Fourth Reich Archaeology - #090 - She Harvey Oswald, Part Six, Side A

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

It’s the end of the line for Squeaky, as this week we wrap up our tale on the first of the two would-be assassins who, in September 1975, pointed their pistols at President Gerald R. Ford.  In this episode we pick things up on the morning of September 5, 1975, just moments after Squeaky is taken into custody for making an attempt on our boy Jerry’s life. We begin the tale on the eve of Ford’s visit to Sacramento from Squeaky’s point of view. Squeaky was, to say the least, frustrated with how things were going. Charles Manson’s newfangled quasi-religion known as ATWA (Air Trees Water & Animals), of which Squeaky and her Sac-town roommate Sandy Good were the prime exponents, was falling flat. Prison authorities were blocking Manson from receiving visitors or making public statements. And the media don’t seem to care about Squeaky and Sandy’s “International People’s Court of Retribution,” the threatening letters they were sending to corporate executives of polluting industries, or the environmental destruction being wrought in the Nixon/Ford era.We then turn to the event itself, Lyn’s arrest and pretrial phase, and the cast of characters in the drama that was her trial. It was truly a bizarre spectacle, which we compare and contrast with the “trial of the century” of Jack Ruby in Dallas. Spoiler alert: she’s convicted, and the whole story passes into the realm of spectacle. We consider Squeaky’s trial as a window into the pros and cons of propaganda of the deed - relevant today in a time when political assassination and spectacular violence is very much back in the mainstream.Finally, we end with two overarching questions.  Did she really intend to kill Jerry, or was it just a performance?  And did she act alone or was there a conspiracy? Listen to Side A of Squeaky’s swan song for free today. If you like what you hear, head on over to patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and become a member of our community to get access to the full 3.5 hour episode. Otherwise, you’ll just have to hang tight until Sides B and C make their way onto the free feed.

In the case of the United States of America versus Lynette Alice Frum, criminal action S751, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, the witness appears today pursuant to subpoena heretofore issued pursuant to a request of the defendant, Lynette Alice Frome, and by order of this court previously issued, and by stipulation of co-counsel and his client, Ms. Frome, and the United States Attorney, that this hearing may be conducted in this fashion in lieu of the witness appearing in person in Sacramento

at the hearing of this case. Mr. President, please stand. You promised that all of the testimony that you would give in this matter would be the truth. You may comment your question. Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. President, I would like to direct your attention to Friday, September the 5th, 1975, in Sacramento, California. Where was Lynette from when you first observed her, if you recall?

Approximately halfway between Elstreet and the state capital. I noticed a person in the second. or third row in a brightly colored dress who appeared to want to either shake hands or speak or at least get closer to me. I stopped because I was gradually moving toward the state capital and that was my first impression of a person who had a dress on. I of course didn't know who it was. As I stopped, I saw a hand come through the crowd in the first row, and that was the only active gesture that I saw, but in the hand, it was a weapon. You indicate that you saw, you could see her hand on the weapon. That is correct. Could you tell if her finger was on the trigger? I could not.

And I would assume also that you could not tell from your observations whether or not she put her. pulled the trigger. I could not. Did you at any time see any motion that would indicate to you that she was cocking the gun? I could not say I noticed any such action on her part. Did you ever hear the gun click? I have no recollection of it clicking or not clicking. Did you at any time hear her say anything?

I did not. Do you recall anything about the condition of her face when you first observed her? Was it flush, pale, wet, wet, or? I know you've used the term weathered before. Is that your recollection? It looked weathered, but there were many faces. But the brightness of the dress attracted my attention, and in the process of noticing the dress,

I thought her face did appear to be some of the weather. Imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, Now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world

and exploit them of their natural resources. Piracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one.

For example, we're to CIA. Now, he has a mom. See, there's so long this is nine, afraid of we never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pro Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back to our show. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are coming back at you this week with our next installment, our last installment. our last installment on the saga about Squeaky Frommi,

the first of the two would-be assassins who in September 1975 pointed their pistol at President Gerald R. Ford. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we are back at it with our series within a series Shee Harvey Oswald. We are going to wrap up that story about Squeaky Frommi. today, but before we do, our usual preliminaries. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to all of you for supporting the podcast.

