October 17, 2024 • 29 mins
Sara Jane Moore’s life is a series of new beginnings followed by sudden exits, leaving husbands and children behind. She arrives at the PIN program, an abrasive, ambitious figure looking to make a name for herself.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Rip current. It is the production of I Heart podcasts.
The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those
if the host, producers or parent company listener discretion. Is
it fine?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The quote of the People of this date issues the
following order. All corporate enemies of the people will be
shot on site, at any time and at any place.
This order is permanent until such time as all enemies
for us have either surrendered or been destroyed. In closing,
(00:40):
I wish to play the national anthem of the Simbanese
Liberation Army.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
The Crusaders were really popular in the Bay Area at
the time. They were a gateway a band into real jazz.
They had music that was being played on the mainstream
adult contemporary stations, but they were also being played on
the progressive rock stations. My name is Joe Mata. I
live in Portland, Oregon. During the time of the SLA,
(01:18):
I lived in Berkeley. I wanted to be a music writer,
but I was also got involved with a underground newspaper
that was based in San Francisco called the San Francisco Phoenix.
And my entire time that I spent writing there was
no more than I'm guessing four to six weeks. The
Crusaders had kind of an interesting connection with the Sla.
(01:40):
Not of their choice, but the Sla chose one of
their songs, which was Way Back Home, as their theme song.
It was like their an anthem. I really liked the
band and they were going to be playing had a
live performance at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I contacted
the publisher and I said, and I'm going to try
(02:00):
to get a ticket. Would you like me to review
the show. I was nineteen twenty years old and carried
my notebook and penned into the Greek Theater and I
think it was general mission. I was sitting up near
the top of the stadium. It's a beautiful theater. It
seemed like its seats several hundred, maybe even more than that,
maybe in the low thousands of people. During the performance,
(02:24):
in between one of the songs or a couple of songs,
somebody stormed the stage and grabbed the microphone, and I
want to say he grabbed it from the pianist, Joe Sample,
and he screened into the microphone play Way back Home
for the brothers and the sisters of the Sla. The
guy was escorted off by the security at the theater,
(02:47):
and I made note of it, but I didn't include
it in my review. Within the next forty eight seventy
two hours, the review was published, and under my byline,
the publisher or the ed inserted some of his own
language about the person who stormed the stage. I chose
(03:08):
to stop writing for that because I didn't want to
be associated with anything having to do with the SLA.
It was such a controversial group for obvious reasons. They're
very radical. They had murdered people in a bank. I
was just a kid. I didn't want to be associated
with that.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I'm Toby Ball.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
And this is rip current.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
And she just disappeared. She basically abandoned her children, at
least to her mother, not a mystery, but they could
never find her. Her phone was then disconnected.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Episode seven, A Confusion of Sanity and Reality. Joe Mayetta's
experience at the Crusaders show at the Greek Theater illustrates
just how culturally prominent the SLA would become and the
strong feelings they would evoke. But this was still months
(04:16):
in the future. In the immediate aftermath of Patty Hurst's kidnapping,
the police, the media, the public, and the Hurst family
were simply trying to figure out who the SLA were
and what they wanted. On February twelfth, eight days after
the kidnapping of Patty Hurst, the SLA sent an audio
(04:38):
tape to several media outlets.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
On it, the.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
SLA announced their ransom demand that Patty's father, Randolph Hurst,
arranged to feed the poor in California. This was impossible
to meet, but in an effort to do so locally,
Hearst quickly got a program up and running to provide
free food for the poor in the San Francisco Bay area.
(05:02):
The program was called People in Need or PIN. It
operated out of a block long warehouse by the San
Francisco waterfront. A Los Angeles Times reporter named Charles T.
Powers visited the site.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
The dominant impression is of a paranoid security consciousness, a
vast concern for a favorable public relations image, and the
confusion of a dozen petty officers and aging radicals who
wander about with plastic cups of coffee in one hand
and clipboards in the other, issuing mutually disregarded orders and
declarations of policy emanating apparently from some unknown source.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
As he sought someone to talk to about touring the warehouse,
he was directed to a woman with gray hair and
a peck and peck pantsuit.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
My name is Sarah Jane Moore, and I'm chief flunky here.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Moore, who had experienced as a bookkeeper, had volunteered to
help with PINS financial record keeping, but with grander designs
for her role. Ludlow Kramer, who ran the PIN program,
said about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She came on strong. She was like the employee who
two weeks after hiring wants to run the company. She
wanted in on the politics of the thing, the decision making.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Patty Hurst's boyfriend Stephen Weed said, she has an amazing
ability to move right in and drive everybody crazy. Here's
Jerry Spieler, the author of Housewife Assassin, the woman who
tried to kill Gerald Ford.
Speaker 6 (06:36):
Sarah Jane fit in in terms of anybody who has
a bookkeeping skills in such an event, you know, yes,
please come help us. You know, she had her own office,
but she became very difficult and Richard Palladino, who is
the security guy, said that she would yell at people
and accuse them of disturbing her work and then she
would also walk around and tell everybody how wonderful they were,
(06:58):
and after a while it became problematic.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
This talent for alienating people was a recurring theme in
Moore's life, as was her ability to leave one chapter
of her life behind and move forward unencumbered by her past.
She barely even acknowledged that she had a past.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
Sarah Jane did not shy away from publicity. She seemed,
in truth to court it. But while she was very
forthcoming about her activities and actions, beginning with volunteering at Penn,
she was strikingly tight lipped about anything that happened before that.
