March 20, 2025 • 62 mins
This is part two of a two-part series on Sarah Jane Moore, the unlikely woman who wanted to kill the president, and the bizarre life she led…which the headlines never got quite right. Stay until the end for an interview with Geri Spieler, author of 'Housewife Assassin: The Woman Who Tried To Kill The President'.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care and listening. Today's episode is part two of our
two part series about Sarah Jane Moore, the housewife who
shocked the world when she tried to kill its most
(00:32):
powerful leader. If you missed part one, I highly recommend
that you pause me here, listen to that episode, and
then come back once you're caught up. Trust me, that
backstory is going to make what happens in this episode
even more fascinating. And be sure to stick around after
our main story, because I'm interviewing Jerry Spieler, an incredible
(00:55):
journalist who corresponded with Sarah Jane Moore for decades after
Sarah Jane tried to shoot President Ford. Jerry got to
know Sarah Jane better than many members of Sarah Jane's
own family, and she's got tons of incredible stories to
share that we just couldn't fit into our episodes, So
(01:15):
definitely don't miss that. It's spring of nineteen seventy four
and Sarah Jane Moore is standing on a quiet street
corner in San Francisco's upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood. She squints
(01:39):
to catch the license plate number of a green Toyota
that passes by. Nope, not that one. A few days ago,
Sarah Jane walked out of her apartment when a man
she'd never seen before approached her. He said his name
was Charles Bates, and he said he'd like to take
a meeting with her. What's this about, she asked. He
(02:04):
flashed her his FBI badge mates told her the agency
was working on a project and needed her help. He
said he'd be happy to share more details, but not here.
Could she meet him in a more secure location in
a few days. Over the last two years, Sarah Jane
(02:25):
transformed from a sheltered suburban housewife to full fledged anti
government activist embedded into San Francisco's radical underground. Her dedication
to the activist group called People in Need or PEN
became her anchor, her source of pride, and her identity.
(02:48):
Sarah Jane is pretty sure her activist work is the
reason for the FBI's interest in her, but she's no leader.
She's still learning the ropes. How had they noticed her?
And what could they want from the curb on the
hill where she's standing, Sarah Jane can see another green
(03:08):
sedan pulling towards her. She recognizes the driver, Charles Bates,
the agent who approached her outside her apartment. There's another
man in the car with him, and when they pull
up alongside Sarah Jane, they tell her to hop in back.
The second man introduces himself as Bert Worthington. He tells
(03:32):
her he and Bates are gathering information on certain members
of San Francisco's activist groups and they've been observing Sarah
Jane for a while. They've seen the way she has
so quickly made space for herself inside some of these groups,
and they want her to learn everything she can about
(03:54):
one of the leaders of the PEN program and then
share it with them. Look, we need your help here,
Worthington said, these are dangerous people. They are out to
destroy the country. Many of them are dupes of foreign
governments of the KGB. Bates explains what being an FBI
(04:15):
informant will entail. She needed to continue attending meetings and
take diligent notes. They want any details she can give
them about the group leaders, personal lives and connections outside
the activist community. They want Sarah Jane to write up
regular reports, sign them with a code name, and then
(04:38):
deliver them to a po box where an agent will
pick them up. They want her to call them at
least once a week from a payphone for updates, and
they will compensate her for her time. Sarah Jane pauses
for a moment. His whole thing was like something out
of a spy novel. She asked the agents the only
(05:01):
question she can think of, how should I behave? Just
be yourself, they said. What the agents didn't know was
that who Sarah Jane was was anyone's guest. Welcome to
(05:33):
the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer.
Today's episode, we're calling The Housewife who Tried to Kill
the President Part two. It's the final episode of our
two part series about the unlikely woman who wanted to
kill former President Gerald Ford and the bizarre life she led,
(05:55):
which the headlines never got quite right. In our last episode,
(06:24):
we left Sarah Jane Moore with a thirty eight revolver
in her hands, just moments after she fired a bullet
at President Gerald Ford outside of an event in San Francisco,
a bystander wrestled Sarah Jane to the ground, and police
took her into custody shortly after. Sarah Jane may have
looked matronly and unassuming, but, as we learned last episode,
(06:48):
President Ford was just the last in a string of
people she had victimized, starting with the members of her
own family. As a kid, she was a social outcast
with an abrasive personality, and soon after leaving home, she
began a pattern of jumping from career to career, relationship
to relationship, in city to city. At one time, she
(07:10):
even abandoned four of her children and completely skipped town.
In this episode, we'll get to see how Sarah Jane
responds under the microscope of police custody and find out
what psychologists have to say about her bizarre detachment and
manipulative behavior. But first, I'm going to back up a
(07:30):
little bit to where we began this episode, in the
back of that green sedan, where Sarah Jane got her
first lesson in how to be a spy.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Now you might be.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Thinking, wait, I thought Sarah Jane was all in on
this activism thing. It seemed like she had finally found
her purpose after so many failed relationships and career attempts.
Wasn't this radical underground scene her new calling. What on
(08:11):
earth could have motivated her to start spying on this
community that she cared about so much. Let me be
honest with you here for a second. The most frustrating
thing about telling Sarah Jane's story is that her motives
are so unclear. She's constantly bouncing back and forth, jumping
from one team to the other. As a storyteller, that's
(08:34):
really hard to explain, and it can make for a
confusing story. I have a theory that that's one reason
more books and TV specials about Sarah Jane don't exist.
She's a frustrating character to follow. But on the other hand,
I think Sarah Jane's constant flip flopping tells us something
(08:56):
important about her. Her closest loyalty is to any organization
or person. It's to herself, her image, you could even
say her ego. Sarah Jane wants to live a big,
important life. She wants to feel significant and exceptional. She
knows she's smart. She probably feels like the smartest person
(09:18):
in a lot of the room she's in, and because
of that, it's possible she feels like the rules.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Don't apply to her.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So from that perspective, Sarah Jane's willingness to work with
the FBI starts to seem a little less out of
left field. Yes, being in the radical groups gave Sarah
Jane purpose, but being an FBI informant made her feel
important in a way those groups never did. The government
(09:48):
was coming to her for help. She had something they wanted,
and she liked the way that made her feel, and
so she said yes. But according to interviews with Sarah
Jane from later in her life, there was another reason
she agreed to go along with the informant work. She
(10:10):
told reporters that she believed that keeping close ties to
the FBI was actually in service to her activist friends.
Working with the FBI I meant that she was getting
access to information about their inner workings, which she could
share with the radicals when it would benefit them, And
(10:31):
so Sarah Jane did both. She became a real life
double agent. She continued sending information about her radical friends
to the FBI, and she passed whatever bits of intel
she could gather from her FBI contacts to her radical friends.
To avoid suspicion, she told the activists she used to
(10:53):
be an FBI informant, and so she knew certain things
about how they worked. Sarah Jane's weaseling could only take
her so far. She may have been charming and good
at making connections, that Sarah Jane never quite understood how
to build real trust with people. Just like the other
(11:14):
kids in her neighborhood in West Virginia, the activists could
sense that something.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Was off about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
According to interviews with fellow members of Sarah Jane's activist groups,
she was intelligent and articulate, and she showed up with enthusiasm.
She was also headstrong and difficult to work with. Somedays
she would show up to the PENN headquarters beaming with
praise for how everyone was doing, and on other days
(11:42):
she'd loudly complained about how much work she had to
do and yell at anyone who interrupted her train of
thought with a question. Her behavior was volatile and unpredictable,
and eventually members of PENN had enough. One morning, Sarah
Janeane entered the headquarters and turned in the direction of
her office where she did her accounting volunteer work, and
(12:05):
stopped in her tracks. A group of high up volunteers
were crowded around her desk, thumbing through papers. What are
you doing, she shouted, No one touches my ledgers except me.
If there's any checking to do, I'll do it now.
Get the hell out of here. But the volunteers already
saw what they needed to see a quick look through
(12:29):
her desk drawer revealed that Sarah Jane had done little,
if any, of the accounting work she claimed to have
been doing. The volunteers found checks that hadn't been deposited
and a stack of unpaid invoices stuffed at the back
of the drawer. The donation summary reports she had been
asked to prepare were nowhere to be found. What Sarah
(12:51):
Jane had been spending all her time doing in this
office was a mystery. Two of the group's security guards
then grabs Sarah Jane under her arms and swiftly walked
her toward the exit. She protested, but I'm the chief bookkeeper.
No one knows how to do anything here. They're just
a bunch of idiots.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
One of the men.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Said, go home, Sarah Jane, get some rest and don't
come back here. You will not be let I can,
and that was that. Sarah Jane was out, but rather
than slow her down, her ejection from the PEN program
was neither an emotional nor a practical setback for Sarah Jane.
She simply moved on to other activist groups. She attended,
(13:37):
meeting after meeting, introducing herself and making connections. Sarah Jane
always knew how to charm people, and she turned out
to be a natural at getting information. She would show
up with an extra pack of cigarettes in her purse
and share them with folks during long group conversations. FYI,
the PI I used to date, used to do this.
(13:58):
Apparently smoke breaks are where people let their guards down.
People started opening up to her, and she was ready
with pen and.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Paper to take notes.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
But the career of an FBI informant doesn't last forever.
Sooner or later people start to smell a rat, especially
in a small scene like the one in San Francisco,
and once the suspicion starts, it can be impossible to
regain that trust. According to Sarah Jane, at some point
word got out, whether true or fabricated, that she was
(14:32):
in cahoots with the FBI. More groups began ostracizing her.
Sarah Jane later said that she received death threats and
that she began to fear for her life, which is
why on Monday morning, September twenty second, nineteen seventy five,
Sarah Jane called a gun dealer in the Bay Area
(14:53):
and asked if she could make a purchase.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It's the day of the shooting in September nineteen seventy five,
and Sarah Jane is on the phone with a small
time gun dealer. She says she wants to meet him
that morning to pick up a revolver. He agrees to
meet her, and she leaves his home a few hours
later with a thirty eight caliber.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Smith and Wesson.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
As we know from part one of this series, Sarah
Jane drove from the gun dealer's house directly to the
hotel in San Francisco where President Ford was attending an event.