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is, if not totally suppressed, at least far-flung, hidden in different corners of the world, in books, in the internet, in blog posts from 2010, in the little corners that don't get peaked into often enough, and we certainly do enjoy peeking into them. And so that's exactly what we've been doing on the saga of Squeaky Frommi and her attempted assassination, quote unquote, attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford on September 5th, 1975. And before we get into our narrative and pick things back up where we left off in the last installment. A quick recap of where we did leave off and kind of what the trajectory, what this narrative is all about because, you know, I'm a big believer. I think Dick, you're also a big believer. Please correct me if you're

not. That, you know, we understand the podcast medium how it works. We deliver a lot of information. Sometimes it's dense, sometimes it's less dense, and you, while you're listening, maybe multitasking. Maybe you're cooking a meal. Maybe you're doing some kind of a job. Maybe you're driving in your car. And when there's information coming into your earbuds, into your headphones, you know, you'll pick up what you pick up. And so these recaps, this amount of repetition, It's not to belabor any points. It is simply based on the data-driven conclusion that the important stuff bears repeating. And so, where do we leave off?

Well, in our last installment, we covered Squeaky and her fellow Manson followers, Sandy Good, to Sacramento, where they live together in this charming little Victorian house in the third-story apartment. They remember it used to be a single family home, and it kind of evolved along with the housing patterns of Sacramento of many former industrial cities over time in the 20th century from these single family homes to subdividing into units, into apartments, into rental properties. the old classic trajectory of real estate. And Sandy and Squeaky and another Manson follower were all living together. They divided their time while living together between the important work of advocating for Charlie Manson, advocating for his release, advocating for him to get the right to speak publicly. and to speak with visitors in the prison.

In fact, the reason they were in Sacramento in the first place was because he had been moved to Folsom Prison, which is approximately located to Sacramento. So a good deal of their time was still focused on Charlie. And, you know, part of that was their advocacy work. Part of that was developing Charlie Manson thought and living Charlie Manson thought both in their words and in their habits. So remember Charlie had kind of shifted his helter-skelter ideology to what the Manson family

referred to as Atwa. That is an acronym, ATWA, signifying air, trees, water, and animals. It was a quasi-involving. environmentalist movement that they were trying to work on. And it was also quasi-religious. Part of the whole schick was that Squeaky and Sandy would dress in these very elaborate robes. Squeaky went by the name Red and would always wear her red robe, matched her red hair. She walked around out in these streets looking like Little Red Riding Hood. and Sandy Good went by the name of blue

and would frequently dress herself in a blue-hooded robe. And, you know, this idea of colors and of color purity feeds back into the sort of initial white supremacist ethos behind all of Charlie Manson thought where racial misogination was frowned upon, the mixing of the races was something to be avoided, and purity in all of its forms, whether the purity of the air and the water, or the purity of racial groups, was something to be protected. And so we can see how, again, to hammer home one of the key points that we are making in this series within a series about Manson ideology and mythology,

it's sowing the seeds of white supremacy, of division, of racial divisiveness, and, you know, I don't know that we would call squeaky and Sandy bigoted and hateful in the way that we think of, you know, your David Dukes as bigoted and hateful. they certainly were not spewing racial invective in a way that would alienate people right off of the jump. But certainly, once you scratch past the surface of what they're putting down, there is this element of white supremacy, of racism and racialism built into their version of environmentalism. And I think generally speaking, when we talk about shit coding, when we talk about taking a radical idea that has a grain of truth at its center, the grain of truth in this case being that corporations enabled by the government that they sponsor and control, pollute the earth and threaten environmental destruction on a mass scale,

certainly we would agree with that part of the message, but where they are shit-coding that message is obviously by associating it with the psychotic Charles Manson and his pro-violence message as enacted by his followers at Cialo Drive and at the La Bianca House. But also through the continuation of that work through Squeaky and Sandy, when they're going around talking about this environmental plan, they're threatening CEOs through their People's Court of Retribution. They are speaking to reporters about the need for some sort of a violent reckoning, and they are at the same time still maintaining some, albeit tangential ties,

with the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, who was somewhat distanced from Charlie by this point in time. But nevertheless, a part of Squeaky and Sandy's life, to be sure, just given that that was the social circle that they had built up around themselves when Charlie was incarcerated. And of course, we spoke a great deal about that in previous installments of this.

series within a series. So there was Atwa, but that wasn't the only project they had going. They also had a side project, an offshoot. And they formed another group called the International People's Court of Retribution. Now, Squeaky and Sandy had claimed that that group, the International People's Court of Retribution, had thousands of members. But really, it was just the two of them and maybe a handful of hangers on. And what this group was, do is mainly write letters. They would write threatening letters to executives, to CEOs, to politicians, to all of these individuals that had a hand in these polluting companies, in these companies that were causing harm to the environment. Now, these efforts, they were, it was a Herculean task.