In fact, she was known to create a fictitious backstory
for herself if it suited her. For instance, she told
(07:41):
Tohirst that she was the daughter of a rich timber
and coal family in West Virginia. To others, she claimed
that she had completed the requirements for an MBA degree,
or that she had earned fifty thousand dollars a year
as an accountant that's more than two hundred and eighty
thousand in today's dollars. These claims were not true. In fact,
(08:02):
she was born into a comfortable, middle class family in Charleston,
West Virginia, the day after Valentine's Day in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
Her mother was a concert pianist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
Her father was an engineer, and I think her mother
was a perfectionist in a lot of ways. But they
lived in a community where her mom was sort of
the block mom. If anything happened, people went to Ruth's
house to get help or whatever.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Her father, according to Spieler, had very strict limits and
a cutting tongue that could slice through his children's self confidence.
Despite this, Sarah Jane's upbringing seems to have not involved
the kinds of intense conflict with her parents that plagued
Lynette Fromm's teenage years.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
She came from a very talented, supportive home. Her brother's
skip told me as her parents were very much there
for the kids in terms of their activities, girls Scouts
and garden club and all these kinds of things. She
was active in school, she was in the Spanish club
and theater group, but she was sort of off to
(09:11):
the side. I guess you could describe her in terms of,
you know, she had a sort of different attitude towards
things or very competitive towards things.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
In a prelude to her adult life, Sarah Jane had
a hard time connecting with friends. Her brothers and sisters
got along fine with kids in school, but Sarah Jane
was an outlier. And then when she was sixteen, she
briefly went missing.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
She just disappeared for three days. Nobody knew where she was,
and then she just showed back up and there was
no explanation. She was fine. You know, the family was hysterical,
but what happened to Sarah Jane? And then when she
showed up again, she just refused to talk about what happened,
and so they ended up just having to let it go.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
This is another pattern that would show up again and
again in her adulthood, leaving a situation without providing any
sort of explanation and not looking back. And as we'll see,
this habit would play out in more and more extreme ways.
Sarah Jane was very smart. Her IQ was reportedly near
one pint forty. She got good grades in high school,
(10:17):
and then after graduation the chaos of her adult life began.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
She went to nursing school and then quit. You know,
she had the brains and the ability to do whatever
she wanted.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
She joined the Women's Army Corps or WAX, then briefly
married a marine named Wallace Anderson. Because of military regulations,
the marriage essentially caught off any possibility that Sarah Jane
could advance to a leadership position in the WAX. This
might have been a moot point because around this time
she suffered a series of fainting spells. These incidents came
(10:51):
to a head in the spring of nineteen fifty when,
after a tour of the White House, she fainted on
the lawn. When she revive, Moore was disoriented, saying she
didn't know who or where she was. She was not
in uniform and had no identification, though for some reason,
she was carrying several photos of herself. While she recovered
(11:13):
at Walter Reed Army Hospital, newspapers ran photos of this
mystery woman seeking information. Both of her parents, living now
in separate states, saw the photos and came to d
c in hospital. Sarah Jane quickly recovered her memory. The
FBI investigated and concluded that she'd purposely left her identification behind.
(11:35):
Was this fainting episode real or a fake, or a
combination of the two, or something else entirely. This is
one of the difficulties in assessing Sarah Jane's life how
much of her strange behavior was calculated. When she was
examined by the psychiatrist Gustav Wiland after her assassination attempt
on Gerald Ford, he noted, I found a confusion of
(11:57):
sanity and reality. You never know to what exct. She
doesn't have things straight. These kinds of observations come up
time and time again, and accounts of Sarah Jane.
Speaker 6 (12:08):
Nobody can seem to crack her psyche on that kind
of behavior.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
The question of how much her unusual, even disturbing behavior
was calculated and how much was mental illness continues throughout
her story.
Speaker 6 (12:25):
Sarah Jane I think was very attractive in a lot
of ways, not just physically pleasing, but very smart and
her ability to get people signed on with her. I
think she had a vision of what her life should
be like, and when it didn't turn out that way,
she looked for the nearest exit, so to speak. That's
a repeated behavior throughout her life, these sort of short
(12:48):
stints at things.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
This would over time lead to five marriages to four
men and five divorces. Soon after the White house fainting spell.
Sarah Jane divorced Wallace Anderson and left the wax within months.
She was remarried, this time to an Air Force captain
named Sidney Manning. By nineteen fifty three, she had two children,
(13:13):
Sidney Junior and Janet. Sarah Jane struggled to play the
part of a nineteen fifties homemaker. Her mother called her
daily and worried about her parenting of the young children.
Sarah Jane and sid divorce in nineteen fifty four, and
then reconciled and remarried, moving the family from Tucson, Arizona,
to southern Los Angeles. She had a third child, Melissa,
(13:37):
a mentally disabled girl whom Sarah Jane's mother arranged to
be raised by a foster family. Sarah Jane didn't see
Melissa again.
Speaker 6 (13:47):
She envisioned some glamorous military wife lifestyle, but it wasn't
as glamorous as she thought it would be. You know,
she was stuck at home with the kids, and she
was living on this millitary base kind of thing, and
it wasn't glamorous. Her mom came to visit, and one
of her brothers came to visit, and they were kind
of disturbed at what they saw in terms of Sarah
(14:09):
Jane being sort of overwhelmed and not really as present
as they would like her to be with the kids,
but she did take care of her children.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
During this time, Sarah Jane attended some Hollywood parties and
got a taste of what seemed like a more glamorous life.
