(2 of 3)
In that second robbery, a blast from a shotgun, fired by one of the raiders, killed a customer, Myrna Lee Opsahl. If Patty was a member of the gang that hit that bank, she could be charged with murder. And agents are already convinced that she took part at least in the preparations for the raid.
The link was a 1967 Pontiac Firebird, stolen in Oakland, Calif., that was used as a getaway car. Investigators believe Patty rented garage space for the car in Sacramento the week before the robbery. The Sacramento police received a tip that the garage had been rented by a young woman who was acting suspiciously. TIME has learned that the police set up a stakeout on the car, which lasted from Monday through Friday, April 14 to 18. No one showed up. But on Saturdays and Sundays only a skeleton police force guards the relaxed city of Sacramento, so the watch was lifted. On Sunday night, the day before the Crocker robbery, the car vanished.
Without Knowing. The casual approach of the Sacramento police may be one reason that Patty and the Harrises were able to avoid capture there from around last Thanksgiving until late May, when they moved to San Francisco. Last spring the Sacramento police stumbled across Patty without knowing it. The fugitives were living in an apartment in a duplex at 1721 W Street in the downtown area. They were using aliases —Patty was known as Sue Hendricks, Emily Harris as Suzanne Lanphear, and Bill Harris as Steve Broudy.
One day in April, the body of a murder victim—having nothing to do with the Symbionese Liberation Army—was found near the house where the trio was living. In a routine check of the area, local police interviewed Hendricks, Lanphear and Broudy. All three reported that nothing unusual had happened on the night before the body was discovered. The police dutifully filed their reports. After Patty and the Harrises were captured last month and traced back to Sacramento, federal agents went through the police files and found the write-ups under the fugitives' aliases.
More and more details are emerging about Patty's life during her odyssey. TIME has also learned that she and the Harrises were living in the house in Los Angeles where six members of the S.L.A. were slain in the blazing shoot-out on May 17, 1974. Shortly before the Los Angeles police and federal agents surrounded the house, Patty and the Harrises were sent out by the others to run a few errands, one of which, apparently, was to steal some money for the group. The three are thought to have taken $400 from a man driving a Lincoln Continental. Then they headed for home, heard the gunfire and fled.
The purported reason for the kidnaping of Patty that started the whole bizarre affair appeared last week in the San Francisco Examiner, the oldest newspaper in the Hearst chain. It printed a lengthy excerpt from an S.L.A. document said to have been found at the Harrises' apartment after their arrest. The paper, which had no identifiable author, declared that the S.L.A. had grabbed Patty in revenge for the arrest on Jan. 10, 1974 of Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, members of the terrorist group who were later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Marcus Foster, Oakland's superintendent of schools. The S.L.A. was convinced that the Hearst family was powerful enough to secure the release of Little and Remiro in exchange for Patty.