Sandra Good, a Manson follower imprisoned for mailing death threats, has refused parole because authorities won’t let her see ‘Charlie.’

ALDERSON, W. VA., Apr. 18 – Oh, there is anger all right, and regret, lots of it, and sorrow in buckets for the land, for the trees, for the soot-smogged skies. But when it comes to the murdered people, the five who were killed by the Manson family — her family — her eyes grow vacant as plates. Sometimes, she said, murder is “appropriate.”

And never more appropriate than on the day that actress Sharon Tate, a pregnant woman, was held down and stabbed to death, along with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent, every one of them stabbed and murdered.

Sandra Good talks easily about it, the way one remembers high school graduation, or getting a magazine subscription. She is the mother of Charles Manson’s child, was and is an active Manson family member, although she was not involved in the Tate murders. She refuses to leave the federal penitentiary in Alderson, W. Va., because authorities won’t let her see Manson.

“Those murders were appropriate for that point in time,” said Sandra Good, implying perhaps not now.

At 41, she has served 10 years of a 15-year sentence for writing letters threatening to assassinate corporate heads she accused of being polluters, and she was approved for parole. She won’t sign parole papers because they require her to stay out of California, where Manson is serving a life term, and require her to spend time in a New Jersey halfway house.

This galls her. Doesn’t anyone understand what she stands for? “And they’re picking Jersey — knowing how I feel about pollution.” This is taxing, but not the heart of the matter: “I just want to see Charlie,” she said.

Still visible is the X she carved into her forehead during the Tate trial, the day after Manson carved his own X above his brows. “We did cut them with a small knife, a little screwdriver, heated it, made a brand. We’re X’d out of the system,” she explained. She keeps her short, reddish hair covered with a scarf, “for respect, modesty. It’s part of our religion. We’re Mansonites. We’re in the house of Manson.” And she talks in authentic Sixties rap that hasn’t been around for 15 years. “Old lady, ya’ dig? Far out,” and “I’ve been tripping on these things that are going around.” She wears on a necklace a wool spider Manson made from a sock. For three days running, she was entirely clad in blue.

“Blue” is the name she goes by, the name Charlie gave her. Manson, who considered all his women one and never particularly differentiated among them for any purpose including sex, assigned them colors. Sandra Good was called Blue, which she likes because it reminds her of clear skies and blue seas. He gave the name “Red” to Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, another family member, also imprisoned at Alderson for the attempted assassination of then President Gerald Ford.

Conversations with Good vary widely day by day, like the picture on a television on the blink, now hazy, now clear, now color, now black and white. She is secretive, yet possessed of a rhetorician’s skills. On the environmentally destructive: “How cold, cruel, crude, callous they become.” On air pollution: “Hold your breath. See how much you don’t need air.”

One day she talked in Manson-gabble using phrases in Mansonian, like “Alikens from Pice,” which means “alike in him, your heartbeat.” On most days she delivers running tracts about the heart of the Mansonian creed, ATWA, an acronym for air, trees, water and animals. She is always lucid but has her own agenda that she hates to depart from, and that agenda is ATWA.

“The most necessary thing to do is focus on saving our air and water. To balance life on Earth is necessary. Our immune systems are being worn away by assault from so many chemicals antithetical to the human body. They interfere with the cellular metabolism. Companies render the soil dead, destroy the wildlife dependent on the trees, the birds and the insects. The Manson family’s thought is to balance life on Earth.” She seems to know her environmental stuff and genuinely care about ecology, a caring that doesn’t extend to people. She was eligible for parole in 1980, and presumably could have gone to see her son back then, five years ago, but never applied for parole. “Board wants you to scrape and bow and play act for their offer of the gate.”

Verbal as she is, an innocuous question shocked her. Were there blacks in the Manson family?

There was silence for a full minute. She stopped smiling, though she does whenever she mentions Manson’s name, and throughout discussions of the murders. And in her sweet, musical voice, the voice of the president of the DAR, she echoes.

“Blacks?” And finally, “No.”

Why?

Silence again. “We’re a white family.” Silence again.

“It’s native to reproduce yourself. If I was black, I’d want the children to be black. Each kind is beautiful unto itself. We’re talking about kind.” Asked whether she had ties to the Aryan Brotherhood, a group Manson befriended at the California State Prison at Folsom, referring them to Good when they got out, she said, “I have some understanding in that spot.”

For 16 years, since the Tate murders, she said, the Manson family has been much misunderstood. “Scapegoats for the sins and crimes of the government,” in her view, and she has been no exception.

