LOS ANGELES (AP) — Newspaper heiress Patricia “Patty” Hearst was kidnapped at gunpoint 50 years in the past Sunday by the Symbionese Liberation Army, later becoming a member of her captors in a 1974 San Francisco financial institution theft that earned her a jail sentence.
The abduction and subsequent trial of Hearst, then a 19-year-old school scholar and the granddaughter of rich newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was one of the sensational and fascinating instances of the Seventies.
Hearst will flip 70 on Feb. 20. She is now referred to as Patricia Hearst Shaw after she married a police officer who guarded her when she was out on bail, the late Bernard Shaw. She has been within the information in recent years for her dogs, principally French bulldogs, which have won prizes within the Westminster Kennel Club canine present.
Hearst’s allegiance to the Symbionese Liberation Army raised questions on Stockholm syndromea standard time period deployed to explain the bond that victims of kidnappings or hostage conditions typically develop with their captors.
Stockholm syndrome obtained its identify from an August 1973 failed bank robbery in Sweden’s capital. Rather than a analysis of a dysfunction, consultants describe it as a psychological coping mechanism utilized by some hostages to endure being held captive and abused.
Hearst, who glided by the identify “Tania” within the group, denounced her household and posed for {a photograph} carrying a weapon in entrance of their flag. The self-styled radicals seen facets of U.S. society as racist and oppressive, they usually had been accused of killing a California college superintendent.
As a member of a rich and highly effective household, Hearst was kidnapped to convey consideration to the Symbionese Liberation Army, based on the FBI. The group demanded meals and money donations for the poor in alternate for Hearst’s launch, although she remained a captive even after her household met the ransom via a $2 million meals distribution program.
Hearst took half within the group’s theft of a San Francisco financial institution on April 15, 1974. Surveillance cameras captured her wielding an assault rifle in the course of the crime.
She wasn’t arrested till the FBI caught up along with her on Sept. 18, 1975, in San Francisco, 19 months after her abduction.
Her trial was one of the most sensational of that decade. The prosecutor performed a jail cell recording of Hearst speaking with a pal by which she was assured, cursing and absolutely conscious of her position with the Symbionese Liberation Army.
While Hearst was sentenced to seven years in jail, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979 after she served 22 months behind bars. She later was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
