Accused Ford Assailant Has Led a Tangled Life (Published 1975) (2024)

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23 —Sara Jane Moore, the matronly woman accused of attempting to assassinate President Ford here yesterday, has for years deliberately sought to obscure her background and identity.

Through a series of assumed names, misstatements and false documents, Miss Moore, who will be sent to San Diego Friday for a psychiatric examination, has left a murky transcontinental trail that investigators have just begun to discover.

She startled the investigators with what seemed to be a confession of her intention to shoot the President when she told the Secret Service that she would have hit President Ford, if the police had not confiscated a .44‐caliber pistol from her the day before.

“If I had had my .44, I would have caught him,” Miss Moore said, according to a San Francisco police officer, William S. Taylor, who stood guard over her during the interrogation moments after the episode yesterday.

United States Attorney James L. Browning Jr. said today that he believed Miss Moore was acting alone, but that the investigation was continuing.

Miss Moore told officers of leaving her home in this city's rundown Mission District and driving fast down an expressway, loading her gun at the same time and “hoping she would be stopped for speeding,” according to the Secret Service.

Miss Moore, who was arraigned last night and is held under $500,000 bail, reportedly said that at one point she had started to pull the gun from her purse when she spotted a man who resembled Mr. Ford.

“In another 10 minutes,” she said, “the President did come out.” Then she is said to have described how she steadied one hand with the other and fired a single shot. Oliver Sipple, a 33‐year‐old ex‐Marine, deflected her arm. She was seized and carried off.

She told the agents she “would have had to leave to pick up my boy” at school if the President had been any later.

Her 9‐year‐old son, Frederick, to whom Miss Moore seemed particularly close, was in protective custody today as the police, neighbors and newsmen inquired into Miss Moore's activities that led her from the halls of Stonewall Jackson High School in Charleston, W. Va., to a Federal courtroom in San Francisco.

In between, according to reports available now, there were apparently at least two marriages and a total of four children, and two divorces She is said to have had infrequent jobs as an accountant and to have been a participant in civil rights and radical left causes. In addition, she has been identified as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

At times Miss Moore seemed to have difficulty organizing her loyalties and causes. “Sarah,” said one friend, “seemed to live in a fantasy world.”

Fits of Temper

Neighbors and co‐workers were occasionally startled by the violent fits of temper during which Miss Moore issued wild threats. On one occasion she locked herself in an office.

At the end yesterday, Miss Moore appeared to have few friends, some frightened neighbors and a landlord anxious to get several months of overdue rent.

Her friends did include Joyce and Paul Halverson, whose twobedroom apartment Miss Moore took over several months ago.

The Halversons, who have not been seen for some time now, were close friends of Camilla Hall, one of six, members of the so‐called Symbionese Liberation Army killed last year in a Los Angeles shootout with the police.

Tendency to Waver

How the couple and Miss Moore became acquainted is not known. But it may have been in recent years when Miss Moore wavered between apparently active support of leftist causes in the San Francisco Bay area and openly informing on the group to the F.B.I. and the Treasury Department.

Her life apparently began in the late nineteen‐twenties or early thirties in Charleston, W. Va. But, according to The Charleston Gazette, her name was Sara Jane Kahn.

Moore was said to be the maiden name of Miss Kahn's mother. Sara Moore was classmate of Sara Jane Kahn in the class of 1945 at Stonewall Jackson High School there; members of that class said Sara Moore was now a secretary at the West Virginia state house and the person arrested in San Francisco yesterday was their classmate, Sara Jane Kahn. And another Sara Moore is a housewife in San Jose. Calif., a copy of whose driver's license the suspect reportedly carried in her purse yesterday.

She evidently took the name Moore from one or all of those other persorfs.

According to The Charleston Gazette, sometime after graduation Miss Kahn married a man named Sidney Louis Manning. The will of Sara Jane Kahn's father, Olaf Kahn, probated in Charleston on May 18, 1964, mentions Miss Kahn as Mrs. Manning, living in Los Angeles, and lists her three children—Sydney, Christopher and Janette.

After the Mannings were divorced, The Gazette said, Miss Kahn's widowed mother adopted the three children, gave them her name and moved to Cincinnati.

There today a Sydney Kahn, who is a furrier, at first told a reporter for The Charleston Gazette that the description of the tangled family affairs matched that of his own. He said he had been adopted by his grandinother, now Mrs. C. E. Bailey, as a child and never knew his mother, although he believed she lived in California. Later today Mr. Kahn was unavailable for further comment.

Today Dr. Willard Carmel, an internist with the Kaiser Permanente medical care program in a suburb of San Francisco, confirmed through a spokesman that he had been married for four years to the woman known as Miss Moore, but that they were divorced two years ago and he had not seen her since. He denied being the father of Frederick, the 9‐year‐old.

About the time of this di vorce Miss Moore evidently drifted toward San Francisco.

In early 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army issued its ransom demands for MissHearst. These included a multimillion‐dollar food distribution program for the poor.

Miss Moore was among the first to volunteer for the pro, eram. She wanted to be the bookkeeper and told program officials she had been “sent by God.” She is said to have given them a false Social Security number, and an incorrect home address, and refused to give her telephone number.

“She came on strong,” saidLudlow Kramer, the top official, of the People In Need Program. “She was like the employe who two weeks after hiring wants to run the company. She wanted in on the politics of the thing, the decision making.”

Sometime later Mr. Kramer dismissed Miss Moore. Some say it was for incompatibility with other workers. And some say it was for bookkeeping incompetence.

But it was through this work that Miss Moore, who once wanted to be an actress, was exppsed to a new element of society. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times she described her interest in the fringes of radical groups, drugs and easy sex. “I was fascinated,” she said, “I was learning that there was a whole... left movement that had been around all the time that I had lived right here and knew, nothing about.”

At the same time, said Miss Moore, she became an informant for the F.B.I. A bureau spokes, man confirmed this today, but he said her affiliation was terminated last June. She continued to volunteer information, he said.

In a number of newspaper interviews, which Miss Moore sought, she described how She had become convinced, that her friends were justified in their revolutionary beliefs. “I Was dissatisfied with the world,” she said, “and thought this socialist revolution might be something that would change it.”

Apparently she became convinced that she had to make a clean break with the F.B.I. to fully establish her radical credentials. So she announced in some interviews that she had been an informant.

As a result, the F.B.I. terminated her status and the radical groups, including the United Prisoner Union, rejected her as an untrustworthy “snitch,” as one member put it.

In recent months Miss Moore had run into financial difficulty. She said today that she had had no job since doing some secretarial work last spring. James L. Hewitt, a public defender, was appointed her attorney.

He sought and received a stay until Friday of her transfer to the San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Facility for psychiatric examination, pending consideration of an appeal of United States Magistrate Owen E. Woodruff's decision not to allow legal counsel to be present during the examination. Mr. Hewitt said Miss Moore's mental condition was “cloudy.”

Beginning last spring Miss Moore began falling behind on the $190‐a‐month rent payments to the Gordon Wong family, which also lives in and owns the two‐flat apartment house at 565 Guerrero Street. Miss Moore occupied the firstfloor apartment.

Neighbors described Miss Moore as solitary and at times argumentative.

Evelyn Gibeau, a landlord nearby, said she had frequently seen Miss Moore putting her son into a car for the trip to his school in the East Bay area.

Mrs. Gibeau, the local Avon lady, said she had never summoned enough nerve to call on Miss Moore. “She seemed so strange,” Mrs. Gateau said. “She was so quiet and unfriendly. And this is such a friendly neighborhood. Of course, you don't go out much after dark. But it's a friendly neighborhood.”