By Mel Freilicher
Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials by Paul Krassner on PM Press, 2014
1.
Very hard to do justice to this odd, fascinating slim volume, and to its one-of-a-kind author, as well. Paul Krassner first published the seminal, nationally distributed American countercultural magazine, The Realist, in 1958: coming out regularly in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and intermittently till being discontinued in 2001. Krassner states circulation peaked at a hundred thousand.
This unique mixture of political satire and investigative reporting, tagged as “social-political-religious criticism and satire,” often featured articles by significant American figures: Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Jules Feiffer, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Phil Ochs, the militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Gary Trudeau, R. Crumb, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Mae Brussell, Robert Anton Wilson, Bruce Jay Friedman. When the magazine was in financial trouble, John Lennon became a major patron.
Initially writing for MAD magazine (where the first issue of The Realist was produced), Krassner studied journalism, and was a major counter-culture figure himself: a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, protégé of Lenny Bruce, and editor of his autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Krasser had been a violin prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall at age 6.
In a brief interview at the end of the book, Krassner calls himself an “investigative satirist,” and also discusses “morphing from satirist to an activist.” After publishing an anonymous interview with an abortion doctor in 1962, “I began to get calls from women who were pregnant and didn’t want to be, and I became an underground abortion referral service.” Subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities, Krassner refused to testify before the grand juries.
One of the founding members of the Yippies, with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin: a kind of dada-esque anti-war group (speaking of pranksters), employing highly theatrical gestures, such as advocating for a pig called “Pigasus the Immortal” as candidate for US President in 1968. The Yippie “New Nation” platform was all about creation of alternative, counter-culture establishments: food coops, free stores (originally tried by the Diggers), free schools, organic farming coops, squatters right.
(Parenthetically, I was at the delightful Yippie invasion of La Jolla in the late ’60s or early ‘70s. From UCSD, we marched down to the cove where rubber dinghies full of Yippies were landing, their flags—consisting of a black background with a five-pointed red star in the center, and a green cannabis leaf superimposed over it--flapping in the breeze. Continuing to walk, bowing down at various banks, we turned a corner and came upon the largest phalanx of police cars I’d ever seen anywhere.)
A disc jockey in San Francisco, under the moniker Rumpleforeskin, Krassner was a frequent contributor to Playboy, the Nation, High Times, Huffington Post, Berkeley Barb, the music magazine, Crawdaddy, and was described by the FBI as a “raving, unconfined nut.” He wrote an autobiography and published several books, some of which were compilations of pieces from The Realist.
In the Patty Hearst article, his satire is sometimes clearly distinguishable from the investigative reporting. For instance, Krassner pens an imaginary interview with Patty based on “the non-fact I disclosed in the Berkeley Barb that I had been brought to meet Patty underground.”
In other sections, it can be harder to separate the two modes--partly due to Krassner’s sarcastic, associative and funny writing style. Also because investigations turned up bizarre theories, often involving splinter leftist groups I’d never heard of (and probably few people living outside—or in!--the Bay area had either), with names which themselves sounded satirical.
The official version of the story: Kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army—a small group of white men and women led by an African-American, Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze--Patty Hearst was kept in a closet, allegedly raped and brainwashed. Then she joined them, changing her name to Tania, adopting radical rhetoric and robbing a bank with the gang in 1974.
After l8 months. Patty Hearst was finally captured. But not before other SLA members were burned alive on national TV, in a Los Angeles safe house during a shootout with police. A spectacular media conflagration! Krassner comments on Patty’s upcoming trial, “Now the philosophical paradox which had plagued the history of human consciousness –Is there or is there ain’t Free Will—was finally going to be decided by a jury.”
Pop culture, myself and practically everyone I knew at the time were totally fascinated by the unfolding of this saga. For one thing, Tania’s communiques (widely broadcast tape recordings left outside KPFK radio station) were bizarrely campy. A sentence like, “Mom, stop wearing black in public” would be immediately followed by flaming rhetoric about the coming revolution. A number of my writer and composer friends used these communiques as material for their work, as did some musicians, apparently.
It soon became known that “Cinque” DeFreeze had been let out early from a federal penitentiary: who knew if he was an agent of the police or some kind of counteragent? It was later revealed he’d worked as a police informant from 1967 to ’69 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the LAPD.