“I am not,” said the mother of Charles Manson’s child, “a kill-cult, zombie disciple of drug-crazed, mass-murderer hippies.”

“I am not,” said the mother of Manson’s son, “a willowy wierdo or a wierdo drug-crazed cultist. I have never been a follower of any guru.”

The murders were “not thrill killings, not for fun, not motivated by hate, not motivated by money, not sadistic, not hate or rage or thrills.”

What were they?

“It would take too much time.

“What’s all this preoccupation with the Tate murders, anyway? Why are they [society] so stuck on death, they’ve been through the Vietnam War. Nobody knows the reasons for those murders.”

Do you?

“Yes.”

Well, then, what were they?

She will tell about this, along the way offering insight into how the minds of the Manson family members worked, and wherefore their strange devotion to Manson, and she talks of herself only reluctantly, but in her life story there are immediate echoes to Manson’s childhood and Lynette Fromme’s childhood that give clues to the visceral understanding Manson had of his women, of what their hearts needed and what he supplied.

It is years and years ago, the Fifties in San Diego, Calif., where a little girl of divorced parents is growing up in the home of her mother, Eleanor Ruth Dixon Good, descended from John Paul Jones, a socialite, a commentator on beauty pageants, the daughter of a bank president, a member of the country club, a beauty.

Her father, the late George Franz Good, is distant geographically and emotionally. Economics degree from Princeton, mansion in New Rochelle. A “very rich” man, working for Kaiser. Son of a lawyer. “He had a lot of stock, his mother was a Frick, a Pennsylvania Frick, money going back as far as I know.” A trust fund was set up for the daughter.

The little girl was Sandra Good, trying to please her mother and failing. She is intelligent and verbal but has a lifelong reading problem that puzzles her. “I’ve always been a slow reader.” Only years later would the phrase “learning disability” come into use.

“My mother won’t communicate with me,” she said, speaking of now. Since when? “Since birth.” When she was 4 her mother remarried an aeronautical engineer. On the surface, hers was a life of high school sororities, proms, junior cotillion and assemblies.

“I gave the impression I was wealthy, but I wore hand-me-down clothes from my sisters and thrift clothes. We had maids, but we were not spoiled with material possessions. I didn’t have a car, or a TV. I shared my mom with my sister until she went to Sarah Lawrence.

“I was left to my own devices emotionally. I remember being in the rich crowd in school, but I had no clothes and clothes is a big thing in high school.” And clothes, “I didn’t have.”

“My mother was a sorority girl in UCLA, real beautiful, totally, totally insecure. My mother didn’t know how to be a mother. Her whole trip was social climbing and wanting to be a perennial beauty. She liked to go to cocktail parties. We had housekeepers and stuff to houseclean.

“Emotionally deprived we all were. She was not a loving kind of mom, didn’t hug me. She was temperamental. There was no communication. She was a very strict disciplinarian. Strict. She used to smack us across the face. You should never smack a child across the face; it’s disrespectful.

“I did a lot of my childhood alone. I’d come home, see if her station wagon was in the driveway, that would mean she was home.” She hid. “I’d go out to this old abandoned greenhouse. The anxiety started at the age of one, wondering where my daddy is.

“I felt so left out, never having a mommy, being smacked around. Just wipe your eyes, dry the tears off, go to school with that pit in your stomach. You have to buck up and interrelate with your classmates. And smile. And you’re hurting.”

Her mother’s message: “Be beautiful and witty and marry a lawyer, just marry money.” But she never seemed to manage to make it even to pretty, at least not in her mind. She attended college for a while, traveled to Europe and Hawaii and at 25, a friend introduced her to Manson.

Lynette Alice Fromme’s life in Santa Monica in many ways paralleled Good’s. She was a high school majorette from an upper-middle-class, but loveless family. She was turned out of her home. She felt ugly and unlovable until she was 17 and Manson found her in the street, said he knew her father didn’t want her, and invited her to join his group. Her self-esteem was so low that, she later explained, “A dog goes to somebody who loves it and takes care of it.”

Under Manson, the two young women blossomed. An older man — he is 50 now — a father figure who made love to them and made them feel beautiful. “Charlie knew us totally,” said Good, pointing to a tracheotomy scar she has had since infancy. “He knew the reason for this: ‘Your mother was jealous of you and did not want you to live. She programmed you to sickness and death.'” With Charlie, “It was like seeing a part of myself that they’ve tried to hide from us, our own beauty, our own grace, your own majesty, your own naturalness.”

