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