Sara Jane Moore, 77, who tried to assassinate Former United States President Gerald Ford in 1975 was paroled from prison in California this afternoon.
Moore tried to assassinate Ford outside of the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco on January 15, by firing one shot, which missed because a bystander grabbed Moore’s arms just seconds before she fired the gun. The bullet missed hitting Ford in the head by inches.
It is not yet known why she was released or what the conditions of her release were.
In 2006, Ford died from natural causes. He was 93.
Background
A former nursing school student, Women’s Army Corps recruit, and accountant, Moore had five husbands before she turned to revolutionary politics at the age of 45.
Moore’s friends said she was obsessed with Patty Hearst. After Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, her father Randolph Hearst created the organization People in Need (P.I.N.) to feed the poor, in order to answer S.L.A. claims that the elder Hearst was “committing ‘crimes’ against ‘the people.’” Moore was a bookkeeper for P.I.N. and an FBI informant when she attempted to assassinate Ford.
Moore had been evaluated by the Secret Service earlier in 1975, but they had decided she presented no danger to the President. She had been picked up by police on an illegal handgun charge the day before the Ford incident but was released. Police kept the .44 pistol and 113 rounds of ammunition.
Assassination attempt
Moore was 40 feet away from the President when she fired a single shot at him. The bullet missed the President because bystander Oliver Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm and then pulled her to the ground, using his hand to keep the gun from firing a second time. Sipple said at the time: “I saw [her gun] pointed out there and I grabbed for it. [...] I lunged and grabbed the woman’s arm and the gun went off.” The single shot which Moore did manage to fire from her .38-caliber revolver ricocheted off the entrance to the hotel and slightly injured a bystander.
Moore pleaded guilty to attempted assassination and was sentenced to life in prison. She served her term at the federal women’s prison in Dublin, California. She was paroled on December 31, 2007.
In an interview in 2004, former President Ford described Moore as “off her mind” and said that he continued making public appearances, even after two attempts on his life within such a short time, because “a president has to be aggressive, has to meet the people.”
Release
On December 31, 2007, at the age of 77, Moore was released from prison on parole. She had served 32 years of her life sentence. Ford had died from natural causes on December 26, 2006, approximately one year before her release. Moore has stated that she regrets the assassination attempt.
In popular culture
In Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Assassins, Moore is portrayed as a flaky accident-waiting-to-happen who can’t wield a gun properly; in the Gun Song (the only song she sings outside of the Assassins as a group) when she “squeezes her little finger to change the world” along with the boys, hers goes off although theirs do not, and in “Everybody’s Got the Right” the Proprietor reminds her “Don’t forget that guns can go boom,” when she accidentally aims hers at him. Along with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, she serves as a bit of comic relief before major events in the musical, such as Guiteau’s assassination of James Garfield.[20]. The interactions between Moore and Fromme presented in the musical, which include smoking marijuana and firing off pistols at a bucket of fast food, are entirely fictitious, however.
Moore’s assassination attempt on Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel was also mentioned on the October 22, 2007 episode of the NBC time-traveling show Journeyman, where the main character’s father misses the opportunity to photograph the event.
