David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "sara-jane-olson"
American Heiress
When Patty Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery and firing a machine gone to help her friends Bill and Emily Harris escape from an especially brave sporting goods clerk, I must admit I was angry. Would she have done any of these things if she hadn't been kidnapped?
It's pretty clear from Toobin's book that she did become a full-fledged member of the SLA. There were a couple of reasons for that: Angela Atwood would talk to Patty in her closet prison as if she were a long lost girlfriend, and Willie Wood, would read to her from radical literature and from Karl Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Patty adjusted to her circumstances, just as she did when she was released, when she readjusted to being a rich heiress. According to Patty, everything was the SLA's fault, including her communiques in which she sounded like a member. Then there's the Stockholm Syndrome which wasn't widely known when Patty was tired. It maintains that some captives take on the personalities of their captors. F. Lee Bailey could have used that defense when he took her case.
For me, the most interesting part of the book was Toobin's background information on the SLA and its members. Donald Defreeze or Cinque' had a thing about Marcus Foster, the black Oakland superintendent of schools. Before Foster arrived Oakland's schools were a mess. Rather than hire off duty policeman to provide security, he hired his own team. Defreeze saw this as a fascist ploy. He was also jealous of the attention Foster was getting. Foster's murder was a public relations ploy, in other words. Two other members, Nancy Ling Perry and Patricia Soltysik, were directly involved in the Foster murder, but the getaway drivers, Joe Remiro, who was still in jail prior to the release of the book, and Russ Little, who got off on a technicality during the trial, were the only two tried for the murder. After Foster's murder, Cinque and the others decided murder was too extreme to get any public sympathy for their cause: sticking it to the man, helping the poor. They saw Patty Hearst's wedding announcement in the paper and staked out her apartment.
For me, the second most interesting aspect was Kathleen Soliah's involvement with the SLA. She spoke out against the killing of the SLA members in a wild shootout with the LA police and the FBI SWAT teams. She was also a member of the New World Liberation Front, which relied more on bombing police cars and stations to get attention. Almost forgot, most people will want to know why the Harrises and Patty weren't at the SLA hideout during the shootout. Luck. I'll let you read it for yourself. Anyway Soliah provided a connection between the Harrises, Patty Hearst and Jack Scott, who hid them on his mother's Pennsylvania farm for most of the year, ostensibly to write a book about them. The cops screwed up when they captured Patty and the Harrises; they could've captured the whole gang, but they didn't cover all the bases. As a result Kathleen Soliah became Sara Jane Olson, a soccer mom married to a doctor in Highland Park, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. Thanks to a TV show, she was captured more than twenty years after the events described in the book. Minnesotans know all about Sara Jane Olson. Toobin doesn't tell her whole story for some reason. He just says she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
Seems like I remember watching the shootout between the police and the SLA on television. I was fascinated; it was like an earlier version of the O.J. fracas. There's a picture of Patty as a sixty-year-old matron at a dog show with her pooch. As Jeffrey Toobin so aptly says, “she had become another version of her mother,” whom she had derided in her SLA communiques.
It's pretty clear from Toobin's book that she did become a full-fledged member of the SLA. There were a couple of reasons for that: Angela Atwood would talk to Patty in her closet prison as if she were a long lost girlfriend, and Willie Wood, would read to her from radical literature and from Karl Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Patty adjusted to her circumstances, just as she did when she was released, when she readjusted to being a rich heiress. According to Patty, everything was the SLA's fault, including her communiques in which she sounded like a member. Then there's the Stockholm Syndrome which wasn't widely known when Patty was tired. It maintains that some captives take on the personalities of their captors. F. Lee Bailey could have used that defense when he took her case.
For me, the most interesting part of the book was Toobin's background information on the SLA and its members. Donald Defreeze or Cinque' had a thing about Marcus Foster, the black Oakland superintendent of schools. Before Foster arrived Oakland's schools were a mess. Rather than hire off duty policeman to provide security, he hired his own team. Defreeze saw this as a fascist ploy. He was also jealous of the attention Foster was getting. Foster's murder was a public relations ploy, in other words. Two other members, Nancy Ling Perry and Patricia Soltysik, were directly involved in the Foster murder, but the getaway drivers, Joe Remiro, who was still in jail prior to the release of the book, and Russ Little, who got off on a technicality during the trial, were the only two tried for the murder. After Foster's murder, Cinque and the others decided murder was too extreme to get any public sympathy for their cause: sticking it to the man, helping the poor. They saw Patty Hearst's wedding announcement in the paper and staked out her apartment.
For me, the second most interesting aspect was Kathleen Soliah's involvement with the SLA. She spoke out against the killing of the SLA members in a wild shootout with the LA police and the FBI SWAT teams. She was also a member of the New World Liberation Front, which relied more on bombing police cars and stations to get attention. Almost forgot, most people will want to know why the Harrises and Patty weren't at the SLA hideout during the shootout. Luck. I'll let you read it for yourself. Anyway Soliah provided a connection between the Harrises, Patty Hearst and Jack Scott, who hid them on his mother's Pennsylvania farm for most of the year, ostensibly to write a book about them. The cops screwed up when they captured Patty and the Harrises; they could've captured the whole gang, but they didn't cover all the bases. As a result Kathleen Soliah became Sara Jane Olson, a soccer mom married to a doctor in Highland Park, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. Thanks to a TV show, she was captured more than twenty years after the events described in the book. Minnesotans know all about Sara Jane Olson. Toobin doesn't tell her whole story for some reason. He just says she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
Seems like I remember watching the shootout between the police and the SLA on television. I was fascinated; it was like an earlier version of the O.J. fracas. There's a picture of Patty as a sixty-year-old matron at a dog show with her pooch. As Jeffrey Toobin so aptly says, “she had become another version of her mother,” whom she had derided in her SLA communiques.
