Speaker 1: Rip Current is a production of iHeart Podcasts. The views
Speaker 1: and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the host,
Speaker 1: producers or parent company. Listener discretion is it Fine?
Speaker 2: Five suspective members of the Symbionese Liberation Army are dead
Speaker 2: following the bloodiest and most massive gun battle in the
Speaker 2: history of Los Angeles hundred.
Speaker 3: After the disastrous Los Angeles shootout in May nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: four that had left six members of the Simonese Liberation
Speaker 3: Army dead, the remaining three Corps members, Bill and Emily
Speaker 3: Harris and Patty Hurst went underground. They became for sixteen
Speaker 3: months the most wanted fugitives in America. During that time,
Speaker 3: new recruits joined a vastly changed SLA. Sinq was dead,
Speaker 3: Patty and the Harris's state underground mostly out of Pennsylvania
Speaker 3: farmhouse before eventually moving back to the Bay Area. This
Speaker 3: new SLA included the three Solia siblings, Steve and his
Speaker 3: sisters Kathy and Joe, Michael Bordon, who'd been involved in
Speaker 3: a loose organization called the Revolutionary Army, and an artist
Speaker 3: named Wendy Yashimora. On September fifteenth, nineteen seventy five, just
Speaker 3: one week before Sarah Jane Moore would take a shot
Speaker 3: at Gerald Ford, the FBI visited a two hundred unit
Speaker 3: apartment complex in Pacifica, California, just south of San Francisco.
Speaker 3: The agent showed the manager, a man named Bill Osgood,
Speaker 3: some pictures, wondering if he recognized any of the people
Speaker 3: in them as working on a crew painting the apartments.
Speaker 3: Osgood pooked out two Michael Bordon and Steven Solia. The
Speaker 3: manager said that two young women also worked on the crew.
Speaker 3: The agents waited, and at ten thirty that morning saw
Speaker 3: Kathy and Joe Solia arrive ready to work. After sixteen months,
Speaker 3: they'd finally located the SLA the big question where Patty
Speaker 3: Hurst or the harrises with them. Around five point thirty
Speaker 3: that afternoon, the two Solia sisters left the complex with
Speaker 3: an unidentified man and drove to a house at six
Speaker 3: twenty five Morse Street in San Francisco. The agents watched
Speaker 3: the three people enter the house and circled the block
Speaker 3: a few times before being called off. Morse was a narrow,
Speaker 3: one way street and very difficult to stake out. The
Speaker 3: next morning, the sixteenth, a new FBI team watched as
Speaker 3: Steven Solia left the house alone at ten point fifty.
Speaker 3: They followed him as he drove his forward further into
Speaker 3: San Francisco to two eighty eight Procida, where he picked
Speaker 3: up his sisters and brought them to the complex in
Speaker 3: Pacifica for another day of painting. The FBI set up
Speaker 3: a watch at the Persida address. It was a busier
Speaker 3: street and easier to surveil, and they thought Kathy Solia
Speaker 3: most likely lived there. The consensus was that Kathy was
Speaker 3: the key person to keep an eye on. The following day,
Speaker 3: the seventeenth, the FBI watched Kathy and Joe leave two
Speaker 3: eighty eight Prisida at ten am, walked to their car
Speaker 3: and presumably had to work at the apartment complex. The
Speaker 3: agents did not follow. They stayed with the stakeout. At
Speaker 3: ten point fifty, a man left the house. He had
Speaker 3: a full beard and wore cut off jeans and a
Speaker 3: T shirt. It was Bill Harris. He went back into
Speaker 3: the house and emerged again forty minutes later, this time
Speaker 3: with Emily Harris. They went for a jog. The FBI
Speaker 3: had located two of the three most wanted fugitives. Where
Speaker 3: was Patty On Thursday, September eighteenth, the FBI agents again
Speaker 3: watched two eighty eight Prosida, but not the house on
Speaker 3: Morse Street. The observed Kathy and Joe leave again for work.
Speaker 3: A young black man pulled up to the house in
Speaker 3: a truck. He knocked on the door and talked to
Speaker 3: Bill Harris for a moment, then the two of them
Speaker 3: walked down to the truck. The agent's tensed, not sure
Speaker 3: what was happening, but Harris walked away from the truck
Speaker 3: carrying a fish. The man was a black Muslim fish peddler.
