When Symbionese Liberation Army member and Patty Hearst co-kidnapper Camilla Hall was gunned down by the LAPD in 1974, newspapers described the blond Midwestern girl as “homely” or “manly.” Unflattering or not, there was something unusual about Hall’s appearance.
In fact, two witnesses who saw the pale Camilla acting suspiciously on the moonlit night of Hearst’s kidnapping would later describe her to Los Angeles cops as an “albino male.”
Perhaps even more baffling was Hall’s motivation to leave behind her innocent politicking in Minnesota to join the SLA, the first organization characterized by the U.S. government as “domestic terrorists.”
As Rachael Hanel asks in her book “Not The Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path From Small-Town America To The Symbionese Liberation Army” (University of Minnesota Press), how did a “soft Minnesota girl, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, become a revolutionary?”
In the mid-1950s, the Halls were a family of do-gooders. Camilla’s father was a minister and his wife a stay-at-home mom, the two always working to aid their congregation and community. The four Hall children shared that philanthropic bent, with Camilla handing out books, clothes and supplies to needy natives when her father did missionary work in Africa.
In high school in Minnesota, Camilla was an arty, popular student. She provided comic relief in school plays and in 1963 was voted “class clown” by the seniors. Hall charmed her fellow students at the University of Minnesota, too, performing on her ukulele whimsical songs she’d written.
“I just got a kick out of Camilla,” one roommate said.
After college Camilla worked to make the world a better place. She took a job with the welfare department in northeast Minnesota, helping single mothers and the poor, and started becoming political. In 1968 she supported Eugene McCarthy for president because he was the only candidate against the Vietnam War. She organized labor unions and led grape boycotts in support of Cesar Chavez.
Although a political activist, Camilla still didn’t approve of the carnage that occurred at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“She wasn’t into gun violence, just get-up-and-shout violence,” Hanel writes.
Camilla relocated to Los Angeles in 1970 and sold artwork (she made cheeky line drawings), but by 1971 she’d moved to Berkeley. There she became lovers with a neighbor, Patty Soltysik, whose vague political ideas included “banding together with others to resist the system.”
After Hall’s death, much was made of Camilla’s relationship with Soltysik, as if that homosexual affair was her motivation to take up kidnapping and murder. “It’s an easy narrative that makes for eye-catching headlines, a lurid ‘lesbian love’ pulp storyline for the 1970s,” Hanel writes.
Soltysik was at least partly responsible for Camilla joining the Symbionese Liberation Army. The couple had parted ways in 1972 but reconnected in 1973, though only platonically — Soltysik no longer wanted a sexual relationship with Hall. But Camilla found herself swept up in Soltysik’s increasingly radical politics, eventually joining the SLA and supporting its stated purpose: “By the right of our children and people and by Force of Arms and with every drop of our blood, Declare Revolutionary War against The Fascist Capitalist Class, and all their agents of murder, oppression, and exploitation.”
But even though she joined, Camilla doubted the SLA would have any real effect. After the Patty Hearst kidnapping, a friend said to Camilla it was a “useless, ridiculous tactic” and “not the way to change the world.” Camilla didn’t refute her — in fact, she agreed.
Still, during her time in the SLA Camilla bought herself a .380 Mauser pistol and acted as lookout during the Hearst kidnapping. She may not have been involved in the SLA’s first major attack — the 1973 assassination of San Francisco school superintendent, Marcus Foster — but she was an armed participant in the 1974 robbery of San Francisco’s Hibernia Bank. Two innocent bystanders were shot and wounded during that theft.
With the SLA’s continuing sensational crime spree on the West Coast and its militant screeds sent to local media outlets, the FBI was on the case. Eventually, six members of the group – more than half of the organization — were discovered at a “safe house” in South Central Los Angeles on May 17, 1974. Apparently, the SLA always wanted to die in their quixotic quest, believing that sacrifice would give their movement credence. The Los Angeles Police Department and FBI were happy to accommodate them.
With more than 400 LAPD members and dozens of FBI agents surrounding the house, Camilla Hall came out the front door with guns blazing. She was killed instantly with a bullet to the forehead, followed quickly by her comrades.
While the mystery of why Camilla Hall would end up in such a fruitless endeavor was never definitively proven, one of Hall’s friends had a theory. Although one of four children growing up, by the time she was a senior in high school, Camilla was the only one left: Her two brothers and one sister all died of genetic kidney problems. The friend said Camilla had begun suffering similar symptoms in Berkeley, and Camilla might’ve foreseen that her medical issues were leading to an early grave.
Could it be that Camilla Hall joined the SLA to go out in a blaze of glory, via suicide by cops? As one child psychologist said, siblings of dead children often have suicidal thoughts or an obsession with early death.
As Hanel writes, “Sadness, and anger born out of that sadness, will always emerge.”
