Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (29 page)

Standing on the other side of the street, forty-five-year-old Sara Jane Moore had been waiting amid a crowd for three hours, hoping to get a glimpse of the president. When he appeared, Moore took her .38 caliber revolver from her purse, aimed it at the president’s head, and fired.

By pure coincidence, Moore also had a connection to Charles Manson. As children, Moore and Manson both grew up in Charlotte, West Virginia, and bought candy from the same grocery store where Manson’s mother was briefly employed.

As a child, young “Sally,” as she liked to be called, was a straight-A student, studied ballet, was an excellent seamstress, and played violin. Her comfortable middle-class family would often gather to play their instruments together.

Wanting to escape her overly strict Baptist father, Moore left home after high school. Impulsively she married a marine for a month, and within a week of annulling that marriage, she married an air force officer with whom she had three children before filing for divorce.

In 1958, Moore moved to Los Angeles and married a minor movie executive, eventually leaving her three children behind to be raised by their grandparents in West Virginia.

Moore had a fourth child but soon separated from the boy’s father. She took her son to the San Francisco Bay Area where she trained to become a certified professional accountant and married a fourth husband, a wealthy physician.

But this marriage soon also soured and was annulled. In 1974, Moore became obsessed with the news stories of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s (SLA) kidnapping and brainwashing of Patty Hearst, the daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst.

When the SLA demanded a ransom of $2 million in food to be given to the poor, Randolph Hearst established the People in Need fund, and Moore volunteered her accounting skills. Noting her dedication, Hearst asked Moore if she might develop contacts among the radical left in San Francisco to help find his daughter.

Living in San Francisco’s Mission District, Moore immersed herself in revolutionary left-wing political writings and cultivated friendships with people like United Prisoners Union Head Wilbert “Popeye” Jackson at parties and counter-culture events.

Taking note of her new acquaintances, the FBI approached Moore in the spring of 1974, asking her to become an informant for the radical movements they hoped to keep a tight watch on in those turbulent times. Flattered by the attention and the importance of her role, Moore agreed.

The more time Moore spent among the radicals, though, the more she sympathized with their revolutionary ideology, and the more she felt accepted by them. Feeling she was betraying her friends, she decided to stop informing on them and come clean with them about it.