The Star-Ledger
HOUSTON — The Charles Manson follower convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford is set to be released from a federal prison in Texas later this month after serving more than 30 years behind bars.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a 26-year-old disciple of the cult murderer Manson when she aimed a semiautomatic .45- caliber pistol at Ford in September 1975 in Sacramento, Calif. Secret Service agents grabbed her and Ford was unhurt.
Fromme, now 60, is scheduled to be released on parole from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the court-appointed attorney who represented her at trial. Fromme, who got a life term, became the first person sentenced under a special federal law covering assaults on U.S. presidents, a statute enacted after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Ford was walking to the California State Capitol from his hotel when Fromme pushed through the crowd, drew the pistol from a holster on her thigh and pointed it at the president as he shook hands with well-wishers. She was restrained by Secret Service agents who wrested the gun away from her and led the president to safety.
Less than two weeks later, another would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, fired at Ford in San Francisco but missed.
In a 1987 interview with CNN affiliate WCHS, Fromme, then housed in West Virginia, recalled the president “had his hands out and was waving ... and he looked like cardboard to me. But at the same time, I had ejected the bullet in my apartment and I used the gun as it was .”
She said she knew Ford was in town and near her, “and I said, “I gotta go and talk to him,’ and then I thought, “That’s foolish. He’s not going to stop and talk to you.’ People have already shown you can lay blood in front of them and they’re not, you know, they don’t think anything of it. I said, “Maybe I’ll take the gun,’ and I thought, “I have to do this. This is the time.’ ”
She said it never occurred to her that she could wind up in prison. Asked whether she had any regrets, Fromme said, “No. No, I don’t. I feel it was fate.” However, she said she thought that her incarceration was “unnecessary” and that she couldn’t see herself repeating her offense.
“My argument to the jury was, if she wanted to kill him, she would have shot him,” John Virga, a Sacramento attorney appointed to defend Fromme, told CNN yesterday. “She’d been around guns. And let’s be realistic: We know the Manson family, at least some of them, are killers.”
It was unclear why Fromme was at Carswell, a facility that specializes in providing medical and mental health services to female offenders. A spokeswoman for the bureau of prisons did not immediately return a phone call yesterday seeking comment.
“I knew some day she would be released,” said Virga.
Fromme served time in at least two other facilities before Carswell.
She escaped from a female prison in Alderson, W.Va., on Dec. 23, 1987, and was recaptured about two miles away on Christmas Day after a massive search. She was sentenced to an additional 15 months in prison for the escape.
Fromme had said she escaped from prison to be closer to Manson.
Manson is serving a life term in San Quentin in California for the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and eight others. Fromme, one of his “family” of followers, was not implicated in those attacks.
Information from the Associated Press and CNN.com was used to compile this report.
Copyright 2009 Newark Morning Ledger Co.