They were writing thousands of letters, but they were largely fruitless. Their efforts proved fruitless, and of course the media turned a deaf ear to all of this. And the two, Squeaky and Sandy, they grew increasingly frustrated with these efforts, that nobody was really paying attention to the fact that they're writing these threatening letters to these execs and these politicians about all the dirt that was being done. And of course, in our last episode, we covered our boy, Jerry Ford, and his Pacific Northwest tour in the fall of 1975 when he was going to the northwest of towns like Portland, Seattle, and Sacramento, which was his last stop in this Northwest tour, to basically do this charm offensive.

He was gearing up to start campaigning for president. and he was facing a challenger by the name of Ronald Reagan. So he took this as an opportunity to go out and greet the people of the Pacific Northwest and especially the people of Northern California, because at the time Ronald Reagan was the former California governor and really the household name in California. So Jerry needed that positive edge. Of course, as we covered in our last,

last episode, it didn't really play out the way that Jerry had hoped and he was facing protests basically at every stop with good reason. In the fall of 1975, Jerry Ford was not the most popular guy, right? In fact, his track record at that point was basically all negatives. You had the Nixon bargain. You had the fall of Saigon. You had continued inflation and economic distress. and most recently this brutal FBI crackdown on the American Indian movement at Pine Ridge. All of this was front and center when Jerry was on this Northwest tour. And one more thing just to add to the list of negatives that were dragging Jerry down at this point, which I don't think we did mention last time, but bears keeping in mind as well,

is summer of 75 was when the Rockefeller commission, report came out. And remember, that was kind of the executive branches' attempt to get out in front of the congressional investigations, into assassinations, into covert operations, into any range of deep state malfeasance that was spurred by Seymour Hershey's publication of the Family Jules document in 1974 in December that just kicked off this opening up of the can of worms of the dirty laundry of the CIA, the FBI, and all of their crimes in the wake of Watergate, which of course, you know, we can debate and we'll definitely cover all of this much more in depth in Jerry World

proper, the degree to which any of this stuff was a legit exposure of the crimes versus just being sort of a modified, limited hangout of the crimes. But needless to say, when the deep state is being exposed and when one of the big things on the agenda of that exposure involves the Kennedy assassination, 75 is all. Also, when the Geraldo Rivera show airs the Zapruder film for the first time and shows the American people the trajectory of JFK's head going back and to the left when fatally struck by a bullet, calling into question the findings of the Warren Commission on which Jerry Ford, of course, sat, well, is just one more item on the pile of

Jerry's negatives. So Jerry's facing all negatives as he's heading into Sacramento. And then of course, on September 5th, 1975, that is the day of the deed when Squeaky allegedly, I guess she was convicted. So when Squeaky walks up to him and points her pistol. In this episode, we're going to follow Squeaky Story through her arrest and trial for the attempted assassination of the president. And that's where we're going to leave her to pick up next time with our next she Harvey Oswald, Sarah James Moore. And with that, let's get digging. President Gerald Ford pressed his election efforts on a two-day west coast trip.

Before arriving in Sacramento, he added friends and money to the Republican cause in Seattle and Portland. In the capital city of California, he told its business leaders to create more jobs. It was a short walk from the hotel to the legislative chambers to urge the lawmakers to cooperate in a tough anti-crime program. Suddenly a hand came from the crowd pointing a gun at the President of the United States. An assassination attempt that brought some frightening moments on the day the president came to town. And all of a sudden I was standing maybe three feet from Ford about behind two people. All of a sudden I saw the Secret Service man right behind Ford. Just reach in and just reach out and push.

And I saw this woman start to go down and her arm go back and I saw the gun. And I didn't watch what Ford was doing. And they wrestled to her to the ground and were slapping cuffs on her. And a big black gun, they got it out of her hand. And she kept saying, easy fellas, easy fellas, easy fellas. It didn't go off.

It didn't go off. It didn't go off. It didn't go off. It didn't go off. It didn't go off. It didn't go off. I was standing about 10 feet down the line from him. He just shook my hand and kept on going.

