some resources at some point.

SCOTT: Jack, he was like a bulldog, you know, and he had an idea of how something would be and should be, he could be like, he would let go of it. It was really not about making money, it was about getting the story out. Trying to get people to understand why they were doing what they were doing.

HARRIS: He knew that this was probably an interesting book. Why would middle class educated white people pick up guns and wage revolution against the government in ways that would probably get them killed. What would motivate them to do such a crazy thing?

SCOTT: We had friend, he came to the farmhouse. He was doing tapes towards making this book.

HARRIS: We took turn transcribing the tapes.

CJ WESTRICK, U.S. ATTORNEY'S OFFICE: Patty Hearst's writings, her revolutionary statements. She did a lengthy document where she talked about her life and how she felt about her parents and really raw.

TOOBIN: She is as in her own words, a radical, a revolutionary feminist, someone who believes in world revolution.

HARRIS: I started to feel that this is never going to be beneficial to us. And in the end I didn't like what we created. It sounded hokey. And we weren't given the manuscripts. We destroyed the tapes. And that really pissed Jack off.

SCOTT: I think there was a lot of conflict around that.

TOOBIN: Jack Scott, whose a really journalist, starts to recognize that there was no book coming out of this. And he's stuck now with these fugitives in his farmhouse.

SCOTT: I know there was a single moment when Jack said I'm done and left and wouldn't go back to the farmhouse.

HARRIS: I think Jack was a little bit afraid of us anyway. The fact of the matter we had a falling out and we had to leave.

SCOTT: And I was like, OK. Now what?

TOOBIN: The group has to figure out where to go. And they reached back out to Kathy Soliah.

SCOTT: And we were like, going back to California, it was just crazy. But they were adamant that that's where their army was. And that's where they had to go.

He agreed to take Patty as far as Las Vegas. But he said I'm not taking you in to California. That's insane. And Bill and Emily, you're on your own, figure out how to get back.

Jack and Patty were in the van. And Jack got pulled over. And she was disguised as a pregnant woman.

[22:35:11] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At one point in their travels, Jack Scott and Patty Hearst were stopped for speeding by an Iowa State trooper.

TOOBIN: She could say, oh by the way officer I'm Patty Hearst take me in. I want to surrender. And Patty Hearst says nothing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jack, quickly jump out of his van and started gabbing with the troop about Iowa upset football victory that over UCLA. The report says the trooper smiled, put away his ticket book and drove off without ever seeing Ms. Hearst in the van.

TOOBIN: Jack Scott drives Patty Hearst to Las Vegas. And he leaves her in the motel there. And for two days she is on her own. She could surrender. She could leave. But instead she waits for one of the team.

In this case Jim Kilgore takes her from Las Vegas to Sacramento.

HARRIS: Emily and I took a train all the way across to go to Sacramento. The comrades who were going to help us get set up they decided Sacramento was reasonable location that they probably wouldn't look for us there.

TOOBIN: In Sacramento there's a new cast of characters, Wendy Yashimura, Kathy Soliah, Steve Soliah, Josephine Soliah, Jim Kilgore and Mike Bortin, a very exciting member of the group joins them in Sacramento.

HARRIS: Mike Bortin is a little bit of wild man. First time I met Mike he talked about wanting to do an operation well on LSD.

MIKE BORTIN, LSA FORMER MEMBER: I had nothing to do with Patty Hearst being kidnapped, although it maybe one of the few things I wouldn't mind taken credit for. I didn't meet Patty Hearst until these three of them came back from hiding out in the country. She had a pretty vivacious personality. She used to call Bill little Hitler. That tells you a lot right there.

HARRIS: Mike and I butted heads, you know, we never gotten -- I think we had a good shoving match one time, when I think about it.

BORTIN: We were just hiding them out. We didn't agree with their philosophy, but they were being hunted like animals.

Kathy, she got Jim Kilgore and Steve involved.

HARRIS: Steve Soliah is Kathy's Soliah's younger brother. Steven wasn't radical per se. He was progressive minded person. He pretty low key, easy going guy.

TOOBIN: Patty Hearst and Steve Soliah develop a relationship, and they wind up living together for quite sometime, they fall in love. And it's just an illustration of how she has become part of the group.

BORTIN: We took this lawyer up to meet them because hopefully we're going to try to get them to Cuba. So right in the middle of it, Patty says, I'll see you guys later, I'm going to go get some stuff at the store. And he's like, he's like in shock. Like, I thought she was brainwashed, I thought she was kidnapped, you know, like what the (INAUDIBLE).

