The Man Who Took on Charles Manson

B
rooks Poston followed Paul Crockett up the canyon wall, trying to keep his balance as loose stones shifted under his boots. Below them stretched Goler Wash, a narrow desert canyon carved into the western edge of the Panamint Mountains, one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes in California.

Crockett, who was lean and weathered, moved across the rocks with the ease of someone who had spent years working the desert. Then he stopped and turned. “Where’s your attention?” he asked.

Poston hesitated.

Crockett pointed to the rocks beneath their feet. “If you’re walking on rocks,” he said, “your attention stays on the rocks.”

Crockett and Poston made for an unlikely pairing: a prospector in his mid-forties and a drifting 19-year-old musician. The two men had met only weeks earlier at Barker Ranch, a nearby remote desert outpost. Crockett had come to the desert that spring looking for gold. What he found instead was a young man whose mind had been slowly dismantled by a charismatic and dangerous ex-convict named Charles Manson.

“[Crockett] tried to straighten up my mind as to whether I was really dead or alive because I didn’t know,” Poston later said. “Charlie had told me that I was living in death and that I was supposed to give up my world so that I could have his.”

For Poston, a chance run-in with Crockett changed his life. The prospector offered the teenager a job hauling gold ore down from the mines in the Panamint Mountains after he’d left Los Angeles, where he’d been living with Manson and the Family, a group of runaways and drifters Manson had drawn into his orbit . The mining work was hard and deliberate.

“The whole thing was learning to keep your attention in present time,” Poston later said of his work with Crockett. The manual labor combined with Crockett’s unique background with spirituality wound up breaking the spell Manson had cast.  

The story of Manson and his band of hippie followers has been told and retold for more than 50 years. But that familiar narrative, centered around the group’s two-day murder spree in August 1969 that left seven people dead, obscures one of the most revealing chapters of the Manson Family saga, before the murders, when the cult leader’s grip on his followers was fraying. What unfolded at a remote desert outpost in Death Valley was perhaps the only documented case of someone successfully counteracting Manson’s influence in real time: a quiet, middle-aged prospector who, through sheer presence and psychological insight, helped several followers break away before the world even knew Manson’s name. Crockett’s time studying some of the  same fringe metaphysical ideas as the cult leader allowed him to break through with Manson’s followers. While Manson used the techniques to imprison minds, Crockett used similar tactics to set people free.

Rarely cited records from Inyo County, home to Barker Ranch, along with taped interviews and new firsthand accounts from the people who lived through it, shed light on the overlooked moment before the murders, showing how a cult leader began to lose control, and how a few young people found their way back to themselves in the most unlikely place.

In the spring of 1969, that lesson may have been the difference between life and death.

PAUL GAYLORD CROCKETT GREW UP in Texas, the son of a Methodist minister. He began questioning organized religion as soon as he was old enough to think for himself. He preferred to explore spiritual questions on his own terms, hiding metaphysical books under his bed as a young man. “Paul was always searching,” says his widow, Sylvee. “He wanted to know why we’re here, what makes people suffer, and how we can be free of it. He never stopped asking those questions.”

As an adult, Crocket lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where he ran a bicycle repair shop for 17 years. After struggling for years with chronic back pain, he began seeing a local chiropractor and healer he affectionately referred to as  “Doc” Bailey. Bailey, according to Sylvee, was a first-generation student of George Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian mystic whose “Fourth Way” teachings held that most people move through life in a kind of waking sleep, and that true consciousness requires deliberate, sustained effort. “Doc Bailey started talking about things that he knew, which really intrigued Paul,” Sylvee says. The apprenticeship lasted nearly a decade.

After Bailey’s passing, Crockett sought out another teacher — a man he found in Carlsbad whose first name was Ted, and whose last name he never disclosed. According to Sylvee, Ted had been granted a doctorate by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, one of only about a dozen people Hubbard ever awarded that distinction. Ted was no longer formally associated with Scientology at that point but retained many of its methods, including the E-meter — a device that measures minute changes in skin response, which Scientologists use to gauge areas of mental or emotional stress — and shared some of its written materials on Scientology with Crockett. From roughly 1961 to 1965, Crockett studied privately with him, describing the experience in later interviews as “a turning point.”

Though he never joined the Church of Scientology, Crockett absorbed elements of its teachings through Ted’s instruction, blending what he had learned from Bailey and Ted with years of independent reading in metaphysical literature — “a personal synthesis,” as Sylvee describes it, “that was entirely his own.”

