Manson 'girl' lost herself
She was a suburban mother of three, married for 30 years, with a ski boat and a lake house. She sang in the church choir, volunteered at summer Bible camp and took family road trips to Yosemite and Zion.
In January 2008, a phone call snapped her back to a time she'd spent nearly 40 years trying to forget.
"Is this Dianne Lake?" a man asked.
The words drilled a pit in her gut. No one used her maiden name. She made sure of it.
Her hands began to sweat. The man explained how he was part of a forensic team planning to exhume bodies in the desert, how her name might end up in the news.
She begged him to keep her out of it, but he said he could not. "You were part of something bigger than you are," he told her.
She'd thought she'd escaped this reckoning. Her husband knew her secret. But now she'd have to tell her friends, her employer, her children.
A week after the call, Lake stepped into her oldest child's bedroom and sat on the mattress.
"There is something I've dreaded ever having to tell you," she said. Her 22-year-old daughter looked up, startled. "Remember when I told you how your grandparents became hippies and lived in a bread truck when I was 14?" "Yeah."
There was another part to the story. "Well, I met a man named Charles Manson."
In 1967, Lake became Manson's youngest follower, nicknamed Snake. She was 14 years old and lived with him for more than two years, squatting at the Spahn Ranch near Chatsworth and stocking up for the apocalypse in a Mars-like valley of the Panamint Mountains.
Lake, now 66, is part of the great enigma that has inspired half a century of unrelenting fascination with the Manson murders: how honor students, choir girls, junior college dropouts and homecoming queens lost themselves so catastrophically to the spell of a slightly built, uneducated ex-con from West Virginia.
The butchery of seven people in August 1969 - Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca - in the most rarefied reaches of what the world saw
