November 21, 2024 • 49 mins
The arrests of Lynette Fromme, Patty Hearst, and Sara Jane Moore in a 17-day period lead to unprecedented interest. How do people suddenly change from one set of beliefs to another? Patty Hearst’s trial hinges on the answer to this question. Fromme and Moore never have to answer that question.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second,
nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at
President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the
Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
She missed.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
As we heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted
La Times reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner
with her husband. He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't
talk to him until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen
come up to San Francisco? She caught the last plane
a reminder, Sarah Jane was going by the name Sally
(00:58):
at the time.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto,
and what I had worked out as a deal with
my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would
help her by drafting a statement as she wished it
to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind
of help her to draft it, but that that would
be included in a real news story that I would
(01:20):
write as I interviewed her in prison.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
So it was a deal where she'd get.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Her manifesto, but I would get my professional job done,
but without exploiting her. She would have her statement and
I would have my story. And she apparently agreed to
this through her lawyer. So the next day the arraignment occurred.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
September twenty third, was a wild day at the courthouse.
Sarah Jane and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did
SLA member Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbs
coverage of that day in court.
Speaker 5 (01:55):
With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for
the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air
of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner.
Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on
floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in
could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below.
At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on
(02:17):
Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse
in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my
breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse,
got in there, and then when she was brought into
the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was
so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so,
(02:43):
wanting to give her a signal that I was there
and was going to talk to her, I jumped up,
waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down.
It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal
that I was there.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Walter.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
That night on CBS News had a report that a
supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose.
And when I talked to Carol Plogash about this recently,
she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that.
So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing, but.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Either no one noticed or no one could be bothered
to do anything about it. It was just another odd
moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from the
Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty Hurst's
hearing ended.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
The scene became a little confused. At that point, one
hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and
headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody
knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From
that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The
elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People
ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or
(04:00):
someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically
for telephones and unlocked doors.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
And then I went back and waited in the hotel
room and a call came, and her lawyer called me
and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in,
but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and
he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes.
This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive
after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't
have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't
(04:32):
have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of
paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's
all I could take into the interview.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in
Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had
gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there.
The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of
the jail's news celebrity inmates.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
There are five singles set and the maximum security corridor
of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said,
one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it,
one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst
and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across
the corridor from each other. It has been reported here
(05:19):
that the two women discussed that episode that touched both
their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't
seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
So I go in there and the first thing I
say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater,
I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said,
because the FBI killed your story on me. I said,
what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the
paper this morning.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to run today.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
It's supposed to run Wednesday.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
And she said, oh, and looked downcast. Can you imagine
how amazing and terrible and weird that whole thing was.
I said to myself, Okay, so my story didn't run,
and that's why she tried to kill the president. I state,
wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But I understood that she believed that story.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Was going to save her life. And I, now, having
thought about this for all these forty some years, understand
that by trying to kill the president, and she was
mentally unstable. Okay, she was emotionally ill. This was not
a well person, and I didn't understand that at the time,
but she clearly wasn't She believed that if she did
(06:37):
something really dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view,
then they wouldn't kill her.
Speaker 6 (06:47):
I'm Toby Ball and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this
is rip current.
Speaker 7 (06:57):
Nay, she was a lovely child. And sixty days later,
I bet you're ever in a bank where the gun
that I had you. I don't think anybody.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that
only kooks do it.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Americans who saw the dramatic Conversions from Middle American to
Radical Young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and
Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to
try to understand what had happened. The first was a
series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry
at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in
the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that
made people more persuadable, and people started doing un accountable
(08:02):
things that were just difficult to explain.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five
other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare
against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice
was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live
in communists China rather than return home. In between these
(08:29):
two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts.
The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty
and it now was used to try to explain what
had happened. Timothy Melly professor of English at Miami University
told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is
(08:52):
designed to address is the question why would anybody become
a communist. It is a story that we tell to
explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the
time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause
fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even
allow complete control over them.
Speaker 8 (09:14):
So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress,
force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them,
isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for
coercion and persuasion.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with
the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a
returning Korean War soldier whose conditioned to commit an assassination
when he receives a signal allow me.
Speaker 9 (09:49):
To introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to
forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have conditioned them
or brainwashed them, which I understand that the new American work.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
The second incident was the attempt by a parolee named
Jan Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit Banking
in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and a
partner held four hostages inside the bank for six days
before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault.
(10:25):
None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers,
and in fact began to raise money to aid in
their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their
captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look
back even further a century ago to the earliest observation
of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist
(10:47):
Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned
to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with
being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning.
Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in
(11:10):
this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg
experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose.
The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high
as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually,
(11:31):
Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do
this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling
them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic
for the dogs, and.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation
was so extensive that the dogs were never the same.
They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius.
He could teach a dog to respond to middle C
on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He
was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything
(12:08):
that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov
observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of
a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of
them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used
to like hated serge thereafter. So massive stress seems to
(12:35):
shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans, in
a way that causes people to forget.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design,
can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change
is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this
was not the case in the mid seventies. But before
we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who
(13:05):
was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a
statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
After we did the interview, I went back to my
hotel room in draft of the statement, and I would
call a lawyer and read it to him and over
and over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it.
I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it.
So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I
will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this
is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that.
(13:35):
And it's important to me to note that I really
tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to
help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in
any way. But the story that came out in the Times,
the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact
that she had thought a story was going to run
(13:57):
about her, and that she thought that was going to
save her life. It was just that she wanted to
prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my
interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece
that she had said to me about why she had
done it. I now look back on it as she
probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I
(14:18):
did my interview with her was it ran the next
day in the La Times, and it ran in every
paper all around the world because it was an exclusive
jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had
access to her.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the
attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes
of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on
forward within the framework and language of the radical movement.
These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of
myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid
I would go around shooting people. And then it was
kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did
not want to kill somebody. But there comes a point
when the only way you can make a statement is
to pick up a gun.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger
of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what
she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired
revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow
force the radical movement to unite, to.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led
to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I
wanted them to face the realities of some of the
things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things.
But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind
of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven
to act.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a
musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls.
I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth
was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about
what had happened, and again I thought that I might
have been able to stop it, and it just killed
me that I hadn't taken that call.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There
was no question that she had fired at the president.
The only hope for her lay in some kind of
mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane
was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was
sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not
(16:42):
very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not
in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she
suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree
that she was competent to stand trial while she met
the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew
her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly
(17:03):
perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred
to any of us that she would act on it.
She was this nutty person who none of us took
seriously until we had to.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial,
her defense would have to be that she had not
been competent at the time of the assassination attempt on
December ninth. Her lawyer at the time, a man named
James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental
condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in
(17:45):
her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot
at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of
a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and
she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's
why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to
draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here,
(18:06):
Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams.
Speaker 10 (18:09):
The government has to believe that any political act of
that sort, they would likely one to believe that.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Only kooks do it.
Speaker 10 (18:16):
That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that
would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they
must put it down to kooks. They must say that
these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels
me to say that it was an an out that
was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy.
That's your that's your your route to freedom.
