From Newsgroup: alt.obituaries

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/us/sara-jane-moore-dead.html

Sara Jane Moore, Would-Be Assassin of President Ford, Dies at 95

A mother of four on the fringes of radical leftist movements, she fired at
the president outside a San Francisco hotel in 1975. She had hoped to
spark a revolution, she said.


By Robert D. McFadden
Sept. 25, 2025
Updated 2:05 p.m. ET
Sara Jane Moore, the middle-aged radical and mother of four who fired two errant shots at President Gerald R. Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in
San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1975, with a vague notion of igniting a leftist revolution in America, died on Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin,
Tenn. She was 95.

Demetria Kalodimos, a reporter for The Nashville Banner who had developed
a friendship with Ms. Moore, confirmed the death, which was first reported
by The Banner.

Ms. MoorerCOs attempt to kill Mr. Ford occurred only 17 days after another would-be assassin, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, a follower of the cult leader Charles Manson, pointed a gun at the president in a crowd at Sacramento
but was seized before she could fire.

In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45,
who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and
fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a
second shot.

Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired.
The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed
a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two
police officers seized Ms. Moore.

Investigators found no evidence of a conspiracy and said her ties to
radical groups were tenuous. She was found legally sane by doctors who had examined her tangled life of marriages, divorces, possible mental
illnesses, radical associations and work as an F.B.I. informant. She
pleaded guilty to the attempted assassination that December, was sentenced
to life in prison and spent 32 years behind bars before being paroled. At
one point she wrote an apology to Mr. Ford but received no reply.

In a 2003 interview with Geri Spieler, who later wrote a well-received biography of Ms. Moore, Mr. Ford, talking about an unsuccessful parole application by the would-be assassin, was unforgiving. rCLJust because the president is left standing may be a matter of luck,rCY he said, rCLbut the malice was the same and the attempt was to kill.rCY

In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler
that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was
paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.

Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBCrCOs rCLTodayrCY show in 2009.

rCLIt was a time people donrCOt remember,rCY Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and
her attempt to kill the president. rCLWe were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.rCY

Joining John Wilkes Booth and other notorious figures from history, Ms.
Moore was a character in Stephen Sondheim and John WidemanrCOs dark musical rCLAssassins,rCY which debuted Off Broadway in 1990. In the show, she was portrayed as a hapless revolutionary rCo rCLa true flibbertigibbet,rCY as the critic David Richards wrote in The New York Times, rCLas likely to pull a banana from her capacious handbag as she is a pistol."

Sara Jane Kahn was born on Feb. 15, 1930, in Charleston, W.Va., to Olaf
and Ruth (Moore) Kahn. She graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School, studied nursing, joined the WomenrCOs Army Corps and became an accountant at RKO Studios in Hollywood. Friends called her intelligent and, by the late 1960s, she was living in the Bay Area and was politically engaged. She
joined civil rights and antiwar protests.

Accounts of her life are fragmentary and contradictory, partly because she deliberately obscured her identity and background. She told people falsely that she was the daughter of a rich coal and timber family, had graduate degrees in business administration and was an aspiring actress. Officials
said she had been hospitalized repeatedly for aberrant behavior. At some
point she took her motherrCOs maiden name as her surname.

Her first marriage, to Wallace Anderson, a Marine Corps staff sergeant,
ended in divorce. She had three children, Sydney Jr., Christopher and
Janet, with her second husband, Sydney L. Manning, an Air Force officer,
but gave them up to her parents. Another husband, John Aalberg, the father
of a fourth child, Frederic, worked in Hollywood as a sound technician.
She was married to Dr. Willard J. Carmel Jr., an internist with Kaiser Permanente in Danville, Calif., from 1969 to 1973.

After her release from prison in 2007, Ms. Moore married Philip Chase, a clinical psychologist, and lived in a retirement community in North
Carolina. He died in 2018, and Ms. Moore moved a few years later to
Tennessee. Her son Christopher died; a complete list of survivors could
not be immediately confirmed.

By 1974, she was in San Francisco with Frederic, 9 at the time, working
for People in Need, a food giveaway program begun by the media-empire heir Randolph A. Hearst at the demand of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical leftist group that had kidnapped his daughter Patty Hearst.

Over the next year, Ms. Moore attached herself to the fringes of extremist groups but was also recruited as an F.B.I. informant. The word got out.

Ostracized by radicals and desperate to persuade them of her sincerity and remorse, she called reporters and went on radio programs to expound
Marxist and Maoist theories. She also confessed her informerrCOs role and
said it had ended. Still, she felt endangered and bought a .44-caliber
pistol.

On Sept. 21, 1975, she was spotted with the gun by Secret Service agents
in Palo Alto, Calif., as President Ford made an appearance at Stanford University. Agents seized the weapon but, after a brief evaluation of Ms. Moore, did not deem her a serious threat and released her. Hours later,
she bought the .38-caliber gun from a dealer in Danville and fired it at
the president the next day in San Francisco.

Ms. SpielerrCOs biography of Ms. Moore, rCLTaking Aim at the President,rCY was published in 2009. The author was an investigative reporter and writer who
had corresponded with Ms. Moore for years.

In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Spieler said Ms. Moore could be rCLcharmingrCY and give the appearance of a kindly neighbor, rCLwhich was why the Secret Service wasnrCOt looking at her in the crowd that day.rCY

Based on the general profile of an assassin, she added, rCLThey were looking for a man, foreign-born, a loner with delusions of grandeur, not a white, middle-aged lady with curly hair.rCY

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