The Hearst Nightmare

The robbers--a black man and four white women-strode swiftly into the Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco's Sunset district, pulling out semiautomatic carbines from under their long black coats. "Get on the floor, get on the floor," barked the stubbly-bearded leader at the two dozen terrified employees and customers. Two of the women rushed to the cash drawers, while another, in the best Bonnie-and-Clyde style, proudly announced: "We're from the S.L.A." One of the gang gestured toward the young woman who had taken up a position at the middle of the seven tellers' cages and shouted: "This is Tania Hearst!"

That surreal scene, captured on film by the bank's automatic cameras, was the Symbionese Liberation Army's way of introducing Patricia Campbell Hearst, 20, to the world in their role for her as an armed terrorist. It was the latest bizarre development in what had already become one of the most sensational and baffling crime sagas in American history, engaging the speculation and imagination of the U.S., the sure stuff of books and movies to come. Last week's episode only added a sharp new edge to the fears of a particular class of Americans, the wealthy and vulnerable, who have special reasons for empathizing with the Hearst nightmare.

Only three months ago, Patty Hearst was a quiet, comely heiress to a famed publishing fortune who spent much of her time preparing for her intended marriage to Steven Andrew Weed, 26, a graduate philosophy student. Kidnaped on Feb. 4 by the obscure revolutionary band that grandiosely calls itself an army but is more of a ragtag platoon, she seemed close to release two weeks ago, after her family started a free-food program for the Bay Area's needy and aged that the S.L.A. had demanded. Then she stunned her family and friends by announcing that she had renounced them, joined her abductors, and adopted the name Tania, after the German-Argentine mistress of Latin American Revolutionary Che Guevara. Whether through conversion or coercion, she materialized last week in the role of a foul-mouthed bank robber. In the bewilderment shared by all who have followed the case, her anguished father Randolph A. Hearst exclaimed: "It's terrible! Sixty days ago, she was a lovely child. Now there's a picture of her in a bank with a gun in her hand."

Armchair View. It was still not known whether Patty had actually been won over to the band's vague philosophy, with its Maoist cant and its dedication to deadly terrorism. There was furious debate, despite the 1,200 photographs snapped by the bank's cameras during the five-minute robbery, over whether Patty had willingly participated. In Washington, Attorney General William Saxbe, whose foot-in-mouth disease seems to be becoming increasingly virulent, gratuitously offered his armchair Sherlock Holmes view that the girl was "not a reluctant participant," and labeled all bank robbers, including Patty, "common criminals." Reacting angrily, Hearst called Saxbe's statement "irresponsible." Officially, at least, the FBI did not share Saxbe's view.

Director Clarence M. Kelley declared that "the FBI is going to be guided by facts, not opinions," and the bureau issued a warrant for Patty's arrest only as a material witness. It charged her four companions with bank robbery.

The robbery dropped a few clues into the hands of FBI agents, who had been frustrated by lack of information about the S.L.A. and its members. But it did not seem to bring the harassed agency any closer to solving the case. The FBI has not located any hideout of the band. If it does, it must decide whether to try to rescue Patty or wait for her release, as the bureau has done in every kidnaping case it has handled. If agents do go in after her, Kelley promised that they would be cautious. "We're not in the position of assassinating anyone," he said, "but we have some other things in mind for them." ,

As was true of the few other known S.L.A. hit-and-run forays, the bank robbery was apparently meticulously planned and coolly and professionally executed. Police believe that the bank had been carefully cased beforehand, presumably by some of the women because they would be less likely to be recognized. On the crystalline morning of the holdup, the bandits drove into the Sunset district, a neighborhood of middie-class homes and small businesses, in a green Ford station wagon. They were followed by four other S.L.A. members in a red Hornet sports car. The bank opened at 9 a.m., and at 9:50, the five marched into the bank building. They were identified by the FBI as Patty Hearst, Patricia ("Mizmoon") Soltysik, 24, Nancy Ling Perry, 27, Camilla Hall, 29, and the band's ostensible leader, Donald DeFreeze, 30, who styles himself General Field Marshal Cinque.

Carefully Centered. With military precision, DeFreeze disarmed Bank Guard Ed Shea, 66, at the door and ordered the 20 or so bank employees and six customers to lie face down. Patty Hearst stood 40 feet away, toward the center of the bank lobby-and carefully centered before the cameras-while Camilla Hall positioned herself at the far end of the bank (see diagram). All three covered the victims with their carbines while Perry and Soltysik took the keys from the tellers, unlocked the cash drawers and scooped up $10,960.

