'Scared She's Going to Be Killed'

Mother and daughter converse through a glass partition that prevents them from touching, so they do the best they can. When their visits are over, Catherine Hearst kisses her own hand and then presses it to the glass. On the other side of the prison barrier, Patty Hearst does the same.

Family friends contend that Patty is now very loving toward her parents; her harsh statements against them are either forgotten or overlooked. Still, the Hearsts are said to be alarmed by the way Patty's mind veers. "Sometimes she's real normal," a close source reports. "But she really is not in very good shape. Talking with her is like talking to a 15-year-old, with lapses back to three years of age." According to a defense attorney, Albert Johnson, "Her attention span is very limited. She does not have a realization of the enormity of the charges against her. Her thoughts are disjointed, disconnected. She thinks of the moment rather than the hour, the day or the future."

Who First? Patty's mental state remains the key issue before the courts. Last week Federal Judge Oliver Carter postponed until at least Oct. 22 the hearing to determine whether she should go free on $500,000 bail pending trial. The delay will give three psychiatrists and one psychologist appointed by the court more time to evaluate her stability. If Patty is found to be mentally incompetent, she could be confined to an institution indefinitely (see THE LAW).

If she is found competent to stand trial, the prosecutors will face another question: who should try her first? Patty has been indicted on one federal count of bank robbery--for her admitted participation in the robbery of a Hibernia Bank in San Francisco--and on eleven state charges of kidnaping, armed bank robbery and assault.

To discuss how to handle the many charges against Patty, 16 federal and state prosecutors, headed by U.S. Attorney James Browning, met in San Francisco. Browning's federal case will probably take precedence. But even after the trials already in the works are over, Patty's long day in court may not have ended. Agents and detectives are investigating evidence that may connect her, as well as her Symbionese Liberation Army companions, William and Emily Harris, to two more bank robberies, one at the Guild Savings & Loan Association in Sacramento on Feb. 25 and the other at the Crocker National Bank near Sacramento on April 21. Indeed, there were twelve bank robberies in the Sacramento area in the first six months of this year, and investigators are now taking a new look at them.

The two robberies for which Patty is under suspicion had one peculiar similarity. At the first, one of the two men who entered the building stood at the door and counted out the seconds to one minute, then yelled, "Let's get out of here!" At the second, a woman, who had a blue bandanna pulled over her face, stood by the door and counted off the time. She noted every 30 seconds until, at 1 1/2 minutes, she began ticking off every second. At two minutes, she too yelled, "Let's get out of here!"

In that second robbery, a blast from a shotgun, fired by one of the raiders, killed a customer, Myrna Lee Opsahl. If Patty was a member of the gang that hit that bank, she could be charged with murder. And agents are already convinced that she took part at least in the preparations for the raid.

The link was a 1967 Pontiac Firebird, stolen in Oakland, Calif., that was used as a getaway car. Investigators believe Patty rented garage space for the car in Sacramento the week before the robbery. The Sacramento police received a tip that the garage had been rented by a young woman who was acting suspiciously. TIME has learned that the police set up a stakeout on the car, which lasted from Monday through Friday, April 14 to 18. No one showed up. But on Saturdays and Sundays only a skeleton police force guards the relaxed city of Sacramento, so the watch was lifted. On Sunday night, the day before the Crocker robbery, the car vanished.

Without Knowing. The casual approach of the Sacramento police may be one reason that Patty and the Harrises were able to avoid capture there from around last Thanksgiving until late May, when they moved to San Francisco. Last spring the Sacramento police stumbled across Patty without knowing it. The fugitives were living in an apartment in a duplex at 1721 W Street in the downtown area. They were using aliases --Patty was known as Sue Hendricks, Emily Harris as Suzanne Lanphear, and Bill Harris as Steve Broudy.

One day in April, the body of a murder victim--having nothing to do with the Symbionese Liberation Army--was found near the house where the trio was living. In a routine check of the area, local police interviewed Hendricks, Lanphear and Broudy. All three reported that nothing unusual had happened on the night before the body was discovered. The police dutifully filed their reports. After Patty and the Harrises were captured last month and traced back to Sacramento, federal agents went through the police files and found the write-ups under the fugitives' aliases.

More and more details are emerging about Patty's life during her odyssey. TIME has also learned that she and the Harrises were living in the house in Los Angeles where six members of the S.L.A. were slain in the blazing shoot-out on May 17, 1974. Shortly before the Los Angeles police and federal agents surrounded the house, Patty and the Harrises were sent out by the others to run a few errands, one of which, apparently, was to steal some money for the group. The three are thought to have taken $400 from a man driving a Lincoln Continental. Then they headed for home, heard the gunfire and fled.

The purported reason for the kidnaping of Patty that started the whole bizarre affair appeared last week in the San Francisco Examiner, the oldest newspaper in the Hearst chain. It printed a lengthy excerpt from an S.L.A. document said to have been found at the Harrises' apartment after their arrest. The paper, which had no identifiable author, declared that the S.L.A. had grabbed Patty in revenge for the arrest on Jan. 10, 1974 of Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, members of the terrorist group who were later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Marcus Foster, Oakland's superintendent of schools. The S.L.A. was convinced that the Hearst family was powerful enough to secure the release of Little and Remiro in exchange for Patty.

For some unexplained reason, the S.L.A. did not immediately offer to trade Patty for the pair. Instead, the group demanded that Randolph Hearst ransom his daughter by giving free food to California's poor in a program that could have cost as much as $400 million. When the publisher spent only $2 million, said the document, the S.L.A. became disillusioned about his intentions and never offered to swap prisoners.

The S.L.A. account does not name any of the persons who kidnaped Patty, but investigators believe that one was Bill Harris, her former comrade in arms. Patty now lives in fear of Harris and of other S.L.A. supporters, perhaps because of the attack on the S.L.A. in the affidavit that her lawyers submitted for her last month. Says a source close to the family: "She's scared she's going to be killed."

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