LOS ANGELES, Sept. 29 – Once, the inner circle of the notorious Charles Manson Family encompassed the minds and occasionally murderous hands of about 25 young men and women.

Today, despite some widespread news reports to the contrary, all available evidence is that Manson’s circle has contracted to almost zero.

At the center of the zero stands the petite Sandra Good, one of Manson’s earliest and most adoring followers.

As far as can be documented, the 31-year-old Good, still living in Sacramento, is virtually the last of Manson’s true believers with any measure of freedom.

The most famous of Manson’s followers, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, is jailed in Sacramento awaiting trial on a charge of attempting to assassinate President Ford on Sept. 5.

The rest of the hard-core Manson loyalists were behind bars long before Fromme’s bizarre act — and as Good herself hinted in an interview, the loyalty of some of them is in question.

And, since the Friday morning when her scarlet-costumed roommate thrust a .45-caliber automatic pistol at the President of the United States, Good has been under intense observation by law enforcement agencies.

“While the President was here (in California) the last time, there were 12 Secret Service fellas watching the house,” Good told The Times. “Four of them followed me everywhere. But I’m not doing anything — it doesn’t matter that we’re under surveillance.”

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt by one of Manson’s most dedicated disciples, it was only natural that there would be a new flareup of old fears about the death-obsessed Family.

After all, Manson Family members had been tried and convicted of taking part in nine grisly murders — and former Los Angeles Dep. Dist. Atty. Vincent Bugliosi had speculated in his best-selling book, “Helter Skelter,” that the strange cult had been responsible for a total of between 35 and 40 slayings.

In background stories on the Fromme attempt, some publications played on those fears. Time magazine was in the forefront. In a sidebar story in its Sept. 15 edition, the magazine led off:

“Their eyes revealing a horrifying emptiness, the members of the Manson family are once again haunting the headlines. The motley, mixed-up band today numbers about 100, fanned out in communes up and down California. Some Mansonites live in a three-story wood frame house about 30 miles east of Folsom prison where Manson was held for a time. The number of residents varies, but usually includes at least seven women, three men and up to ten children.”

The story went on to describe Manson women packing hunting knives on their hips, and to claim:

“California law officials have much evidence of a loose, long standing conjunction between the Manson family and a close-knit, all-white group of 200 inmates spread throughout the California prison system called the Aryan Brotherhood which shares with the Family an intense hatred of blacks.”

In interviews with more than a dozen persons familiar with the Manson Family — local, state and federal law enforcement intelligence officers, cellblock-level prison sources, former Family associates, lawyers for both the prosecution and defense in Manson cases, and Sandra Good — The Times was unable to verify a single one of these scary assertions.

The consensus of the intelligence sources was, in the words of a state Department of Justice agent, “For practical purposes, the Manson gang does not exist outside of prison.”

Bugliosi agrees with the intelligence estimate that even at its peak in 1969, the core of the Manson Family consisted of a maximum of 25 persons.

“There are no hundred Manson Family members,” Bugliosi said. “Even in their heyday, they never had more than 20 to 25. When you were a member, you lived together (with the others). If there were a hundred family members, they’d be with Sandy (Good) and Squeaky (Fromme) right now.

“They have not been with them. What is a possibility is there may have been as many as 100 people who were associated with the Family at one time or another, for a month or two, or during the trial. There was always a new face … for a week or two, and then you’d never see them again. And they’d go around and say, ‘I was a member of Manson’s Family.’”

One person, who knew Manson before the Family was formed and was intimate with a number of its members, but declined to be identified publicly even by sex, said that both the 25 “inner circle” and the 100 “associate” figures are “pretty optimistic.”

This source said there were only a handful of true believers. There were as many as 60 who drifted in and out of Manson’s sphere without actually becoming Family members, according to the source.

Somewhat surprisingly, Good also agrees generally with the estimates of intelligence sources — up to a point.

In an interview in the top-floor apartment on Sacramento’s “P’ St. which she shared until recently with Fromme, she said that the family consisted of “10, maybe 15” people.

“The ‘inside’ Family,” she said, they have been imprisoned for five years. The people who were arrested in the desert, the people who came with Manson all the way to the gas chamber — this is what we’ll call the Family. OK? Now everybody has been locked up in different institutions.”

And even among these few, she said, “We have our problems,” principally with Susan Atkins, who disavowed Manson in a recent television interview from prison.

The other members of the inner circle — she named only herself, Fromme, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houton, Charles (Tex) Watson, Bruce Davis and Steve Grogan — are still at least spiritually “together,” according to Good.

“We are together no matter what,” she emphasized. “We’re united in a bond that can’t be broken. It’s set in the universe.”

(Krenwinkel and Van Houton, like Atkins and Mary Brunner, mother of Manson’s son, are serving sentences at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. Watson is serving life at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Davis is serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison. Grogan, convicted with Davis of the decapitation murder of Spahn ranch hand Donald (Shorty) Shea, is serving life at Deuel Vocational Institute at Tracy. Manson, is doing life at San Quentin Prison.)

By JERRY BELCHER