Priscilla Joyce Ford

Life & Legacy

Priscilla Joyce Ford (February 10, 1929 – January 29, 2005) was an American convicted mass murderer, who was sentenced to death for killing six people on Thanksgiving Day 1980 in Reno, Nevada by driving her car on the sidewalk into a crowd of people. She injured 23 more.
A former teacher in New York, Ford had struggled for years with mental illness: she had been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia with religious and violent tendencies. She had been treated and released by seven different hospitals before moving to Reno in 1980.
Ford filed numerous appeals of her death sentence. She was still being held on death row when she died of emphysema in prison, at the age of 75. She had long been a heavy smoker.