On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.” The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing;the...

On February 4, 1974, college student Patty Hearst (granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst), was kidnapped from her apartment by a terrorist group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA, seeking to foment a violent uprising within America's working class, forced the Hearst family to donate millions of dollars in food to the poor. But two months after her kidnapping, Patty emerged in public as Tania, an armed member...

It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army-who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robbery-and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst's criminal conviction-seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era. With Patty's...