‘Greatest Escapes With Arturo Castro’ Episode 11: The Manson Family’s Squeaky Escapee

Mental Floss is partnering with FilmNation and iHeartPodcasts to bring you the transcripts for Greatest Escapes, a podcast hosted by Arturo Castro about some of the wildest escape stories across history. In this episode, Aimee Carrero (The Menu, The Consultant) helps Arturo explore a dark chapter in Hollywood history as they learn about one of Charles Manson’s original family members: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Read all the transcripts here.

Arturo Castro: Hey guys, welcome to Greatest Escapes, a show bringing you the wildest true escape stories of all time. Today’s story goes into a truly dark chapter of Hollywood history, only this time we’re talking about the crimes—and escapes—that you usually don’t hear about.

I’m Arturo, and for this one I had to bring in the incredible actress and voiceover artist and Queen of Miami: It’s Aimee Carrerro!

Aimee Carrero!!! [Airhorn sounds] Hola, welcome!

Aimee Carrero: Should I just use my normal Miami accent or what?

Arturo: Yeah, just, like—let’s f***ing do it. Like, just—the 305 is present and accounted for.

Aimee: It’s present—but you know what? We actually met way before The Menu. Remember that?

Arturo: That’s true.

Aimee: Remember that?

Arturo: We were doing phone banking live on ABC or whatever?

Aimee: Uh, Good Morning America.

Arturo: That’s what it was.

Aimee: Yeah. And we sat next to each other.

Arturo: That’s right. And I remember I was like, “oh my God.” And we saw John Leguizamo was one of the main guests. “I’ll see you in about 10 years in a movie called The Menu, John Leguizamo.”

Aimee: The Menu. Right, right. So that was my intro.

Arturo: And look how far we’ve come. Now we’re in a podcast together. Wow. This is great.

Aimee: I love it.

1. Aimee’s Escape
2. CHAPTER 1: Squeaky Clean Getaway
3. CHAPTER 2: Found Family
4. CHAPTER 3: Swelter Shelter
5. CHAPTER 4: Run and Gun
6. CHAPTER 5: True Crime
7. Outro
8. Credits

Aimee’s Escape

Arturo: Aimee, what do you consider to be your greatest escape?

Aimee: It happened Christmas 2021. I was by myself and—my husband Tim had gone to Egypt with his family for Christmas. We—our marriage is great. No, I’m kidding.

I was doing a TV show at the time, and it was like right after Christmas, we’d had these Egypt tickets booked and I was like, “You should just go.” I—I couldn’t go, like—you know, I had to work, whatever.

So I stayed and secretly, I was like, “Ooh, this is nice. Get the house to myself.” So I was walking the dog, and—I know my neighborhood obviously really well, I’ve lived here like almost 10 years—and I turned around and there was this all like, black—like a black sedan, and the front mirror was blacked out, and I remember thinking that was really strange. I was like, “Why can’t I see?”

Arturo: You don’t see that in Los Angeles. Yeah.

Aimee: Right. Like the front mirror, right? So I turned around, the car was there and it must have pulled up and it wasn’t, like, a hybrid, but I didn’t hear it. And so I was walking the dog and it was just kind of in a weird spot. I live kind of in, like—in an area where there’s not a lot of cars that stop.

It’s just like, you know, it’s strange to that—for that to happen. So I was like, “you know what, I’m not gonna go back to my house cause I don’t want this person to know where I live just in case.” So I like—I like, went up the hill cause I live in the hills.

Arturo: Mmhmm. Nice little side note there.

Aimee: Yeah. Um, and I was gone for like 30 minutes. I ran into a neighbor. I started talking to the neighbor, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, “OK, the car’s probably gone.” So I’m going back down this hill to turn to the street where I live, but my house is like six houses down, right? So I’m like, turning, and there’s this intersection. So I’m here with my dog and that car is like, going—like, passing, and he sees me and stops, and pulls over.

Arturo: Whoa.

Aimee: And there was this other car that was like, I guess maybe like, with that car. It was like, this Lexus car, and there was a woman in it—like, a Latin woman in it, cause I know my fellow mamis. And she stopped behind him. So this car pulls over, she pulls over behind him. Luckily there’s like, this mass of dudes that are like, riding bike[s]. It’s like the—literally, it’s like Christmas day and I guess they went on a Christmas-day bike ride and I was like, “oh my God, thank God.” So, I scooch in where they are and I run back home, lock the door and I ended up spending like four nights in a hotel after that. Cause I’m like, “I gotta walk my dog. Like what if–”

So get this, this is like comes full circle. So like two days later I was watching the news and I saw that there had been like a dog kidnapping in West Hollywood. And they had video of it, and the owner was dragged, cause his, like, jacket got caught onto the door. So he was dragged and I saw it and what do I see, but this blacked out Nissan or what, sedan, whatever it was, right?