She was super hero, you know, I mean you can't help it. I mean, this little tiny girl with the big machine gun, and giving up all that money. I mean, what can you say? How many people have been in that situation, you know?

How can you not love someone like that? There's was this one day in the park, she's sitting up there clearly a mixture of different most emotions, that's what make it so interesting. She said, you know, sometimes I wish you someone would just snatch me again, take me to New York or something. Get out of the ship.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[22:43:04] CATHERINE HEARST, PATRICIA HEARST'S MOTHER: Since I cannot mail you a letter, Patty, I'm reading this over the air and hoping and praying that it will reach you. My darling, Patty, Christmas is almost upon us again, and I'm sure you must realize our agony as we face the possibility of a Christmas without you.

Dad and I find it too painful to continue living here with so many memories of you, and are moving to an apartment in the city for a few months. I spent many hours a day praying that god will inspire you to come back to us, hopefully at Christmas. With all our love, mother.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The FIB was doing anything they could to attempt to locate these people and they were not being successful. They were living under assumed names. They're renting multiple apartments under assumed names. They were making it almost impossible for us to find them.

These people knew what they were doing. And then, what had happened was we had developed information that Wendy Yoshimura's fingerprints had been found in Homedale, Pennsylvania in a farmhouse. And we'd received the information from gentleman by the name of Walter Scott.

SCOTT: Jack's brother was very troubled man. And he was drunk and went into the FBI and said, hey, I think Patty Hearst was in this farmhouse.

HARRIS: We wiped down the entire house, every surface got cleaned with bleach and cleaners. They ended up finding inside a mattress a piece of newspaper that had Wendy's fingerprint on it. And what really happened was one night we were still there she woke up in the middle of night, and there was a big spider on her bed, she freaked out.

[22;45:10] She tore up the bedroom looking for the dammed spider again, got us all in there looking. We're all looking for a spider. Nobody could find the spider.

She fix up the mattress and underneath the matters she saw a little quarter size hole in the bottom of the mattress and she figures that the only possible place the spider could have disappeared to is inside that hole underneath the mattress. And so she widen of a piece of newspaper and push it up inside so that was pretty cool I thorough, that was pretty good I give a away for that one.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That tied the Hearst case to Wendy, and that's when the case was assigned to me this case is round down from being the number one priority case in the FBI. So it's gone from 100s of agents and we're down to four.

TOOBIN: They know Wendy Yoshimura the ex-girlfriend of a bomber who is in prison named Willy Brandt. And they see that she has visited Willy Brandt in prison. They also see that some of the Soliahs had visited Willy Brandt in prison. And it's through this that the FBI begins to identify the cell, the group that is now sheltering Patty Hearst in Sacramento.

DAVID WIER, JOURNALIST: Jack and Micki Scott who had been underground they stayed underground but then they decided to become public. They said they would not operate with the FBI trying to find the SLA. So the FBI couldn't get any information because nobody would talk to the FBI. For me it was relatively easy to find these people and talk to them, and they would all talk to me I mean all I'd have to say is I'm writing for Rolling Stone, it really wasn't very difficult to get sources. Everyone wanted to be in Rolling Stone one way or the other, and I think we had 33 sources by the time we published.

HARRIS: No, we know that it mostly it came from Jack. Like giving the information it made available to the FBI about in what details of his harboring us, without claiming it was him.

WIER: Jack Scott was the primary source. Jack sat down with Howard and me and start telling us everything they knew.

HARRIS: And it seemed like it was his by the way for getting back at us for us not letting him have the material.

WIER: The FBI called us up and said give us part two before you publish or we're going to cut you off at in knees.

SCOTT: After we get out, our lawyer get in touch with (INAUDIBLE) and set up this theater at his house. He was totally accepting of her having joined the group. He said she's been a rebel her whole life and it didn't surprise him. And I said, you know, she was upset about her mother accepting a reappointment to the board of regents when she was a kidnapping victim.

And he said, yes, I said I didn't know she was going to do that. That really made me angry. I'm going to get rid of the bitches when this is over. He came across as a father who was really distressed about his daughter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think anything can be done to help her to surface?

RANDOLF HEARST, PATTY HEARST'S FATHER: I think if she surfaces, she'll surface because she wants to come back and I hope she does. I hope she comes back that way.