Krassner comments, “If DeFreeze was a double agent, then the SLA was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality that had been orchestrated only as a media image.” He also points out when Cinque DeFreeze’s charred remains were sent to his family in Cleveland, “they couldn’t help but notice that he had been decapitated.”
One SLA demand was for a free food program. Patty’s father, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, arranged for such a project in Oakland. Then-governor Ronald Reagan’s response, Krassner reminds us, to the long line of people waiting for free food: “I hope they all get botulism.” Also, William F. Buckley wrote that Patty should be sacrificed “in the name of Christ.” And Catherine Hearst said she would rather see her daughter dead than red!
A Tania communique opened with: “Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to supposedly secure my safety. The food giveaway was a sham…You were playing games—stalling for time—which the FBI was using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements which guarded me…” (Wikipedia states the SLA demand was for distribution of $70 worth of free food for every needy Californian, which would cost an estimated $400 million; Patty’s father arranged for the immediate donation of two million dollars.)
“In view of conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell’s track record with the Watergate story,” Krassner writes, ”I decided to devote an entire issue of The Realist to her documented analysis, ‘Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnapped?’—the thrust of which was the SLA was essentially an espionage plot orchestrated by our secret government in order to distort the message of idealism.” (Again, sometimes hard to tell whose findings Krassner is explicating: Brussel’s, his own, or others.)
Patty’s original defense attorney intended to plead involuntary intoxication—dosed with LSD by her captors—a side effect of which can be amnesia. So Patty would neither have to snitch on others nor invoke the Fifth Amendment. But her uncle, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Editor-in-Chief of the Hearst newspaper chain, warned his family the entire corporate image of the Hearst empire was at stake (particularly as bulwark against unions and communists), and insisted they hire a prominent attorney.
F. Lee Bailey had defended a serial killer (the Boston Strangler), and a war criminal at the My Lai massacre, but he said he would not defend Patty if she were a revolutionary. “You’ve got to have standards,” Krassner wryly comments. Adding, “What was really on trial was this royal nuclear family…”
Rumor had it Patty Hearst was being drugged in the San Mateo jail. “A source close to the specialists conducting the examination,” the Associated Press reported, “said that the dosages of ‘anti-psychotic drugs’ listed on Miss Hearst’s medical report would themselves cause lethargy and disorientation.” By the time defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey got her on the stand, Patty repudiated the pronouncement, on her arrest, she was an “Urban Guerilla”; now she stated she’d been brainwashed.
Patty’s complicity on multiple levels was always a key question. One theory was, while out shopping for bagels, she participated in her own kidnapping, as a means of getting out of her engagement with Steven Weed, the graduate student boyfriend she’d been living with at the time of the kidnapping, “in as adventurous way as possible.”
A not uncommon belief at the time: the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but were using her to build up their files on other dissidents. They had also planted agents in other underground guerilla groups.
Then a Berkeley underground group called Tribal Thumb prepared a statement which began by exploring how various government agencies had been trying to eradicate them. It ended with the accusation that Donald DeFreeze escaped from prison with help from the FBI. “His mission was to establish an armed revolutionary organization controlled by the FBI, specifically either to make contact with or undermine the surfacing and development of the August Seventh Guerilla Movement (ASGM).”
They wrote Patty Hearst “was slipped out of her jail cell by the FBI and Mr. Randolph Hearst and taken to a nearby jail to identify a man being held there…who was allegedly closely associated with Tribal Thumb, to make an identification of the man’s alleged trafficking of large quantities of arms to Tribal Thumb and the Symbionese Liberation Army.”
The family of slain SLA member Willie Wolf hired an ex-police officer who was chief investigator at Wounded Knee, to find out what really happened. Lake Headley and associates discovered the SLA “was part of the CIA’s CHAOS program.” In that context they were planning to kill Black Panther leader, Huey Newton, and had succeeded in killing the first black superintendent of the Oakland school system, Marcus Foster, after he agreed to meet Panther demands for educational reform. (Foster’s assassination was publicly announced as an SLA operation.)