And then all of a sudden, the Secret Serviceman, rushed out from behind him and grabbed this gal and his red, long, flowing and gown. and as they put the harm around her the 45 looked like a 45 drop to the ground and then the crowd got everybody away from the from that area pushed them back and then 45 just laid there what was she saying when they got her tied behind this tree she kept saying that he's not a public servant he's not a public servant Lynn Fong is the woman who was accused with attempting to shoot the president of

the United States in Sacramento today this person that tried to become another Lee Harvey Oswald Serhan or Sirhan or James Earl So it's the morning of September 5th, 1975, and you are Jerry Brown, the governor of California. And you've just seen the president at the host breakfast with Sacramento's businessman and high society and these guys who are there to basically glad hand the president. I think it's like a 600, 700 or so of Sacramento's business elite there to see the, hear the president speak and you are back in your office in the Capitol building and your chief of staff, Gray Davis, says, here comes the president. The plan was for the president to come and see you after his talk at the host breakfast.

and in walks in, President Jerry Ford, and as he walks in being ushered by the Secret Service, you see that the Secret Service agents that are surrounding the President, they're sort of these guys, they're sort of frantically drawing the blinds in your office, they're checking the windows, they're checking the corners, everyone is sort of, there's this like hushed whispers around, and everyone's sort of freaking out. You don't really know what's going on.

the president seems perfectly composed and you're having your meeting and you're speaking with the president and it's not until say 30 minutes or so into the meeting that white house aide donnie rumsfeld walks in and checks in on the president and that's when he tells you by the way there was just an attempt made on the president's and you're like, wait, what the heck? What the heck, Mr. President? You didn't think to mention that there was an attempt made on your life right before you walked into my office? That's pretty weird. Meanwhile, Lynette is being taken, is in custody and is being driven to the police headquarters where she will be interrogated.

And I can't help but think that as she's being driven away after she has pulled the trigger and not shot the president, she's thinking back to sort of the lead-up to that moment in August of 1975. Oh, yeah. You got to think so. Because, listener, you know, we covered a little bit of the broad strokes of the buildup in Squeaky's mind towards this act. But we want to deepen that narrative a little bit more. So she's in the car, she's thinking back, and perhaps she is recollecting the time about a month before when she was reading a news story,

a news story about the effects of logging in the redwood forest. And remember, this is an era, the mid-70s. when the environmental movement was hitting a peak, it had made some real gains under the Nixon administration, in fact, who remember it was Richard Nixon that passed the Environmental Protection Act, which established the Environmental Protection Agency, which was the first federal government executive office to deal with a issues of conservation, with issues of environmental protection. But nevertheless, it was

inadequate at its job. And one of those inadequacies became apparent to Squeaky because it allowed for the destruction of these thousand-year-old organisms in Northern California. You know, you know them, you love them. They're the Redwoods, the sequoias. these just majestic, majestic trees. And after Squeaky learned that some of these trees were going to be cut down for logging, she took it upon herself to try and stop it. So she goes to the local TV station, for example, and she tries to pitch them a story about this logging problem.

and she's a known personality around the media in Sacramento at this time, right? Squeaky is always making outreaches to the media to try and spread the word for Charlie, to try and spread the word of her Atwa philosophy, or of Charlie's Atwa philosophy, as it were. And so she shows up, she kind of walks into the place, You know, it almost reminds me of Jack Ruby in a way because she's just a known commodity, kind of viewed as a kook, but she's able to just walk right in to the TV station and talk to the actual reporters.

And she doesn't get the response that she was hoping for. They are very dismissive. They tell her, nobody cares about this. Sorry, but we're not going to cover it, especially because, because, because, because, because we have to dedicate so much coverage to the president's visit. He's coming here in just a couple of weeks to Sacramento. And that, that squeaky is real news. And you got to imagine that, you know, had that conversation gone differently,

maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't have ended up spending the bulk of her life in prison. But it did happen that way. And so, you know, she's got one more chip on her. her shoulder. Add to that the fact that she's also striking out in her attempts to visit Charlie throughout the month of August. And in fact, she had gone, so we mentioned before, Charlie was in Folsom when Squeaky and Sandy moved to Sacramento. At some point during their stay in Sacramento, he's actually moved back down to San Quentin in the Bay Area. And so she's making these trips back and forth, and she makes one such trip literally the day before Jerry's visit on

September 4th. And on that trip, she drives all the way down to San Quentin. She is not permitted to see Charlie, and she leaves San Quentin believing firmly that she will never be able to see Charlie ever again. And, you know, it is not pertinent to what's going on subjectively in her mind, but as a matter of fact, one of Charlie's lawyers, in parallel to her efforts, actually was working on getting Charlie more access and actually did secure his right to visitation around the same time, but Squeaky was not informed in a timely manner of that. So here she is. She's depressed about the lack of any response on the environment. She's depressed about the imminent logging and potential destruction of the redwood forest.

She is depressed about Charlie being thrown into a cage where he'll never even be able to get his voice out, not just his body, but even his voice out of that cage. And so she arrives home she sits there with Sandy, with their other roommate, Heather, and with these neighbor guys that have been kind of hanging around and helping out with some of the People's Court of Retribution research and, you know, pulling phone numbers and names and things like that. And they get into a real heated argument. And Squeaky, apparently, in the course of this argument, both sorts of, Squeaky and Sandy become pretty verbally abusive to their male friends here.

