Edgars Flashback: Patty Hearst · Murder Boy

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be doing a look back at the 1980 Edgar Award nominees for Best Fact Crime. These titles, published in 1979, include a cold war espionage classic, an account of one of the 1970s’ most high profile criminal trials, a Texas murder saga, an investigative look at inmates on death row, and the story of one of the decades’ lesser-known serial murder cases. Are any of these titles worth a read 43 years on?

Our next title is Anyone’s Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst, a diary by Shana Alexander of Hearst’s 1976 trial on two charges: armed bank robbery, and use of a firearm to commit a felony. The trial started two years to the day after Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an insular left-wing terrorist group. The SLA planned to leverage the Hearst family’s influence (Patty is the granddaughter of newspaper legend William Randolph Hearst) to free two SLA members imprisoned for the 1972 murder of the Oakland Superintendent of Schools Marcus Foster and fund a free-food campaign for poor Californians.