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At about 6:40 a.m. on the day of the gun battle, the three released Matthews unharmed and abandoned his van. A few minutes later a motorist named Frank Sutter stopped for two hitchhiking girls, who suddenly brandished guns. The girls picked up Harris and, with Sutter lying in the back seat, the trio drove around for six hours. Then the kidnapers released Sutter in Griffith Park after taking $250 from his wallet. "You can figure this as a loan, but you won't get it back," said Harris. A short distance farther on, the trio parked the car and disappeared.
Discussing the assorted counts against Patty, D.A. Busch said, "She faces life imprisonment." In committing acts of violence, claimed Busch, "Miss Hearst was acting of her own free will." Busch thus differed with Randolph Hearst, who was still staunchly insisting last week that his daughter must have been brainwashed by the S.L.A. A picture of Patty Hearst, smiling like a prom queen, soon appeared on "wanted" posters distributed throughout the country.
Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles county coroner, cast new and harrowing light on the exact events of the Shootout, after studying the wounds on the six bodies and the positions in which they were found. When the shooting began, Dr. Noguchi theorized, the six chopped a hole in the wooden floor of the house and sought refuge in the 20-in.-deep crawl space under the structure, which was protected by a foot-thick cement foundation wall. This would explain not only how some members survived the fusillade for so long, but also why they failed to hit any of the officers laying siege to the frame and stucco hideout. The S.L.A. members had to shoot upward through narrow ventilation slots, and their bullets passed harmlessly over the heads of their unseen assailants.
Reconstructing the action, Dr. Noguchi said that Camilla Hall had died first—a rifle bullet piercing the middle of her forehead. Nancy Ling Perry was probably the next to go, hit in the spine and lung. Three other S.L.A. members —Angela Atwood, Patricia ("Mizmoon") Soltysik and William Wolfe—succumbed to noxious gases given off by the conflagration. "They chose to stay under the floor as the fire burned instead of getting out," said Dr. Noguchi. "In all my years as a coroner, I've never seen this kind of behavior in the face of live flames." To try to discover why the three showed such fanatical determination to die so horribly, Noguchi said that he was ordering "a psychological autopsy" by a varied team of experts.
The last to die, according to Dr. Noguchi, was Donald DeFreeze, the self-styled General Field Marshal Cinque of the S.L.A. From traces of gunpowder deep within a wound in his right temple, Dr. Noguchi deduced that the terrorist leader had committed suicide while the flames roared through the house a few inches above his head.