Arturo: No f***ing way.

Aimee: Yeah. So I was like, “oh my God.” I called the LAPD. I was like, “I think I know what car it is.” I didn’t get the license plate, obviously, so it was useless information that I gave him. But I was like–

Arturo: But you just wanted to feel heard?

Aimee: Yeah. I was like, “I narrowly escaped with my dog.” And so–

Arturo: Wow. How scary. Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us, Aimee. Now are you ready to hear some f***ing crazy escape?

Aimee: I’m ready.

Arturo: Let’s rock and roll.

CHAPTER 1: Squeaky Clean Getaway

Aimee: So it’s December 23, 1987, and at Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia a routine bed check raised the alarm: Lynette Fromme was missing. FROMME!

[Suspense strings]

Yes. She had just turned 39, but she—thank you for that, Ben.

Aimee: Fromme was missing from!

Arturo: Fromme! She had just turned 39, but she had spent 12 of those years in prison for crimes that made national headlines.

Aimee: Oh. Oh, sh*t.

Arturo: People had been discussing Lynette’s life choices since 1969 because she was also a diehard follower of Charles Manson. Gimme the music again, Ben!

[Suspense strings]

Aimee: Oooh sh*t. I should have known it was a Charles Manson follower, because she was like—I mean, this is a child criminal. I mean, you know, not like—she’s only 39. She’s been in jail.

Arturo: Yeah. Have you heard of her before, Lynette Fromme?

Aimee: No, I’ve heard of like the Krenwinckle and Tex and like the other ones that were, like, arrested for the murders, but I don’t—I’d never heard of her.

Arturo: Well, Lynette had actually lived such a wild life before she was locked up, and that’s what we’re gonna get into today. OK?

Aimee: Great.

Arturo: But two days before Christmas in 1987, why wasn’t Lynette in her cell?

Aimee: Ooh.

Arturo: So the guards scrambled to ask the other inmates when they had last seen Lynette. And they all said that it was just before 9 p.m. That means when the guards started looking, Lynette had been gone for less than an hour.

Her disappearance mystified the prison officials. They had no idea when she had slipped away or how she got out. The prison itself was super remote. It was about 12 miles to the nearest town in southeastern West Virginia. It held almost a thousand women, including many under what they called “maximum guard.”

Aimee: I was gonna ask—was this like a max prison? Like, what’s the situation?

Arturo: Max, maximum guard. So, basically, it should have been really hard for Lynette to escape. The officers searched all the prison buildings, but couldn’t find any sign of her. There were also no holes in the prison fencing or any sign of how she got past the barbed wire. Who the f*** knows?

Aimee: OK.

Arturo: Then federal agents were called in for the hunt. But they didn’t really have much to go on, you know, because weirdly enough, prisoners at Alderson were not required to wear uniforms.

Aimee: Oh, well then it’s not a maximum guard. What are we doing here?

Arturo: Were they just like encouraged to like, express themselves? They’re like, “How are we feeling today, you guys?”

Aimee: “I think I’m gonna wear a crocheted halter.” Yeah. What the hell?

Arturo: The description given to local residents said that she had been last wearing a green army jacket, khaki pants, and a penchant for danger. No. And a red checkered banana, right?

Aimee: That’s like a very fashionable outfit. Like, what are we doing here?

Arturo: I know. She’s just like slapped it on. That’s like, a good brunch outfit, you know?

Aimee: Oh, totally.

Arturo: She’s like, “I’m gonna go out, but in case I have an impromptu brunch meeting, I’m just gonna wear this.”

Aimee: Right.

Arturo: And the main thing was that she had freckles and blazing red hair.

Aimee: So they had hair dye at the f***ing prison? Or maybe she was a natural red?

Arturo: No, it was a spa. Right. I believe it’s just a spa. So this isn’t fair to Gingers, though. I mean, imagine you’re just another local, West Virginia, 39-year-old with red hair and a closet full of Army jackets. Like how would you feel?

Aimee: Bad.

