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LYNETTE "SQUEAKY" FROMME
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From the Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1975:
Manson "Family"—It's Scattered and in Prison
By John Kendall and Bill Farr
Times Staff Writers
Love...mass murder..peace...armed robbery...life without clocks...attempted assassination.
All those things--and more--have been attributed to the followers of Charles Manson within the last half dozen years.
Those who collected around the little ex-convict in the late 1960s were known as a "family", but they were a rag-tag band of hippie types taking drugs and sex as they pleased.
Manson, who had spent most of his life in reform schools and prisons, collected them from San Francisco to Malibu.
He was in his mid 30s when he and his followers settled down at George Spahn's movie ranch in Chatsworth around the middle of 1968.
They lived make believe. Life was a "magical mysetery tour" of drugs and easy sex.
"Most of the people at the ranch that you call the family were just people that were alongside the road that their parents had kicked them out or they did not want to go to Juvinile Hall", Manson once explained.
"So I did the best I could and took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love there is no wrong."
"The soul doesn't hear the word 'don't'. You won't get caught if you don't have a thought in your head. Do what your love tells you.
"The truth is now. I have never found any wrong. No sense makes sense."
No wrong. No future. No past.
If the doctrine according to Charles Manson had stopped there with a sort of amoral hedonism, it might have only been a manifestation of the flower-child phenomenon of the 1960s.
But some members of the Manson family turned murderous. Charlie ordered them to kill--for money--and for a far out-idea of starting a black-white race war, and they obeyed.
Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme was living with family member Sandra Good in a Sacramento attic until Friday when Fromme held a gun on the President of the United States.
Had Manson acted from his San Quentin cell and once again directed one of his followers the way he did Charles (Tex) Watson, Susan (Sadie) Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten in two nights of murder in August, 1969?
Seven persons died in Los Angeles then: actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Voityck Frykowsky [sic], hair stylist Jay Sebring, Steven Parent, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
Another person sent along by Manson on those two nights--a petite blond named Linda Kasabian, 21--testified against the other four and returned to New England to live.
Watson, a 6-foot, 2-inch Texan, was convicted in a separate trial and is now at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo, serving a life term.
The three "girls" convicted with Manson and sentenced to death with him on April 19, 1971--Atkins, Van Houten, and Krenwinkle--also got life terms.
Actually, they are women in their middle or late 20s and they are being held at the California Institution for Women at Frontera.
Serving time in the same prison is Mary Brunner, a one-time University of Wisconsin librarian who was one of Manson's earliest converts in San Francisco's Hait-Ashbury district.
Brunner, who bore a sone fathered by Manson, is serving two consecutive 10-year-to-life terms for her part in a pair of armed robberies committed to help break the hippie cult leader out of jail.
She and three others associated with Manson were convicted Feb. 21, 1973, on charges of having taken 143 rifles and $630 in cash from a Hawthorne surplus store and robbing a Covina beer distributor of $2,600, both in mid-1971.
Convicted in the same case was Catherine Share, who recently was paroled and pleaded with the press and public to let her build a new life unhaunted by those years when she was a Manson follower called Gypsy.
Share has taken the new name of Jessica and maintains she has "completely dissociated" herself from Manson. She also stressed that her husband, Kenneth Como, never was a Manson follower.
Como, also serving time for the Hawthorne holdup, recently attacked Manson in the exercize yard at Folsom.
One of the least known of the family, Lawrence Baily, is serving a prison term in the same robbery case.
One of the suprise "character" witnesses called by the defense in the Hawthorne holdup case was Robert (Cupid) Beausoleil.
"You better pray that I never get out", Beausoleil told a jammed courtroom.
Now serving a life term at Deuel Vocational Institute near Tracy, he was the first of the Manson group to go to jail for murder when he was charged with the slaying of Malibu musician Gary Hinman.
Beausoleil was arrested just two days before the homicidal assault at the Tate estate when he was stopped near San Luis Obispo while driving Hinman's van.
His first trial ended in a hung jury but he was convicted the second time around when Brunner, testifying under a promise of immunity, said that Beausoleil had killed Hinman under orders from Manson.
Testimony at the trial revealed that Hinman had been tortured over a two-day period in an effort to get $20,000 that Manson thought he had. Hinman was finally killed with stab wounds in his chest from Beausoleil, Brunner said.
Following the Tate-LaBianca trial, Manson also was put on trial for the Hinman murder and convicted. It came out in the trial that before Himan was killed, Manson sliced off his ear with a sword. Atkins sewed the ear back on without the benefit of anesthesia, according to trial testimony.
Bruce Davis, who took part in the torture death and drove Manson away from the musician's Topanga Canyon home, also was convicted of murder and and is serving his life term at Folsom.
Still another murder attributed to to Manson and Davis was the beheading of Donald (Shorty) Shea, a wrangler who worked at the Spahn Ranch.
Shea disappeared about three weeks after the Tate-LaBianca murders and his body was never found. Some family members reportedly blamed him for a sherriff's raid that caused the arrest of 20 persons at the ranch in mid-August of 1969.
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