BORTIN: It seemed with all the fanfare and all the support for Patty Hearst that there would be money flowing in, but it didn't happen, not in the slightest. The only cash we had was when I got from painting houses down there while they were plotting.

HARRIS: There was a tough existence. So we started having discussions about expropriations again.

BORTIN: Really know when one wanted to be involved in crime. We wanted to be involved in political activities. And all of a sudden, everything being done is criminal --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That we needed a bank without electronic security systems.

HARRIS: The Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California, was selected.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People let bravado take over and didn't ask themselves enough are we ready for something like this? Do we have the calmness under pressure to do something like this?

[22:49:46] And the answer was no.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: April 21st, 1975, it was a Monday morning. I'd have just turned 15. I woke up about 4:00 that morning to get my homework done. And I couldn't find a pen in the house that worked anywhere. And I was angry with my mom for not having a good supply of pens in the house for me to use.

I remember her promising, I'll be sure to pick up more pens. She was a church clerk, and one of a group of women that would count the weekend offerings and take them into the bank every Monday morning.

HARRIS: Crocker National Bank had a perfect setup. So it was ideal and we struggled of anything, we struggle on who was going in. Everybody wants to go in, maybe you know what they mean everybody wants to be the one doing this.

BORTIN: So then we had a big discussion well naturally, I should be leer because I was cozy cucumber but no, we have to have a woman doing it. We have to make a statement in all that. That Emily's never been in a bank before.

HARRIS: And then we decided two men and two women would go in, Jim, Mike, Emily and Cathleen. Steve and I would be in a backup car. Patty was in the third car with Wendy.

RACHEL HARP, FORMER CROCKER BANK EMPLOYEE: My day started on April 21st, 1975 just like any other day. When the bank opened at 10:00, we opened up the doors. I went whack back to my counter.

[22:55:02] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In fact, I believe one of the SLA members held the door open for my mom and the other two other women to go in ahead of them. And so there were three of them. And she was carrying this big heavy old style calculator.

HARP: Next thing you know there's screaming at the back door.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My mom had this big adding machine in her hands and wanted to set it down on the counter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Emily, she'd taken the safety off of her shotgun, and it discharged.

HARP: That split second of an instant, Mrs. Opsahl was shot with a 12 gauge shotgun from about six or seven feet from me.

BORTIN: And Emily was so nervous. That's why she did it. She was so (inaudible) nervous.

HARP: People were screaming, yelling, cussing at us, pistol whipping people, jumping over counters, cocking shotguns at the back of our heads. You mother (inaudible) better put your heads in the dirt or we're going to blow your (inaudible) heads off.

There was a young woman there that was pregnant that they beat her up and she lost her baby. And I remember putting my hand over my mouth so I wouldn't subconsciously or otherwise wouldn't allow any sound to come out. And then it was over.

I remember going to the kitchen and getting towels to try to pack Mrs. Opsahl's wounds. We put the towels on her body. God, it just went through her. And so we knew there was nothing that could be done. We just sat with her until they came. And after they took her away, we cleaned up the blood that was left on the floor. We couldn't just leave the mess. And there was nobody there to take care of it but us.

BORTIN: The mother of four was killed. We killed her, (inaudible).

OPSAHL: My dad actually was a surgeon. I found out later that he had been one of the doctors that tried to resuscitate her when they brought her in and was the last to step away, and I think one of them kind of had to insist that he stop because he wouldn't by himself. I couldn't imagine him having to do that.

For those first few days after my mom was murdered and up until the funeral things were really in a fog. I was just in a state of shock.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Patty was driving the getaway car, and according to the felony murder rule, anybody who is a participant in a felony and there's a murder, they're also responsible for that murder.

HARRIS: April 21st, 1975, we've all lived with the death of Myrna Opsahl. It being an accident doesn't change anything. It didn't change anything about what I was doing. It didn't alter my bet. It didn't do that for any of us. It made us all amazingly introspective, but we came to the same conclusion. We had to carry on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Like many 19-year-olds she's open to the sense of adventure, not skiing in Switzerland. This is not skiing in Switzerland.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 56 days in the closet turned her into an urban guerrilla.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Patty Hearst places a bomb under a police car.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were clearly outgunned.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We knew we were in for a fight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He said I'm going to kill her if you don't come back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your the daughter of an American millionaire turned revolutionary, and if so, why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This may be called the trial of the century.