Woman who tried to kill President Ford released

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sara Jane Moore, one of two women who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a three-week span in 1975, was freed on parole on Monday after almost 32 years in prison, a government spokesman said.

Moore, 77, who began her sentence January 15, 1976, left the low-security women's prison in Dublin, California, where she had been serving a life term, said Mike Truman, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She was released on Monday morning.

"I'm very surprised that they would release someone who would try to assassinate a president," said Geri Spieler, a California writer who had a 29-year acquaintanceship with Moore and has written an unpublished biography of her.

Ford expressed opposition to any parole in a 2003 interview. "Just because the president is left standing may be a matter of luck ... the malice is the same, and the attempt to kill is the same," Spieler quoted Ford as saying in her interview notes.

Moore aimed a gun at Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, but a bystander grabbed her arm as she tried to fire and her single shot missed.

Moore was quoted as saying after her arrest that she regretted failing to kill Ford but she later expressed remorse. "I am very glad I did not succeed," Moore told a San Francisco television station in January 2007. "I know now that I was wrong to try."

Moore said she was motivated by a zeal for revolutionary politics and Ford's pardon of his predecessor, resigned president Richard Nixon. She said she wrote Ford to apologize a few days after the attempt. He did not reply.

Spieler described Moore as "a very complex, very manipulative, sort of frightening American. Yet she is very bright and very charming. "

"It's hard to know with her what's the truth," she said.

Congress abolished federal parole for anyone sentenced after November 1987. Moore remained eligible for parole because she was sentenced before the change, Truman said.

Ford, who was in office from August 1974 to January 1977, died on December 26, 2006, at the age of 93.

Seventeen days before Moore's assassination attempt, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme pointed a gun a Ford near the California state Capitol. Fromme, a follower of convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, was convicted of attempted assassination and is serving a life sentence at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.

Fromme's sentence also includes the possible parole, Truman said.

John Hinckley, who wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined in a psychiatric facility. He has been allowed occasional visits to his parents' home.

(Editing by Bill Trott)