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The doctors hope to complete their examination of Patty in time for another bail hearing early this week. Her father Randolph, chairman of the Hearst Corp., is ready and willing to put up the $1.5 million bail and has agreed to meet any conditions imposed by the court to keep Patty from fleeing. In an affidavit of his own, which was mocked by Patty's harsh words on the tape, Hearst declared that his daughter "regards our home as her home, and has expressed, over the past three days, an enthusiastic wish to return to living with her parents."
If Patty does take the stand, the bail hearing—often a commonplace proceeding—could become a dramatic mini-trial that would anticipate any regular trials that follow. Her affidavit described in lurid detail how she had been tortured and threatened so intensively by the S.L.A. that she felt herself to be a psychological as well as a physical captive of her abductors. She told how, after her kidnaping on the night of Feb. 4, 1974, she had been placed in a hot, stifling closet about 5 ft. or 6 ft. long and 3 ft. wide, her hands bound, her eyes blindfolded, unable to get out even to go to the bathroom. During the first week, the only person who spoke to her was Donald DeFreeze (the self-styled General Field Marshal Cinque of the S.L.A.), who, according to the affidavit, repeatedly threatened to kill her. De-Freeze also recorded her early tapes, in which she assured her family that she was all right.
The affidavit was rambling and repetitious, ungrammatical and contradictory in part: at one point, it said Patty was in the closet for "several days"; at another, for "an interminable length of time, which seemed to her to be weeks." But the account made its basic points clear enough.
Released from the closet, she was so weak that she could stand for only a minute or so before falling. Her captors told her that she had to take part in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco that occurred on April 15, 1974. "She was given a gun," the document declared, "and directed to stand about in the center of the bank counter. Meanwhile, one of her captors, armed with a gun which was kept pointed at her, kept an eye on her and had told her in advance that if she made one false move or did anything except announce her name, she would be killed immediately.
When she was taken back to her place of captivity, she was told that she was now guilty of bank robbery and murder and that the FBI would shoot her on sight. In her disordered and frightened mind," according to the affidavit, "this appeared to her to be probable . . ."
Finally, she felt her mind clouding and feared that she was losing her sanity. "She was unable to distinguish between what was real and what was imaginary . . . Among the things that served to deprive her of her sanity was the statement, repeated to her many times, that her mother and father had abandoned her, that they had offered a reward of $50,000 to have her brought in, dead or alive, and that they were working with the FBI to destroy her."