In October of nineteen fifty five, she divorced, said for
a second time there would not be another reconciliation, but
she was pregnant again. When Christopher was born, she found
herself living in Los Angeles as a single mother, caring
(14:40):
for three small children. Then came Christmas of nineteen fifty six,
where she committed the most extreme act to date of
shedding her past.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
She called her mom and said, you know, I really
need some time at home with you and the kids,
and I'm going to come home. And so they send
her tickets, and her brother Dana, goes to the airport
to pick her up, and he sees people getting off
the plane, getting off the plane, getting off the plane,
and then finally he sees what we used to call
(15:13):
the steward is carrying baby Christopher, and then her oldest
son helding his sister's hand walking down the stairs. But
there's no Sarah Jane, and Dana is flu mixed. It's like,
where's Sarah Jane with the kids. And her parents tried
(15:33):
to find her. They called the police, they called sid
who you know, said I can't find her. I don't
know anything about that, and she just disappeared. She basically
abandoned her children, at least to her mother and not
on the street, but they could never find her. Her
phone was then disconnected and that was it. She was
(15:54):
no longer the mother of these three children. In her mind.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
The split was to She was never in contact with
her children again. Eventually, Sarah Jane's parents would unsuccessfully try
to have her arrested for lack of child support. If
this seems unusual or even pathological, it's not the only
indication Sarah Jane struggled with mental health. The New York
(16:19):
Times later reported that she had been hospitalized at least
seven times for mental health reasons over the years. Her
strange and disagreeable behavior also prevented Sarah Jane from maintaining
employment throughout her adulthood. As a co worker said of her,
if she had only shut up and done her job.
Everything would have been fine, but she couldn't shut up
(16:40):
for ten minutes. This combination of constant reinvention, mental health issues,
and difficult personality next led her to a new husband
who was able to provide the life that she had
envisioned for herself, even if that life didn't in the
end prevent her from returning to her old habits of escape.
(17:01):
After the break, three times divorced and having abandoned three
children with her parents in West Virginia and a fourth
to foster parents, Sarah Jane married a man with a
money and social cachet that her previous husbands had lacked.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
John Alberg was a very accomplished sound designer with RKO
and Juan Oscars.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Moore met Alberg while working as an accountant at RKO
Movie Studios. According to Jerry Spieler, The FBI reported that
Sarah Jane had nearly earned a graduate degree in business,
but didn't name the college. Sarah Jane told friends that
she had taken accounting classes at UCLA. John Alberg was
one of the most prominent sound mixers in the film
(17:51):
industry between nineteen thirty six and nineteen fifty four. He
was nominated for ten Oscars for sound production, including for
film classic Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life. Though
he didn't win in any of these years, he was
over time given three technical awards.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
When she met John, one thing they said they had
in common as neither of them had any family, so
he didn't know anything about her previous life. This was
Sarah Jane reinventing herself to this man, who was a
very accomplished person in Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Later in San Francisco, she would complain to friends about
the pressure to maintain a certain image in Los Angeles.
She hinted that she had undergone cosmetic surgery to live
up to the physical ideals that were expected there. But
of course, with Sarah Jane, there was no way to
know what the truth was. For instance, she became pregnant
by John Alberg. She would later tell the woman she
(18:52):
considered her best friend, a Bay Area radical named Joyce Halverson,
that her interest in Patti hurst kidnapping was in part
you to threat she received in La to kidnap her child.
The kidnapping threats never happened. By the time her fifth child, Frederick,
was born, she had left Alburg after one month of
marriage and moved north to the Bay Area.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Her comment to me in the letters that I had
was she couldn't live in Los Angeles anymore. She had
to leave, So she moved to San Francisco and had
the baby, Frederick, and then met her next husband, Willard Carmel,
who was a physician with Kaiser and he lived up
in Danville. Nobody knows what she told Willard about why
(19:37):
she was pregnant alone in San Francisco. She never explained
that to me.
Speaker 5 (19:42):
Her marriage to Willard allowed her to continue the well
healed lifestyle that she'd become accustomed to with John Auberg
in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Danville and where she lived in the Blackhawk country Club
community is definitely not middle class. It's upper class. It's
a very expensive community, and they what we call the
East Bay is very conservative, and that after a while
rubbed Sarah Jane the wrong way. But for a while
she was very much the Danville community housewife, but had
(20:13):
some issues around them.
Speaker 5 (20:16):
Sarah Jane was living the white picket fence lifestyle that
she probably envisioned for herself. A young child, a doctor husband,
a house, and a wealthy community. She even worked on
the nineteen seventy campaign of a conservative Republican named George Murphy,
who was running for re election to the Senate. He
was the first famous actor elected to statewide office in
(20:38):
California When I.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Was the George Murphy, a star of death Bomb Highway
nine nine, a suspense.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Played for you, edited and directed by William Spear.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
Saddled by his continuing support for the Vietnam War and
reports that he was continuing to receive a salary for
an old position while in the Senate, Murphy lost the
election to a Democrat named John Tunney. Sarah Jane's neighbors
were put off by her manner and campaigning for Murphy.
She was too talkative, too self aggrandizing, not tuned into
(21:12):
other people's responses. As throughout her life, her personality often
graded on those around her.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
She wanted to paint her front door purple, and the
community guidelines said you can't do that, and so that
started off a rift between her and her neighbors. Covenants
and restrictions basically had you know, you can only paint
your house this color, and you know you can't have
cars on the street, or you can't have an RV
(21:40):
on the street, and all the stuff that goes around
with a planned community like that.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Her community had rules and covenants prohibiting a whole host
of things in order to keep the development looking clean
and homogeneous. The rules did not allow purple front doors.
