8. A parking ticket led to a raid on SLA headquarters
When Patty was kidnapped, she disappeared without a trace. Despite one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the country using all of the resources at its disposal to find her, nothing was turning up. Even after the SLA began releasing tapes of her to radio stations, investigators could not track where her captors were holding her. Investigations following the bank robbery ended in cold trails. The firefight in the sporting goods parking lot brought them a lucky break, though: the getaway van that Patty and William and Emily Harris used had been issued a parking ticket earlier that day.
The parking ticket led investigators to a suburban hideaway, which was probably the house where Patty was held during her initial months of captivity, when she was beaten, raped, and kept in a dark closet. It was probably where she had undergone her transformation from Patty, the wealthy heiress, to Tania, the urban guerrilla who was unapologetic in her militant crusade. Now that police had their fingers on her whereabouts, though, they weren’t preparing a rescue mission. No, after the heinous crimes that Patty had participated in, they were preparing for an all-out raid that would leave no survivors.
