Things started to go wrong for the Chase family not long after Suzy Chase-Motzkin suggested to her 85-year-old father, Philip Chase, that he sign up for a dating site.
At the time, Phil was bereft over the loss of his wife of 60 years, Marion Crouze Chase, who had died the year before. On a typical night, he found himself alone in the couple’s lakefront home in Whispering Pines, N.C., watching “Dancing With the Stars.” He longed for companionship.
Phil, a retired psychologist who had served in the Navy during World War II, followed his daughter’s advice. On eHarmony, he was matched with an 80-year-old woman in Coatesville, Pa., who gave her name as Sarah Kahn.
Sarah was well-read and loved to laugh, qualities Phil found attractive. They even shared the same birthday. They spent hours talking on the phone and then on Skype.
Now, more than 15 years after the relationship started, Phil’s daughter is filled with anguish. On a recent afternoon at her mountaintop home near Woodstock, N.Y., Suzy, who trains ski instructors for a living, seemed overwhelmed at times as she recalled everything her family had been through.
Laid out on a long wooden table were the email printouts, cassette tapes and transcripts of phone conversations she had saved — a catalog of the Chase family’s upheaval.
“‘Be careful what you wish for’ looms a little bit,” Suzy said, referring to her suggestion that her father try online dating.
His conversations with Sarah started in July 2010. A few weeks later, Phil drove from his home in North Carolina to the Catskills, where the Chase family owned land, to visit his two grown children — Suzy and her brother, Cru. He didn’t say much about his new friend. Just that they were hitting it off.
On his way back to North Carolina, Phil made a stop in Pennsylvania to meet Sarah face to face. They flirted and laughed over brunch. Then Sarah packed a suitcase and joined him for the rest of the drive south. She spent a week at the house in Whispering Pines.
After her visit, Phil tried to put into words what he was going through in an email to Suzy and Cru: “I cannot really convey to you the intensity of my feelings for her, as they are (with absolutely no disrespect for your mother) such as I have never felt before.”
As effusive as he was about his emotional state, he was less forthcoming about the woman he had fallen for. In the email, he offered only a thumbnail biography of Sarah, saying she had once lived in California, where she had been married to an executive at RKO Pictures. He added that her Hollywood experience had left her “extremely protective of her privacy.” He also mentioned that she was estranged from her children.
Days later, Phil emailed again to tell his children that Sarah had gone back to Pennsylvania, to close down her rental apartment there. She was moving in with him.
Suzy was alarmed. And determined to learn everything she could about Sarah Kahn. When an online search revealed nothing, she asked her father the name of the RKO film executive she had been married to. John Aalberg, he said.
Suzy Googled that name and the name of her father’s girlfriend. When she saw the results of her search, she started shaking: Sarah Kahn was better known as Sara Jane Moore. On Sept. 22, 1975, she had tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford with a .38 caliber revolver. She had been paroled in 2007, after having served more than 30 years of a life sentence in federal prison.
Suzy called her brother and got his voice mail. She screamed into the phone: “Cru! Call me as soon as you get this! Oh my God!”
A Double Life
The questions Suzy and Cru had to ask themselves — How do you accept someone new into the family? How do you determine if your elderly parent is fit to make major life decisions? — are faced by thousands of people every day.
The Chases experienced an extreme version: What if your dad found new love with someone who had tried to kill a U.S. president?
Sara Jane Moore died in September, at age 95, but for Phil’s loved ones, her impact is still being felt. She “just completely exploded our family dynamic,” Suzy said.
Suzy and Cru said a hallmark of their home when they were growing up was honesty. So they were especially frustrated when their father seemed unwilling to accept any account of Sara Jane’s life other than the one she presented to him. If he had read “Taking Aim at the President” by Geri Spieler, a deeply researched 2008 biography of Sara Jane, he would have learned of how troubled she had been long before she fired at President Ford.
Born Sara Jane Kahn in 1930, she grew up in a middle-class household in Charleston, W.V. She was described by a teacher quoted in Ms. Spieler’s book as “a little odd.” She seemed unable to connect with her peers, yet demanded to be the center of attention. At 16, she disappeared for three days, making her parents frantic with worry and she offered no explanation upon her return.
Her first marriage, to a Marine Corps staff sergeant, ended in divorce. She had three children with her second husband, an Air Force officer, but gave them up to her parents to raise. (A fourth child with the same father was born with serious complications and institutionalized.)
Living in Los Angeles during the 1960s, Sara Jane worked as an accountant at RKO studios. There she met the man who would become her third husband, John O. Aalberg, the Oscar-winning head of the RKO sound department, who had worked on the classics “Citizen Kane” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” After a month of marriage, and pregnant with their child, Sara Jane fled and started over once more, moving to the Bay Area.
