Bill Harris, a member of the radical domestic terrorist group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, has died at 81.
Harris suffered a heart attack and died at a San Francisco hospital on Sept. 10, his wife, Rebecca Young, told The New York Times on Tuesday.
Born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Harris served as a Marine in Vietnam. After returning to the United States, he enrolled at Indiana University.
While at Indiana, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and gradually moved toward the political left. He also met Emily Schwartz, a fellow student from an affluent Chicago suburb who was becoming active in far-left politics. The two married in 1971, according to the newspaper.
The couple eventually relocated to California’s San Francisco Bay Area, where they joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA. The violent far-left organization had drawn national attention in 1973 after killing Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster. Harris and Schwartz later helped organize the kidnapping of Hearst.
By then a senior SLA lieutenant, Harris became a central figure in the case. On Feb. 4, 1974, he and two other members broke into Hearst’s apartment in Berkeley, California, and abducted her after a violent struggle, forcing the 19-year-old into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala, according to the FBI.
Hearst was a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, and the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose life helped inspire the film “Citizen Kane.”
The SLA initially called Hearst a “prisoner of war” and did not seek a conventional ransom. Instead, the group eventually demanded that her family fund a massive food-distribution program for poor Californians.
Harris later described Hearst as a deliberate symbolic choice, according to The New York Times.
“Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the United States government,” he said.
For several weeks, Hearst was held mostly inside a closet at an SLA safe house in Daly City, where she read the group’s propaganda by flashlight.
In April 1974, the SLA released a photograph showing Hearst holding a gun. An accompanying audiotape featured her adopting the name “Tania” and condemning her family and the establishment, the FBI said.
Fewer than two weeks later, Hearst participated in the SLA’s robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. The episode transformed her from a kidnapping victim into an alleged bank robber and became one of the 1970s’ most unusual and heavily publicized criminal sagas.
Hearst later maintained that the SLA had forced her to join and that she feared she would be killed if she resisted. Harris rejected that explanation for decades.
The organization’s collapse began on May 16, 1974, when Harris and his wife were nearly apprehended while trying to steal an ammunition belt from a sporting goods store, according to the FBI.
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Their escape van helped investigators locate an SLA safe house in South Central Los Angeles. Police surrounded the building the following day, leading to a prolonged shootout that ended with the house in flames and six SLA members dead, including leader Donald DeFreeze.
The SLA carried out another bank robbery in April 1975, targeting a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, a community outside Sacramento.
During the robbery, Emily Schwartz’s shotgun discharged and killed Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing church funds, according to The New York Times.
Hearst was not inside the bank when Opsahl was killed. She later testified that she had remained in a getaway car.
After spending more than a year as fugitives, Hearst and the Harrises were arrested by FBI agents in San Francisco in September 1975.
Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery in 1976. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979, and President Bill Clinton later pardoned her, the outlet reported.
Harris and Emily Harris served roughly eight years in prison for the kidnapping and were released in the early 1980s.
After his release, Harris divorced his first wife and built a new life as a private investigator.
In 1988, he married Young, a Bay Area defense lawyer, and the couple raised two sons in Oakland before settling in San Francisco, the New York Times reported.
It would be more than 25 years before Harris and his former wife were charged in Opsahl’s killing.
In 2002, Harris, Emily Harris and other former SLA members pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
At his 2003 sentencing, Harris apologized to Opsahl’s family for his role in her death. He was sentenced to seven years and served about four.
“If you do something and you succeed, then you’re a revolutionary of high quality and you get to be George Washington, the father of the country,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “But if you challenge power and you’re rubbed out, you’re in the trash bin of history.”
In a 2018 CNN interview, he said, “Reality isn’t always on the surface. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper to see what’s real.”
Harris is survived by Young and their sons, Cody and Shane.
