The ashes from the holocaust and Shootout in Los Angeles had barely cooled last week when law authorities declared that they finally had the answers to two of the most persistent questions about the Patty Hearst saga. They were convinced that the newspaper heiress had really been kidnaped by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Feb. 4 rather than taken part in an elaborate ruse to join old friends. But they were also persuaded that Patty had since joined the cause of the shattered S.L.A. and become a terrorist herself.
The chief contributor to these conclusions was Thomas Matthews, an 18-year-old high school student. He was kidnaped by Patty and her S.L.A. companions, Emily and William Harris, during their frantic escape after shooting up a Los Angeles sporting-goods store the day before the fiery siege in which six of the S.L.A. gang members died. For twelve hours, the trio held Matthews captive while driving aimlessly around the Los Angeles area in his van. They even stopped for a while in a drive-in movie. Immediately after his release, Matthews, fearing reprisal by the S.L.A., did not tell the authorities that Patty had been in the truck. But two days after the Shootout, he confessed that Patty—wearing a short, dark, afro-style wig as a disguise—not only had been a member of the trio but had been remarkably willing to talk and chatted away like any 20-year-old girl on a date.
Bizarre Touch. According to Matthews, Patty said that she had decided to join her captors after becoming disillusioned with the attempts of her father, Randolph A. Hearst, to secure her release. She felt that he had mishandled the distribution of more than $2 million worth of food to the poor, an effort to meet the demands of the S.L.A. In addition, said Matthews, Patty admitted that she had willingly taken part in the S.L.A.'s robbery of a San Francisco bank on April 15. And she said that she had been the one who riddled the sporting-goods storefront with automatic fire to cover the trio's escape after William Harris had been caught shoplifting.
On the basis of Matthews' story, Los Angeles District Attorney Joseph Busch charged Patty with 19 felony counts, introducing the most bizarre touch yet in the whole strange affair: two counts charging Patty with being a kidnaper herself. The flurry of charges stemmed from the incident at the sporting-goods store and the subsequent flight.
As Busch reconstructed the series of events, the S.L.A. trio sped away from the store in a red and white van, then pulled up behind a parked car. Harris and one of the women took the car at gunpoint from its two occupants. "We are S.L.A.," Harris announced. "We need your car. I have to kill someone, and I don't want to kill you."
When that car stalled within a few blocks, the three fugitives seized a blue Chevrolet station wagon, which they drove until they saw a blue Ford van with a for-sale sign in its window parked in front of the Matthews home. Emily Harris walked up to Tom Matthews and said she would like to test-drive the truck. Once around the corner, Emily stopped to pick up her husband and Patty. "Do you know who this is?" Harris asked Matthews. "This is Tania." Tania was the name Patty had adopted with the S.L.A. and used while making several of her well-publicized tapes.