William "Bill" Harris

Bill Harris died on September 10, 2026, at a hospital in San Francisco, at the age of 81. His wife, Rebecca Young, confirmed his death to The New York Times and said the cause was a heart attack. The news was not widely reported until the Times published its obituary on October 6, 2026, followed by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Associated Press and Berkeleyside. He was survived by his wife, his sons Cody and Shane, and his sisters Joanne Johnson and Amy Duke. No public funeral or memorial arrangements have been reported.

William Harris was born in 1945 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a U.S. Army post. He joined the Marine Corps and served in the Vietnam War. After returning home he became involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and his politics moved sharply to the left.

He enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he met Emily Montague Schwartz. The two married, and in 1973 they moved to Berkeley, California, with friends, where they became involved in left wing prison outreach work that brought them into contact with the founders of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The Harrises joined the SLA soon after it formed around escaped prisoner Donald DeFreeze. Harris took the name "Teko" within the group. On February 4, 1974, he and two other members burst into Patricia Hearst's Berkeley apartment. After a struggle, Harris forced the 19 year old granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala. He later explained that the group saw her family's media empire as "an arm of propaganda for the United States government."

The SLA at first called Hearst a "prisoner of war" and then demanded a large food giveaway for poor Californians. In April 1974 Hearst announced she had joined the group as "Tania" and took part in a San Francisco bank robbery. In May 1974 six members, including DeFreeze, died in a gun battle and fire at a house in South Central Los Angeles, while Harris, Emily Harris and Hearst escaped. The Harrises then led the group, spending more than a year in hiding with Hearst, partly on the East Coast, before returning to California. In April 1975 SLA members robbed a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, where customer Myrna Opsahl was shot and killed. The Harrises were arrested later in 1975 and served about eight years in prison for the kidnapping.

After his release in 1983, Harris took a job with San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, beginning as a receptionist and becoming a private investigator, work he carried on for decades. Advances in forensic evidence led to murder charges over the Opsahl killing in 2002, by which time Harris had long lived openly in the Bay Area. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder, was sentenced to seven years and served about four, being paroled in 2006.

Harris's first marriage, to fellow SLA member Emily Harris, ended in divorce. In 1988 he married Rebecca Young, a Bay Area defense lawyer. They had two sons, Cody and Shane, whom they raised in Oakland before settling in San Francisco. At his 2003 sentencing he apologised to members of Myrna Opsahl's family. He continued to give interviews about the SLA, including a 2018 CNN interview in which he said, "Reality isn't always on the surface. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper to see what's real."

Harris remained a central figure in the history of the Hearst kidnapping, one of the most closely followed criminal sagas of 1970s America. His long dispute with Hearst over whether she joined the SLA willingly kept the case in public debate for decades. The killing of Myrna Opsahl, and the guilty pleas that followed more than 25 years later, are also part of his record, as is the conventional life he built in the Bay Area between his two prison terms.