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Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost preorder at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.

Welcome to stuff you should know the production of pirate radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles Doublecheck, Brian over there. And this is stuff you should know, just the two of us being Chuck are going to make it if we try. Just the two of us, you know. Not man now. Wish we were doing a show on Bill Withers. Is it a Bill Withers song?

What?

I mean, I, I guess I can hear his voice now that you say that. But that's not the song I think of when I think Bill Withers, you know, uh, what do you think? Lean on me. No. The theme song to Annie.

Oh, sure. Some come out tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one. Good song. I love that Annie soundtrack. So good man.

Hey, have I mentioned Winola homes that you have.

Well, few days yet. I haven't seen it yet.

Oh good. Did you see the challenge documentary.

Uh, I have not seen that. And that is hard to watch. Yeah, I've been watching horror movies because this October is kind of the month where I get a pass to do that on my own.

Yeah, October more like Shock Tober, you know what I mean? Right.

I finally watched the Rob Zombie movie. Never seen any of those before. Which one. I started at the beginning and did House of 1000 corpses.

OK, what do you think. It was good.

It was just exactly what I thought it would be, which is sort of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre like story.

Mm hmm.

But you could you could feel his enthusiasm for filmmaking.

I liked it for sure. When's the last time you saw the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

I saw it last year for the very first time, believe it or not. Oh, my. I think we talked about that. Fine. Yeah, it scared the pants off of me. And it's so good. It's weird because it keeps getting better.

I remember being a teenager in the first time I saw and I was like, why? What is this? And then the next time. So I was like, oh, it's actually pretty good. And then the last time I saw it, I was like, I just want to sit around, watch this all the time.

stone-Cold Classic.

So speaking of stone-Cold classics, I got a stone-Cold classic, which is what true crime question case for you, Chuck. What's the question? The question is this. Was Patty Hearst a brainwashed hostage who carried out violent crimes for fear of her life, or was she a.

Spoiled rich kid who was basically who turned thrill seeker to the nth degree. You know what, I don't know. I mean. Part of me thinks that she did flip and was radicalized, but I don't know, man, I mean, I don't think it's super clear either way.

No. And do you think I'm in the same boat as you? I feel like I lean a little more toward radicalized. And there's a couple of things that it's just like, I can't get past that.

Yeah, I think I know one of them, but I think I think that she became radicalized initially out of fear for her life. And it's really hard to discount what happened to her initially. Sure. That got it. Absolutely. And I think Jimmy Carter has the most sensible take on the whole thing. So we'll get into all of this. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about Patty Hearst. And Patty Hearst was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, whose name might sound familiar.

He was the publishing magnate. I think a radio guy, too, right? I think it was, yeah.

Radio. But, you know, very much well known for his newspaper, his string of newspapers. And he was a bit of a political kingmaker, incredibly mind bogglingly wealthy. He was the model for Citizen Kane, I believe. Right.

And he had basically established this media empire in the first half of the 20th century. And he had a son. He had a son named Randy Hearst. No joke. Randall Hearst, not William Randolph Hearst, sorry, Randolph Hearst. And they call them Randy. And Randy had a daughter. He was brought up like a very wealthy guy, but he was also brought up to take over the family business. And he had by 1954, I think, when a daughter arrived to Randy and his wife, Catherine, and they named their kid Patty or Patricia Hearst.

That's right, Patricia Campbell, and she was what you would think she was born into an heiress, she was born a rich kid. It's funny to think about, like in today's terms, plenty of people to pick from.

But like, if you could imagine Paris Hilton robbing a bank with a machine gun. Right. That's that's kind of a good analogue to who Patricia Hearst was back then.

Yeah, that's that's actually really good. Although, you know, you could say she's quite, quite a bit more low key or she was at the time, like by the time she was 19, she was living in San Francisco or the Bay Area, I should say, attending UC Berkeley.

So I guess she was living in Berkeley because it's not necessarily that she wasn't exactly Paris Hilton. Right. If we're being honest. But she was just like. But as far as the famous heiress in the United States.

Yeah. So yes. Yeah. But also living this quiet life. She was 19. She was engaged to a guy named Steven Wead, who is like a Catholic high school teacher. I think he was twenty six or something and studying art history and going to school and just kind of living life, you know.

But yes, she really missed his going. She went right, especially in Berkeley in the sense I know Stevie Weed.

So she but she was like mind bogglingly wild thing. She was going to inherit all this and she was famous for being an heiress. Right. And so just a few days before her 20th birthday on February 4th, I think.

Right, 1974. Mm hmm. There was a knock on her door like nine p.m. It was a Monday night.

And I actually I don't even know if they knocked or else if they just came bursting in. But three people who turned out to be members of what very few people had heard of at the time, but who had become very famous, the Symbionese Liberation Army burst through their door, beat up Steven Weed, Catholic high school teacher, and dragged Patty Hearst out of her apartment to their car. They shot off a few shots and drove off into the night with Patty Hearst kidnapped as hostage.

Yeah, they threw in the trunk bound and she was gone. And as far as the SLA goes, like you said, they were not very well known at the time. They were pretty new in an era of sort of I'm not going to say they were just American terrorist organizations all over the place in the United States. But it was a time in our country where there were a lot of bombings, a lot and.

