PATTY'S TWISTED JOURNEY

The evidence was fragmentary and scattered and painfully hard to gather, but slowly it accumulated--a red Volkswagen camper, a fingerprint discovered at a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, a post office box in San Francisco. Suddenly last week the bits fitted into a pattern. When they did, an FBI agent and a policeman climbed stealthily up the backstairs to the top-floor apartment of the modest house on the edge of San Francisco. They knocked, and the door swung open. Standing in the room was the thin, pale young woman. "Don't shoot," said Patty Hearst. "I'll go with you."

That quiet drama ended a 19 1/2-month chase--one of the longest and most intensive in U.S. history--and climaxed a bizarre odyssey that had a special and disturbing fascination for Americans. They had been appalled by the violence of the whole affair: the strong-arm kidnaping near a college campus, then the bank robbery in which Patty herself wielded a gun, then the surrealistic, nationally televised shootout that left six of her companions dead. With some apprehension, parents debated just why Patty, the heiress to a celebrated fortune, had become a self-proclaimed revolutionary. Many people claimed to have spotted her in various parts of the world, yet she managed to elude the great chase--until last Thursday.

Captured along with Patty was her close companion, Wendy Yoshimura, 32. An hour earlier, outside an old white two-story house three miles away, the FBI had arrested two of Patty's other friends: robust William Harris, 30, and his wan and tired wife, Emily, 28. All four were comrades-in-arms in the explosive and tiny cult of revolutionaries who grandiosely called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. With the arrests, said the FBI, the S.L.A. had ceased to exist. All dozen members of the group, which had first shown willingness to kill in the ambush-slaying of Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster in 1973, were either jailed or dead.

Some of the mysteries of the Patty Hearst case began to lift when the four were arraigned two hours later in a crowded San Francisco federal court. The first to be handled was Wendy Yoshimura, a Japanese-American artist who disappeared in 1972 after being charged with taking part in a plan to bomb the naval-architecture building on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Federal authorities believe that she and Patty Hearst have been together since at least the summer of 1974. Magistrate Owen Woodruff dismissed federal fugitive charges against Yoshimura, and remanded her to the custody of Alameda County authorities to face arraignment for her part in the Berkeley incident. As she was taken from the courtroom, she paused at the defense table and touched the outstretched hand of Patty Hearst.

Then it was Patty's turn. Newsmen and spectators in the crowded chamber strained to get a good look at the defendant in Case No. 74-364: The United States of America v. Patricia Campbell Hearst. Sitting near her at the witness table was her cousin, William Randolph Hearst III, 26, the first member of her family she saw after her capture. They had been close friends, and he seemed on the verge of tears. They avoided each other's eyes.

Patty had changed during her hegira. Not only had her long dark-blonde hair been cut shorter and dyed red but she had lost her healthy, cover-girl looks. Her face was noticeably drawn. But she did not look or act like a victim who had been forced by her abductors to rob a bank and denounce her grieving parents and her fiance as "pigs" and "clowns." She was as casual as if she had dropped by to answer a traffic summons. She was wearing stained rubber clogs and dark brown cotton pants, and beneath her striped, long-sleeved jersey she was braless. Throughout the proceedings, she nonchalantly smiled and chewed gum.

Standing before Woodruff, Patty lowered her voice to almost a whisper as she gave her age--21--and acknowledged her name, not mentioning the revolutionary name of Tania that she had adopted while on the run. She was then arraigned on charges of armed bank robbery and violation of the Federal Firearms Act. Armed bank robbery carries a maximum 25-year sentence and is only one of 22 federal and state charges that she faces; they could jail her for life. Her bail was set at $1.5 million. At one point Patty Hearst stood erect, tightly clenched her small right fist and flourished it aloft remorselessly in the salute of the social revolutionary.