Speaker 3: At ten of one, Bill and Emily Harris came out
Speaker 3: and went for their jog. After the shootout in Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: the FBI wanted to arrest the Harrises on the street.
Speaker 3: They got in position, and when the Harrises returned to
Speaker 3: the block, four agents stepped out of a car and
Speaker 3: identified themselves. Emily tried to run, but agents blocked her path.
Speaker 3: She screamed expletives at them as she was put into
Speaker 3: an FBI car. Bill stayed silent and was driven away
Speaker 3: in a separate car. FBI agents searched the house. They
Speaker 3: found guns, bomb making equipment, and radical literature. They did
Speaker 3: not find Patty Hurst. Members of the San Francisco Police
Speaker 3: Department and the FBI went to the Morse Street address.
Speaker 3: They didn't expect to find anything, but wanted to cover
Speaker 3: all the bases. Looking through the kitchen window, they saw
Speaker 3: two women at a table. An FBI agent named Tom
Speaker 3: Padden kicked down the door, gun drawn, yelling at the
Speaker 3: two women to freeze. One of the women seemed to
Speaker 3: be thinking of retreating to a back room. Padden pointed
Speaker 3: the gun at the other woman and yelled, freeze or
Speaker 3: all shoot her in the head. The woman laughed, then giggled,
Speaker 3: then put her hands up. It was Patty Hurst. According
Speaker 3: to the FBI, Patty was arrested at two twenty five
Speaker 3: on September eighteenth. Sometime just prior to that, radio station
Speaker 3: KPFA received to call from a woman claiming to be
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane Moore. She told station manager Larry Benske that
Speaker 3: the arrest had happened. Bensky knew Sarah Jane. He recognized
Speaker 3: her voice. It's not clear how she came by this information.
Speaker 4: I'm to be bald, and I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and
Speaker 4: this is rip current.
Speaker 5: Well, I yelled the bitch has got a gun before
Speaker 5: I made the lunch flot as the trigger was going.
Speaker 4: On Episode eleven, there comes a point where the only
Speaker 4: way you can make a statement is to pick up
Speaker 4: a gun.
Speaker 2: Good evening, Patty Hurst has been taken into custody. The
Speaker 2: FBI says Patty Hurst was picked up today in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: The hearst newspaper Eiras has been missing for nineteen months.
Speaker 3: Patty Hurst's capture was easily the biggest story in the country.
Speaker 3: California newspapers in particular were suddenly under pressure to produce
Speaker 3: stories about or related to her captivity and arrest. Ellen Hume,
Speaker 3: who was a reporter at the La Times, had already
Speaker 3: been working on a series of articles about the current
Speaker 3: state of the radical left, and.
Speaker 6: I did it with a colleague at the La Times,
Speaker 6: Arta Zechino, and she and I went out and spent
Speaker 6: a long time interviewing everybody we could about all aspects.
Speaker 6: How did the Black Panthers fit in, how of the
Speaker 6: weather underground fit in? And so we were trying to
Speaker 6: create this huge series.
Speaker 3: The plan was to run a sidebar about Sarah Jane
Speaker 3: Moore to accompany one of the stories in the series,
Speaker 3: but with Patty and custody. The deadline for the series
Speaker 3: was moved up to begin the far following Monday. They
Speaker 3: had a weekend to get the articles ready to publish again.
Speaker 3: Sarah Jean often went by Sally at this time, and
Speaker 3: that is how Ellen refers to her here.
Speaker 6: So Narda and I were continuing to work on our series,
Speaker 6: and then all of a sudden, Patty Hurst and Harris
Speaker 6: As were arrested in San Francisco, which meant our series
Speaker 6: had a new time peg. We had to get it
Speaker 6: in the paper immediately.
Speaker 3: So we worked.
Speaker 6: Narda and I worked all weekend preparing all these different
Speaker 6: packages that were going to go in the paper one
Speaker 6: day after another. And the first story ran on page
Speaker 6: one on a Monday, and the story about Sally was
Speaker 6: supposed to run with another piece that was going to
Speaker 6: go on Wednesday. That was the whole plan, so we
Speaker 6: had multiple stories. Her little sidebar was going to go
Speaker 6: on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: While Ellen was working on her series. The weekend of
Speaker 3: September twentieth and twenty first, President Ford was back in
Speaker 3: California for the first time since his close call with Lynette.
