Sara Jane Moore, a Charleston native who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died.
Moore was one of two women involved in separate assassination attempts of President Ford to have a West Virginia connection. The other, Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme, also tried to assassinate the president in 1975 and, after conviction, was held at Federal Prison Camp Alderson in West Virginia, where she briefly escaped in 1987.
The assassination attempts were just 17 days apart. The two women did not know each other, and Moore said she was not inspired by Fromme’s earlier act.
Moore’s death at age 95 was covered in The New York Times and was placed at the bottom of the front page of today’s Washington Post print edition. She died at a nursing facility in Franklin, Tennessee.
Her death occurred two days after the 50th anniversary of her attempt on Ford’s life.
She was born Sara Jane Kahn in Charleston on Feb. 15, 1930, and graduated from Charleston’s Stonewall Jackson High School in 1947. Her father was a DuPont engineer, and her mother was a concert violinist. She changed her last name to Moore, adopting her mother’s maiden name.
Moore moved to California, where she was drawn into radical left-wing activism. She also was an FBI and San Francisco police informant. Moore was evaluated by the Secret Service as a potential danger to the president earlier in 1975.
Her assassination attempt occurred in San Francisco, across the street from the St. Francis Hotel and about 40 feet from Ford as he waved to the crowd. Using a gun that she had bought that same morning, Moore fired a single shot at him with a .38 caliber revolver.
The shot missed.
Moore raised her arm again to attempt a second shot, but an observer nearby, former Marine Oliver Sipple, ran over and grabbed her arm. The gun went off, ricocheted and hit a taxi driver who survived. Ford was rushed to a waiting limousine and sped away.
Like Fromme, Moore received a life sentence and was taken to the Federal Penitentiary for Women at Alderson in Greenbrier County.
Moore escaped from the minimum security prison on Feb. 5, 1979, after scaling a 12-foot fence with another inmate. She was captured about four hours later about 10 miles from the prison near White Sulphur Springs while trying to hitchhike with a fellow inmate.
“If I knew that I was going to be captured several hours later, I would have stopped at the local bar just to get a drink and a burger,” she said on The Today Show in 2009.
On Dec. 31, 2007, when she was 77, Moore was released from prison on parole. She had served 32 years of her life sentence.
Her release came a little more than a year after Ford died from natural causes on Dec. 26, 2006.
“I am very glad I did not succeed,” Moore told a California television station. “I know now that I was wrong to try.”