Barbara Hoyt & Gypsy Share

Free Manson 'family' members haunted by horror
By LINDA DEUTSCH AP Special Correspondent

Published: Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009

Those who are free are still trying to sort out how they fell under his spell and how they came so close to one of the worst crimes of the 20th century. This is the anniversary of their nightmare.
They were very young when they found Manson - or he found them. Some were just 14. Others were in their late teens and early 20s.

Share muses how she might have been a lawyer or journalist had she never met Manson.

"We were just a bunch of kids looking for love and attention and a different way to live," recalls Share, 66. "He was everything to us. He was a con, a manipulator of the worst kind."

Hoyt was a 17-year-old who had left home after an argument with her father. She was sitting under a tree eating her lunch when a group of Manson followers came along in a van and asked her to go with them. They went to a house in the San Fernando Valley.

"I met Charlie the next morning," she said. "He took me for a motorcycle ride and we went for doughnuts. He was very nice. I thought he was pretty neat."

She said she was told by others of Manson's prediction of a race war that would destroy all but his followers who would go to the desert to live in a bottomless pit until it was safe for them to emerge and take over the world. She said she didn't believe much of it, but they were fixing up dune buggies for their escape and it was fun.

Hoyt and Share eluded being tapped for the Tate-LaBianca murders for different reasons.
"I was very young and I hadn't been there very long," said Hoyt. Others had joined the family long before she had and had been subject to Manson's "deprogramming," which included group sex and LSD trips.

"I wasn't as dead in the head as others. He asked me one time if I could kill and I said if someone asked me I would talk my way out of it. There were other people willing to do it."
Share said she was never asked, partly because she was older. But there was another reason: an extra 20 pounds that would have made it difficult for her to climb through windows.
"Let me tell you," she said, "I was just short of murdering for him. If he had told me to get some black clothes and get in a car, I would have."

The two women, who are not in touch with each other, have struggled back to normalcy. Share became pregnant while living at Spahn Ranch and has a grown son who served in the Marines. She declines to identify the father but said it was not Manson or any other notorious cult figure.
She went to prison for five years for involvement in a Manson Family robbery and later did more time for credit card fraud. She said the time in prison helped her recover and she became a Christian. Some of those in prison also have embraced Christianity.

Share went into retail sales and has just finished a book on her experiences with the Manson Family.

Hoyt went to college and became a nurse and is proud of her accomplishments.
"I raised my daughter; I have my own home and I've had some vacations," she said. But memories haunt her and she doesn't reveal where she's living.

"People freak out when they find out about my past," she said.

She keeps track of the Manson Family members in prison and writes letters urging that they never be released.

Share is more sympathetic to those who were convicted. Susan Atkins, 61, who is dying of brain cancer and had a leg amputated, has been turned down for compassionate release and has a parole hearing coming up in September. Leslie Van Houten, 59, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 61, convicted with her, remain in prison for life as does Charles "Tex" Watson, 63, another of the killers.

"Everyone wants to make them monsters," said Share. "They weren't monsters. They did a monstrous thing and now they're older people and they're not monsters anymore. None of those people ever would have been violent if it weren't for Manson."

http://www.sacbee.com/827/story/2095195.html