This may be my anxiety showing, but the quick turnaround
here really stresses me out, Like you're planning an assassination
for later today, but you don't have.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
The weapon yet.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
This, if nothing else, is proof that she was living
on the edge. Sarah Jane stood outside in the crowd
with hundreds of other people with the gun in her
purse and waited until he emerged from the building. Then
she fired a single shot which missed Ford's head by
about six inches before she was tackled to the ground
and apprehended by police. Now by all accounts, Sarah Jane
(16:23):
was acting pretty normal in the days and weeks leading
up to the shooting. There was no escalating behavior, she
didn't seem distressed or erratic, well no more erratic than usual,
and there wasn't any talk of assassinating the president among
her radical groups. President Ford may have been the face
of a government they were highly critical of, but killing
(16:45):
him wasn't something any of them were actually.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Motivated to do.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
By all accounts, this shooting came out of nowhere and
with something Sarah Jane.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Did on her own.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Now it was going to be up to the police
to uncover what got her from point A attending activist
meetings and informing for the FBI to point B pointing
a revolver at the sitting president, and to decide what
to do with her next. As we know from last
week's episode, dramatic outbursts were nothing new for Sarah Jane,
(17:19):
but this one was different. There was nowhere for her
to run this time, no one to swoop in and
apologize for her behavior. The world was finally going to
get a close look at Sarah Jane Moore. Immediately after
(17:50):
she was handcuffed by police, Sarah Jane was taken to
a secure room inside the Saint Francis Hotel for questioning. There,
officers removed her handcuffs and turned on their tape recorders.
They listened as Sarah Jane gave a rambling account of
everything she did that morning and a vague but emotional
(18:12):
retelling of her assassination attempt. According to the officers who
were there that day, even though Sarah Jane spoke with
eloquence and enthusiasm right away, she was making very little sense.
She evaded the officer's questions, even the most straightforward ones.
(18:32):
Every chance she had to speak, she launched into a
twisted and lengthy word salad that never actually got them
closer to understanding why she did this.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
To me.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
She's the person who corners you at the party and
tells you at length about their weird niche interest for
forty minutes, even though you have done nothing to deserve
this monologue. Search YouTube for a video interview with her,
and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Eventually, when officers
realized they weren't going to get very far with her,
(19:03):
they tucked her into the back of a police car
and dropped her off at San Francisco County Jail, where
she would stay until her trial. Sarah Jane requested a
public defender named James Hewitt to represent her, and Hewitt
realized right away that their best bet would be an
insanity defense. I like to imagine that he stopped her
(19:24):
mid sentence about why s peranto should be a real
language and said, your brain is broke. That didn't happen,
but it's fun to imagine. The first step in preparing
that insanity defense would be to determine whether Sarah Jane
was mentally fit to stand trial. Those close to Sarah
Jane spent years trying to understand her bizarre and often
(19:48):
destructive behavior. Now it was the professional's turn over the
next few months, as Sarah Jane awaited her trial in
a county jail cell, a group of mental health specialists
visited Sarah Jane to interview her and run assessments. Hewitt,
her attorney, hopes that these assessments would offer some kind
(20:10):
of concrete diagnosis that might support his insanity plea, or
at least lay the groundwork for some kind of believable
story he could use to explain her behavior to a jury.
Unfortunately for Hewitt, the psychiatrists had just as much trouble
understanding Sarah Jane as the police officers did when they
interviewed her after the shooting. In their reports to Hewitt,
(20:33):
the psychiatrist said that in her own charming way, Sarah
Jane was frustratingly uncooperative. For one thing, she wouldn't discuss
her upbringing or background at all. She was cagey, constantly
either dodging questions or shifting the conversation into a direction
she wanted to go in. Eventually, though, the specialists were
(20:56):
able to come up with some hypotheses. According to the reports,
Sarah Jane might either have a hysterical personality disorder, a
borderline personality disorder, or bipolar disorder. The psychologist described a
pattern of excessive emotionality, attention seeking, excessive need for approval,
(21:18):
extreme episodes of mania and depression, and an unquenchable need
for admiration, as well as a complete lack of empathy.
One doctor described the way she presented as quote, pleasant, intelligent,
and sometimes witty and bantering. She is always neatly dressed
(21:38):
in the limited county prison wardrobe. She apparently goes to
great efforts to present the best possible appearance. She particularly
seems to find it important not to give any impression
of being flustered or in any way under great tension.
All of this posturing could fool people for a while,
(21:59):
but she could only keep up the facade for so long.
The same doctor said, you never know to what extent
she doesn't have things straight. Now, I'm going to take
a quick moment to editorialize here. So often in the
stories I research for this show, all we have to
go on is either personal accounts from the criminal's recover
(22:22):
or descriptions of their behavior from those close to them.
It's a rare treat to have actual psychological assessments to reference.
And even though psychologists at the time couldn't quite agree
on a diagnosis for Sarah Jane, the fact that they
could put words to the bizarre and manipulative behaviors we've
seen her demonstrate gives us that much more clarity about her. Yes,
(22:46):
she did seek attention and approval to an unusual degree,
and yes, she did struggle to empathize with the people
around her. It wasn't just an abrasive personality. Sarah Jane
had a real darkness inside of her, one that she
had used multiple times to manipulate people to get what
she wanted. But despite their reports about her mental health challenges,
(23:12):
the psychologists agreed that their findings weren't enough to prove
that she was mentally unfit to stand trial. In other words,
she was well enough to face a judge, so a
few months later she did. Now there's one piece of
Sarah Jane's life that we haven't touched on yet in
this episode. It's something pretty significant that you might assume
(23:35):
would have been weighing heavily on her at this time,
the safety and whereabouts of her son, Frederick, who was
nine years old by now. As Sarah Jane was making
her way through the court system, conferring with her lawyer
and being evaluated by doctors, the San Francisco Juvenile Authority
was watching over Frederick with a father whom Sarah Jane
(23:58):
had never really allowed in the picture. Frederick was left
alone in the world to watch his mother's name get
plastered across newspapers around the country. The tragic thing is
Frederick had family, a lot of it. Remember Sarah Jane's
four other children, whom she'd abandoned years ago to live
(24:20):
with their grandparents in West Virginia. Poor Frederick knew nothing
about them, and they knew nothing about him. He was
completely cut off from anyone in the world but his mother,
who might very well be spending the rest of her
life behind bars. On October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, a
month after the shooting, Frederick sat small and bewildered in
(24:43):
the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center for a hearing that
would decide where he'd be spending possibly the rest of
his life. Social workers tried hard to find someone to
take responsibility for Frederick. If no one stepped up, he
would have to be sir to the foster care system. Thankfully,
a sweet middle aged couple named Charles and Gale Roberts
(25:06):
agreed to take him in. The Roberts were acquaintances of
Sarah Jane's in San Francisco, and they volunteered to take
Frederick once they realized that the chances of Sarah Jane
going to prison were pretty high. Frederick would end up
living with them until he graduated high school nearly ten
years later. Not much is known about Frederick's life after
(25:28):
this point, because, to the Roberts credit, they were very
protective of his privacy and rarely spoke.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
To the media.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
What we do know is that they worked as hard
as they could to give him a normal life. So now,
twenty years after she abandoned her first four children, Sarah
Jane was effectively doing it again. Back in jail, Sarah
(26:07):
Jane was preparing for her court case. Her actions on
September twenty second were undeniable. Plenty of people saw what
she did. It was caught on film. There was no
chance in her attorney's mind that she could convince a
jury she was not guilty. Hewittt was sure her best
(26:27):
bet was an insanity plea, or, in official words, not guilty.
Due to diminished capacity. Hewitt could lean into her questionable
psych assessments and draw on examples of Sarah Jane's unusual
behavior from her early life to paint a picture of
a capable woman who wasn't in her right mind during
the incident. She may have been reckless in her actions,
(26:51):
but she didn't mean to cause harm. The judge would
give her a few years at jail time, but it
would be nothing like the potential life sentence that a
full on presidential assassination attempt could get her if she
pled not guilty. Unfortunately for Hewitt, Sarah Jane didn't appear
to be concerned about her jail time. In fact, she
(27:12):
was completely uncooperative in her conversations with him. She wouldn't
answer any of his questions about the days and months
preceding the shooting, and she refused to say anything about
her past. When he asked her about her motive for
the shooting, she simply said that it was complicated. For
Sarah Jane, the most important thing was that she wasn't
(27:35):
labeled crazy. Once again, it seemed Sarah Jane was more
concerned about the image she was projecting with the story
she wanted to tell about herself than with her actual circumstances.
You can imagine how frustrating this would be for someone
whose job it was to help Sarah Jane. Hewitt couldn't
understand why Sarah Jane could possibly be prioritizing.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Her image this way when so much was on the line.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
He was later quoted as saying, I can only assume
she would rather go down in history as a crusader
than a demented malcontent. Sarah Jane's psychologist had some interesting
things to say about her preoccupation with her image. To
one doctor described her as a blank slate who would
(28:23):
periodically adopt different roles and play them out until they
were used up. The role she was playing on September
twenty second, he said, was Sarah Jane Moore the vanguard
of a vast and implacable movement, and she couldn't stand
to have that role tarnished, even if it meant spending
her life in prison. In the end, James Hewitt had
(28:46):
no hope of convincing Sarah Jane to plead not guilty.
She insisted on maintaining the story that she was not
only mentally fit to stand trial, but that she was
of sound mind on the day she shot at the president.
On January sixteenth, nineteen seventy six, Sarah Jane pled guilty
(29:06):
to attempting to assassinate the President of the United States
and had a sentencing hearing where she had a chance
to read a statement to the judge. There's a section
of her statement that I'm going to read to you now,
because I think it really captures just how defiant she
was and totally unclear of her own motives. She said,
(29:27):
do I think assassination is a valid political tool?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Am I sorry? I tried?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And no, Yes because it accomplished little except to throw
away the rest of my life. And no, I'm not sorry.
I tried because at the time it seemed a correct
expression of my anger and if successful, the assassination just
might have triggered the kind of chaos that could have
started the upheaval of change. So not only is she
(29:57):
claiming to be totally in control of herself and her
actions on this day, but the only thing she regrets
is the prison term she's about to have. The judge
sentenced her with the maximum life in prison, and no
one in the courtroom reacted, not that there was anyone
there to support Sarah Jane anyway. None of her five children,
(30:20):
none of her siblings, none of her ex husbands, her
parents or friends showed up. Sarah Jane began serving her
sentence the very next day, stepping off the bus for
(30:48):
her first day at Alderton Women's Reformatory in Alderton, West Virginia.
Sarah Jane might have felt a bit of nostalgia, even comfort.
The prison complex was nestled in some quaint woods, with
a lazy river and a railroad track running behind it,
and it was only one hundred and forty five miles
from her hometown of Charleston. But that's before she got
(31:10):
to Davis Hall, the maximum security unit where she would
be living. Davis housed prisoners from federal prisons all over
the United States. Windows at Davis were made of several
layers of the unbreakable polycarbonate plastic and an eight foot
fence with a razor wire on top. Surrounded the facility
(31:32):
cells at Davis were cinder block rooms with barred windows
and heavy metal doors, the kind of thing you might
draw as a kid if your teacher asks you what
a prison looked like. The Isolation lock Up, also known
as solitary or the shoe, was another cinder block room,
separate from the regular cells and about half the size
(31:53):
of them. It was just five feet by eight feet
and was surrounded by metal bars on all sides. Double
metal interlocking bars with heavy bolts made sure no one
could get out. Sarah Jane didn't know it then, but
she would end up spending many many days inside that room.