Initially, at Vacaville Prison, DeFreeze was permitted to set up a program “by which convicts could get laid by visiting females,” Krassner remarks. According to investigator Headley, DeFreeze’s visitors included two Hearst kidnappers-to-be, “and Patty Hearst, then eighteen…using the ID of a student at Berkeley.” Headley’s affidavit included statements about the parents “disagreeing bitterly over Patricia’s political and personal relations…and that a love affair between a black man and Patricia Hearst did take place prior to her relationship with fiancé Steven Weed.”
When DeFreeze became leader of the SLA, he renewed his affair with Patty for a brief time. The affidavit continued: “Discussions were held between Patricia Campbell Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army concerning a kidnapping—not her own.” The investigators reported their findings to the Los Angeles City Council, charging the intelligence unit of the police department knew of the SLA’s presence but wanted the shootout “for test purposes.”
Headley acquired official film footage, showing the FBI using a pair of German shepherds to sniff out Patty’s presence to make sure she wasn’t inside the burning safe house. (Thus, they could assure Steven Weed, “Don’t worry, Patty’s not in there.”)
This article ends with a comment: “The FBI itself had published pamphlets in the name of the Panthers advocating the killing of cops, and that an FBI file on Groucho Marx” was begun (echoing some opening remarks of Krassner’s on Groucho), and he was labeled as a national security risk. “I called Groucho to tell him the good news. ‘I deny everything,’ he said, ‘because I lie about everything.’ He paused, then added, ‘And everything I deny is a lie.’”
Conspiracies, conspiracies, everywhere, and not a drop to think.
2.
Former policeman, Dan White, resigned from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors because he couldn’t support his wife and baby on a salary of $9,600 a year. He obtained a lease for a fast food franchise, The Hot Potato, on Fisherman’s Wharf. However, White had been the swing vote on the Board “representing downtown real estate interests and the conservative Police Officers Association.” With promise of financial backing, White changed his mind and asked Mayor George Moscone for his job back.
Moscone was inclined to grant White’s wish, but there was opposition to his return—especially from openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, who warned Moscone reseating the homophobic White would antagonize the homosexual community which was already being attacked by several local newspapers for gentrifying the city, displacing middle class workers. (Indeed, a perpetual issue in San Francisco—Silicon Valley eventually replacing the gay menace.) White had cast the only vote against the gay rights ordinance.
Moscone, like Dan White, changed his mind.
On Monday morning, White went to the mayor’s office in City Hall, and after a brief conversation, he shot George Moscone twice in the body then two more times in the head, execution style, as he lay on the floor. The Marlboro cigarette in his hand would still be burning when the paramedics arrived.
After murdering Moscone, White hurriedly walked down a long corridor to the area of the supervisors’ offices. His name had already been removed from his door, but he still had a key. Inside, he reloaded his gun, walked to Harvey Milk’s office, asking “Can I see you for a minute, Harvey?” Following Milk into his inner office, White fired three shots into his body, and while Milk was prone on the floor, two more shots into his head.
One of the many absurd issues in the trial: how premeditated vs. instinctive were these murders? The question of why White carried ten extra cartridges that day, wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket, became salient, as did the issue of where, exactly, he reloaded. Even more damning: Dan White’s entrance to the building was through a large basement window, because he didn’t recognize the security guard monitoring the metal detector at the front door of City Hall.
Actually, Krassner, who covered the 1979 trial for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, opens this piece, “The Case of the Twinkie Murders” with a discussion of Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000 member People’s Temple in San Francisco.
In November, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan who’d been investigating Jonestown in Guyana where Jones had moved his cult, was slain at the airport there, along with three newspeople and several disillusioned members of the Temple. (Interestingly, Wikipedia tells us several weeks before, Ryan had been collecting signatures on a petition for Patty Hearst’s release.)
Jones then orchestrated the mass suicide-murder of nine hundred men, women, and children, mostly black, who he’d basically been brainwashing from the start. Checking out potential recruits for the Temple, his representatives would “rummage through their garbage and report to him on their findings—discarded letters, food preferences and other clues.”
Temple members would visit their homes; while one would initiate conversation, the other would use the bathroom, copying names of doctors and types of medicine.” They’d also phone relatives of recruits in the guise of conducting a survey, gathering other information. It was all taped to the inside of Jones’ podium, “from which he would proceed to demonstrate his magical powers at a lecture by ‘sensing the presence’ of an individual, mentioning specific detail.”