Manson had also encountered Scientology during his time in prison and appeared to adapt its language and techniques for his own ends. The overlap may have helped Crockett recognize the structure of Manson’s influence, the familiar patterns of manipulation and belief.

BY EARLY 1969, CROCKETT HAD for some time been working for business associates scouting mining properties, eventually landing on a tip about a stretch of the Panamint Mountains called Goler Wash — gold prospecting had become both a livelihood and a form of spiritual inquiry. 

“Paul was always searching — not for fame or recognition, but for ways to understand people and help them see themselves more clearly,” says Sylvee, who met Crockett in Shoshone in 1972, three years after the events at Barker Ranch.

In March 1969, Crockett and his prospecting partner, Bob Berry, then in his mid thirties, made their way into Goler Wash, a desolate, nearly impassable part of southern Death Valley. 

The year before, Berry had passed through Goler Canyon and encountered a group of hippies calling themselves “The Family” who spent their days wandering the desert, playing music, and absorbing the teachings of their self-appointed leader, Charlie Manson. 

Manson preached about the end of days, an impending race war, and the dissolution of individual identity into a kind of collective consciousness. Somewhere in Death Valley, he claimed, was a hole in the Earth that led to an underground city. When the race war began, Manson and his followers would retreat there, waiting until Black men had gained control of society — at which point, Manson believed, the new rulers would find themselves unable to govern and would turn to him for guidance. 

Berry wanted to return to the area because, as Crockett later explained in an interview with Inyo County Sheriff’s Deputy Don Ward — who would later lead the raid on Barker Ranch — Berry had seen women living there and “figured he could come back and have himself a little pleasure at their expense.” For Crockett, the promise of gold made it an attractive business adventure. 

Though Goler Canyon had been a base of operations for the Family for a time, when Crockett and Berry arrived, most had already gone back down to Spahn Ranch, outside of Los Angeles and there were only two people still living there — Poston and another Manson acolyte, 24-year-old Juanita Wildebush. The two were not a couple, though Manson had apparently intended them to be. Poston told Deputy Ward he was “supposed to be making love with Juanita” but had quietly rearranged his sleep schedule to avoid her. 

By the time Crockett arrived, Wildebush and Poston had been stranded at the ranch for weeks. Manson had told them both to stay and hold the place — he’d be back in 10 days, he said. But there was still no sign of him. “We had no plan to leave at all,” Wildebush says. “We were just waiting for them to come back.”

Crockett chose Barker Ranch as a remote base for their gold-mining expedition. They would stay in the smaller bunkhouse, leaving the main house — a single-story stone and wood cabin with a porch and kitchen — to Poston and Wildebush.

Poston had first encountered Manson in June 1968 at the home of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, where Manson was staying with his growing harem. Poston had arrived with a small group that included a man named Dean Moorehouse, father of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, one of Manson’s teenage followers. When Dean negotiated for them to stay, Poston found himself shoveling horse manure and saddling horses at Spahn. By the time Crockett found him at Barker Ranch the following spring, he no longer knew whether he was “really dead or alive,” he told Inyo County investigators

Wildebush had come a long way to end up in the desert. Raised in a prominent East Coast family, she had attended Long Island University. While studying abroad in Mexico City, she fell in love with a Mexican philosophy student named Carlos, and though she returned to the East Coast, she fully intended to return, marry him, and stay there. When she got back to home, she made plans to travel to Mexico with a pit stop in Palo Alto, California to visit her sister. As she was getting on the highway to leave Palo Alto for Mexico, she saw a pregnant woman hitchhiking, leaning against a tree, holding a sign for L.A. She pulled over. Two men stepped out from behind the woman and all three climbed in.

The woman said her name was Sadie (her real name was Susan Atkins, though Wildebush wouldn’t learn that until much later). Driving south, Sadie told her about the group she traveled with, a band who had sung with the Beach Boys and all lived together on a ranch. A few hundred miles later, Sadie directed Wildebush off the freeway and up toward Spahn Ranch. It was well after dark when they pulled in. “I can’t wait for you to meet Charlie,” Wildebush recalls Sadie telling her. Wildebush asked who he was. Sadie told her, “He’s kind of the leader of our band.”

“I thought [Spahn Ranch] would be a free-spirited place. Every day felt like walking on a knife’s edge. You never knew what would snap next.”

