Photo by Janet Fries
Photo by Mike Kepka for the San Francisco Chronicle
Sara Jane Moore was sentenced to life in prison on December 15, 1975, for her attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The attempted assassination occurred on September 22, 1975, in San Francisco, California.
Immediately following Sara Jane Moore’s attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford on September 22, 1975, the press scrambled to find any information at all about this woman who had appeared out of nowhere. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times ran front-page stories the next day, describing her as stemming from an impoverished neighborhood in Charleston, West Virginia. The accounts also repeated Sara Jane’s claim, told to one of the police officers detaining her, that she was
descended from a West Virginia oil and timber baron. Neither description was accurate. In fact, the only correct information about her early background in either account was the identity of her home state, West Virginia, where she was born Sara Jane Kahn, the second daughter of Olaf and Ruth Kahn, on February 15, 1930.
At a glance, the Kahns presented a picture-perfect image of a twentieth-century middle-class American family: three brothers, two sisters, and their parents. At age forty-five, Sara Jane Moore was several years older than I was then, but we had one thing in common: We both had young sons. I pictured my child, alone in the world as his mother was carted off to a federal prison, and my heart immediately went out to this little boy.
On October 15, 1975, I received a handwritten note from Sara Jane inviting me to visit her. The note was sent to me in care of the paper I was writing for where I worked. She had read an article I had written about a class-action suit against Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles County’s women’s jail, and she thought I would be a sympathetic ear. Further, she would begin serving her sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in San Pedro, California, just five miles from where I lived with my husband and young son. I was intrigued.
As the day for my visit approached, I tried to imagine what she would be like. It was January 1976. I couldn’t wait to meet the woman who had attempted to assassinate a U.S. president, a woman the newspapers described as sharp-tongued, scatterbrained, uncommunicative, and uncooperative. But the woman who approached me at the prison was not like that at all. She entered the room with confidence, extending her hand to me with a warm and friendly gesture. She was middle-aged, of medium height, blue-eyed, with short, curly brown hair. She could easily have been my neighbor. She looked me straight in the eye with a clear gaze.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said, smiling broadly. The disconnect was stunning. She behaved as if we were meeting for lunch at a fancy Los Angeles restaurant.
“By the way,” she asked with interest, “how old did you say your son is?” I had to stop her right then and there. I could sense that she was trying to smooth-talk me. Maybe I never tried to murder anyone, but I did grow up in Los Angeles and I wasn’t totally without some street savvy.
“Listen, Sara Jane,” I began.
She jumped in, “Oh, call me Sally. All my friends call me Sally.”
“OK, Sally, Sara Jane, look, I did not come here because I’m a fan of yours. I also didn’t come here to save you and I’m certainly no sympathizer. I think what you tried to do was very wrong. I came because I’m a journalist and you asked me to come. I told you in my letter I’m not assigned to write about you. So, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”
She ignored my speech and went on to tell me that she needed help getting birthday and Christmas gifts to her son. She asked if I could help with that.
I continued to visit or write to her over the years.
I never had a reason to doubt what she told me, and I never questioned her or checked on anything she said. It didn’t matter, and I just assumed that what she said was true. After all, why would she lie to me?
In 2003, my schedule became more flexible and I went to see Sara Jane. It had been more than a year since my last visit.
When I explained that I had some time on my hands, Sara Jane said, “Well, now you should get back to your real writing.”
“What do you suggest I write about?”
“Maybe it is finally time to write my book.”
We talked about what it would mean for me to transition from a regular visitor to an official journalist, with privileges to bring in a tape recorder and paper for notes—more than just a plastic sandwich
bag full of change for the vending machines. As I began to sketch out a schedule and create lists of people, Sara Jane started canceling our visits. She would call me at the last minute, on the same morning I was to drive seventy minutes to reach the latest prison relocation. Breathless, she would tell me on
the phone that some prison issue had suddenly come up and I couldn’t get in to see her.
On our last visit, I began to gently ask her about growing up in Charleston, West Virginia. Her back stiffened and her head twisted in my direction. “How did you know that I was from Charleston? I never told you where I grew up.”
“I know you didn’t tell me. You didn’t have to. It was all over every news story ever written about you,” I said. Through clenched teeth, she replied, “That may be. But I didn’t tell you.”
This exchange raised one of several small red flags. Sara Jane’s demand for control was going to be a problem. I had put out requests for interviews to many people who could tell me about Sara Jane’s early life. One such person was Father Bill O’Donnel at St. Joseph The Worker Church in Berkeley. Sara Jane had first met him when they both attended a rally in support of the Delano grape strike that focused
on migrant workers’ rights and was led by César Chávez in the late 1960s. They had maintained contact into the seventies, and Father Bill had been there to counsel Sara Jane after she was arrested in 1975.
Being the honorable man that he was, Father Bill wrote to Sara Jane about my request for an interview. On an August evening in 2003, Sara Jane called me at home. At first she was calm, but I could hear the tension in her voice. Gradually her voice rose in anger: “How dare you ask to talk to Father Bill!”
She did not like that I was doing research about the book without her direct and detailed involvement. I told her that since it had been increasingly difficult to visit and speak with her, I had figured I might move forward more rapidly by interviewing people she knew.
She proceeded to tell me exactly how this project was going to be done: she would approve my book proposal to be sure it was the book she wanted to publish; she would supply me with a list of interviewees; and she would read and approve everything I wrote.
Then she demanded to see and review my contract with my agent and said she would call her after that review.
My response was simple. “That is not how I work,” I explained to her. “If I am going to write your book, you must give me some room. And, you need to cooperate with me. You need to talk with me about your entire life.”
I waited through a few uneasy minutes of silence as she pondered how to phrase her response. After one more very audible breath, and with great intensity, she clearly enunciated each word: “I am no longer at home to you.” Then she slammed down the receiver.
That was the last time Sara Jane Moore and I spoke to each other. She never participated in the active writing of this book, but I had twenty-eight years of conversations and letters before that date that I could refer to.
When I began to research the life of the woman who was Sara Jane Kahn, I began to uncover information that led me to believe there was much more to her story than I’d ever heard from her directly.
I also ran into many false leads and dead ends, which made me even more determined to find out the story behind this woman I thought I knew. I faced many challenges while researching Sara Jane’s life—from her habit of distorting and withholding information as she pleased to the fact that key documentation covering large swaths of her life was either unavailable or destroyed, and many details
were impossible to corroborate. This obliged me, at times, to leave gaps in the narrative, and I have pointed these out in the text as they occur. Although the research process was frustrating at times,
I have always believed that Sara Jane’s story is important. My search eventually led me to a hilltop home in Charleston, West Virginia, where Sara Jane grew up. Her story must begin there.
(Text from Housewife Assassin-The Woman Who Tried To Kill President Ford by Geri Spieler)