Arturo: Have redheads not been through enough. And Caucasians in general, have they not been through enough, Aimee?

Aimee: Just give white people a chance. Give them a break. Here’s the thing with Gingers, they have to go through their life as gingers. And you know, that’s hard enough. I mean, I bought the Prince Harry book, like we’re reading it. I’m just saying that like …

Arturo: That’s your defense for like—whenever you’re like, “Are you hating on Gingers?” She’s like, “Hey guys, I have the Prince Harry book!”

Aimee: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arturo: So tips started flowing in. Apparently she had been spotted nearby many, many times. But as teams of officers started to investigate the sightings, they found that all of them were cases of mistaken identity.

Aimee: Oh sh*t. How many redheads with—what?!

Arturo: Yeah, what the f***? Like match the description and–

Aimee: Like Appalachia. Like they were like–

Arturo: It was a massive exodus from Ireland.

Aimee: That’s so weird.

Arturo: And gingers were just being handed over to the police left and right for questioning, which is truly, truly hilarious. Being like, “excuse me, ma’am.” Be like, “I am literally the girl from Wendy’s.” Like, “f***ing leave me alone.”

Aimee: Right, right, right. What did I do? What is my crime? Being a ginger?

Arturo: That’s right.

So more than a hundred agents swept the woods and hills around the prison using dogs to try to pick up Lynette’s trail. But two days later, they still hadn’t come up with any trace of her.

The prison warden said—OK get this—that the dogs were hampered by the dampness and rocky soil … plus they were feeling like, really emotionally unavailable, you know? Cause like, Mercury was in the Third House.

Aimee: They need a mental health day.

Arturo: Yeah. Small time bullsh*t like this was definitely not gonna cut it because actually it might not have been all that hard for Lynette to get out, especially since there had been 15 escapes from Alderson in just two years. Bro …

Aimee: Oh, for f***’s sake.

Arturo: I’m telling you. They were like, “dress what you want day.”

Aimee: “Do what you want.”

Arturo: Yeah. They would have excursions, which I—“you guys come back whenever you’re ready though.”

If you were, if you were the warden though, and you’re at the press conference, how would you try to spin this?

Aimee: Oh, I would just quit.

Arturo: Yeah, you’d just quit?

Aimee: I’d be like, “I don’t believe in the prison system. Bye!”

Arturo: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Aimee: There’s no spinning this.

Arturo: I wonder how a Miami mayor would do this, so like, “Hey, listen everybody, OK? People escape. OK. What do you want me to do?”

Aimee: “Mira, it happens. OK, look, I had a really bad day. My stomach was hurting. I went to the bathroom and she was gone. Y, that’s it, like …”

Arturo: “Y that’s it! What you want me to do about it? OK?”

Aimee: “You know, it’s hard. Yeah.”

[Both speaking Spanish]

Arturo: “Why don’t you worry about your life?”

Aimee: Let me ask you this, so—so did she commit one of the murders or she was just like, an accessory? Like what was her crime? Do we know?

Arturo: I’m about to get to it.

Aimee: Oh, OK.

Arturo: I’m gonna blow your mind with this.

The officials hunting for Lynette weren’t laughing, right? So word went out to the agencies in all 50 states.

The U.S. Marshalls started talking to everyone who had recently been in touch with her, and the headlines just—bam—hit the papers. It was December 25, 1987. So, Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad to you, America.

Aimee: Merry Christmas, Lynette.

[Christmas music]

Arturo: That’s right. Lynette Fromme is free and she might be headed to a house near you.

Also, what a Tim Burton, Nightmare Before Christmas little song there, Ben. I was like—I wanted to keep going with that. I was like, cozying up.

Aimee: I know. I really love that sound.

[Christmas music]

Arturo: So, in fact, when word went up the chain that Lynette had escaped federal custody, the message reached all the way to the White House and the Secret Service was put on notice. Yeah. They even tightened up security around the president.

Aimee: Oh for f***’s sake.

Arturo: Because the reason Lynette was imprisoned in the first place—it was a really serious one.

Aimee: Oh, OK.

Arturo: She had been locked up for a failed attempt to assassinate—dun dun dun!—the President of the United States!

Aimee: Oh, what? OK.

Arturo: Yeah!

Aimee: That’s a plot twist. Did she get close? Like, what—or did she just think about it and then–

Arturo: I’m about to tell you.

Aimee: OK.

