She Escaped Charles Manson’s Murderous Sex Cult

Charlie, Juanita, Clem, and Sadie huddled together in the back of the Dodge van that had become Juanita’s traveling home in the summer of ’68. Clem and Sadie made no attempt to conceal their sexual desire for each other, and soon retreated to the upper loft. Now, alone with Juanita for the first time that day at the beach, Charlie knew he had her cornered.

At 24, Juanita was a few years older than most of the free-spirited hippie girls in Charlie’s orbit, but no less idealistic, and Charlie knew that. He turned to her and smiled, his eyes wide with enthusiasm, a toothy grin across his face. He slithered his small, compact frame closer to her, and kissed her. She pulled her lips away from his. “What about Carlos?” she asked, referring to her fiancé, the man she’d planned to rendezvous with in Mexico.

He giggled, that little stuttering laugh she initially found so delightful and charming but would later try to erase from memory. “You don’t need to worry about Carlos, because I am him, and he is me,” he said, his calm, soothing, self-assured voice settling any anxiety she may have had about what was about to happen. Then, he made love to her in the back of the van, while Clem had his way with Sadie in the bed above them. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to punctuate a moment with drama, Charlie even invited Sadie and Clem to join him and Juanita in bed together. That didn’t matter much to Juanita, she was open to it, and if Charlie said it was cool, heck, it must have been.

From that moment on, Juanita Wildebush was hooked, so meeting up with Carlos in Mexico would just have to wait. Before that night at the beach was over, she’d agreed to give Charlie Manson not just her van and the $14,000 she had in a trust fund account, but her whole self.

“He was amazing,” she says, describing Manson’s sexual prowess to me over Zoom. Now 77, a retired social worker who spent the better part of her career helping others who, like her, have escaped a dangerous cult, Juanita lives comfortably in Oregon, a widow, mother, and grandmother. “He was so tender, he would bring you just to the point of orgasm and then he would bring you back. Like a Kama Sutra kind of thing, you know, just bring you up, and bring you up, and bring you back.” I had to remind myself that she was describing the lovemaking technique of one of America’s most notorious criminals, the Machiavellian cult leader who masterminded the brutal “Helter Skelter” murders in 1969 that shocked the world.

When I ask if sex was a tool Manson used to get people hooked on him, she pauses for a minute. “I think so,” she says, as if realizing this for the first time, but this should come as no surprise: she’s spent the last 50 years of her life running as far away from Manson as possible.

“I just don’t get why this is so interesting to people,” she tells me. It won’t be the last time I hear her say this.

I ask her about her earliest memories of life before “Charlie.” “I had a pretty unremarkable childhood,” she says. “My father had had a heart attack at the end of World War II and was given 18 months to live, a year before I was born. And so there was always that undercurrent of he could die any minute. That weighed heavily on me because I was much closer to my dad than I was to my mom,” she continues.

Growing up just across the river from New York City in Westwood, a modest New Jersey suburb, Juanita has fond memories of her father but had, at best, a contentious relationship with her mother. “She had a rule for everything,” she says. “Like you never went into New York City without wearing gloves. You had to wear stockings. You know, there was just a rule for everything. You don’t tip on alcohol. You only tip if there’s table service, there were just rules, rules, rules, rules, rules, rules.”

Religion was hardly center-stage in the Wildebush home. Juanita was Jewish on her father’s side (her grandmother had escaped the Holocaust) but told by her mother she was Lutheran. She has no recollection of going to church or Sunday school as a child.

She starts telling me about ‘the Family’ and how they're a band, how they sang with the Beach Boys. I liked her right away.
Summer camp had a profound impact on her as a teen. “It was a girls’ residential camp in Vermont and it probably did more to mold me into the person I am than anything else in my life,” she says enthusiastically. “It was run on the freedom program,” she continues. “We all lived in cabins, two to four campers in a cabin, two on each side of a cabin, no counselor in the cabin with us. The activities were open. I’d be hot and I’d say, hey, I’m gonna go swimming. So you got to really roam free and kind of be independent and roam. “

The way she talks about the camp, it’s hard not to make the connection between those early experiences and the ones she would have later with the Manson Family, in the hippie commune she discovered in Los Angeles—Charlie, with his beard, guitar, and New Age ideals, could have easily been mistaken for a Camp Director at any run-of-the-mill free-love community. Only in Manson’s case, activities like horseback riding and arts and crafts would eventually take a backseat to those with a darker bent, namely, auto theft, assault, and murder.
Charles Manson was 32 years old when he was paroled from McNeil Island prison in Washington state in March of 1967. Having spent half of his life up to that point behind bars for mostly petty crimes like check forgery and pimping, Manson eventually settled in the Bay Area, where that year as many as 100,000 people converged in San Francisco’s neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury for what would come to be known as the “Summer of Love.” There, Manson recruited a group of young girls and formed “the Family,” a roving band of bohemian nomads doing whatever possible to avoid the straight life, traveling around the country in a modified school bus in search of enlightenment.

