Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

Good is believed to be the proud guardian of the vest Manson frequently wore during the Family’s heyday, embroidered by “Charlie’s girls” through the years with the images of devils, witches, goblins, and other symbols of black magic and demonology. Also sewn into the vest is the hair of those girls who shaved their heads while conducting their round-the-clock vigil for Manson outside the Hall of Justice during his trial.

As to those who were once members of Manson’s flock, or associated with the Family, they have scattered to the four winds and are very protective of their privacy from the media. Because the Manson Family has become synonymous with terror, like those in the Bible’s Revelation 9 whose identifying seal on their foreheads their leader often spoke about, all of its former members (even those who, as far as we know, did not participate in any of the execrable crimes committed by the Family) are marked for life. Since they know that few who are aware of their background can ever feel serene in their presence, nearly all of them keep their history a secret in their new lives.

My latest information is that Linda Kasabian moved from New Hampshire and is now living under an assumed name in the Pacific Southwest with her husband and three children. A friend of Linda’s when she lived in Milford, New Hampshire, told a reporter that Linda “led a normal life. She drove her kids to school, participated in the PTA, that sort of thing.” Barbara Hoyt, whom I was happy to help get into nursing school, is now a registered nurse in the Northwest. Barbara is divorced and living with her daughter in a townhouse she just purchased. She leads a very active life “camping, fishing, painting, and playing volleyball.”

Contrary to other reports, Dianne Lake never became a corporate executive or vice-president of a bank. She worked as a bank teller for years, and describes herself today as a “happily married, well adjusted and committed Christian living with my husband and three children in the western part of the United States.” Kitty Lutesinger is divorced and raising her two children in California. Steve Grogan is not, as has been reported, working as a house painter in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Someone very close to him informed me that his occupation (undisclosed) takes him to various states and “he is doing exceptionally well, better than anyone could have anticipated.”

Mary Brunner, the first female member of the Family, who was an assistant librarian at the University of California at Berkeley when she joined Manson, served six and one-half years for her participation in the Western Surplus Store robbery in Hawthorne, California. She is presently living in the Midwest under an assumed name, is single, and is doing clerical work.

Catherine Share served five years for her conviction in the Hawthorne robbery. She now lives in a Southwest state with her second husband and a twenty-three-year-old son who is a senior in college. After divorcing Manson Family associate Kenneth Como in 1981, she says she completely separated herself from the Family. Like Dianne Lake, she says she is “happily married, and a Christian very active in church affairs.” Share, who was born in Paris to a Hungarian violinist father and German-Jewish refugee mother, both of whom were members of the anti-Nazi underground French resistance during the Second World War, describes her life today as so clean she hasn’t “gotten a traffic ticket in ten years.” And like Patricia Krenwinkel and other former Family members, she is deeply concerned about the many young people today who look up to Manson and want to follow him. Because of this, she is in the process of working on a book (She Was a Gypsy Woman) with a Texas-based writer which will “tell the truth” to these youths about “who Charles Manson really is.”

During the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, Share had testified that the motive for the murders was not Helter Skelter—which I had tied firmly to Manson—but the so-called copycat motive, which had nothing to do with Manson. In a conversation with her in early April of 1994, she acknowledged to me what I had already known (of the text): that her testimony was untruthful. She said the copycat motive story (as well, of course, as her testimony that Linda Kasabian, not Manson, had been behind the murders) was a fabrication to save Manson from the gas chamber, and that she had testified to it under his explicit direction.