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Speaker 2: At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at
Speaker 2: President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the
Speaker 2: Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: She missed.
Speaker 2: As we heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted
Speaker 2: La Times reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner
Speaker 2: with her husband. He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't
Speaker 2: talk to him until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen
Speaker 2: come up to San Francisco? She caught the last plane
Speaker 2: a reminder, Sarah Jane was going by the name Sally
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 4: What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto,
Speaker 4: and what I had worked out as a deal with
Speaker 4: my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would
Speaker 4: help her by drafting a statement as she wished it
Speaker 4: to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind
Speaker 4: of help her to draft it, but that that would
Speaker 4: be included in a real news story that I would
Speaker 4: write as I interviewed her in prison.
Speaker 3: So it was a deal where she'd get.
Speaker 4: Her manifesto, but I would get my professional job done,
Speaker 4: but without exploiting her. She would have her statement and
Speaker 4: I would have my story. And she apparently agreed to
Speaker 4: this through her lawyer. So the next day the arraignment occurred.
Speaker 2: September twenty third, was a wild day at the courthouse.
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did
Speaker 2: SLA member Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbs
Speaker 2: coverage of that day in court.
Speaker 5: With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for
Speaker 5: the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air
Speaker 5: of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner.
Speaker 5: Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on
Speaker 5: floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in
Speaker 5: could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below.
Speaker 5: At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on
Speaker 5: Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick.
Speaker 4: Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse
Speaker 4: in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my
Speaker 4: breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse,
Speaker 4: got in there, and then when she was brought into
Speaker 4: the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was
Speaker 4: so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so,
Speaker 4: wanting to give her a signal that I was there
Speaker 4: and was going to talk to her, I jumped up,
Speaker 4: waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down.
Speaker 4: It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal
Speaker 4: that I was there.
Speaker 3: Walter.
Speaker 4: That night on CBS News had a report that a
Speaker 4: supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose.
Speaker 4: And when I talked to Carol Plogash about this recently,
Speaker 4: she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that.
Speaker 4: So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing, but.
Speaker 2: Either no one noticed or no one could be bothered
Speaker 2: to do anything about it. It was just another odd
Speaker 2: moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from the
Speaker 2: Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty Hurst's
Speaker 2: hearing ended.
Speaker 5: The scene became a little confused. At that point, one
Speaker 5: hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and
Speaker 5: headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody
Speaker 5: knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From
Speaker 5: that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The
Speaker 5: elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People
Speaker 5: ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or
Speaker 5: someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically
Speaker 5: for telephones and unlocked doors.
Speaker 4: And then I went back and waited in the hotel
Speaker 4: room and a call came, and her lawyer called me
Speaker 4: and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in,
Speaker 4: but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and
Speaker 4: he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes.
Speaker 4: This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive
Speaker 4: after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't
Speaker 4: have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't
Speaker 4: have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of
Speaker 4: paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's
Speaker 4: all I could take into the interview.
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in
Speaker 2: Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had
Speaker 2: gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there.
Speaker 2: The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of
Speaker 2: the jail's news celebrity inmates.
Speaker 5: There are five singles set and the maximum security corridor
Speaker 5: of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said,
Speaker 5: one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it,
Speaker 5: one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst
Speaker 5: and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across
Speaker 5: the corridor from each other. It has been reported here
Speaker 5: that the two women discussed that episode that touched both
Speaker 5: their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't
Speaker 5: seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said.
Speaker 4: So I go in there and the first thing I
Speaker 4: say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater,
Speaker 4: I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said,
Speaker 4: because the FBI killed your story on me. I said,
Speaker 4: what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the
Speaker 4: paper this morning.
Speaker 3: I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to run today.
Speaker 2: It's supposed to run Wednesday.
Speaker 4: And she said, oh, and looked downcast. Can you imagine
Speaker 4: how amazing and terrible and weird that whole thing was.
Speaker 4: I said to myself, Okay, so my story didn't run,
Speaker 4: and that's why she tried to kill the president. I state,
Speaker 4: wait a minute.
Speaker 3: But I understood that she believed that story.
Speaker 4: Was going to save her life. And I, now, having
Speaker 4: thought about this for all these forty some years, understand
Speaker 4: that by trying to kill the president, and she was
Speaker 4: mentally unstable. Okay, she was emotionally ill. This was not
Speaker 4: a well person, and I didn't understand that at the time,
Speaker 4: but she clearly wasn't She believed that if she did
Speaker 4: something really dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view,
Speaker 4: then they wouldn't kill her.
Speaker 6: I'm Toby Ball and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this
Speaker 6: is rip current.
Speaker 7: Nay, she was a lovely child. And sixty days later,
Speaker 7: I bet you're ever in a bank where the gun
Speaker 7: that I had you. I don't think anybody.
Speaker 6: Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that
Speaker 6: only kooks do it.
