Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped 50 years ago.

[Tennesseer]

For those of us who were just starting out as young adults fifty years ago.

Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped 50 years ago. Now she's famous for her dogs

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Newspaper heiress Patricia “Patty” Hearst was kidnapped at gunpoint 50 years ago Sunday by the Symbionese Liberation Army, later joining her captors in a 1974 San Francisco bank robbery that earned her a prison sentence.

The abduction and subsequent trial of Hearst, then a 19-year-old college student and the granddaughter of wealthy newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was one of the most sensational and captivating cases of the 1970s.

Hearst will turn 70 on Feb. 20. She is now known as Patricia Hearst Shaw after she married a police officer who guarded her when she was out on bail, the late Bernard Shaw. She has been in the news in recent years for her dogs, mostly French bulldogs, that have won prizes in the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

Hearst's allegiance to the Symbionese Liberation Army raised questions about Stockholm syndrome, a common term deployed to describe the bond that victims of kidnappings or hostage situations sometimes develop with their captors.

Stockholm syndrome got its name from an August 1973 failed bank robbery in Sweden’s capital. Rather than a diagnosis of a disorder, experts describe it as a psychological coping mechanism used by some hostages to endure being held captive and abused.

Hearst, who went by the name “Tania” in the group, denounced her family and posed for a photograph carrying a weapon in front of their flag. The self-styled radicals viewed aspects of U.S. society as racist and oppressive, and they were accused of killing a California school superintendent.

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