When they arrived, Manson came out of a trailer, naked. Someone handed Wildebush a joint and a cup of tea. They sang for a while, everyone went to bed, and Manson invited himself into her van, where he made a pass at her. She turned him down, and told him she planned to leave in the morning. But he convinced her to stay.

A night became a week, then a month. 

“I thought it would be a free-spirited place,” she says. “Every day felt like walking on a knife’s edge. You never knew what would snap next.”

Poston’s memories echoed hers — he and Wildebush had crossed paths at Spahn Ranch in the winter of 1968, when the Family first set out for Barker Ranch, and by the time Crockett arrived in March, they’d been stranded there together for weeks, waiting on a Manson who showed no sign of returning. Poston, some nine months into life with the Family, told Inyo County investigators he had lost his grip on reality entirely. “Charlie had told me that I was living in death and that I was supposed to give up my world so that I could have his,” he said. Poston told Deputy Ward he’d seen Manson strike women in the group, including grabbing them by the hair and hitting them. “He’s beaten up several girls that I know of,” Poston said.

As Wildebush and Poston got to know Crockett and Berry, they explained to them that Manson would be returning to the ranch — and when he did, anyone still there would be in danger. At that point, Manson and the Family hadn’t made national news — it was the first the two prospectors were hearing of him and the group. Crockett acknowledged the warning but made it clear he was staying.

Wildebush and Poston didn’t have a plan, not really. That night, with almost nothing left in the kitchen, they invited Crockett and Berry in and put what little they had on the table. “We didn’t have much,” Juanita said, “but we didn’t go out of our way to give them the best we could. We had no intention of encouraging them to stay.”

Whatever the dinner was meant to communicate, it didn’t work. Crockett had spent years working remote desert terrain on whatever food he could find. He’d been through worse, and he wasn’t leaving. 

BY SPRING, WITH CROCKETT AND Berry settled into their daily routine alongside Wildebush and Poston, Inyo County Sheriff deputies were documenting “continued hippie activity” at the Barker property, describing smoke from cookfires and a vehicle moving through the canyon late at night. Crockett and Berry made their daily treks to the old mines, chipping into the brittle carbonate walls for traces of ore. Each evening they returned at dusk, dust-covered and hopeful. 

“It was strange to see men with a purpose again,” Wildebush says. ”They just kept going. It made me think about what we’d been doing, or not doing, all that time.”

As the weeks passed, dinners at the main house became routine. “We stopped pretending they were outsiders,” Wildebush says. Conversations grew longer, more personal. She and Poston talked openly about life with the Family — about Manson’s prophecies of Helter Skelter (his term for a coming race war), his fixation on the Beatles’ White Album (the 1968 record whose lyrics he claimed prophesied the war), and his violent temper. 

In a May 1978 interview with Darlene Ward — Deputy Ward’s daughter, who stayed closed with Poston — Poston recalled that during their dinners, Crockett had done something no one in the Family ever did: he directly challenged Manson’s ideas. 

“When Paul invalidated it,”— whatever he said, Poston later told her, it took only a single sentence — “my entire world, I started listening to him,” Poston said. Crockett began introducing small exercises — evening focus sessions, guided walks through the wash, simple practices designed to put their attention somewhere Manson had never allowed it to go — to restore their focus and independence. 

At Barker Ranch, these quiet rituals — evening discussions, guided focus exercises, long walks through the canyon — laid the groundwork of recovery. Poston had taken on work hauling ore from the mines, a job Crockett had offered him deliberately — something physical, purposeful, and entirely his own. Wildebush helped tend the ranch. Neither of them was being paid in any formal sense. They were, as Crockett later described it to investigators, simply people he had decided to look after. “He cared deeply for Brooks and Juanita,” Sylvee says, recalling what Paul later told her about that time. “It wasn’t just about the gold or the expeditions. He wanted to see them whole again.”

His methods, built on physical work, deliberate attention exercises, and patient questioning, bore a striking resemblance to what would later be called deprogramming, though he never used that term himself. “Deprogramming is more complex, focused and deliberately planned with family,” says Rick Ross, one of the country’s foremost cult intervention specialists and author of Cults Inside Out. “He simply took a personal interest in the welfare of the kids… an informal spontaneous effort.” 

No family had hired him. No one asked him to help. He just saw two young people in trouble and decided he was going to do something about it.

