[chris]

Susan Atkins
09304 MB-127-L
Frontera, CA 91720

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[chris]

Susan Denise Atkins was born on May 7, 1948 in San Gabriel, California, to a lower middle-class family. Her father was a construction worker and her mother took various odd jobs (such as doing surveys over the telephone) to help support Susan and her two brothers. When Susan was still very young, the family moved to northern California, living in San Francisco suburb of Millbrae, and, after that, San Jose.


By all accounts hers was not exactly an idyllic childhood. Both of her parents were alcoholics and often got into violent conflicts with one another. Susan has also claimed that she was molested by her older brother and some of his friends. To top it all off, her mother died of cancer when Susan was just fifteen.


After Mrs. Atkins's death, Susan's father sank deeper and deeper into depression and alcoholism and eventually left her and her younger brother Steven in the care of an aunt. It was around this time that Susan quit school and headed for San Francisco, barely subsisting on a series of dead-end jobs and associating with the likes of drug addicts and car thieves. When she was eighteen she got a job as a topless dancer at the Kandy Kat club in San Francisco; perhaps her biggest "accomplishment" during this period was dancing topless in a pseudo-Satanic revue staged by none other than Anton LaVey. Her success was short-lived, though; her drug use and promiscuity landed her in a hospital for several months with a nasty case of the clap.


This did not deter Susan from her free-wheeling lifestyle, though. Soon after she was released from the hospital she moved into a commune in Haight-Ashbury right next door to Janis Joplin. The group's main source of income was from selling narcotics, and thus Susan was supplied with a steady stream of the drugs that she had grown so dependent on. Her appetite for sex and drugs had been satiated; apparently, though, there was still something that she was missing.


She came to believe that the answer that she had been looking for came to her in the form of a grubby, thirty-two-year-old ex-convict named Charles Manson. She met him one day while he was visiting friends at her pad in the Haight. She was the fourth girl to join the growing "Family" and hopped on the group's black bus without a moment's hesitation. Little did she know what kind of a ride she was in for...


Susan traveled with the group up and down the West Coast before they finally settled in a house in Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon. The building soon proved too small for the burgeoning Family, though, and Susan says that it was she who secured the use of a run-down movie ranch as the main setting for their Magical Mystery Tour (This fact has been widely disputed, though; many sources maintain that Sandra Good was actually the one who made possible the use of Spahn's Ranch, and a few people have even said that it was Lynette Fromme. ).


These early, pre-murder days were saturated with dope and orgies, and Sadie (as she was now called by Manson, utilizing the clever cultic name-change tactic)was by all accounts one of the most enthusiastic participants in the festivities. It was around this time that she became pregnant; she has said that the father was a short-term Family member by the name of Bruce Hall. Her son, dubbed Zezozose Zadfrack by Manson, was born on October 7, 1968 in one of the run-down shacks on the ranch. Everyone in the group participated in the delivery, right down to Charlie tying the umbilical cord with a guitar string.


Motherhood didn't do anything to soften Sadie's outrageous tendencies, though, and she willingly lapped up Charlie's talk of Helter Skelter during the next several months. Charlie told his girls that to kill someone was to give them life, and Sadie took his message right to heart. One time she even offered an ax to a ranch visitor, telling him to go ahead and kill her. With all this being said, it is not surprising that Sadie was involved in the first Family-related killing. In July of 1969, she and Mary Brunner accompanied Family member (or associate, depending on whom who ask) Robert Beausoleil to the home of one Gary Hinman, a music teacher who had befriended the group and even let members stay with him when times were rough.


Charlie, apparently convinced that Gary had recently come into a large sum of money, sent Beausoleil to get Hinman to share some of his wealth, including the pink slips to his vehicles. When Hinman refused, things got ugly fast. The three Mansonites held a gun on him for three days, when Bobby finally stabbed him and suffocated him with a pillow, adding the Helter-Skelteresque touch of writing "Political Piggy" in blood on the wall.


Apparently Sadie's first taste of murder hadn't turned her stomach that much, as only weeks later she accompanied cohorts Charles "Tex" Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to the doomed mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon area of LA. Once the group had broken into the house, it was Sadie who rounded up pregnant actress Sharon Tate, her former fiance Jay Sebring, and her friend and temporary housemate, Abigail Folger, bringing them into the room where Tex was with Folger's boyfriend, Voytek Frykowski. Sadie then tied Frykowski's hands with a towel from the bathroom. He struggled free, though, and began fighting with Sadie. Before Tex chased him out onto the lawn, Sadie managed to stab him in the legs.


