CRIME: The Ordeal of a Political Prisoner

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The first solid break in the case came with the probable identification of Cinque as Donald D. DeFreeze, 30, an escaped prisoner who had been serving a five-year-to-life term at California's Soledad prison for assault and robbery.

Inmates who knew DeFreeze reportedly said that they recognized his voice from the tape, and at least three witnesses to the kidnaping were said to have identified him by photo as one of the two black men who, accompanied by a young white woman, burst into the Hearst apartment. Authorities were also looking for another prison escapee, The-ro M. Wheeler, 29, a jail acquaintance of DeFreeze's, who at one time was active in a California revolutionary Maoist group known as Venceremos. At week's end an intensified search for the two escapees, both of whom have been at large for months, had turned up nothing.

Ransom Demands. The S.L.A. communique early in the week demanded that Hearst provide $70 worth of "top" meats, vegetables and dairy products to everyone in California holding one of several certificates attesting to neediness: welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled-veteran cards, Medi-Cal (the state's version of Medicare) cards, parole or probation papers and jailor bail-release slips. The food was to be distributed through supermarkets for three days during each of the next four weeks, and the S.L.A. suggested that the program be supervised by several groups, including the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Black Teachers Caucus.

The plan was modeled on ransom demands made in recent years by the Argentine E.R.P. (Revolutionary Army of the People), which has demanded food, clothing and medical equipment for poor areas from corporations in return for freeing kidnaped executives. The S.L.A., however, had wildly raised the stakes. The largest amount known to have been demanded by the E.R.P. was $10 million from Exxon last year. California officials estimated that the bill for the state's 1.9 million welfare recipients alone would come to $133 million and that other people deemed eligible by the S.L.A. might make it as high as $400 million. Even if the logistics of finding and distributing so much food could be worked out—a doubtful proposition—that kind of money was certainly beyond even Hearst's means.

The family's strategy was to attempt to find a compromise. Urging Patricia over television to "hang in there, honey," Hearst promised to make "some kind of counteroffer that is acceptable."

He said that he was hoping to find a way "to give the food to people who really do need it, and not assume that anyone with a card can go in."