President’s Would-Be Assassin Dies at 95

Sara Jane Moore—the woman who tried to gun down President Gerald Ford in broad daylight—has died at a Tennessee nursing home. She was 95. Her death came just two days after the nation marked the 50th anniversary of her failed assassination attempt.

On September 22, 1975, crowds gathered outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco to catch a glimpse of Ford. Moore, then a 45-year-old accountant with radical leanings, stood among them. She raised a .38-caliber revolver and fired two shots.

The first bullet missed. The second might have struck Ford had it not been for Oliver W. Sipple, a 33-year-old Marine veteran standing nearby. Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm mid-shot, causing the bullet to ricochet. Ford was rushed away unharmed.

“I did what anyone should do,” Sipple later told reporters. “You don’t stand by when the president’s life is in danger.”

Moore’s attempt came just 17 days after another failed plot against Ford by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a devoted follower of Charles Manson. The back-to-back attacks stunned the country and underscored how turbulent post-Watergate America had become.

Born Sara Jane Kahn in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1930, Moore’s life veered into strange territory. She became an FBI informant while working at People in Need, a San Francisco charity founded by newspaper giant Randolph Hearst to placate the radical Symbionese Liberation Army after the kidnapping of his daughter, Patty Hearst.

But Moore harbored her own extremist fantasies. “I wanted to trigger a violent revolution,” she admitted in a 2009 interview. “Looking back, it was madness.”

Moore was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. She served 32 years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, before being released on parole in 2007. By then, she had expressed remorse, even penning an apology letter to Ford. The former president never replied.

In her later years, she reflected on her crime with regret. “It was a crazy thing to do,” she told NBC News in 2009. “I am glad I didn’t succeed. The world didn’t need another trauma.”

The bizarre attempt, paired with Fromme’s earlier effort, became part of American pop culture. Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins even featured Moore as a character, immortalizing her in Broadway lore.

Moore married five times and had four children—Sydney, Christopher, Janet, and Frederic. She spent her final years quietly at a nursing facility in Franklin, Tennessee. Her death was confirmed by Nashville journalist Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime friend.

Even in her last years, Moore acknowledged she would forever be remembered for one violent moment. “I’m not the woman I was in 1975,” she once said. “But history doesn’t forget.”