Speaker 11 (18:40):
You mean the government offered you, yes, who Well, in
terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it was
as overt.
Speaker 8 (18:51):
As that.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three
days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in
front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty.
Journalist Ellen Hume.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the
judicial system because here was a person with mental illness.
She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and
not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that
meant she's just going to be in prison for the
rest of her life, which she pretty much was.
Speaker 12 (19:26):
Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I
know a lot of this poilet game, but it was
pretty obvious manipulated it into pleading.
Speaker 6 (19:35):
Lawyer Peggy Garrity.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I's been a lawyer for about five minutes.
Speaker 12 (19:39):
At this point. There was a woman who was very
involved in feminist organizations in the office I was renting
a space from, and she was contacted and she didn't
want to deal with it, and something about Sarah Jane
was not getting access to her child.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son by
John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her. After Sarah Jane's arrest,
Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known
Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he
graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 12 (20:11):
I was so excited about being in the practice of law.
I was dying to go out to the federal prison.
So I went out and talked to her and left,
thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something
else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child.
So I talked to her about everything, and I decided
I could do basically effectively hate this corpus to help
her not get out, I guess, but get a trial.
(20:34):
She would talk to me like she didn't talk to
other people. So I just said something fun, like a
new brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god,
an assassin, a real assassin.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months
before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She
had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as
a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Jane's loneliness.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
But I went to visit her in Long Beach because
that's where one of the prisons where she was being
held and surprisingly they let me in as if I
were a family member, and we hugged each other because
you know, I always was kind of supportive of her
in many ways, and just in terms of listening to her,
not because I supported her ideas. She was glad to
(21:22):
have somebody visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know.
I did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness.
But I realized after that she was so unstable. She
could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me
in the back as I hugged her, and I thought
I better not go back there again. And I didn't.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out
to be well placed.
Speaker 12 (21:48):
So I spent a lot of time going back and forth,
and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something.
So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed
guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla
folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. I'm like,
I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's
in there is not a good thing. And even the
(22:11):
rookie years I am.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I'm like, oh nope.
Speaker 12 (22:12):
So I when I leave here. I don't go through
the metal detector, I go around it. I get back
to my office and I open up and it shived
that big, it's like twelve inches. I kept it for
a long time and it disappeared. I don't know where
it went.
Speaker 6 (22:26):
So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued
to maintain that she was completely saying her time in
the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her
understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that
it was all because the FBI had used her as
an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never
(22:47):
have become involved to that degree with the radical movement
and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems
fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried
different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a
number of times, Women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife,
doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on
(23:12):
without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in
her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most
likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion
to the radical young but were there other contributing factors.
We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely
(23:33):
led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch
to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean
War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst,
she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation,
indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her
(23:56):
habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her
sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to know
for sure, of course, but it may explain her actions
and her assessment of her situation in the radical underground.
When feeling she had no recourse, she took the shot.
(24:17):
The judicial course following Lynette's and Sarah Jane's attempts denied
the opportunity to find out more about their conversion experiences.
Sarah Jane pled guilty and wasn't brought to trial. Lynette
was brought to trial, but managed to turn it into
a farce. She initially tried to serve as her own
defense attorney, but was unable to abide by the rules
of the court. After that, she essentially refused to attend
(24:40):
the trial, and on the occasion she did refused to
walk so had to be carried by a deputy to
the court room. She provided minimal cooperation with her defense attorney,
and at one point threw an apple at the prosecutor,
hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses.
You get the picture. She was found guilty and sentenced
to life in prison. With that a real examination of
(25:01):
how she had come so thoroughly under Manson's sway. But
this was not the case with Patty Hurst. In fact,
her trial revolved primarily around this question, did Patty actually
become a revolutionary and if so, did she become one
of her own free will or was she brainwashed? After
(25:23):
the break, Joan Beck joined the Chicago Tribune as one
of the very few women working in the newsroom in
nineteen fifty. She worked her way from lifestyle beat topics
such as fashion and cooking, to harder news focusing on
topics such as education and medical research. In nineteen seventy five,
(25:46):
she became the first woman to serve on the Tribune's
editorial board and began writing a commentary column. On Friday
September twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, a week and a
day after the capture of Patty Hurst, Beck wrote a
column titled many Parents study Patty for Answers.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
In it, she wrote, one of the most fearsome aspects
of this long, tragic story has been trying to explain
in some rational way why a beloved daughter of what
may seem to be good, caring parents could turn as
harshly and hatefully on her family and their lifestyle as
she seemed to have done. Patty's public rejection of her
family in the taped Pighirst messages differs only in degree
(26:29):
in drama from the kind of rejection many other parents
have been getting from young adult children whose behavior they
can no longer understand, and they are desperately hungry for
any crumbs of understanding. Too often, there seems to be
no family pathology, no social trauma sufficient to account for
some of the young adults who are spoiling their lives
with drugs, or losing their bearings in sexual experimentation, or
(26:52):
dropping out of college aimlessly, or generally balking at growing
up into responsible adults.
Speaker 6 (27:01):
Parents confused by their children adopting seemingly incomprehensible political and
ethical beliefs probably goes back millennia, but came into particular
relief with the emergence of the radical Young in the
nineteen sixties. That Patty Hurst had changed, at least temporarily
during her time with the sla seemed obvious. But how
much free will did she have in the matter. When
(27:23):
she heard of Patty's arrest, her mother, Catherine said, thank God,
she's all right. Please call it a rescue, not a capture.
To her, Patty was the victim who needed to be saved,
not the gun toting revolutionary. The question of which of
these two people Patty really was became the crux of
her trial.
Speaker 13 (27:42):
The story that Patricia Hurst today began telling is a
horror story of being captured, tortured, driven to the brink
of insanity from which she is only now beginning to return.
That is her story that will be her to pace.
Speaker 11 (27:55):
She was in court for a hearing today.
Speaker 13 (27:56):
Her lawyer is saying she is in too fragile a
condition to take the witness in. The judge saying Hilla
Point's psychiaprists to examine her because of all she claims
to have been proved. She did not speak in court,
but her affidavit was admitted, and it told her story
of being kidnapped, thrown in the front of a car,
taken to a hideout, and forced into a closet for
nine weeks.
Speaker 6 (28:19):
When Patti Hurst was arrested on September eighteenth, the public
had no idea what her experience over the past nineteen
months had been. The only clues were the audio communicates
that had been released in the early days of her
time with the SLA, and then her participation in the
robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Her months with the SLA
were a complete void, and given the interest in the case,
(28:40):
it is not much of an exaggeration to say that
the nation waited anxiously for the story to emerge. The
first inkling came from the affidavit filed with the court
by her defense. One of her attorneys, Terence Halenan, read
from the affidavit in front of a press gaggle.
Speaker 14 (28:58):
She remained in that case with her hands brown, blindfolded
and no lights on.
Speaker 7 (29:04):
The closet was.
Speaker 14 (29:05):
Hot and extremely uncomfortable. When the blind plot was removed,
she felt that if she were on an LSD trip.
Everything was out of proportion, big and distorted.
Speaker 13 (29:17):
The suggestion there that she had been drugged also was
so weak by then she could barely stand.