Yes, said about a thousand a year. That's a lot. Yeah, that's compared to now.

Yeah. We don't have a lot of bombings and we should thank Julia Layton for helping us put this together. But no one had heard of them much because like I said, they were new. They formed a couple of months before her abduction. And it wasn't like there were, you know, a hundred of these people. There were no you know, it kind of varied from, you know, depending on like, I guess who had the good drugs at the time.

But there were never more than a dozen. It seems like it varied between like seven and twelve right at a time. And their their ideology was basically just like anticapitalist. We that's kind of just it it wasn't super inspiring.

It was a well thought out. It was just, hey, we hate we hate the rich.

It was pretty ho hum and yeah. Not very inspiring. And I think that's why they never had that many members. But they were they were extremely militant, they were very paranoid and they were willing to carry out violence like they didn't have no qualms with violence. They used to practice with weapons and guns and they had a lot of guns, a lot of ammunition. They knew how to make bombs. They weren't messing around in that sense. They were just kind of dullards when it came to political ideology.

They were just following in everybody else's wake. But interestingly enough, Chuck, the whole the whole Symbionese Liberation Army started out of a prison tutoring program where a bunch of white students from Berkeley went and tutored inmates on things like black history and political science, things like that. And that's where the SLA originally grew from when one of those inmates, a guy named Donald DeFreeze, escaped from prison and showed up in San Francisco and said, let's get this thing started.

Yeah, he was they all adopted different names when they joined the SLA. His name was General Field Marshal sinc is it Matu May?

Mattoo May. And it might be Chinky. Oh really. Yeah. Because they were super into Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. So anything that looks even remotely Spanish is probably pronounced like that.

OK, well I don't know Spanish. So I'm going to pronounce it like Spike Lee style, OK? I think that's his sister's name. Is it so. Yeah, think I didn't know it can kill you. One of his sisters. I got to screen.

So, yeah, he was in prison for a while. He did a bunch of stuff. He was well known to possess homemade bombs. He was arrested for kidnapping, possession of explosives. He was arrested for robbing a bank. And that's finally in 1969, what finally got him into prison. But in this pops up sort of throughout the story. But it was it was way easier to get away with crime back then. Yeah. Like to escape from prison and then just say, like, I like to live in San Francisco and start a radical organization.

Right. And and kind of not get caught. Right. And that's what he did. And he ended up engineering the murder of many Marcus Foster. He was superintendent of the Oakland school system and he didn't actually carry out the murder. But two SLA members shot him in one of their signature moves that would turn out to be a cyanide tipped bullets, which I didn't look into that.

I don't even know if that's a thing. I know if that helps. Yeah, kill somebody.

I think it's overkill is what, like literal overkill?

Or maybe just they thought it sounded intimidating or something to put in letters. I think it definitely did that. But they shot faster to draw attention to something they saw, which was antiblack schooling policies. Foster was a black man. One of the cruel ironies there.

Well, not only that, he was also a respected black community organizer. And when they killed them, everybody else on the left in Berkeley was like, what are you doing? Are you guys morons? And the ACLU was like, oh, no.

Yeah, they were kind of morons. Yeah, yes. They were a little bit morons as far as domestic terrorist groups go.

So when they the shooters were actually in prison, when they got Patty Hearst and the first thought from the cops and the feds was here's what's going to happen, is they've kidnapped this rich girl and they're going to try to exchange giving her back to get these two guys out of prison.

Right. They're like, no, not exactly. We're actually going to keep her.

No, but even before they they had a chance to ask and I guess they never did bring it up. Ronald Reagan, who was governor at the time, said, no, we're not doing that. But they didn't go that way. Instead, they said, hey, Willie Hurst, no, sorry, Randy Herse, Willie Randy was dead by this time. Randy Hurst, your super rich. We want you to take some of those riches and we want you to feed the poor with it.

That was their first demand. And they they came they they sent this demand. First of all, they sent a communiqué to a radio station in San Francisco. And I think that's who they basically corresponded with. The public and the police through was this radio station. And they would send letters and they would eventually send like voice recordings as well. But in this first one, they sent what was basically an arrest warrant for Patty Hearst, Patricia Campbell Hearst, daughter of Randolph Hearst, corporate enemy of the people.

And they sent her credit card as proof that they had her, which, if you ask me, shows their hand right off the bat. They didn't send a finger. They didn't even send like a lock of hair. They sent a credit card you could pick up off the ground. They could have just taken it off of her off of her nightstand. They didn't send me anything, anything vicious. They they just sent a credit card to prove that they had her, but they didn't make any ransom demand.

Then six days later, after that first communicated with with the arrest warrant, that's when they said the Hearst need to figure out how to how to feed any single person in California that can prove that they are not beneficiaries of the corporate capitalist state with at least seventy dollars worth of high quality food per person.

Yeah. And they were like, you know, we're going to get it together, not we. But you need to arrange it through the grocery stores in California. Right. To distribute this stuff. They included an audiotape from Patty, right. Where she says, Mom, dad, I'm OK. I'm with a combat unit with automatic weapons. And these people aren't just a bunch of nuts or morons like Josh and Chuck will say in the future, I want to get out of here.

