CHARLESTON, W.Va., Jun. 5 — Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower serving a life term for trying to kill then-President Gerald Ford, has been transferred from a prison where she escaped last year to one in Kentucky with better security, officials said.

Fromme, 39, was moved Friday to the Lexington Federal Correctional Institution, said Ron Burkhart, warden of the Alderson Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia.

She was sentenced May 25 to an additional 15 months in prison for escaping from the all-female Alderson prison for two days last December.

The Lexington prison is “basically a level 1 (minimum) security installation, but within that institution we operate a high-security unit,” Burkhart said Saturday, “She’ll be housed in the high-security unit.”

Alderson, a medium-security prison in the mountains of southern West Virginia, has no separate unit to house dangerous inmates or those considered escape risks.

Fromme was the first person sentenced under a special federal law covering assaults on presidents, a statute enacted after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

She was arrested after she aimed a semiautomatic pistol at Ford on Sept. 5, 1975, in Sacramento, Calif.

During her sentencing on the escape charge, Fromme told U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth V. Hallanan that she couldn’t promise that she would not try to escape again.

Fromme had said she left the prison Dec. 23 in order to be closer to Manson. She was recaptured near the prison on Christmas Day.