Berkeley, California.
February 4, 1974.
It was around nine o'clock at night when someone knocked on the door of Apartment 4 at 2603 Benvenue Avenue.
Nineteen-year-old Patricia Hearst was inside with her fiancé, Steven Weed.
To most Americans, the name Hearst meant wealth.
Patty was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate whose publishing empire had made the family one of the best-known names in the country.
But that evening, she was a college student living near the University of California, Berkeley.
She was engaged.
She was studying art history.
Her life had very little connection to the violent underground politics developing around parts of California.
Then the door opened.
Members of a small armed radical organization calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army burst inside.
The FBI later described the SLA as an armed extremist group seeking to provoke guerrilla conflict against the United States government. Its leader was Donald DeFreeze, an escaped prisoner who called himself Field Marshal Cinque.
The organization had already moved beyond revolutionary rhetoric.
In November 1973, SLA members had attacked Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster and deputy superintendent Robert Blackburn. Foster was killed and Blackburn seriously wounded.
Now they wanted something much bigger.
Attention.
A nationally recognizable hostage could provide it.
Patty Hearst was almost perfect.
According to later accounts, SLA members had noticed newspaper coverage mentioning that a Hearst granddaughter was attending UC Berkeley.
She represented wealth, media power and what the SLA denounced as America's capitalist establishment.
They decided to take her.
Inside the apartment, the kidnapping became violent almost immediately.
Steven Weed was beaten.
Patty tried to get away.
She was grabbed and dragged outside.
Neighbors heard shouting.
Gunshots were fired as the kidnappers escaped.
Patty was forced into the vehicle and taken away.
Within hours, the story was everywhere.
A young heiress had been kidnapped from her own apartment by an armed revolutionary group.
The FBI began what it later described as one of the most intensive searches in its history.
At first, nobody knew whether Patty was alive.
Then the messages began.
Three days after the kidnapping, the SLA announced that it was holding her as what it called a "prisoner of war."
Soon an audio recording arrived.
Patty's voice could be heard.
She told her family she was alive.
She also warned police against trying to rescue her.
The SLA then presented an extraordinary demand.
Patty's father, Randolph Hearst, was to finance a massive food distribution program for poor Californians.
The initial demand was so large that fulfilling it exactly was practically impossible.
Eventually the Hearst family created a program called People in Need.
Millions of dollars were committed.
Food was distributed across the Bay Area.
The first giveaway became chaotic, with crowds overwhelming some distribution sites. Later distributions were better organized.
Randolph Hearst hoped compliance would bring his daughter home.
It did not.
The SLA wanted more.
More money.
More political attention.
More concessions.
And Patty remained somewhere in captivity.
For her family, the public recordings were among the only evidence that she was still alive.
But those recordings were changing.
At first, Patty sounded like a hostage trying to survive.
Then she began criticizing her parents.
Her language started sounding increasingly like that of her captors.
The country listened as the kidnapped heiress appeared to move further from the family desperately trying to recover her.
Years later, Hearst would describe what happened during those weeks very differently from the image presented on the tapes.
She testified that the SLA initially kept her blindfolded in an extremely small closet for extended periods.
She described threats.
Interrogations.
Political indoctrination.
Physical and sexual abuse.
She said she became convinced the people around her could kill her at any time.
At her 1976 trial, psychiatrists supporting the defense argued that what happened amounted to coercive persuasion under conditions of extreme dependency and fear.
But no one outside knew any of this during February and March 1974.
America heard only the recordings.
And every recording seemed stranger than the one before.
Then, fifty-nine days after she was abducted, another tape arrived.
April 3, 1974.
This time Patty was no longer asking to come home.
She announced that she had been offered a choice.
Leave.
Or remain with the SLA.
According to the recording, she had chosen to stay.
She criticized her family.
Declared support for the SLA.
And announced a new identity.
She would now be called:
Tania.
The name referenced Tamara Bunke, the revolutionary associated with Che Guevara.
Her family immediately argued that she had been brainwashed.
Other Americans were not so certain.
Some believed she had genuinely converted.
Others saw the tape as exactly what a terrified hostage might say when surrounded by people carrying guns.
Nobody outside the SLA knew.
Then came April 15.
Twelve days after the tape.
Shortly before ten in the morning, armed people entered the Sunset District branch of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco.
One of the bank's security cameras was activated.
The photographs showed SLA leader Donald DeFreeze.
Other armed members.
And beside them stood a young woman in a dark coat.
A rifle in her hands.
It was Patty Hearst.
The kidnapped heiress was no longer appearing on an audio tape.
She was standing inside a bank with the people who had taken her.
And she appeared to be helping them rob it.