U.S.|One of Patty Hearst’s Kidnappers Has Died

Bill Harris, a Marine Corps veteran who was one of the main kidnappers of the heiress Patricia Hearst in his role as a top lieutenant of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the underground band of firebrands that epitomized — and, to many, helped discredit — the revolutionary far left of the 1970s, died on Sept. 10 in San Francisco. He was 81.

His wife, Rebecca Young, confirmed the death, at a hospital, and said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr. Harris’s byzantine journey into the American consciousness began around 9 p.m. on Feb. 4, 1974, when he and two other “soldiers” from the Symbionese Liberation Army, or S.L.A., burst into the Berkeley, Calif., apartment that Ms. Hearst, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California known as Patty, shared with her fiancé, Steven Weed.

Ms. Hearst was a scion of California’s equivalent of a royal family. She was a daughter of Randolph A. Hearst, the chairman of the Hearst Corporation, which was founded by her grandfather William Randolph Hearst, the lordly media baron and model for the title character in “Citizen Kane.”

“Patricia Hearst was a symbolic target,” Mr. Harris said later, adding: “Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the United States government.”

On that February evening, after a brief, violent struggle, Mr. Harris stuffed her — writhing and screaming, wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy blue slippers — into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala. It was the start of one of the defining news epics of the era, as Ms. Hearst morphed from Patty to Tania — a gun-toting urban guerrilla and bank robber — and back to Patty again.

For the ever-voluble, ever-dogmatic Mr. Harris, it was also the start of a headline-grabbing odyssey of crime and punishment that unfolded over decades, involving one of the largest manhunts in F.B.I. history, two prison sentences and enough revolutionary sloganeering to make Mao’s head spin.