Speaker 14 (29:23):
After an interminable length of time, which seemed to her
to be weeks, she was released from the closet and
seated with the gang of captors who were at that
time discussing the robbery of a.
Speaker 6 (29:35):
Bank, and the SLA members told Patty that she had
to accompany them during the bank robbery. She needed to
allow herself to be photographed and to say her name
out loud so there would be no doubt she was
actively involved in the hold up.
Speaker 13 (29:51):
That was the hard Brunnia bank hold up, and Patricia
Hurst did exactly as she claimed she was ordered to do,
because the epidavit says she held her mind clouding he
was losing her sanity.
Speaker 6 (30:03):
This was functionally the beginning of her defense, positioning her
actions with the SLA as a product of fear and brainwashing,
but very quickly a different narrative was also put forward.
This came in the form of a Blockbuster magazine article
that portrayed Patty Hursts time with the SLA in a
very different and more complicated light.
Speaker 15 (30:24):
My breakthrough was a big expos of Timothy Leary testifying
before grand jury's about how the weather Underground broke him
out of prison. But in the process, the sources and
the people I got to know throughout the Bay area
led me to the hearst situation.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
This is retired journalist David Weir. He and his good
friend Howard Khne researched and wrote a blockbuster article for
Rolling Stone magazine about Patty Hurst and the SLA at
a time when the FBI was having no luck in
finding them.
Speaker 15 (30:58):
I started realizing and that I knew people that knew
people that knew people that were the people helping the SLA.
So Howard and I told John Winner. He of course
recognized it was the biggest story in the world and
was excited. But our condition was don't publish it until
(31:20):
they catch her, because we don't want to be essentially
snitches helping the FBI catch these people whether we agree
with them or not.
Speaker 6 (31:30):
John Winner was the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone.
He agreed to hold off in publishing the article. The article,
titled The Inside Story, was released a month after Patty's arrest.
They had the biggest scoop on the planet.
Speaker 15 (31:46):
We were just valuged with reporters. Reporters came from all directions,
and you know, Rolling Stone at that point was on
Third Street in San Francisco in a warehouse office and
crowded around, and we were both twenty eight and I'd
never appeared before the press before. Howard kind of went catatonic.
(32:12):
He didn't have anything to say. Joan Wenner, the head
of the magazine, was hiding in his office. He didn't
want to come out and deal with it. So it
was all on me. And like I say, I'd never
done anything like this before in my life.
Speaker 6 (32:27):
This is David Weir at that press conference.
Speaker 16 (32:30):
Our information is that the political content of their arguments
about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country and
a lot of things that a lot of us would
agree with, did make an impact on Patty Hurst, and
that she was receptive to these correct political positions, and
that so she did come to have a sympathy with
what the SLA was telling her. Politically, then, as we
(32:52):
understand it, her conversion was more emotional in the end
then political, in that the SLA people warmed up to her,
called her sister, treated her in a friendly way after
being at first unfriendly and more threatening to her. That
complex sort of three folded says, circumstances led to the conversion,
not this sort of simplistic brainwashing theory that I think
has been has been spread so far.
Speaker 15 (33:17):
We had a different narrative. It's not that we said
that she absolutely had one hundred percent sincerely converted into
a revolutionary soldier.
Speaker 8 (33:29):
It's just that.
Speaker 15 (33:30):
We conveyed that that was the impression that all the
people were met her during those many months underground came
away with. She seemed to be almost the fiercest SLA soldier,
and her actions tended to verify that. When Bill Harris
(33:51):
and Emily Harris had shoplifted and were in danger of
being caught at Mels Hardware in La, it was Patty
in the getaway car who strayed the hardware front and
the people there with machine gun bullets, so they escaped,
And so actions like that really were hard to reconcile
(34:13):
with the kidnap victim.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
This more complicated story was the focus of the Rolling
Stone article, which described Patty's political and emotional indoctrination, her
growing sense of betrayal by her parents, and her emerging
view of societal problems. The following short excerpts are in
the same order they appeared in Weir and Cohene's article,
(34:38):
and show how they detailed the process of Patty's conversion.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
So Patty grew impatient as the ransom negotiations bogged down.
I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth.
She later said, like they figured I was worth two million,
but I wasn't worth ten million. It was a terrible
feeling that my parents could think of me in terms
of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over by degrees,
her disillusionment with her parents turned into sympathy for the SLA.
(35:08):
For a month, she had been kept in a small
isolation chamber approximating a San Quentin whole. She became weak
and could hardly stand up. To be able to walk
freely from one room to another seemed the world's greatest pleasure.
Patty was urged to attend the SLA's daily political study sessions.
She was invited to listen to the SLA National anthem,
(35:29):
an eerie jazz composition of wind and strings that Sink
had selected, and she was furnished with statistical evidence and
quotations from George Jackson and Rochelle McGee that promoted her
political development.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
George Jackson and Rochelle McGhee were prison radicals whose writings
were influential in the revolutionary movement.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
Patty was shown a long list of herst family holdings,
nine newspapers, thirteen magazines, four TV and radio stations, a
silver mine, a paper, and prime real estate. Her parents
clearly were part of the ruling elite, and the only
power that could fight that money was the power that
came out of the barrel of a gun. The SLA's
motives made more sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hurst
(36:15):
wealth to more needy people. It was her parents and
the economic class they represented who were to blame for
her misery and countless authors. The SLA members encouraged her radicalization.
They hugged her, called her sister, and ended her loneliness.
Patty's conversion was as much emotional as political. Seven weeks
after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the SLA.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Patty Hirst's trial for her participation in the Hibernia bank
robbery began on February fourth, nineteen seventy six. Again Professor
Emeritis Joel Dimmesdale.
Speaker 8 (36:52):
Her trial wasn't about who done it? Was why has
she done it? And the psychiatric testimony formed the guts
of the trial, and it was like a formal struggle
between these different expert opinions. So the defense psychiatrist's view
was that she was under massive stress, she was isolated,
(37:16):
she dissociated, and that in essence, her behavior was coerced.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
This defense required the jury to accept the more complicated
view of control, that it could be the result of
things like the terror of a violent kidnapping, isolation in
a closet for weeks, and forced indoctrination. It also tied
her participation in the bank robbery to her seeming conversion
to the SLA. But the prosecution had a different, arguably
(37:48):
simpler view.
Speaker 8 (37:50):
The prosecution argued for a very narrow definition of coersion.
If I hold a gun to your head, I'd tell
you to rob a bank right now, that's coercion. But
if I tell you rob a bank tomorrow, is that
coersion now? The SLA told Patty that if she didn't
(38:15):
join them, they would come after her family, and in
fact they did come after her family. They bombed a
family household.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
This was the bombing of Hurst Castle on February twelfth,
nineteen seventy six by the New World Liberation Front, the
group who publicly accused Popeye Jackson of being a police
informant right before his execution, and who committed this bombing
in support of the SLA. It caused about five point
five million of today's dollars in damage to the property.
Speaker 8 (38:47):
The jury, initially, they were all very sympathetic to Patty.
