Biography
William Taylor “Bill” Harris was a Marine Corps veteran who studied urban education at Indiana University and later joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, using the name Teko. After six SLA members died in the May 1974 Los Angeles shootout, Harris became one of the group’s principal public voices. Police arrested him, Emily Harris, Patricia Hearst, and Wendy Yoshimura in San Francisco on September 18, 1975. Harris later pleaded guilty to kidnapping Hearst and remained imprisoned until April 25, 1983. In 2002 he was charged in the 1975 Crocker National Bank robbery in which Myrna Opsahl was killed. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, received a seven-year sentence on February 14, 2003, and was paroled in September 2006.
The issue reproduces a January 1976 joint statement with Emily from Los Angeles County Jail accompanying a $30 million federal civil suit against law-enforcement agencies over allegedly prejudicial leaks. Their denials of involvement in several unsolved attacks are their own contemporaneous position, not judicial findings. A February 5 statement discusses their request to delay their joint Los Angeles trial until Hearst could be tried with them. Pages3-10. Source: https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC514_scans/SLA%20Dragon/514.SLA.Dragon7.Febmarch1976.Periodical.pdf
Breakthrough reports Bill Harris’s August 31, 1978 guilty plea in the Patricia Hearst kidnapping case and continued prison isolation, alleging mistreatment by prison authorities.
The issue reproduces sentencing-statement excerpts and reports eleven years to life for kidnapping, robbery and vehicle-code violations. The Berkeley Hearst kidnapping arraignment remained scheduled for September 22; a scheduled appearance is not a completed trial or new incarceration. The sentence is nominal, not measured time served.
