Act II of the SLA saga began in the Bay Area of California. Donald DeFreeze worked as Patricia Soltysik's valet and cook. Willie Wolfe, meanwhile, attended school board meetings in the Bay Area. They, along with the William and Emily Harris approached a number of leftist organizations, urging them to unite behind their new group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (prompting the obvious question, “Where the hell is Symbia?”).

The Atwoods bickered constantly, so Gary moved back to Indiana, while erudite Angela landed a job as a waitress. Nancy Ling Perry, meanwhile, operated a bagel and juice stand where she had daily contact with Patricia Hearst, a regular customer. Thero Wheeler alternately vanished into thin air, supposedly to be with Siem, his twenty-three-year-old mystery sweetheart, who looked very young for her age.

The rest of the players in place, Jean Chan drove Russell Little and Joseph Remiro to the site where they shot and killed Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster on November 6, 1973. They also shot his assistant, moderately conservative Robert Blackburn, who, fortunately, survived. The assassins used cyanide-laced bullets on Foster. They shot Blackburn, however, with ordinary ammo.

What made Foster so dangerous to the SLA? Well, if they were the leftists that they claimed, the answer would be “nothing.” He had already received kudos for reforming the Philadelphia school system, and had made substantial progress in Oakland.

What would be their real motive? Among other things, publicity. The killing attracted a lot of media attention, and the SLA quickly took advantage of it, announcing their existence in the first of what would be a series of communiqués.

Police picked up Remiro and Little after neighbors phoned in a suspicious van circling a suburban block near their latest hideout (they had gotten lost). The van contained the guns used in the Foster slaying, the cyanide bottle, and the blackface makeup they wore as a disguise.

Perry took it upon herself to torch the hideout the day after Little and Remiro’s arrest in order to hide evidence of their crimes, plans, and future whereabouts. Her results were kinda mixed. She did a good job on the house. But the evidence pretty much escaped damaged. Marilyn Baker, a reporter for KQED, the local PBS station, found a number of important clues that the police had somehow missed, among them a persons to be kidnapped or killed list (Hearst’s name appeared on it), a few half-drunk bottles of Gallo wine (an item real leftists were boycotting at the time due to Caesar Chavez’s organizing), and a how-to book on insurgency--sort of a Revolution for Dummies kind of thing.

The SLA then kidnapped Hearst on February 4, 1974. Police initially suspected Stephen Weed, her fiancé, of murdering her, and hiding the body. He only got off the hook after another SLA communiqué claimed to have her.

The Hearst family offered to pay any price for Patricia’s safe return, but the SLA didn’t ask for money. They instead ordered the Hearsts to give away $75 worth of free food to every needy family in California. That would have amounted to over $400 million. Unfortunately for her, Patty wasn’t worth quite that much to them. The Hearsts tried to mollify the SLA by doling out a million dollars worth of food instead.

Gov. Ronald Reagan assisted the effort, but at the same time ardently hoped that all those who took the food would come down with botulism. He pretty much got his wish. The “ransom” consisted of items that couldn’t be sold because they were unfit for human consumption, or contaminated. Those who managed to get the fifth-rate grub became very ill if they were desperate enough to eat it. Most of the recipients, however, weren’t even lucky enough to get poisoned. After waiting an ungodly amount of time, Reagan-picked volunteers began distributing the food. If you’re assuming that they handed it out to one person at a time, then shame on you for assuming something reasonable. Their idea of food distribution consisted of flinging it at the needy. Hungry indigents, hoping for nothing more than a square meal, found themselves getting knocked unconscious by flying, frozen turkeys. Incensed, many in the crowd returned fire. Wouldn’t you know, political commentators scolded the poor for their ungratefulness.

Hearst lambasted her parents for the giveaway debacle in a taped communiqué issued shortly thereafter, thus giving the first hint of the change to come. Now calling herself Tania, after Che Guevara’s girlfriend, she accompanied the SLA in their heist of Hibernia National Bank, the controlling stockholder of which was the father of her best friend, Patricia Tobin.

It never dawned on anyone to keep an eye out for the bank, but that would have almost seemed like a no-brainer. The FBI field office sat right across the street. And despite the fact that she had already been identified as a member of the SLA, Camilla Hall maintained a savings account there. She regularly withdrew money from it to help with SLA expenses. In fact, she withdrew close to $1,500 hours before an unidentified black male and black female, posing as a married couple, paid cash for the blue van that took the SLA to Los Angeles.