By 1967, she was married again, this time to a doctor, and living in the East Bay city of Danville, Calif. While that marriage was disintegrating, Sara Jane became an activist.
In the wake of political assassinations, Vietnam and Watergate, revolutionary groups like the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army sought to achieve their aims through violent acts. In 1974, the S.L.A. kidnapped Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of the newspaper baron Randolph A. Hearst, from her college apartment in Berkeley.
As news of the kidnapping and Ms. Hearst’s involvement in a bank robbery made headlines, Sara Jane volunteered at People in Need, a food bank funded by Mr. Hearst at the S.L.A.’s behest. “God has sent me,” she reportedly told her colleagues, before taking over as the bookkeeper.
As she allied herself with other revolutionary groups, she also became an F.B.I. informant. In a few short years, Sara Jane had gone from an unhappy housewife to the star of her own spy drama.
It was a dangerous time to be a government mole. One of the activists she kept tabs on, Wilbert (Popeye) Jackson, was mysteriously murdered in his car in June 1975. Word got out about Sara Jane’s double life. She received death threats.
On Sept. 5, 1975, Lynette Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson known as Squeaky, aimed a .45-caliber pistol at President Ford while he was walking through a park in Sacramento. Secret Service agents subdued her before she was able to fire. In the wake of that failed attempt, Sara Jane, now a single mother living in the Mission District, decided to kill the president herself.
On the morning of Sept. 22, 1975, she made three phone calls: to a Secret Service agent; to her F.B.I. contact; and to a San Francisco Police Department inspector. She was unable to reach any of them. Then she made another call, to a local gun dealer. She said she wanted to buy a firearm on behalf of a friend.
President Ford was attending a meeting that day at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. Sara Jane waited outside in the crowd. When the president appeared, she raised her revolver and fired. “I was aiming for a headshot,” she said in an interview for the 2024 documentary “Suburban Fury.” She missed her target by inches. As she prepared to fire a second time, a former Marine, Oliver Sipple, grabbed her arm.
The image of a 45-year-old former housewife assassin puzzled the news media. Sara Jane offered muddled explanations about wanting to start a revolution. Though she would plead guilty, she was never fully contrite. “There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun,” she said shortly after her arrest.
In 1979, while serving a life term, she made news again when she and another prisoner scaled a 12-foot-high barbed wire fence at a correctional facility in West Virginia. She was captured four hours after her escape.
Ms. Spieler, the author, tried to understand Sara Jane’s character while interviewing her and corresponding with her in the years before the publication of her book. “No matter how wonderful you were or what you did, she would turn and accuse you of something,” Ms. Spieler said. “But Sara Jane was very charming. She would be your neighbor, your aunt, your friend. No one saw her coming.”
‘More Damn Fun Together’
In the late summer of 2010, Suzy and Cru told their father what they had learned about Sara Jane and warned him to be careful.
Phil knew all about her past, he said. And given his Ph.D in psychology and the decades he had spent working in that field, he felt able to offer a diagnosis: At the time of the assassination attempt, he wrote in an email to his children, Sara Jane was “mightily confused and emotionally fragile.” Furthermore, she had paid her debt to society. And she simply made him happy.
“We have more damn fun together,” he wrote.
The Chase family wondered how their kind, rational, loving patriarch could embrace someone with such a past. Phil had been a corporate psychologist for companies like Pillsbury and a professor at Marist College, a warmhearted man who liked to share his knowledge at the dinner table. His wife of more than six decades, Marion, was Sara Jane’s opposite, an avid golfer and painter who loved to throw parties.
But the children knew from comments Phil had made that their parents’ marriage had been sexless for years. By contrast, Sara Jane showered Phil with compliments about his successful career, his broad shoulders and his sexual prowess. Even before they had met in person, she called him her “Dazzlin’ Amazin’ Dude.”
“She was mentally stimulating for him in a way that other women weren’t,” said Phil’s granddaughter Chelsey Alfano, 36. “To me, it felt like he met her and it was this fascinating pet project.”
While Phil defended his new relationship, Sara Jane started making the case for herself in emails and phone calls with his two children. Suzy recorded some of the calls and is now using the recordings, along with the old emails, to write a memoir.
In an email sent in late August 2010, a month after meeting Phil, Sara Jane told Suzy and Cru that she loved their father “with an intensity I have never known before.” She added that she “would not ever do anything to hurt this delightful man.” She also acknowledged that, at the start of the relationship, she had not been forthcoming about her past, describing herself as “not totally open but honest.”