Speaker 3: From On Saturday, he received an honorary degree at Pepperdine
Speaker 3: University in Malibu. Ford then flew to the Monterey Peninsula,
Speaker 3: where he played golf in the afternoon. He and his
Speaker 3: wife spent the night at the residence of Lawrence Firestone,
Speaker 3: the ambassador to Belgium. The next day, Sunday, the twenty first,
Speaker 3: the President would travel to Palo Alto, where he would
Speaker 3: dedicate Stanford's new law school building. That Saturday, Sarah Jane
Speaker 3: phoned San Francisco Police Inspector Jack O'shay. She had met
Speaker 3: him during her work for the People in Need program
Speaker 3: and had since occasionally fed him bits of information. On
Speaker 3: the call, she told him that she was thinking about
Speaker 3: driving down to Palo Alto two, in her words, test
Speaker 3: the system. Jack O'shay was alarmed by this statement. He
Speaker 3: called the Secret Service to tell them about the conversation.
Speaker 3: Said this Gal could be another squeaky from At this time,
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane was becoming increasingly isolated, shunned by the radicals
Speaker 3: in the Bay Area because she was a known informant
Speaker 3: for law enforcement. Popeye Jackson's execution had made clear to
Speaker 3: her the danger she was in. She was an admitted informant.
Speaker 3: Her accusations against Popeye may have led to his death,
Speaker 3: and she had been called out publicly by the Vietnam
Speaker 3: Veterans Against the War and other groups for her infiltration
Speaker 3: into radical organizations. Since entering the world of the Bay
Speaker 3: Area radical scene through the People in Need program, Sarah
Speaker 3: Jane had done everything she could to be in the
Speaker 3: center of events. This was no longer possible with most
Speaker 3: of the far left groups that she'd been involved with
Speaker 3: for the previous year. In an interview with Ellen Hume
Speaker 3: two days after her attempt, Sarah Jane.
Speaker 4: Said, I knew I was rapidly reaching a point that
Speaker 4: all of the ADAM news of taking action were being
Speaker 4: closed one at a time.
Speaker 3: Sunday morning, September twenty first, Jack O'shay again called the
Speaker 3: Secret Service about Sarah Jane. He then met with her
Speaker 3: in person. During this meeting, O'shay asked Sarah Jane if
Speaker 3: she had a gun. Yes, she said she had a
Speaker 3: forty four. It shows how crazy things had gotten in
Speaker 3: Sarah Jane's life that she went straight from that meeting
Speaker 3: with Inspector o'sha to participate in a potential sting operation
Speaker 3: with the Firearms Bureau of the Department of Treasury. She
Speaker 3: and a short stocky ATF agent who went by the
Speaker 3: name Chuck, drove to the Danville house of Mark Fernwood
Speaker 3: two weeks before. Fernwood had sold Sarah Jane of forty four.
Speaker 3: Now she was back with a check to pay for
Speaker 3: the gun. She had told the ATF that she suspected
Speaker 3: that Fernwood was selling guns illegally. It's not clear if
Speaker 3: she really believed this. This is Sarah Jane being interviewed
Speaker 3: by Ben Williams for KPIX in San Francisco.
Speaker 7: So, the man who went with you to buy the
Speaker 7: thirty eighth that you found at the President was a
Speaker 7: government agent. Yes, his name was Chuck or something like that. Yes,
Speaker 7: what was his role in helping ut to buy a gun?
Speaker 8: He wasn't helping me buy a gun. And that's a
Speaker 8: part of the very in my world was falling apart
Speaker 8: at the end. There were a variety of pressures that
Speaker 8: were brought to bear on me, and there was a
Speaker 8: little bit of blackmail on the part of the SFPD,
Speaker 8: and I got trapped into something and it was the
Speaker 8: kind of thing that was happening to me at the end.