It is also believed that she managed to stab Sharon Tate, as well, although Sadie herself now denies this. Whether or not her knife actually penetrated the blond beauty, Atkins had readily admitted that she held Sharon down so Tex could stab her, responding to her cries for mercy with an utterly unsympathetic "Look, bitch, I don't care a thing about you. You're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it." When the massacre was all over, it was Sadie who wrote "Pig" on the house's front door with Tate's blood.


If she had any qualms of conscience immediately following the murders, she sure didn't show it. When the group arrived back at Spahn's, Sadie bubbled over with tales of the night's events, adding that "Boy, it sure was Helter Skelter." As she and other Family members watched the killings being described on the news the following day, she laughed and giggled. It was perhaps this coldness that made her a candidate for accompanying Charlie and other members on a second murder spree the following night. After dropping Watson, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten off at the LaBianca residence in Los Feliz, he sent Atkins, Kasabian, and Steven Grogan to the home of actor Saladin Nader. The attempt on his life was thwarted by Linda's knocking on the wrong door in his apartment building. Sadie ever-so-delicately responded to the evening's events by taking a crap on the building's staircase.


In September of 1969 Sadie and her baby accompanied the Family out to the remote Barker Ranch in Death Valley. It was there that the gang was arrested for auto theft on October 10 and 12, 1969. While they were in the Inyo County Jail in Independence, California, off-and-on Family member Kathryn Lutesinger implicated her in the Hinman murder, for which Beausoleil had already been arrested. Atkins was shipped down to Sybil Brand in Los Angeles. It was there that she regaled her cellmates with tales of Helter Skelter, leading to Manson's arraignment and the arrests of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in December of 1969. The Magical Mystery had screeched to an abrupt end.


Although Sadie initially cooperated with the prosecution, when it came time for trial she was right there by Charlie's side. She, Manson, Van Houten and Krenwinkel were tried together for first-degree murder(Tex was still fighting extradition in his home state of Texas and Linda was being granted immunity), starting on June 15, 1970. The group did everything they could to make a complete spectacle of the courtroom. The girls lifted their skirts up, sang "The Old Gray Mare", chanted in Latin, carved "X" marks into their foreheads and ultimately shaved their heads as signs of solidarity. Their behavior didn't help them any, though; all of them were sentenced to death on March 29, 1971.


A California state law forbidding the death penalty spared the group from the gas chamber the following year. Atkins spent her first several years at the California Institution for Women in relative isolation, remaining loyal to Charlie but feeling cut off from fellow Family members for being a "snitch." Her outlook soon changed, though, when she began receiving letters from former member Bruce Davis. Davis had recently become a born-again Christian and he was key in Susan's decision to become a Christian in September 1974.


Since then, the main focus of Atkins's life has been her religion; she has even started a ministry from CIW. Her post-Manson life has not been totally devoid of problems, though; one such problem came in the form of purported Texan millionaire Donald Lee Laisure, whom she married in prison in 1980. When it turned out that he barely had a penny to his name, she sent him packing. She is now married to a Harvard Law School graduate named James Whitehouse, who represented her at her 2000 parole hearing. Atkins has yet to see freedom, though; her next hearing is in 2005.

[calabera]

a famous groupie hippie killer

[Hotstuff]

good read chris

[t18amgr]

the cunt is dead of a brain tumor now

[Gh007]

Two things that amaze me about the whole Manson mystique is there was a school bus among really huge boulder on top of a mountain where the "family" would hide out. The sheriffs office asked how the bus got there since it would have taken heavy machinery to set it down among the rock on the peak in a mountainous area... every member had the same answer. "How do you think it got there? He flew it there."
In the prison system Manson is in, in California, he is on a permanent transportation cycle where they move him every six months because apparently whenever they tried to allow him to stay in one area he was developing a following.

The beginning of the attached song is her voice being recorded during an interview.

[zadfrackglutz]

"i am that child."

[Frank_Furter]

Here's a video of the bitch just before she died last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=q8JVnBsjJLI

[Cumulonimbus]

A fine read, Chris.

[downunder]

Dam, that vid has been removed