Fromme: 'There Is a Gun Pointed'

"I wasn't going to shoot him," complained the prisoner in solitary confinement. "I just wanted to get some attention for a new trial for Charlie and the girls." Why did she take such a potentially catastrophic action to make her point? "Well, you know, when people around you treat you like a child and pay no attention to the things you say, you have to do something."

Calmly, almost casually, Lynette ("Squeaky") Fromme, 26, last week discussed her reasons for aiming a loaded Colt .45 automatic at President Ford in Sacramento, Calif. She claimed to have endangered the life of the President —and thereby revived the national nightmare of political assassination —solely to win a new trial for her master and mentor, Charles Manson. The psychopathic guru had been sentenced to jail for life, along with three of his women followers, for the sadistic slayings of Actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969. Somehow the act of threatening Ford made sense to Squeaky Fromme. Referring to the Manson "family," a Department of Justice official said: "They think that the people will say 'Hey, they mean business. They kill Presidents. Let's free Manson so they won't go on killing Presidents.' "

Just how close Fromme came to killing the President became clearer when it was learned that she had known all along that she had to pull back the slide of her Colt .45 in order to fire the weapon —a procedure that she did not follow as Ford approached. A friend, who requested anonymity, reported that early last year Fromme was taken by a boy friend to the Sharp's Park rifle range in South San Francisco. Squeaky was said to have been afraid of the .45—she did not like its noise or kick—but she did learn to handle a .22 pistol that had a similar slide mechanism. Why, then, had she not pulled back the slide on her Colt? Says her friend: "Squeaky's a spacy girl, and it's just like her to forget to pull the slide."

Last week some 50 Secret Servicemen, FBI agents and California police were frantically trying to determine if Squeaky had acted in a plot with other members of the Manson family. They now number about 60 men and women, mostly in their mid-20s, who are living on the loose, mainly in California, and who are still convinced that the sly and Satan-eyed Manson is the second Christ. Searching for evidence, investigators carefully went through the attic apartment in downtown Sacramento that Squeaky had occupied with Sandra Good, 31, another Manson cultist. In recent months, the two women had been urging members of the Manson family not to give up the faith. They had also issued bombastic threats involving Ford that had been shrugged off by newsmen and officials as harmless rhetoric. But after examining the apartment and interviewing Manson himself in San Quentin, law officers reported that they had found no evidence of conspiracy.