Sarah Jane lost this fight, but it was another example
of her irritating the people around her. Her marriage to
Willard Carmel lasted four years.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
Sarah Jane did a one to eighty after living in
Danville for a while and going through the divorce. That's
when Patty Hurst got kidnapped.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
On February twentieth, nineteen seventy five. Sarah Jane arrived at
the chaos of Penn Headquarters with her bookkeeping experience and
the ambition to become a leader. She also possessed the
self assurance to hold her own in an environment rife
with strong personalities and rivalries. As journalist Carol Polgash wrote
(22:39):
of her, Sarah was unintimidated, a fact she spread to
anyone who would listen. She could handle anyone, ignore any
foul language, and maintain her cool, she would say. In
his book My Search for Patty Hurst, Patty's boyfriend Stephen
Weed describes going to the Penn headquarters at a time
when Ludlow Kramer, the Washington Secretary of State and the
(23:02):
man in charge of the pen program, was away in
Washington State along with his deputy. Sarah Jane, who had
the title of executive Secretary, had been left in charge.
Weed starts by describing the squalor.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
The walls were smeared and dirty. There was garbage everywhere.
In short, the offices had become a crash pad for
anyone who walked in off the street. The smell of
marijuana filled the air. People were lying on the floor
and sleeping bags and winos were slumped in the alcove.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Sarah Jane got the warehouse guards to remove these people,
despite the protests of a long haired sixteen year old
who thought it was elitist. The next day, she came
in to find the warehouse volunteers, including a young warehouse
foreman named Mike, masked around a secretary named Nancy who
had been coming down from a drug trip all night.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Weed wrote, We've got to get her out of here.
Sarah snapped, we can't let the whole program come to
a grind because of Nancy. People like Nancy is what
the program is all about. No it's not. We're here
to get Patty out.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
Sarah Jane took Nancy to another room and told her
that she was a detriment to the program. Nancy said
she'd leave if she was a problem, but didn't want
to go. Mike came into the room. According to Weed,
Sarah Jane told Mike to get out there and get
those people to work. Mike protested that he couldn't leave Nancy,
who was now sobbing. Eventually, Sarah Jane had a volunteer
(24:32):
take Nancy home. Two days later, Mike came into Sarah
Jane's office shouting wildly and then broke down crying. Sarah
Jane called Ludlow Kramer in Washington, and Kramer told her
to fire him. But who's going to run the warehouse?
Sarah Jane asked him, We've got forty people out there
and none of them know what they're doing. We'd wrote that.
Kramer said to just do the best you can and
(24:54):
hung up the phone.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
For two months, from mid February to me April, Sarah
Jane centered her life around her pin work. Her son, Fred,
now nine, spent most days and nights with a babysitter,
but despite her dedication and ambition. Is perhaps not surprising
that injecting Sarah Jane's volatility into an effort that's disorganized
(25:18):
as PIN would not prove sustainable.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
So there's this different thing sort of clashing all at
the same time at people in need for one thing,
Sarah Jane being sort of difficult to work with. On
the other side of Sarah Jane wanting to be in
the know and in the group, in the clique politically.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
In the PIN warehouse where people vied for authority and influence,
her ambition and strangeness stood out. Carol Pogash described it
as her persistence and pathetic personality. When the end came,
she did not go quietly. Richard Palladino, the head of security,
had received so many complaints about Sarah Jane that he
(26:03):
felt compelled to investigate.
Speaker 6 (26:06):
It got so bad that Palladino went into her office
to see what was going on and pulled out a
drawer and found old bills and receipts and things that
had never been logged in that basically she was not
really doing the job, but loved being in the new
(26:26):
and somebody who was important because she was keeping the records,
so she was part of the elite group working there,
and she liked that image of herself. But when they
realized she wasn't doing her job, Palladino said, they physically
marched her out of PIN headquarters and told her to
(26:48):
go home.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
The New York Times quoted a PIN worker as saying,
we marched her out of the office screaming and crying,
with two men holding her arms. Her expulsion from PEN
was not the end of her interaction with radical activists,
though it was just the beginning. Sarah Jane was a
keen observer of the dynamics in the PIN warehouse and
(27:12):
had identified a former prisoner and current activist named Wilfred
Popeye Jackson as someone who could be a valuable friend.
Speaker 6 (27:21):
This character Popeye Jackson, who was very well known in
the Bay Area for his political views and his program
for literacy for prisoners. He was the guy to know,
and Sarah Jane saw that and she wanted to get
to know him. He was unofficially sort of management. He
(27:43):
went around to make sure that things were going right,
that food was getting packed properly. He would didn't have
any official capacity at PINN, but he was the political
person who would walk around and make sure everybody was
doing their jobs. If Popeye said jump, you said how high?
Speaker 4 (28:02):
In Popeye Jackson, Sarah Jane found the man who would
for a time be her patron in the world at
Bay Area Radicals. It was a relationship that would have
enormous consequences for both of them next time on rip Current.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
developed with Alexander Williams. Posted by Toby Ball with Mary
Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff. Show art by
jeffny az Goda and Charles Rudder. The producers Jesse fun
Reema O'Kelly and Melams Griffin. Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive
(28:59):
producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick Hear. Episodes of Rip
Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content
by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit
(29:21):
our website ripcurrentpod dot com.