And, you know, just insulting their lack of dedication to the cause, insulting their intelligence. And apparently, Squeaky asks one of these guys if he has a gun that she could borrow. And so she's really like, she's on a real edge. and doesn't get very much sleep the night before. So, Dick, you want to walk through her morning routine after just getting a few winks in, you know, she gets up the next morning, the morning of Jerry's visit, and what does she do?

Yeah, so that brings us to the morning of September 5th, 1975. Squeaky, not able to get the visitation she wanted to, with Charlie not able to get the air time on the local news. I got to think that if those things went the other way, maybe she wouldn't have done what she did that morning. But they didn't go the other way. They went the way they went. And so Squeaky, not having gotten much sleep the night before,

she strapped her boyfriend, Manny Borough's antique, 45 to her leg under her long red robe and she went for a walk and she went for a walk to capital park where president jerry ford was going to be walking himself and when she arrives there's a crowd it had gathered and squeaky gravitates towards the crowd and awaits the president and indeed the president shows up and she walks up to him and points the 45 and pulls the trigger and nothing happens. It doesn't go off. Well, maybe she pulls the trigger.

That is contested. Right. That's true. Maybe she pulls the trigger. She definitely points. It doesn't go off. She's intercepted by a bystander. I think the bystander's name is also Jerry.

There's a lot of jerrys in this story, and I think the guy who first grabs her is not a Secret Service agent, but shortly thereafter Secret Service agent Larry Boondorf, he springs into action and wrestles the gun out of Lynn's hand. And as he does this, he cuts his finger on the metal parts of the pistol in the process. Yeah, this is where the notion that she pulled the trigger comes from. So in the struggle, there are sort of conflicting witness reports of whether or not there was a click and when the click actually happened. Right, exactly. It could have been when Buendorf puts his hand over the trigger guard and could have been that he activated the trigger and it clicked then. Could have been that she actually did pull the trigger.

it's really not established to any degree of certainty whether she pulled the trigger. She says that she didn't. I think on the whole of the evidence, it does not suggest that she pulled the trigger. And the reason why is because I do believe that she was aware that there was no bullet in the chamber of, the gun, right? Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, and this notion, this idea that whether she did or not, whether the trigger, whether there was a click or not, or when that happened, this is like a big part of ultimately the facts of dispute and ultimately like one of the reasons why they ended up getting the deposition of Jerry Ford, President Jerry Ford was subpoenaed and

there was a deposition taken. One of the facts that the attorneys wanted to get out, the defense attorneys wanted to get out is whether the president heard this click which would uh which would show you know that she pulled the trigger so yes that's exactly right it's a fact in dispute i agree i don't know that she did pull the trigger um exactly because there's also this other fact that comes out and we'll get to down the road but her whole thing was that the gun wasn't loaded meaning that there wasn't a bullet in the chamber ready to go. And recall that Squeaky definitely knew how to use an automatic pistol. But back to the morning of September 5th, back to Larry Boondorf, who incidentally was, okay, so this guy, it's a great story because he is like the Secret Service agents that is assigned to Jerry Ford.

he is Jerry's man and it's a hilarious reason the reason he's assigned to Jerry is not because he's like the super great secret service guy it's not because he's like this amazing bodyguard but because he's an expert skier

who could keep up with Jerry on the slopes at Vale or Jerry had a vacation home yeah Yeah, it's great. And it was like, Boendorf would always talk about what a sweet job he had because every time that Jerry would go to his mountain vacation home in Vale, Beaver Creek, Colorado, Boondorf would go with the advance team and ski the slopes for like two weeks ahead of time to clear out the situation there. And then afterwards, he would take a vacation and ski some more. and while Jerry was there he'd be skiing with him every day and he just he loved loved the slopes did Larry

and you know he he got pretty lucky I think with this close call and was ultimately hailed by Jerry as a life-saving hero although he injures himself he might have actually pulled the trigger and lucked out that the chamber was empty and there was no bullet he injures himself yeah and then you know he he certainly does have the upper body strength to carry this wayfish 26-year-old squeaky away from the scene that's for sure but it is very funny how it plays out with larry totally this like ski bum turned secret service agent And in the process, as he's carrying her away with some help, Lynn is shouting this famous line,

it didn't go off, take it easy, it didn't go off, and then something like, he's not your public servant, which honestly, facts, right? Because at this point, Jerry Ford has not been elected president. He's got the job purely through a series of unfortunate events, right? He's the president who was assigned the president. post, not the president who was elected. Yeah.