Speaker 2: Americans who saw the dramatic Conversions from Middle American to
Speaker 2: Radical Young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to
Speaker 2: try to understand what had happened. The first was a
Speaker 2: series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War.
Speaker 8: My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry
Speaker 8: at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in
Speaker 8: the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that
Speaker 8: made people more persuadable, and people started doing un accountable
Speaker 8: things that were just difficult to explain.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five
Speaker 2: other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare
Speaker 2: against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice
Speaker 2: was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live
Speaker 2: in communists China rather than return home. In between these
Speaker 2: two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts.
Speaker 2: The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: and it now was used to try to explain what
Speaker 2: had happened. Timothy Melly professor of English at Miami University
Speaker 2: told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is
Speaker 2: designed to address is the question why would anybody become
Speaker 2: a communist. It is a story that we tell to
Speaker 2: explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the
Speaker 2: time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause
Speaker 2: fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even
Speaker 2: allow complete control over them.
Speaker 8: So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress,
Speaker 8: force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them,
Speaker 8: isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for
Speaker 8: coercion and persuasion.
Speaker 2: The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a
Speaker 2: returning Korean War soldier whose conditioned to commit an assassination
Speaker 2: when he receives a signal allow me.
Speaker 9: To introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to
Speaker 9: forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have conditioned them
Speaker 9: or brainwashed them, which I understand that the new American work.
Speaker 2: The second incident was the attempt by a parolee named
Speaker 2: Jan Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit Banking
Speaker 2: in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and a
Speaker 2: partner held four hostages inside the bank for six days
Speaker 2: before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault.
Speaker 2: None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers,
Speaker 2: and in fact began to raise money to aid in
Speaker 2: their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their
Speaker 2: captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look
Speaker 2: back even further a century ago to the earliest observation
Speaker 2: of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist
Speaker 2: Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned
Speaker 2: to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with
Speaker 2: being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning.
Speaker 2: Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Speaker 2: The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in
Speaker 2: this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg
Speaker 2: experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose.
Speaker 2: The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high
Speaker 2: as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually,
Speaker 2: Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do
Speaker 2: this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling
Speaker 2: them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic
Speaker 2: for the dogs, and.
Speaker 8: What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation
Speaker 8: was so extensive that the dogs were never the same.
Speaker 8: They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius.
Speaker 8: He could teach a dog to respond to middle C
Speaker 8: on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He
Speaker 8: was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything
Speaker 8: that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov
Speaker 8: observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of
Speaker 8: a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of
Speaker 8: them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used
Speaker 8: to like hated serge thereafter. So massive stress seems to
Speaker 8: shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans, in
Speaker 8: a way that causes people to forget.
Speaker 2: This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design,
Speaker 2: can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change
Speaker 2: is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this
Speaker 2: was not the case in the mid seventies. But before
Speaker 2: we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who
Speaker 2: was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a
Speaker 2: statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Speaker 4: After we did the interview, I went back to my
Speaker 4: hotel room in draft of the statement, and I would
Speaker 4: call a lawyer and read it to him and over
Speaker 4: and over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it.
Speaker 4: I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it.
Speaker 4: So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I
Speaker 4: will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this
Speaker 4: is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that.
Speaker 4: And it's important to me to note that I really
Speaker 4: tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to
Speaker 4: help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in
Speaker 4: any way. But the story that came out in the Times,
Speaker 4: the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact
Speaker 4: that she had thought a story was going to run
Speaker 4: about her, and that she thought that was going to
Speaker 4: save her life. It was just that she wanted to
Speaker 4: prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my
Speaker 4: interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece
Speaker 4: that she had said to me about why she had
Speaker 4: done it. I now look back on it as she
Speaker 4: probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I
Speaker 4: did my interview with her was it ran the next
Speaker 4: day in the La Times, and it ran in every
Speaker 4: paper all around the world because it was an exclusive
Speaker 4: jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had
Speaker 4: access to her.
Speaker 2: Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the
Speaker 2: attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes
Speaker 2: of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on
Speaker 2: forward within the framework and language of the radical movement.
Speaker 2: These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 6: I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of
Speaker 6: myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid
Speaker 6: I would go around shooting people. And then it was
Speaker 6: kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did
Speaker 6: not want to kill somebody. But there comes a point
Speaker 6: when the only way you can make a statement is
Speaker 6: to pick up a gun.
Speaker 2: In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger
Speaker 2: of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what
Speaker 2: she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired
Speaker 2: revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow
Speaker 2: force the radical movement to unite, to.
Speaker 6: Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led
Speaker 6: to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I
Speaker 6: wanted them to face the realities of some of the
Speaker 6: things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things.
Speaker 6: But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind
Speaker 6: of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven
Speaker 6: to act.
Speaker 2: The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a
Speaker 2: musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye.
