Bill Harris, a former Symbionese Liberation Army member involved in Patty Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping, died Sept. 10 at a San Francisco hospital at 81. His wife, Rebecca Young, said he died of a heart attack, The New York Times reported.
After his release from prison in 1983, Harris worked for San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon and later became a private investigator, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. His post-prison life also included a later case tied to the SLA’s past: Harris pleaded guilty in 2002 to second-degree murder in connection with the 1975 killing of Myrna Opsahl and was sentenced to seven years, the New York Post reported.
A personal history, not a measure of reentry
Harris’s path from prison to investigative work—and his later murder plea—cannot establish what happens to people released from prison generally. For a broader, but different, measure, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported a three-year conviction rate of 39.1% among people released from its custody in fiscal year 2019–20, the lowest since the department began reporting the rate. CDCR identifies the three-year conviction rate as its primary recidivism measure, with arrests and returns to prison as supplemental measures, the department said.
The events that made Harris known
Harris was among the SLA members who abducted Hearst, then 19, from the Berkeley apartment she shared with her fiancé, Steven Weed, in February 1974. The FBI’s historical account says the group beat Weed, put Hearst in a car trunk and drove away; The FBI recounts the abduction.
The SLA initially described Hearst as a prisoner of war and later demanded that her family help fund a food distribution for poor Californians, the Chronicle reported. Hearst subsequently appeared in an SLA photograph carrying a weapon, used the name Tania and took part in a San Francisco bank robbery. She later said she had been coerced into joining the group; Harris disputed that account, according to the Chronicle.
Hearst and the Harrises were arrested in San Francisco in September 1975, the New York Post reported. A contemporaneous New York Times report said William and Emily Harris were found guilty of kidnapping, robbery and auto theft in 1976. Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery and sentenced to seven years; President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979, and President Bill Clinton pardoned her in 2001, the Chronicle reported.
The Opsahl case arose from a separate SLA crime: during a 1975 bank robbery in suburban Sacramento, Emily Harris’s weapon discharged and killed Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, according to the Chronicle. Harris’s later guilty plea concerned that killing; it does not change the distinction between his role in Hearst’s kidnapping and the circumstances of Opsahl’s death.