As the robbers moved out of the bank, one of them-police believe it was DeFreeze-theatrically and unnecessarily opened fire through the bank's glass door. The bullets hit two men passing by outside, Peter Markoff, 59, and Eugene Brennan, 70, and both received severe stomach wounds. Once outside the bank, DeFreeze fired again, at Pharmacist Ken Outlander, 62, but missed. The bandits raced away in the station wagon, their escape covered by the four accomplices in the Hornet. Police and FBI agents could not identify the four people--either four men or three men and a woman--but believed that some were among the five S.L.A. members sought in Patty's abduction. They are Angela Atwood, 25, Emily Harris, 27, and her husband William, 29, Thero Wheeler, 29, and William Wolfe, 22.

To investigators, the robbery had all the earmarks of a macabre publicity stunt, staged principally to demonstrate that the S.L.A. has tightened its grip on the millionaire's daughter. The gang did not shoot out the cameras that recorded their moves and made certain that the witnesses knew that Tania-Patty was with them. Moreover, investigators have turned up no evidence that the terrorist organization was running short of cash. Said one federal law enforcement official: "The S.L.A. feeds on publicity, and its appetite is enormous." As a consequence, authorities feared that the S.L.A., emboldened by the bank robbery, would soon try another spectacular stunt. A local investigator explained: "The pressure should be the other way, against pulling another job soon because of the danger of a foul-up. But that's not the point with these people. The point is to make a big splash."

Targeted for Death. One possibility was another murder by the terrorists. Before the robbery they issued a "shoot-to-kill" edict against three former friends who had somehow earned the S.L.A.'s displeasure. They are Colston Westbrook, a black instructor in linguistics at Berkeley; Robyn Steiner, a white woman who used to live with an S.L.A. member; and Chris Thompson, a black resident of Berkeley. In addition, law enforcement officials believed the S.L.A. had "targeted" three others for death: Black Panther Leader Huey Newton, for his abandonment of violence as a tactic; Raymond Procunier, director of the California department of corrections, who heads the state prison system that the S.L.A. so loathes; and ex-Convict Ronald Wayne Beaty, who testified against two young radicals in an October 1972 prison break in which one guard was killed and another wounded.

For San Francisco, normally one of America's most serene and sophisticated cities, there has been killing enough. Last January the city heard from an apparent psychopath who called himself Zodiac. In letters to newspapers, he claimed to have murdered 37 people and threatened new violence; police assigned him six slayings in northern California, dating back to 1968. This year the city has had to contend with the "Zebra" murders, in which twelve whites have been shot and killed by one or more black assailants. The latest occurred last week (see box page 18). The murders, together with the Hearst kidnaping, have created apprehension among many residents. It is not keeping most of them at home, but they are more cautious when they do go out in public.

Altered Habits. The Hearst tragedy has caused many upper-income Americans in particular to pay special attention to personal safety. Some have hired bodyguards; others have bought guard dogs or installed alarm systems in their homes. Still others have altered their habits to foil attackers. In Detroit, some automotive executives have begun to vary their routes to work as well as their arrival and departure times. In Atlanta, Constitution Editor Reg Murphy, kidnaped himself in February, has received a number of pleas from people asking that the newspaper stop identifying them as "wealthy" (the Constitution has refused to do so).

It is not reassuring that law enforcement agencies still know comparatively little about the S.L.A., even though five months have passed since it claimed credit for a grisly murder and became a household word in the Bay Area. The accepted theory is that the S.L.A. had its genesis roughly a year ago in the California medical facility at Vacaville, a psychiatric treatment center for criminals. Inmates were permitted to form an educational organization called the Black Cultural Association, and by late 1972, some 130 prisoners had joined. Authorities permitted about 100 outsiders, some of them middle-class white activists deeply interested in penal reform, to attend weekly association meetings. At them, several members of the band that kidnaped Patty Hearst got together for the first time.