Speaker 4: I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls.
Speaker 4: I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth
Speaker 4: was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about
Speaker 4: what had happened, and again I thought that I might
Speaker 4: have been able to stop it, and it just killed
Speaker 4: me that I hadn't taken that call.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There
Speaker 6: was no question that she had fired at the president.
Speaker 6: The only hope for her lay in some kind of
Speaker 6: mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was
Speaker 6: sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not
Speaker 6: very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not
Speaker 6: in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she
Speaker 6: suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree
Speaker 6: that she was competent to stand trial while she met
Speaker 6: the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew
Speaker 6: her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly
Speaker 6: perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash.
Speaker 3: She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred
Speaker 3: to any of us that she would act on it.
Speaker 3: She was this nutty person who none of us took
Speaker 3: seriously until we had to.
Speaker 6: But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial,
Speaker 6: her defense would have to be that she had not
Speaker 6: been competent at the time of the assassination attempt on
Speaker 6: December ninth. Her lawyer at the time, a man named
Speaker 6: James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental
Speaker 6: condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in
Speaker 6: her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot
Speaker 6: at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of
Speaker 6: a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and
Speaker 6: she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's
Speaker 6: why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to
Speaker 6: draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here,
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams.
Speaker 10: The government has to believe that any political act of
Speaker 10: that sort, they would likely one to believe that.
Speaker 3: Only kooks do it.
Speaker 10: That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that
Speaker 10: would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they
Speaker 10: must put it down to kooks. They must say that
Speaker 10: these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels
Speaker 10: me to say that it was an an out that
Speaker 10: was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy.
Speaker 10: That's your that's your your route to freedom.
Speaker 11: You mean the government offered you, yes, who Well, in
Speaker 11: terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it was
Speaker 11: as overt.
Speaker 8: As that.
Speaker 6: Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three
Speaker 6: days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in
Speaker 6: front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty.
Speaker 6: Journalist Ellen Hume.
Speaker 4: When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the
Speaker 4: judicial system because here was a person with mental illness.
Speaker 4: She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and
Speaker 4: not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that
Speaker 4: meant she's just going to be in prison for the
Speaker 4: rest of her life, which she pretty much was.
Speaker 12: Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I
Speaker 12: know a lot of this poilet game, but it was
Speaker 12: pretty obvious manipulated it into pleading.
Speaker 6: Lawyer Peggy Garrity.
Speaker 3: I's been a lawyer for about five minutes.
Speaker 12: At this point. There was a woman who was very
Speaker 12: involved in feminist organizations in the office I was renting
Speaker 12: a space from, and she was contacted and she didn't
Speaker 12: want to deal with it, and something about Sarah Jane
Speaker 12: was not getting access to her child.
Speaker 6: This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son by
Speaker 6: John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her. After Sarah Jane's arrest,
Speaker 6: Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he
Speaker 6: graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 12: I was so excited about being in the practice of law.
Speaker 12: I was dying to go out to the federal prison.
Speaker 12: So I went out and talked to her and left,
Speaker 12: thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something
Speaker 12: else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child.
Speaker 12: So I talked to her about everything, and I decided
Speaker 12: I could do basically effectively hate this corpus to help
Speaker 12: her not get out, I guess, but get a trial.
Speaker 12: She would talk to me like she didn't talk to
Speaker 12: other people. So I just said something fun, like a
Speaker 12: new brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god,
Speaker 12: an assassin, a real assassin.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months
Speaker 6: before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She
Speaker 6: had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as
Speaker 6: a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Jane's loneliness.
Speaker 4: But I went to visit her in Long Beach because
Speaker 4: that's where one of the prisons where she was being
Speaker 4: held and surprisingly they let me in as if I
Speaker 4: were a family member, and we hugged each other because
Speaker 4: you know, I always was kind of supportive of her
Speaker 4: in many ways, and just in terms of listening to her,
Speaker 4: not because I supported her ideas. She was glad to
Speaker 4: have somebody visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know.
Speaker 4: I did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness.
Speaker 4: But I realized after that she was so unstable. She
Speaker 4: could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me
Speaker 4: in the back as I hugged her, and I thought
Speaker 4: I better not go back there again. And I didn't.
Speaker 6: This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out
Speaker 6: to be well placed.
Speaker 12: So I spent a lot of time going back and forth,
Speaker 12: and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something.
Speaker 12: So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed
Speaker 12: guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla
Speaker 12: folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. I'm like,
Speaker 12: I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's
Speaker 12: in there is not a good thing. And even the
Speaker 12: rookie years I am.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh nope.
Speaker 12: So I when I leave here. I don't go through
Speaker 12: the metal detector, I go around it. I get back
Speaker 12: to my office and I open up and it shived
Speaker 12: that big, it's like twelve inches. I kept it for
Speaker 12: a long time and it disappeared. I don't know where
Speaker 12: it went.
