NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Sarah Jane Moore has passed away after being jailed for more than 30 years since attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. She was 95 years old.
Moore passed away Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee. According to longtime acquaintance Demetria Carodimos, he was informed by the executor of Moore’s property. Kalodimos was the executive producer of the Nashville Banner newspaper and first reported his death.
Moore seemed like an unlikely candidate to gain national infamous as a violent political extremist. I almost killed the president. When she shot at Ford in San Francisco, she was a middle-aged woman who began to dabble in left-wing groups and sometimes served as an FBI informant.
Declared of life, Moore spent time at a federal correctional facility in Dublin, California when he was unexpectedly released from parole on December 31, 2007.
She later lived in private places primarily anonymously, but in a broadcast interview she expressed regret for what she did. She said she was caught up in a radical political movement that was common in California in the mid-1970s.
“I was blindfolded, I really had it and I thought I believed…” she told San Francisco television station KGO in April 2009.
Two assassins
Moore was confused from Lynette “Squeak,” a pupil of Charles Manson, a cult killer who targeted a semi-automatic pistol in Ford, California on September 5, 1975. Secret Service agents grabbed the gun before firing, making the president rude.
Just 17 days later, on September 22nd, Moore shot Ford as he waved to the crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, San Francisco. Oliver Shipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, knocked out a .38 caliber pistol from her hand when she fired, causing her to stray shots and hit the building.
“Sorry,” Moore said in an interview with San Jose Mercury News seven years later. “Yes, sorry, but I missed it. I don’t want to fail.”
However, in later interviews, she repeatedly said before and after her release that she regretted her actions and was convinced that the government had declared war on the left.
In 2009, she asked the KGO what she would say to Ford if that was possible, and she replied to him, “Sorry for it to happen… I’m so happy that it wasn’t successful.” Ford passed away in 2006, about a year before her release.
Her family did not publicly comment on her death. Geri Spieler, who wrote Moore’s biography entitled “Housewife Assassin,” said she abandoned her child and became estranged from her living relatives.
Increases marriage, name change, and unclear motivation
Moore was born on February 15, 1930 in Charleston, West Virginia to Sarah Jane Cahn. Her confusing background, including multiple marriage failures, name changes with both left-wing political groups and the FBI, and involvement, baffled even the public and her own defense attorneys during her trial.
“I never got a satisfactory answer from her as to why she did that,” federal defense attorney James F. Hewitt once said. “There was something strange. She wouldn’t tell anyone anything about her background.”
Ford argued that his two attempts on life should not prevent him from contacting people, saying, “If there’s no opportunity to talk to each other, see each other, and hold each other, something is wrong in our society.”
His other attacker, Fromme, was also eventually released from prison. She had not commented as she left a federal lockup in Texas at the age of 60 in August 2009.
Not only the left-wing group, but the FBI is also working together.
Moore began working for the needy, a free food program for the poor, established by billionaire Randolph Hearst, after her daughter Patty was lured into the radical symbiont liberation army.
Moore soon became involved with the leftists, former prisoners and other members of San Francisco counterculture. At this point she became an FBI informant.
Moore said she shot Ford because she thought she would be killed after it was revealed to be an FBI informant. The agency ended their relationship with her about four months before the shooting.
“I was going to get off anyway,” she said in a 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “And if I was about to get off, I was going to do it. If the government was trying to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”
A failed prison escape
Moore was sent to the women’s prison in West Virginia in 1977. Two years later, she escaped, but was captured a few hours later.
She was later transferred to a prison in Pleasanton, California before heading to Dublin.
In 2000, she sued the federal prison guard to prevent him from stealing the keys given to prisoners to lock themselves in as a security measure.
In an interview after the July 2024 attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump, Moore told Nashville Banner that part of her motivation was that Ford, who became president after Richard Nixon resigned, was not elected president.
“He was not elected anything. He was appointed,” Moore said. “It wasn’t a belief, it was a fact. It was the fact that he was appointed.”