Speaker 3: It seems likely that this half hearted attempt to set
Speaker 3: up Mark Fernwood was in response to or perceived pressure
Speaker 3: from law enforcement to give them something useful. She'd been
Speaker 3: largely shunned by the radical left after confessing that she
Speaker 3: had been an FBI informant. Her need for connection as
Speaker 3: she became increasingly isolated, led her to continue to work
Speaker 3: with the San Francisco Police Department, the FBI, and other
Speaker 3: agencies just for the human contact. Some of the pressures
Speaker 3: she perceived may have been her own need to continue
Speaker 3: to fuel those relationships. The trip to Danville came to
Speaker 3: very little. The ATF agent called Chuck, walked around looking
Speaker 3: at things but saying little. Sarah Jane paid Mark for
Speaker 3: the forty four and made small talk. Then they left.
Speaker 3: There was no indication that Fernwood was doing anything illegal
Speaker 3: more biographer Jerry Spieler.
Speaker 9: So nothing happened with that. But you know, she used
Speaker 9: that saying, look, I really help with what you're doing.
Speaker 9: You know, I'm really helping you do these things. So
Speaker 9: she wanted to make herself look important in helping the
Speaker 9: government do what they needed to do.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane and Chuck drove back to San Francisco. She
Speaker 4: returned to her apartment at two thirty to find two
Speaker 4: San Francisco police officers waiting for her. Jack O'sheay had
Speaker 4: sent them. They asked her if she had a weapon,
Speaker 4: and she said that she had a forty four in
Speaker 4: her purse. They searched her car and found two boxes
Speaker 4: of ammunition and eleven loose rounds. At the time, this
Speaker 4: amounted to a misdemeanor offense in California. The officers told
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane that they were going to take her to
Speaker 4: the local precinct office. A blond woman emerged from Sarah
Speaker 4: Jane's apartment and said she'd go with Sarah Jane to
Speaker 4: the police station. This woman is believed to have been
Speaker 4: a member of the radical group Tribal Thumb, who lived
Speaker 4: with Sarah Jane for a couple of weeks that September.
Speaker 4: The officers didn't know this, of course, and allowed her
Speaker 4: to accompany Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane was held in the
Speaker 4: station until about four in the afternoon, long enough that
Speaker 4: she wouldn't have time to travel the forty miles to
Speaker 4: Palo Alto to see President Ford. Then an SFBD lieutenant
Speaker 4: called the Secret Service to see if they wanted the
Speaker 4: SFPD to continue to hold Sarah Jane. The response they
Speaker 4: could let her go. The Secret Service planned to see
Speaker 4: her that night, so she was allowed to leave and
Speaker 4: return to her apartment. At about eight thirty that evening,
Speaker 4: two Secret Service agents, Gary Yager and Martin Haskell Junior,
Speaker 4: arrived at Sarah Jane's apartment. There is no mention of
Speaker 4: the blonde woman in accounts of this encounter. The two
Speaker 4: agents took Sarah Jane to the Federal building on Golden
Speaker 4: Gate Drive and interviewed her for about an hour and
Speaker 4: a half. The Senate would later hold hearings investigating whether
Speaker 4: law enforcement had made errors in their dealings with Sarah
Speaker 4: Jane and the hours leading up to her attempt on Ford.
Speaker 4: At one of the hearings, Gary Yager described their conversation
Speaker 4: with Sarah Jane at the Secret Service office. She was
Speaker 4: hesitant to talk and became a little upset, saying something
Speaker 4: like I'm in a fine kettle of fish. The agents
Speaker 4: asked her why she carried a gun. She said because
Speaker 4: her life had been threatened, and this apparently was an
Speaker 4: adequate explanation. They asked her whether she planned to shoot
Speaker 4: Ford or perhaps a demonstrator. According to their testimony. She
Speaker 4: calmly replied no to both questions. She also said that
Speaker 4: she had no animosity towards Ford or his administration, which
Speaker 4: she considered uncontroversial. As the interview wound down, one of
Speaker 4: the agents phoned SFPD Inspector Jack O'sheay O'shee told the
Speaker 4: agent what he knew about Sarah Jane, her background, her
Speaker 4: work is an informant for both the SFPD and the FBI,
Speaker 4: and that he felt as though he knew her personally.