Next, Patty's friends Bill and Emily Harris went before Woodruff. As Harris entered the courtroom, he scanned the expectant audience and cried out, "What do you say, comrades? Keep on trucking!" Then he lifted his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The Harrises were arraigned on charges of illegal possession of arms; bail was set at $550,000 for each. As he was led from the courtroom by two U.S. marshals, Harris raised his right arm, his fist a hard ball, and announced loudly, "This ain't no big deal, comrades. Long live the guerrillas!"

The Harrises and Patty Hearst were sent to the San Mateo jail, 30 miles to the south. As they were being driven away, Emily Harris raised her own clenched fist to newsmen, and Patty grinned broadly.

At the San Mateo jail, Patty listed her occupation as "urban guerrilla." Her lawyer, Terence Hallinan, told newsmen that she had asked him to relay a message to the public: "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there."

At the jail where she was quartered alone in a 7-ft. by 9-ft. cell containing a double-bunk bed, Patty Hearst was equally truculent. One temporary jail-mate who had a brief chance to talk to the new prisoner was Evelyn Broussard. After being released, Broussard said she had told Patty, "It's been a long time since we've seen you." Her answer, according to Broussard: "I wish it had been longer." Broussard asked Patty how she had been caught, and said that she had answered: "I wish to hell I knew."

Although Patty did not ask to see her parents, she agreed to their request for a meeting. They were already hurrying to San Francisco, her father from New York City (where he had been on business for the Hearst Corp., the publishing company of which he is chairman), and her mother from Los Angeles (where she had been attending a meeting of the regents of the University of California).

Taking along a bunch of yellow roses, which the San Francisco FBI had given them for Patty in a rather odd, gentlemanly gesture, the parents arrived at the San Mateo jail shortly after midnight and talked with her for about half an hour. There were reports later that the meeting had gone coolly, but the parents insisted that they were delighted by the reception they had received. "We all smiled and laughed and hugged each other," said Mrs. Hearst. "Patty is happy to come home and would like to come home with us. She really wants to come home."

The search for Patty Hearst was not only one of the longest in FBI history but one of the most embarrassing. Occasionally, Attorney General Edward Levi was frustrated by the inability of the bureau to lay its hands on the much-publicized fugitive heiress. Says one Justice Department source: "He couldn't understand why the bureau, with all its resources, couldn't even get close to her."

As many as 300 FBI agents worked on the case at one time. In San Francisco, a special unit of agents did nothing but run down leads. Several times, the FBI got to Patty's hideouts shortly after she had left. The bureau's traditional methods did not work quickly for two good reasons. First, most fugitives sooner or later make personal contact with family members or friends, who are quietly watched by the FBI. Patty, however, remained aloof. Second, the bureau was unable to infiltrate the S.L.A.; the radical group was too small and tightly knit. Thus for months at a time, the FBI had no idea where its elusive quarry was.

The FBI was flooded with tips and followed up on almost all of them. Patty was reportedly "sighted" in Hong Kong, Cuba, Mexico City, Algeria, on a Los Angeles freeway, in the hills of Tennessee and in a Colorado cafe. Sometimes the FBI and other officials reacted overzealously. FBI agents barged into a young woman's apartment in Arlington, Va., prompting the tenant, Elizabeth Norton, to sue for invasion of privacy. About 50 Los Angeles police staged a predawn raid on a Hollywood home, awakening two sleepy women in pajamas who vaguely resembled Patty and Emily Harris. A young woman seemingly meditating in a subway station in New York's Times Square resisted efforts of New York police to check her identity against that of Patty; she was arrested for disorderly conduct. Scores of "hippy-looking" American women were stopped along the Mexican border, and even in Central American tourist spots like Honduras, because of real or imagined resemblances to Miss Hearst.