(32:37):
By this point, it should come as no surprise that
Sarah Jane caused trouble in prison wardens at nearly every
facility Sarah Jane spent time at quickly labeled her as
an agitator. She of course rejected that label. She wasn't
a troublemaker. She was a political prisoner. Her story was
(32:58):
always that she was being target because she was a
critic of the US government. Any flag she received from
corrections officers was, in her mind, a sign that she
was being singled out. At the slightest whiff of mistreatment,
Sarah Jane would act out a routine random urine test
sent her into a fit. Anytime her mail arrived late
(33:21):
or she missed out on something in the mess hall,
she lodged a complaint. She would even go on hunger strikes. Once,
she even tried to escape, and she was nearly successful.
For every one of these displays, she was given time
in solitary. Sometimes it was weeks, sometimes months. That's months
(33:41):
at a time in a little five x eight cel
with nothing to do but read, write, and think. Other
inmates at Alderton probably didn't mind much when she was
locked away in the shoe. By all accounts, it seems
they found her pretty hard to be around. Sarah Jane
was known to assert herself as a leader among her
(34:01):
fellow prisoners and lobby for certain things from the staff.
Her crusades never actually led to acceptance or loyalty from
her fellow prisoners. In fact, according to some letters she
wrote to reporters while she was in prison, she was
frequently harassed, both verbally and physically. I have to tell you,
(34:21):
every time I start to feel a little sympathy for
Sarah Jane, she undercuts it by positioning herself as the victim.
One of the most fascinating and revealing stories from her
time in prison has to do with her family. According
to her letters from prison, Sarah Jane frequently complained of
loneliness and lamented the fact that no one ever visited her.
(34:43):
I wish I was closer to someone who knows me
so I could have regular visits, she wrote. Now, as
I have mentioned, Alderton happened to be one hundred and
forty five miles or about three and a half hours
from Sarah Jane's hometown in West Virginia. Sarah Jane's parents, siblings,
and three of her children were still living in West
(35:05):
Virginia at the time, and they did attempt to visit her.
Just three days after Sarah Jane arrived at Alderton, her
daughter Janet, drove to the prison to see her. Janet
was twenty four years old now, and it would have
been the first time she'd seen her mother since being
sent away at the age of three. When Janet arrived
(35:27):
at Alderton and requested a visit, Sarah Jane told the
prison staff that she didn't have a daughter, so Janet
was sent away. Can you imagine she drove three and
a half hours one way, only to be turned away
by her incarcerated, estranged mother. And Janet wasn't the only
(35:49):
member of the family who attempted a visit. One of
Sarah Jane's brothers also called the warden at Alderton and
asked if he could meet with Sarah Jane, but she
refused to see him. As we well, we'll never know
why she was so resistant to contact with her family,
but one thing is for sure. That line of I
(36:10):
wish I was closer to someone who knows me was
just a bullshit eploy for sympathy. Sarah Jane ended up
getting shuffled around to a few different facilities through her
time in prison. And there's a lot more I could
tell you about the next few decades of her life,
But by all accounts, it seems like her attitude cooled
off the longer she was behind bars. She was still defiant,
(36:32):
and she still ended up spending a few more months
in the shoe.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
But despite all.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
That, on December thirty first, two thousand and seven, Sarah
Jane Moore was released to serve five years of parole.
She was seventy seven years old and she had been
incarcerated for thirty two of those years. Stepping off the
(37:08):
bus for her first day at Alderton Women's Reformatory in Alderton,
West Virginia, Sarah Jane might have felt a bit of nostalgia,
even comfort. The prison complex was nestled in some quaint woods,
with a lazy river and a railroad track running behind it,
and it was only one hundred and forty five miles
from her hometown of Charleston. But that's before she got
(37:31):
to Davis Hall, the maximum security unit where she would
be living. Davis housed prisoners from federal prisons all over
the United States. Windows at Davis were made of several
layers of the unbreakable polycarbonate plastic and an eight foot
fence with a razor wire on top. Surrounded the facility
(37:53):
cells at Davis were cinderblock rooms with barred windows and
heavy metal doors, the kind of thing you might draw
as a kid if your teacher asks you what a
prison looked like. The isolation lock up, also known as
solitary or the shoe, with another cinder block room separate
from the regular cells and about half the size of them.
(38:15):
It was just five feet by eight feet and was
surrounded by metal bars on all sides. Double metal interlocking
bars with heavy bolts made sure no one could get out.
Sarah Jane didn't know it then, but she would end
up spending many many days inside that room. So let's
(38:47):
return to the question I posed at the beginning of
this episode. How is it that this bright, capable, unassuming
suburban mom could find herself within six inches of killing
the thirty eighth president of the United States. She was
given every opportunity for a successful, happy life. She could
(39:08):
have raised a loving family, She could have had a
supportive marriage. She could have even led a fulfilling life
as an activist On the other hand, Sarah Jane consistently
showed signs of being disturbed or at least of questionable
decision making. Why didn't the FBI pick up on these signals?
What was their vetting process like before hiring her as
(39:31):
an informant? Did they set her up to do something?
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Radical?
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Law enforcement has been asking themselves these questions since the
day of the shooting. In fact, for the first twenty
five years Sarah Jane was in prison, two Secret Service
agents would visit her once a year on the anniversary
of the shooting, to question her at length about her motivations.
Sarah Jane was, of course, evasive and never gave them
(39:59):
much informa, surprising no one, but they continued to hope
that speaking with her would help them establish some patterns.
Their goal was both to understand her unique motivations, but
also to clarify the profile they used to spot other
possible assassins. The information they gathered is, of course confidential,
(40:20):
but I have a little armchair theory. Sarah Jane Moore
was a woman with undiagnosed mental health issues that manifested
as delusions of grandeur, attention seeking behavior, and manipulation of
those close to her. She wasn't driven by a commitment
to any cause. What she was driven by was a
(40:41):
desire to feel important, to do something that mattered, to
be at the center of things, and if those in
power wouldn't let her into the center of things, she
would figure out a way to get there. That's why
she could never fathom putting her children's lives before her own.
That's why she acted alone and told no one of
her plans. That's why she fought so hard against being
(41:04):
labeled insane during her trial. The more you learn about her,
the less about her feels real. She tries on one
persona after another, but nothing seems to fit. For all
the persona she has tried on and discarded, For all
the twists and turns her life is taken, the one
thing that remained consistent for Sarah Jane was how hard
(41:27):
she worked at crafting her image. One thing she never
failed to prioritize was the way she looked to the
outside world, and that remains true even to this day,
because as of this recording, Sarah Jane Moore is still alive.
She's ninety four years old. It's not clear where she's living,
(41:48):
but she did make her way into the news in
twenty nineteen when she was arrested at JFK Airport in
New York for leaving the country without telling her parole officer.
In twenty five, fifteen, when she was eighty five years old,
Sarah Jane gave what might be her last live television interview.
With a polite smile and a glint in her eye,
(42:11):
she spoke to a CNN anchor about why she did
what she did and how she characterizes her crime now
forty years later. One of the most telling moments for
me came when the anchor asked her what she thinks
about her time served.
Speaker 5 (42:26):
You then were given five years of parole. Are you
still on parole?
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yes? I am.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
The rules say that after five years of clear conduct,
like your mandatory release, you're supposed to be released from parole.
And I am now seven years of clear conduct and
have yet to be released from parole.
Speaker 5 (42:46):
And why is that? I mean, I believe that you
have gone on and proven as best you can to
the court that you are now an upstanding citizen. You've
turned over a new leaf. So what do they tell you?
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Well, I was always a pretty good citizen. Let's not
talk about it turning over a new leaf.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
So apparently the fact that she abandoned four of her
children on her parents' doorstep twenty years before the shooting
doesn't register in Sarah Jane's mind as bad behavior. Either
that or, more likely, it doesn't drive with the version
of herself, the spirited but harmless housewife that she wants
on display. In this interview, Sarah Jane goes on about
(43:26):
her parole.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
The first time that they turned me down, I was
shocked because one would have thought the incident had happened
the day before, the way they talked about me, and
I was in total shock. And they repeated much the
same this time. They're supposed to release you unless they're
unless they feel that you're going to commit another offense.
(43:48):
And I don't know what offense I would commit, jaywalking perhaps.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Well, I mean, there you have.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
I mean, I say, you've turned over a new leaf,
and you bristle at that. But you tried to kill
the president of the United States back then.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yes, But it makes it sound like I was a
totally different person, and I was pretty much the person
I am now. Had gotten into something over my head.
I will admit that had quit listening to reason. So
for a little while I was a different person. But
in terms of being your ordinary normal citizen who gets
up and goes to work, and you know, I think
(44:24):
the most Yeah, I think the only Kremin'd had before it.
I've gotten a ticket for jaywalking.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Sure, she's served more than thirty years in prison. Maybe
it's time to just let this woman live her life.
But on the other hand, when you hear her speak
about her crime, this cavalierly and with so little apparent remorse,
you can't help but wonder what else she might be
capable of. This has been part two of our two
(45:09):
part series about Sarah Jane Moore, the woman who tried
to kill the President. I'd like to shout out the
book Housewife Assassin The Woman who Tried to Kill President
Ford by Jerry Spieler one more time. That was our
primary source for this series, and it's the best reporting
and account of Sarah Jane Moore's life, crimes, trial, and
prison sentence that's out there. Jerry Spieler is a fantastic
(45:33):
journalist who spent decades writing letters and making phone calls
to Sarah Jane while she was in prison. She had
access to Sarah Jane in a way that no other
reporter ever did, and she has lots to tell us
about what Sarah Jane is like behind the scenes. Did
Jerry ever get past Sarah Jane's carefully crafted image? Find
(45:54):
out from Jerry herself after the break. Hi, Jerry, thank
you so much for coming on and talking to me.
I heard that there's a really interesting story about how
the book came about. Can you tell us?
Speaker 4 (46:13):
Yes, I call it the backstory, and I'll describe it.
I was living in Los Angeles and I was working
for the Times down there. Sarah Jane Moore in nineteen
seventy five was in San Francisco when she took a
shot at President Ford and what was not out at
the time, as she missed his head by six inches,
(46:34):
and that was never in the press. But I wasn't
covering her. I was assigned to do a story about
sybil Brand Jail, which is the largest women's jail in
the country, and there was a class action suit against
the jail because the law library wasn't equal to the
men's library. So I was asked as a reporter to
(46:56):
cover that story, which I did, and it appeared in
the paper and Sarah Jane was closer to San Diego
being evaluated by a psychiatrists because she pleaded guilty, and
when somebody pleads guilty, the court wants to know that
they're in the right mind to do that and not
(47:16):
plead not guilty. And so while she was being evaluated
by the psychiatrist, she got a copy of the newspaper
and she saw the story I wrote about women in prison.
