Sara Jane Moore

From Free net encyclopedia

Sara Jane Moore (born 1930 in Charleston, WV) tried to assassinate US President Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975 outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A former nursing school student, Women's Army Corps recruit, and accountant, Moore had had five husbands and four children before she turned to revolutionary politics in her forties. She was recruited as an informant by the FBI to gain information on the Patty Hearst kidnappers, but her cover was blown. In order to carry out a plot she planned with a radical organization and prove herself with her radical friends, she attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, only 17 days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Ford was saved by bystander Oliver Sipple.

Moore pleaded guilty to attempted assassination and was sentenced to life in prison. On February 6, 1979 Moore escaped from her minimum security prison, the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia, but was recaptured the next day. She is currently serving at the federal women’s prison in Pleasanton, California.

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Trivia

Moore is one of the assassins portrayed 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 Fromme, she serves as a bit of comic relief before major events in the musical, such as Guiteau's assassination of James Garfield.

A recent web site, http://www.gerispieler.com/, uses the Sara Jane Moore story as the basis for an unpublished book.

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