In December 1972, DeFreeze was transferred to Soledad prison and escaped the following March 5 from the prison boiler room by simply walking away from a work detail. Rebuffed when he sought help from several black women in the San Francisco Bay Area, he turned to the white radical friends he had met at Vacaville and was given haven by Patricia Soltysik. Joined by Black Convict Thero Wheeler, who escaped from Vacaville five months later, the group founded the S.L.A. They recruited no more than 25 known supporters, among whom were alumni of the Black Panthers and the defunct Maoist revolutionary group called the Venceremos ("We shall conquer") who were dissatisfied because those groups were too moderate for them. Some FBI and police investigators have theorized that DeFreeze is actually only a figurehead and the group is really directed by the white women, perhaps led by Nancy Ling Perry, a longtime radical feminist. But in the bank robbery and in the rambling S.L.A. communiques, DeFreeze acted as leader.

Patterning themselves in part after South American revolutionaries like the Tupamaros of Uruguay, the S.L.A. drew up a set of goals. Among other things, the S.L.A. promised to disappropriate the "capitalist class," disband the prison system, and destroy "all forms of racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, fascism, individualism, possessiveness and competitiveness." The organization adopted as its emblem a seven-headed cobra, giving each head a symbolic meaning: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative production, purpose, creativity and faith. But at the heart of the organization was a cold determination to act violently against "enemies of the people."

At first the S.L.A. reportedly offered its services to the sagging New Left organizations in the Bay Area, proposing to back them up with terrorist acts. When no one accepted, the "army" went off on its own. Indeed, the group and its tactics have been disavowed by many leftists, among them Communist Angela Davis, American Indian Leader Dennis Banks and Huey Newton.

The S.L.A. struck into public consciousness last November with a claim of responsibility for the murder of Oakland School Super intendent Marcus Foster, who was shot in a parking lot with cyanide-tipped bullets. Foster's deputy, Robert Blackburn, was wounded in the attack. Foster had incurred the wrath of a community group by proposing student identity cards to help combat violence in the junior and senior high schools. Why the terrorist organization became involved was a mystery until it was discovered that one of its members, Willie Wolfe, was also a member of the community group. Two months later, Oakland police arrested two white S.L.A. members, Joseph Remiro, 27, and Russell Little, 24, and charged them with Foster's murder.

Free Food. The army's next terrorist act was the kidnaping of Patty Hearst. On Feb. 4, two black men and a white woman dragged the screaming girl from the apartment she shared with Fiance Weed near the Berkeley campus of the University of California. They badly beat Weed on the head with a bottle, stuffed Patty into the trunk of a stolen car and drove off.

For two months Patty and her captors disappeared from sight, communicating with her parents and the public only through occasional tape recordings. Two weeks ago, however, the case seemed to be coming to a happy conclusion. To comply with the instructions of the S.L.A., the Hearst family and the Hearst Foundation (which mainly backs medical charities) passed out free food worth about $2.3 million--some $300,000 more than had been planned--to poor people in the San Francisco area. Hearst also talked the directors of the Hearst Corp., which publishes eight newspapers and eleven magazines (including Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and Good Housekeeping), into putting an additional $4 million into an escrow account in the Wells Fargo Bank. If Patty is released unharmed by May 3, the date when the offer expires, the money is to be spent on more free food and other aid to the needy. The S.L.A. even promised that it would soon name the time and place for her release. Then came the shocking announcement that she had joined the S.L.A., followed by the bank robbery.

Of some two dozen people who are believed to belong to the S.L.A., the FBI suspects that nine--self-styled as "intelligence units" --were involved in the kidnaping. Explains one law enforcement official: "All of them were under suspicion right from the start: they vanished overnight while other members of the S.L.A. stayed around." They are an odd and un likely assortment of characters whose private odysseys reveal much about their collective extremism. Thumbnail portraits of the nine:

ANGELA ATWOOD.

The "Genina" who spoke on one taped S.L.A. communique, she majored in education at Indiana University, where she became a close friend of Emily and William Harris. In 1970, Atwood was a student teacher in Indianapolis, and she is remembered as a rebel who opposed rules of conduct for students. After she parted from her husband in Berkeley last June, she moved in with the Harrises and disappeared with them in January.

DONALD DAVID DEFREEZE. A habitual runaway as a child, he dropped out of school at 14 and eventually drifted to New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles. In 1965 police arrested him on a freeway ramp for suspicion of robbery and burglary. He had in his possession a tear-gas bomb, a .22-cal. rifle, an 8-in. knife, gunpowder, blasting caps, wiring and a security officer's badge. DeFreeze told the police that he needed the weapons to protect himself from "criminals."

