For nearly a century, the Hearst family name was synonymous with a newspaper tycoon and a powerful media empire.
That changed in April 1974, when Patricia Hearst appeared on surveillance video taking part of an armed bank robbery just two months after being kidnapped by a violent terrorist group.
In the first of a weeklong series on some of the biggest crimes and cults of the 20th century, TODAY examines the Patty Hearst saga that dominated the headlines — many in the same newspapers her grandfather had built into an empire.
Hearst was a 19-year-old student at the University of California at Berkeley, when she was kidnapped by a deadly domestic terrorist group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA.
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