But the only way I'm going to do it is if we do it their way. And I just hope that you'll do what they say, Dad, and do it quickly. And Randy Herse got this and he was like, these people are morons. How do they expect me to give everyone in California that proves they're in need? Seventy dollars worth of high quality food, what is high quality food anyway? And they're like, that's what you mean every day, sir.

He's like, no, it's actually pretty good. OK, I gotcha.

And so he said, you know, I don't know him. I think I can pull this off, which followed another back and forth in which Patty said, hey, stop acting like I'm dead. He needs a good faith gesture from you. And so just a few days after that, the Hearst Foundation formed, I guess they looked in probably the best way to get a tax benefit out of this and formed an actual program called People in Need, which would feed a hundred thousand people for a year, two million dollars worth of food, which sounds fairly high quality to me.

Yeah, and apparently they had a rough start at first because they didn't know what they were doing. There were food riots at the distribution site and they finally managed to get it figured out. So in that sense, and it's kind of overlooked, I think, in a lot of histories, because everything they did after that was just so stupid and terrible. But the SLA had a genuine impact right out of the gate that they use their their hostage for, which was to feed poor and hungry people.

So clearly, they were at least partially dedicated to that. And taking away Matou, is it more to me? Donald DeFreeze, the field marshal, general, field marshal, he he had said in a statement, he said, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, I will I have no qualms about executing your daughter if it will save the lives of any starving poor people. So that was like a real big initial thing.

So, yeah, I was kind of surprised that they form this program, People in Need, which obviously was going to take a lot of work to make into sort of a legit charity.

And they were like just for one year, though, like after that, I'm surprised they didn't say, well, you know, maybe this is worthwhile.

I mean, I didn't get the impression they were those types.

Well, and they probably it probably wasn't a great look to be inspired by these these terrorists.

That's true. That's true, too. But I just find it significant that that was like that that was their first demand, was that it actually had a real effect.

But they asked for more money, though. I think they said two million is not enough. Right. We want eight million total. Yeah. And the Hirsch said Randy said no, go. You got to release Patty Hearst if you want that extra six mil.

Yeah. So they this I think is another kind of overlooked thing that that when you look at what you know, the process of changing her mind, that Patty Hearst eventually is said to have gone through, I think that this is really where the seeds started because she said later on that she felt like her parents were trying to they were debating how much I was worth. Yeah. And they were focusing on dollars and cents, you know, in the balance of her daughter's life.

And she, you know, like she had said before, stop acting like I'm dead.

She apparently felt very if not left behind, definitely gambled with her life, was gambled with by her parents who were basically publicly negotiating the the costs down for the release of their daughter.

And I think that that really may have set up a 19 year old to to be more open to whatever the opposite of their parents thought processes and ideology might be.

Yeah, there's another really good movie about the J. Paul Getty kidnapping called All the Money in the World, directed by Ridley Scott. And that's sort of one of the threads in that movie is, you know, is the granddad trying to, like, negotiate down this money like somebody that's like one of the richest human beings on the planet trying to bargain with the life of of a family member like no dream, no money.

Really, really interesting. Yeah. Nice photograph, by the way. I think you should take a break.

Yeah, sure. Why not. All right. We'll take a break and we're going to come back right through this and talk about what happens on April 3rd.

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Listen on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this whole ad, the test. Well, except for Indiana Jones. Wow. He ruined everything. Legendary artists, musical icons. Recognized for decades of impact, influence and bringing the house down. Each year, some of the most outstanding artists of our time are honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. And now we've teamed up with I Heart Radio to take you inside those memorable nights with a brand new podcast series, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ball.

You'll hear humble, impassioned and inspiring speeches from these amazing inductees and the artists who were on hand to honor them. Catch for premiere episode starting Friday, November 6th, featuring the inductions of the Beatles, Stevie Nicks, the Eagles and NWA Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction vault available now with new episodes every Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. So, Chuck, you mentioned April 3rd, and here is about the time when things really start to turn as far as the public's perception of what exactly is going on, because 59 days earlier, Patty Hearst, poor little Patty Hearst, never harmed Iffley, just, you know, wanted to study art history and be super amazingly rich, was abducted from her house and then forced into the public spotlight as a hostage who was used to negotiate between the SLA and the her parents, the Hirst's.

But then that changed on April 3rd. Yes, she sent a another tape that said, I have been given the choice of one being released in a safe area or two joining forces, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom in the freedom of all oppressed people I have chosen to stay and fight. And then she revealed that she had taken on an SLA name, Tania. Or is it Taniya?

I think. I don't know. Let's go, Tania. OK, Tania, Tia and I a and they sent a little visual aid too. And this was this became very, very famous picture. One of the most famous pictures of the 1970s was this photo of this Polaroid of Patty. We've all seen it holding that machine gun, wearing the beret in front of the SLA flag and their emblem, which was a seven headed COBRA, very famous picture, extremely famous.

And that beret was significant in that she adopted the nom de guerre Tanya from another woman who adopted the nom de guerre of Tanya back in the 60s, about a decade earlier when she was fighting alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia. Her name was Tamara Bubenik. I believe she was Argentinean and she was a revolutionary. I guess Patty Hearst admired her and adopted that name.