Had thought no kidnapping, no participation in the robbery, she
wouldn't have been there. As they went into the details
of the case, they rather quickly came to a decision
(39:09):
that she was guilty. The second piece of it, of course,
is well, should there be mitigating circumstances. It's one thing
to say she's guilty, but marked these unusual circumstances. Oddly enough,
the court did not decide that there was anything mitigating
(39:30):
about this at all. They said she was a rich brat,
and they sentenced her to the average sentence in California
at that time for a first time. Bank Robert gave
her no extra mitigation consideration at all and set her
off to jail.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
And so the jury found that despite enduring many of
the same conditions as the Korean War, POW's isolation, fear, indoctrination.
None of this mattered. She was responsible for the actions.
She'd made a conscious decision to become a revolutionary, and
this may have been the correct verdict.
Speaker 15 (40:12):
When you think about it. The big questions that remain.
Did Patty suffer from Stockholm syndrome, from being held in
the closet and perhaps fearing she'd be killed and the
trauma of being kidnapped, or did she voluntarily convert to
(40:33):
becoming an SLA soldier, or are there nuances of this
that she may have been initially traumatized but also was
a very rebellious person. She was only a teenager, and
she'd been a rebellious girl from very young age, getting
into trouble and having to change schools from the age
(40:56):
of twelve or fourteen in these private religious schools and
things like that.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Even the people within the radical movement weren't sure.
Speaker 15 (41:07):
It was a very public debate about that, but internally
throughout the network of people supporting the SLA and helping
the survivors, particularly after the LA shootout, there was a
debate among the people who were our sources, I can
honestly say nobody seemed to know for sure, and I
(41:29):
can say fifty years later, I don't know for sure.
Patty Hurst herself may not know for sure. I think
this is an incredibly complicated situation. And I remember interviewing
cops doing some other stories. As they drive around the
city at bus stops, they would look at the people
(41:52):
waiting at the bus stop and the way they would
pace and the number of steps they would take and say,
that guy was in San Quentin, guy was in Fulsome
that guy was in David. They could tell years after freedom,
who had been imprisoned where by their pacing, Because prisoners,
(42:12):
like animals in the cage, pace the perimeter over and
over and over all day long. It gets imprinted in
their mind. So what I'm saying is I think once
somebody has been kidnapped, they're always a kidnapped victim. Even
after they're free, they're never truly free.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
In nineteen seventy three, the top grossing film in the
United States was The Exorcist, the story of an adolescent
girl possessed by a demon. A famous moment from the
film comes when the girl's mother is pleading with a
priest to consider the possibility that her daughter is possessed.
She says, i'd.
Speaker 9 (42:53):
Known my gut.
Speaker 17 (42:54):
I'm telling you that that thing upstairs isn't my daughter.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
This quote echo the reactions of parents of many of
the people involved in this story. In episode two, we
heard Manson follower Susan Atkins, father, you.
Speaker 18 (43:10):
Can be involved in almost anything because the hypnotic trans
you won't do something that is basically against who but
you know is right. But under you can do almost anything.
I don't know how to stand by her side. I
lost her.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
In an interview with the La Times, Martin Solia, the
father of the three Solia siblings who joined the SLA, said.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
They were good kids, good students, and Stephen was an athlete.
But they went up north and got screwed up at home.
They were good right wing Republicans who got up every
morning and pledged allegiance to the flag. How do you
figure it?
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And Randolph Hurst echoed this sentiment to the press after
Patty Hurst appeared as a militant in the Hibernia bank robbery.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
You have a reaction though it. Iay, she was a
lovely child, and sixty days later the picture over in
a bank with a gun in her hand. You know,
I didn't think anybody feel.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
It's disorienting. When someone undergoes a fundamental change in their
perception of the world, the people around them wonder what happened.
What caused Lynette from to follow Manson, Patty Hurst to
join the SLA, Sarah Jane Moore to become a self
styled Marxist revolutionary. Was it mental illness? Was a coercive persuasion?
(44:36):
Was it a sudden realization of truths about the country
and the world that had been hidden before and were
now a parent along with an ideology to direct how
to think about it? And how do you know? It
seems to me that any huge shift in a person's
understanding of the world will seem to those around them
as the product of mental illness or coercive persuasion. People
(45:00):
would probably say brainwashing, but the person who has made
the change probably experiences it as a lifting of the
veil of a burst of understanding. Lynette, Sarah Jane, and
Patty each most likely experienced either mental illness or coercive persuasion,
or both. They ended up at the furthest extremes of
(45:21):
the radical young. They are not representative of the millions
of people who adopted the new ethos that developed during
what we call the sixties. They are the exceptions, anomalies
whose journeys somehow all ended within a two and a
half week period in northern California. This is Paggy Gharrity
(45:42):
talking about a prison meeting she had with Sarah Jane.
Speaker 12 (45:47):
Well, you're sitting in the prison yard is like patio tables, umbrellas,
round tables, and were sitting there and she says, that's
squeaky over it. She's staring at us. And I look
over and this tiny little person it's glaring, glaring, glaring.
It was really creepy, super creepy. Em sitting with one
assassin looking at another, and I'm I'm like, okay, yeah, lawyer.
(46:11):
For maybe two years at this point, there were moments
I thought I'm in this thing too deep.
Speaker 19 (46:19):
Ford had his hands out and was waving and had
just come from breakfast with the businessman, and he looked
like cardboard to me.
Speaker 6 (46:31):
Lynette from was released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell
in Fort Worth, Texas, on August fourteenth, two thousand and nine.
She now lives in upstate New York, And.
Speaker 17 (46:43):
I know it's really hard to understand, because it's really
hard for me now to try to think of of
our what it was really in my mind, you know
how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 6 (47:03):
President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty her sentence after she had
served twenty two months for robbing the Hibernia Bank. She
was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in Dublin, California,
on February first, nineteen seventy nine. President Bill Clinton pardoned
her on January twentieth, two thousand and one, his last
day in office. She currently lives on the East Coast
(47:27):
and raises show dogs.
Speaker 10 (47:30):
In the very nature of the act that I committed,
you know, I made an irrevocable commitment to a cause.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Sarah Jane Moore also served a term at the Federal
Correctional Institution Dublin. She was released on December thirty one,
two thousand and seven. She lives in a nursing home
in Nashville, Tennessee. During Sarah Jane's interview with Playboy magazine,
writer Andrew Hill asked if she could what she was
(48:01):
feeling on the day she shot at gerald Ford. She
responded by reciting a poem she'd written.
Speaker 6 (48:08):
Hold hold still my hand, steady my eye, chill my heart,
and let my gun sing for the people scream their anger,
cleanse with their hate, and kill This monster.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Is the monster in this poem Ford, I don't think so.
No one was screaming their anger about gerald Ford. They
were screaming their anger about America. In Sarah Jane's own telling,
the end of her journey in the Radical Underground was
a single gunshot at a symbol of all that she
had come to hate about her country, a single gunshot
(48:45):
that missed.
