Dianne Lake - Member of the Family - Manson, Murder and Me

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First published in the US by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2017

This UK edition HarperElement 2018

FIRST EDITION

Text © Dianne Lake 2017

All photos courtesy of the author

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Vladimir Serov/Getty Images (model); Bettmann/Getty Images (Charles Manson)

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Dianne Lake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008274764

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008261481

Version 2018-03-09

To the victims and their families; those who needlessly

lost their lives and those who continue to suffer because of

the madness of this dark time in our shared history. May

God’s grace prevail and heal the pain that remains.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

PART I. TURN ON

1 A Minnesota Childhood

2 Family Matters

3 One Stray Ash

4 California

5 How to Be-In

6 Hippies in Newsprint

7 The Note

8 Welcome to the Hog Farm

9 Someone Groovy

PART II. TUNE IN

10 The Black Bus

11 We Are All One

12 Panhandling and Postulating

13 Snake

14 Spahn Ranch

15 Beach Boy

16 A Little Monkey

17 A Door Closes

18 On the Edge

19 Baking Soda Biscuits

20 Out of Sight

21 Preaching the White Album

22 A Simple Bag of Coins

PART III. DROP OUT

23 The Witches’ Brew

24 Reclaiming My Name

25 My Day in Court

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Photos Section

About the Publisher

It is time for me to exorcise my own demons and to face the truth as much as I can remember it. In this book, I have shared what I can re-create through straining my memory muscle, research, corroboration from people who knew me, and my own words from trial and interrogation transcripts. They tell only my piece of the story from personal experience and perception. I was with the Manson Family from the age of fourteen until my arrest at Barker Ranch at the age of sixteen. My memories by necessity reflect the mind of a teenager. Everything in this book is true. Some of the names and identifying details have been changed to protect people’s privacy. Some conversations are re-created to the best of my ability, as no memory is perfect. This is my perspective. This is my story and this is my confessional.

2008

It began, as these stories often do, with a phone call, one that I had been dreading for decades.

“Are you Dianne Lake?” the voice asked.

The question stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t heard that name for years. This could be about only one thing.

“Uh-huh,” I said hesitantly. “What do you want?”

Immediately after the words left my mouth, I regretted saying them. I’d done nothing wrong, committed no crimes, but I had a reason to hide. So many people out there had looked for me over the years—reporters writing about the crimes, journalists seeking sources for books about the Family—and of course the worst were the crazies obsessed with Charles Manson. For the most part, I’d been able to evade them all—flying under the radar all these years, hiding in plain sight with my husband’s last name. I immediately wished I had hung up the phone right at that moment, but it happened too fast, my answer a reflex. Even after all these years, I still wasn’t prepared.

I had buried my history so well I’d almost forgotten that once I was someone else: a young girl named Dianne Lake who was only fourteen when Charles Manson had inducted her into his Family of followers. A girl who had spent almost two years being manipulated by him before a moment of clarity broke the spell, and who then went on to testify against him on November 3, 1970, helping to put him in prison forever. Over the course of the eight years that followed, I’d been in and out of the courtroom through the Manson trial and two retrials of fellow Family member Leslie Van Houten, coming of age on the witness stand and telling my story to the juries and the judges, as well as to the gawkers who obsessed over the gruesome acts that were committed by Charles Manson and members of his Family on two nights in August 1969. I’d told stories of life with the Family, of the things we’d done and the drugs we’d taken, of how I’d joined with the blessing of my parents, hippies themselves, thinking that I was in control of my life, only to discover a reality darker than I ever could have imagined.

And in 1978, after my final appearance on the witness stand for Leslie Van Houten’s retrial, I put away these stories of Charles Manson and the Family and left them behind for good. In a case that had captured the attention of people around the world, where spectators waited all night for one of the fifteen seats in the courtroom, I was the last witness.

From then on, Charles Manson and his Family were a part of my past—they had nothing to do with my present or my future. By that point, I was already being courted by my husband, with whom I spent the next thirty-five years. He knew about my past, but we decided to create a life without ties to that former identity. We never told his family or the three children we went on to have together about what I’d been through. Even when my daughter brought in a stray cat and named it Charlie, I never acknowledged why I suggested she call him something else.

Over time, my memories of the Manson Family became watercolors, the lines soft and blurry without clear definition. Whenever I was reminded of the Family, either because of events in the news or anniversary retrospectives, I disconnected, all too willing to forget the events of my own life. Until the phone rang.

“I am Paul Dostie,” the voice said. “I am a detective and my partner is a cadaver dog named Buster.”

“What is this about?” I asked.

“I know that you told investigator Jack Gardiner that you thought there were more bodies buried up by Barker Ranch.”

Barker Ranch. It was where we’d hidden out after the murders, in Death Valley, the middle of nowhere and as far away as Charlie could take us. A place where they weren’t supposed to find us. Only they did. Two months after the killings, with a warrant for an unrelated charge of vandalism, the police raided Barker Ranch, rounding up all of us. In the interim it was Family member Susan Atkins, one of the killers, then in jail on another charge, who made the connection between these crimes and Charlie. I kept my identity secret as I shared a cell with the other girls in the Family. When it came time to testify before the grand jury, I admitted my real age of only sixteen and gave them my true name. Confessing my true age made me a ward of the court and landed me in a mental institution, an interesting twist for a teenage girl who’d experienced all that the counterculture of the 1960s had to offer.