This is an L.A. Times Studios podcast.

On February 4th, 1974, Patricia Hurst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California.

She was 19 years old, an art history student at UC Berkeley.

Hurst was American aristocracy, the daughter of the San Francisco Examiner publisher

and heiress to the immense Hearst Media Empire.

Her kidnappers were members of a tiny Marxist revolutionary cadre that called itself

the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA.

The SLA's motto was, death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.

I didn't just start as some nut job that wanted to go do violent shit.

You know, I didn't want to do any violent shit, really, at all.

This is Bill Harris, one of the members who planned and executed her abduction.

But I had embraced the concepts of revolutionary violence, as much as I was, you know, nervous, scared,

reluctant, fearful,

whatever you want to call it, to do it.

Patty Hurst's kidnapping and her transformation from captive

to an armed SLA revolutionary herself

was one of the decades' biggest and weirdest stories.

And we're willing to sacrifice a lot, our very lives, our freedom.

I mean, look, I did what I thought needed to be done. It wasn't the most brilliant thing to do at the time.

It was doomed from the beginning. It caused a lot of grief and hardship and tragic aspects.

It has elements that I regret to my very fibers.

For more than a year, the newspaper heiress was on the run with the SLA.

...