A member of the domestic radical terror group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst has died aged 81.
Bill Harris died of a heart attack at a San Francisco hospital on September 10, his wife Rebecca Young told The New York Times on Tuesday.
Harris was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, served in Vietnam and attended Indiana University upon his return.
There, he joined the anti-war Vietnam Veterans organization, moved steadily to the left, and met his first wife, Emily Schwartz, a classmate from an affluent Chicago suburb who also embraced far-left politics. They married in 1971, the outlet reported.
The couple later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they joined the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)—a violent far-left group notorious for the 1973 assassination of Oakland school principal Marcus Foster—and helped orchestrate the Hearst kidnapping.
Harris, then a senior lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, became the focus of national attention on February 4, 1974, when he and two others broke into Hearst’s apartment in Berkeley, California, dragged her away during a violent struggle and stuffed her into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala, according to the FBI.
Hearst was 19, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, and the granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane.
The group initially called Hearst a “prisoner of war” and made no ransom demands, but later called on her family to fund free meals for poor people across California.
“Patricia Hearst was a symbolic target,” Harris later said of the group’s reasons for choosing her, according to The New York Times.
“Her family controls a media empire that we view as the propaganda arm of the U.S. government.”
For weeks, Hearst spent much of his time locked in a closet at the Sudan Liberation Army’s safe house in Daly City, reading the group’s propaganda with a flashlight.
In April 1974, the SLA released a photo of her holding a gun and an audiotape in which she used the name “Tanya” to denounce her family and those in power, according to the FBI.
Less than two weeks later, the heiress went from kidnapping victim to bank robber—participating in the SLA’s hijacking of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco and turning her kidnapping into one of the most bizarre and sensational crime sagas of the 1970s.
Hearst later said she was forced to join the group and believed she would be killed if she refused – a claim Harris has disputed for decades.
According to the FBI, the fall of the SLA began on May 16, 1974, when Harris and his wife were nearly caught stealing ammunition belts from a sporting goods store.
Their getaway car led police to a safe house in South Central Los Angeles. The next day, police surrounded it, triggering a fierce gun battle in which the building caught fire and six SPLA members were killed, including leader Donald de Freeze.
In April 1975, the SLA attacked again and robbed the Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento.
According to the New York Times, during the robbery, Emily’s shotgun went off, killing Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was storing church collections.
Hester was not at the bank when Opsall was killed. She later testified that she had been waiting in a getaway car.
After more than a year on the run, Hearst and Harris were arrested by FBI agents in San Francisco in September 1975.
Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery in 1976, the outlet reported. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979, and President Bill Clinton later pardoned her.
and Emily Harris served about eight years in prison for kidnapping and were released in the early 1980s.
After his release from prison, Harris divorced his first wife and began a new life as a private investigator.
In 1988, he married Yang, a Bay Area defense attorney, and the couple raised their two sons in Oakland before settling in San Francisco, according to the New York Times.
More than 25 years later, Harris and his ex-wife were charged with Opsall’s murder.
In 2002, Harris, Emily Harris and other former SLA members pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
At her 2003 sentencing, Harris apologized to her family for her role in Opsall’s death. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and served about four years.
In 2002, he told the Los Angeles Times: “If you do something and you succeed, then you are a high-quality revolutionary and you become George Washington, the founding father. But if you challenge power and are eliminated, you are consigned to the dustbin of history.”
In a 2018 interview with CNN, he said: “Reality is not always on the surface. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper to see what’s really going on.”
Harris is survived by Young and their sons, Cody and Sean.