SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The high-profile trial of Patricia Hearst, the California publishing heiress kidnapped by a leftist military group she later joined in a string of armed robberies and car bombings across California, "might have very well" killed its presiding judge, his former law clerk said Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Oliver Carter suffered a heart attack within a week of the close of the April 1976 trial in San Francisco that riveted people around the United States and abroad. A second heart attack that June ended his life at age 65, his law clerk Ralph Swanson told an audience gathered at the federal courthouse in San Francisco to hear from lawyers involved in the case.
"The stress of the press and protecting us, in fact, I think he constantly worried about that," Swanson, now of Berliner Cohen, said during a panel discussion of the trial, which was held in the same 19th floor courtroom in which Hearst was tried. "It took its toll. It was really something."
Hearst, who went by "Patty," was kidnapped from her Benvenue Avenue apartment in February 1974 while a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
The radical leftist group, formed just months earlier by escaped convict Donald DeFreeze and a small group of university students, hoped to exchange their famous hostage for two of its members who had been arrested in the 1973 murder of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster.
According to Lowell Jensen, a retired judge for the Northern District of California and then-district attorney for Alameda County, the SLA murdered Foster and wounded his deputy Robert Blackburn in an "execution-style" shooting as payback for the "evil" educational policies they had implemented in Oakland, then a city with a large black population just south of Berkeley.
The murder was supposed to inspire black Oaklanders to "rise up," Jensen said. But no one had heard of the SLA before then – including the federal government – and no uprising materialized.
And the group's hopes for exchanging Hearst for their comrades "were dashed very quickly" after according to Robert James, a Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman attorney and partner of late Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward Davis Jr., who helped prosecute Hearst.
"So the question became, what you do with one of the most famous hostages ever taken?" James said.
The SLA, Hearst later testified, gave her the choice of joining the group or being killed. After weeks bound and blindfolded in a small closet in nearby Daly City, where she says she was raped by DeFreeze and fellow SLA member Willie Wolfe, Hearst chose to join the rag-tag group that ultimately numbered just nine members, perhaps as a result of "feeding into the guilt complex of an affluent person," James said.
Despite its thin ranks, the SLA became notorious for its daring bank robberies, leading spectators to believe the group was bigger and more powerful than it was.
"There was an air of theatricality to the SLA," James said. "Several of them were majors in drama at the university."