She tried to elicit sympathy by describing what life was like for someone in her position. “Becoming well-known — OK, infamous — on my own was a shocking experience,” she wrote. “The incredible, awful curiosity of everyone. And everyone acted like they had a right to know absolutely everything.”
In the fall of 2010, Phil and Sara Jane were living as “partners,” as he informed his daughter in an email. But then Sara Jane told Phil it was illegal for her to be living with someone out of wedlock in North Carolina. She was violating the terms of her parole, she said, and could be sent back to prison at any time. While it’s true that there was once such a law, it had been ruled unconstitutional four years earlier.
In December 2010, five months after they had met on eHarmony, Phil and Sara Jane were married by a magistrate. He notified his children of the union in an email. A woman so notorious that she had been a character in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins,” alongside John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, was now the stepmother to Suzy and Cru.
‘Wake Up!’
As Sara Jane tried to integrate herself into the Chase family, their lives took on a surreal quality.
Suzy met her new stepmother for the first time in the summer of 2011, when the recently married couple visited the Catskills home Suzy shared with her husband, David Motzkin, an engineer. The 14-acre property had once been part of a 500-acre farm and mountaintop purchased by Phil’s grandmother, Lula Chase.
Suzy, who is now 68 years old, tried to be welcoming, but she was unsettled by something Sara Jane said when her father was in the bathroom. If she had her way, Sara Jane told her, Suzy and her brother would get nothing from their father’s estate — they already had so much. Mr. Motzkin, 70, also heard the remark.
Sara Jane also laid claim to their late mother’s possessions, if not her role as matriarch. When Suzy and Cru asked if they could have some of Marion’s landscape paintings, Sara Jane said no, adding that she hadn’t yet decided which paintings she wanted to hang. Phil, who didn’t like conflict, deferred to his new wife on this and other matters.
One day, Phil went for a walk in the woods with his son. “I said, ‘Dad, she’s playing you — wake up!’” recalled Cru, 71. “He told me, ‘Son, I’ve made my decision. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’”
Family get-togethers were often marred by Sara Jane’s chilling comments. Mr. Motzkin recalled a dinner during which Sara Jane said she had missed President Ford only because of the faulty sighting on the gun she had used. She would have succeeded in killing him, she said, if she had sighted the weapon herself. On another occasion, Suzy listened to her stepmother discuss how to make a prison shank.
Phil usually sat quietly as Sara Jane dominated the conversation. Yet if someone offered a criticism that upset her, he would say, “I will not let you talk about my wife that way.”
He also asked his family not to reveal Sara Jane’s criminal past to others. The request created a veil of secrecy around the couple that isolated them socially and further worried his children.
Something else struck Suzy: She thought it was odd that her stepmother seemed so chummy with the Secret Service agent who kept watch over her. (In addition to protecting high government officials, the Secret Service keeps tabs on people who have shown an inclination to harm those in their charge.) Sara Jane had introduced the agent to Phil as her nephew.
Sara Jane could be syrupy sweet, but only to select people — and she had a volcanic temper, which surfaced whenever the story she told about herself was questioned or contradicted. Suzy showed a reporter a video of one such incident, a recording of a Skype call in 2012.
Suzy asks her father about a friend of Sara Jane’s who had visited their house in North Carolina, and whether the Secret Service agent was concerned about this visitor. Suzy is calm, but there’s a subtext of fear to her question, given that her father is living with someone able to fire point blank at a president.
Sara Jane, who is listening in, seems incensed at the intrusion. She makes clear that, in her view, the authority of a wife supersedes that of her stepchildren. “You have no right to question or be concerned about who we invite into our home,” she says. “I am your father’s wife … I am his wife and this is my home, as well as his.”
She steps offscreen in a fury. Phil, in his usual role as conciliator, tries to ease the tension. “I’m sorry about the blowup here,” he says, explaining in the gentle tone of a therapist that Sara Jane is “hypersensitive about how people perceive her.”
That brief exchange was a rare one-on-one moment in those years between father and daughter. Family members said that Sara Jane was always present during calls, listening to what was said and chiming in. She seemed to be controlling access to her husband, with his meek acceptance.
In 2014, Phil, at age 89, had knee replacement surgery. While recovering, he fell and broke a hip. After that, Suzy said, his health and cognition began to deteriorate, and he deferred more and more to his wife. Tensions between the couple and Phil’s children intensified.
The rupture came about when Sara Jane discovered that Cru had been arrested for felony drug possession in 1983, when he was 29, and had spent a year in jail. She said he could no longer visit the home in North Carolina. Associating with a felon was a violation of her parole.
Cru had been open about his dislike of Sara Jane from the beginning. Early on, during a visit to his father’s home, he asked her why she had given up her children. On that same visit, he said, he had witnessed Sara Jane using guilt and tears to manipulate Phil. Now, he believed, she was trying to turn his father against him.