In her mind, if I write about women in prison,
I'm sympathetic to women in prison. No, I write about
(47:37):
murderers too, I'm not sympathetic. But she wrote to me
and said, I'd like to meet you well, and I'm thinking, huh,
I've never met an assassin before. I wonder what she's
like for real, I've ever been in a prison before.
So I said, sure, you know, so it had to happen.
(48:01):
She saw she shot in September seventy five, but by
the time she had her hearing and her you know which,
she was going to be sentenced, it was January of
seventy six, and I got on her visitors list and
I went to meet her because I was curious. And
I was sitting in this like human warehouse, this big
(48:24):
room and I'm sitting on a chair and a woman
comes out of the door across from me, and she's
walking towards me. She's in civilian clothes and I just
figured she's somebody that works there. She walks up to
me and she grabs my hand like this, and she says,
are you Jerry? And I said yes. She said, oh,
thank you for coming. It's so lovely of you. And
(48:46):
I'm thinking, are we going out to lunch? Who is
this person? This is not a presidential assassin? But that
was Sarah Jane. That's how we met. And I told her, look,
I'm not here because i'm your fan. I don't agree
with what you did. I'm not here to save you.
(49:08):
I was just interested in who you are. But know
that I don't agree with what you did. It was wrong.
It was the wrong approach for whatever reasons you had,
Assassinating the president was not the right approach. Okay, that's fine.
She said she loved newspaper reporters. She never met a
(49:28):
reporter she didn't love.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (49:32):
We kept in touch. I was curious about her. She
also had a nine year old son, and I felt
bad for him, so I sent him birthday cards and
gifts for his birthday on her behalf, and that just
went along for twenty years or so. I was a journalist.
I had no vision of being an author. Ever, it
(49:54):
was not my mission in life to write a book.
So twenty some years later, when she asked me to
write her book, I said, no, write your own book,
write your own story. I don't write books. They're too
hard and they take too long. I write fifteen hundred
words and I'm out of here. That's great. She nagged,
(50:14):
She nagged, And you know, over the years, I don't
go home and research everybody I talked to. If I
talk to you, you know, we have a conversation, I
don't go home and start researching what you said. If
she said this guy was brown, I don't care. This
guy's brown had no influence on my life. So she
talked about her garden club, or her home, or her
(50:37):
this or her that. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But
then when she wanted me to write about her, I
started doing some research. Everything on the internet about her
was wrong. Half of what she told me realies. That's
when my spidy sense, my journalism spidey sense, started going off,
(50:58):
and I realized that the real story had never been told.
And I contacted the FBI, I contacted the Secret Service.
But before that, I contacted Catholic priest Father Bill O'Reilly
in Berkeley at Saint Joseph's of the Worker's Church, who
(51:21):
was a major political activist. He marched with Caesar Shavez.
He did this, he did that, and he knew Sarah Jane.
And I asked if I could talk to him about
her nothing confidential, of course, and he said sure, and
he wrote to Sarah Jane and he said, oh, I understand,
Jerry Spieler is going to write your book. That's so wonderful.
(51:42):
She was furious. She called me on the phone and
I used to accept her phone calls, screaming at me,
how dare you? How dare you contact him? I will
tell you what to say, and I will tell you
who you could talk to. And I said, Sarah Jane,
her nick name was Sally, it doesn't work that way.
(52:03):
If you want me to write your book, you got
to let me do my job and you got to
let me talk to people. No, I won't do that.
And I said, well then we don't have a deal.
And she said, I am no longer at home to you. Bang.
She slammed down the phone. There. I was could I
(52:23):
write this book without her? And my husband, who's a
big fan of mine, said, well, if anybody can do it, Jerry,
you can. So I said, you know now that I
realized fifty percent of what she told me realies. What's
the real story?
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Right?
Speaker 4 (52:41):
The Secret Service and the FBI and the San Francisco
Police were wonderful. They talked to me and I found
she had a hearing in San Francisco at Superior Court
with Judge Samuel Conti, who was on the bench. And
the way it works is the FBI gets assigned to
(53:04):
do research on the case. The FBI case agent was
Richard Videmonte, and it took me multiple attempts to get
to him because nobody would give me his phone number.
They would all say, I'll tell him you're looking for him.
I needed to talk to him because he was the
guy right. Finally, after multiple attempts, because the FBI and
(53:27):
Secret Services and police are not going to give you
somebody else's phone number, they don't do that. They will
tell that person Jerry Spieler is looking for you. Here's
her contact information. Right after three attempts, I got a
phone call one night. I answered the phone and here's
this voice. Is this Jerry Smeeler, Yeah, this is veto
(53:51):
Richard Vitemonte to you here. You're looking for me? What
do you want? That's exactly how it went. I went.
I'm writing a book about Sarah Jane Moore. I understand
you were the case agent. Can you talk to me
about the case? Yeah, but I'm not going to do
it over the phone, and I'm not going to do
it by email. I live in Walnut Creek, California. You
want to talk to me, you come up here. Well,
(54:13):
fortunately I'm in Palo Alto, Northern California. About that far
is yesterday too soon? And I drive up there and
he has a lovely home, and he invites me in
and we're sitting in his living room and he's just
chatting me up and I realize he wants to see
(54:33):
he's an FBI agent. By the way, if I'm some
kind of conspiracy nut job, wow, okay, And I'm not
right right And he says, okay, it's been thirty years.
It's time to set the record straight. I have to
call Washington. I'll let you know. But ten days later,
(54:53):
he calls me back, my poor husband. His arm was sore.
I kept hitting him. Is he gonna call me? Okay,
I've got the file. You come up here and we'll
share it with you.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (55:07):
I walk in and he has everything spread out on
his kitchen counter. Where she was standing, where he was standing,
How close she was, how close she came. None of
this was in the press. Why because Ford was safe
and they didn't want the public to know how close
(55:29):
we came to another presidential assassination. She missed his head
by six inches. Why because the site was off of
the gun by six inches, he said to me, and
I quote, if the gun hadn't been faulty, she would
have killed the man. She had him between the eyes.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (55:52):
And all of the ouve indicted co conspirators, the group
called Tribal Thumb. Nobody ever heard of them. They were dangerous,
They killed people. They groomed her to do this. They
knew nobody would see her coming because she looked like
your neighbor lady, right. She looked like somebody wants to
(56:13):
kill a president. Definitely not according to their profile. No,
and I interviewed President Ford, who was alive at the time,
he was lovely. He was so nice. I didn't think
he'd want to talk to me about this woman who
tried to kill them, but he did. I requested an
interview and he said yes. So that's the backstory of
(56:36):
how I came to meet her, how I kept in
touch with her. We exchanged letters over the years. A
lot of what's in the book came from the letters.
Things that she told me that she never told anyone.
How I got the file opened by the FBI, and
(56:59):
the truth. Now, she got out of prison in thirty
two years. Why because in nineteen eighty seven, life was
thirty years. Now, life is life. You don't get out.
But she did, and she's been out and she got remarried.
(57:21):
Fascinating to somebody who worked in the government, It's like,
what and she tried to kill the president? You're getting
married again? Okay?
Speaker 3 (57:31):
That is so interesting to me.
Speaker 2 (57:32):
So did you talk to her anymore after her release
or after she hung up on you?
Speaker 4 (57:36):
No?
Speaker 3 (57:37):
No, that was the end for real, Furial.
Speaker 4 (57:39):
That was the and yeah, and there was nothing to say.
You know, if you ask her, she'll say the book
is all lies. But I had a fabulous publisher the
first time around, and the second time around Diversion, the
first publisher was mcmellan, and we had lawyers go over
every single word of my book. And I was thrilled
(58:03):
because as a journalist, I kept copious notes. I have
a whole file cabinet of notes and vetted information because
I wanted people to know that there was treminous amount
of research and everything you read in that book is accurate.
And no one has ever challenged anything in my book.
(58:24):
And when Diversion came along after McMillan stopped publishing it,
and they came along and said we want to publish
the book, and they came up with a much better
title and did a great job publishing it, made an
audio book. I mean, the relationship with Diversion has just
been fantastic. They've just been wonderful. Really won I love
(58:47):
Diversion two. Yeah, Yeah, they're great.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Okay, So she just really dropped you for real, which
is fascinating because she was so pumped that you got
there that like she asked you to come yeah, and
then she didn't. You didn't follow her rules and then
she is like get out, and you were like, okay.
Speaker 3 (59:02):
Everything I need from you os mostly lies. Anyway, fascinating.
What is she like in person?
Speaker 4 (59:09):
She is charming. She does control the conversation, which isn't
a surprise. You know, she is a chameleon. You know.
In the book you'll see how she completely reinvents herself
over and over and over again. And the piece that
I wanted to highlight, and I have a quote you
(59:30):
know in the book in my notes in my letters,
is when she abandoned her children and then she goes
to work at RKO Studios and she meets an Oscar
winning sound designer there they end up getting married. She
says in her letter, we have a lot in common.
Neither of us has any family. This is a woman
(59:51):
I've been married a couple of times and had like
four kids, right, and she just completely reinvents herself as
a little Southern bell. That's Sarah Jane.
Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
I just had one more question has like two parts though.
So the first part is where's the best place to
find your work if people are obsessed with you and
want to know more about you and what you do?
And then what are you working on next?
Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
So my website Jerry Spieler dot com and I just
had another book published it It's called Housewife Assassin. It's
historical fiction based on my grandmother's life. I have a trilogy, actually,
and the second book has been written about the daughters,
but each book stands alone. So Book one is out
(01:00:40):
Regina of Warsaw, Love, Loss and Liberation, based on my
grandmother's life. Book two is Revenge of the Sisters, and
it's a revenge book. Nobody gets shot, nobody gets beaten up,
but three girls have events that shape their lives and
they get revenge on each of these people. And I
don't know what the third book is yet, but they
(01:01:00):
can find me on my website. They can contact me
through my website or just Jerryspieler dot com. And I'd
love to talk to people and love to talk to
anyone about the book.
Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Oh that's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
We'll link to those things in our show notes as well,
So listeners, if y'all are like driving right now, you
don't have to pull over.
Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
It'll be there for you.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
The notes will be there for you, and you can
follow the links and get in touch with Jerry that way.
Thank you, Mary, Kay, absolutely, thank you so much for
coming to talk to me.
Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
I love talking to you. This is a fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
Story and thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Speaker 4 (01:01:34):
Thank you for having me, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit diversion audio dot com. The Greatest
True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode. This
episode was written by Grace Heerman. Our show is produced
(01:02:06):
by Emma Dumouth, edited by Antonio Enriquez, Theme music by
Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman. Join me next
week when I'll be telling you about the real life
story of love, loss and betrayal surrounding Agatha Christie, one
of the world's most prolific mystery writers because she wasn't
(01:02:29):
just a creator of dramatic stories, she actually lived one too,
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care and listening. Today's episode is part two of our
two part series about Sarah Jane Moore, the housewife who
shocked the world when she tried to kill its most
(00:32):
powerful leader. If you missed part one, I highly recommend
that you pause me here, listen to that episode, and
then come back once you're caught up. Trust me, that
backstory is going to make what happens in this episode
even more fascinating. And be sure to stick around after
our main story, because I'm interviewing Jerry Spieler, an incredible
(00:55):
journalist who corresponded with Sarah Jane Moore for decades after
Sarah Jane tried to shoot President Ford. Jerry got to
know Sarah Jane better than many members of Sarah Jane's
own family, and she's got tons of incredible stories to
share that we just couldn't fit into our episodes, So
(01:15):
definitely don't miss that. It's spring of nineteen seventy four
and Sarah Jane Moore is standing on a quiet street
corner in San Francisco's upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood. She squints
(01:39):
to catch the license plate number of a green Toyota
that passes by. Nope, not that one. A few days ago,
Sarah Jane walked out of her apartment when a man
she'd never seen before approached her. He said his name
was Charles Bates, and he said he'd like to take
a meeting with her. What's this about, she asked. He
(02:04):
flashed her his FBI badge mates told her the agency
was working on a project and needed her help. He
said he'd be happy to share more details, but not here.
Could she meet him in a more secure location in
a few days. Over the last two years, Sarah Jane
(02:25):
transformed from a sheltered suburban housewife to full fledged anti
government activist embedded into San Francisco's radical underground. Her dedication
to the activist group called People in Need or PEN
became her anchor, her source of pride, and her identity.
(02:48):
Sarah Jane is pretty sure her activist work is the
reason for the FBI's interest in her, but she's no leader.
She's still learning the ropes. How had they noticed her?
And what could they want from the curb on the
hill where she's standing, Sarah Jane can see another green
(03:08):
sedan pulling towards her. She recognizes the driver, Charles Bates,
the agent who approached her outside her apartment. There's another
man in the car with him, and when they pull
up alongside Sarah Jane, they tell her to hop in back.
The second man introduces himself as Bert Worthington. He tells
(03:32):
her he and Bates are gathering information on certain members
of San Francisco's activist groups and they've been observing Sarah
Jane for a while. They've seen the way she has
so quickly made space for herself inside some of these groups,
and they want her to learn everything she can about
(03:54):
one of the leaders of the PEN program and then
share it with them. Look, we need your help here,
Worthington said, these are dangerous people. They are out to
destroy the country. Many of them are dupes of foreign
governments of the KGB. Bates explains what being an FBI
(04:15):
informant will entail. She needed to continue attending meetings and
take diligent notes. They want any details she can give
them about the group leaders, personal lives and connections outside
the activist community. They want Sarah Jane to write up
regular reports, sign them with a code name, and then
(04:38):
deliver them to a po box where an agent will
pick them up. They want her to call them at
least once a week from a payphone for updates, and
they will compensate her for her time. Sarah Jane pauses
for a moment. His whole thing was like something out
of a spy novel. She asked the agents the only
(05:01):
question she can think of, how should I behave? Just
be yourself, they said. What the agents didn't know was
that who Sarah Jane was was anyone's guest. Welcome to
(05:33):
the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer.
Today's episode, we're calling The Housewife who Tried to Kill
the President Part two. It's the final episode of our
two part series about the unlikely woman who wanted to
kill former President Gerald Ford and the bizarre life she led,
(05:55):
which the headlines never got quite right. In our last episode,
(06:24):
we left Sarah Jane Moore with a thirty eight revolver
in her hands, just moments after she fired a bullet
at President Gerald Ford outside of an event in San Francisco,
a bystander wrestled Sarah Jane to the ground, and police
took her into custody shortly after. Sarah Jane may have
looked matronly and unassuming, but, as we learned last episode,
(06:48):
President Ford was just the last in a string of
people she had victimized, starting with the members of her
own family. As a kid, she was a social outcast
with an abrasive personality, and soon after leaving home, she
began a pattern of jumping from career to career, relationship
to relationship, in city to city. At one time, she
(07:10):
even abandoned four of her children and completely skipped town.
In this episode, we'll get to see how Sarah Jane
responds under the microscope of police custody and find out
what psychologists have to say about her bizarre detachment and
manipulative behavior. But first, I'm going to back up a
(07:30):
little bit to where we began this episode, in the
back of that green sedan, where Sarah Jane got her
first lesson in how to be a spy.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Now you might be.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Thinking, wait, I thought Sarah Jane was all in on
this activism thing. It seemed like she had finally found
her purpose after so many failed relationships and career attempts.
Wasn't this radical underground scene her new calling. What on
(08:11):
earth could have motivated her to start spying on this
community that she cared about so much. Let me be
honest with you here for a second. The most frustrating
thing about telling Sarah Jane's story is that her motives
are so unclear. She's constantly bouncing back and forth, jumping
from one team to the other. As a storyteller, that's
(08:34):
really hard to explain, and it can make for a
confusing story. I have a theory that that's one reason
more books and TV specials about Sarah Jane don't exist.
She's a frustrating character to follow. But on the other hand,
I think Sarah Jane's constant flip flopping tells us something
(08:56):
important about her. Her closest loyalty is to any organization
or person. It's to herself, her image, you could even
say her ego. Sarah Jane wants to live a big,
important life. She wants to feel significant and exceptional. She
knows she's smart. She probably feels like the smartest person
(09:18):
in a lot of the room she's in, and because
of that, it's possible she feels like the rules.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Don't apply to her.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So from that perspective, Sarah Jane's willingness to work with
the FBI starts to seem a little less out of
left field. Yes, being in the radical groups gave Sarah
Jane purpose, but being an FBI informant made her feel
important in a way those groups never did. The government
(09:48):
was coming to her for help. She had something they wanted,
and she liked the way that made her feel, and
so she said yes. But according to interviews with Sarah
Jane from later in her life, there was another reason
she agreed to go along with the informant work. She
(10:10):
told reporters that she believed that keeping close ties to
the FBI was actually in service to her activist friends.
Working with the FBI I meant that she was getting
access to information about their inner workings, which she could
share with the radicals when it would benefit them, And
(10:31):
so Sarah Jane did both. She became a real life
double agent. She continued sending information about her radical friends
to the FBI, and she passed whatever bits of intel
she could gather from her FBI contacts to her radical friends.
To avoid suspicion, she told the activists she used to
(10:53):
be an FBI informant, and so she knew certain things
about how they worked. Sarah Jane's weaseling could only take
her so far. She may have been charming and good
at making connections, that Sarah Jane never quite understood how
to build real trust with people. Just like the other
(11:14):
kids in her neighborhood in West Virginia, the activists could
sense that something.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Was off about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
According to interviews with fellow members of Sarah Jane's activist groups,
she was intelligent and articulate, and she showed up with enthusiasm.
She was also headstrong and difficult to work with. Somedays
she would show up to the PENN headquarters beaming with
praise for how everyone was doing, and on other days
(11:42):
she'd loudly complained about how much work she had to
do and yell at anyone who interrupted her train of
thought with a question. Her behavior was volatile and unpredictable,
and eventually members of PENN had enough. One morning, Sarah
Janeane entered the headquarters and turned in the direction of
her office where she did her accounting volunteer work, and
(12:05):
stopped in her tracks. A group of high up volunteers
were crowded around her desk, thumbing through papers. What are
you doing, she shouted, No one touches my ledgers except me.
If there's any checking to do, I'll do it now.
Get the hell out of here. But the volunteers already
saw what they needed to see a quick look through
(12:29):
her desk drawer revealed that Sarah Jane had done little,
if any, of the accounting work she claimed to have
been doing. The volunteers found checks that hadn't been deposited
and a stack of unpaid invoices stuffed at the back
of the drawer. The donation summary reports she had been
asked to prepare were nowhere to be found. What Sarah
(12:51):
Jane had been spending all her time doing in this
office was a mystery. Two of the group's security guards
then grabs Sarah Jane under her arms and swiftly walked
her toward the exit. She protested, but I'm the chief bookkeeper.
No one knows how to do anything here. They're just
a bunch of idiots.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
One of the men.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Said, go home, Sarah Jane, get some rest and don't
come back here. You will not be let I can,
and that was that. Sarah Jane was out, but rather
than slow her down, her ejection from the PEN program
was neither an emotional nor a practical setback for Sarah Jane.
She simply moved on to other activist groups. She attended,
(13:37):
meeting after meeting, introducing herself and making connections. Sarah Jane
always knew how to charm people, and she turned out
to be a natural at getting information. She would show
up with an extra pack of cigarettes in her purse
and share them with folks during long group conversations. FYI,
the PI I used to date, used to do this.
(13:58):
Apparently smoke breaks are where people let their guards down.
People started opening up to her, and she was ready
with pen and.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Paper to take notes.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
But the career of an FBI informant doesn't last forever.
Sooner or later people start to smell a rat, especially
in a small scene like the one in San Francisco,
and once the suspicion starts, it can be impossible to
regain that trust. According to Sarah Jane, at some point
word got out, whether true or fabricated, that she was
(14:32):
in cahoots with the FBI. More groups began ostracizing her.
Sarah Jane later said that she received death threats and
that she began to fear for her life, which is
why on Monday morning, September twenty second, nineteen seventy five,
Sarah Jane called a gun dealer in the Bay Area
(14:53):
and asked if she could make a purchase.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It's the day of the shooting in September nineteen seventy five,
and Sarah Jane is on the phone with a small
time gun dealer. She says she wants to meet him
that morning to pick up a revolver. He agrees to
meet her, and she leaves his home a few hours
later with a thirty eight caliber.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Smith and Wesson.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
As we know from part one of this series, Sarah
Jane drove from the gun dealer's house directly to the
hotel in San Francisco where President Ford was attending an event.
This may be my anxiety showing, but the quick turnaround
here really stresses me out, Like you're planning an assassination
for later today, but you don't have.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
The weapon yet.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
This, if nothing else, is proof that she was living
on the edge. Sarah Jane stood outside in the crowd
with hundreds of other people with the gun in her
purse and waited until he emerged from the building. Then
she fired a single shot which missed Ford's head by
about six inches before she was tackled to the ground
and apprehended by police. Now by all accounts, Sarah Jane
(16:23):
was acting pretty normal in the days and weeks leading
up to the shooting. There was no escalating behavior, she
didn't seem distressed or erratic, well no more erratic than usual,
and there wasn't any talk of assassinating the president among
her radical groups. President Ford may have been the face
of a government they were highly critical of, but killing
(16:45):
him wasn't something any of them were actually.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Motivated to do.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
By all accounts, this shooting came out of nowhere and
with something Sarah Jane.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Did on her own.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Now it was going to be up to the police
to uncover what got her from point A attending activist
meetings and informing for the FBI to point B pointing
a revolver at the sitting president, and to decide what
to do with her next. As we know from last
week's episode, dramatic outbursts were nothing new for Sarah Jane,
(17:19):
but this one was different. There was nowhere for her
to run this time, no one to swoop in and
apologize for her behavior. The world was finally going to
get a close look at Sarah Jane Moore. Immediately after
(17:50):
she was handcuffed by police, Sarah Jane was taken to
a secure room inside the Saint Francis Hotel for questioning. There,
officers removed her handcuffs and turned on their tape recorders.