EVERY DAY AT BARKER RANCH, Poston climbed two or three hundred feet up, chipped at quartz with a single jack, filled old money bags with ore, and carried them down. The first day, Poston had to sit down every 20 feet to rest. He had no soles in his shoes. It was 122 degrees. “My body was completely out of condition,” he said. “Everything was out.”

Slowly, something shifted. As Crockett told Sylvee, “You could see the fog lift from their eyes.” 

In the main house by light of a camping lantern, Crockett introduced the teenagers to what he called “attention processes” — simple exercises designed to put the mind at ease. He taught them to build what he called energy balls, cupping their hands and holding the sensation long enough to feel it, then throwing it across the kitchen to each other. “It was sort of like playing keepaway,” Wildebush recalls. Other nights Crockett would simply talk about the universe, cosmic energy, the nature of consciousness.

“Everything started to fade in the room until there was nothing left but Paul,” Poston told Darlene Ward. “Then, he vanished. There was nothing there. I was in nowhere. I hadn’t had my attention focused on anything for that length of time, on anything, for any reason, ever.”

“It felt like waking up from a nightmare,” Wildebush says.

Crockett’s approach was patient and deliberate. He never told them what to believe, only asked them to notice how their thoughts formed, and where they came from.

“He didn’t talk down to us,” Poston said. “He’d ask questions that made you stop and think. Nobody in the Family did that — not Charlie, not anyone.”

Still, the fear of Manson was visceral and constant. “Every sound outside, I thought it was Charlie coming back,” Wildebush says. “We slept with our clothes on for weeks, just in case we had to run.” 

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES to the south, the world Poston and Wildebush had left behind was growing darker by the week.

By the spring of 1969, Manson’s preaching about “Helter Skelter” had taken over nightly gatherings. The group’s days revolved around scavenging for food. Some nights, Manson sent them “creepy crawling” — slipping into local homes while residents slept, moving their possessions around to unsettle them. The acid trips that had once felt transcendent had turned dark and controlling, wrote Paul Watkins, a soft-spoken 19-year-old musician and one of Manson’s most trusted lieutenants, in his book, My Life with Charles Manson. The evenings ended with psychedelic jam sessions in the dusty corral, but the mood, Watkins recalled, had become apocalyptic. 

“Charlie started talking about death like it was just another trip,” Watkins wrote in his memoir. “He said we’d survive what was coming because we were pure.”

Watkins had begun to grow concerned about Poston and Wildebush, his comrades they’d left in the desert. Without telling Manson where he was going, he got on his motorcycle and headed north.

Poston remembered hearing the engine echo up through Goler Wash before he saw him. Weeks had passed without Poston and Wildebush getting any word about what was happening in Los Angeles and who was still loyal to Manson. “We didn’t know where his head was at,” Poston told Darlene Ward. “Whether he was still with Charlie or not.”

Wildebush says, “We were careful what we said at first. We didn’t know who we could trust anymore.”

What Watkins found was not a rebellious splinter group but two frightened young people and a calm, unshaken prospector. Watkins later described Crockett as grounded and far less volatile than Manson — his thinking more rational, the atmosphere at Barker Ranch more stable than anything the Family had created. Something felt different, though he couldn’t quite name it yet. “It was strange,” he recalled. “Charlie had said they were lost, but they looked like they were waking up.”

Watkins joined the group for their nightly dinners, where Crockett turned the conversation back on Watkins the same way he had with Poston and Wildebush. “How did you get to believe that?” Wildebush recalls him asking. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

That subtle shift in perspective, Watkins later wrote, was “like being handed back my own mind.”

After several weeks at the ranch, Crockett urged Watkins to return to Spahn and ask Manson to release him, Poston, and Wildebush from the unspoken psychological contracts, as Crockett understood them, that kept Manson’s followers bound to his will even in his absence. When Watkins got back to Spahn, he stood in the trailer in front of Manson and the assembled Family and made his case. Manson barely hesitated. “Sure… sure… I release you… ain’t no agreements,” he said — then kept on talking about Helter Skelter as if nothing had happened. But a few minutes later after the gathering broke up, Manson pulled Watkins aside. “What’s all this talk about agreements?” he asked. “Who’s this guy Crockett?” 

Watkins returned to Barker Ranch and told Crockett what Manson had said. Crockett wasn’t surprised. “Charlie didn’t know who I was,” he later told investigators, “but he had heard of me, and so I was already a threat to him.”