Speaker 5 (48:47):
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary
Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff, Show art by
jeffnya's Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk Rima O'Kelly
and Noams Griffin, Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive producers Alexander
(49:09):
Williams and Matt Frederick. Hear episodes of Rip Current early
completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit
(49:29):
our website, ripcurrentpod dot com
Rip Current is a production of iHeart Podcasts. The views
and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the host, producers,
or parent company. Listener discretion is it fine?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second,
nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at
President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the
Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
She missed.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
As we heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted
La Times reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner
with her husband. He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't
talk to him until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen
come up to San Francisco? She caught the last plane
a reminder, Sarah Jane was going by the name Sally
(00:58):
at the time.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto,
and what I had worked out as a deal with
my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would
help her by drafting a statement as she wished it
to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind
of help her to draft it, but that that would
be included in a real news story that I would
(01:20):
write as I interviewed her in prison.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
So it was a deal where she'd get.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Her manifesto, but I would get my professional job done,
but without exploiting her. She would have her statement and
I would have my story. And she apparently agreed to
this through her lawyer. So the next day the arraignment occurred.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
September twenty third, was a wild day at the courthouse.
Sarah Jane and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did
SLA member Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbs
coverage of that day in court.
Speaker 5 (01:55):
With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for
the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air
of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner.
Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on
floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in
could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below.
At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on
(02:17):
Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse
in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my
breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse,
got in there, and then when she was brought into
the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was
so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so,
(02:43):
wanting to give her a signal that I was there
and was going to talk to her, I jumped up,
waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down.
It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal
that I was there.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Walter.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
That night on CBS News had a report that a
supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose.
And when I talked to Carol Plogash about this recently,
she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that.
So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing, but.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Either no one noticed or no one could be bothered
to do anything about it. It was just another odd
moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from the
Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty Hurst's
hearing ended.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
The scene became a little confused. At that point, one
hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and
headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody
knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From
that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The
elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People
ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or
(04:00):
someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically
for telephones and unlocked doors.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
And then I went back and waited in the hotel
room and a call came, and her lawyer called me
and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in,
but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and
he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes.
This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive
after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't
have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't
(04:32):
have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of
paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's
all I could take into the interview.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in
Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had
gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there.
The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of
the jail's news celebrity inmates.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
There are five singles set and the maximum security corridor
of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said,
one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it,
one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst
and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across
the corridor from each other. It has been reported here
(05:19):
that the two women discussed that episode that touched both
their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't
seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
So I go in there and the first thing I
say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater,
I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said,
because the FBI killed your story on me. I said,
what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the
paper this morning.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to run today.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
It's supposed to run Wednesday.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
And she said, oh, and looked downcast. Can you imagine
how amazing and terrible and weird that whole thing was.
I said to myself, Okay, so my story didn't run,
and that's why she tried to kill the president. I state,
wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
But I understood that she believed that story.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Was going to save her life. And I, now, having
thought about this for all these forty some years, understand
that by trying to kill the president, and she was
mentally unstable. Okay, she was emotionally ill. This was not
a well person, and I didn't understand that at the time,
but she clearly wasn't She believed that if she did
(06:37):
something really dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view,
then they wouldn't kill her.
Speaker 6 (06:47):
I'm Toby Ball and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this
is rip current.
Speaker 7 (06:57):
Nay, she was a lovely child. And sixty days later,
I bet you're ever in a bank where the gun
that I had you. I don't think anybody.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that
only kooks do it.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Americans who saw the dramatic Conversions from Middle American to
Radical Young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and
Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to
try to understand what had happened. The first was a
series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry
at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in
the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that
made people more persuadable, and people started doing un accountable
(08:02):
things that were just difficult to explain.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five
other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare
against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice
was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live
in communists China rather than return home. In between these
(08:29):
two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts.
The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty
and it now was used to try to explain what
had happened. Timothy Melly professor of English at Miami University
told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is
(08:52):
designed to address is the question why would anybody become
a communist. It is a story that we tell to
explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the
time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause
fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even
allow complete control over them.
Speaker 8 (09:14):
So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress,
force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them,
isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for
coercion and persuasion.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with
the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a
returning Korean War soldier whose conditioned to commit an assassination
when he receives a signal allow me.
Speaker 9 (09:49):
To introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to
forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have conditioned them
or brainwashed them, which I understand that the new American work.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
The second incident was the attempt by a parolee named
Jan Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit Banking
in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and a
partner held four hostages inside the bank for six days
before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault.
(10:25):
None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers,
and in fact began to raise money to aid in
their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their
captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look
back even further a century ago to the earliest observation
of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist
(10:47):
Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned
to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with
being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning.
Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in
(11:10):
this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg
experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose.
The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high
as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually,
(11:31):
Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do
this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling
them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic
for the dogs, and.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation
was so extensive that the dogs were never the same.
They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius.
He could teach a dog to respond to middle C
on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He
was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything
(12:08):
that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov
observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of
a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of
them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used
to like hated serge thereafter. So massive stress seems to
(12:35):
shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans, in
a way that causes people to forget.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design,
can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change
is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this
was not the case in the mid seventies. But before
we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who
(13:05):
was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a
statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
After we did the interview, I went back to my
hotel room in draft of the statement, and I would
call a lawyer and read it to him and over
and over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it.
I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it.
So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I
will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this
is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that.
(13:35):
And it's important to me to note that I really
tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to
help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in
any way. But the story that came out in the Times,
the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact
that she had thought a story was going to run
(13:57):
about her, and that she thought that was going to
save her life. It was just that she wanted to
prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my
interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece
that she had said to me about why she had
done it. I now look back on it as she
probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I
(14:18):
did my interview with her was it ran the next
day in the La Times, and it ran in every
paper all around the world because it was an exclusive
jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had
access to her.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the
attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes
of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on
forward within the framework and language of the radical movement.
These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of
myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid
I would go around shooting people. And then it was
kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did
not want to kill somebody. But there comes a point
when the only way you can make a statement is
to pick up a gun.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger
of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what
she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired
revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow
force the radical movement to unite, to.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led
to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I
wanted them to face the realities of some of the
things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things.
But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind
of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven
to act.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a
musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls.
I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth
was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about
what had happened, and again I thought that I might
have been able to stop it, and it just killed
me that I hadn't taken that call.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There
was no question that she had fired at the president.
The only hope for her lay in some kind of
mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane
was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was
sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not
(16:42):
very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not
in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she
suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree
that she was competent to stand trial while she met
the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew
her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly
(17:03):
perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred
to any of us that she would act on it.
She was this nutty person who none of us took
seriously until we had to.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial,
her defense would have to be that she had not
been competent at the time of the assassination attempt on
December ninth. Her lawyer at the time, a man named
James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental
condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in
(17:45):
her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot
at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of
a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and
she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's
why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to
draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here,
(18:06):
Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams.
Speaker 10 (18:09):
The government has to believe that any political act of
that sort, they would likely one to believe that.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Only kooks do it.
Speaker 10 (18:16):
That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that
would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they
must put it down to kooks. They must say that
these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels
me to say that it was an an out that
was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy.
That's your that's your your route to freedom.
Speaker 11 (18:40):
You mean the government offered you, yes, who Well, in
terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it was
as overt.
Speaker 8 (18:51):
As that.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three
days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in
front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty.