Sex was everywhere in the houses they inhabited during the Manson years, but not for Good, who was never made to feel like Manson’s lover. Manson slept with “whoever he was moved to sleep with.” She looked on enviously as he paid attention to the other women. “I had very little sex, very, very, very little. About enough to get me with child. He thought I’d make a good, strong baby.”

He was attentive to animals, to spiders, cats, dogs and horses, but paid little attention to Good.

“I was very jealous. Me personally. Jealous. I wanted his attention all the time. Got it not very often.” Why? “Because I was trying. I was doing typical little womanly things to get a man’s attention. Sulking.” And recalling how that was she said, “It doesn’t get rewarded. He was hip to every game women play.”

Charles Manson’s mother was in a West Virginia prison. And now, so is the mother of Manson’s son.

Manson told Good about his childhood. “He was a hillbilly kid, not well-read, came from mountain people in gunny-sack clothes. West Virginia, Kentucky. He had no shoes. His uncle was making moonshine; they came to the uncle’s property to take down the stills and send the kids to school, and he blew the whole thing up, house and stills, ’cause he was not going to send his kids to a government school. His Uncle Jess blew up the property before he’d send the kids to school. His mother went to prison in Moundsville, West Virginia, when he was young. Armed robbery with her brother.

“She used to work in the prison, she cleaned the killing floor in the days when they hung people in West Virginia. He was in reform school by the time he was nine, doing institution time, so really the system raised him.”

Manson was an outsider and could spot other outsiders every time. And spotting them, he took
them in, and some, like Good and Fromme, remain grateful.

Sandra Good was eight months pregnant when Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant. Good’s son was born Sept. 15. Sharon Tate’s baby didn’t survive her mother’s murder and never had a chance to be born.

Good was in prison for using stolen credit cards on Aug. 9, 1969, the night of the Tate killings, and on Aug. 10, the night of the family’s second round of murders — of supermarket chain owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.

When Good heard of the killings, not knowing who committed them, she claims, “I said God, you’re so upset over a movie star, and every day your brothers are being killed in Vietnam?”

She said she was told the Manson family did it two months later by one of the killers, Susan Atkins.

“I was breastfeeding my child. Susan Atkins mentioned Tate, and it rang a bell. The other girl went ‘Shhhh.’ And they told me. I’m holding this baby in my arms, breastfeeding it, and I said what about the [Tate] baby? Why did you let the baby die? Knowing how I was feeling, they said they would have done a Caesarean and take the baby out but there wasn’t time.

“I went through some changes. I thought of the death of Tate’s baby. I thought about all the women in Vietnam, mothers holding mutilated babies, women having abortions. Why should I mourn the death of one baby without mourning the death of thousands of babies?

“I didn’t say anything. I was in profound thought.” Upset initially, she told herself, “I knew that there was reasons. I didn’t ask at that point. Reasons.”

Having a baby was not her own idea but that of family members’ other women, who thought she and Manson would make a good “superbaby.” Fine genes, they said. She wasn’t interested at first, associating babies with “Dr. Spock and sterilizers,” but Manson’s philosophy made it easy, because he didn’t believe parents should raise their own children so as not to pass on their “hang-ups” to offspring. [Shortly after he was born, Good’s son was informally adopted by people she knows.] No liquor was tolerated at the ranch, especially for pregnant women, whose outside stimulants during pregnancy were limited. “To make a good baby, we really discouraged the use of anything but pot, mescaline and acid.”

“There’s a lot of reasons for those murders,” said Sandra Good. “You know, when you honor somebody, worthy of your respect, or a lord. I don’t like to put him up as a Christ, ’cause people kill their lords. He has answers on how to reorder the goddamn country for life. He’s got the mind to fix it. He’s the best servant to life on Earth, his mind circles all world thought.”

Tate/LaBianca? “Those people were already dead.

“When they invest money in getting things, how alive was that? THEY WERE SUPERMARKET CHAIN OWNERS! Rain forests, Indians! Cultures being massacred for beef. The whole world could be fed!” And Folger, the coffee heiress? “You’re displacing the native people, hurting the soil! Growing one crop! The people involved in the Manson murders, they killed a lie. Hollywood’s a lie. And one of the motives was to get Bobby [Beausoleil, accused of a different murder] out of jail, love of brother.

“Those people were dead in the money. [People] focus their fears on a small group of people that gave all to wake them up. Gave their lives to wake them up!” Said a prison official who has known her for years: “She’s institutionalized. A frightened woman afraid to be released … Manson doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about her. They are virtually her family. She has no family. They don’t want to know about her.”

And so she remains in jail. She hasn’t heard from her mother since 1965. She hasn’t heard from Manson “for years.”

By CAROLE AGUS