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 in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Harris served as a Marine in Vietnam before enrolling at Indiana University after returning to the United States.
While at Indiana, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and gradually moved toward far-left politics. He also met his first wife, Emily Schwartz, a fellow student from an affluent Chicago suburb who shared his political shift. The couple married in 1971, according to the outlet.
Harris and Schwartz later relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA. The violent far-left group had drawn national attention in 1973 after assassinating Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster. Harris and Schwartz also helped organize the kidnapping of Hearst.
By then a senior SLA lieutenant, Harris became a central figure in the case after he and two other members broke into Hearst’s Berkeley, California, apartment on Feb. 4, 1974. According to the FBI, they dragged the 19-year-old away during a violent struggle and forced her into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala.
Hearst was a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, and the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose life inspired “Citizen Kane.”
The SLA initially described Hearst as a “prisoner of war” and did not demand a ransom. The group later ordered her family to fund a massive food-distribution program for poor people throughout California.
“Patricia Hearst was a symbolic target,” Harris later said, explaining the group’s 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.”
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 of Hearst holding a gun, along with an audiotape in which she adopted the name “Tania” and condemned her family and the establishment, the FBI reported.
Less than two weeks later, Hearst took part in the SLA’s robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. The episode transformed her from a kidnapping victim into a bank robber and became one of the most unusual and widely publicized criminal sagas of the 1970s.
Hearst later maintained that the SLA had coerced her into participating and that she believed she would be killed if she refused. Harris disputed that account for decades.
The SLA’s collapse began on May 16, 1974, when Harris and his wife were nearly apprehended while stealing an ammunition belt from a sporting goods store, according to the FBI.
The couple’s getaway van led police to an SLA safe house in South Central Los Angeles. Officers surrounded the building the following day, triggering a fierce gunbattle that set the house on fire and killed six SLA members, including leader Donald DeFreeze.
The group carried out another robbery in April 1975, targeting a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, outside Sacramento.
During the robbery, Emily’s shotgun discharged and killed Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing church collections, according to The New York Times.
Hearst was not inside the bank when Opsahl was killed. She later testified that she had been waiting in a getaway car.
After spending more than a year on the run, 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.
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