At Barker Ranch, Wildebush had quietly let go of any remaining thought of Carlos, the fiancé she’d left behind in Mexico. She had fallen for Berry, eight years her senior, over shared meals and long nights watching for cougars. They had known each other for five weeks when a transient prospector who was also an ordained minister passed through the camp. He offered to marry them.

Wildebush fashioned a simple dress from the faded curtains hanging in the abandoned school bus where Berry had been sleeping. The ceremony took place under the desert sun, with Crockett and Poston as witnesses. “It wasn’t about romance,” she says. “It was about finding something normal in the middle of all that chaos.”

Soon after the ceremony, with rumors spreading that Manson planned to return to Death Valley, Wildebush and Berry decided to leave. “I learned that wanting to survive wasn’t weakness. It was clarity,” she says.

They set out toward Arizona to join Berry’s brother on a turquoise mining claim, leaving Crockett and Poston behind.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the Manson Family’s activities had turned violent. In late July, Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil murdered music teacher Gary Hinman in Topanga Canyon. Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 8, members of the group broke into two homes in Los Angeles, killing actress Sharon Tate and four others at a house on Cielo Drive, then killing supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary the following night. 

Wildebush recalls seeing the news of the Tate-LaBianca murders while stopped at a small diner in Arizona. “I just froze,” she says. “I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with Charlie, but deep down I knew.”

Two weeks later, sheriff’s deputies raided Spahn Ranch, arresting Manson and most of his followers on vehicle theft charges. They were released weeks later for lack of evidence — the connection to the murders not yet made — but the raid scattered the group. Some drifted. Some headed for the desert. 

By September,  Inyo County deputies investigating the arson and tracking stolen vehicles moving through Goler Wash, advised Crockett and Poston to leave the area for their own safety — not yet aware that the group they were monitoring was connected to the murders that had shocked Los Angeles weeks earlier. Crockett refused to go. “He said that if we ran, Charlie would win,” Poston later recalled. “He wanted to stand his ground and prove there was another way to live.” 

ONE AFTERNOON, THE SOUND OF engines echoed up through the canyon. A yellow dune buggy pulled up in front of the ranch house, trailed by several others — what Watkins later described as a “ragtag convoy.” It carried Manson and most of what remained of his inner circle: Squeaky, Sandy, Ouisch, Snake, Sherry, Cathy, and Gypsy, along with lieutenants Tex Watson and Bruce Davis. Manson, who stood about 5’2″, climbed out and immediately asked where Crockett was.

Watkins led him inside.

Crockett didn’t get up. He stayed at the scarred wooden table where he’d been playing solitaire, a bent Pall Mall between his lips, and offered Manson a handshake. Manson took it with impatience and began to pace, talking about the movement of weapons and vehicles and supplies, about what was coming and what they would need. At one point, according to Poston, Manson pressed a knife to Poston’s throat. “It wasn’t about me,” Poston recalled of the incident. “It was about Crockett.”

Crockett kept his eyes on his cards.

Eventually Manson sat down across from him and lit a cigarette.

“Dig it,” Manson said. “I am you and you are me.”

Crockett looked up.

“No,” Crockett said. “No… that ain’t true. We are both spirits… that’s true… but we have lived different lives… therefore I am not you and you are not me.”

Manson paused at that. Then he left the house with Watkins. “You know, man, we had to kill Shorty,” Manson said, almost offhandedly. “Got to talking too damn much. A real pain in the ass. We cut him up real good.”

Watkins later wrote that in that moment, he wasn’t sure whether to believe it. Whatever he knew or suspected about what had been happening in Los Angeles, hearing Manson describe a killing this casually, almost as an aside, was something else entirely. The words stayed with him. Later, LAPD and Inyo County investigative records would confirm that a ranch hand named Donald “Shorty” Shea had disappeared around that time. The confession, it turned out, was real. (His remains wouldn’t be found until 1977.)

“You’d wake up and there’d be a shadow at the door, someone whispering your name. Charlie wanted us scared… that was his way of control.”

Crockett told investigators he immediately recognized the danger Manson posed to him and the group and “made himself useful” to Manson, volunteering to help move supplies between Barker and Myers Ranch. “It was the only way to keep things calm,” he said.

Manson shifted the bulk of the Family to the nearby Meyers Ranch, about a quarter-mile away, leaving Crockett, Poston, and Watkins at Barker Ranch. Though the camps were close enough to walk between, they had become increasingly separate worlds.

