• Founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army
• Believed to have been the mastermind of the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst

Thero “Bayo” Wheeler helped create the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a domestic terrorist group of the 1970s.

A repeat lawbreaker from an early age, Wheeler was arrested in San Francisco at the age of sixteen for assault and robbery; he was paroled five years later and was then re-arrested for assaulting a police officer in 1970.

He escaped from Soledad prison in 1971, after which he was recaptured and sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a California psychiatric prison. There he joined the Venceremos “revolutionary vanguard” and the Black Convicts Association, which put him in touch with other future members of the SLA. Eventually he escaped from Vacaville and joined up with SLA creator Donald DeFreeze.

DeFreeze used a number of Wheeler’s ideas in establishing the SLA’s structure. There is evidence that Wheeler was the person who planned the kidnapping of Patty Hearst (the daughter of billionaire Randolph Hearst), who later joined the SLA herself.

Wheeler quit the SLA sometime before the group assassinated Oakland (California) Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster in 1973, and later denied ever having been part of the organization.