Rip current. It is the production of I Heart podcasts.
The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those
if the host, producers or parent company listener discretion. Is
it fine?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The quote of the People of this date issues the
following order. All corporate enemies of the people will be
shot on site, at any time and at any place.
This order is permanent until such time as all enemies
for us have either surrendered or been destroyed. In closing,
(00:40):
I wish to play the national anthem of the Simbanese
Liberation Army.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
The Crusaders were really popular in the Bay Area at
the time. They were a gateway a band into real jazz.
They had music that was being played on the mainstream
adult contemporary stations, but they were also being played on
the progressive rock stations. My name is Joe Mata. I
live in Portland, Oregon. During the time of the SLA,
(01:18):
I lived in Berkeley. I wanted to be a music writer,
but I was also got involved with a underground newspaper
that was based in San Francisco called the San Francisco Phoenix.
And my entire time that I spent writing there was
no more than I'm guessing four to six weeks. The
Crusaders had kind of an interesting connection with the Sla.
(01:40):
Not of their choice, but the Sla chose one of
their songs, which was Way Back Home, as their theme song.
It was like their an anthem. I really liked the
band and they were going to be playing had a
live performance at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I contacted
the publisher and I said, and I'm going to try
(02:00):
to get a ticket. Would you like me to review
the show. I was nineteen twenty years old and carried
my notebook and penned into the Greek Theater and I
think it was general mission. I was sitting up near
the top of the stadium. It's a beautiful theater. It
seemed like its seats several hundred, maybe even more than that,
maybe in the low thousands of people. During the performance,
(02:24):
in between one of the songs or a couple of songs,
somebody stormed the stage and grabbed the microphone, and I
want to say he grabbed it from the pianist, Joe Sample,
and he screened into the microphone play Way back Home
for the brothers and the sisters of the Sla. The
guy was escorted off by the security at the theater,
(02:47):
and I made note of it, but I didn't include
it in my review. Within the next forty eight seventy
two hours, the review was published, and under my byline,
the publisher or the ed inserted some of his own
language about the person who stormed the stage. I chose
(03:08):
to stop writing for that because I didn't want to
be associated with anything having to do with the SLA.
It was such a controversial group for obvious reasons. They're
very radical. They had murdered people in a bank. I
was just a kid. I didn't want to be associated
with that.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
I'm Toby Ball.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
And this is rip current.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
And she just disappeared. She basically abandoned her children, at
least to her mother, not a mystery, but they could
never find her. Her phone was then disconnected.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Episode seven, A Confusion of Sanity and Reality. Joe Mayetta's
experience at the Crusaders show at the Greek Theater illustrates
just how culturally prominent the SLA would become and the
strong feelings they would evoke. But this was still months
(04:16):
in the future. In the immediate aftermath of Patty Hurst's kidnapping,
the police, the media, the public, and the Hurst family
were simply trying to figure out who the SLA were
and what they wanted. On February twelfth, eight days after
the kidnapping of Patty Hurst, the SLA sent an audio
(04:38):
tape to several media outlets.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
On it, the.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
SLA announced their ransom demand that Patty's father, Randolph Hurst,
arranged to feed the poor in California. This was impossible
to meet, but in an effort to do so locally,
Hearst quickly got a program up and running to provide
free food for the poor in the San Francisco Bay area.
(05:02):
The program was called People in Need or PIN. It
operated out of a block long warehouse by the San
Francisco waterfront. A Los Angeles Times reporter named Charles T.
Powers visited the site.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
The dominant impression is of a paranoid security consciousness, a
vast concern for a favorable public relations image, and the
confusion of a dozen petty officers and aging radicals who
wander about with plastic cups of coffee in one hand
and clipboards in the other, issuing mutually disregarded orders and
declarations of policy emanating apparently from some unknown source.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
As he sought someone to talk to about touring the warehouse,
he was directed to a woman with gray hair and
a peck and peck pantsuit.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
My name is Sarah Jane Moore, and I'm chief flunky here.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Moore, who had experienced as a bookkeeper, had volunteered to
help with PINS financial record keeping, but with grander designs
for her role. Ludlow Kramer, who ran the PIN program,
said about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She came on strong. She was like the employee who
two weeks after hiring wants to run the company. She
wanted in on the politics of the thing, the decision making.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Patty Hurst's boyfriend Stephen Weed said, she has an amazing
ability to move right in and drive everybody crazy. Here's
Jerry Spieler, the author of Housewife Assassin, the woman who
tried to kill Gerald Ford.
Speaker 6 (06:36):
Sarah Jane fit in in terms of anybody who has
a bookkeeping skills in such an event, you know, yes,
please come help us. You know, she had her own office,
but she became very difficult and Richard Palladino, who is
the security guy, said that she would yell at people
and accuse them of disturbing her work and then she
would also walk around and tell everybody how wonderful they were,
(06:58):
and after a while it became problematic.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
This talent for alienating people was a recurring theme in
Moore's life, as was her ability to leave one chapter
of her life behind and move forward unencumbered by her past.
She barely even acknowledged that she had a past.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
Sarah Jane did not shy away from publicity. She seemed,
in truth to court it. But while she was very
forthcoming about her activities and actions, beginning with volunteering at Penn,
she was strikingly tight lipped about anything that happened before that.
