For the past ten months, there have been sporadic reports that she has been spotted, that the authorities have been playing a waiting game, that the long chase would soon be over. But the leads always turned out to be false, and the FBI always had to admit that, despite one of the most massive searches in its history, it had no idea where Patty Hearst was.
She was abducted from her apartment in Berkeley, Calif., on Feb. 4, 1974 by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. On April 15, with a carbine cradled in her arm, she appeared with S.L.A. members during the robbery of a San Francisco bank. After six of her S.L.A. companions were killed in a violent shootout with Los Angeles police on May 17, Patty disappeared. Last month, on the eve of the anniversary of his daughter's kidnaping, Randolph Hearst admitted: "We don't know anything about Patricia. We don't know where she is, and we don't know whether she is well. But we believe she is still alive."
Last week the search for Patty Hearst suddenly heated up. There was a flurry of grand jury action on both coasts. If they did not know where she was, at least the searchers were sure that they knew where she had been. In keeping with the bizarre nature of the entire episode, the latest chapter involved a radical athletics director named John V. Scott who had once been employed by Oberlin College in Ohio, and—the strangest touch of all—Bill Walton, the talented, eccentric 6-ft. 11-in. basketball center of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Berkeley Plot. After the Los Angeles shootout, law enforcement agencies now believe, Patty Hearst fled to Berkeley with at least two S.L.A. members, William and Emily Harris. There they were joined by Wendy Masako Yoshimura, 32, who has been a fugitive since March 30, 1972. She is wanted for possessing explosives that were to have been used in a plot—never carried out—to blow up the naval architecture building on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Patty and the Harrises apparently linked up with Scott, 33, who is an intense, articulate critic of American athletics. Scott argues that most college sports programs are an extension of a society that he calls racist and militaristic. Looking for a fresh approach, Oberlin hired Scott as athletics director in 1972, on the theory that he was the right man to enliven the college's de-emphasized athletics program. It did not work out, and Oberlin and the reformer parted company last year, with Oberlin paying Scott the amount of his unexpired contract: $42,000.
TIME has learned that early last summer a West Coast radical leader summoned Scott to Berkeley and asked him to help Patty and her friends. Then either Scott or his parents, Mr. and Mrs. John S. Scott, picked up Patty and the Harrises near Berkeley and took them to the motel the elder Scotts managed in Las Vegas. The trio stayed there for about a week. Patty and the Harrises then traveled to New York City and moved into an apartment on West 92nd Street. The younger Scott and his wife Micki joined the trio in New York.
Ideal Spot. In early October, police thought they saw Patty in the Times Square subway station. The girl, who looked remarkably like Patty, was so incensed at being examined by police that she resisted strongly and was arrested, and the story got into the newspapers.