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.
Ling met Black jazz musician Gilbert Perry when he was working for a state employment office, and the couple were married December 26, 1967.
At Vacaville, Perry formed a relationship with black inmate Donald DeFreeze, who was active at the prison.
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.
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.
He believed it was the wrong direction, and withdrew in October 1973 with his heiress girlfriend Mary Alice Siem.
The SLA first made headlines by claiming credit for the murder on November 6, 1973, of Marcus Foster, Superintendent of Oakland Public Schools.
In a public statement, the unknown group SLA claimed that the bullets used were tipped with the poison cyanide.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
During the next several months, the SLA undertook increasingly risky actions, including kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst in February.
By this time Hearst had publicly declared she had joined the SLA; she was filmed in videos at the bank brandishing an assault weapon.
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 south central 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.