The kidnapping of Patty Hearst
Berkeley, California, 1974
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
At around 9 pm on February 4, 1974, there was a knock at the door of an apartment on Benvenue Street in Berkeley. An armed group of men and women burst in, beat the fiancé and carried off Patricia Hearst, a 19-year-old art history student, in the trunk of a car. She was the granddaughter of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the kidnapping became headline news across the country.
The Symbionese Liberation Army, a small armed far-left group that had already killed an Oakland school superintendent, claimed responsibility. At first it demanded the release of two imprisoned members; when that was refused, it demanded food for the poor of California, and the young woman's father funded a distribution of $2 million in food that ended in chaos. On April 3, in a tape sent to the press, Patricia announced that she had joined the group under the name Tania; on April 15, cameras at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco filmed her carrying a carbine during a robbery.
Sources
In the game
The Nine O'Clock Showing
Berkeley, California, Tuesday, February 5, 1974, 11 pm. In apartment 4 of a small wooden building near the campus, the sofa is still out of place and the dead phone hangs from the little table.
In May 1974, six members of the group died in a police siege in Los Angeles. Patricia was arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975 and, in 1976, convicted of the robbery, despite the defense that she had been coerced and brainwashed. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979, after almost two years in prison, and Bill Clinton pardoned her in 2001.
