Sara Jane Moore
Sara Jane Moore (born
1930 in
Charleston, West Virginia) 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 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's attempted assassination. 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.
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A recent web site, http://www.gerispieler.com/, uses the Sara Jane Moore story as the basis for an unpublished book.
* "There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun."
* "Hold-Hold, still my hand.: Steady my eye, chill my heart,: And let my gun sing for the people.: Scream their anger, cleanse with their : hate,: And kill this monster."
*http://www.geocities.com/proprioter/y_moore.html
