This dark psychological drama is a filmic mental adventure for two female characters: One an analytical journalist and the other a former FBI informant, leftist radical, and attempt presidential assassin. The mental combat lasts over dozens of jailhouse interviews covering nearly thirty years.

When journalist Geri Spieler received a note from President Gerald Ford's attempted assassin, Sara Jane Moore, asking Spieler to meet with her in prison, she had no idea that it was to be the beginning of a long interview process that would span the next three decades. There was no issue of doubts about Moore's guilt, since she had been caught red-handed after firing a shot at President Ford and barely missing his head. Only the quick action of a nearby off-duty Marine prevented her from taking a second, more accurate killing shot.

The point of fascination for Spieler was the challenge of unraveling the personality of a woman who appeared to be nothing more than a middle-aged Southern housewife. Fortunately for her, Moore also enjoyed a payoff in their long interview relationship. She earned the attention of a smart and focused woman of creative drive who listened and weighed everything Moore told her.

The plot journey leading up to Sara Jane Moore's attack on the President of the United States is a years-long saga of a disintegrating life run by a woman so devoid of empathy and compassion that she enjoyed an existence nearly free of any sense of obligation to anything. She goes through marriages like water, three, and four, five of them: some as short as a month to a man two years older than her own father--most producing children.  She leaves behind each of her four offspring as easily as she drops marriages and the lives that hold them. She is a smart and attractive woman who knows how to be socially attractive, but exits from moment to moment as unreliable as the next emerging whim. Moore develops a personality that seems like a gracious, bright, and funny person with recognizable Southern charm that rests like cake icing over a heart of ice and an empty hole where her personal character out to be.

After thirty years of repeated personal visits and phone calls, Moore convinces Geri Spieler to write Moore's life story. The contradictions immediately come clear and Geri Spieler begins to grind away on the problem of trying to peel away Moore's layers. She conducts secondary interviews with relatives and acquaintances. She double and triple checks facts with documented evidence to catch Moore in her bouts of falsehood and to support her when a grain of truth slips out.

Spieler suffers massive self-doubt about her task, but refuses to let go of her quarry. Moore plays a complex game of falsehood and truth, mixing in just enough truth to keep Spieler coming back, but never giving her a full and complete version of anything. The risk that Moore takes each time is that Spieler keeps getting closer to answering the question of what makes Sara Jane Moore tick which Moore expends her capital of truth to keep Spieler's attention focused on her.

In the end, Spieler wins the battle -- as we do through her--by zeroing in on Moore's internal nuggets in spite of all the obfuscation thrown at her. The portrait emerges as sketched by Moore herself through actions and words. It is like watching wisps of fog part to reveal a statue. The classic sociopath is revealed: a human being in all parts except any connection to a sense of consequence for others. The message is permanently embraced by the U.S. Secret Service that you can never tell a person's intent by their appearance.