She was one of Charles Manson’s earliest disciples, a waif-like flower child who rhapsodized about LSD and redwood trees, and one day in 1975 she brought a loaded gun to see the president.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 26, had been living in a $100-a-month attic apartment in an old Victorian on P Street, a few blocks from the Sacramento statehouse. She had moved to the city to be close to Manson, who for a time had been incarcerated in nearby Folsom for the home-invasion murders in Los Angeles that made him infamous.
Fromme did not appear to harbor any specific animus toward President Ford, but he represented an establishment she and the Manson clan despised. She had been distributing apocalyptic news releases. That summer, speaking to the Associated Press, she promised carnage while invoking two of Manson’s crime scenes and a massacre in Vietnam.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
“If Nixon’s reality — wearing a new Ford face — continues to run the country against the law, our homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca houses and My Lai put together,” she said.
Then, as now, the Secret Service had a long list of people who posed a potential threat to the president. Despite her menacing rhetoric, Fromme’s name did not make the list.
She was waiting quietly near an orange tree in Capitol Park around 10 a.m. on Sept. 5, wearing a hand-sewn Red Riding Hood-style cloak that was supposed to symbolize a newly ascetic lifestyle of sacrifice and activism. On her leg, beneath her dress, was a jury-rigged holster with a borrowed .45 handgun that had been developed for the military.
Having just spoken to a group of business leaders at breakfast, Ford left the Senator Hotel and crossed the street to the park. He was going to see Gov. Jerry Brown at his office, a walk of maybe 150 yards. Hundreds of people had gathered to catch a glimpse of him and shake his hand.
Karen Skelton, then 14, had ditched school for a look at the president. She recalls the crowd was three or four people deep, and Fromme was a few feet ahead of her, to the right.
“I thought she was a little odd, because she was in this red robe,” Skelton told The Times in a recent interview. “At one point she sort of looked around and looked up, and said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful day.’”
The president had opted against traveling to the Capitol in his armored car, and Larry Buendorf, a 37-year-old Secret Service agent, was part of the security detail accompanying him on foot.
“Rather than a motorcade, he said, ‘I think I’ll just walk,’” Buendorf recalled this month. “It was unplanned, so everybody hustled to get things in place as best we could. A lot of people lined up along the sidewalk. He was just walking along, shaking hands. I was right at his shoulder, to make sure nobody held on too long and make sure nobody took his watch. My concentration was on the hands that were reaching out to him.”