And so all of this happens very quickly. You know, Jerry Ford is rushed away and makes it to his meeting, as we've already said. And so I think now we're going to introduce the case of Squeaky and the cast of characters. The first one that we're going to mention is the federal prosecutor who's assigned to this case. This is an assistant U.S. attorney by the name of Don Heller, and he, like any reasonable prosecutor in his situation, was quick to assume that the best defense that the defendant could put forward to an event like this with so many eyewitnesses who saw her brandish a weapon at the president,

it would be, just like Jack Ruby, the insanity defense, right? And so Heller, you know, even before Squeaky is read her rights and locked up into his cell, he's already hitting the horn ordering a battery of psychological tests and evaluations, the same, in fact, that the Dallas PD did with Jack Ruby. after he shot Oswald, remember, before the Jolly West team springs into action, the Dallas prosecutors are already sending a shrink to assess Ruby. The same goes for squeaky, although things don't happen so quickly. And they don't happen so quickly because in the wake of the JFK assassination, if we haven't

mentioned it already, remember, Congress did pass a law. to make it a federal crime to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the president of the United States. And so that confers federal jurisdiction over a case like this rather than what would ordinarily be a local crime of attempted murder. This is a federal crime of attempted assassination of the president. So now, unlike with the JFK assassination, there's not this sort of jurisdictional squabble. In play, it's clear that as soon as the feds show up on the scene, they're going to be the ones running the show for both the prosecution and the investigation. That's right. That was one of the things that LVJ was hung up in the aftermath, right? He's like, this is a violation of state law. And of course, he's talking about murder.

And that's why he, one of the stated reasons, at least one of the reasons he gave to, I can't remember who. it was, I want to say it was Alcip, but it was his whole thing was like, you know, the federal government shouldn't get involved. The Texas, the state authorities have got this. Right. But back to

Don Heller. So Heller's this federal prosecutor. He's this brash, excitable New Yorker and he's sort of a grading personality in like the provincial Sacramento legal community. And his nickname was madness.

dog. And he's a big time, big time death penalty advocate. And he even said that he would gladly pull the switch himself. And this guy, to me, reminds me a lot of the prosecutor that led the Jack Ruby case, bare knuckle Bill Alexander. So same sort of vibe, these prosecutors that are out for blood, right? And it's important to keep that in mind when you're thinking about this trial, because you have a prosecutor not just there to make a name for himself, but there because they fully believed that these bad people deserve to die. Yeah, definitely a great point. And for her part, Squeaky is playing it real cool during her arrest.

Like throughout this process, you know, after she's carried off, she refuses to give her real name she tells the cops that she's name mrs x yeah it's talking about like talking about how like you know the children you know we're doing wrong by our children and how food is too expensive and how we're killing the trees and kind of like um disassociating from you know the reality of what she just did yeah she's very much on message. And that kind of continues into her early arrest. And maybe we should just get right into what happens with her next. So she's, go ahead. Oh, yes. Well, I do want to go over her transport to her arraignment. So she's in, she's at the police headquarters. She's,

the very first thing that needs to happen, of course, is that she needs to get arraigned in front of a judge. Should we say what's an arraignment? I don't know, you know, you know, Yeah, why don't you do that? Yeah, sure. Arraignment is simply the legal proceeding where a criminal defendant is read their charges against them and then given the opportunity to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. That's it. And then there will be usually sometimes at the same time, sometimes it's later, a bail proceeding where the judge determines whether the person, can be released pending trial and on what payment, what security they can be released. And the arraignment is like this procedural sort of milepost that has to happen within a certain amount of time. So like there's usually a law that sets the time period, whether it's a state law or federal law. I think in most instances it's going to be like 24 hours or 48 hours after an arrest. You have to be arraigned or they got to let you go unless there's some intervening

executive decision to say, okay, this arraignment can be, you know, a few days later than that or whatever, but there's usually like a time limit between arrest and arraignment. And I want to talk about the arraignment because this U.S. Marshal that's in charge of transporting Lynn, it's just such a funny story. So the guy in charge of the transport to the arraignment to the court. So going from the jailhouse, going from the jail to the court is the U.S. Marshal's name is Arthur VanCourt. And this guy is a real character. So whenever there was a woman who was in custody,

VanCort would call up his wife, Marsha, to help. So whenever there's like a female defendant, this is how provincial Sacramento was at the time. So the U.S. Marshal would call upon his wife to handle transport and security. Not an employee of the government, by the way. Not exactly. Yeah.