Speaker 4: When he was done, the agent asked him if there
Speaker 4: was anything else. He said no. After the interview was completed,
Speaker 4: the agents concluded that Sarah Jane was not of sufficient
Speaker 4: ptime detection interest to warrant surveillance. They released her from custody.
Speaker 4: It was sometime after one in the morning of September
Speaker 4: twenty second. Within sixteen hours, Sarah Jane would fire a
Speaker 4: shot at Gerald Ford after the break. After her release
Speaker 4: from Secret Service custody in the early morning hours of Monday,
Speaker 4: September twenty second, Sarah Jane presumably went home to sleep.
Speaker 4: By nine point fifteen, she was up and making a
Speaker 4: series of phone calls. She was clearly in a period
Speaker 4: of high stress exacerbated by her mental illness, she feared
Speaker 4: for her life. She later talked about this in her
Speaker 4: interview for Playboy magazine. I was going to get killed.
Speaker 4: I'm glad to see stories in the paper finally that
Speaker 4: people are admitting it. They had told me that if
Speaker 4: anyone was saying I was safe, I never heard it.
Speaker 4: I even got calls from people out of town saying,
Speaker 4: my god, do you know what we've heard from our
Speaker 4: underground contacts. They were calling to tell me I was
Speaker 4: going to be killed. When people began dying around me, though,
Speaker 4: I began to think maybe I was next. In an
Speaker 4: article following Sarah Jane's attempt, Carol Pogash wrote that a
Speaker 4: mutual friend of hers and Sarah Janes told her everything
Speaker 4: was coming together on her. She had moved to the
Speaker 4: Mission to be in the center of the action. She
Speaker 4: had made many enemies. I warned her she might be killed.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane felt as though she needed to prove to
Speaker 4: the left that she had chosen their side over that
Speaker 4: of the establishment, meaning the FBI, SFPD and so on. Or,
Speaker 4: to put it in terms we have already talked about,
Speaker 4: she wanted to prove that she was a member of
Speaker 4: the radical young and not Middle America. She had hoped
Speaker 4: that Ellen Hume's peace about her in the La Times
Speaker 4: might accomplish that.
Speaker 6: And this is what's so interesting about the power of
Speaker 6: the newspapers in those days. She expected that my story
Speaker 6: in the La Times explaining that she'd converted to the
Speaker 6: radical cause. She had spoken, you know, as an informant
Speaker 6: to the FBI, but her real heart now had converted.
Speaker 6: She expected that would save her life. And I didn't
Speaker 6: understand the extent to which she was hanging on that
Speaker 6: and waiting for that. I told her it was going
Speaker 6: to take a couple more days or weeks to get
Speaker 6: the story in the paper because we were waiting for
Speaker 6: the whole series to be finished. But the stakes for
Speaker 6: that story were very high for her. She believed it
Speaker 6: would save her life.
Speaker 4: One of the calls Sarah Jane made that morning was
Speaker 4: to Ellen. Ellen had been working all weekend with NARDA
Speaker 4: Zechino to finish a series on the state of radicalism
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy five. The publication dates had been moved
Speaker 4: up because of Patty Hurst's arrest.
Speaker 6: So Monday rolls around and I'd been up all night
Speaker 6: every night all weekend with NARDA. I was asleep and
Speaker 6: the phone rings in my home and it's a switchboard
Speaker 6: saying someone named Sarah Jane Morris or Sally Moore is
Speaker 6: calling you from San Francisco. Will you take the call
Speaker 6: because they would have patched it through to me. And
Speaker 6: I said, oh, tell her to call back later, you know,
Speaker 6: because i'd pro finally gone to bed.
Speaker 4: What Ellen didn't know was that Sarah Jane thought that
Speaker 4: the piece about her was supposed to run on that day, Monday,
Speaker 4: the twenty second, It was actually slated for Wednesday, the
Speaker 4: twenty fourth, So on Monday morning, when she looked at
Speaker 4: the La Times, the story wasn't there. She presumably called
Speaker 4: Ellen to ask her what had happened, but Ellen didn't
Speaker 4: take her call. Sarah Jane told Playboy Charles Bates, special
Speaker 4: agent in charge of the San Francisco office, told me,
Speaker 4: if the FBI did not like anything in the proposed story,
Speaker 4: they would ask some higher ups at the publication to
Speaker 4: edit it out. That they had done that before. She
Speaker 4: felt her life was in danger. She needed to prove
Speaker 4: herself to the radical left. The article she thought would
Speaker 4: save her hadn't appeared, and Gerald Ford was in town
Speaker 4: that day. Sarah Jane made other calls that morning. She
Speaker 4: called Martin Haskell, one of the Secret Service agents who
Speaker 4: had interviewed her just hours before. He was an inn.
