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Sara Jane Moore Sentenced
This Day in December 15, 1975
Sara Jane Moore was sentenced to life in prison on December 15, 1975, for her attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The attempted assassination occurred on September 22, 1975, in San Francisco, California.
Immediately following Sara Jane Moore’s attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford on September 22, 1975, the press scrambled to find any information at all about this woman who had appeared out of nowhere. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times ran front-page stories the next day, describing her as stemming from an impoverished neighborhood in Charleston, West Virginia.
The accounts also repeated Sara Jane’s claim, told to one of the police officers detaining her, that she was descended from a West Virginia oil and timber baron. Neither description was accurate. In fact, the only correct information about her early background in either account was the identity of her home state, West Virginia, where she was born Sara Jane Kahn, the second daughter of Olaf and Ruth Kahn, on February 15, 1930.
At a glance, the Kahns presented a picture-perfect image of a twentieth-century middle-class American…