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Whatever happens to her in Los Angeles, the reaction to last week's verdict in San Francisco showed that Americans are split in their feelings about Patty and whether she was lying when she insisted that she had been coerced into going along on the bank robbery. In his final instructions to the jury, Judge Carter said: "The law does not permit jurors to be governed by sympathy, prejudice or public opinion." Plainly, some Americans were still swayed by sympathy for Patty. "I'm really taken aback," said Sylvia Volin, an artist in Bergen County, N.J. "I thought everything was removed from her hands the moment she was kidnaped. My sympathies are with her." Patty's ex-fiancé, Steven Weed, told TIME: "I was more surprised by the speed of the verdict than by the verdict itself. I can't see how any group of people could reach a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt in something in which nothing is clear." But others felt that the defendant had got what she deserved. The reaction of James Strauch, a New York accountant, was typical: "After she was kidnaped, I suspect they persuaded her to join up, and she went along. Now she will suffer the consequences, just as anyone else would under the same circumstances."
The drama that reached a climax last week is precisely the kind of sensational story that Patty's grandfather, Publisher William Randolph Hearst, exploited so skillfully while building his communications empire. From the moment that Patty was hauled half naked and screaming from her Berkeley, Calif., apartment, the story became not only increasingly dramatic but increasingly improbable. Could a rich, attractive young woman bearing such a legendary name really join the violent social revolutionaries of the S.L.A.? Could she have been so alienated from society and her parents—"pigs," she called them—that in two months she could change, by some strange metamorphosis, into the revolutionary named Tania? And could she have gone along on the bank raid of her own free will, carrying a sawed-off carbine like a latter-day gun moll?
After the robbery. Patty escaped the holocaust of May 17, 1974, when six S.L.A. members died in the shootout with Los Angeles police. Along with millions of other Americans, she watched the death struggle live on television—the macabre media event of the year. There followed the 16-month chase as the FBI searched for her across the country while she traveled from the West Coast to a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania and back again. Then, on Sept. 18, 1975, two lawmen crept up the stairs of a small house in San Francisco and knocked on the door, which swung open. Petrified, Patty Hearst pleaded, "Don't shoot," and went along quietly.