Undated portrait of heiress Patricia Hearst as a 19-year-old University of California student. The photo was taken shortly before her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army

Bill Harris, who helped kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the 1970s, dies at 81

Bill Harris, a member of the domestic terrorist group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia  Patty  Hearst in the 1970s, has died at 81, The New York Times reported.

Harris died of a heart attack on Sept. 10 in San Francisco, his wife, Rebecca Young, confirmed to The New York Times.


Harris was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militant organization, when he and two others kidnapped Hearst from her apartment in Berkeley, California, on Feb. 4, 1974.

Hearst was the daughter of Randolph A. Hearst, the chairman of the Hearst Corporation, and the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who founded the Hearst Corporation in 1887.

The SLA kidnapped Hearst because she was a  symbolic target,  according to Harris.  Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the United States government. 

After taking Hearst as a  prisoner of war,  the SLA demanded that her family fund a food giveaway in California to feed the poor. The Hearst family pledged $2 million, which the kidnappers found to be not enough, according to NYT.

Two weeks after her kidnapping, Hearst participated in a bank robbery in San Francisco. She later said that she was coerced into joining the SLA and she feared that she would be killed if she refused, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery in 1976 and sentenced to seven years in prison. After she served about 22 months in prison, former President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.

Harris reached a plea deal in the Hearst kidnapping and spent about eight years in prison. Harris was convicted of additional crimes throughout his life, including armed robbery and auto theft. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder after a woman was shot and killed during a SLA bank robbery in 1975.

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