In Jonestown, Jim Jones publicly humiliated his followers. For example, he’d require them to remove their clothing and participate in boxing matches, pitting an elderly person against a young one. He forced one man to perform a homosexual act in the presence of his girlfriend. There were paddle beatings and compulsory practice-suicide sessions called “White Nights.”
The “suicides” happened just a week before the Dan White murders, so people in San Francisco were already freaked out, caught in this post-Vietnam zeitgeist of chaos and insanity. Some strange connections with Patty Hearst’s and Dan White’s cases: Because of rumors that People’s Temple assassins were programmed to hit targets back in the States, metal detectors had originally been set up at the front door of City Hall.
Also when SF District Attorney Joe Freitas learned of the City Hall killings, he was in Washington DC, conferring with the State Dept. about the mass suicide-murders in Jonestown. He immediately assumed that Moscone and Milk has been assassinated by a People’s Temple hit squad. “After all, George Moscone was number one on their hit list,” Krassner remarks.
The day before the Assistant D.A. was set to prosecute the case, he heard a voice behind him in the elevator of the Hall of Justice, saying, “You’re a motherfucker for prosecuting Dan White.” Turning around, he saw a half a dozen police inspectors. Krasner remarks, “One could only speculate about the chilling effect that incident had on him, conceivably engendering the sloppy presentation of the prosecution’s case.” Several key examples follow…
Prosecutor Norman “simply bungled his case,” allowing the defense to use White’s taped confession to his own advantage. He sounded like “a little boy sobbing uncontrollably because he wouldn’t be allowed to play on the Little League team.” In court, “some reporters wept openly, including me, along with members of White’s family, spectators, jurors, an assistant D.A.--who had a man-sized tissue box on his table—and Dan White himself, crying both live and on tape simultaneously.”
Throughout Dan White’s trial, “he just sat there as though he had been mainlining epoxy glue…in a state of complete control bordering on catatonia, as he listened to an assembly line of psychiatrists tell the jury how out of control he had been.” One even testified that, ‘If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”(White was never called upon to testify.) Krassner concludes this paragraph: “And so it came to pass that a pair of political assassinations was transmuted into voluntary manslaughter.”
Of course, the infamous classic Twinkie defense resulted in a voluntary manslaughter verdict of seven years in prison. This defense, Krassner reports, “was a purely accidental tactic.” An attorney told Krassner how he happened to be playing chess with an associate of Dan White’s attorney, and mentioned the book he’d just read, Orthomolecular Nutrition. Asking about White’s diet under stress, he was told “massive candy bars and soft drinks.”
During the trial psychiatrist Martin Blinder stated that, on the night before the murders, White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed, he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” Krassner scribbled in his notebook, “Twinkie defense.”(Twenty-five years after the assassination, an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian speculated Krassner may have “coined the phrase Twinkie defense.”)
A representative of the company which manufactures Twinkies declared at the trial that their product could lead to murder was “poppycock” and “crap”—apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, Krassner comments. Nonetheless some jurors were sympathetic. One remarked after the trial, “It seemed like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”
In the defense’s closing argument, he told the jury White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “eat a Twinkie and go crazy.” “Nevertheless,” Krassner remarks, “spray-painted on the walls of San Francisco, graffiti cautioned: ‘Eat a Twinkie”—Kill a Cop!’”
In January, 1984, Dan White was released from prison, having done a little more than five years for killing Moscone and Milk. “The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie,” Krassner points out, “is seven years. That’s two years longer than White spent behind bars. When he was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard was still edible. But maybe, instead of eating it, he would have it bronzed.”
Dan White committed suicide in October, 1985 by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the car’s windshield, reading: “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.” White’s defense attorney was quoted as saying, “I expected that he would kill himself. And, in certain respects, it vindicates the defense. I don’t think a well man would take his own life.”
3.