In fact, she was known to create a fictitious backstory
for herself if it suited her. For instance, she told
(07:41):
Tohirst that she was the daughter of a rich timber
and coal family in West Virginia. To others, she claimed
that she had completed the requirements for an MBA degree,
or that she had earned fifty thousand dollars a year
as an accountant that's more than two hundred and eighty
thousand in today's dollars. These claims were not true. In fact,
(08:02):
she was born into a comfortable, middle class family in Charleston,
West Virginia, the day after Valentine's Day in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
Her mother was a concert pianist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
Her father was an engineer, and I think her mother
was a perfectionist in a lot of ways. But they
lived in a community where her mom was sort of
the block mom. If anything happened, people went to Ruth's
house to get help or whatever.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Her father, according to Spieler, had very strict limits and
a cutting tongue that could slice through his children's self confidence.
Despite this, Sarah Jane's upbringing seems to have not involved
the kinds of intense conflict with her parents that plagued
Lynette Fromm's teenage years.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
She came from a very talented, supportive home. Her brother's
skip told me as her parents were very much there
for the kids in terms of their activities, girls Scouts
and garden club and all these kinds of things. She
was active in school, she was in the Spanish club
and theater group, but she was sort of off to
(09:11):
the side. I guess you could describe her in terms of,
you know, she had a sort of different attitude towards
things or very competitive towards things.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
In a prelude to her adult life, Sarah Jane had
a hard time connecting with friends. Her brothers and sisters
got along fine with kids in school, but Sarah Jane
was an outlier. And then when she was sixteen, she
briefly went missing.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
She just disappeared for three days. Nobody knew where she was,
and then she just showed back up and there was
no explanation. She was fine. You know, the family was hysterical,
but what happened to Sarah Jane? And then when she
showed up again, she just refused to talk about what happened,
and so they ended up just having to let it go.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
This is another pattern that would show up again and
again in her adulthood, leaving a situation without providing any
sort of explanation and not looking back. And as we'll see,
this habit would play out in more and more extreme ways.
Sarah Jane was very smart. Her IQ was reportedly near
one pint forty. She got good grades in high school,
(10:17):
and then after graduation the chaos of her adult life began.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
She went to nursing school and then quit. You know,
she had the brains and the ability to do whatever
she wanted.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
She joined the Women's Army Corps or WAX, then briefly
married a marine named Wallace Anderson. Because of military regulations,
the marriage essentially caught off any possibility that Sarah Jane
could advance to a leadership position in the WAX. This
might have been a moot point because around this time
she suffered a series of fainting spells. These incidents came
(10:51):
to a head in the spring of nineteen fifty when,
after a tour of the White House, she fainted on
the lawn. When she revive, Moore was disoriented, saying she
didn't know who or where she was. She was not
in uniform and had no identification, though for some reason,
she was carrying several photos of herself. While she recovered
(11:13):
at Walter Reed Army Hospital, newspapers ran photos of this
mystery woman seeking information. Both of her parents, living now
in separate states, saw the photos and came to d
c in hospital. Sarah Jane quickly recovered her memory. The
FBI investigated and concluded that she'd purposely left her identification behind.
(11:35):
Was this fainting episode real or a fake, or a
combination of the two, or something else entirely. This is
one of the difficulties in assessing Sarah Jane's life how
much of her strange behavior was calculated. When she was
examined by the psychiatrist Gustav Wiland after her assassination attempt
on Gerald Ford, he noted, I found a confusion of
(11:57):
sanity and reality. You never know to what exct. She
doesn't have things straight. These kinds of observations come up
time and time again, and accounts of Sarah Jane.
Speaker 6 (12:08):
Nobody can seem to crack her psyche on that kind
of behavior.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
The question of how much her unusual, even disturbing behavior
was calculated and how much was mental illness continues throughout
her story.
Speaker 6 (12:25):
Sarah Jane I think was very attractive in a lot
of ways, not just physically pleasing, but very smart and
her ability to get people signed on with her. I
think she had a vision of what her life should
be like, and when it didn't turn out that way,
she looked for the nearest exit, so to speak. That's
a repeated behavior throughout her life, these sort of short
(12:48):
stints at things.
Speaker 5 (12:51):
This would over time lead to five marriages to four
men and five divorces. Soon after the White house fainting spell.
Sarah Jane divorced Wallace Anderson and left the wax within months.
She was remarried, this time to an Air Force captain
named Sidney Manning. By nineteen fifty three, she had two children,
(13:13):
Sidney Junior and Janet. Sarah Jane struggled to play the
part of a nineteen fifties homemaker. Her mother called her
daily and worried about her parenting of the young children.
Sarah Jane and sid divorce in nineteen fifty four, and
then reconciled and remarried, moving the family from Tucson, Arizona,
to southern Los Angeles. She had a third child, Melissa,
(13:37):
a mentally disabled girl whom Sarah Jane's mother arranged to
be raised by a foster family. Sarah Jane didn't see
Melissa again.
Speaker 6 (13:47):
She envisioned some glamorous military wife lifestyle, but it wasn't
as glamorous as she thought it would be. You know,
she was stuck at home with the kids, and she
was living on this millitary base kind of thing, and
it wasn't glamorous. Her mom came to visit, and one
of her brothers came to visit, and they were kind
of disturbed at what they saw in terms of Sarah
(14:09):
Jane being sort of overwhelmed and not really as present
as they would like her to be with the kids,
but she did take care of her children.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
During this time, Sarah Jane attended some Hollywood parties and
got a taste of what seemed like a more glamorous life.