Then tne FBI began to get some breaks. TIME has learned that one key factor leading to the capture was that Patty and her companions--the Harrises and Yoshimura--were abandoned during the summer of 1974 by other radical underground groups. In particular, they were shunned by the Weatherman, the most violent revolutionary organization of the late '60s and early '70s, because of an incident that occurred in Manhattan. At the time, the S.L.A. fugitives were using a West 92nd Street apartment that had been a Weatherman hideout. Pursuing Patty, FBI agents not only discovered the sanctuary but very nearly got their hands on Kathy Boudin, 32. She was a leader of a group that had been making bombs in a Greenwich Village town house, but fled after the bombs accidentally exploded.

The near-capture of Boudin was "too close a call for the Weatherpeople," says a federal investigator. "To them, Patty was nothing but a source of heat. They considered her more of a goofy heiress than a true revolutionary. The word went out to keep away from her."

Deprived of such shelter, Patty and the Harrises next occupied an isolated farmhouse in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, near the hamlet of South Canaan. They did so, the FBI believes, with the aid of Jack Scott, former athletics director at Ohio's Oberlin College, who with his wife Micki has refused to answer FBI questions or appear before a federal grand jury investigating the movements of Patty and the Harrises.

Keeping a step ahead of authorities, the group left the farmhouse. By the time authorities found the place, only the fingerprints of Wendy Yoshimura remained, but these positively linked her with the other fugitives. Born in a World War II detention camp for Japanese Americans near Fresno, Calif, Yoshimura was a familiar figure in the Berkeley street scene and radical movements, including Venceremos. She had become a fugitive as early as 1972, when explosives for use in the abortive Berkeley bombing plot were found in her garage. Yoshimura and three men were indicted by a California grand jury in the conspiracy.

The crucial clue in the Hearst case, TIME has learned, turned out to be the red Volkswagen. It had been spotted at a farm in South Canaan that the fugitives had used as a hideout. A former owner of the car told authorities he had sold it to one Kathleen Soliah, who had given her address as a post office box number in San Francisco. Checking further, the FBI learned that Soliah had been friendly with S.L.A. members and other radicals, known as the "Tom Thumb" group, suspected of robbing a bank near Sacramento last April 21. A young woman led the masked bandits who looted the bank of $15,000 and killed a housewife with a shotgun blast in the process. Authorities speculated at the time that Patty's band of S.L.A. fugitives might have had a hand in the bank raid.

Accordingly, early last week the FBI set up a surveillance on Kathleen Soliah's postal box in San Francisco and discovered that mail was being picked up by messengers and taken to two addresses: 288 Precita Avenue and 625 Morse Street.

Charles Bates, head of the FBI'S San Francisco office and the man directing the overall search for Patty (see box page 16), ordered a watch to be kept on both dwellings. On Precita Avenue, four agents sat in a light green Ford LTD parked at the curb, and three more waited in a yellow and white camper just down the block. The agents wore sandais, beards and beads, hoping to blend in with the inhabitants of the area. Still, neighbors spotted the stakeout and watched with considerable interest to find out who was being trailed. No one appears to have suspected the athletic and pleasant young couple who had just moved into an apartment in the neo-Victorian structure at 288 Precita.

At 1:15 p.m. last Thursday--a clear, cool day that was perfect for running--the couple from No. 288 came down the stairs and went loping off to nearby Bernal Park. The agents thought they knew who the two were from sightings the day before, but they still were not sure. "Our pictures of them were almost two years old," says an agent. But when the pair came jogging back home, there was no longer any doubt. The four agents leaped out of the LTD, and the other three came sprinting from the nearby camper. They were armed with pistols, a sawed-off shotgun and submachine guns. One watching neighbor later recalled, "They [the agents] seemed very nervous and shaky." The woman tried to get away, only to be caught within 20 ft. But the man calmly put up his hands, says another witness, "like a little kid who had been caught doing something wrong." His attitude seemed to be, she adds, " 'Well, I'm caught.' " Swiftly, the FBI agents handcuffed William and Emily Harris.

Then, as city police cars closed off both ends of the block, some agents hurried into the apartment; while others, guns drawn, burst into a few of the neighboring houses to look unsuccessfully for Patty Hearst. In the Harrises' apartment, the FBI found 40 pounds of black explosive powder, three .30-cal., fully automatic carbines, two shotguns, two pistols and a substantial amount of ammunition.

