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Soon the guns within fell silent. One officer, making his way to the back of the house, reported spotting two women lying on the floor, one white and one black, both wearing cartridge belts. The heat was so intense that the bullets were exploding. Later, when the flames had died down and the little house had collapsed into 4 ft. of debris, police found three more bodies clustered in what had once been the bathroom. All were wearing tear-gas masks, and in the ruins, police found a formidable arsenal that included six sawed-off shotguns, one automatic rifle and two submachine guns. As the five bodies were removed in brown rubber bags, one of the witnesses who stood by, staring at the smoking rubble, was Steven Weed, whom Patty Hearst had renounced as her fiance. He would only say that he would remain in town until the bodies were identified.
The bodies were so disfigured that at first the Los Angeles coroners could determine only that three were females and one of the males was black and the other white. To help in the identifications, the coroner's office sent for Patty Hearst's dental records. Early Saturday morning, Patty's father, Randolph Hearst, called the coroner's office and asked to be told the results of the study before word was given to the press.
Hearst was assured that he would be the first to know. When they called him with the news that his daughter was not one of the victims, Hearst could only gasp, "Thank God!" His wife burst into tears.
Until the explosive events of last week, FBI and police investigators had admitted that they had no idea where the S.L.A. and Patty Hearst might be, so well hidden were they in the black ghettos of the Bay Area. For weeks the authorities hoped to drive the S.L.A. out of this haven and into a new, unfamiliar area where the members might make some damaging mistakes. To that end, Hearst offered a reward of $50,000 to anyone furnishing information about the kidnapers; FBI agents made house-to-house searches, and a grand jury was called into session to sift evidence.
The strategy worked. The members of the S.L.A. are thought to have left San Francisco for Los Angeles on May 8 or 9. They traveled in three vans—all found in Los Angeles last Friday—that had been bought in San Francisco for $3,500 by a black man who paid cash and gave a fictitious name and address.
The money is believed to have come from the S.L.A.'s robbery of San Francisco's Hibernia Bank that netted nearly $11,000.
Once in the unfamiliar setting of Los Angeles, the S.L.A.—so coolly professional on their own turf—began to make amateurish errors. The day before the Shootout, a couple believed to be William and Emily Harris, both suspected S.L.A. members, bought $31.50 worth of heavy outdoor clothing at a sporting-goods store. As they left, a clerk noticed that the man had stuffed a pair of 490 socks up his sleeve. He followed the pilferer outside, where the two began to struggle. Suddenly, a woman sitting in a Volkswagen van across the street sprayed the store with machine-gun fire.