It's like real backwater shit. And so like his, and the other part of this is like his, his big concern at the time and something like he vocalized was that he wanted to avoid another, quote, Oswald incident. So no one's getting shot on his watch. And the way he schemes for this to happen, so he amps up the security in the federal building. But he also orders his wife and two other ways. women to dress in red and serve as decoys. I want to avoid an Oswald incident. Honey, dress up like the defendant.

So if anybody is trying to kill her, they'll kill you instead. That's nuts. It's like, okay. But why don't you riff a little bit on Van Corp? Because he is an interesting character, right? Yeah, for sure. So this guy, Art VanCourt, during Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial administration, he was this chief of security for the governor. So he worked directly for Ronald Reagan. And when Nixon was elected president, the Nixon administration, I wouldn't say Nixon personally, is, you know, giving a shit who the U.S. Marshal of Sacramento is. But the Nixon administration appoints him to U.S. Marshal, which means basically he's in charge of the security for the federal buildings, for the federal courts, and for the employees of the U.S. Marshal's service in that district.

So it's not just the city of Sacramento, but a wider geographic district in the area around Sacramento. And in between his government jobs, VanCort worked as a private investigator. And as a private investigator, his biggest client was Ronnie Reagan and his entourage. So he worked really as a fixer in the private sector for Reagan, like a contractor, a security contractor of sorts. And so, you know, I wanted to make sure that we got it on the record that this guy. and court while he's handling Squeakies lodging and while he's kind of controlling her custody and all of the arrangements for how she's traveling and how she's getting back and forth from

the court and where she's staying and who's in charge. This is a guy who's like a career loyalist to Gerald Ford's primary opponent, Ronald Reagan. So, you know, there is sort of this conflict of interest. I don't think that we could point to any conduct by Van Court and say, oh, he's undermining the investigation to try and skew things for Reagan or he's trying to rat fuck Jerry or anything like that. Not, I don't think that there's any real smoke there, but it is interesting that this whole scene. This whole milieu in California represents kind of a factional dispute, a real microcosm between these different factions.

And this is something that's going to play out in Jerry World a great deal because Ronald Reagan, besides being the former governor of California, of course, represents sort of the future Republican vision for a president. party that is much more hardline right wing on a lot of issues that takes a break away from the detente of Kissinger and of Nixon that Gerald Ford inherited in the Cold War and a much more aggressive politics, a much more aggressive Cold War politics in particular, much more aggressive defense policies. And so, you know, whilst Reagan is hovering over spectral-like above the events going on in California,

even though he's not there on the ground, his proxy van court is in the ring, you know, the Attorney General of the state, Evel Younger, who was a longtime Reagan ally and who eventually would be a big fixture in right-wing politics, far right-wing politics, was not out of loyalty to Gerald Ford the person, but out of sort of partisan careerism, the guy who's running Jerry Ford's presidential campaign in California for the 76 election. So there are proxies making moves on the ground. And to some extent, it's interesting to consider their involvement in the squeaky incident. And of course, that's something that will bear in mind and follow on to when we get into

Sarah Jane Moore and the second attempt on Jerry's life in California later on in September of 75. But for now, suffice it to say that Art VanCourt, the kind of Reagan eyes and ears on the ground here, is acting in, if not a nefarious way, a hilarious way. All right, back to Lynn, back to the transport. So Lynn is taken from the police station to the federal building where she is presented before a federal magistrate Esther Mix. Now, federal magistrate, they're now called magistrate judges, but they're effectively judicial officers.

They're not your Article III judges. Remember the Constitution. Article 3 says that there will be federal judges appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, confirmed by the Senate. These magistrates are judicial officers that these federal judges will appoint themselves. They'll hire a magistrate to help with the work of the court. court. And in most instances, the magistrates, it'll depend based on court to court, but in most instances, the magistrates are helping the federal judges manage the criminal docket and doing things

like arraignments and bail hearings and taking pleas and things like that. And so Lynn is before Magistrate Judge Esther Mix for a bail hearing. And Magistrate Mix also issues the search warrant to search Lynn's P Street apartment where Sandy and Lynn lived at the time. And so we're at this bail hearing and I believe we're still on September 5th. I think it's all happening that same day. And that is where Lynn is first sort of really interacts with her first public defender and also the U.S. attorney, Dwayne Key. So now where Don Heller is like this brash New Yorker, Dwayne Key, Dwayne Keyes, the U.S. attorney, he's more of your California style. He's got like a shaggy, curly mop of hair. He's got a dry sense of humor. And he's much more of your provincial Sacramento lawyer, much more of a Sacramento guy. And Dwayne Keyes was another guy who was at the host breakfast literally earlier that morning. So it's like, it's got to be wild for these guys. Like they were at the host breakfast. And then in that afternoon, they're there. like, you know, sitting across the guy, the guy who was at the host breakfast sitting across

