We’ve managed to gather L. Ron Hubbard, Patty Hearst, Jimmy Hendrix and Jesus OneTouch on one page.
If you look closely you’ll even see Walter Cronkite.
We’ll tell you where the Virgin Mary is, give you today’s religion number, and took a look at the books in your hotel room’s nightstand.
If you think life in America is wild and woolly these days, consider the early ’70s, when Radical Chic was de rigueur and when talk of the violent overthrow of the government wafted through space stations like Berkeley, Calif. There, such rhetoric was as much a part of daily life as clearlight acid and the tie-dye T-shirts favored by the radical children of orthodontists. Capping the weirdness of it all was the Feb. 4, 1974 kidnapping of the 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her apartment in Berkeley, where she lived with her fiance, Steven Weed. The event became an
Stranger-than-fiction story recounted in context of its time Despite what nostalgic TV shows say, the ’70s were a rocky, often rotten time for America. Troubles began in May 1970, with National Guardsmen killing four students at Kent State University in Ohio, and ran through the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. In between came the last days of Vietnam, vice president Spiro Agnew’s crooked shenanigans, the public shaming of Watergate, fuel shortages, the rise of cocaine and countless other headaches. Smack in the middle of the decade stood the most bizarre kidnapping of the century: The heisting of Patricia Hearst, one
The story of the SLA gripped the nation. Now a film captures the craziness of the times. Robert Stone was editing his documentary about the Symbionese Liberation Army, the 1970s revolutionary group, when, only blocks away, a far more dangerous organization unleashed the most devastating attack ever on U.S. soil. “I was right there,” Stone recalls of working in Lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district on Sept. 11, 2001. As one of the first people to get out of the neighborhood, the filmmaker himself was surrounded, at one point, by dozens of news cameras. “Not only was I in the middle of
Director Jonathan Demme fiddles with the classics again. After a remake of “Charade,” he now offers up “The Manchurian Candidate” for a nervous, post Sept. 11 era. The original 1962 film featured Angela Lansbury as a political Svengali and Frank Sinatra as an Army major who tracks down Laurence Harvey, an American soldier captured during the Korean War and programmed through hypnotism for assassination by Chinese Communists. The film was based on a 1959 best-selling book by Richard Condon. For all the critical acclaim and subsequent political attention (Did Lee Harvey Oswald see it or not?), the movie flopped initially
Former Symbionese Liberation Army members and where they are now: James Kilgore, sentenced Monday to six years in state prison for April 21, 1975, shotgun slaying of Myrna Opsahl during a bank robbery in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb. Also sentenced April 27 to 54 months in federal prison on explosives and passport fraud convictions. Extradited from South Africa in November 2002 after 26 years living under an alias, Charles William Pape. Emily Montague, serving an eight-year sentence at Valley State Prison for Women, Chowchilla. The former computer consultant from Altadena confessed to pulling the trigger in Opsahl’s shooting, but claimed
SACRAMENTO – The long, violent saga of the Symbionese Liberation Army finally came to an end. SLA member James Kilgore was sentenced to six years in state prison Monday for the killing of a suburban Sacramento housewife during an April 1975 bank robbery that netted the would-be revolutionaries $15,000. Kilgore, 56, who evaded authorities for more than two decades before his November 2002 arrest in South Africa, was the last of five SLA members sentenced for the shotgun slaying of 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four who was in the Crocker National Bank depositing a church collection. ” I
Summary: Sniper case puts cult indoctrination to the test. Lawyers for accused sniper Lee Boyd Malvo are using an insanity defense that claims John Allen Muhammad, 42, indoctrinated Malvo, 18, into a “cult of two,” such that Malvo could not distinguish right from wrong. Malvo is on trial for last year’s Washington D.C., area sniper shootings and will face the death penalty if convicted. Psychologists and legal experts are skeptical about the insanity-by-brainwashing defense, though some cult experts are adamant that the youngster was, in fact, brainwashed. Muhammad plucked 15-year-old Malvo from the Caribbean island of Antigua, where his mother
Larry King Live, CNN, Mar. 13, 2003 http://www.cnn.com/ Aired March 13, 2003 – 21:00 ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ED SMART, ELIZABETH SMART’S FATHER: It’s real. It’s real. (END VIDEO CLIP) LARRY KING, CNN HOST: Tonight, Elizabeth Smart’s miraculous return and her ordeal. We’ll speak with members of the Smart family and they’ll tell us how Elizabeth’s doing and what she’s had to say about what she went through. Plus, the Smart’s family’s bishop, Bishop David Hamblin of the Mormon Church. He
Independent (England), Nov. 8, 2002 http://news.independent.co.uk/ By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles Four former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the Californian guerrilla group that kidnapped Patty Hearst, pleaded guilty yesterday rather than face trial for the last outstanding crime of their days of political violence – the murder of a disabled housewife shot dead during a 1975 bank robbery outside Sacramento. Under a deal worked out with prosecutors, who revived the case years after it had been abandoned because it was deemed to be unsolvable, the four defendants pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for assurances that