In October of nineteen fifty five, she divorced, said for
a second time there would not be another reconciliation, but
she was pregnant again. When Christopher was born, she found
herself living in Los Angeles as a single mother, caring
(14:40):
for three small children. Then came Christmas of nineteen fifty six,
where she committed the most extreme act to date of
shedding her past.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
She called her mom and said, you know, I really
need some time at home with you and the kids,
and I'm going to come home. And so they send
her tickets, and her brother Dana, goes to the airport
to pick her up, and he sees people getting off
the plane, getting off the plane, getting off the plane,
and then finally he sees what we used to call
(15:13):
the steward is carrying baby Christopher, and then her oldest
son helding his sister's hand walking down the stairs. But
there's no Sarah Jane, and Dana is flu mixed. It's like,
where's Sarah Jane with the kids. And her parents tried
(15:33):
to find her. They called the police, they called sid
who you know, said I can't find her. I don't
know anything about that, and she just disappeared. She basically
abandoned her children, at least to her mother and not
on the street, but they could never find her. Her
phone was then disconnected and that was it. She was
(15:54):
no longer the mother of these three children. In her mind.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
The split was to She was never in contact with
her children again. Eventually, Sarah Jane's parents would unsuccessfully try
to have her arrested for lack of child support. If
this seems unusual or even pathological, it's not the only
indication Sarah Jane struggled with mental health. The New York
(16:19):
Times later reported that she had been hospitalized at least
seven times for mental health reasons over the years. Her
strange and disagreeable behavior also prevented Sarah Jane from maintaining
employment throughout her adulthood. As a co worker said of her,
if she had only shut up and done her job.
Everything would have been fine, but she couldn't shut up
(16:40):
for ten minutes. This combination of constant reinvention, mental health issues,
and difficult personality next led her to a new husband
who was able to provide the life that she had
envisioned for herself, even if that life didn't in the
end prevent her from returning to her old habits of escape.
(17:01):
After the break, three times divorced and having abandoned three
children with her parents in West Virginia and a fourth
to foster parents, Sarah Jane married a man with a
money and social cachet that her previous husbands had lacked.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
John Alberg was a very accomplished sound designer with RKO
and Juan Oscars.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Moore met Alberg while working as an accountant at RKO
Movie Studios. According to Jerry Spieler, The FBI reported that
Sarah Jane had nearly earned a graduate degree in business,
but didn't name the college. Sarah Jane told friends that
she had taken accounting classes at UCLA. John Alberg was
one of the most prominent sound mixers in the film
(17:51):
industry between nineteen thirty six and nineteen fifty four. He
was nominated for ten Oscars for sound production, including for
film classic Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life. Though
he didn't win in any of these years, he was
over time given three technical awards.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
When she met John, one thing they said they had
in common as neither of them had any family, so
he didn't know anything about her previous life. This was
Sarah Jane reinventing herself to this man, who was a
very accomplished person in Hollywood.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Later in San Francisco, she would complain to friends about
the pressure to maintain a certain image in Los Angeles.
She hinted that she had undergone cosmetic surgery to live
up to the physical ideals that were expected there. But
of course, with Sarah Jane, there was no way to
know what the truth was. For instance, she became pregnant
by John Alberg. She would later tell the woman she
(18:52):
considered her best friend, a Bay Area radical named Joyce Halverson,
that her interest in Patti hurst kidnapping was in part
you to threat she received in La to kidnap her child.
The kidnapping threats never happened. By the time her fifth child, Frederick,
was born, she had left Alburg after one month of
marriage and moved north to the Bay Area.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Her comment to me in the letters that I had
was she couldn't live in Los Angeles anymore. She had
to leave, So she moved to San Francisco and had
the baby, Frederick, and then met her next husband, Willard Carmel,
who was a physician with Kaiser and he lived up
in Danville. Nobody knows what she told Willard about why
(19:37):
she was pregnant alone in San Francisco. She never explained
that to me.
Speaker 5 (19:42):
Her marriage to Willard allowed her to continue the well
healed lifestyle that she'd become accustomed to with John Auberg
in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Danville and where she lived in the Blackhawk country Club
community is definitely not middle class. It's upper class. It's
a very expensive community, and they what we call the
East Bay is very conservative, and that after a while
rubbed Sarah Jane the wrong way. But for a while
she was very much the Danville community housewife, but had
(20:13):
some issues around them.
Speaker 5 (20:16):
Sarah Jane was living the white picket fence lifestyle that
she probably envisioned for herself. A young child, a doctor husband,
a house, and a wealthy community. She even worked on
the nineteen seventy campaign of a conservative Republican named George Murphy,
who was running for re election to the Senate. He
was the first famous actor elected to statewide office in
(20:38):
California When I.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Was the George Murphy, a star of death Bomb Highway
nine nine, a suspense.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Played for you, edited and directed by William Spear.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
Saddled by his continuing support for the Vietnam War and
reports that he was continuing to receive a salary for
an old position while in the Senate, Murphy lost the
election to a Democrat named John Tunney. Sarah Jane's neighbors
were put off by her manner and campaigning for Murphy.
She was too talkative, too self aggrandizing, not tuned into
(21:12):
other people's responses. As throughout her life, her personality often
graded on those around her.
Speaker 6 (21:19):
She wanted to paint her front door purple, and the
community guidelines said you can't do that, and so that
started off a rift between her and her neighbors. Covenants
and restrictions basically had you know, you can only paint
your house this color, and you know you can't have
cars on the street, or you can't have an RV
(21:40):
on the street, and all the stuff that goes around
with a planned community like that.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Her community had rules and covenants prohibiting a whole host
of things in order to keep the development looking clean
and homogeneous. The rules did not allow purple front doors.