Speaker 4: She called Bert Worthington, a contact of hers in the FBI.
Speaker 4: He was an in either. She called Jack O'shay at
Speaker 4: the SFPD. An operator said that she could take a
Speaker 4: message for O'Shea, but Sarah Jane hung up without leaving one.
Speaker 4: She may have made other calls as well. We only
Speaker 4: know for sure of one other call that morning, made
Speaker 4: to the gun dealing hobbyist Mark Fernwood. Sarah Jane called
Speaker 4: Fernwood at nine thirty. She said that she wanted to
Speaker 4: buy a gun for a friend who needed it for protection.
Speaker 4: Fernwood said that he wanted to see this other goal
Speaker 4: before he sold her a weapon. Sarah Jane told him
Speaker 4: that her friend wasn't available to come out to Danville
Speaker 4: that day, but that she needed the gun. Fernwood was reluctant,
Speaker 4: but everything that he'd seen of Sarah Jane made him
Speaker 4: believe that she was responsible and trustworthy. He agreed to
Speaker 4: sell her a thirty eight for her friend. Sarah Jane
Speaker 4: drove out to Danville. Fern One would later say that
Speaker 4: she was friendly. He offered her soda and she drank
Speaker 4: it quickly while they made small talk. Eventually, she bought
Speaker 4: the thirty eight with a check for one hundred and
Speaker 4: forty five dollars. As she left, Fernwood mentioned that she
Speaker 4: might want to check the sight on the gun, that
Speaker 4: it was a little off. She got back in her
Speaker 4: car and drove towards San Francisco. In the days that followed,
Speaker 4: Fernwood would say that the thirty eight was a self
Speaker 4: defense gun, not suitable for an assassination. Sarah Jane would
Speaker 4: later claim that she wanted someone to stop her from
Speaker 4: trying to kill President Ford. She'd made those calls in
Speaker 4: the morning, but no one was there to take them. Now,
Speaker 4: she sped down Highway six eighty from Danville towards San Francisco.
Speaker 4: As she drove, she had the thirty eight in her
Speaker 4: lap and she loaded it with bullets. She hoped police
Speaker 4: would pull her over for speeding, find the gun, and detainer,
Speaker 4: but that didn't happen. She crossed the Bay Bridge into
Speaker 4: San Francisco and made her way to the underground parking
Speaker 4: garage at Union Square and parked. She left the garage
Speaker 4: and walked to the Saint Francis Hotel. Demonstrators and supporters
Speaker 4: stood behind cordons across the street from the hotel. Television
Speaker 4: cameras were on hand. Uniform police were posted at three
Speaker 4: foot intervals along the street. Sarah Jane walked toward the
Speaker 4: hotel's side entrance on Post Street. This was where she
Speaker 4: thought Ford would eventually exit the building. She stepped into
Speaker 4: the crowd, hoping to disappear among the masses. Another person
Speaker 4: in the crowd that day was a Michigan raised ex
Speaker 4: marine named Oliver Sipple. He hadn't come out of any
Speaker 4: political conviction. He was just curious.
Speaker 5: Well all the guys from Michigan, I've never seen him
Speaker 5: the person. I'll stick around and see him. You like
Speaker 5: in series, it looks.
Speaker 4: Like Oliver Sipple. And Sarah Jane and the rest of
Speaker 4: the crowd settled into wait for Ford to emerge from
Speaker 4: his hotel, scheduled for about four that afternoon. Jerry Speeler, she.
Speaker 3: Was forty feet away.
Speaker 9: She was right at the front of the rope and
Speaker 9: forty feet away from him when he walked out. So
Speaker 9: there was a woman from one of the newspapers. Who
Speaker 9: was there, Carol Pogas, who saw Sarah Jane, who remembered
Speaker 9: her from all of the Pean activities and that kind
Speaker 9: of stuff.