Speaker 6: So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued
Speaker 6: to maintain that she was completely saying her time in
Speaker 6: the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her
Speaker 6: understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that
Speaker 6: it was all because the FBI had used her as
Speaker 6: an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never
Speaker 6: have become involved to that degree with the radical movement
Speaker 6: and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems
Speaker 6: fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried
Speaker 6: different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a
Speaker 6: number of times, Women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife,
Speaker 6: doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on
Speaker 6: without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in
Speaker 6: her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most
Speaker 6: likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion
Speaker 6: to the radical young but were there other contributing factors.
Speaker 6: We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely
Speaker 6: led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch
Speaker 6: to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean
Speaker 6: War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst,
Speaker 6: she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation,
Speaker 6: indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her
Speaker 6: habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her
Speaker 6: sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to know
Speaker 6: for sure, of course, but it may explain her actions
Speaker 6: and her assessment of her situation in the radical underground.
Speaker 6: When feeling she had no recourse, she took the shot.
Speaker 6: The judicial course following Lynette's and Sarah Jane's attempts denied
Speaker 6: the opportunity to find out more about their conversion experiences.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane pled guilty and wasn't brought to trial. Lynette
Speaker 6: was brought to trial, but managed to turn it into
Speaker 6: a farce. She initially tried to serve as her own
Speaker 6: defense attorney, but was unable to abide by the rules
Speaker 6: of the court. After that, she essentially refused to attend
Speaker 6: the trial, and on the occasion she did refused to
Speaker 6: walk so had to be carried by a deputy to
Speaker 6: the court room. She provided minimal cooperation with her defense attorney,
Speaker 6: and at one point threw an apple at the prosecutor,
Speaker 6: hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses.
Speaker 6: You get the picture. She was found guilty and sentenced
Speaker 6: to life in prison. With that a real examination of
Speaker 6: how she had come so thoroughly under Manson's sway. But
Speaker 6: this was not the case with Patty Hurst. In fact,
Speaker 6: her trial revolved primarily around this question, did Patty actually
Speaker 6: become a revolutionary and if so, did she become one
Speaker 6: of her own free will or was she brainwashed? After
Speaker 6: the break, Joan Beck joined the Chicago Tribune as one
Speaker 6: of the very few women working in the newsroom in
Speaker 6: nineteen fifty. She worked her way from lifestyle beat topics
Speaker 6: such as fashion and cooking, to harder news focusing on
Speaker 6: topics such as education and medical research. In nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 6: she became the first woman to serve on the Tribune's
Speaker 6: editorial board and began writing a commentary column. On Friday
Speaker 6: September twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, a week and a
Speaker 6: day after the capture of Patty Hurst, Beck wrote a
Speaker 6: column titled many Parents study Patty for Answers.
Speaker 5: In it, she wrote, one of the most fearsome aspects
Speaker 5: of this long, tragic story has been trying to explain
Speaker 5: in some rational way why a beloved daughter of what
Speaker 5: may seem to be good, caring parents could turn as
Speaker 5: harshly and hatefully on her family and their lifestyle as
Speaker 5: she seemed to have done. Patty's public rejection of her
Speaker 5: family in the taped Pighirst messages differs only in degree
Speaker 5: in drama from the kind of rejection many other parents
Speaker 5: have been getting from young adult children whose behavior they
Speaker 5: can no longer understand, and they are desperately hungry for
Speaker 5: any crumbs of understanding. Too often, there seems to be
Speaker 5: no family pathology, no social trauma sufficient to account for
Speaker 5: some of the young adults who are spoiling their lives
Speaker 5: with drugs, or losing their bearings in sexual experimentation, or
Speaker 5: dropping out of college aimlessly, or generally balking at growing
Speaker 5: up into responsible adults.
Speaker 6: Parents confused by their children adopting seemingly incomprehensible political and
Speaker 6: ethical beliefs probably goes back millennia, but came into particular
Speaker 6: relief with the emergence of the radical Young in the
Speaker 6: nineteen sixties. That Patty Hurst had changed, at least temporarily
Speaker 6: during her time with the sla seemed obvious. But how
Speaker 6: much free will did she have in the matter. When
Speaker 6: she heard of Patty's arrest, her mother, Catherine said, thank God,
Speaker 6: she's all right. Please call it a rescue, not a capture.
Speaker 6: To her, Patty was the victim who needed to be saved,
Speaker 6: not the gun toting revolutionary. The question of which of
Speaker 6: these two people Patty really was became the crux of
Speaker 6: her trial.
Speaker 13: The story that Patricia Hurst today began telling is a
Speaker 13: horror story of being captured, tortured, driven to the brink
Speaker 13: of insanity from which she is only now beginning to return.
Speaker 13: That is her story that will be her to pace.
Speaker 11: She was in court for a hearing today.
