SAN FRANCISCO -- On a crisp, clear winter night 25 years ago Thursday, three armed kidnappers burst into a Berkeley, Calif., apartment and carried off a 19-year-old newspaper heiress wrapped in a blue bathrobe.
Her name was Patricia Campbell Hearst, and her kidnapping -- complete with gunshots and squealing cars a few blocks south of the University of California campus -- set off one of the most bizarre sagas in modern history.Before it was over, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst had joined her kidnappers -- a small band of self-styled revolutionaries who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army -- helping them rob banks and plant bombs before she was eventually arrested in San Francisco.
Her trial, held in San Francisco's federal courthouse, was billed as the "trial of the century" -- the first time since the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in the 1930s that the term was used with any seriousness. Eventually she served two years in federal prison.
Today, the 44-year-old Hearst hurries through the busy life of an East Coast society matron, devoted to a raft of charities, raising two teenage daughters, appearing in the occasional John Waters movie. It is a life so normal that her kidnapping now seems like a mirage, an event so implausible and so long ago that it is as if it never happened.
It was a different era but one that bears at least one uncanny similarity to the present. On the day of the kidnapping, the nation was preoccupied with talk of the impeachment of the president, and special prosecutor Leon Jaworsky was demanding that Richard Nixon turn over the fateful White House tapes.
Lines at gas stations extended for blocks, as the Arab oil embargo squeezed supplies. On the Sunday before the kidnapping, only 11 stations in San Francisco had enough gasoline to open.
The Vietnam War was nearly over and, despite Watergate, the nation at times seemed to be trying to reclaim some of its earlier innocence. "American Graffiti" had debuted in movie theaters the previous year, and "Happy Days" was playing on television.
But the act of terror that struck a quiet Berkeley neighborhood on the night of Feb. 4, 1974, reminded the nation that the radical political turmoil that had begun in the 1960s was still in full force, at least in the Bay area.
In its first "communiques" after the kidnapping, the SLA railed against the establishment, demanding that the wealthy Hearst family -- her father was chairman of the Hearst Corp. and editor of the San Francisco Examiner -- use its millions to feed the poor.
Soon, Patty Hearst would be heard in tape recordings denouncing her parents as "pigs," a phrase that sent shudders through mothers and fathers across America.
And on April 15, a little more than two months after her kidnapping, Hearst, now calling herself "Tanya," appeared in the jerky frames of a surveillance video, holding a rifle as she and her kidnappers robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco's Sunset District.
When she was arrested 17 months later, after one of the most intensive manhunts in FBI history, she gave the revolutionary clenched-fist salute. Asked her occupation when was being booked and fingerprinted, she replied: "urban guerrilla."
Along with F. Lee Bailey, his famous law partner, J. Albert Johnson, was hired by the Hearsts to defend their daughter against the Hibernia bank robbery charges.
Johnson said he spent hours every day with Hearst at the jail, while Bailey held press conferences and attended to pretrial work on the case.
"I just allowed her to express her feelings, to come out of it," Johnson said late in January. "It was never planned as a deprogramming, never. She just slowly freed herself from the brainwashing."
By the time her trial began four months later, Hearst's transformation back to being a frightened Berkeley sophomore was complete.
Hearst testified that after her kidnapping, the SLA kept her blindfolded for more than 50 days in a closet in a Daly City, Calif., safe house, incessantly haranguing her with radical rhetoric. She also explained that she took part in the Hibernia Bank robbery out of fear that she would be killed if she did not.
But the man who prosecuted her, former U.S. Attorney James L. Browning, has never wavered in his belief that Hearst was guilty and her trial and its outcome just.
"Her defense was physical duress, but it never squared with the facts," said Browning, 66, who recently retired from the San Mateo County Superior Court.
"When she was in that bank," Browning said, "she acted with verve and great purpose, and she avoided apprehension for a year and a half, when she had plenty of opportunities to walk away and come home. The fact is she had joined them."
It took the jury little more than a day to convict her, concluding that she had been a willing participant in the Hibernia Bank robbery.
In 1979, after serving two years of a five-year sentence, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence and she was freed.