Speaker 4: Journalist Carol Pogash.
Speaker 10: My city editor, had sent me up there with the
Speaker 10: idea that, you know, maybe there'll be some nut whatever,
Speaker 10: just keep an eye out. And so I looked around.
Speaker 10: I didn't see anything. I talked to Sarah Jane Moore.
Speaker 4: Carol Pogash later wrote an article for the San Francisco
Speaker 4: Chronicle about seeing Sarah Jane that day. She wrote, we
Speaker 4: made small talk.
Speaker 3: She mentioned something about a trip to Palo Alto, her
Speaker 3: son Fred and my recent marriage. She appeared composed.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane also told Carol about her visit from the
Speaker 4: Secret Service a previous night. Carol thought Sarah Jane seemed
Speaker 4: excited by the visit. After a brief conversation, Carol left
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane in the crowd.
Speaker 10: I just thought, well, then I'll go back to the
Speaker 10: city room. So I wasn't there when he came out,
Speaker 10: because there was nothing I had to worry about so
Speaker 10: much for my intuition.
Speaker 4: As the weight went on, Sarah Jane became concerned.
Speaker 9: And Sarah Jane was worried that Ford wouldn't come out
Speaker 9: in time because she needed to go pick up her
Speaker 9: son from school.
Speaker 4: The crowd cheered as a man emerged from the hotel,
Speaker 4: but it was a false alarm. It was not the President,
Speaker 4: just a staffer who looked a little like Sarah Jane
Speaker 4: pulled the thirty eight halfway from her purse and then
Speaker 4: pushed it back in. No one saw the gun. Then
Speaker 4: Ford appeared.
Speaker 11: About three thousand people had gathered along the street where
Speaker 11: mister Ford's bullet proved limousine had been parked. The President
Speaker 11: waved to the crowds and they had cheered him, and
Speaker 11: that's when it happened.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane pulled the gun from her purse and held
Speaker 4: it shoulder high in a two handed cup and saucer position,
Speaker 4: with one hand bracing the gun from below. She knew
Speaker 4: that he was wearing a bulletproof vest, so she shot
Speaker 4: at his face.
Speaker 11: A shot rang out. At first it appeared mister Ford
Speaker 11: had been hit, but he was not injured and had
Speaker 11: just ducked as Secret Service agents hustled him into the limousine.
Speaker 11: The shot had come from across the street, no more
Speaker 11: than forty feet away the bullet. Ricougeted off a taxi
Speaker 11: and struck the driver a glancing blow, but the spent
Speaker 11: slug caused only a min scratch. The cabby recovered it
Speaker 11: and gave it the police.
Speaker 4: Oliver Sipple, the former marine standing next to Sarah Jane,
Speaker 4: acted quickly preventing Sarah Jane from getting off a second shot.
Speaker 5: For some strange reason, I looked down and I had
Speaker 5: seen Sarah Jane Margot enterprise and pull me. I yelled,
Speaker 5: the bitch has got a gun before I made the
Speaker 5: lunch for as the trigger was going on, I grabbed
Speaker 5: in about ten agents and twenty police for on us all.
Speaker 8: I just like that, always felt that I would only
Speaker 8: have a chance at one shot. I had practiced with
Speaker 8: only one shot. I actually had time even before simple
Speaker 8: I hit my arm or shoulder or whatever does he hit,
Speaker 8: I actually had time to get off a second shot.
Speaker 8: I was stunned that I missed, Absolutely stunned. It was
Speaker 8: even it was a freaky thing because it was it
Speaker 8: was like target practice. The man came out, looked straight
Speaker 8: at us. I have I could not have asked, you know,
Speaker 8: for a better shock.
