By William “Skip” Deegans
On November 26, 1975 Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme was found guilty of attempting to assassinate U. S. President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California, with a 45-caliber pistol. The trial was a spectacle with U. S. Marshalls having to carry Fromme into the courtroom. The climax occurred the last day of the trial when Fromme threw and hit the prosecutor in the head with an apple.
Raised in a middle class family in California, Fromme had been involved with drugs and alcohol and was kicked out of her home by her father while she was a student at a local community college. Homeless at 18, she fell into the clutches of Charles Manson, head of a California cult known as “the family.” Manson who stirred his followers to violence was convicted and imprisoned for the murder of seven people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. He died in prison in 2017.
Fromme was sentenced to life in prison on December 17, 1975 and began serving her term in California. When the first Federal maximum security facility for women was completed at the Federal Correction Institution for Women (FCI) in Alderson, West Virginia, Fromme was transferred there in 1977 along with West Virginia native Sara Jane Moore who had also been convicted for her attempt to assassinate President Ford at a different time and place. Prison authorities reported Fromme behaved well at FCI, but she escaped on December 23, 1987. Some 100 searchers combed the area around the prison, and she was found the next day at a nearby fish camp. Fromme was moved to a prison in Lexington, Kentucky, then to a Florida prison, and finally to the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas where she was released on parole in 2009. By then, she was 60 years old.
Fromme was last reported to be living with a boyfriend and ex-con in upstate New York. In 2019, she told ABC News that she was still in love with Manson.
Sources: The Sacramento Bee, Las Angeles Times, New York Post, Forbes.