Ultimately, Phil sided with his wife. Father and son stopped talking. The silence between them lasted three years, and Phil’s hands would nervously shake at the mention of his son’s name. “It was one of the most painful experiences of my life,” Cru said.
For all her concern about privacy, Sara Jane made a guest appearance on CNN while she was married to Phil. It took place on Sept. 22, 2015, the 40th anniversary of her attempt on President Ford’s life, and eight years since she had gotten out of federal prison. She seemed vibrant, cheerful and younger than her 85 years.
The anchor Alisyn Camerota asked her why she was still on parole, when it seemed she was now “an upstanding citizen” who had “turned over a new leaf.”
Sara Jane seemed to find fault with the premise of the question.
“Well, I was always a pretty good citizen,” she said sharply, though with the hint of a smile. “Let’s not talk about turning over a new leaf.”
A Mistake
Suzy often thought about driving to North Carolina and removing her father from the situation. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She had no legal recourse, for one thing. And the idea of passing judgment on another person, even someone like her stepmother, went against her character. Suzy had always seen herself as a healer, someone who “tries to love the unloved.” That was before Sara Jane had come into her life.
In 2013, Suzy was diagnosed with cancer. “I was so stressed out all the time,” she said.
In 2017, Phil sold the house in Whispering Pines and moved with Sara Jane to Belle Meade, a retirement community in Southern Pines, N.C. There he ran into Gloria Wyatt, a fellow resident who had gone to college with Phil’s first wife and had socialized with the couple.
Ms. Wyatt, 98, said in an interview that the Phil she encountered at Belle Meade was different from the “live wire” and “dickens” she used to know. He and Sara Jane typically ate alone in the dining room, she added, arriving early and not socializing with other residents. He rarely spoke.
In 2018, Sara Jane spent several weeks in the hospital for back surgery. For the first time in years, Suzy was able to see her father one-on-one during a visit to the retirement village. Cru also went to North Carolina and made amends with him. The two hugged and said they loved each other.
Phil also called his granddaughter. It was the first solo chat they’d had in years. “We had a really good heart-to-heart,” Chelsey said. “He got a little emotional on the phone. He told me he loved me a bunch of times.”
With Sara Jane laid up in the hospital, Phil admitted he had made a mistake in marrying her. According to Suzy, they were talking about life lessons coming out of the family strife when he said: “I learned not to get married again.”
The Will
Four months after the family reunion, in August 2018, Phil suffered a stroke. He died in a North Carolina hospital at 93. He was cremated.
In the aftermath of his death, Suzy and Cru discovered that, during his marriage to Sara Jane, Phil’s will had been changed several times. With each amendment, the portion of his estate allotted to his wife increased. One of the executors was the son-in-law of a longtime friend of Sara Jane’s — a man Phil had met only once.
Sara Jane received one third of Phil’s assets, including his pension and annuity, which Suzy and Cru estimated to be worth around $700,000. More distressing to them, she kept the household belongings and family heirlooms.
As later confirmed by Sara Jane in a deposition, Phil had asked her — but had not stipulated in his will — to give certain family items to his children upon his death. But as the months dragged on, Sara Jane held onto their mother’s paintings and other possessions, including the Chase family genealogy, furniture and a carved lion Suzy had made as a child for her mother. Sara Jane also kept the urn containing Phil’s remains.
“His ashes,” Cru said. “She wouldn’t give us his ashes.”
Yet Sara Jane had left North Carolina and moved on. Just months after Phil’s death, she went on an extended trip to Europe and Israel with another man.
Things got weirder in February 2019. Sara Jane Moore, now going by the name Sarah J. Chase, was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport after returning from abroad. Because she had not notified her parole officer about the trip, she ended up back in jail for six months. Even at age 89, Sara Jane was creating a life of high drama and entanglements.
The next year, Suzy and Cru filed a suit challenging the will. During a deposition, Sara Jane acknowledged having told Phil that he should disinherit his children.
The case ended in a settlement: Sara Jane would return the family heirlooms to Suzy and Cru, as well their father’s ashes. Suzy said that she and her brother got back some of what they wanted, but not all of it.
In 2023, Suzy received a phone call from a man in Nashville.
He said his father-in-law, known as Papa, had joined an online dating service, SilverSingles, and was matched with a Sally Chase from Pennsylvania.
Papa spoke with Sally every day on the phone. She laughed at his jokes. He was smitten.
Papa’s family members grew suspicious. Who was this woman?
They went online and did a little research.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
The post She Tried to Kill a President. He Loved Her Anyway. appeared first on New York Times.
