Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford 50 years ago, died at a nursing home in Franklin, Tenn., on Wednesday. She was 95.

Secret Service agents, police and bystanders react after Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford on September 22, 1975, in San Francisco. Photo courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library UPI Sara Jane Moore watches Kris Allen and Adam Lambert perform on the NBC Today show live from Rockefeller Center in New York City on May 28, 2009. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI UPI

Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died. She was 95.

Moore died at a nursing home in Franklin, Tenn., on Wednesday, two days after the 50th anniversary of her attempt to kill the president on Sept. 22, 1975. Demetria Kalodimos, a reporter for the Nashville Banner who developed a friendship with Moore, confirmed her death.

Kalodimos said Moore had been bedridden for 15 months after a fall, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Seventeen days before the shooting in San Francisco, Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to kill the 38th president in Sacramento, Calif.

The two events were not connected.

Moore went to a North Carolina retirement community after serving 32 years in federal prison.

In 1975, wearing polka-dot slacks, she attempted to kill Ford as he left the fashionable St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

About 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square.

Moore, who had been questioned by the Secret Service one day earlier but released, was standing across the street around 40 to 50 feet from Ford.

The bullet from her .38-caliber revolver missed.

As she attempted a second shot, Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun. That shot missed, going off the wall and grazing a bystander.

Ford was pushed into a limousine by Secret Service agents and was driven from the area.

Sipple and two police officers seized Moore.

...

Though she had ties to a left-wing radical group, investigators found no conspiracy evidence. Moore had worked as an FBI informant in a life that included marriages, divorces and mental illness.

After she was found legally sane by doctors, Moore pleaded guilty to attempted assassination in December 1975. She was sentenced to life in prison.

At 77, she became eligible for parole in December 2006 and got out of prison on Dec. 31, 2007 -- nearly one year after Ford died on Dec. 26, 2006.

Before then, Moore and another female inmate at a minimum security federal prison camp in West Virginia scaled a 12-foot fence but they were recaptured a few hours later in February 1979.

Moore was then transferred to a prison in Dublin, Calif.

She spoke about Ford after his death.

"I was functioning I think purely on adrenaline and not thinking clearly," Moore said from her California prison cell in January 2007. "I have often said that I had put blinders on and I was only listening to what I wanted to hear."

She said on NBC's Today show in May 2009: "It was a time that people don't remember. You know we had a war ... the Vietnam War, you became, I became immersed in it. We were saying the country needed to change. 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."

She spoke to the Banner in July 2024 after Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, also was a victim of an attempted assassination.

"When you psych yourself up to do something like that ... it's sort of like being in a play," Moore said. "You know, you rehearse and rehearse and then when the time comes, you just do it."

Moore, who was born in Charleston, W.Va., joined the Women's Army Corps and later became an accountant at RKO Studios in Hollywood, Calif.

When living in San Francisco, she joined civil-rights and anti-war protests.

She was married five times, including to Dr. Willard J. Carmel Jr., an internist with Kaiser Permanente in Danville, Calif., from 1969 to 1973.

After her prison release, she married Philip Chase, a clinical psychologist, and lived in a retirement community in North Carolina. He died in 2018, before she moved to Tennessee.

She had five children.