Would-Be Assassin Fromme Assails Polluters From Cell

“Mass murder is going on out there all the time. And they don’t have Charlie Manson to blame,” Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme told the Tallahassee Democrat in an interview published Sunday.

She told the newspaper her remarks were in reference to pollution and toxic waste.

The planet is an organism and can take only so much sickness, said Fromme, 40, who for almost 14 years has been shuttled through the federal prison system for the attempted assassination of President Gerald R. Ford.

“We’re killing the Earth, and it hurts,” she said. “I want to say, ‘Stop, stop doing it or you’ll die.’ ”

Since August, Fromme’s home has been a two-person cell in the Marianna (Fla.) Federal Correctional Institution.

“It’s very depressing,” she said of prison life. “I have value. I can’t see the reason for being locked up in an ice cube the rest of my life.”

Manson and four followers were convicted of the 1969 Los Angeles murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. Fromme, a member of the Manson “family,” did not take part, she said, although she knew what was happening. On the morning of Sept. 5, 1975, she aimed a borrowed .45-caliber pistol in the direction of Ford’s midsection near the state Capitol in Sacramento and tried to pull the trigger.

“I didn’t really want to kill him,” she told the Democrat. “But when people around you treat you like a child and pay no attention to the things you say, you have to do something.”