WOULD-BE-ASSASSIN
Born Sara-Jane Khan in Charleston, West Virginia, she was the daughter of Olaf Kahn and Ruth Moore. Both families were of German Jewish origin and had emigrated to the USA.
Her father was a scientist and her mother a pianist.
The family lived on the same street in Charleston as a boy called Charlie Manson. He was to become a notorious murderer in later life.
Sara’s mother, Ruth became a Catholic and Sara-Jane was brought up in this religion, although she converted to Judaism in later life.
At school, she played the flute in the band and performed in various concerts and productions. Her school reports described her as being very intelligent but a loner.
Sara enrolled as a nursing student before eventually changing careers and becoming an accountant. She volunteered for the Women’s Army Corps but failed basic training.
Sara married five times, getting divorced on each occasion. She had four children.
Her first husband was Marine Staff-Sergeant Wallace Anderson and her second was also in the military, Captain Sidney Manning. She had three children with him; Sydney, Janet and Christopher.
Her third husband worked in the film industry and her fourth was a bookkeeper. Her fifth was Dr Moore – a medical man in San Francisco. She kept his name after her divorce.
Sara put her three older children onto a plane headed for West Virginia and abandoned them. She phoned her mother telling her to pick them up at the airport . Sara wanted nothing more to do with them.
Sara’s parents eventually adopted the three children. A fourth (name unknown) continued living their mother.
In the mid–1970s, Sara became radicalised.
Heiress, Patti Hearst was kidnapped by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) and unexpectedly, joined her captors. Sara became obsessed with the case.
One of the requirements of Patti’s release, forced Randolph Hearst to set up a charity to help poor people. It was called ‘People in Need’ (PIN). Sara volunteered as a bookkeeper for the organisation.
As it was a left-wing charity, Sara was recruited as an FBI informant, reporting to the authorities on people within PIN.
However, in 1975 she was relieved of her FBI duties.
The President of the USA was Gerald Ford, who had replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon.
Early in September 1975, there was an assassination attempt on Ford in Sacramento, California. It was carried out by Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, a follower of the cult of the imprisoned murderer Charles Manson.
Her gun failed to fire, and President Ford escaped unhurt.
Fromme had the dubious distinction of being the first woman ever to be charged with the attempted assassination of a US President.
Consequently, security was tightened for the President’s visit to San Francisco later in the month. This was where Sara lived.
On the 21st of the month, Sara was arrested by San Francisco police, for waving a gun near to the President. Her revolver and 113 bullets were confiscated. She told the police that she wanted to test the president’s security system.
The Secret Service ran a check on her and decided she was not a risk, so Sara was released.
The following day (22nd September 1975), Sara bought a Glock (gun) from a hardware store. She was wearing baggy tan pants and a neatly pressed blue raincoat – an unprepossessing middle-aged woman.
She waited in a crowd of three thousand in Union Square, and when President Ford emerged from the St. Francis Hotel, she fired a shot at him from a distance of forty yards. It missed by just six inches.
Not being used to the new gun, Sara had not realised that its sights were not aligned properly – just six inches off.
Sara had time to fire a second shot. However, ex-marine, Oliver Sipple, was standing close to her. He dived and grabbed her arm. The shot missed, hit a wall and the ricochet caught taxi driver John Ludwig.
Sipple said, “I saw her gun pointed out there and I grabbed for it – I lunged and grabbed the woman’s arm and the gun went off.”
Although hospitalised, Ludwig was not badly injured.
Sara’s assassination attempt on the President was just seventeen days after Fromme’s earlier attempt.
The President was bundled into a car and driven away at high speed. His security men lay on top of him. Gerald Ford said, “I’m going to be crushed to death – get off me!”
Sara was immediately arrested by FBI agent Richard Vitimanti.
As she was being taken away, she said to Vitimanti, “If I had had my ’44, I would have caught him.”
Sara was taken to a local ballroom where she was interrogated.
During questioning, Sara was asked why she had done it. She said that her motive was to spark a violent revolution which would change the USA.
In court, Sara pleaded guilty. She said, “Am I sorry I tried? Yes 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.”
During her trial, she constantly changed her motives. One occasion she said it was because President Ford had not been elected, so she felt he had no right to be in power.
Another reason was that she claimed the FBI had been trying to kill her since she stopped working for them. “If I was going to go down, I was going to do it my way. If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”
Investigators never felt that they got to the bottom of her reasons for trying to kill the president.
In summing up, the judge, Samuel Conti, said that if Sara had her own gun, she would have killed President Ford. It was, “Only because her gun was faulty”, that the assassination did not succeed.
Sara was adjudged to have no links to revolutionary groups and had acted of her own accord. She was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Many years later, it was discovered that Sara had in fact, had a link to a San Francisco revolutionary group named ‘Tribal Thumb’. Their leader was ex-con Earl Satcher, who had served eighteen years in prison.
Tribal Thumb had ‘persuaded’ Sara to assassinate the president.
Gerald Ford was asked his opinion about Sara-Jane. He said she was, “Out of her mind.”
Despite two assassination attempts on him in a short space of time, the President continued to make public appearances – “Because a president has to be aggressive and has to meet the people.”
Ford added, “If we can’t have the opportunity of talking with one another, seeing one another, shaking hands with one another, something has gone wrong with our society.”
Sara served her sentence in a West Virginia prison, working as an accountant.
In 1979, she escaped, going over the prison wall. Another prisoner told her, “When jumping the fence, just put your hand on the barbed wire. You’ll only have a few puncture wounds.”
Sara was recaptured just a few hours later. She said she only escaped, “Because I wanted a drink and a burger.”
After this, Sara was moved to a prison in California. She was initially a difficult inmate, regularly clashing with the authorities, leading to many days in solitary confinement.
She mellowed in later years.
Sara was released under parole in 2007. She was 77 years old and had served over thirty-two years in prison.
Her release was one year after Gerald Ford had died.
Sara changed her name and moved to North Carolina. She married Philip Chase, a psychologist – her sixth husband.
Lynne ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, the other potential assassin of the president, was released from prison in 2009, aged sixty.
That same year, a biography about Sara was published, entitled ‘Taking Aim at the President’. It was written by Geri Spieler. Although Sara had worked with Spieler, once the book came out, she refused to ever speak to the author again.
Sara gave her first television interview, to NBC News. She said, “I got the idea because everyone was talking about assassinating Ford.”
She said she had been radicalised by the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. “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.”
Sara also said, “I’m very glad I did not succeed. I know now that I was wrong to try.”
Her husband, Philip, died in 2018.
In 2019, Sara was re-arrested for violating her parole. She had taken a holiday outside the USA (to Israel), without notifying the authorities. She was sent back to prison for six months, despite being eighty-nine years old.
In her final interview, Sara said, “It was so long ago, and I’ve deliberately not thought about it. It happened so it happened. And I went on with my life after that. It cost me a little bit – well, a lot. You know I did nearly thirty-four years in prison.”
Sara died in a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, just two days after the fiftieth anniversary of her assassination attempt. She was estranged from all her family.
RIP – Really Irritated President