Speaker 13: Her lawyer is saying she is in too fragile a
Speaker 13: condition to take the witness in. The judge saying Hilla
Speaker 13: Point's psychiaprists to examine her because of all she claims
Speaker 13: to have been proved. She did not speak in court,
Speaker 13: but her affidavit was admitted, and it told her story
Speaker 13: of being kidnapped, thrown in the front of a car,
Speaker 13: taken to a hideout, and forced into a closet for
Speaker 13: nine weeks.
Speaker 6: When Patti Hurst was arrested on September eighteenth, the public
Speaker 6: had no idea what her experience over the past nineteen
Speaker 6: months had been. The only clues were the audio communicates
Speaker 6: that had been released in the early days of her
Speaker 6: time with the SLA, and then her participation in the
Speaker 6: robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Her months with the SLA
Speaker 6: were a complete void, and given the interest in the case,
Speaker 6: it is not much of an exaggeration to say that
Speaker 6: the nation waited anxiously for the story to emerge. The
Speaker 6: first inkling came from the affidavit filed with the court
Speaker 6: by her defense. One of her attorneys, Terence Halenan, read
Speaker 6: from the affidavit in front of a press gaggle.
Speaker 14: She remained in that case with her hands brown, blindfolded
Speaker 14: and no lights on.
Speaker 7: The closet was.
Speaker 14: Hot and extremely uncomfortable. When the blind plot was removed,
Speaker 14: she felt that if she were on an LSD trip.
Speaker 14: Everything was out of proportion, big and distorted.
Speaker 13: The suggestion there that she had been drugged also was
Speaker 13: so weak by then she could barely stand.
Speaker 14: After an interminable length of time, which seemed to her
Speaker 14: to be weeks, she was released from the closet and
Speaker 14: seated with the gang of captors who were at that
Speaker 14: time discussing the robbery of a.
Speaker 6: Bank, and the SLA members told Patty that she had
Speaker 6: to accompany them during the bank robbery. She needed to
Speaker 6: allow herself to be photographed and to say her name
Speaker 6: out loud so there would be no doubt she was
Speaker 6: actively involved in the hold up.
Speaker 13: That was the hard Brunnia bank hold up, and Patricia
Speaker 13: Hurst did exactly as she claimed she was ordered to do,
Speaker 13: because the epidavit says she held her mind clouding he
Speaker 13: was losing her sanity.
Speaker 6: This was functionally the beginning of her defense, positioning her
Speaker 6: actions with the SLA as a product of fear and brainwashing,
Speaker 6: but very quickly a different narrative was also put forward.
Speaker 6: This came in the form of a Blockbuster magazine article
Speaker 6: that portrayed Patty Hursts time with the SLA in a
Speaker 6: very different and more complicated light.
Speaker 15: My breakthrough was a big expos of Timothy Leary testifying
Speaker 15: before grand jury's about how the weather Underground broke him
Speaker 15: out of prison. But in the process, the sources and
Speaker 15: the people I got to know throughout the Bay area
Speaker 15: led me to the hearst situation.
Speaker 6: This is retired journalist David Weir. He and his good
Speaker 6: friend Howard Khne researched and wrote a blockbuster article for
Speaker 6: Rolling Stone magazine about Patty Hurst and the SLA at
Speaker 6: a time when the FBI was having no luck in
Speaker 6: finding them.
Speaker 15: I started realizing and that I knew people that knew
Speaker 15: people that knew people that were the people helping the SLA.
Speaker 15: So Howard and I told John Winner. He of course
Speaker 15: recognized it was the biggest story in the world and
Speaker 15: was excited. But our condition was don't publish it until
Speaker 15: they catch her, because we don't want to be essentially
Speaker 15: snitches helping the FBI catch these people whether we agree
Speaker 15: with them or not.
Speaker 6: John Winner was the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone.
Speaker 6: He agreed to hold off in publishing the article. The article,
Speaker 6: titled The Inside Story, was released a month after Patty's arrest.
Speaker 6: They had the biggest scoop on the planet.
Speaker 15: We were just valuged with reporters. Reporters came from all directions,
Speaker 15: and you know, Rolling Stone at that point was on
Speaker 15: Third Street in San Francisco in a warehouse office and
Speaker 15: crowded around, and we were both twenty eight and I'd
Speaker 15: never appeared before the press before. Howard kind of went catatonic.
Speaker 15: He didn't have anything to say. Joan Wenner, the head
Speaker 15: of the magazine, was hiding in his office. He didn't
Speaker 15: want to come out and deal with it. So it
Speaker 15: was all on me. And like I say, I'd never
Speaker 15: done anything like this before in my life.
Speaker 6: This is David Weir at that press conference.
