Hearst May Undergo Mental Evaluation

There is no forgetting her name or the waxen face--beret on head, carbine in hand. Patty Hearst, the abducted newspaper heiress turned gun-toting terrorist, remains a dark emblem of a revolutionary era.

Now she’s being pulled back to that time and called upon to revisit its horrors.

Hearst is the prosecution’s presumptive star witness in a case against four old comrades in arms, members of a violent anti-establishment band who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. The defendants have pleaded not guilty to charges relating to a 1975 robbery and slaying at a Crocker National Bank branch in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael.

Twenty-eight years after her kidnapping, after a book, a cameo acting career, a presidential pardon and much time nurturing a family, Hearst would seem the perfect witness for the prosecution--articulate, poised and patrician, ready to tell all the grim old tales.

But defense attorneys, intent on discrediting her testimony, have a very different Patty Hearst in mind. They intend to portray her as a woman steeped in suspect recollections. Her brief term as Tania, the SLA’s brainwashed radical addition, induced a trauma that shadows her to this day, they argue, undercutting her fitness as prime witness against the SLA foursome.

In a hearing today, defense attorneys are expected to ask a Sacramento Superior Court judge to order that Hearst be examined by a psychiatrist. The lawyers also want access to all her mental-health records compiled since the SLA days.

What they hope to undercut is Chapter 15.

That would be the fifteenth chapter of Hearst’s 1982 autobiography, “Every Secret Thing.” In damning detail, it recounts the events of the bank robbery and shotgun murder of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who had just arrived at the bank, intending to count church receipts.

The book tells how William Harris, one of the four former SLA members on trial, waited outside. It suggests that Sara Jane Olson, Michael Bortin and Emily Harris all entered the bank, masks or disguises in place. The chapter states that Emily Harris shot Opsahl.

Hearst, who admits she drove a getaway car, recounts in the book that Emily Harris rationalized afterward that Opsahl had been “a bourgeois pig anyway.”

In court papers, attorneys for the former SLA members note that Hearst, now 48, said she had been traumatized by the ordeal of her captivity and had cited her mental state as a defense at her own 1976 trial for a San Francisco bank robbery with the SLA.

A 19-year-old UC Berkeley student when she was kidnapped, Hearst spent more than 50 days locked in a closet. Her defense attorneys argued 26 years ago that she succumbed to “Stockholm Syndrome,” a state of mind that turned her into an unwitting pawn of her captors. Several psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Hearst for the case concluded that the brainwashing and traumatic months on the run had left her impaired, burdened by “patchy amnesia.” Gaps in her memory, they said, had been filled with what she had heard from others.

“No one thinks she’s crazy. We’re trying to get an examination to see what her memory is like,” said Stuart Hanlon, an attorney on the SLA defense team. “If she’s not believed, they don’t have a case.”

Prosecutors counter in court briefs that Hanlon and the defense have produced no evidence suggesting that Hearst has a current mental condition that would impair her testimony.

Today’s anticipated court fight is merely “the first of what is expected to be many motions designed to discredit, dissuade and ultimately harass” the government’s key witness, argued prosecutors Rob Gold and Mark Curry. “Ms. Hearst, who has been interrogated, interviewed, examined and cross-examined possibly more than any witness in the history of criminal jurisprudence, has already recounted literally thousands of details surrounding the time period in question.”

Hearst is not expected to appear during today’s hearing.

Her lawyer says Patricia Hearst Shaw--Shaw is the name she has used since her marriage more than two decades ago to former bodyguard Bernard Shaw--retains vivid memories of her SLA days.

“She has a mind like a steel trap,” said George Martinez, a Tiburon attorney who has represented Hearst since the late 1970s. “She’s a very bright, self-assured woman. She’s raised good children. She’s gotten on with life. But that doesn’t mean she’ll forget what happened. You don’t forget things like that.”

Hearst served nearly two years in prison after her conviction for robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with the SLA. The robbery provided the surveillance shot of Hearst carrying a semiautomatic carbine--one of the iconic images of the 1970s. In 1979, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

For the past 20 years she has lived mostly a quiet life, raising her two daughters, now 21 and 17, in Fairfield County, an affluent Connecticut enclave. Hearst does charity work and avoids political activity.

She forged a minor acting career in independent films, becoming a celebrity in the gay community as part of the informal repertory of satirical filmmaker John Waters. She appeared in films such as “Cry-Baby,” “Serial Mom,” “Pecker” and “Cecil B. DeMented.”

Hearst also proved willing to probe her famous grandfather’s storied past, serving as host for a two-hour cable documentary on San Simeon, the palatial home built by William Randolph Hearst on a coastal hilltop in central California. Reared in San Francisco, Hearst visited the castle as a weekend retreat in her childhood.

Her past with the SLA, seemingly behind her, boomeranged with the June 1999 arrest of Sara Jane Olson, the pseudonym adopted by SLA member Kathleen Soliah, who had reinvented herself as a Minnesota soccer mom during 25 years in hiding.

By her own account, Hearst was slated to be a reluctant witness when Olson was tried on charges of planting bombs, which failed to go off, under several Los Angeles police cars.

“I keep trying to forget these people,” Hearst was quoted saying in Talk magazine. “And they keep dragging me back into it!”

After the arrests in the Opsahl slaying, Hearst presented a different face. She appeared on “Larry King Live,” calling Opsahl’s murder a “violent, senseless, evil act” and suggested she had no qualms about testifying against her erstwhile comrades.

“They just don’t have any power over me anymore,” she added. “They haven’t had for years.”

Defense attorneys, however, suggest that there remains every reason to question Hearst’s memories.

“There exists numerous documents that illustrate that Ms. Hearst suffered from a mental illness that affected, and may still affect, her ability to accurately recall and relate the events,” the defense said in court papers.

Mental-health experts say there is little doubt that traumatic events do often impair people’s recollections. It is called “disassociated amnesia,” said Michael Mantell, a 30-year law enforcement psychologist in San Diego County.

But for some people, the trauma can recede and the memories come rolling back, he said, “like they’re coming out of a fog.”