With the Harrises in hand, the FBI quickly shifted its attention to 625 Morse Street, a concrete house with redwood facing. About two weeks ago, a young sandy-haired man had rented the small upstairs apartment, paying the $180-per-month rent with a check signed "Charlie Adams." Later, another man--shorter and darker--briefly helped "Adams" move in along with a woman wearing slacks and a big floppy hat that completely obscured her face. Like the Harrises, "Adams" and the woman made a good first impression on their neighbors. Later, the couple were joined by a girl who was slighter and taller than the first. "Adams" generally left the apartment at about 10:30 in the morning, driving away in a station wagon and returning in the early afternoon. But the two women were rarely seen around the neighborhood.

An hour and ten minutes after the Harrises were arrested, FBI Special Agent Tom Padden and San Francisco Police Inspector Tim Casey climbed the stairs to the apartment, still not knowing what they would find. They pounded on the door. It opened, and Wendy Yoshimura looked out. Behind her was the taller woman--Patty Hearst. Padden warned Yoshimura: "Don't move or I'll blast your head off." Neither woman stirred, although each had a .38-cal. pistol in her purse.

Searching the sparsely furnished flat, law officers found a cat, some dirty clothes and dishes, and four more pistols, two sawed-off shotguns (both loaded), a store of ammunition and a two-foot high marijuana plant.

Later, authorities established that "Adams" was Stephen F. Soliah, 27, the brother of Kathleen. A sometime house painter, Soliah was arrested at the apartment and charged with harboring fugitives from the law. The FBI was also trying to locate Kathleen Soliah, who had been living in the Morse Street apartment, and another sister, Josephine, who was thought to have been involved with the group.

Meanwhile, Patty Hearst's mother flew up from Los Angeles. A front-row seat was held for Catherine Hearst on Pacific Southwest Airlines' 4 p.m. commuter flight to San Francisco. She was a model of tightly controlled composure. Her black, high-necked cocktail dress was smooth and unwrinkled; the triple-strand choker of pearls was precisely in place; and her black alligator bag was set neatly on her lap.

When newsmen swarmed around her, a stewardess offered to break up the impromptu press conference, but Mrs. Hearst declined the favor. Referring to the family's publishing firm, she said with a smile, "We're in the business of harassing people for a living too." Her first reaction on hearing the news about her daughter: "I sat down in a chair and said a silent prayer of thanks. I'm just thankful to God that she's alive." Despite the harsh words Patty had uttered in the past, Mrs. Hearst expected that the reunion would go well. "I don't believe she has given up 19 years of our lives together so completely," she said. "If she went one way, she can go the other way. When you all love each other, everything can be worked out."

Understandably, Mrs. Hearst was remembering the daughter she knew before the trouble began. Until Patty Hearst made her first truculent declaration of revolutionary fervor, read in a flat unemotional voice on seven tapes delivered to Berkeley radio station KFPA, she had shown few signs of anger at the System. Before her disappearance, she was taking part in the most traditional of rites for an engaged American girl: happily picking out her china pattern. Then, on the night of Feb. 4, 1974, Patty's life changed forever.

Screaming, wearing only a blue bathrobe, Patty was dragged from her apartment by three members of the S.L.A., who kicked and struck her fiance Steven Weed with a bottle before stuffing Patty in a car trunk and speeding off. Trying to meet the S.L.A.'s demands for ransom, the Hearsts gave away $2 million worth of food to the poor in the San Francisco Bay Area. As the food was tossed off trucks in neighborhoods of needy people in San Francisco and Oakland, mobs fought angrily for the supplies, then broke bitterly into small-scale rioting when the gifts ran out.

