1 case tagged “political violence”
Convicted: Sara Jane Moore
On September 22, 1975, a 45-year-old woman with a new .38-caliber revolver stood in the crowd outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel and fired one shot at the President of the United States. The bullet missed Gerald Ford's head by five inches. The day before, police had already arrested Sara Jane Moore on an illegal weapons charge and confiscated her gun; she walked free, bought a replacement the next morning, and tried anyway. She was not a trained operative, not a seasoned radical, not a career criminal. She was a five-times-married West Virginia bookkeeper who had somehow become simultaneously an FBI informant and a spy against the FBI, a woman so consumed by the revolutionary fervor of 1970s San Francisco that she convinced herself murdering a president would ignite a leftist uprising. She was wrong about nearly everything. But she came terrifyingly close to being right about one thing: five more inches, and American history changes. Sara Jane Moore died on September 24, 2025, in a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, at age 95, two days after the 50th anniversary of her attempt. This is the story of how an ordinary woman walked to the edge of history and pulled the trigger.