They listened as Sarah Jane gave a rambling account of
everything she did that morning and a vague but emotional
(18:12):
retelling of her assassination attempt. According to the officers who
were there that day, even though Sarah Jane spoke with
eloquence and enthusiasm right away, she was making very little sense.
She evaded the officer's questions, even the most straightforward ones.
(18:32):
Every chance she had to speak, she launched into a
twisted and lengthy word salad that never actually got them
closer to understanding why she did this.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
To me.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
She's the person who corners you at the party and
tells you at length about their weird niche interest for
forty minutes, even though you have done nothing to deserve
this monologue. Search YouTube for a video interview with her,
and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Eventually, when officers
realized they weren't going to get very far with her,
(19:03):
they tucked her into the back of a police car
and dropped her off at San Francisco County Jail, where
she would stay until her trial. Sarah Jane requested a
public defender named James Hewitt to represent her, and Hewitt
realized right away that their best bet would be an
insanity defense. I like to imagine that he stopped her
(19:24):
mid sentence about why s peranto should be a real
language and said, your brain is broke. That didn't happen,
but it's fun to imagine. The first step in preparing
that insanity defense would be to determine whether Sarah Jane
was mentally fit to stand trial. Those close to Sarah
Jane spent years trying to understand her bizarre and often
(19:48):
destructive behavior. Now it was the professional's turn over the
next few months, as Sarah Jane awaited her trial in
a county jail cell, a group of mental health specialists
visited Sarah Jane to interview her and run assessments. Hewitt,
her attorney, hopes that these assessments would offer some kind
(20:10):
of concrete diagnosis that might support his insanity plea, or
at least lay the groundwork for some kind of believable
story he could use to explain her behavior to a jury.
Unfortunately for Hewitt, the psychiatrists had just as much trouble
understanding Sarah Jane as the police officers did when they
interviewed her after the shooting. In their reports to Hewitt,
(20:33):
the psychiatrist said that in her own charming way, Sarah
Jane was frustratingly uncooperative. For one thing, she wouldn't discuss
her upbringing or background at all. She was cagey, constantly
either dodging questions or shifting the conversation into a direction
she wanted to go in. Eventually, though, the specialists were
(20:56):
able to come up with some hypotheses. According to the reports,
Sarah Jane might either have a hysterical personality disorder, a
borderline personality disorder, or bipolar disorder. The psychologist described a
pattern of excessive emotionality, attention seeking, excessive need for approval,
(21:18):
extreme episodes of mania and depression, and an unquenchable need
for admiration, as well as a complete lack of empathy.
One doctor described the way she presented as quote, pleasant, intelligent,
and sometimes witty and bantering. She is always neatly dressed
(21:38):
in the limited county prison wardrobe. She apparently goes to
great efforts to present the best possible appearance. She particularly
seems to find it important not to give any impression
of being flustered or in any way under great tension.
All of this posturing could fool people for a while,
(21:59):
but she could only keep up the facade for so long.
The same doctor said, you never know to what extent
she doesn't have things straight. Now, I'm going to take
a quick moment to editorialize here. So often in the
stories I research for this show, all we have to
go on is either personal accounts from the criminal's recover
(22:22):
or descriptions of their behavior from those close to them.
It's a rare treat to have actual psychological assessments to reference.
And even though psychologists at the time couldn't quite agree
on a diagnosis for Sarah Jane, the fact that they
could put words to the bizarre and manipulative behaviors we've
seen her demonstrate gives us that much more clarity about her. Yes,
(22:46):
she did seek attention and approval to an unusual degree,
and yes, she did struggle to empathize with the people
around her. It wasn't just an abrasive personality. Sarah Jane
had a real darkness inside of her, one that she
had used multiple times to manipulate people to get what
she wanted. But despite their reports about her mental health challenges,
(23:12):
the psychologists agreed that their findings weren't enough to prove
that she was mentally unfit to stand trial. In other words,
she was well enough to face a judge, so a
few months later she did. Now there's one piece of
Sarah Jane's life that we haven't touched on yet in
this episode. It's something pretty significant that you might assume
(23:35):
would have been weighing heavily on her at this time,
the safety and whereabouts of her son, Frederick, who was
nine years old by now. As Sarah Jane was making
her way through the court system, conferring with her lawyer
and being evaluated by doctors, the San Francisco Juvenile Authority
was watching over Frederick with a father whom Sarah Jane
(23:58):
had never really allowed in the picture. Frederick was left
alone in the world to watch his mother's name get
plastered across newspapers around the country. The tragic thing is
Frederick had family, a lot of it. Remember Sarah Jane's
four other children, whom she'd abandoned years ago to live
(24:20):
with their grandparents in West Virginia. Poor Frederick knew nothing
about them, and they knew nothing about him. He was
completely cut off from anyone in the world but his mother,
who might very well be spending the rest of her
life behind bars. On October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, a
month after the shooting, Frederick sat small and bewildered in
(24:43):
the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center for a hearing that
would decide where he'd be spending possibly the rest of
his life. Social workers tried hard to find someone to
take responsibility for Frederick. If no one stepped up, he
would have to be sir to the foster care system. Thankfully,
a sweet middle aged couple named Charles and Gale Roberts
(25:06):
agreed to take him in. The Roberts were acquaintances of
Sarah Jane's in San Francisco, and they volunteered to take
Frederick once they realized that the chances of Sarah Jane
going to prison were pretty high. Frederick would end up
living with them until he graduated high school nearly ten
years later. Not much is known about Frederick's life after
(25:28):
this point, because, to the Roberts credit, they were very
protective of his privacy and rarely spoke.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
To the media.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
What we do know is that they worked as hard
as they could to give him a normal life. So now,
twenty years after she abandoned her first four children, Sarah
Jane was effectively doing it again. Back in jail, Sarah
(26:07):
Jane was preparing for her court case. Her actions on
September twenty second were undeniable. Plenty of people saw what
she did. It was caught on film. There was no
chance in her attorney's mind that she could convince a
jury she was not guilty. Hewittt was sure her best
(26:27):
bet was an insanity plea, or, in official words, not guilty.
Due to diminished capacity. Hewitt could lean into her questionable
psych assessments and draw on examples of Sarah Jane's unusual
behavior from her early life to paint a picture of
a capable woman who wasn't in her right mind during
the incident. She may have been reckless in her actions,
(26:51):
but she didn't mean to cause harm. The judge would
give her a few years at jail time, but it
would be nothing like the potential life sentence that a
full on presidential assassination attempt could get her if she
pled not guilty. Unfortunately for Hewitt, Sarah Jane didn't appear
to be concerned about her jail time. In fact, she
(27:12):
was completely uncooperative in her conversations with him. She wouldn't
answer any of his questions about the days and months
preceding the shooting, and she refused to say anything about
her past. When he asked her about her motive for
the shooting, she simply said that it was complicated. For
Sarah Jane, the most important thing was that she wasn't
(27:35):
labeled crazy. Once again, it seemed Sarah Jane was more
concerned about the image she was projecting with the story
she wanted to tell about herself than with her actual circumstances.
You can imagine how frustrating this would be for someone
whose job it was to help Sarah Jane. Hewitt couldn't
understand why Sarah Jane could possibly be prioritizing.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Her image this way when so much was on the line.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
He was later quoted as saying, I can only assume
she would rather go down in history as a crusader
than a demented malcontent. Sarah Jane's psychologist had some interesting
things to say about her preoccupation with her image. To
one doctor described her as a blank slate who would
(28:23):
periodically adopt different roles and play them out until they
were used up. The role she was playing on September
twenty second, he said, was Sarah Jane Moore the vanguard
of a vast and implacable movement, and she couldn't stand
to have that role tarnished, even if it meant spending
her life in prison. In the end, James Hewitt had
(28:46):
no hope of convincing Sarah Jane to plead not guilty.
She insisted on maintaining the story that she was not
only mentally fit to stand trial, but that she was
of sound mind on the day she shot at the president.
On January sixteenth, nineteen seventy six, Sarah Jane pled guilty
(29:06):
to attempting to assassinate the President of the United States
and had a sentencing hearing where she had a chance
to read a statement to the judge. There's a section
of her statement that I'm going to read to you now,
because I think it really captures just how defiant she
was and totally unclear of her own motives. She said,
(29:27):
do I think assassination is a valid political tool?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Am I sorry? I tried?
Speaker 4 (29:34):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And no, Yes because it accomplished little except to throw
away the rest of my life. And no, I'm not sorry.
I tried because at the time it seemed a correct
expression of my anger and if successful, the assassination just
might have triggered the kind of chaos that could have
started the upheaval of change. So not only is she
(29:57):
claiming to be totally in control of herself and her
actions on this day, but the only thing she regrets
is the prison term she's about to have. The judge
sentenced her with the maximum life in prison, and no
one in the courtroom reacted, not that there was anyone
there to support Sarah Jane anyway. None of her five children,
(30:20):
none of her siblings, none of her ex husbands, her
parents or friends showed up. Sarah Jane began serving her
sentence the very next day, stepping off the bus for
(30:48):
her first day at Alderton Women's Reformatory in Alderton, West Virginia.
Sarah Jane might have felt a bit of nostalgia, even comfort.
The prison complex was nestled in some quaint woods, with
a lazy river and a railroad track running behind it,
and it was only one hundred and forty five miles
from her hometown of Charleston. But that's before she got
(31:10):
to Davis Hall, the maximum security unit where she would
be living. Davis housed prisoners from federal prisons all over
the United States. Windows at Davis were made of several
layers of the unbreakable polycarbonate plastic and an eight foot
fence with a razor wire on top. Surrounded the facility
(31:32):
cells at Davis were cinder block rooms with barred windows
and heavy metal doors, the kind of thing you might
draw as a kid if your teacher asks you what
a prison looked like. The Isolation lock Up, also known
as solitary or the shoe, was another cinder block room,
separate from the regular cells and about half the size
(31:53):
of them. It was just five feet by eight feet
and was surrounded by metal bars on all sides. Double
metal interlocking bars with heavy bolts made sure no one
could get out. Sarah Jane didn't know it then, but
she would end up spending many many days inside that room.
