A Brush with the Heiress Gone Bad
Written By: Michael Harris
When Diana Bowles decided to go on a recon mission to competing banks as part of a marketing assignment for Bank of America in 1974, she didn’t figure to be at the epicenter of a bank robbery.
Working at a bank for most of her life and currently the Vice President at Citizen’s First Bank in Leesburg, Diana, like any bank employee, knows that a bank robbery is a distinct and very real possibility.
This one was different; this one made several national headlines. The Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco on April 15 was robbed by the Symbionese Liberation Army – and one of those robbers, in the building with Diana, was the kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst.
“I went into the bank that morning to get some material on their accounts, just seeing what the competition was doing,” Diana says. “I heard this POW! I thought something broke the windows or something and then I heard another one. I hit the floor and went under the desk and I heard screaming and hollering. I did sit up once and one of the guys ran by me and said get down.”
The SLA was an American self-styled militant group active between 1973 and 1975 that considered themselves a revolutionary vanguard army. In an effort to arrange for the exchange of two imprisoned members, they sought to kidnap an important figure.
Hearst was the daughter of Randolph Hearst, then the managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and chairman of the Hearst Corporation, and granddaughter to billionaire William Randolph Hearst. She was abducted by the SLA on Feb. 4, 1974. In the 57 days between the kidnapping and the bank robbery, Hearst said she was kept in a closet by her abductors.
When the exchange for the prisoners failed, the SLA demanded Hearst would be released if the captive’s family distributed $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. Hearst gave up $6 million to food for the poor in the Bay Area. The SLA said the food was of poor quality and Patricia Hearst said in an audio tape her father could have done better. On April 3, 1974, Patricia Hearst said on an audio tape that she was denouncing her parents and joining the SLA and would take on the name of Tania.
Tania’s first public appearance for the SLA was on the fateful day when Diana was in the bank at 10 a.m.
“I didn’t know Patty Hearst was there at the time,” Diana said. “I didn’t know it was her until the next morning in the paper.”
Being the fact Diana was a customer at the time, she was unsure how much Tania and the SLA made off with, but they did make a clean break in a little less than four minutes.
“For me it lasted three hours, but they were probably in and out of there in four minutes, not more than four minutes,” said Diana, who has rarely talked about the incident.
Just a minute later, the police showed up and proceeded to take statements from the customers as well as Diana.
“They got the usual information; how many robbers were there, what they were dressed like … um, what kind of guns they had. I told them a great big long one,” she says laughing.
Actually, Diana was trained by Bank of America very extensively in what do in a bank robbery situation and the identification of guns. She did say the robbers used automatic rifles.
“You tell them what you know, and then I was out of there,” she says.
Diana described the incident as life-changing, especially in her personal life. For nearly a year, Diana lived in fear of being hunted down by the SLA.
“I wanted to forget about it; I was nervous that they knew who was in the bank,” she says. “A year later they were all arrested. But during that year, I was very nervous. I was nervous for my family. I didn’t know if my name was out there.
“From the time of the robbery until they were arrested, I was always looking over my shoulder. I made sure I locked the room up a lot. It took a toll on me,” she added.
And following the arrest of the remaining members, which included Hearst, she was relieved.
“When I heard they were captured, I looked around my surroundings and it was like the color came back in the room,” she said. “Everything was black and white, you know, fear and being scared. Everything came back. I could smell flowers.”
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