But I imagine, like, put yourself in the in the in the position of just the average public who, you know, person in the public who's following this story. It's like poor little Patty Hearst, poor little Patty Hearst. And then, oh, my God, what is this? There's a picture of Patty Hearst looking like a total boa holding a machine gun in a beret.

Yeah, that's a little B.A. Baracus. Yeah. And she said I they said that they would let me go and I could go free or I could stay and fight. And I'm choosing to fight. And not only that, I have a new name of war. Yeah, I think this started a lot of confusion, I don't think it was immediately everyone was like, oh my God, the future of Paris Hilton of our times is now radicalized and wants to kill people.

That's true. I think I think it just really confused a lot of people that were like, wait a minute, what's going on here? Yeah, I thought she was kidnapped and now she says she's not. And it really gripped the nation. I mean, obviously, I was just a wee toddler when this is going on. But I remember when I was a little kid, this sort of still reverberating in the public sphere a little bit like I remember hearing the name Patty Hearst when I was like six or seven.

Well, she also I mean, she came out with their memoirs, you know, and about when you were probably 10. So I'm sure that that really brought her to your attention as well.

But I'm sure that was we read that in whatever fifth grade. Right. So so. Yeah, you're right. You're right. That wasn't necessarily the turning point, because a picture like that, you know, if you're somebody hostage, your captors can dress you up however they want and take a picture of you and put that put it out there. There was it was still shocking, but it was confusing, like you said, too. And then people generally knew, like if you had a gun to your head, you could say, like, yeah, I'm going to stay and fight.

And here's my new name, the turning point, the real turning point that came about two weeks after that, almost two weeks after that. And that is when Tonya made her real world debut. And at this point, there was there was very little question about whether she was actually involved in the SLA or just a hostage and a lot of people's mind. This is where that turning point came.

Yeah. So the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco was robbed by the SLA, including Tania, and they shot two people. Like we said earlier, you know, it wasn't one of these things where they were just espousing radicalism and threatening violence. They they killed people. They didn't kill these two people, but they did shoot them. They made off with about ten grand to help fund their group. On the surveillance surveillance footage, you see Patty right there pointing an assault rifle, machine gun and screaming at people to get down on the floor, announcing her, I am Tania.

And the footage played on the news. And this is when she said everyone was like, man, this is getting really, really interesting.

I think the FBI wasn't fully convinced. She still wasn't being forced to do this, though, because it's not like they didn't they didn't issue a warrant for her arrest for robbing a bank. Right. She was wanted as a material witness at this point. Still.

Yes, still. I mean, don't forget, she's white and she's rich. So, yeah, you can't just go around saying that she's a bank robber just because she robbed a bank in plain view of everybody on security footage that's on TV, you know, so she has a material witness.

Another tape comes along and this time she called her family the pig Hirst's. And she said, I mean, this is sort of the ideas like, has she been brainwashed or not? And she said in no uncertain terms. As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous beyond belief. I'm a soldier in the People's Army.

See, this is one of those things where people are like, if you had a time machine with something you would do, I would go back to the beginning of 1975 so that I could watch this whole thing unfold in real time, like on the nightly news and in the newspaper. It must have just been totally mind blowing because everything I have ever known about Patty Hearst was all in retrospect. And I knew the whole story from beginning to end all at once to watch this unfold must have just been it just nuts, you know, so you wouldn't go back and kill Hitler in his cradle.

Everything's fine. Now, I just want to see what happened to her. Yeah, I want to sit on the couch in nineteen seventy five seventy.

Well I'd be at Woodstock so what can I say.

OK, we could kill Hitler too. That's fine. All right. What can we do that first and then go watch the Patty Hearst thing and go to.

Well I think the order of operation is we kill Hitler, we go to Woodstock together. We avoid the purple acid is brown acid, brown acid.

And then we we wound up in 1975 eating TV dinners, watching this on TV.

OK, that sounds pretty nice, actually. Yeah.

So so Patty Hearst, just to recap, has said that she is a member of the SLA by choice, that she has a new war name, that she is not brainwashed, and now she's been out in public on foot on video, caught on camera, holding a machine gun during a bank robbery, shouting at people to get on the floor. And witnesses are saying, like, she shouted, I am Tonya. And apparently on her way out of the bank, she dropped the clip out of her submachine gun and my M1 carbine submachine gun like an assault rifle.

And the clip dropped out and it fell to the floor and two bullets. Were knocked out of the clip, she stopped and picked him up, put him back in the clip and then jammed the clip back in her machine gun and strode it out the door, like from from witnesses accounts like she sounds like she was not some meek, timid thing. Who is taking orders that she seemed to be like a warrior princess.

Yeah. And you got to go back in time to 1975 in 74 when, you know, we did a great episode on brainwashing. I encourage you to go back and listen to that.

But briefly, we should just say that in 1974, Stockholm syndrome and brainwashing this stuff wasn't as part of the, you know, just regular conversation like it is today.

No, but the banking firm that created the Stockholm Syndrome idea had just taken place like a year or less before this.

Yeah. So if you if someone would have said Stockholm syndrome on the news. Yeah. People might not even know what they were talking about it. So it would have been not out of the realm for people to not even understand that someone could be brainwashed like this. As far as just, you know, an average American goes.

