“We foraged in the woods for morel mushrooms… We had dogs, goats, cows, chickens, a Shetland pony named Stardust, and a cockatiel named Charles. “The young Family members sang together almost every day as we harvested strawberries or corn. She said: “What I don’t always say is that I also had a happy childhood, or, anyway, parts of one. Her first film was Go Fish, which she acted, co-wrote and co-produced with her then-girlfriend, Rose Troche.īut she also admits having happy memories of her unorthodox upbringing, and to feeling “protective” about the cult when it is branded as dangerous like Manson’s. When her mother chose to leave the Family, Guinevere was kicked out too in accordance with the cult’s rules.Īlthough she considered rejoining when she was 18, she eventually chose to attend college, becoming an actress, screenwriter and director.
We were told that the spaceships hadn’t come because our souls weren’t ready.” “The prophecy’s failure didn’t make anyone believe in Mel Lyman’s wisdom any less, though. “We sat in the living room all night, listening for the hum of the UFOs.
Guinevere remembered how, as the day approached, “we children were told to put on our favorite clothes and pick one toy to bring on the journey. One member of the Family was killed by police, and the other two were caught and jailed.įinally, in 1974, the day the group had been waiting for arrived, when they believed they would be picked up by spaceships and taken to Venus. In 1973, four years after the Manson murders, three members of the Lyman Family staged a bank robbery. “But, if Lyman had asked, I’m pretty sure that they would have complied.” “True, Lyman never ordered his followers to kill anyone, the way Charles Manson did. “I grew up under the reign of a charismatic, complicated leader… who was constantly issuing new rules for living. She said that after leaving the cult she “had to consider some irrefutable truths. While Guinevere’s cult never took part in anything so heinous, she recognises that Lyman Family followers believed so blindly in their leader - who wrote a book called ‘Autobiography of a World Savior - that murder would have been entirely possible. Two years after the LA killing spree, Manson and many of his followers were found guilty of the murders, and he remained America’s most notorious killer until his death in 2017 aged 83. The following night Manson took three Family members to the Los Feliz, Los Angeles house of wealthy supermarket businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary and ordered his followers to brutally murder them. Guinevere says she lived separately from her mother, like all the children in the cult, and saw how Lyman used drugs to brainwash his followers, which numbered 100 adults and 60 children.Ī common practise, she said, was to give a follower LSD “and then have everyone come at them, and attempt to become more of a continuous part of a collective. Manipulated by charismatic cult leader Lyman, members of the Family believed they would be taken by spaceships to Venus, the planet of Love, on January 5, 1974. “My reality included LSD, government cheese, and a repurposed school bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’ painted on both sides.” I was homeschooled and never saw a doctor. My whole world was inhabited by people I had always known. I had no contact with anybody out the Family. Her mother joined the cult in 1968 as an unwed, pregnant 19-year-old - the same age Leslie Van Houten, one of the women convicted of murder whose story is told in the film, joined the Manson Family.
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