Around this time, Manson began what Watkins later called his “fear games” — nighttime intrusions from his base at Myers Ranch meant to rattle the men who had resisted him. “They’d creep into the bunkhouse after dark,” Poston recalled. “You’d wake up and there’d be a shadow at the door, someone whispering your name. Charlie wanted us scared… that was his way of control.”

By late September, tensions were unbearable. Manson had told Crockett that he should be more afraid of him than of the law — a pointed reminder that Crockett, having helped move supplies and vehicles through the canyon, was not entirely without legal exposure himself. He said it, Crockett later told Deputy Ward, “with a straight face, calmly.”

Earlier that week, Crockett had noticed a highway patrolman and a park ranger while hauling supplies down — the first sign that law enforcement was actively moving through the canyon. 

Then the shots came. Poston heard them first — three of them, somewhere over the hill. Neither Crockett nor Poston knew whether there had been a gunfight, whether the officers were dead, whether Manson was coming back. “We didn’t do much sleeping that night,” Crockett told Ward, “because we was sitting up on one ear and one eyeball open all night long, waiting to see what was going to happen.”

But Manson came back. Whether he had anything to do with the shots, Crockett never said.  Crockett gathered Poston, packed some cans of food, and the two men set out into the desert darkness — hiking through the night, over Mengel Pass and into Shoshone, where they arrived the next day and reported what they knew to Inyo County deputies.

Barker Ranch was Manson’s again.

With Crockett and Poston gone, he posted lookouts along the canyon ridges and strung wire across the desert floor — a crude communications line between Barker and Myers Ranch. 

It wasn’t prophecy but carelessness that undid him. In early October, National Park Service rangers discovered that a brand-new Michigan loader — a piece of heavy construction equipment being used to repair roads in the monument — had been set on fire near the north end of Death Valley, its fuel line cut, an empty gas can left at the scene. Following the tire tracks left in the sand, they traced the vehicles back to Goler Wash.

On Oct. 12, 1969, Ward led a coordinated team of sheriffs into the canyon at first light, surrounding the ranch house. Nine people were taken from inside, searched on the porch, and arrested. Two more women were picked up trying to enter Butte Valley. Eleven in total were transported to Independence, the seat of Inyo County, and booked on suspicion of grand theft, grand theft auto, and arson. Soon, three of them would be charged with murder. 

With Manson and his followers now in custody, Poston and Watkins were, for the first time in years, completely free. They stayed in Inyo County and formed Desert Sun in 1971, a five-piece folk band that played clubs across Death Valley and Nevada, performing original songs alongside two of Manson’s own compositions — “Your Home Is Where You’re Happy,” “Look at Your Game, Girl” — as if reclaiming the music that had once been used to control them. Their manager was Paul Crockett. 

When the band eventually split, Watkins put down roots in Tecopa, worked the mines, founded the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce, and was the unofficial mayor of a small desert town. He died of leukemia in 1990 at age 40. Poston followed Crockett to Washington State, continuing to play music under the moniker “Northern Lights.” He died in Washington in 2024. Wildebush and Berry made their way to the Pacific Northwest, too. They remained married until Berry’s death in 2018.

Crockett quietly built a teaching practice around the same principles he had tested in the desert — attention processes, agreements, the mechanics of how belief takes hold and how it can be loosened. By 1975 he was doing it in earnest, eventually operating under the name the Balance Point School for Personal Evolution. He never advertised. 

Many Family members never found their way out. Susan Atkins, who had recruited Wildebush at the side of a freeway, died in prison of brain cancer in 2009. Patricia Krenwinkel remains incarcerated, most recently denied parole in 2025 after a recommendation for release was overturned by Governor Gavin Newsom. Tex Watson, who had arrived at Barker Ranch with Manson that September afternoon, has been denied parole 16 times. Leslie Van Houten, the youngest of the convicted killers, was released in 2023 after more than 50 years behind bars.

“Looking back, I realized how close we came to being swallowed up entirely by that world,” Wildebush says. “If Paul hadn’t been there, I don’t think I’d have made it out.”

Paul Gaylord Crockett died of dementia on Jan. 10, 2014. Sylvee says what she learned from him continues to shape her daily. He taught her you cannot be controlled by something you refuse to fight.

It was a principle he had tested in person years before they met. During those tense final weeks at Barker Ranch, Manson pointed a gun at Crockett and told him it had a hair trigger. Crockett didn’t flinch. “If I lose my body,” he said, “then it’s your problem, not mine.”