Ford was born on February 10, 1929 in Berkeley, California, and had worked as a teacher. She had a long documented history of psychiatric illness and hospitalisation, and had lost custody of a daughter, which she spoke about repeatedly and which appears in every account of her state of mind.
On November 27, 1980 she drove a Lincoln Continental onto the pavement of North Virginia Street in downtown Reno, along a block crowded with people on the Thanksgiving holiday. Six people were killed and more than twenty injured.
At trial she testified that she was an incarnation of Jesus Christ and incapable of sin, and described the people she had hit in terms this roster records. The defence was insanity. The trial ran for months and the jury rejected it, and she was convicted of six counts of murder and sentenced to death on April 29, 1982. The only woman on Nevada's death row.
She was never executed and died of emphysema in prison on January 29, 2005, aged seventy-five, after twenty-two years under sentence of death.
This is a mass killing in a single act, not a serial case, and it belongs in the archive under that classification. It is also one of the clearest examples in the American record of a capital conviction returned against a defendant whose psychiatric history was extensive, documented and uncontested by either side.