BRIDPORT, VT, Nov. 17 – In recent weeks, a Bridport woman named Sandra Collins has taken strong public stands against pollution of Lake Champlain by the International Paper Co.

She spoke, to applause, at a public meeting with U.S. Rep. Peter Smith, R-Vt., led a protest against the company at a court hearing on a federal suit over the pollution, met with college students and organized other activists.

The high profile campaign was designed to focus attention on the lake. Instead it focused attention on Sandra Collins and disclosed her true identity: Sandra Good, a disciple of Charles Manson and mother of a child by him.

“It is probably time to be Sandra Good again,” she told the Addison Independent this week after her identity became known.

Good, 45, served 10 years in a federal prison for writing threatening letters to corporations. Although she is devoted to Manson, she was not implicated in the gruesome slayings of actress Sharon Tate and eight others that led to Manson’s 1969 conviction and life sentence.

Good shared an apartment with Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who is now serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. It was following Fromme’s arrest that investigators found 3,000 letters Good had written to officials at companies such as Union Carbide Corp., warning of death or disaster if they continued to pollute the environment.

Good still considers herself to be an active member of Manson’s family even though she hasn’t seen him since 1971, when he and four other family members were given life sentences for the sadistic slayings of Tate and eight other people.

Upon her release on parole in 1985, Good came to Vermont, living a quiet and very private life. To conceal her identity, she dropped her last name and went by her first and middle names: Sandra Collins.

“I didn’t want to be photographed. I didn’t want to be recognized. The scope of the past is so huge. The media created their own version of what we were about. It wasn’t the truth,” she told the Rutland Herald Wednesday.

She first lived in Burlington, then the small town of St. George, and then three years ago moved to Bridport, located along the shores of Lake Champlain, a 125-mile long lake that is the nation’s sixth largest freshwater lake.

“When I first came here, I knew the lake was sick,” she said. “I looked at the lake and I knew something was wrong.”

Good and her housemate, Earl Parsons, who owns their lakefront home, have been leaders in the fight against the paper company.

Until this week, Good’s true identity was not known. She has been quoted in numerous news articles in recent months about the pollution, but under the name of Sandra Collins.

Two weeks ago, during a court hearing on the IPC case, Good sat directly in front of the paper plant manager, Fred Chasse, and said, “You people are the worst criminals I know of.”

Pollution from the paper plant has been a controversial issue since the mill was built in 1971. Recently the company settled a federal lawsuit against the mill. The suit alleged the mill’s pollution caused a nuisance and devalued the homes and property of Vermont lakeshore residents.

The settlement requires the company to deposit $5 million into a fund for research on the lake and make payments to property owners. Good and Parsons have refused to accept any money, calling the settlement “a monumental buy-off.”

Good said she had wanted to continue to conceal her identity, but felt the future of the lake was too important for her not to fight its pollution.

“If I cared so much about what people think, I would have stayed in the closet,” she said.