Sara Jane Moore obit

Sara Jane Moore, Who Tried to Kill President Ford, Dies in Franklin at 95

The would-be assassin relocated to the Nashville area in 2022 

She was not on the list.

Sara Jane Moore, the would-be assassin of President Gerald Ford, died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Franklin. She was 95.

Moore’s death came two days after the 50th anniversary of her attempt to kill Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco in 1975. Her actions followed Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempt to assassinate Ford just 17 days earlier in Sacramento. The two events were unconnected.

Unlike Fromme, a member of the Manson family cult, Moore had been radicalized by the revolutionary politics of the day and the Patricia Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was arrested by police on a gun charge the day before her attempt, and booked for having a .44 caliber handgun and 113 rounds of ammunition. The gun was confiscated, a fact which proved crucial the next day as authorities said the sight on the .38 caliber handgun she fired at Ford was faulty. She fired one shot at Ford before being tackled by Oliver Sipple, a former Marine.

Moore was sentenced to life in prison. She attempted to escape in 1979, but was captured after a few hours. She was released on parole in 2007.

In 2022, she moved to Bellevue and then, after a fall, spent her remaining years in rehabilitation facilities in Williamson County. She was married five times and had four children.

In a 2009 interview, Moore said her aim back in the ’70s was to overthrow the government.

“It was a time that people don’t remember. You know we had a war … the Vietnam War, you became, I became immersed in it. We were saying the country needed to change,” she said on NBC’s Today show. “The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution in this country.”

In 2024, she discussed the assassination attempt on Ford with the Banner while watching coverage of an attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump’s life.

“When you psych yourself up to do something like that … it’s sort of like being in a play,” Moore said when describing her lack of fear at trying to kill Ford. “You know, you rehearse and rehearse and then when the time comes, you just do it.”