The astonishing news came nine weeks later on a tape. Calmly and coldly, Patty declared that she had joined the S.L.A. "I have chosen to stay and fight." She called her father "a liar" for claiming to be concerned about her welfare and that of "oppressed people." She insisted that she had not been "brainwashed, drugged, tortured, hypnotized or in any way confused" by her abductors. Included with the tape was a snapshot of Patty holding an automatic rifle in front of an S.L.A. cobra poster--a photo that was to become famous.

The Hearsts received another jolt two weeks later. Striding showily into a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco's Sunset district, a black man and four white women wielding semiautomatic carbines announced, "We're from the S.L.A." "This," shouted one of them, "is Tania Hearst!" Unmistakably, the bank's automatic cameras filmed Patty Hearst brandishing a rifle at center stage in the bank lobby. Needlessly opening fire as they left the bank, the robbers fled with $10,960. Declared Patty's distraught father: "It's terrible! Sixty days ago, she was a lovely child. Now there's a picture of her in a bank with a gun in her hand."

When the Harrises were detected shoplifting (stealing a 49-c- pair of socks) at a suburban Los Angeles sporting-goods store, Patty, watching from a parked car, sprayed the storefront with rifle bullets to cover their flight.

On May 17, 1974, an army of 410 agents and heavily armed policemen cornered half a dozen members of the S.L.A. in a small rose-colored house in the south central section of Los Angeles. They pumped more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition into the house, and the fierce gun battle was watched live and in color on television by millions of Americans. The viewers included the Hearsts, who feared that their daughter was in the building as it caught fire and burned to the ground. There were six charred bodies in the smoldering debris, including that of Donald D. DeFreeze, 30, an escaped black convict who called himself Cinque (pronounced Sin-Q) and was the main muscle behind the S.L.A. But Patty, with the Harrises, had managed to escape the shootout--and the nationwide hunt was on again.

Since then, Patty has been traveling off and on with the Harrises. They are an unusual couple. Before their advocacy of revolutionary violence, they had been raised in Midwestern, middleclass, authority-respecting families. Bill, son of a building-supplies salesman, grew up in Carmel, Ind., and, said his mother, "would never have thought of arguing with his dad." But his wartime service as a combat Marine in Viet Nam turned him toward radicalism. On leaving the service, he supported the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War and associated with Venceremos (We shall conquer), a Maoist revolutionary group. He met Emily in 1970 as he pursued a master's degree in urban education at Indiana University (he was an A-minus student). They were married in 1971 and moved to California.

Equally conventional at first, Emily was from Clarendon Hills, a Chicago suburb. Her father is a consulting engineer, village board member and Boy Scouts backer. At Indiana University, she was a fashionably dressed member of Chi Omega sorority, one of the most exclusive campus societies; she later taught in Bloomington schools. When she and Bill moved to Berkeley, both became involved in prison reform and drifted into radical activities. By January 1974, she had told her parents that "Bill and I have changed our relationship. It no longer confines us, and I am enjoying relationships with other men." She had fallen in love, she wrote, "with a beautiful black man who has conveyed to me the torture of being black in this country." Authorities believe she had referred to DeFreeze.

Patty also experienced a change of heart. On June 7, 1974, station KPFK received a tape recording of Patty's voice, eulogizing one of the shootout victims, William Wolfe. Said Patty: "His love for the people was so deep that he was willing to give his life for them." She said she had called him "Cujo" (in Spanish it means unconquerable). And, she said, "we loved each other so much."

Patty Hearst was swept off her feet not only by William Wolfe but also by the S.L.A. itself, according to FBI agents who worked for months on the case. They are convinced that she willingly became a genuine and loyal member of the organization.

Why did the granddaughter of Publishing Tycoon William Randolph Hearst become a revolutionary? How could a girl with her privileged background and brimming future change so completely? The deepest reasons may forever remain shrouded, like the full symbolism of the celebrated sled named Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the film classic modeled on the life of Hearst.