Sarah Jane lost this fight, but it was another example
of her irritating the people around her. Her marriage to
Willard Carmel lasted four years.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
Sarah Jane did a one to eighty after living in
Danville for a while and going through the divorce. That's
when Patty Hurst got kidnapped.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
On February twentieth, nineteen seventy five. Sarah Jane arrived at
the chaos of Penn Headquarters with her bookkeeping experience and
the ambition to become a leader. She also possessed the
self assurance to hold her own in an environment rife
with strong personalities and rivalries. As journalist Carol Polgash wrote
(22:39):
of her, Sarah was unintimidated, a fact she spread to
anyone who would listen. She could handle anyone, ignore any
foul language, and maintain her cool, she would say. In
his book My Search for Patty Hurst, Patty's boyfriend Stephen
Weed describes going to the Penn headquarters at a time
when Ludlow Kramer, the Washington Secretary of State and the
(23:02):
man in charge of the pen program, was away in
Washington State along with his deputy. Sarah Jane, who had
the title of executive Secretary, had been left in charge.
Weed starts by describing the squalor.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
The walls were smeared and dirty. There was garbage everywhere.
In short, the offices had become a crash pad for
anyone who walked in off the street. The smell of
marijuana filled the air. People were lying on the floor
and sleeping bags and winos were slumped in the alcove.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Sarah Jane got the warehouse guards to remove these people,
despite the protests of a long haired sixteen year old
who thought it was elitist. The next day, she came
in to find the warehouse volunteers, including a young warehouse
foreman named Mike, masked around a secretary named Nancy who
had been coming down from a drug trip all night.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Weed wrote, We've got to get her out of here.
Sarah snapped, we can't let the whole program come to
a grind because of Nancy. People like Nancy is what
the program is all about. No it's not. We're here
to get Patty out.
Speaker 5 (24:09):
Sarah Jane took Nancy to another room and told her
that she was a detriment to the program. Nancy said
she'd leave if she was a problem, but didn't want
to go. Mike came into the room. According to Weed,
Sarah Jane told Mike to get out there and get
those people to work. Mike protested that he couldn't leave Nancy,
who was now sobbing. Eventually, Sarah Jane had a volunteer
(24:32):
take Nancy home. Two days later, Mike came into Sarah
Jane's office shouting wildly and then broke down crying. Sarah
Jane called Ludlow Kramer in Washington, and Kramer told her
to fire him. But who's going to run the warehouse?
Sarah Jane asked him, We've got forty people out there
and none of them know what they're doing. We'd wrote that.
Kramer said to just do the best you can and
(24:54):
hung up the phone.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
For two months, from mid February to me April, Sarah
Jane centered her life around her pin work. Her son, Fred,
now nine, spent most days and nights with a babysitter,
but despite her dedication and ambition. Is perhaps not surprising
that injecting Sarah Jane's volatility into an effort that's disorganized
(25:18):
as PIN would not prove sustainable.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
So there's this different thing sort of clashing all at
the same time at people in need for one thing,
Sarah Jane being sort of difficult to work with. On
the other side of Sarah Jane wanting to be in
the know and in the group, in the clique politically.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
In the PIN warehouse where people vied for authority and influence,
her ambition and strangeness stood out. Carol Pogash described it
as her persistence and pathetic personality. When the end came,
she did not go quietly. Richard Palladino, the head of security,
had received so many complaints about Sarah Jane that he
(26:03):
felt compelled to investigate.
Speaker 6 (26:06):
It got so bad that Palladino went into her office
to see what was going on and pulled out a
drawer and found old bills and receipts and things that
had never been logged in that basically she was not
really doing the job, but loved being in the new
(26:26):
and somebody who was important because she was keeping the records,
so she was part of the elite group working there,
and she liked that image of herself. But when they
realized she wasn't doing her job, Palladino said, they physically
marched her out of PIN headquarters and told her to
(26:48):
go home.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
The New York Times quoted a PIN worker as saying,
we marched her out of the office screaming and crying,
with two men holding her arms. Her expulsion from PEN
was not the end of her interaction with radical activists,
though it was just the beginning. Sarah Jane was a
keen observer of the dynamics in the PIN warehouse and
(27:12):
had identified a former prisoner and current activist named Wilfred
Popeye Jackson as someone who could be a valuable friend.
Speaker 6 (27:21):
This character Popeye Jackson, who was very well known in
the Bay Area for his political views and his program
for literacy for prisoners. He was the guy to know,
and Sarah Jane saw that and she wanted to get
to know him. He was unofficially sort of management. He
(27:43):
went around to make sure that things were going right,
that food was getting packed properly. He would didn't have
any official capacity at PINN, but he was the political
person who would walk around and make sure everybody was
doing their jobs. If Popeye said jump, you said how high?
Speaker 4 (28:02):
In Popeye Jackson, Sarah Jane found the man who would
for a time be her patron in the world at
Bay Area Radicals. It was a relationship that would have
enormous consequences for both of them next time on rip Current.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
developed with Alexander Williams. Posted by Toby Ball with Mary
Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff. Show art by
jeffny az Goda and Charles Rudder. The producers Jesse fun
Reema O'Kelly and Melams Griffin. Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive
(28:59):
producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick Hear. Episodes of Rip
Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content
by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit
(29:21):
our website ripcurrentpod dot com.
Host
Toby Ball
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