Yeah, but at the same time, I mean, there there had been a real a real newsworthy and like celebrated case of POWs taken in the Korean War, you know, 20 years before this that had said, you know, they signed confessions that they'd engaged in germ warfare. When they hadn't, there was evidence that they colluded with the enemy, some of them 21 Air Force officers that had been captured, refused to return home when they had the ability to be returned home.

And so the idea of brainwashing was out there, but it was still very it was nothing like our conception of it now. And it was still very much in the beginnings of being studied and understood.

Yeah. So 1974, May 16th, is when things really, really change. And this was the incident.

I don't know if you were referring to, but this is the one that really made me go, OK, I'm really not so sure about this being brainwashed or trying to to save our own bacon thing. Right. They were it was Patty and then Bill and Emily Harris, a couple of other SLA members went to Bill and Emily went to a sporting goods store for some supplies. Bill shoplifted bullets, got caught and then tried to bolt out of there and an employee tackled him as he was leaving.

They got Emily and captured her and then Pattiz across the street sort of waiting in the getaway car. She jumps out, she points that submachine gun at the store and empties the clip and then gets another rifle and keep shooting. She fires about 30 shots total on a public street into a store by the grace of God, didn't hit anybody.

Yeah, I mean, that's the most remarkable part of this whole thing. And the Harris got out of that. I mean, it worked. They got out of there, jumped in the van and they all got away. And this is the point. And this is the one that would really haunt her in court later on, which we'll get to. But it's like it's really hard to believe. I mean, she could have left. She was out there by herself.

Yeah, she could have. Once the the S went down, she could have left. Yeah. But now she jumped out and she just she fired 30 shots trying to help them get out of there.

She was left alone in the van with the keys reading a newspaper while they were there. And like, you don't even have to be a hostage. You could just be an accomplice. And there's a good chance that if somebody getting busted inside, you might just drive off and save your own bacon. Like you said, it's just such a great term. But, yeah, she did the opposite.

She went and fought to free her comrades so that yes, that's definitely one of the things that I, I and basically anybody else familiar with the case points to is like this makes basically everything else questionable, yet this is just not nice.

So here's the thing that was I think May 16th you said. Yeah. So Patty's been kidnapped for, you know, just a few months from February 4th to May 16th. And she's already engaged in a bank robbery and shot up a Los Angeles street and storefront. And just the very next day, like the SLA is all over the news, like the cops are looking for him. They started out in Berkeley and they moved their way down to L.A. at some point.

But they are, again, more ironic in a lot of their actions and a lot of their judgment is just really insensible. But one of the things they did was they, I guess, identified somebody's house in Compton. I don't know if somebody knew them or not or if it just looked like a good place to to hide out in south central Los Angeles. And they said, hey, you can we give you a hundred dollars? I think there's just some middle aged woman who is running a house.

If we give you 100 dollars, can we all stay here and she said, OK. And they said, great, let's go get all of our guns like I like several dozen guns, 6000 rounds of ammunition, a few bombs and move them in. And that lady started to get freaked out. And apparently her daughter said it went and flagged down a traffic cop and said, hey, are you looking for a bunch of white people who have a bunch of guns that seem to be hiding out?

And that led to this convergence of the LAPD on this house in Compton and a firefight, a shootout with most of the members of the SLA in this house. Yes. So there is a firefight that goes down. They lobbed some tear gas in there that starts a fire and it burns the house to the ground and kills all six of the SLA members inside. Right. Patty in the Harris's are not there. They were on the lam at this point, waiting it out in a hotel room after the shoplifting thing.

And then three weeks after this, the the few remaining I mean, you've got to think if they killed six, there were another three hiding out and there were never more than 12, there could only be just a few more right remaining. But the remaining members released another message that Patty had a real hard time with at the trial, explaining it away because she was clearly upset about these deaths. She talked about the fascist pig media and her brothers and sisters dying and then talked about remember, Willie Wolf in particular, is the gentlest, most beautiful man I've ever known and said that neither she nor Wolf had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other.

I read an interview with Willie Wolf's father, who is a doctor back east. Willie Wolf is just raised this like upper middle class son of a doctor, you know, pretty privileged, but also not spoiled, bratty, that kind of thing. Love the outdoors. And he apparently just his father still was just like, I don't I don't get it at all. Like that guy. He really was just super gentle and sweet and kind and not very political.

But something happened to him out in Berkeley and he became extremely concerned. I think a natural propensity toward caring about what happened to other people became radicalized by in the you know, by the SLA. He was a founding member of the SLA. It's not like he was some lamb led to the slaughter, like he was one of the guys who founded the SLA with Donald DeFreeze. And I think the the the couple that were shoplifting the heresies.

Yeah. But his father really, really struggled to explain it. But what is remarkable to me about the interviews, his father wasn't like overexplaining. It wasn't like me thinks he doth protest too much kind of thing. Like he just seemed genuinely baffled and like he just didn't understand it. And I was reading an article in the L.A. Times. I'm like the 20th anniversary of that that shootout in Compton and the owner of the house that had been burned down that the SLA was in.