Speaker 16: Our information is that the political content of their arguments
Speaker 16: about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country and
Speaker 16: a lot of things that a lot of us would
Speaker 16: agree with, did make an impact on Patty Hurst, and
Speaker 16: that she was receptive to these correct political positions, and
Speaker 16: that so she did come to have a sympathy with
Speaker 16: what the SLA was telling her. Politically, then, as we
Speaker 16: understand it, her conversion was more emotional in the end
Speaker 16: then political, in that the SLA people warmed up to her,
Speaker 16: called her sister, treated her in a friendly way after
Speaker 16: being at first unfriendly and more threatening to her. That
Speaker 16: complex sort of three folded says, circumstances led to the conversion,
Speaker 16: not this sort of simplistic brainwashing theory that I think
Speaker 16: has been has been spread so far.
Speaker 15: We had a different narrative. It's not that we said
Speaker 15: that she absolutely had one hundred percent sincerely converted into
Speaker 15: a revolutionary soldier.
Speaker 8: It's just that.
Speaker 15: We conveyed that that was the impression that all the
Speaker 15: people were met her during those many months underground came
Speaker 15: away with. She seemed to be almost the fiercest SLA soldier,
Speaker 15: and her actions tended to verify that. When Bill Harris
Speaker 15: and Emily Harris had shoplifted and were in danger of
Speaker 15: being caught at Mels Hardware in La, it was Patty
Speaker 15: in the getaway car who strayed the hardware front and
Speaker 15: the people there with machine gun bullets, so they escaped,
Speaker 15: And so actions like that really were hard to reconcile
Speaker 15: with the kidnap victim.
Speaker 2: This more complicated story was the focus of the Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone article, which described Patty's political and emotional indoctrination, her
Speaker 2: growing sense of betrayal by her parents, and her emerging
Speaker 2: view of societal problems. The following short excerpts are in
Speaker 2: the same order they appeared in Weir and Cohene's article,
Speaker 2: and show how they detailed the process of Patty's conversion.
Speaker 5: So Patty grew impatient as the ransom negotiations bogged down.
Speaker 5: I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth.
Speaker 5: She later said, like they figured I was worth two million,
Speaker 5: but I wasn't worth ten million. It was a terrible
Speaker 5: feeling that my parents could think of me in terms
Speaker 5: of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over by degrees,
Speaker 5: her disillusionment with her parents turned into sympathy for the SLA.
Speaker 5: For a month, she had been kept in a small
Speaker 5: isolation chamber approximating a San Quentin whole. She became weak
Speaker 5: and could hardly stand up. To be able to walk
Speaker 5: freely from one room to another seemed the world's greatest pleasure.
Speaker 5: Patty was urged to attend the SLA's daily political study sessions.
Speaker 5: She was invited to listen to the SLA National anthem,
Speaker 5: an eerie jazz composition of wind and strings that Sink
Speaker 5: had selected, and she was furnished with statistical evidence and
Speaker 5: quotations from George Jackson and Rochelle McGee that promoted her
Speaker 5: political development.
Speaker 2: George Jackson and Rochelle McGhee were prison radicals whose writings
Speaker 2: were influential in the revolutionary movement.
Speaker 5: Patty was shown a long list of herst family holdings,
Speaker 5: nine newspapers, thirteen magazines, four TV and radio stations, a
Speaker 5: silver mine, a paper, and prime real estate. Her parents
Speaker 5: clearly were part of the ruling elite, and the only
Speaker 5: power that could fight that money was the power that
Speaker 5: came out of the barrel of a gun. The SLA's
Speaker 5: motives made more sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hurst
Speaker 5: wealth to more needy people. It was her parents and
Speaker 5: the economic class they represented who were to blame for
Speaker 5: her misery and countless authors. The SLA members encouraged her radicalization.
Speaker 5: They hugged her, called her sister, and ended her loneliness.
Speaker 5: Patty's conversion was as much emotional as political. Seven weeks
Speaker 5: after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the SLA.
Speaker 2: Patty Hirst's trial for her participation in the Hibernia bank
Speaker 2: robbery began on February fourth, nineteen seventy six. Again Professor
Speaker 2: Emeritis Joel Dimmesdale.
Speaker 8: Her trial wasn't about who done it? Was why has
Speaker 8: she done it? And the psychiatric testimony formed the guts
Speaker 8: of the trial, and it was like a formal struggle
Speaker 8: between these different expert opinions. So the defense psychiatrist's view
Speaker 8: was that she was under massive stress, she was isolated,
Speaker 8: she dissociated, and that in essence, her behavior was coerced.
Speaker 2: This defense required the jury to accept the more complicated
Speaker 2: view of control, that it could be the result of
Speaker 2: things like the terror of a violent kidnapping, isolation in
Speaker 2: a closet for weeks, and forced indoctrination. It also tied
Speaker 2: her participation in the bank robbery to her seeming conversion
Speaker 2: to the SLA. But the prosecution had a different, arguably
Speaker 2: simpler view.