But psychiatrists who specialize in treating disturbed young people have their theories about Patty's behavior. Some believe that her motivations were far more complex than a simple and misdirected zeal to reform the world. They see her as an extreme example of the phenomenon of white, middle-class (or rich) girls turning to violence to strike at society. Starting in the late '60s, a few joined such organizations as the ultra-left Weatherman, the nihilistic and murderous "family" of Charles Manson, and the S.L.A.

Not surprisingly, some experts queried by TIME found similarities between Patty Hearst and Lynette Fromme, the Manson cultist who three weeks ago pointed a loaded .45 automatic directly at President Ford in Sacramento, Calif.

Sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, of California State University at Northridge, believes that Hearst and Fromme act like robots. "With no definite ego of their own, they placed themselves in a totally subservient position, following orders. They have low or no selfesteem, and they are desperately seeking recognition and approval." Typical of their craving for attention is the fact that they have "no regard for their own safety. They are more dangerous because of that."

Dr. Robert Harrington, director of the Hampden District Mental Health Clinic in Springfield, Mass., has observed many disturbed, white, affluent and intelligent young women. Speaking of those who turn to violence, he says: "Their inner life is one of impoverishment, and everything becomes external to them. They never look inside themselves. Some try to solve problems, some act violently, but they never contemplate their own responsibility. They just play out their impulses on society all over the place." Continues Harrington: "I think it becomes a kind of fusion of sexuality and violence when these kids find someone of a different group like Manson, or the S.L.A. led by a black--someone from a 'foreign' group that represents something alien to their own family, some kind of cultish, crazy, occult figure. And then you start getting the things like Patty Hearst holding a neat big rifle, or the Fromme girl with her .45."

So much for psychiatric diagnoses. They undoubtedly capture parts of Patty Hearst, without being able to explain her in full. Yet her mental and emotional state may yet become an issue in the complex legal maneuvers ahead. The one state and two federal cases against Patty Hearst, each with multiple counts, may drag on for years. She faces charges of: five counts of assault with an intent to commit murder; four counts of robbery; five counts of assault with a deadly weapon; three counts of felony auto theft; and two counts of kidnaping. Conceivably, Patty could be locked up for life. In addition, a civil suit for damages could be brought against her in either the state or federal courts by the two people who were wounded in the San Francisco bank robbery. Though she did not fire the shots, she was part of the group that did, and that makes her equally liable in the eyes of the law.

During her preliminary court appearance, Patty Hearst's lawyer said that she plans to plead not guilty on all counts. The rough outlines of the defense that her lawyers may use seemed to be suggested by her parents in their comments last week. They pictured their troubled daughter as a girl who had somehow been influenced or directed by S.L.A. members to commit crimes. "She was only 19 when she was forced to look down the barrel of a gun," said Mrs. Hearst. Her husband added, "I don't think very much is going to happen to her because she was a kidnap victim. Of course, there will be a hassle, and I can see a lot of bumpy roads ahead, but I don't think that is anything."

Following this approach, the high-powered Hearst lawyers may claim that Patty is innocent of any crime because she was acting under duress or even because she was suffering from temporary insanity. Indeed, while arguing that she should be granted bail, Attorney Hallinan last week pointed out: "This woman began as a kidnap victim." But Federal District Court Judge Oliver Carter revoked the $1.5 million bail that had previously been set, noting that he did not feel she was a good risk to be set free on bond. Said he: "In this case, we have a person who has announced to the world with others their revolution against the system ... and then punctuated it with gunfire." And there was always the danger, of course, that Patty Hearst would disappear again. Patty herself said, "Well, it might have looked like favoritism if I had gotten out." Carter set another hearing for this week to reconsider the question of granting bail.

If bail is eventually restored, Randolph Hearst has said, he would put up the $1.5 million. Once free on bond, Patty Hearst might not go to jail for years. Even if she was found guilty, the verdicts would undoubtedly be appealed for as long as possible. In the end, the great irony of Patty Hearst may be that the self-proclaimed revolutionary will depend for her freedom on a family fortune raised in a system that she vowed to overthrow.

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