He said that every year Willie Wolf's mother would come in on the anniversary of her son's death and leave this wreath on a palm tree at the vacant lot where the burned out house had been and would just stand there in silence for hours. Just once, he said she was the only person who ever came. Wow.

Yeah, very sad. And I'm sure, yeah, the parents of these kids were just. Yeah. Like it's sort of like being the parents of like one of the Manson family or something, right.

Yeah. And here's the other thing, too. Like this is a really complicated thing like Donald DeFreeze. He was an escaped convict from prison. But I also read that his stepfather on three different occasions broke both of his arms to punish him. So, I mean, like there's there. And then Willie Wolf was accused of raping Patty Hearst, too. So just how gentle and sweet could he be? Like, it's a really murky, messy case and appropriately so, because even still today, we're, you know, in 20/20, we're we're trying to suss out exactly what happened with Patty Hearst in her mind back to 1974.

Yeah, it's really I mean, it's hard to figure out. And I think that's what makes this such an enduring case, you know? Yeah. So the that eulogy tape was released while she was on the run with the heresies and they stayed on the run, driving across the country, sort of Badlands style.

I don't think they were killing people, that they were committing crimes, they were stealing stuff. And they did this for 18 months, which is another example of like it was just a lot easier to get away with crimes back then before there were cameras everywhere and obviously camera phones everywhere and the Internet, they remained on the lam for 18 months. About a year into that, they robbed another bank in San Francisco and actually killed a customer. In the process, Myrna Opsahl yeah, and you know, this would come up later at the trial, Patty Hearst was not the trigger person, but she was involved.

She was one of the three and the person lost their life. You know, it's very sad.

Yeah, she was apparently a church lady who was there depositing like that week's collection into the bank, the church's bank account. And she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and apparently made a fast move because she was freaked out and got shot and died pretty quickly, from what I understand.

Why should we take another break? Yeah, sure. All right. This is our last break.

And then we'll talk about the arrest in the trial of Patty Hearst right after this.

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All right, so she gets arrested and, you know, this is where things get really weird because you've got two stories playing out in court. One is that I'm Patty Hearst and I was brainwashed. I was kept in a closet for 57 days. When they abducted me, I was blindfolded and bound. I was raped by Donald DeFreeze and Willie Wolfe. I was abused and lectured about how righteous they were. And then after 57 days, I was told, hey, you can either join up with us or we can kill you.

And she said, I joined up. So story number one is that story number two is the other.

Yes. Story number two is we have video evidence of you robbing a bank. Witnesses say that you were involved in another bank robbery when a woman was killed. We have you on tape talking about how you're not brainwashed and how you joined this by your own free will. And your parents are pigs. So it was it was a pretty airtight case as far as the prosecution goes, were it not for one thing. And that is that she was initially kidnapped.

She didn't run off and do this like she didn't get bored and go to a community center and end up falling in with the SLA like she was kidnapped. And our understanding of of psychology was still kind of jelling around the idea of brainwashing. But it wasn't just completely unheard of. The thing is, it had never been tried in a criminal case before. And the Hirst's hired the very famous I think already he was a very famous attorney, F. Lee Bailey, who defended the Boston Strangler, who's also an Ogg's team.

He was just a super famous lawyer and he tried it.

And I think in retrospect, that's the only thing he possibly could have tried was to say she was brainwashed, like you said.

Yeah. And they had psychiatrists that came in to back that up and say this is very possible. That brought up the stuff about the abuse. They had multiple psychiatrists come in and kind of take their side. And then as far as the tapes go, Patti said, you know what, those were scripted. And I had no choice. I had to read them, as they said. And if you think they're believable, it's because I believe that my life depended on how well of a job I did reading these things right.

And that those tapes were I mean, that was the big, big evidence in the trial, was how passionate she was and how she talked about her love of Willy Wolf. And, you know, the other side psychiatrist for the prosecution came in and they were like, you know what? I've listened to these things over and over and I don't know an actress on Earth who could pull this off like she was if she was reading scripted stuff. It surely doesn't sound that way to me.

Right.

And she also did not she literally did not help her case when she was arrested. She put down as their occupation urban guerrilla. She was you know, she was like throw in like fight the power of fists. Any time somebody took a picture of her, she was very much like not the oh, my God, I'm glad to be freed kind of thing that you would expect. And I think that the public wanted to see. And then also when she took the stand, I can't believe I believe she did.

I cannot believe it either. But she took the stand on cross-examination. She plead the fifth 42 times. Yeah. Which I mean, look, yeah, the public does not really trust people who plead the fifth, especially 42 times, especially if they're supposed to be a kidnap victim. So there's a there's a there was a lot that the prosecution had going for them in that sense. And then the defense is basically had brainwashed. She's brainwashed. One of the things they said was like she was raped, she was raped by these men.

So, of course, like she feared them. They threatened her life. Of course she feared them. And apparently, I guess the prosecution got her to say that, no, she didn't love Willie, Wolf, by the way, she never saw Steven Reed again. As far as I could tell. She didn't want to see him. She didn't get back together with them. And I don't think they ever saw each other again, even though he was, you know, speaking to the press the whole time and being very supportive.

