"This Is Tania"

The ashes from the holocaust and Shootout in Los Angeles had barely cooled last week when law authorities declared that they finally had the answers to two of the most persistent questions about the Patty Hearst saga. They were convinced that the newspaper heiress had really been kidnaped by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Feb. 4 rather than taken part in an elaborate ruse to join old friends. But they were also persuaded that Patty had since joined the cause of the shattered S.L.A. and become a terrorist herself.

The chief contributor to these conclusions was Thomas Matthews, an 18-year-old high school student. He was kidnaped by Patty and her S.L.A. companions, Emily and William Harris, during their frantic escape after shooting up a Los Angeles sporting-goods store the day before the fiery siege in which six of the S.L.A. gang members died. For twelve hours, the trio held Matthews captive while driving aimlessly around the Los Angeles area in his van. They even stopped for a while in a drive-in movie. Immediately after his release, Matthews, fearing reprisal by the S.L.A., did not tell the authorities that Patty had been in the truck. But two days after the Shootout, he confessed that Patty--wearing a short, dark, afro-style wig as a disguise--not only had been a member of the trio but had been remarkably willing to talk and chatted away like any 20-year-old girl on a date.

Bizarre Touch. According to Matthews, Patty said that she had decided to join her captors after becoming disillusioned with the attempts of her father, Randolph A. Hearst, to secure her release. She felt that he had mishandled the distribution of more than $2 million worth of food to the poor, an effort to meet the demands of the S.L.A. In addition, said Matthews, Patty admitted that she had willingly taken part in the S.L.A.'s robbery of a San Francisco bank on April 15. And she said that she had been the one who riddled the sporting-goods storefront with automatic fire to cover the trio's escape after William Harris had been caught shoplifting.

On the basis of Matthews' story, Los Angeles District Attorney Joseph Busch charged Patty with 19 felony counts, introducing the most bizarre touch yet in the whole strange affair: two counts charging Patty with being a kidnaper herself. The flurry of charges stemmed from the incident at the sporting-goods store and the subsequent flight.

As Busch reconstructed the series of events, the S.L.A. trio sped away from the store in a red and white van, then pulled up behind a parked car. Harris and one of the women took the car at gunpoint from its two occupants. "We are S.L.A.," Harris announced. "We need your car. I have to kill someone, and I don't want to kill you."

When that car stalled within a few blocks, the three fugitives seized a blue Chevrolet station wagon, which they drove until they saw a blue Ford van with a for-sale sign in its window parked in front of the Matthews home. Emily Harris walked up to Tom Matthews and said she would like to test-drive the truck. Once around the corner, Emily stopped to pick up her husband and Patty. "Do you know who this is?" Harris asked Matthews. "This is Tania." Tania was the name Patty had adopted with the S.L.A. and used while making several of her well-publicized tapes.

At about 6:40 a.m. on the day of the gun battle, the three released Matthews unharmed and abandoned his van. A few minutes later a motorist named Frank Sutter stopped for two hitchhiking girls, who suddenly brandished guns. The girls picked up Harris and, with Sutter lying in the back seat, the trio drove around for six hours. Then the kidnapers released Sutter in Griffith Park after taking $250 from his wallet. "You can figure this as a loan, but you won't get it back," said Harris. A short distance farther on, the trio parked the car and disappeared.

Discussing the assorted counts against Patty, D.A. Busch said, "She faces life imprisonment." In committing acts of violence, claimed Busch, "Miss Hearst was acting of her own free will." Busch thus differed with Randolph Hearst, who was still staunchly insisting last week that his daughter must have been brainwashed by the S.L.A. A picture of Patty Hearst, smiling like a prom queen, soon appeared on "wanted" posters distributed throughout the country.

Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles county coroner, cast new and harrowing light on the exact events of the Shootout, after studying the wounds on the six bodies and the positions in which they were found. When the shooting began, Dr. Noguchi theorized, the six chopped a hole in the wooden floor of the house and sought refuge in the 20-in.-deep crawl space under the structure, which was protected by a foot-thick cement foundation wall. This would explain not only how some members survived the fusillade for so long, but also why they failed to hit any of the officers laying siege to the frame and stucco hideout. The S.L.A. members had to shoot upward through narrow ventilation slots, and their bullets passed harmlessly over the heads of their unseen assailants.

Reconstructing the action, Dr. Noguchi said that Camilla Hall had died first--a rifle bullet piercing the middle of her forehead. Nancy Ling Perry was probably the next to go, hit in the spine and lung. Three other S.L.A. members --Angela Atwood, Patricia ("Mizmoon") Soltysik and William Wolfe--succumbed to noxious gases given off by the conflagration. "They chose to stay under the floor as the fire burned instead of getting out," said Dr. Noguchi. "In all my years as a coroner, I've never seen this kind of behavior in the face of live flames." To try to discover why the three showed such fanatical determination to die so horribly, Noguchi said that he was ordering "a psychological autopsy" by a varied team of experts.

The last to die, according to Dr. Noguchi, was Donald DeFreeze, the self-styled General Field Marshal Cinque of the S.L.A. From traces of gunpowder deep within a wound in his right temple, Dr. Noguchi deduced that the terrorist leader had committed suicide while the flames roared through the house a few inches above his head.

On the Alert. The day before Dr. Noguchi announced his findings, DeFreeze was buried in Cleveland, where he grew up and members of his family still live. At the request of the family, services for the S.L.A. leader, who had been fascinated by guns ever since he was a juvenile delinquent, were conducted by blacks belonging to the Sunni Orthodox Muslim sect, though the dead man was not believed to be a Muslim. As the tan metal coffin was carried out of the church, hundreds in the crowd of 1,500 raised their arms to give the clenched-fist salute of black power.

At week's end, with Patty Hearst and the Harrises still on the loose, the FBI and police were trying to track down a spate of rumors and reports about the trio. One tip had it that Patty would surface in Havana. Another, also unconfirmed, claimed that the Black Muslims had given $50,000 to a black man in Griffith Park two days after the shootout. Some--or all--of the sum was said to have been passed on to the fugitives.

But the FBI, even with 200 agents working on the case in Los Angeles, had to admit once again that it had no idea where Patty Hearst was. Guards along both the Mexican and Canadian borders were on the alert for the trio. The key problem was that the authorities did not know what happened after Patty and the Harrises abandoned Frank Sutler's car near Griffith Park on the day of the shootings. "We're looking like hell," said William Sullivan, FBI chief in the city, "but we don't know how they departed the area." The last reliable sighting of the threesome was on May 19 in Sherman Oaks, a suburban community of Los Angeles.

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