Speaker 9: She didn't test it. It was supposed to be target practice,
Speaker 9: but Ford, when I interviewed him, wanted to be able
Speaker 9: to walk amongst the people. He wanted to be there
Speaker 9: for his constituents, and so there was a little more
Speaker 9: security when at the Saint Francis Hotel, but he still
Speaker 9: wanted to be with people.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane was carried by police and Secret Service agents
Speaker 4: into the Saint Francis Hotel and up to the mezzanine,
Speaker 4: where she was questioned in the Borgia room. According to
Speaker 4: an affidavit, Sarah Jane confessed a Secret Service agent, Gary Yoager,
Speaker 4: who had questioned her earlier that morning, that she had
Speaker 4: fired the shot at President Ford. She was arraigned later
Speaker 4: that night on a charge of attempting to assassinate the
Speaker 4: president of the United States. She was assigned a federal
Speaker 4: public defender named James Hewitt. Bail was set at half
Speaker 4: a million. Bar Ford, meanwhile, had already left the state.
Speaker 11: He was not injured this afternoon, but someone did take
Speaker 11: a shot at him as he emerged from the Saint
Speaker 11: Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Mister Ford was hustled
Speaker 11: into his limousine and taken directly to the airport. The
Speaker 11: plane took off about a half hour or so ago
Speaker 11: from San Francisco and is now en route back to Washington.
Speaker 4: Alan Hume, who had refused Sarah Jane's call that morning,
Speaker 4: had no idea what had happened.
Speaker 6: So when I got up later and went into the office,
Speaker 6: I arrived in the downtown office of the La Times,
Speaker 6: Huge City Room, and all the editors were waiting at
Speaker 6: my desk, and they handed me a picture from the
Speaker 6: wire service. Is this your source, they said, And it
Speaker 6: was Sally. It was Sarah Jane Moore. She had just
Speaker 6: tried to shoot the President of the United States, and
Speaker 6: she'd almost succeeded. So of course, I'm I mean complete,
Speaker 6: literally in shock. I go through the motions of saying yes,
Speaker 6: I took the sidebar that I had already prepared, saying
Speaker 6: she was no madahurry because for one thing, she talked
Speaker 6: too much. I had all this colorful sidebar ready, and
Speaker 6: so what we did was we put a new lead
Speaker 6: on it, a new top. It said, the woman who
Speaker 6: just tried to kill President Ford was blah. And then
Speaker 6: my whole sidebar ran. It turned out later some of
Speaker 6: those details she had lied to me about so it
Speaker 6: hadn't been fact checked. And then I was devastated because
Speaker 6: I hadn't taken the call, and I figured I was
Speaker 6: complicit in her near assassination of the presidency. If I
Speaker 6: had taken the call, I probably could have talked her
Speaker 6: out of it, I thought at the time, I thought,
Speaker 6: oh my god. Turned out she called a lot of
Speaker 6: people that morning. I wasn't the only one, but I
Speaker 6: didn't know that, and I thought, oh boy. So I
Speaker 6: went home and you know, after I did my story
Speaker 6: and I crawled home and just I hadn't had any sleep.
Speaker 6: It was just a wreck. So I'm having dinner that
Speaker 6: night with my husband and the phone rings and it's
Speaker 6: Sally's public defender, the lawyer they've assigned her. She's in jail,
Speaker 6: and he says she won't cooperate with me, the lawyer
Speaker 6: who's both the defender, until she talks to you. Can
Speaker 6: you come up here? Because there was no way to
Speaker 6: get her on the legally to get her on the phone,
Speaker 6: so I called the last plane to San Francisco, a
Speaker 6: nine pm shuttle, and checked into the Cliff Hotel. And
Speaker 6: when I got to the Cliff Hotel, I called the
Speaker 6: lawyer and said I'm here, he said, good, come to
Speaker 6: the arraignment tomorrow and we'll take it from there.
Speaker 4: Sarah Jane had taken her shot and missed, but the
Speaker 4: question remained why the answer would need to go beyond
Speaker 4: just the events of that day to the larger question
Speaker 4: of how she became radicalized to that degree. It was
Speaker 4: a question that could be asked about net From and
Speaker 4: Patty Hurst too. Simply put, what had happened to change
Speaker 4: them so dramatically and so rapidly next time on the
Speaker 4: final episode of this season of Rip Current.
Speaker 1: Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary
Speaker 1: Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sanoff, Show art by
Speaker 1: jeffany As Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk, Rema
Speaker 1: O'Kelly and Noams Griffin. Supervising producer Trelie Young. Executive producers
Speaker 1: Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick.
Speaker 5: Hear.
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