But she was like, no, I'm moving on. But the prosecution got her to say, you know, you said you loved Willie Walsh. Did you love him? She said, no, I hated him. And then they produced this thing. That is another I think another mark that that really stands against her in the mind of a lot of people, which is little statue that she had gotten from Willie Walsh, right?

Yeah. They they pull this out and they're like, then what is this? Yeah. Is this not, in fact, a gift from your supposed captor and supposed rapist, Willie Wolfe? Why would you keep this gift? Still in her reply was the opposite of my famous saying. She said, I like art. Yeah. Instead of I hate art. Yeah, and she said, you know, I'm an art history student and I like art.

And, you know, if you're trying to move the needle for a jury, that's that's not the way to do it.

Well, one of the women jurors on the case said, like no woman would carry around a love trinket from a man who raped her and that that really ruined her credibility. At the same time, though, Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote a book on this American heiress. Yes. But he still had a legitimate book despite what he's done since then.

And I just started not to. I know. I know.

I know he he made a really good point, though, that I think it is worth repeating here.

And that is that regardless of, you know, maybe how she ended up feeling about Willie Wolf or anybody that that were her captors, she was kept in a closet for 57 days and anyone who had sex with her in that closet raped her, that there's no chance for that to have been consensual, no matter how she behaved during that was that was rape and she was raped. And that should be you know, it shouldn't be brushed aside no matter, you know, how she came to feel about Willie, Wolf.

And I think that's that's definitely a good point to remember.

Yeah. I mean, if that entire story is true about being kept in the closet and, you know, most of this testimony comes from her and there are still people that think she cooked up this entire thing. And you know what? She just wanted to get out of her engagement to Steve Weed to begin with.

And that's why there's such a conspiracy theory. Are people saying that? I'm sure they are. But really, you came OK.

Now, I was literally making a joke.

If you see if you see the footage of Steve Weed, he's the kind that somebody would do that to get out of a relationship with a kidnapping. I'm sorry, Steven, we should show your support. Yeah, just just to get out of it. Just breaking up with you, because he's a nice guy. It'll only take a few years, right? One person has to die.

I'm sorry, but the boy. So she on March 20th, 1976, 22 years old, by the way, I don't think that has really, you know, may have hit home to our listeners. Still just a kid. Yeah. She was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbing that bank. She served 22 months of that near San Francisco at Pleasanton Prison. And you mentioned Jimmy Carter earlier. And we put a pin in that. And I'm sure people are like, what does Jimmy Carter have to do with any of this?

Yeah, he commuted her sentence. It was very controversial at the time. He said that he he fully believed her, that she was a victim and would not have done any of this had she not been brainwashed and kidnapped and brainwashed. And they said, what about Stevie Weed? And he was like, I don't know who that is. And he was just a big supporter of her. And he eventually actually helped persuade Bill Clinton to pardon her in 2001.

He did. He granted her he commuted her sentence. So she was let out after 22 months. But it was Clinton who pardoned her. And I said earlier that, you know, Carter, I think, had the most sensible opinion of the whole thing. And it was simply that had she not been kidnapped by the SLA and forced into these, you know, a life of crime, basically she otherwise would never have engaged in any of those criminal acts like she was her life was not in any way, shape or form on a trajectory to robbing banks.

She was just going to end up being kind of a a a art history, a rich art history person.

Yes. You going to collect and buy expensive art? Probably, yeah. Basically. Which, you know, like that was going to be your contribution. The world had some kids and be very, very wealthy. She was not going to go rob banks and the SLA forced her to do that, forced her into that life even if they didn't force her to rob banks. The thing is, though, is that still leaves dangling. There's a big blank space after that sentence, and that is.

But she still robbed the banks. And it does seem like she did it from her own volition. And I mean, anybody who was 19 can imagine what it must have been like to be a 19 or early 20 year old shooting up a storefront to free a couple of friends, you know, as reckless, as dangerous, as murderous, unjustifiable and indefensible as that is.

It also must have been probably the most thrilling moment of Patti her entire life to this day.

Well, of course, it was because, shockingly, she led a pretty low key life for many, many years. After this, she got out of prison. She married a former cop whose name was Bernard Shaw, not the composer, but he was her bodyguard. He was moonlighting once. She was out on bail. A bodyguard had a couple of kids raised their kids in Connecticut and lived a really quiet life until 1981, a couple of years after that, she published her memoir, like you said, which we read in our fifth grade reading class, Mrs.

Shelley, every secret thing.

And then she kind of was very public, but not she was public in the way that I'm not saying she should have have shame, but shamelessly public going on TV shows, plugging her book, talking about her memoirs, talking about what happened, buddying up with maybe the weirdest thing in this whole story, buddying up with John Waters and starring in four of his movies, including Cry-Baby.

Yeah, I mean, she was on a bunch of them. She wasn't serial mom.

Yeah. I remember when I saw her in these movies thinking, is that Patty Hearst? Patty Hearst? And it totally was. I think this is before the Internet when I saw these. And so, like, I read a newspaper article or something confirming that.

Right. I was like, all right. I guess that's what she's doing now. Were you in a van waiting for your accomplices while you read that newspaper article? No, it was a very strange time, though.