Speaker 8: The prosecution argued for a very narrow definition of coersion.
Speaker 8: If I hold a gun to your head, I'd tell
Speaker 8: you to rob a bank right now, that's coercion. But
Speaker 8: if I tell you rob a bank tomorrow, is that
Speaker 8: coersion now? The SLA told Patty that if she didn't
Speaker 8: join them, they would come after her family, and in
Speaker 8: fact they did come after her family. They bombed a
Speaker 8: family household.
Speaker 2: This was the bombing of Hurst Castle on February twelfth,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six by the New World Liberation Front, the
Speaker 2: group who publicly accused Popeye Jackson of being a police
Speaker 2: informant right before his execution, and who committed this bombing
Speaker 2: in support of the SLA. It caused about five point
Speaker 2: five million of today's dollars in damage to the property.
Speaker 8: The jury, initially, they were all very sympathetic to Patty.
Speaker 8: Had thought no kidnapping, no participation in the robbery, she
Speaker 8: wouldn't have been there. As they went into the details
Speaker 8: of the case, they rather quickly came to a decision
Speaker 8: that she was guilty. The second piece of it, of course,
Speaker 8: is well, should there be mitigating circumstances. It's one thing
Speaker 8: to say she's guilty, but marked these unusual circumstances. Oddly enough,
Speaker 8: the court did not decide that there was anything mitigating
Speaker 8: about this at all. They said she was a rich brat,
Speaker 8: and they sentenced her to the average sentence in California
Speaker 8: at that time for a first time. Bank Robert gave
Speaker 8: her no extra mitigation consideration at all and set her
Speaker 8: off to jail.
Speaker 2: And so the jury found that despite enduring many of
Speaker 2: the same conditions as the Korean War, POW's isolation, fear, indoctrination.
Speaker 2: None of this mattered. She was responsible for the actions.
Speaker 2: She'd made a conscious decision to become a revolutionary, and
Speaker 2: this may have been the correct verdict.
Speaker 15: When you think about it. The big questions that remain.
Speaker 15: Did Patty suffer from Stockholm syndrome, from being held in
Speaker 15: the closet and perhaps fearing she'd be killed and the
Speaker 15: trauma of being kidnapped, or did she voluntarily convert to
Speaker 15: becoming an SLA soldier, or are there nuances of this
Speaker 15: that she may have been initially traumatized but also was
Speaker 15: a very rebellious person. She was only a teenager, and
Speaker 15: she'd been a rebellious girl from very young age, getting
Speaker 15: into trouble and having to change schools from the age
Speaker 15: of twelve or fourteen in these private religious schools and
Speaker 15: things like that.
Speaker 2: Even the people within the radical movement weren't sure.
Speaker 15: It was a very public debate about that, but internally
Speaker 15: throughout the network of people supporting the SLA and helping
Speaker 15: the survivors, particularly after the LA shootout, there was a
Speaker 15: debate among the people who were our sources, I can
Speaker 15: honestly say nobody seemed to know for sure, and I
Speaker 15: can say fifty years later, I don't know for sure.
Speaker 15: Patty Hurst herself may not know for sure. I think
Speaker 15: this is an incredibly complicated situation. And I remember interviewing
Speaker 15: cops doing some other stories. As they drive around the
Speaker 15: city at bus stops, they would look at the people
Speaker 15: waiting at the bus stop and the way they would
Speaker 15: pace and the number of steps they would take and say,
Speaker 15: that guy was in San Quentin, guy was in Fulsome
Speaker 15: that guy was in David. They could tell years after freedom,
Speaker 15: who had been imprisoned where by their pacing, Because prisoners,
Speaker 15: like animals in the cage, pace the perimeter over and
Speaker 15: over and over all day long. It gets imprinted in
Speaker 15: their mind. So what I'm saying is I think once
Speaker 15: somebody has been kidnapped, they're always a kidnapped victim. Even
Speaker 15: after they're free, they're never truly free.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy three, the top grossing film in the
Speaker 2: United States was The Exorcist, the story of an adolescent
Speaker 2: girl possessed by a demon. A famous moment from the
Speaker 2: film comes when the girl's mother is pleading with a
Speaker 2: priest to consider the possibility that her daughter is possessed.
Speaker 2: She says, i'd.
Speaker 9: Known my gut.
Speaker 17: I'm telling you that that thing upstairs isn't my daughter.
Speaker 2: This quote echo the reactions of parents of many of
Speaker 2: the people involved in this story. In episode two, we
Speaker 2: heard Manson follower Susan Atkins, father, you.
Speaker 18: Can be involved in almost anything because the hypnotic trans
Speaker 18: you won't do something that is basically against who but
Speaker 18: you know is right. But under you can do almost anything.
Speaker 18: I don't know how to stand by her side. I
Speaker 18: lost her.
Speaker 2: In an interview with the La Times, Martin Solia, the
Speaker 2: father of the three Solia siblings who joined the SLA, said.
