On this day in 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by three armed strangers. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk of a car. Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of war.” Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA, negotiation would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst. Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave away some $2 million worth of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and asked for $6 million more. The Hearst Corporation said it would donate the additional sum if Patty was released unharmed.
In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when a surveillance camera took a photo of Hearst participating in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los Angeles store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she had joined the SLA of her own free will.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country with her captors—or conspirators—for more than a year, Hearst, or “Tania” as she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March 20, 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.
Butterhenge
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Today is the birthday, in 1947, of Margie and Mary Ann Ganser, vocalists for The Shangri-Las, who had a 1964 US No.1 & UK No.11 single with ‘Leader Of The Pack’. Mary Ann died in New York on March 15, 1970, aged 22, of a drug overdose. Margie died of breast cancer on July 28th 1996 age 48. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5YxtweUxrA