this defendant who allegedly tried to kill the president later that morning. Then Keyes does his real Dr. Evil moment when the judge, or the magistrate, rather, asks what his bail request is. And Dwayne Keyes in a dramatic moment spits one man. million dollars, which at the time, it was the highest bail ever sought in this district in California. To compare it, when Sirhan Sirhan was arrested for the murder of RFK in Los Angeles, his bail was set at a quarter that amount, at $250,000. So here, you know, nobody's dead, no shots were even fired, yet the bail is set at the highest

ever because the judge, of course, agrees she's not going to risk letting a would-be presidential assassin run the streets. And so this bail amount is precedential in its scale. and Lynn therefore knows that she's going to be locked up for a minute. Oh yeah, there's a lot of firsts in this trial in this case. And the $1 million bond is just the first of them. And so Judge Mix, magistrate Judge Mix does set this bond at $1 million, and she does issue the warrant, the search warrant, to search Lynn's apartment.

And so I think it's also that same day, the warrant goes out and the authorities show up at P Street and they tear the place apart. Yeah. And of course they're greeted by Sandy, who at that point takes it upon herself to serve as Lynn's PR machine. Yeah, we'll definitely include some clips from Sandy Good and some of the comments that she makes to the media. around this time and at other times, but she's very much, you know, to kind of summarize her narrative, it's, I'm not going to say

if she wanted to kill Gerald Ford or not. Gerald Ford deserves to die no matter whether Lynn wanted to kill him or not. The world is being fucked by all of you polluters. And if you're not careful, a thousand times worse is about to happen and you know the streets of the united states are going to turn into the streets of vietnam and you know the murders at cello drive the manso murders are going to look like child's play compared to what's coming next so really not doing any favors in terms of

influencing the jury pool or potentially building sympathy among the audience of all of these media outlets whom she's addressing with these types of comments. But nevertheless, in her mind, certainly, I'm sure Sandy thought that this was the type of revolutionary action and speech that would help get Charlie out of prison so that he could become the leader of the United States. And remember, like, at the end of the day,

all of the environmentalism, all of the social critiques of these Manson followers, they did not go anywhere to a class-based critique of capitalism or anything like that. It was just, Charlie needs to get out, Charlie needs to become president, we need to let Charlie tell us what to do, and he will save us. It's like probably this worst ideology that you could imagine to address the types of ills that they are speaking on. It's a real mismatch between the diagnosis and the prescription. Let's just put it that way. KCR's Mary Merton had on occasion several months ago to get rather involved with some of the members of the

Manson family. Mary, tell us a little bit about this woman. Like other Manson girls, Lynette Fromm was extremely antagonistic toward her family. And in Charlie, she thought she had found her savior. At his trial, she said Manson once hit her so hard he knocked her clear across the room. But she said it was just what I needed. Though not directly connected with the Tate La Bianca murders, Lynette Frome was twice arrested for murder. And both times those charges were dropped. They said they wanted to meet Governor Brown.

and Attorney General Evel Younger, and they had ideas on how the state should be run. But they were really very politically aware, which surprised me, and there were a lot of underground literature on how this country is being run, who's running at a lot of conspiracy theories, and they would bring out pamphlets from time to time to show me. And she actually thinks that Charlie could be president of this country and run it better than present political meeting. Officers brought out Sandra Good, a Manson family member,

and another woman, Kathleen Murphy. Both were taken in for questioning on the theory of the assassination attempt may have been a conspiracy. But several hours later, authorities released the two women. Apparently satisfied that they were not involved. Sandra Good returned to her apartment and answered reporters' questions.

Unless Manson gets a court ruled and it's allowed to speak, the country will be bloodier than the tape law beyond the house is put together. You people need somebody to help you with your problems. She has more concern for your children, all of you, all of you, that you do what she was doing today? Of course she knew what she was doing. She was moved to do what she did. You'll have to talk to her to find out why. I can't speak for her. I know that we're very, very

sensitive to what's going on in this country right now. And we see that there's no leadership. There's nobody that the people can trust or put faith in. You must let Nancy up. When it starts getting crazy, when the money won't spend, you're better than ready in love. You're doing immediate. All right, folks, that does it for this week's episode on the free feed. If you want to listen to more, of course,

please feel free to head on over to patreon.com slash forthright archaeology and get the rest of this three and a half hour long episode today by becoming a paid member of our Patreon family. Otherwise, we'll see you next week.