The Family settled in the Los Angeles area, first at a flophouse in the Topanga Canyon area that separated the sprawling San Fernando Valley from the Pacific coastline, then at Beach Boy Drummer Brian Wilson’s estate in Pacific Palisades, and later at Spahn Ranch, at the northwest tip of the Valley. By the time Juanita hooked up with them, the Family had grown into a full-fledged commune with Manson at the helm, dictating their every thought and action. He kept his followers isolated; at Spahn Ranch there were no newspapers, calendars, or clocks—the only information they received is what Manson wanted them to know.

Ultimately, Manson would become a household name in December of 1969, when he and other members of the Family were arrested and ultimately convicted of the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders in August of that year. Fortunately for Juanita, by the time those murders took place, she was long gone from the Family and had no role or participation in the crimes, and has lived under the radar ever since. Now, she’s one of the few remaining Manson Family members who can provide a firsthand account of what it was like to fall under Manson’s spell—and to make it out safely.

Long before she hooked up with Manson, Juanita pursued an undergraduate degree at the Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City, where she met Carlos, a philosophy major at nearby Autonomous University. “He looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was just dashing—he was an Olympic-caliber swimmer, so he had that swimmer’s physique, good shoulders, slim hips. He knew he was brilliant, so he was a bit arrogant,” she tells me.

Juanita and Carlos, along with one of his friends from school, would travel around the villages of Mexico, where they came to be known affectionately as “Los Tres” by locals; Juanita stood out with her striking looks and blond hair. Along their many travels, they encountered hippie expatriates who, like Juanita, had grown disillusioned by the political and social climate of the United States and were seeking refuge in a society less consumed with consumerism. Through them, Juanita heard stories about, and became intrigued by, the concept of communal living in the States, specifically, the Hog Farm, an organization founded by peace activist Wavy Gravy, today considered America’s longest-running hippie commune and what some say Manson used as a model for his Family.

And it was in Mexico that Juanita had her first experiences with LSD. At college, she’d befriended a chemist from Sandoz Laboratory who would “show up on a Friday afternoon with a handful of pharmaceutical-grade acid pills in his pocket, lay them down on the table and say, ‘This should hold you for a while.’ We’d go up into the mountains outside of Mexico City before dawn,” she tells me. “We would drop our acid. We’d trip through the day. We’d come down (from the trip), then we’d go home. Yeah, it was beautiful. Just beautiful.” However, her dealer friend warned her of the dangers of “street acid.” Little did she know the role it would play in her life only a few short years later.

Juanita graduated from university in Mexico in 1967 with a degree in psychology and returned to New Jersey with Carlos, who after a short stay in the States retreated to Mexico with the intention of Juanita joining him there after she’d saved up enough money to purchase a van. “He had an odd view of our relationship at the time,” she recalls. “He said to me, you and I are one. There is no need for me to write you. There’s no need for you to write me. There’s no need to call each other. We are one. But then I didn’t hear from him for six months.”

She worked for a time at the Aid to Dependent Children program in Patterson until she’d saved up enough money to acquire a Dodge van with a fancy sound system. Then, towards the end of the summer of ’68, she bid farewell to her parents and made the cross-country trek to California with a friend in tow, whom she planned to drop in San Francisco before heading south to visit her sister’s family in Palo Alto. Then, she would drive to Phoenix, visit a friend, and make her way to Mexico City to rendezvous with Carlos.

On the night before she planned to leave for Phoenix, Juanita’s van was burglarized and the $850 stereo that had become her prized possession was gone. Heartbroken, she spent a few hours the next day searching for a shop that could replace it, and found one in San Jose. She kissed her sister and her nieces and nephews goodbye, loaded the van and made her way south.

After replacing the stereo in San Jose, she noticed a pregnant woman leaning against a tree near the on-ramp to the freeway, holding up a hand-written sign that said “Los Angeles.” She invited the woman, and the two men with her, into the van.

The woman introduced herself as Sadie. After getting in the van, Juanita says, “she starts telling me about ‘the Family’ and how they’re a band, how they sang with the Beach Boys. I liked her right away.”

They drove south to L.A., and Sadie directed her to Spahn Ranch, a horse property and sometimes Western movie set in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, just outside the city limits of Chatsworth. By the time they arrived, it was dark out, and Sadie invited Juanita to stay for the night. “I can’t wait for you to meet Charlie,” she told her.
Manson’s female followers were notoriously devoted to him, even after the murders, none more so than Susan “Sadie” Atkins, the troubled daughter of alcoholics and one of Manson’s earliest recruits. During the trial, news outlets would broadcast startling images of Sadie, Katie, and Leslie (her co-conspirators in the Tate-LaBianca m