Sent to prison, he was subsequently paroled. A prison staff report described him as "an emotionally confused and conflicted young man with deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy." It also remarked that "his fascination with firearms and explosives makes him dangerous." In 1969 he was jailed again on charges of possession of a homemade bomb and receiving stolen property. Paroled, he was later arrested and convicted of robbery and assault and sentenced to five years to life. He calls himself Cinque, after an African who led a successful uprising aboard a slave ship off the coast of Cuba in 1839.

CAMILLA CHRISTINE HALL. She is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Her two sisters and a brother died at an early age when the family lived in St. Peter, Minn.; two of a congenital kidney disease, one of a heart ailment. At the University of Minnesota, she was active in the gay rights movement, majored in humanities and graduated in 1967. After working in Duluth as a social worker and later in Minneapolis as a counselor to unwed mothers, she moved to Berkeley in 1970 and until a year ago was Patricia Soltysik's lover. Last year Hall worked as a $4.18-an-hour parks attendant, but she considered herself to be an artist and poet. A sample: "I will cradle you/ In my woman hips/ Kiss you/ with my woman lips/ Fold you to my heart/ And sing:/ Sister woman, You are a joy to me."

EMILY SCHWARTZ HARRIS. Remembered by her Alpha Chi Omega sorority sisters at Indiana University as a "good dresser," she taught junior high school English for a year in Bloomington. Last year she and her husband William moved to Berkeley. She worked as a clerk typist at the University of California and became deeply involved in radical activities. She headed the Oakland Chino Defense Committee, which raised funds for the legal defense of members of the Venceremos and others accused of aiding a prison escape.

WILLIAM TAYLOR HARRIS. Radicalized by his experience as a Marine in Viet Nam, he earned a master's degree in urban education at Indiana University. He worked for the post office in Berkeley and became involved in the Venceremos and Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. On Jan. 10-the day Remiro and Little were arrested-the Harrises left their Oakland apartment so fast that there was still a pot of coffee on the stove waiting to be brewed.

NANCY LING PERRY. Once a high school cheerleader in Santa Rosa, Calif., she was a staunchly conservative supporter of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. After a year at Whittier College, President Nixon's alma mater, she majored in English literature at Berkeley and graduated in 1970.

Hoping to go on to medical school, she took graduate chemistry courses and worked as a laboratory assistant to Biologist Robert Macy, who has described her as "interested in drugs and consciousness-raising-type pursuits." In February 1973, her six-year marriage to Black Pianist Gilbert Scott Perry broke up, and she began a drifting, seemingly aimless existence, working variously as a topless blackjack dealer in a North Beach nightclub and selling soft drinks from an outdoor stand. On Jan. 10 she fled a rented house in suburban Concord used by the S.L.A. as a headquarters, after trying to set fire to the contents, which included BB guns and maps which showed abandoned mines and ranger stations.

PATRICIA ("MIZMOON") SOLTYSIK.

Raised in Goleta, a small seaside town near Santa Barbara, she moved to Berkeley in 1970. She changed her name to Mizmoon in honor of a poem written to her by Camilla Hall. After a year studying French and English at Berkeley, Mizmoon dropped out to work and threw herself into radical feminist activities. She supported herself as a part-time janitor at the Berkeley public library, where a co-worker remembers her as "a very gentle person."

THERO WHEELER. After spending much of his life in trouble with law enforcement authorities, he was sentenced to prison in August 1962 for second-degree robbery. Paroled in 1967, he was put into Vacaville the next year to receive psychiatric treatment. Once again paroled in January 1969, he was arrested ten months later, convicted of attacking a police officer in Los Angeles, and sentenced to six months to ten years. He was in several state penal institutions, escaping briefly from Soledad in December 1971, and then broke out for good from Vacaville last Aug. 2. He served time with DeFreeze at Vacaville, but the two were not known to be close friends. In prison, Wheeler became active in the Venceremos.

WILLIAM WOLFE. Son of a Pennsylvania anesthesiologist, he was attracted to the political activism at Berkeley, where he registered as a student in 1971 and 1972. His friends, who included Remiro and Little, called him "Willie the Wolf." He took black-culture courses at Berkeley and in May 1972 began regularly attending meetings of the Black Cultural Association at various California prisons. On Jan. 11, he was visiting his parents when a friend phoned to say that Remiro and Little had been arrested. That same day he disappeared.