(32:37):
By this point, it should come as no surprise that
Sarah Jane caused trouble in prison wardens at nearly every
facility Sarah Jane spent time at quickly labeled her as
an agitator. She of course rejected that label. She wasn't
a troublemaker. She was a political prisoner. Her story was
(32:58):
always that she was being target because she was a
critic of the US government. Any flag she received from
corrections officers was, in her mind, a sign that she
was being singled out. At the slightest whiff of mistreatment,
Sarah Jane would act out a routine random urine test
sent her into a fit. Anytime her mail arrived late
(33:21):
or she missed out on something in the mess hall,
she lodged a complaint. She would even go on hunger strikes. Once,
she even tried to escape, and she was nearly successful.
For every one of these displays, she was given time
in solitary. Sometimes it was weeks, sometimes months. That's months
(33:41):
at a time in a little five x eight cel
with nothing to do but read, write, and think. Other
inmates at Alderton probably didn't mind much when she was
locked away in the shoe. By all accounts, it seems
they found her pretty hard to be around. Sarah Jane
was known to assert herself as a leader among her
(34:01):
fellow prisoners and lobby for certain things from the staff.
Her crusades never actually led to acceptance or loyalty from
her fellow prisoners. In fact, according to some letters she
wrote to reporters while she was in prison, she was
frequently harassed, both verbally and physically. I have to tell you,
(34:21):
every time I start to feel a little sympathy for
Sarah Jane, she undercuts it by positioning herself as the victim.
One of the most fascinating and revealing stories from her
time in prison has to do with her family. According
to her letters from prison, Sarah Jane frequently complained of
loneliness and lamented the fact that no one ever visited her.
(34:43):
I wish I was closer to someone who knows me
so I could have regular visits, she wrote. Now, as
I have mentioned, Alderton happened to be one hundred and
forty five miles or about three and a half hours
from Sarah Jane's hometown in West Virginia. Sarah Jane's parents, siblings,
and three of her children were still living in West
(35:05):
Virginia at the time, and they did attempt to visit her.
Just three days after Sarah Jane arrived at Alderton, her
daughter Janet, drove to the prison to see her. Janet
was twenty four years old now, and it would have
been the first time she'd seen her mother since being
sent away at the age of three. When Janet arrived
(35:27):
at Alderton and requested a visit, Sarah Jane told the
prison staff that she didn't have a daughter, so Janet
was sent away. Can you imagine she drove three and
a half hours one way, only to be turned away
by her incarcerated, estranged mother. And Janet wasn't the only
(35:49):
member of the family who attempted a visit. One of
Sarah Jane's brothers also called the warden at Alderton and
asked if he could meet with Sarah Jane, but she
refused to see him. As we well, we'll never know
why she was so resistant to contact with her family,
but one thing is for sure. That line of I
(36:10):
wish I was closer to someone who knows me was
just a bullshit eploy for sympathy. Sarah Jane ended up
getting shuffled around to a few different facilities through her
time in prison. And there's a lot more I could
tell you about the next few decades of her life,
But by all accounts, it seems like her attitude cooled
off the longer she was behind bars. She was still defiant,
(36:32):
and she still ended up spending a few more months
in the shoe.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
But despite all.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
That, on December thirty first, two thousand and seven, Sarah
Jane Moore was released to serve five years of parole.
She was seventy seven years old and she had been
incarcerated for thirty two of those years. Stepping off the
(37:08):
bus for her first day at Alderton Women's Reformatory in Alderton,
West Virginia, Sarah Jane might have felt a bit of nostalgia,
even comfort. The prison complex was nestled in some quaint woods,
with a lazy river and a railroad track running behind it,
and it was only one hundred and forty five miles
from her hometown of Charleston. But that's before she got
(37:31):
to Davis Hall, the maximum security unit where she would
be living. Davis housed prisoners from federal prisons all over
the United States. Windows at Davis were made of several
layers of the unbreakable polycarbonate plastic and an eight foot
fence with a razor wire on top. Surrounded the facility
(37:53):
cells at Davis were cinderblock rooms with barred windows and
heavy metal doors, the kind of thing you might draw
as a kid if your teacher asks you what a
prison looked like. The isolation lock up, also known as
solitary or the shoe, with another cinder block room separate
from the regular cells and about half the size of them.
(38:15):
It was just five feet by eight feet and was
surrounded by metal bars on all sides. Double metal interlocking
bars with heavy bolts made sure no one could get out.
Sarah Jane didn't know it then, but she would end
up spending many many days inside that room. So let's
(38:47):
return to the question I posed at the beginning of
this episode. How is it that this bright, capable, unassuming
suburban mom could find herself within six inches of killing
the thirty eighth president of the United States. She was
given every opportunity for a successful, happy life. She could
(39:08):
have raised a loving family, She could have had a
supportive marriage. She could have even led a fulfilling life
as an activist On the other hand, Sarah Jane consistently
showed signs of being disturbed or at least of questionable
decision making. Why didn't the FBI pick up on these signals?
What was their vetting process like before hiring her as
(39:31):
an informant? Did they set her up to do something?
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Radical?
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Law enforcement has been asking themselves these questions since the
day of the shooting. In fact, for the first twenty
five years Sarah Jane was in prison, two Secret Service
agents would visit her once a year on the anniversary
of the shooting, to question her at length about her motivations.
Sarah Jane was, of course, evasive and never gave them
(39:59):
much informa, surprising no one, but they continued to hope
that speaking with her would help them establish some patterns.
Their goal was both to understand her unique motivations, but
also to clarify the profile they used to spot other
possible assassins. The information they gathered is, of course confidential,
(40:20):
but I have a little armchair theory. Sarah Jane Moore
was a woman with undiagnosed mental health issues that manifested
as delusions of grandeur, attention seeking behavior, and manipulation of
those close to her. She wasn't driven by a commitment
to any cause. What she was driven by was a
(40:41):
desire to feel important, to do something that mattered, to
be at the center of things, and if those in
power wouldn't let her into the center of things, she
would figure out a way to get there. That's why
she could never fathom putting her children's lives before her own.
That's why she acted alone and told no one of
her plans. That's why she fought so hard against being
(41:04):
labeled insane during her trial. The more you learn about her,
the less about her feels real. She tries on one
persona after another, but nothing seems to fit. For all
the persona she has tried on and discarded, For all
the twists and turns her life is taken, the one
thing that remained consistent for Sarah Jane was how hard
(41:27):
she worked at crafting her image. One thing she never
failed to prioritize was the way she looked to the
outside world, and that remains true even to this day,
because as of this recording, Sarah Jane Moore is still alive.
She's ninety four years old. It's not clear where she's living,
(41:48):
but she did make her way into the news in
twenty nineteen when she was arrested at JFK Airport in
New York for leaving the country without telling her parole officer.
In twenty five, fifteen, when she was eighty five years old,
Sarah Jane gave what might be her last live television interview.
With a polite smile and a glint in her eye,
(42:11):
she spoke to a CNN anchor about why she did
what she did and how she characterizes her crime now
forty years later. One of the most telling moments for
me came when the anchor asked her what she thinks
about her time served.
Speaker 5 (42:26):
You then were given five years of parole. Are you
still on parole?
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yes? I am.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
The rules say that after five years of clear conduct,
like your mandatory release, you're supposed to be released from parole.
And I am now seven years of clear conduct and
have yet to be released from parole.
Speaker 5 (42:46):
And why is that? I mean, I believe that you
have gone on and proven as best you can to
the court that you are now an upstanding citizen. You've
turned over a new leaf. So what do they tell you?
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Well, I was always a pretty good citizen. Let's not
talk about it turning over a new leaf.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
So apparently the fact that she abandoned four of her
children on her parents' doorstep twenty years before the shooting
doesn't register in Sarah Jane's mind as bad behavior. Either
that or, more likely, it doesn't drive with the version
of herself, the spirited but harmless housewife that she wants
on display. In this interview, Sarah Jane goes on about
(43:26):
her parole.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
The first time that they turned me down, I was
shocked because one would have thought the incident had happened
the day before, the way they talked about me, and
I was in total shock. And they repeated much the
same this time. They're supposed to release you unless they're
unless they feel that you're going to commit another offense.
(43:48):
And I don't know what offense I would commit, jaywalking perhaps.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Well, I mean, there you have.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
I mean, I say, you've turned over a new leaf,
and you bristle at that. But you tried to kill
the president of the United States back then.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yes, But it makes it sound like I was a
totally different person, and I was pretty much the person
I am now. Had gotten into something over my head.
I will admit that had quit listening to reason. So
for a little while I was a different person. But
in terms of being your ordinary normal citizen who gets
up and goes to work, and you know, I think
(44:24):
the most Yeah, I think the only Kremin'd had before it.
I've gotten a ticket for jaywalking.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Sure, she's served more than thirty years in prison. Maybe
it's time to just let this woman live her life.
But on the other hand, when you hear her speak
about her crime, this cavalierly and with so little apparent remorse,
you can't help but wonder what else she might be
capable of. This has been part two of our two
(45:09):
part series about Sarah Jane Moore, the woman who tried
to kill the President. I'd like to shout out the
book Housewife Assassin The Woman who Tried to Kill President
Ford by Jerry Spieler one more time. That was our
primary source for this series, and it's the best reporting
and account of Sarah Jane Moore's life, crimes, trial, and
prison sentence that's out there. Jerry Spieler is a fantastic
(45:33):
journalist who spent decades writing letters and making phone calls
to Sarah Jane while she was in prison. She had
access to Sarah Jane in a way that no other
reporter ever did, and she has lots to tell us
about what Sarah Jane is like behind the scenes. Did
Jerry ever get past Sarah Jane's carefully crafted image? Find
(45:54):
out from Jerry herself after the break. Hi, Jerry, thank
you so much for coming on and talking to me.
I heard that there's a really interesting story about how
the book came about. Can you tell us?
Speaker 4 (46:13):
Yes, I call it the backstory, and I'll describe it.
I was living in Los Angeles and I was working
for the Times down there. Sarah Jane Moore in nineteen
seventy five was in San Francisco when she took a
shot at President Ford and what was not out at
the time, as she missed his head by six inches,
(46:34):
and that was never in the press. But I wasn't
covering her. I was assigned to do a story about
sybil Brand Jail, which is the largest women's jail in
the country, and there was a class action suit against
the jail because the law library wasn't equal to the
men's library. So I was asked as a reporter to
(46:56):
cover that story, which I did, and it appeared in
the paper and Sarah Jane was closer to San Diego
being evaluated by a psychiatrists because she pleaded guilty, and
when somebody pleads guilty, the court wants to know that
they're in the right mind to do that and not
(47:16):
plead not guilty. And so while she was being evaluated
by the psychiatrist, she got a copy of the newspaper
and she saw the story I wrote about women in prison.