Toward the end of this piece, Krassner’s tale becomes more personal. The night after the verdict was announced, famously San Francisco exploded in a riot (in sharp contrast to the 30,000- person, peaceful march and silent vigil held at City Hall after Milk’s death). Krassner got a call from a friend in a phone booth across from City Hall. (I wonder if it was the same booth from which I was receiving intermittent calls from a former student who’d moved up north: in the midst of the fray, I’ve never heard anyone more excited on the phone.)
When Krassner arrived there by cab, “There were a dozen police cars that had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the shouts from a mob of five thousand gays” some of whom broke the glass to ram their way through locked doors. The cops had been instructed to stay inside City Hall; released, they began marching slowly in formation. “But the instant they were out of view from City Hall, they broke ranks and started running toward us…The police had been let out of their cage and they were absolutely enraged.”
Krassner was beaten, and sustained lifelong injuries. First he was struck with a nightstick on the outside of his right knee. “The cop ran off to injure as many other cockroaches in the kitchen as he could.” Another cop “came charging and yelled at Paul to get up. “He made a threatening gesture with his billy club, and when I tried to protect my head with my arms, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my ribs.”
“The cops were running amok now, in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming, ‘Get the fuck outa here, you fuckin’ faggots, you motherfuckin’ cocksuckers.’” (Later that evening, they attacked some of the gay bars in the Castro district.)
Krassner managed to drag himself along the sidewalk—feeling “like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.” His friend drove him to the emergency ward where X-rays indicated he had a fractured rib and a punctured lung. “The injuries affected my posture and my gait, and I gradually began to develop more and more of a strange limp.”
“Over the years, I developed an increasingly unbalanced walk, triggered by that police beating, so that my right foot would come down hard on the ground with each step. My whole body felt twisted, and my right heel was in constant pain.” Krassner writes, “I limped the gamut of therapies…Meanwhile, my twisted limp became increasingly worse.” Finally, X-rays indicated the spinal cord was being squeezed by spurring on the inside of several discs.
A doctor told him, “You’re a walking time bomb.” If he tripped, his spinal cord could be severed and he’d be paralyzed from the chin down. Krassner needed surgery, but “I was one of thirty-seven million Americans who didn’t have insurance, nor did I have savings.” Fortunately, his “extended family and friends all over the country came to his financial rescue.” The surgery was successful, but “Over the years, I gradually got gimpier and gimpier.”
His hip was so far out of kilter that his left foot was continuously tripping over his right foot. After inadvertently tripping a number of other people, he began walking with a cane. Still, he fell several times. “Now I really am a walking time bomb. I cannot afford to fall again…I must be fully conscious of every step. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Any fall could injure me. It might even be fatal. I have surrendered to a process that is truly an ongoing lesson in mindfulness.”
“I’m learning that when you are mindful in one aspect of your life, you’ll strengthen mindfulness in other aspects. I am, after all, a Zen Bastard—a title bestowed upon me when Ken Kesey and I coedited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Krassner ends this piece with: “As for me, my physical condition has gotten worse, including my balance, and I’ve had to substitute a walker for my cane. I exercise at a gym three times a week, but they won’t allow me to use my walker on the treadmill.”
4.
As for Patty Hearst, in 1976 she was convicted for the crime of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, which was later reduced to 7 years. President Jimmy Carter commuted her federal sentence to the 22 months already served. President Bill Clinton pardoned Patricia (the name she prefers).
Marrying a policeman who’d been part of her security team when she was out on bail, they had 2 children before he died in 2013. Naturally, Patty continued to be a media figure: including several books and documentaries about her, and an autobiography. She appeared in episodes of a number of TV series, including Frasier, starring the right-wing Kelsey Grammer.
John Waters featured Patty in small roles in several of his later films—most famously, she plays a jury member in Serial Mom, in which the bourgeois yet utterly deadly Kathleen Turner (who becomes a media star herself in the film) is on trial for multiple murders. Acquitted, due to her own canny defense, Turner immediately murders Patty (off screen) for the crime of wearing white after Labor Day.
As for PM Press, publisher of this volume. I’ve expressed admiration before for this leftist press, with over 500 releases to date. Their promotional material contains this statement:
“PM Press is an independent, radical publisher of critically necessary books for our tumultuous times…Founded in 2007 by a small group of people with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience, we have sold millions of our books, most often one at a time, face to face. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.”
Now, more than ever…
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.