On Feb. 4, 1974, the SLA carried out its most notorious crime — the kidnapping of 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst, the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst and an art history major at Berkeley. Three SLA soldiers — later identified by Hearst as Atwood, DeFreeze and Bill Harris — burst into the apartment Hearst shared with her fiance Steven Weed. Armed with guns, the men assaulted Weed with a wine bottle and carried Hearst, screaming and clothed in a nightgown, to a waiting car.

Two days later, a local radio station received an SLA communiqué saying the group had "served an arrest warrant" on Hearst, daughter of the "corporate enemy of the people." Hearst's kidnapping was a national media event. Reporters camped on the lawn of her parents home, waiting with the family for news of a ransom demand.

On February 12, the SLA sent a second communiqué, a letter and an audiotaped message from DeFreeze and Hearst.

"Mom, Dad, I'm okay," Hearst began on the tape. She said she was kept blindfolded, but treated well, and cautioned police from trying rescue operations that could endanger her or themselves. The communiqué also carried the SLA's first demand: that every poor person in California be given $70 in free food.

Hearst's father, Randolph, the chairman of the Hearst Corporation, estimated the cost of such a food distribution would be $400 million, way beyond the family's resources. Instead, he set up the People In Need program and, with the family foundation, donated about $2 million. In some locations, the food distribution resulted in rioting and fraud.

In her autobiography, Hearst says she spent the first two months of her abduction in a dark closet where she was raped by DeFreeze and subject to unending SLA propaganda.

"While I may have looked upon their beliefs with disdain, they, in turn, held my life style and my beliefs in utter contempt. Just about everything I thought was white, they said was black and they were determined to re-educate me," she wrote.


NEXT: From heiress to urban guerilla