In her mind, if I write about women in prison,
I'm sympathetic to women in prison. No, I write about
(47:37):
murderers too, I'm not sympathetic. But she wrote to me
and said, I'd like to meet you well, and I'm thinking, huh,
I've never met an assassin before. I wonder what she's
like for real, I've ever been in a prison before.
So I said, sure, you know, so it had to happen.
(48:01):
She saw she shot in September seventy five, but by
the time she had her hearing and her you know which,
she was going to be sentenced, it was January of
seventy six, and I got on her visitors list and
I went to meet her because I was curious. And
I was sitting in this like human warehouse, this big
(48:24):
room and I'm sitting on a chair and a woman
comes out of the door across from me, and she's
walking towards me. She's in civilian clothes and I just
figured she's somebody that works there. She walks up to
me and she grabs my hand like this, and she says,
are you Jerry? And I said yes. She said, oh,
thank you for coming. It's so lovely of you. And
(48:46):
I'm thinking, are we going out to lunch? Who is
this person? This is not a presidential assassin? But that
was Sarah Jane. That's how we met. And I told her, look,
I'm not here because i'm your fan. I don't agree
with what you did. I'm not here to save you.
(49:08):
I was just interested in who you are. But know
that I don't agree with what you did. It was wrong.
It was the wrong approach for whatever reasons you had,
Assassinating the president was not the right approach. Okay, that's fine.
She said she loved newspaper reporters. She never met a
(49:28):
reporter she didn't love.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (49:32):
We kept in touch. I was curious about her. She
also had a nine year old son, and I felt
bad for him, so I sent him birthday cards and
gifts for his birthday on her behalf, and that just
went along for twenty years or so. I was a journalist.
I had no vision of being an author. Ever, it
(49:54):
was not my mission in life to write a book.
So twenty some years later, when she asked me to
write her book, I said, no, write your own book,
write your own story. I don't write books. They're too
hard and they take too long. I write fifteen hundred
words and I'm out of here. That's great. She nagged,
(50:14):
She nagged, And you know, over the years, I don't
go home and research everybody I talked to. If I
talk to you, you know, we have a conversation, I
don't go home and start researching what you said. If
she said this guy was brown, I don't care. This
guy's brown had no influence on my life. So she
talked about her garden club, or her home, or her
(50:37):
this or her that. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But
then when she wanted me to write about her, I
started doing some research. Everything on the internet about her
was wrong. Half of what she told me realies. That's
when my spidy sense, my journalism spidey sense, started going off,
(50:58):
and I realized that the real story had never been told.
And I contacted the FBI, I contacted the Secret Service.
But before that, I contacted Catholic priest Father Bill O'Reilly
in Berkeley at Saint Joseph's of the Worker's Church, who
(51:21):
was a major political activist. He marched with Caesar Shavez.
He did this, he did that, and he knew Sarah Jane.
And I asked if I could talk to him about
her nothing confidential, of course, and he said sure, and
he wrote to Sarah Jane and he said, oh, I understand,
Jerry Spieler is going to write your book. That's so wonderful.
(51:42):
She was furious. She called me on the phone and
I used to accept her phone calls, screaming at me,
how dare you? How dare you contact him? I will
tell you what to say, and I will tell you
who you could talk to. And I said, Sarah Jane,
her nick name was Sally, it doesn't work that way.
(52:03):
If you want me to write your book, you got
to let me do my job and you got to
let me talk to people. No, I won't do that.
And I said, well then we don't have a deal.
And she said, I am no longer at home to you. Bang.
She slammed down the phone. There. I was could I
(52:23):
write this book without her? And my husband, who's a
big fan of mine, said, well, if anybody can do it, Jerry,
you can. So I said, you know now that I
realized fifty percent of what she told me realies. What's
the real story?
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Right?
Speaker 4 (52:41):
The Secret Service and the FBI and the San Francisco
Police were wonderful. They talked to me and I found
she had a hearing in San Francisco at Superior Court
with Judge Samuel Conti, who was on the bench. And
the way it works is the FBI gets assigned to
(53:04):
do research on the case. The FBI case agent was
Richard Videmonte, and it took me multiple attempts to get
to him because nobody would give me his phone number.
They would all say, I'll tell him you're looking for him.
I needed to talk to him because he was the
guy right. Finally, after multiple attempts, because the FBI and
(53:27):
Secret Services and police are not going to give you
somebody else's phone number, they don't do that. They will
tell that person Jerry Spieler is looking for you. Here's
her contact information. Right after three attempts, I got a
phone call one night. I answered the phone and here's
this voice. Is this Jerry Smeeler, Yeah, this is veto
(53:51):
Richard Vitemonte to you here. You're looking for me? What
do you want? That's exactly how it went. I went.
I'm writing a book about Sarah Jane Moore. I understand
you were the case agent. Can you talk to me
about the case? Yeah, but I'm not going to do
it over the phone, and I'm not going to do
it by email. I live in Walnut Creek, California. You
want to talk to me, you come up here. Well,
(54:13):
fortunately I'm in Palo Alto, Northern California. About that far
is yesterday too soon? And I drive up there and
he has a lovely home, and he invites me in
and we're sitting in his living room and he's just
chatting me up and I realize he wants to see
(54:33):
he's an FBI agent. By the way, if I'm some
kind of conspiracy nut job, wow, okay, And I'm not
right right And he says, okay, it's been thirty years.
It's time to set the record straight. I have to
call Washington. I'll let you know. But ten days later,
(54:53):
he calls me back, my poor husband. His arm was sore.
I kept hitting him. Is he gonna call me? Okay,
I've got the file. You come up here and we'll
share it with you.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (55:07):
I walk in and he has everything spread out on
his kitchen counter. Where she was standing, where he was standing,
How close she was, how close she came. None of
this was in the press. Why because Ford was safe
and they didn't want the public to know how close
(55:29):
we came to another presidential assassination. She missed his head
by six inches. Why because the site was off of
the gun by six inches, he said to me, and
I quote, if the gun hadn't been faulty, she would
have killed the man. She had him between the eyes.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (55:52):
And all of the ouve indicted co conspirators, the group
called Tribal Thumb. Nobody ever heard of them. They were dangerous,
They killed people. They groomed her to do this. They
knew nobody would see her coming because she looked like
your neighbor lady, right. She looked like somebody wants to
(56:13):
kill a president. Definitely not according to their profile. No,
and I interviewed President Ford, who was alive at the time,
he was lovely. He was so nice. I didn't think
he'd want to talk to me about this woman who
tried to kill them, but he did. I requested an
interview and he said yes. So that's the backstory of
(56:36):
how I came to meet her, how I kept in
touch with her. We exchanged letters over the years. A
lot of what's in the book came from the letters.
Things that she told me that she never told anyone.
How I got the file opened by the FBI, and
(56:59):
the truth. Now, she got out of prison in thirty
two years. Why because in nineteen eighty seven, life was
thirty years. Now, life is life. You don't get out.
But she did, and she's been out and she got remarried.
(57:21):
Fascinating to somebody who worked in the government, It's like,
what and she tried to kill the president? You're getting
married again? Okay?
Speaker 3 (57:31):
That is so interesting to me.
Speaker 2 (57:32):
So did you talk to her anymore after her release
or after she hung up on you?
Speaker 4 (57:36):
No?
Speaker 3 (57:37):
No, that was the end for real, Furial.
Speaker 4 (57:39):
That was the and yeah, and there was nothing to say.
You know, if you ask her, she'll say the book
is all lies. But I had a fabulous publisher the
first time around, and the second time around Diversion, the
first publisher was mcmellan, and we had lawyers go over
every single word of my book. And I was thrilled
(58:03):
because as a journalist, I kept copious notes. I have
a whole file cabinet of notes and vetted information because
I wanted people to know that there was treminous amount
of research and everything you read in that book is accurate.
And no one has ever challenged anything in my book.
(58:24):
And when Diversion came along after McMillan stopped publishing it,
and they came along and said we want to publish
the book, and they came up with a much better
title and did a great job publishing it, made an
audio book. I mean, the relationship with Diversion has just
been fantastic. They've just been wonderful. Really won I love
(58:47):
Diversion two. Yeah, Yeah, they're great.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Okay, So she just really dropped you for real, which
is fascinating because she was so pumped that you got
there that like she asked you to come yeah, and
then she didn't. You didn't follow her rules and then
she is like get out, and you were like, okay.
Speaker 3 (59:02):
Everything I need from you os mostly lies. Anyway, fascinating.
What is she like in person?
Speaker 4 (59:09):
She is charming. She does control the conversation, which isn't
a surprise. You know, she is a chameleon. You know.
In the book you'll see how she completely reinvents herself
over and over and over again. And the piece that
I wanted to highlight, and I have a quote you
(59:30):
know in the book in my notes in my letters,
is when she abandoned her children and then she goes
to work at RKO Studios and she meets an Oscar
winning sound designer there they end up getting married. She
says in her letter, we have a lot in common.
Neither of us has any family. This is a woman
(59:51):
I've been married a couple of times and had like
four kids, right, and she just completely reinvents herself as
a little Southern bell. That's Sarah Jane.
Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
I just had one more question has like two parts though.
So the first part is where's the best place to
find your work if people are obsessed with you and
want to know more about you and what you do?
And then what are you working on next?
Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
So my website Jerry Spieler dot com and I just
had another book published it It's called Housewife Assassin. It's
historical fiction based on my grandmother's life. I have a trilogy, actually,
and the second book has been written about the daughters,
but each book stands alone. So Book one is out
(01:00:40):
Regina of Warsaw, Love, Loss and Liberation, based on my
grandmother's life. Book two is Revenge of the Sisters, and
it's a revenge book. Nobody gets shot, nobody gets beaten up,
but three girls have events that shape their lives and
they get revenge on each of these people. And I
don't know what the third book is yet, but they
(01:01:00):
can find me on my website. They can contact me
through my website or just Jerryspieler dot com. And I'd
love to talk to people and love to talk to
anyone about the book.
Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Oh that's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
We'll link to those things in our show notes as well,
So listeners, if y'all are like driving right now, you
don't have to pull over.
Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
It'll be there for you.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
The notes will be there for you, and you can
follow the links and get in touch with Jerry that way.
Thank you, Mary, Kay, absolutely, thank you so much for
coming to talk to me.
Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
I love talking to you. This is a fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
Story and thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Speaker 4 (01:01:34):
Thank you for having me, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit diversion audio dot com. The Greatest
True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode. This
episode was written by Grace Heerman. Our show is produced
(01:02:06):
by Emma Dumouth, edited by Antonio Enriquez, Theme music by
Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman. Join me next
week when I'll be telling you about the real life
story of love, loss and betrayal surrounding Agatha Christie, one
of the world's most prolific mystery writers because she wasn't
(01:02:29):
just a creator of dramatic stories, she actually lived one too,
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