And then there were a couple of more cases in the late 90s, the FBI captured this woman. She was an SLA fugitive named Kathleen Solia. She was living. She managed to get out and live a very quiet life of Sarah Jane Olson.

She's basically like Homer Simpson's mom. Yeah. Also a wife and mother in Connecticut. And she was arrested for a car bombing carried out in seventy five.

Actually, I think the weirdest part of the story is, is that her daughter ended up being a contestant on American Idol.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's a little weird. I don't know if that's starring in John Waters movies level weird, but it's definitely that's a great little one.

It's a nice little tidbit. Her daughters, though, when they were questioned about this, were like, you know, this was Berkeley in the 70s.

Like it was kind of not everybody was blowing stuff up.

That was kind of their attitude. It was interesting.

It is interesting. I've got a little detail. I turned up that I hadn't seen anywhere else, but it was from the recollections of the one of the FBI agents who arrested Patty Hearst finally. And they said, get this man. She was on the run with another SLA member, Wendy Yoshimura. And when the agents came up these back stairs to this house where she and Wendy were hiding out, they were sitting at the kitchen table and the agents came in with their guns drawn.

And Wendy Yoshimura had both hands on the table and did everything those FBI agents said. Patty Hearst jumped up and ran to the front room.

And apparently the FBI agent said, you know, get back here, we're going to shoot Wendy or something like that. They they said that they couldn't guarantee Wendy safety unless Patty came back. So Patty reluctantly came back into the kitchen where she was arrested. But when they went back and searched the house in the front room, they found her M1 carbine and a 12 gauge shotgun.

Wow. Which really it's very difficult not to imagine that she was jumping up to go get her gun to engage in a gun battle. Interesting. That's nuts, man. Wow. Well, Solia gets found out at Sarah-Jane also, like I said, that trial and then another one. Remember that bank robbery that we mentioned earlier when they were on the lam? That comes back to haunt her as well. And they're these two kind of trials popping up where she has immunity.

If she's going to come in and testify and say who the shooter was, she was going to say it was Emily Harris. She was all prepared to testify against them. And they both everyone ended up pleading guilty. And so she didn't have to go to court again. And she kind of just went back to her. Her life is as Patty Hearst, the mom in Connecticut.

That's right. Very interesting story. And like we said, we look back now and I don't think anyone has the clearest picture still of exactly what happened.

So my guess is it might have been a little bit of both.

Yeah, I think there was an initial brainwashing hostage thing. But, you know, William Harris later said we inadvertently kidnapped a revolutionary freak like she was just right. She had a real propensity for it. Yeah. And they were they were astounded by how how eagerly she took it on so well.

And this has come you know, you got to remember, too, this is a 19 year old coming off the heels of being a middle schooler in the late 60s when all of that's going on. Right. And, you know, that was in the the public sphere as her whole life growing up, really this radical revolutionary kind of thing growing up in Northern California, near San Francisco. So, yes, she may have been like, hey, this is my chance.

Yeah.

You know, and she took it. Well, that's Patty Hearst, everybody. If you want to know more about it, there's a lot of ink that's been spilled on her story and just go down that rabbit hole as deep as you like. And since I said that, it's time for listen to me.

I'm curious to read her or I guess reread her memoir.

I don't remember yours. Right. It's been many years. Uh, let me see here. I'm going to call this Bavarian Beavers. Hey, guys, want to take the opportunity to talk about your recent show on Beavers to tell you what I have been doing for a few years now between finishing school and starting university. I did nine months of civil service in my regional environmental authority. My main focus, besides cleaning up local forests, was taking care of beavers.

So I basically had to maintain live traps and had to perform sabotage on dams of beavers, which flooded fields of local farmers who I did so on a daily basis. Since overnight the dams were of course, restored by the respective constructors.

This was done in order to softly, softly force the Beavers to find a new place to live, which mostly worked after a few months. Also to beavers were caught alive during my period of service and were moved to the UK, as far as I know, in order to reintroduce them there.

As far as I know, they went to go live on a farm in England. I learned a lot about these animals during this time and I was stoked when I saw this episode title pop up. As usual, you did a great job gathering and summarizing all the facts and interesting good Tinos, including the weird classification as fish for religious reasons, keep up the great work.

This is from Bavaria, Germany, and that is from Nico. Thanks, Nico. Nico says, Chuck, hats off to you. And your German skills is being very kind. Yeah. What about me, Nico? What about Josh? Well, you own Japanese and Spanish. All right. But Nico didn't say anything about it. No, she did. That was the piece. That's OK.

Yeah. So thanks a lot, Nico, for complimenting both of us. I appreciate you finally getting to it. And if you want to be like Nico and compliment both of us, we love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast that I heart radio dot com.

Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, my radio is the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Get ready to laugh and learn. I'm Nick Smith, I am Flamin wrote, I am hishe he cash a check, she make the money, we spend it. Laugh and Learn is a weekly podcast bringing you the latest headlines, keeping you politically informed, mixed in with the little pop culture.

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I'm Debbie Brown, the host of the Dropping Gems podcast, a podcast about the depth and potential of personal growth, no one's journey is the same as the next. But the magic of being human shows up in the things we have in common. Our capacity for love, pain, joy, sadness, togetherness and solitude are things that make us perfectly imperfect.

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