Speaker 5: They were good kids, good students, and Stephen was an athlete.
Speaker 5: But they went up north and got screwed up at home.
Speaker 5: They were good right wing Republicans who got up every
Speaker 5: morning and pledged allegiance to the flag. How do you
Speaker 5: figure it?
Speaker 2: And Randolph Hurst echoed this sentiment to the press after
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst appeared as a militant in the Hibernia bank robbery.
Speaker 7: You have a reaction though it. Iay, she was a
Speaker 7: lovely child, and sixty days later the picture over in
Speaker 7: a bank with a gun in her hand. You know,
Speaker 7: I didn't think anybody feel.
Speaker 2: It's disorienting. When someone undergoes a fundamental change in their
Speaker 2: perception of the world, the people around them wonder what happened.
Speaker 2: What caused Lynette from to follow Manson, Patty Hurst to
Speaker 2: join the SLA, Sarah Jane Moore to become a self
Speaker 2: styled Marxist revolutionary. Was it mental illness? Was a coercive persuasion?
Speaker 2: Was it a sudden realization of truths about the country
Speaker 2: and the world that had been hidden before and were
Speaker 2: now a parent along with an ideology to direct how
Speaker 2: to think about it? And how do you know? It
Speaker 2: seems to me that any huge shift in a person's
Speaker 2: understanding of the world will seem to those around them
Speaker 2: as the product of mental illness or coercive persuasion. People
Speaker 2: would probably say brainwashing, but the person who has made
Speaker 2: the change probably experiences it as a lifting of the
Speaker 2: veil of a burst of understanding. Lynette, Sarah Jane, and
Speaker 2: Patty each most likely experienced either mental illness or coercive persuasion,
Speaker 2: or both. They ended up at the furthest extremes of
Speaker 2: the radical young. They are not representative of the millions
Speaker 2: of people who adopted the new ethos that developed during
Speaker 2: what we call the sixties. They are the exceptions, anomalies
Speaker 2: whose journeys somehow all ended within a two and a
Speaker 2: half week period in northern California. This is Paggy Gharrity
Speaker 2: talking about a prison meeting she had with Sarah Jane.
Speaker 12: Well, you're sitting in the prison yard is like patio tables, umbrellas,
Speaker 12: round tables, and were sitting there and she says, that's
Speaker 12: squeaky over it. She's staring at us. And I look
Speaker 12: over and this tiny little person it's glaring, glaring, glaring.
Speaker 12: It was really creepy, super creepy. Em sitting with one
Speaker 12: assassin looking at another, and I'm I'm like, okay, yeah, lawyer.
Speaker 12: For maybe two years at this point, there were moments
Speaker 12: I thought I'm in this thing too deep.
Speaker 19: Ford had his hands out and was waving and had
Speaker 19: just come from breakfast with the businessman, and he looked
Speaker 19: like cardboard to me.
Speaker 6: Lynette from was released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell
Speaker 6: in Fort Worth, Texas, on August fourteenth, two thousand and nine.
Speaker 6: She now lives in upstate New York, And.
Speaker 17: I know it's really hard to understand, because it's really
Speaker 17: hard for me now to try to think of of
Speaker 17: our what it was really in my mind, you know
Speaker 17: how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy.
Speaker 17: This doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 6: President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty her sentence after she had
Speaker 6: served twenty two months for robbing the Hibernia Bank. She
Speaker 6: was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in Dublin, California,
Speaker 6: on February first, nineteen seventy nine. President Bill Clinton pardoned
Speaker 6: her on January twentieth, two thousand and one, his last
Speaker 6: day in office. She currently lives on the East Coast
Speaker 6: and raises show dogs.
Speaker 10: In the very nature of the act that I committed,
Speaker 10: you know, I made an irrevocable commitment to a cause.
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane Moore also served a term at the Federal
Speaker 2: Correctional Institution Dublin. She was released on December thirty one,
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven. She lives in a nursing home
Speaker 2: in Nashville, Tennessee. During Sarah Jane's interview with Playboy magazine,
Speaker 2: writer Andrew Hill asked if she could what she was
Speaker 2: feeling on the day she shot at gerald Ford. She
Speaker 2: responded by reciting a poem she'd written.
Speaker 6: Hold hold still my hand, steady my eye, chill my heart,
Speaker 6: and let my gun sing for the people scream their anger,
Speaker 6: cleanse with their hate, and kill This monster.
Speaker 2: Is the monster in this poem Ford, I don't think so.
Speaker 2: No one was screaming their anger about gerald Ford. They
Speaker 2: were screaming their anger about America. In Sarah Jane's own telling,
Speaker 2: the end of her journey in the Radical Underground was
Speaker 2: a single gunshot at a symbol of all that she
Speaker 2: had come to hate about her country, a single gunshot
Speaker 2: that missed.
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