Housewife Assassin: The Woman Who Tried to Kill President Ford

by Geri Spieler

Overview

United States History award-winner from the International Book Awards, Best Nonfiction True Crime award from BookFest, and Five Stars from Reader's Favorite among other accolades.

"Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this.” ―Publishers Weekly 

President Gerald Ford suffered two attempts on his life during his term in office: one by a young woman in Charles Manson's Family, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and the other by a far more unlikely candidate—an average middle-aged mother of five—Sara Jane Moore. After thirty years in contact with Moore in prison, journalist Geri Spieler deconstructs her life in Housewife Assassin, tracing the path from Moore’s small-town upbringing in West Virginia to that fateful moment when she tried to assassinate the president. 

Throughout Moore’s dodgy life she hid her identity and misled those around her. Through the turbulent 60s and 70s, she married five times, abandoned children, faked amnesia, befriended Patty Hearst’s father, became a revolutionary, and worked as an FBI informant turned double agent feeding information to the underground radicals, all before the assassination attempt. 

From Spieler’s insider correspondence and independent research, including interviews with President Ford himself, she confirms details (the gunshot missed the President’s head by six inches) and debunks others (Sara Jane did not “shoot wild” as the press had reported) to deliver a compelling profile of a society lady turned elusive assassin. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635768251
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	644,208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Geri Spieler is an investigative journalist and award-winning speaker who has written articles for the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Huffington Post, Westways, and was a featured correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She founded and edited Electronic Commerce News, a technology journal published by Phillips Business Information, which led to a six-year assignment as a Research Director and Analyst for the Gartner Group. She is president of the California Writers Club, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Authors Guild, Women’s National Book Association, the Internet Society, and Book Critics Circle. Spieler is a United States History award-winner from the International Book Awards, won the Best Nonfiction True Crime award from Bookfest, and received Five Stars from Reader's Favorite for her work, among other accolades. She lives in Northern California with her husband, her pet chickens and her fruit trees.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue xi

1 The Girl Who Disappeared 1

2 The Unhappy Housewife 13

3 The Doctor's Wife 23

4 Changing Times 35

5 San Francisco's Radical Underground 49

6 The Would-Be Activist 59

7 The Accountant 65

8 Federal Stranglehold 71

9 Fired 81

10 The Spy 91

11 The Mission 99

12 Doubling 107

13 Hunted 115

14 Testing Security 125

15 The Unlikely Assassin 131

16 "I Acted Alone" 137

17 Guilty 143

18 Making a Statement 155

19 The Prisoner 165

20 Settling In and Becoming Queen 175

21 Solitary 183

Afterword to the 2009 Edition 193

Afterword: Thirteen Years Later 199

Appendix 205

Notes 207

Bibliography 221

Permissions 223

Editorial Reviews

"Spieler offers a portrait of an erratic, unstable woman with a protean capacity to shift identities, with the 1960s and '70s as a dramatic backdrop. Fans of true crime accounts or contemporary history will savor this.”  

―Publishers Weekly 
 

“In her investigative exploration, Spieler leverages the unexpected narrative of Sara Jane Moore—an everyday housewife turned attempted presidential assassin—as a startling exposé of systemic issues within the U.S. intelligence network. The remarkable story of Moore, who managed to evade the detection of agencies like the FBI and Secret Service, presents a compelling case study in the perils of interagency miscommunication and inadequate threat evaluation. Spieler challenges us to ponder: how can such glaring oversights occur within our intelligence apparatus, and more importantly, what measures can be implemented to safeguard our nation from similar, potentially more successful threats in the future? . . . Housewife Assassin thus stands as a critical resource for all those invested in the security of our nation—policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and ordinary citizens alike. . . . It's a stirring testament to the urgent need for reform, and a roadmap to achieving a more secure future for our nation.”
—USA TODAY

"It is the obligation of the thoughtful journalist to tell us something meaningful that we don't already know. In Taking Aim at the President, Geri Spieler is more than up to the task. The byzantine tale of Sara Jane Moore's double, triple and quadruple lives, with so many bizarre groups - including the federal government - exploiting her vulnerabilities, is the stuff of Hollywood fiction. The fact that it's all true, and told with precision by Spieler, raises Sara Jane's story to something significantly more than a footnote to history."  

―Alan Weisman, author of Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle, The Kingdom, the Power & the End of Empire in America and Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather 
 
"Geri Spieler has done a marvelous job of unraveling the details surrounding one of the most bizarre events in American history, Sara Jane Moore's attack on Gerald Ford.” 
―James Dalessandro, author of 1906 and Citizen Jane 
 
"A well-written, fascinating story about an inexplicable moment in American History."  

―Carl Stern, Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, and former NBC News correspondent 
 
"Talk about truth being stranger than fiction! Captivating."  

―The San Francisco Chronicle  

From the Publisher