The criminal Sara Jane Moore, born February 15, 1930, in Charleston, attempted to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford on September 22, 1975, in San Francisco. Moore, whose maiden name was Sara Jane Kahn, graduated from Charleston's Stonewall Jackson High School in 1947. She later moved to California, where she joined left-wing groups and became an FBI informant.

Only 17 days before Moore attempted to shoot President Ford, Charles Manson associate Lynette ‘‘Squeaky’’ Fromme had also tried to assassinate the president, in Sacramento, California. Like Fromme, Moore received a life sentence and was taken to the Federal Penitentiary for Women at Alderson in Greenbrier County. Moore's assassination attempt has never been linked to the earlier attempt by Fromme. In February 1979, Moore escaped from Alderson but was captured three hours later. She was sentenced to an additional three years on the escape charge. Later, she was transferred to a federal prison in Dublin, California. Moore was released from prison on December 31, 2007, “to an undisclosed location” after serving 32 years of her life sentence. She later emerged from seclusion to do high profile interviews with various news media.

In her first TV appearance, in 2009 on NBC's Today show, she expressed thankfulness that her assassination attempt had failed. Regarding her brief escape from Alderson, she said, "If I knew that I was going to be captured several hours later, I would have stopped at the local bar just to get a drink and a burger."

Anecdotal evidence and some historical documentation suggest that President William McKinley's assassin (1901), Leon Czolgosz, briefly lived in Charleston and worked at a nail factory in the Kanawha City section of town shortly before his successful assassination attempt. Ironically, in the late 1930s, as children, Moore and future criminal/cult leader Charles Manson lived less than a mile apart in the North Charleston part of town.

Moore appears as a character in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's 1990 musical Assassins.