Journalist Ellen Hume.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the
judicial system because here was a person with mental illness.
She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and
not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that
meant she's just going to be in prison for the
rest of her life, which she pretty much was.
Speaker 12 (19:26):
Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I
know a lot of this poilet game, but it was
pretty obvious manipulated it into pleading.
Speaker 6 (19:35):
Lawyer Peggy Garrity.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I's been a lawyer for about five minutes.
Speaker 12 (19:39):
At this point. There was a woman who was very
involved in feminist organizations in the office I was renting
a space from, and she was contacted and she didn't
want to deal with it, and something about Sarah Jane
was not getting access to her child.
Speaker 6 (19:54):
This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son by
John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her. After Sarah Jane's arrest,
Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known
Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he
graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 12 (20:11):
I was so excited about being in the practice of law.
I was dying to go out to the federal prison.
So I went out and talked to her and left,
thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something
else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child.
So I talked to her about everything, and I decided
I could do basically effectively hate this corpus to help
her not get out, I guess, but get a trial.
(20:34):
She would talk to me like she didn't talk to
other people. So I just said something fun, like a
new brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god,
an assassin, a real assassin.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months
before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She
had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as
a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Jane's loneliness.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
But I went to visit her in Long Beach because
that's where one of the prisons where she was being
held and surprisingly they let me in as if I
were a family member, and we hugged each other because
you know, I always was kind of supportive of her
in many ways, and just in terms of listening to her,
not because I supported her ideas. She was glad to
(21:22):
have somebody visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know.
I did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness.
But I realized after that she was so unstable. She
could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me
in the back as I hugged her, and I thought
I better not go back there again. And I didn't.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out
to be well placed.
Speaker 12 (21:48):
So I spent a lot of time going back and forth,
and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something.
So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed
guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla
folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. I'm like,
I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's
in there is not a good thing. And even the
(22:11):
rookie years I am.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I'm like, oh nope.
Speaker 12 (22:12):
So I when I leave here. I don't go through
the metal detector, I go around it. I get back
to my office and I open up and it shived
that big, it's like twelve inches. I kept it for
a long time and it disappeared. I don't know where
it went.
Speaker 6 (22:26):
So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued
to maintain that she was completely saying her time in
the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her
understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that
it was all because the FBI had used her as
an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never
(22:47):
have become involved to that degree with the radical movement
and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems
fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried
different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a
number of times, Women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife,
doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on
(23:12):
without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in
her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most
likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion
to the radical young but were there other contributing factors.
We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely
(23:33):
led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch
to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean
War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst,
she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation,
indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her
(23:56):
habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her
sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to know
for sure, of course, but it may explain her actions
and her assessment of her situation in the radical underground.
When feeling she had no recourse, she took the shot.
(24:17):
The judicial course following Lynette's and Sarah Jane's attempts denied
the opportunity to find out more about their conversion experiences.
Sarah Jane pled guilty and wasn't brought to trial. Lynette
was brought to trial, but managed to turn it into
a farce. She initially tried to serve as her own
defense attorney, but was unable to abide by the rules
of the court. After that, she essentially refused to attend
(24:40):
the trial, and on the occasion she did refused to
walk so had to be carried by a deputy to
the court room. She provided minimal cooperation with her defense attorney,
and at one point threw an apple at the prosecutor,
hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses.
You get the picture. She was found guilty and sentenced
to life in prison. With that a real examination of
(25:01):
how she had come so thoroughly under Manson's sway. But
this was not the case with Patty Hurst. In fact,
her trial revolved primarily around this question, did Patty actually
become a revolutionary and if so, did she become one
of her own free will or was she brainwashed? After
(25:23):
the break, Joan Beck joined the Chicago Tribune as one
of the very few women working in the newsroom in
nineteen fifty. She worked her way from lifestyle beat topics
such as fashion and cooking, to harder news focusing on
topics such as education and medical research. In nineteen seventy five,
(25:46):
she became the first woman to serve on the Tribune's
editorial board and began writing a commentary column. On Friday
September twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, a week and a
day after the capture of Patty Hurst, Beck wrote a
column titled many Parents study Patty for Answers.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
In it, she wrote, one of the most fearsome aspects
of this long, tragic story has been trying to explain
in some rational way why a beloved daughter of what
may seem to be good, caring parents could turn as
harshly and hatefully on her family and their lifestyle as
she seemed to have done. Patty's public rejection of her
family in the taped Pighirst messages differs only in degree
(26:29):
in drama from the kind of rejection many other parents
have been getting from young adult children whose behavior they
can no longer understand, and they are desperately hungry for
any crumbs of understanding. Too often, there seems to be
no family pathology, no social trauma sufficient to account for
some of the young adults who are spoiling their lives
with drugs, or losing their bearings in sexual experimentation, or
(26:52):
dropping out of college aimlessly, or generally balking at growing
up into responsible adults.
Speaker 6 (27:01):
Parents confused by their children adopting seemingly incomprehensible political and
ethical beliefs probably goes back millennia, but came into particular
relief with the emergence of the radical Young in the
nineteen sixties. That Patty Hurst had changed, at least temporarily
during her time with the sla seemed obvious. But how
much free will did she have in the matter. When
(27:23):
she heard of Patty's arrest, her mother, Catherine said, thank God,
she's all right. Please call it a rescue, not a capture.
To her, Patty was the victim who needed to be saved,
not the gun toting revolutionary. The question of which of
these two people Patty really was became the crux of
her trial.
Speaker 13 (27:42):
The story that Patricia Hurst today began telling is a
horror story of being captured, tortured, driven to the brink
of insanity from which she is only now beginning to return.
That is her story that will be her to pace.
Speaker 11 (27:55):
She was in court for a hearing today.
Speaker 13 (27:56):
Her lawyer is saying she is in too fragile a
condition to take the witness in. The judge saying Hilla
Point's psychiaprists to examine her because of all she claims
to have been proved. She did not speak in court,
but her affidavit was admitted, and it told her story
of being kidnapped, thrown in the front of a car,
taken to a hideout, and forced into a closet for
nine weeks.
Speaker 6 (28:19):
When Patti Hurst was arrested on September eighteenth, the public
had no idea what her experience over the past nineteen
months had been. The only clues were the audio communicates
that had been released in the early days of her
time with the SLA, and then her participation in the
robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Her months with the SLA
were a complete void, and given the interest in the case,
(28:40):
it is not much of an exaggeration to say that
the nation waited anxiously for the story to emerge. The
first inkling came from the affidavit filed with the court
by her defense. One of her attorneys, Terence Halenan, read
from the affidavit in front of a press gaggle.
Speaker 14 (28:58):
She remained in that case with her hands brown, blindfolded
and no lights on.
Speaker 7 (29:04):
The closet was.
Speaker 14 (29:05):
Hot and extremely uncomfortable. When the blind plot was removed,
she felt that if she were on an LSD trip.
Everything was out of proportion, big and distorted.
Speaker 13 (29:17):
The suggestion there that she had been drugged also was
so weak by then she could barely stand.
Speaker 14 (29:23):
After an interminable length of time, which seemed to her
to be weeks, she was released from the closet and
seated with the gang of captors who were at that
time discussing the robbery of a.