The woman whom the members of the S.L.A. claimed as their latest convert, Tania-Patty, was surely the most unlikely terrorist recruit of all. Granddaughter of the legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst, she grew up with four sisters in a 22-room house in the suburb of Hillsborough. At Berkeley, she was partly supported with $300 a month from a trust fund and credit cards in her father's name. Patty had never demonstrated much interest in politics. Those who know her describe her as reserved and strongwilled. Says Brother-in-Law Jay Bosworth: "I wouldn't characterize her as naive, or as exceptionally worldly. But she was very independent."

Patty left exclusive Santa Catalina, a Monterey boarding school, in 1970 because she found its atmosphere too cloistered. Despite her family's social position, she refused to come out as a debutante. Two years ago, even though her parents disapproved, she moved with Weed into the apartment in Berkeley, near the university where she was a student majoring in art history.

They planned to be married this summer, and Patty had spent much of her time selecting china and silver patterns at Tiffany's and buying dresses. Their life together was tranquil. Says her sister, Virginia Bosworth: "They didn't party a lot. Steve played the guitar and liked to work on his stereo equipment. Patty liked to cook. They both took pride in fixing up the apartment."

Her parents, Randolph Apperson and Catherine Hearst, were notably apolitical and in general stayed aloof from the Burlingame Country Club set around Hillsborough. Since her kidnaping, Randolph, chairman of the Hearst Corp. and editor of the San Francisco Examiner, has devoted himself almost entirely to getting Patty released. Before he paid out $500,000 for food as part of the effort to satisfy the S.L. A.'s demands, he estimated his net worth at $2 million. He earns about $100,000 a year from the Hearst Corp. Wife Catherine, a Southern belle from Atlanta, is a staunch Roman Catholic and a conservative member of the University of California board of regents.

Some of the more conspiratorial amateur speculation about the kidnaping has turned on Steve Weed and is based on rumored and exaggerated reports about his own radical connections. They are more modish than real. The son of a stockbroker in nearby Palo Alto, Weed was graduated from Princeton with a degree in philosophy and physics in 1969; he was captain of the track team and was mildly active in the antiwar movement. True, he was friendly with several members of the university's loosely structured chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. But on only two occasions did he become publicly involved in then activities. The first was when he was enlisted as a ringer to quarterback the chapter's touch-football team to victory over an ROTC squad. The second was when he was accused by a student-faculty discipline committee--and later exonerated--of participating in a sit-in that obstructed a Marine Corps recruiter visiting the campus. Weed was found to be nothing more than a bystander. He was teaching at the Crystal Springs school for girls in Hillsborough when he first met Patty. By last December, the two were engaged, and he had enrolled at Berkeley. Since Patty's kidnaping, Weed has deeply involved himself in the attempt to free her. On April 7, reported New Times, he secretly flew to Mexico City to visit French Marxist Regis Debray, who was one of the original Tania's closest friends. At Weed's behest, Debray wrote Patty a letter that said in part: "I ask you only to assure me that you have consciously and freely chosen to take the name and follow the example of Tania."

The Hearst case's resistant mysteries have spawned a host of speculative theories about what has really happened to Patty. Among them:

> Patty has been killed, and the bank robber was an impostor. There is no evidence to support this dire supposition. It arose apparently because the bank photographs released by the FBI and published in the press are slightly out of focus, making it hard to identify her positively. But the FBI had access to all the bank photographs, and it is certain that the woman was Patty--a conclusion accepted by her parents.

> She was an S.L.A. member all along and helped set up her own abduction. A variation of this theory has Patty helping to plan a kidnaping, not knowing that she was to be the victim (thus her screams as she was carried off: "Please, not me, please!"). Both unlikely conjectures were based on the suspicion--since disproved--that Weed had kept up his leftist contacts and initiated Patty into radical politics. There is nothing in her background or in the circumstances of the kidnaping that would support either version. She had no known radical friends or sympathies, and the man she loved was severely beaten by her abductors. Finally, a piece of evidence was made public last week by the San Francisco Chronicle that undermined the theory. The newspaper reported that three weeks before the kidnaping, local police found a green notebook in which an unidentified S.L.A. member had jotted down these cryptic references to Patty: "At U.C.... daughter of Hearst"; "Junior--art student"; "Patricia Campbell Hearst... the night of the full moon of Jan. 7." Randolph Hearst called the notebook "unquestionable proof that his daughter had "in no way" arranged her own kidnaping.

