背景
In the early 1970s the United States had dozens of small armed groups that had grown out of the protest movement against the Vietnam War. The Symbionese Liberation Army, founded in 1973 around the escaped prisoner Donald DeFreeze, never had more than about twenty members and in November 1973 had murdered the school superintendent Marcus Foster in Oakland. When two members were arrested for that, the group looked for a hostage with a famous name. Patricia Hearst was studying art history at Berkeley and lived there with her fiancé.
经过
On the evening of 4 February 1974 armed SLA members forced their way into the apartment, beat her fiancé and carried Hearst off in the boot of a car. The group demanded first the release of the two prisoners and then food aid for the poor of California; her father's 'People in Need' programme was chaotic. By her own account Hearst spent weeks blindfolded in a closet and was threatened and abused. On 3 April her voice was heard on a tape: she was staying with the SLA and would from now on be called Tania.
调查
On 15 April 1974 security cameras recorded Hearst taking part with a carbine in the robbery of a branch of the Hibernia Bank, in which two bystanders were wounded. The FBI mounted one of the largest searches in its history. On 17 May the Los Angeles police surrounded a house holding six SLA members; they died in a gun battle and fire that were shown live on television. Hearst was not there and lived underground for another sixteen months, until her arrest in San Francisco on 18 September 1975.
后续与未解之谜
At her trial her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argued that she had acted under duress and brainwashing; the prosecutor pointed to the months in which she could have escaped. On 20 March 1976 the jury found her guilty of bank robbery. She served almost two of the seven years before President Carter commuted the sentence in 1979; in 2001 she was pardoned by President Clinton. The case, like the Stockholm hostage-taking of 1973, is often cited in discussions of the 'Stockholm syndrome' and of the line between victim and perpetrator.