Speaker 6 (29:35):
Bank, and the SLA members told Patty that she had
to accompany them during the bank robbery. She needed to
allow herself to be photographed and to say her name
out loud so there would be no doubt she was
actively involved in the hold up.
Speaker 13 (29:51):
That was the hard Brunnia bank hold up, and Patricia
Hurst did exactly as she claimed she was ordered to do,
because the epidavit says she held her mind clouding he
was losing her sanity.
Speaker 6 (30:03):
This was functionally the beginning of her defense, positioning her
actions with the SLA as a product of fear and brainwashing,
but very quickly a different narrative was also put forward.
This came in the form of a Blockbuster magazine article
that portrayed Patty Hursts time with the SLA in a
very different and more complicated light.
Speaker 15 (30:24):
My breakthrough was a big expos of Timothy Leary testifying
before grand jury's about how the weather Underground broke him
out of prison. But in the process, the sources and
the people I got to know throughout the Bay area
led me to the hearst situation.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
This is retired journalist David Weir. He and his good
friend Howard Khne researched and wrote a blockbuster article for
Rolling Stone magazine about Patty Hurst and the SLA at
a time when the FBI was having no luck in
finding them.
Speaker 15 (30:58):
I started realizing and that I knew people that knew
people that knew people that were the people helping the SLA.
So Howard and I told John Winner. He of course
recognized it was the biggest story in the world and
was excited. But our condition was don't publish it until
(31:20):
they catch her, because we don't want to be essentially
snitches helping the FBI catch these people whether we agree
with them or not.
Speaker 6 (31:30):
John Winner was the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone.
He agreed to hold off in publishing the article. The article,
titled The Inside Story, was released a month after Patty's arrest.
They had the biggest scoop on the planet.
Speaker 15 (31:46):
We were just valuged with reporters. Reporters came from all directions,
and you know, Rolling Stone at that point was on
Third Street in San Francisco in a warehouse office and
crowded around, and we were both twenty eight and I'd
never appeared before the press before. Howard kind of went catatonic.
(32:12):
He didn't have anything to say. Joan Wenner, the head
of the magazine, was hiding in his office. He didn't
want to come out and deal with it. So it
was all on me. And like I say, I'd never
done anything like this before in my life.
Speaker 6 (32:27):
This is David Weir at that press conference.
Speaker 16 (32:30):
Our information is that the political content of their arguments
about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country and
a lot of things that a lot of us would
agree with, did make an impact on Patty Hurst, and
that she was receptive to these correct political positions, and
that so she did come to have a sympathy with
what the SLA was telling her. Politically, then, as we
(32:52):
understand it, her conversion was more emotional in the end
then political, in that the SLA people warmed up to her,
called her sister, treated her in a friendly way after
being at first unfriendly and more threatening to her. That
complex sort of three folded says, circumstances led to the conversion,
not this sort of simplistic brainwashing theory that I think
has been has been spread so far.
Speaker 15 (33:17):
We had a different narrative. It's not that we said
that she absolutely had one hundred percent sincerely converted into
a revolutionary soldier.
Speaker 8 (33:29):
It's just that.
Speaker 15 (33:30):
We conveyed that that was the impression that all the
people were met her during those many months underground came
away with. She seemed to be almost the fiercest SLA soldier,
and her actions tended to verify that. When Bill Harris
(33:51):
and Emily Harris had shoplifted and were in danger of
being caught at Mels Hardware in La, it was Patty
in the getaway car who strayed the hardware front and
the people there with machine gun bullets, so they escaped,
And so actions like that really were hard to reconcile
(34:13):
with the kidnap victim.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
This more complicated story was the focus of the Rolling
Stone article, which described Patty's political and emotional indoctrination, her
growing sense of betrayal by her parents, and her emerging
view of societal problems. The following short excerpts are in
the same order they appeared in Weir and Cohene's article,
(34:38):
and show how they detailed the process of Patty's conversion.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
So Patty grew impatient as the ransom negotiations bogged down.
I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth.
She later said, like they figured I was worth two million,
but I wasn't worth ten million. It was a terrible
feeling that my parents could think of me in terms
of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over by degrees,
her disillusionment with her parents turned into sympathy for the SLA.
(35:08):
For a month, she had been kept in a small
isolation chamber approximating a San Quentin whole. She became weak
and could hardly stand up. To be able to walk
freely from one room to another seemed the world's greatest pleasure.
Patty was urged to attend the SLA's daily political study sessions.
She was invited to listen to the SLA National anthem,
(35:29):
an eerie jazz composition of wind and strings that Sink
had selected, and she was furnished with statistical evidence and
quotations from George Jackson and Rochelle McGee that promoted her
political development.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
George Jackson and Rochelle McGhee were prison radicals whose writings
were influential in the revolutionary movement.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
Patty was shown a long list of herst family holdings,
nine newspapers, thirteen magazines, four TV and radio stations, a
silver mine, a paper, and prime real estate. Her parents
clearly were part of the ruling elite, and the only
power that could fight that money was the power that
came out of the barrel of a gun. The SLA's
motives made more sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hurst
(36:15):
wealth to more needy people. It was her parents and
the economic class they represented who were to blame for
her misery and countless authors. The SLA members encouraged her radicalization.
They hugged her, called her sister, and ended her loneliness.
Patty's conversion was as much emotional as political. Seven weeks
after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the SLA.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Patty Hirst's trial for her participation in the Hibernia bank
robbery began on February fourth, nineteen seventy six. Again Professor
Emeritis Joel Dimmesdale.
Speaker 8 (36:52):
Her trial wasn't about who done it? Was why has
she done it? And the psychiatric testimony formed the guts
of the trial, and it was like a formal struggle
between these different expert opinions. So the defense psychiatrist's view
was that she was under massive stress, she was isolated,
(37:16):
she dissociated, and that in essence, her behavior was coerced.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
This defense required the jury to accept the more complicated
view of control, that it could be the result of
things like the terror of a violent kidnapping, isolation in
a closet for weeks, and forced indoctrination. It also tied
her participation in the bank robbery to her seeming conversion
to the SLA. But the prosecution had a different, arguably
(37:48):
simpler view.
Speaker 8 (37:50):
The prosecution argued for a very narrow definition of coersion.
If I hold a gun to your head, I'd tell
you to rob a bank right now, that's coercion. But
if I tell you rob a bank tomorrow, is that
coersion now? The SLA told Patty that if she didn't
(38:15):
join them, they would come after her family, and in
fact they did come after her family. They bombed a
family household.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
This was the bombing of Hurst Castle on February twelfth,
nineteen seventy six by the New World Liberation Front, the
group who publicly accused Popeye Jackson of being a police
informant right before his execution, and who committed this bombing
in support of the SLA. It caused about five point
five million of today's dollars in damage to the property.
Speaker 8 (38:47):
The jury, initially, they were all very sympathetic to Patty.