> Patty, fearing that she might be killed, has pretended to convert to the S.L.A., and was coerced into helping rob the bank. Much of her background, as well as the time she devoted to preparing for her wedding, seems to fit this theory. After her alleged conversion, one student friend said: "It just doesn't sound like her. She's too levelheaded, she's got too much of a sense of humor about things to get involved with something as fanatical as the S.L.A." Further, one of the bank photographs shows DeFreeze and Hall aiming their rifles in Patty's direction, perhaps to make certain that she played her assigned role.

> After two months of intense psychological pressure, Patty was brainwashed into joining her captors and willingly participated in the robbery. To FBI investigators last week, this seemed the most likely theory. Experts on terrorism say that women victims can fall under the spell of their captors, sometimes to the point of forming quasi-love relationships. And some psychiatrists believe that Patty's taped messages indicate that she is not a strong personality and might have been swayed under the strain and terror she has had to endure. Support for that conjecture came last week from Bank Guard Shea, who said: "If she was being coerced, she was doing a damn good job of acting." At one point, according to Shea, Patty cried, "Lie down or I'll shoot your mother---- heads off!" He has no doubt that she meant it. "She had the authoritative voice, the stance and the will to do it," he says. Moreover, bank photographs not released by the FBI show Patty moving about the bank lobby, actively pointing her gun at people, and giving orders. But it is so far simply unknowable whether Patty's rifle was operable (even though it had a clip of cartridges in firing position) or whether she had been threatened with death if she did not act like a willing participant. Another, even darker variant of this theory is that Patty was enslaved by addicting her to heroin, though the S.L.A. abjured any use of hard drugs in its "code of war."

No Structure. The long weeks with no break in the case have led to friction between the law enforcement agencies involved in it. State investigators privately criticize the FBI for adopting "a timid approach" to the kidnaping. The bureau admittedly has followed its established practice of moving cautiously in kidnapings so as not to jeopardize the victim, and it continues to regard Patty as a victim, not a member of the S.L.A. But FBI officials challenged the charge that they were overly cautious. "We've practically turned Berkeley over," said John Kelley, assistant special agent in charge of the investigation. Yet he frankly admits: "We don't know where Patty Hearst is."

Agents have found information about the S.L.A. tough to come by. It took 150 of them more than two months, piecing together bits of information mined from the diverse Berkeley radical elements, to uncover the shape of the S.L.A. and the identities of the nine suspects. The reason for the difficulty is the Symbionese Liberation Army's small and communal organization. Explains one federal law enforcement official: "It has no visible national structure to attack. Against a commune, conventional informants are totally ineffective."

After the robbery, teams of agents made a door-to-door search of San Francisco's Sunset district and continued to comb through the entire Bay Area. Their working assumption was that the S.L.A. had several "safe houses" in the area where members could hide out, meet, plan and disband, once again melting into the radical scene. Agents also assumed that the group was so anonymous that lesser-known members, such as Camilla Hall and Angela Atwood, can be sent out to cash bad checks, buy or steal food and carry messages.

No Deals. In the Hearst home, the mood at week's end was grimmer than ever. There is no more talk of possible deals to free Patty. Weed was a frequent visitor and often stayed at the Hearst home until he and his prospective father-in-law had a mild run-in over Weed's public statements about the case. Now he lives with friends, visiting the family only occasionally.

Once relatively calm and collected, Patty's parents are showing signs of strain. Catherine Hearst seems despondent; her reaction to the bank-robbery pictures reportedly was, "Doesn't my Patty look thin and tired?" Even Randolph Hearst has begun to despair. "We have hope," he says, "but it is not too bright now." He is willing to clutch at any straw and search anywhere for an intermediary who can put him in touch with the S.L.A. He recently visited Clifford Jefferson, a black lifer at Vacaville known as "Death Row Jeff' who knew Cinque very well. Hearst has even talked with a number of psychics in a vain effort to turn up clues.

No one has offered the Hearsts any information that would help answer the agonizing question of whether their daughter was a victim of a nightmarish crime or has become a bank-robbing political terrorist. "How do I know?" Hearst asked rhetorically last week. There isn't any proof until you get hold of Patricia and ask her what happened, and get hold of the others and find out what happened."

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