The photographs traveled across America almost immediately.
For two months, newspapers had printed Patty Hearst's face beneath words like:
KIDNAPPED.
MISSING.
HOSTAGE.
Now the same face appeared beneath a completely different image.
A weapon.
Dark clothing.
Sunglasses.
The SLA.
The April 15 robbery lasted only minutes.
The group took approximately $10,000 from the Hibernia Bank branch.
Two people entering the bank during the robbery were shot and wounded by SLA members.
Patty was photographed carrying an M1 carbine and helping control the room.
The image became one of the defining photographs of the 1970s.
It seemed to offer a simple answer to an impossible question.
Had Patty Hearst joined her kidnappers?
Look at the photograph.
She had a gun.
But photographs cannot show coercion.
They cannot show what happened before the camera turned on.
They cannot establish what someone believed would happen if she refused.
That became the central problem of the entire Hearst case.
The prosecution would later emphasize what the photograph showed.
The defense would emphasize everything outside its frame.
After the robbery, another tape appeared.
Patty described herself as Tania.
She defended what had happened.
She attacked authorities and her family.
To many listeners, she sounded committed.
Not terrified.
Not hesitant.
Committed.
The FBI began moving away from viewing Hearst simply as a kidnapping victim.
On April 23, it issued wanted material containing photographs of Hearst and SLA members, although at that point the Bureau initially listed her as a material witness as the debate over her status continued.
Then something happened that made the prosecution's future argument even stronger.
May 16, 1974.
Inglewood, near Los Angeles.
SLA members William and Emily Harris entered Mel's Sporting Goods.
A shoplifting incident turned into a confrontation.
The Harrises were stopped outside.
Patty Hearst was waiting nearby in a van.
According to trial evidence later summarized by the federal court, Hearst opened fire from the vehicle with an automatic weapon.
Bullets struck near a store employee.
The gunfire allowed the Harrises to escape.
They reached the van.
Later, after switching vehicles, the group got away.
This incident became extremely important.
At Hibernia Bank, the defense could argue that Patty had been placed in the robbery under threat.
But at Mel's Sporting Goods, prosecutors asked a much harder question.
Why fire to rescue her captors?
If she wanted to escape them, the Harrises being detained by a store employee might have created an opportunity.
Instead, she fired.
Hearst later offered explanations based on the same coercive environment she said had controlled her since the kidnapping.
The jury would eventually have to decide what those actions meant.
But before any trial came another spectacular event.
The following day.
May 17.
Police traced the SLA to a house in Los Angeles.
Officers surrounded it.
Television cameras arrived.
What followed unfolded live before a huge audience.
Gunfire erupted between SLA members and police.
The confrontation lasted for hours.
Tear gas was fired.
The building caught fire.
Smoke poured from the structure while television viewers watched.
Six SLA members died, including Donald DeFreeze.
To Patty Hearst's family, there was one immediate terrifying question.
Was she inside?
She was not.
Neither were William and Emily Harris.
The three had avoided the siege.
Suddenly the organization that had kidnapped her had been shattered.
Its leader was dead.
Several of its core members were gone.
If Patty had remained with the SLA only because DeFreeze and the others threatened her, one might expect her to walk into a police station.
She did not.
She disappeared again with the Harrises.
That decision would haunt her defense.
The trio went underground.
People sympathetic to radical political movements helped fugitives move between hiding places.
At times they left California.
Hearst later spent time in Pennsylvania and other locations.
Months passed.
The kidnapped student who once dominated missing-person posters was now one of America's most famous fugitives.
The FBI continued pursuing her.
And the longer she remained underground, the more difficult it became for the public to understand her only as a hostage.
Yet the psychological situation was not necessarily as simple as physical opportunity.
Someone held captive for months may not instantly return to the person they were before the kidnapping because a particular captor dies.
Fear.
Dependency.
Identity.
Isolation.
Trauma.
All can outlast the immediate threat.
That would become a major theme of Hearst's later defense.
But the government saw something different.
Months of continued association.
Weapons.
Radical communiqués.
Additional criminal activity.
Flight from police.
To prosecutors, these were choices.
Not symptoms.
And there was another event still to come.
On April 21, 1975, almost a year after the Hibernia robbery, members of the expanded SLA robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California.
During the robbery, customer Myrna Opsahl was killed.
Hearst was outside in one of the vehicles rather than inside the bank, according to later court and prosecution records. Years afterward, other SLA members would be prosecuted for the killing; Hearst received immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony related to the case.
By then, Patty had spent more than a year outside ordinary society.
She had been abducted as a nineteen-year-old student.
She was now twenty-one.
Her appearance had changed.
Her life had changed.
Her public identity had changed.
And law enforcement no longer wanted only to rescue Patricia Hearst.
They wanted to arrest Tania.
On September 18, 1975, agents finally found her.
An apartment in San Francisco.
No dramatic shootout.
No burning building.
No televised siege.
Patty Hearst and fellow fugitive Wendy Yoshimura were taken into custody.
The eighteen-month hunt was over.
Now came a question even more difficult than finding her.
Was the young woman entering federal custody a terrorist who had willingly joined her kidnappers?
Or was she still a kidnapping victim whose behavior had been shaped by nineteen months of fear, isolation and coercion?
For the first time, that question would not be decided by newspapers.
It would be decided by a jury.