Nancy Ling Perry

In an effort to destroy evidence linked to the SLA, Perry set the house on fire and fled. But the fire was discovered and put out, and police found numerous documents, illegal weapons, lists of target public figures, and other materials connected to the SLA. Little and Remiro were both convicted of the murder of Foster and wounding of his deputy. They were sentenced to prison and assigned to San Quentin. Little's conviction was overturned on appeal, but Remiro remains in prison in 2022, the only member of the SLA still incarcerated. Parole has been repeatedly denied.

With Soltysik, Perry is considered to have been a chief theorist and driver of the SLA. She was the only one to identify publicly as SLA, and wrote a five-page letter to The San Francisco Chronicle in 1974 affirming this.

In an effort to evade police attention after the attack on Foster and his deputy, Perry rented a house for the SLA under a false name in Concord, California, east of the Berkeley hills. Little and Remiro were stopped in that area in early January 1974 by police and exchanged shots with them. They were both arrested.

In May 1974 Nancy Ling Perry, DeFreeze, Patricia Soltysik and two other founding members of the SLA had taken refuge at a safe house in Los Angeles, at 1466 East 54th Street. On May 17, 1974, the Los Angeles Police Department surrounded the house with a SWAT team and a shootout began. The house accidentally caught on fire. and the group hid in a crawlspace.

DeFreeze was transferred to Soledad Prison for good behavior. He escaped from there in March 1973 and made his way to Oakland, where he contacted Russ Little and some other white associates he had met through the BCA at Vacaville. Little put him in touch with Patricia Soltysik, and he started living at her apartment. They formed a sexual relationship and were co-founders of what became the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Others in the small group were Thero Wheeler, a black convict who escaped from Vacaville in August 1973; Chicano Joe Remiro (classified as white by the New York Times), and Angela Atwood, another white woman. They were soon joined by a white married couple, Emily Harris and her husband William. All but DeFreeze, Wheeler and Remiro were white and mostly educated, from middle and upper-class families.

Initially Wheeler and Remiro, a veteran, began training the inexperienced whites in the use of weapons. Wheeler was increasingly opposed to the radical plans for violence formed by SLA leaders. He believed it was the wrong direction, and withdrew in October 1973 with his heiress girlfriend Mary Alice Siem. The two separated, and he lived as a fugitive for two years before being apprehended.

The SLA first made headlines by claiming credit for the murder on November 6, 1973, of Marcus Foster, Superintendent of Oakland Public Schools. He was the first black superintendent of any major urban school system. This act outraged the black community, which had strongly admired him. The SLA claimed that the bullets used were tipped with the poison cyanide, which was confirmed by the city coroner.

Ling met black jazz musician Gilbert Perry when he was working for a state employment office, and the couple were married December 26, 1967. Married for six years, they had a relationship described as a "love-hate affair". It ended when Gilbert left Nancy, but she remained deeply interested in black culture.

Nancy Ling Perry (September 19, 1947 – May 17, 1974, born Nancy Ling) was also known as Nancy Devoto, Lynn Ledworth, and Fahizah while a founding member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small leftist terrorist group based in northern California. Considered one of its chief theorists and activists, she died in a shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department at an SLA safehouse in that city.

Nancy Ling was born in San Francisco in 1947 to an upper-middle-class family. She attended Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, where she was a cheerleader and a Sunday school teacher. In 1964, while in high school, she was a campaign worker for Barry Goldwater. While in high school, Ling was also involved in Job's Daughters (Bethel #16) and served as their Honored Queen.