Had thought no kidnapping, no participation in the robbery, she
wouldn't have been there. As they went into the details
of the case, they rather quickly came to a decision
(39:09):
that she was guilty. The second piece of it, of course,
is well, should there be mitigating circumstances. It's one thing
to say she's guilty, but marked these unusual circumstances. Oddly enough,
the court did not decide that there was anything mitigating
(39:30):
about this at all. They said she was a rich brat,
and they sentenced her to the average sentence in California
at that time for a first time. Bank Robert gave
her no extra mitigation consideration at all and set her
off to jail.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
And so the jury found that despite enduring many of
the same conditions as the Korean War, POW's isolation, fear, indoctrination.
None of this mattered. She was responsible for the actions.
She'd made a conscious decision to become a revolutionary, and
this may have been the correct verdict.
Speaker 15 (40:12):
When you think about it. The big questions that remain.
Did Patty suffer from Stockholm syndrome, from being held in
the closet and perhaps fearing she'd be killed and the
trauma of being kidnapped, or did she voluntarily convert to
(40:33):
becoming an SLA soldier, or are there nuances of this
that she may have been initially traumatized but also was
a very rebellious person. She was only a teenager, and
she'd been a rebellious girl from very young age, getting
into trouble and having to change schools from the age
(40:56):
of twelve or fourteen in these private religious schools and
things like that.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Even the people within the radical movement weren't sure.
Speaker 15 (41:07):
It was a very public debate about that, but internally
throughout the network of people supporting the SLA and helping
the survivors, particularly after the LA shootout, there was a
debate among the people who were our sources, I can
honestly say nobody seemed to know for sure, and I
(41:29):
can say fifty years later, I don't know for sure.
Patty Hurst herself may not know for sure. I think
this is an incredibly complicated situation. And I remember interviewing
cops doing some other stories. As they drive around the
city at bus stops, they would look at the people
(41:52):
waiting at the bus stop and the way they would
pace and the number of steps they would take and say,
that guy was in San Quentin, guy was in Fulsome
that guy was in David. They could tell years after freedom,
who had been imprisoned where by their pacing, Because prisoners,
(42:12):
like animals in the cage, pace the perimeter over and
over and over all day long. It gets imprinted in
their mind. So what I'm saying is I think once
somebody has been kidnapped, they're always a kidnapped victim. Even
after they're free, they're never truly free.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
In nineteen seventy three, the top grossing film in the
United States was The Exorcist, the story of an adolescent
girl possessed by a demon. A famous moment from the
film comes when the girl's mother is pleading with a
priest to consider the possibility that her daughter is possessed.
She says, i'd.
Speaker 9 (42:53):
Known my gut.
Speaker 17 (42:54):
I'm telling you that that thing upstairs isn't my daughter.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
This quote echo the reactions of parents of many of
the people involved in this story. In episode two, we
heard Manson follower Susan Atkins, father, you.
Speaker 18 (43:10):
Can be involved in almost anything because the hypnotic trans
you won't do something that is basically against who but
you know is right. But under you can do almost anything.
I don't know how to stand by her side. I
lost her.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
In an interview with the La Times, Martin Solia, the
father of the three Solia siblings who joined the SLA, said.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
They were good kids, good students, and Stephen was an athlete.
But they went up north and got screwed up at home.
They were good right wing Republicans who got up every
morning and pledged allegiance to the flag. How do you
figure it?
Speaker 2 (43:50):
And Randolph Hurst echoed this sentiment to the press after
Patty Hurst appeared as a militant in the Hibernia bank robbery.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
You have a reaction though it. Iay, she was a
lovely child, and sixty days later the picture over in
a bank with a gun in her hand. You know,
I didn't think anybody feel.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
It's disorienting. When someone undergoes a fundamental change in their
perception of the world, the people around them wonder what happened.
What caused Lynette from to follow Manson, Patty Hurst to
join the SLA, Sarah Jane Moore to become a self
styled Marxist revolutionary. Was it mental illness? Was a coercive persuasion?
(44:36):
Was it a sudden realization of truths about the country
and the world that had been hidden before and were
now a parent along with an ideology to direct how
to think about it? And how do you know? It
seems to me that any huge shift in a person's
understanding of the world will seem to those around them
as the product of mental illness or coercive persuasion. People
(45:00):
would probably say brainwashing, but the person who has made
the change probably experiences it as a lifting of the
veil of a burst of understanding. Lynette, Sarah Jane, and
Patty each most likely experienced either mental illness or coercive persuasion,
or both. They ended up at the furthest extremes of
(45:21):
the radical young. They are not representative of the millions
of people who adopted the new ethos that developed during
what we call the sixties. They are the exceptions, anomalies
whose journeys somehow all ended within a two and a
half week period in northern California. This is Paggy Gharrity
(45:42):
talking about a prison meeting she had with Sarah Jane.
Speaker 12 (45:47):
Well, you're sitting in the prison yard is like patio tables, umbrellas,
round tables, and were sitting there and she says, that's
squeaky over it. She's staring at us. And I look
over and this tiny little person it's glaring, glaring, glaring.
It was really creepy, super creepy. Em sitting with one
assassin looking at another, and I'm I'm like, okay, yeah, lawyer.
(46:11):
For maybe two years at this point, there were moments
I thought I'm in this thing too deep.
Speaker 19 (46:19):
Ford had his hands out and was waving and had
just come from breakfast with the businessman, and he looked
like cardboard to me.
Speaker 6 (46:31):
Lynette from was released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell
in Fort Worth, Texas, on August fourteenth, two thousand and nine.
She now lives in upstate New York, And.
Speaker 17 (46:43):
I know it's really hard to understand, because it's really
hard for me now to try to think of of
our what it was really in my mind, you know
how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 6 (47:03):
President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty her sentence after she had
served twenty two months for robbing the Hibernia Bank. She
was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in Dublin, California,
on February first, nineteen seventy nine. President Bill Clinton pardoned
her on January twentieth, two thousand and one, his last
day in office. She currently lives on the East Coast
(47:27):
and raises show dogs.
Speaker 10 (47:30):
In the very nature of the act that I committed,
you know, I made an irrevocable commitment to a cause.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Sarah Jane Moore also served a term at the Federal
Correctional Institution Dublin. She was released on December thirty one,
two thousand and seven. She lives in a nursing home
in Nashville, Tennessee. During Sarah Jane's interview with Playboy magazine,
writer Andrew Hill asked if she could what she was
(48:01):
feeling on the day she shot at gerald Ford. She
responded by reciting a poem she'd written.
Speaker 6 (48:08):
Hold hold still my hand, steady my eye, chill my heart,
and let my gun sing for the people scream their anger,
cleanse with their hate, and kill This monster.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Is the monster in this poem Ford, I don't think so.
No one was screaming their anger about gerald Ford. They
were screaming their anger about America. In Sarah Jane's own telling,
the end of her journey in the Radical Underground was
a single gunshot at a symbol of all that she
had come to hate about her country, a single gunshot
(48:45):
that missed.
Speaker 5 (48:47):
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary
Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff, Show art by
jeffnya's Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk Rima O'Kelly
and Noams Griffin, Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive producers Alexander
(49:09):
Williams and Matt Frederick. Hear episodes of Rip Current early
completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing
to iHeart True Crime plus only on Apple Podcasts. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit
(49:29):
our website, ripcurrentpod dot com
Host
Toby Ball
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