CHAPTER 2: Found Family

Arturo: OK, so you know how Lynette was a follower of Charles Manson, right? Well, we’re going all the way back to Manson’s earliest days as a cult leader, because Lynette was actually his second recruit.

Aimee: OK so she got in on the ground floor. She was like, “I want in.”

Arturo: She became like the cornerstone of the Manson family. So do you know—do you know much about the Manson family?

Aimee: I do, I’m obsessed. There’s actually a tour in Los Angeles called The Dearly Departed Tour, and it’s about like weird deaths. Dude, I took this f***ing tour alone, and you can go—they take you up to the house. I know enough about it.

Arturo: To Cielo Drive?

Aimee: Yeah, but now they changed the name. It’s something else now, but like—but yeah, they’ll take you up there.

But I know—I think I know maybe just like a skosh more than most people, but I’d never heard of this one. So maybe I—maybe I’m not as—yeah.

Arturo: Let me give you some details on [it]. So Lynette’s intro to Charles Manson takes us back a couple decades to 1967. Lynette was 18 and she’d been recently kicked out by her parents for promiscuity. She probably like hooked up with two guys or something, you know what I mean? Like, how it was back then.

Aimee: “Mira, she had a WAP. OK. She had WAP needs.”

Arturo: OK. That’s right.

Aimee: I worked with this woman. You could just tell in the ’60s she was f***ing killing it. And she was telling me this story that she moved to Venice Beach and she was approached by the Manson family.

Arturo: No.

Aimee: Yeah, dude. And that was like her great escape story. She never like went to like a meeting or anything. She got weird vibes immediately.

Arturo: Can you imagine the—the kind of cute girls like that lived in Venice Beach that didn’t get approached by a Manson family? They’d be like, “So what’s it about me that you didn’t like?” You know, they’re super self conscious about it.

Aimee: Right, right, right, right. “Was I not like blonde enough?” But she—you could just tell she like—even as an older woman now, you look at her and you’re like, “Oh you would’ve–“

Arturo: “Oh, you would’ve f***ing—you destroyed hearts.”

Aimee: I mean, she’s still killing it, but back then it was like—so I think Venice Beach was like ground zero for recruitment, but she got weird vibes from, you know, them. Anyway …

Arturo: Well, Charles brought her back to the house where he was living at the time with his first partner, and together, the three of them started growing the Manson family. Now, by most reports, Lynette became the family’s main recruiter, right? She would find other young, isolated women, introduce them to Charles, and bring them into the fold.

Aimee: That’s creepy.

Arturo: Things started to change for the growing Manson family the next year.

Aimee: Wow. Quick.

Arturo: Yeah. They were picked up by none other than Dennis Wilson, the drummer of–

Arturo and Aimee: The Beach Boys!

Arturo: Yeah. As the story goes, the women told Dennis about Charles Manson, their spiritual leader and teacher, and Dennis was curious and said he would like to meet Manson sometime. Right? But he was in for a surprise, because the next time Dennis came home, he opened his door to find that Charles Manson was already in his house.

Aimee: OK, call the cops. What are we doing here? We could have saved all these lives. [singing] “Bad vibrations.” Yeah.

Arturo: [singing] “Bad vibrations … getting the creeps from this f***ing guy.” So if this is you, at this point, are you riding the vibes or are you going to the cops? What are you doing?

Aimee: No, man. Well, it depends. Look, it was 1960s. Everybody was probably super high, so he was like, “OK, this is cool, I guess …”

Arturo: That’s exactly it. You hit it on the head. Dennis and Charles just smoked some weed together, and who knows what Charles said, but Dennis was super charmed right. Now…

[Bong rip]

Oh, is that a bong sound that you put - put in, Ben?

Ben Chugg: Yeah. Sorry, I just—I needed to take a rip.

Arturo: Yeah. I was like, “Is that a sound in my house?”

It didn’t take long for Dennis to invite Charles, Lynette, and the rest of the family to move into his house on Sunset Boulevard.

Aimee: Wait, wait, wait, wait. They moved in? Oh, I didn’t know that.

Arturo: They moved in with Dennis. Yeah.

Aimee: OK.

Arturo: So for a little while, at least, Lynette found herself literally living in the mansion of one of the Beach Boys. And this is when, listen, they—they were at the top of their f***ing game, right? The ’60s. I mean, if this was today, whose house would you be moving into, if you had a choice—if you were in a cult?

Aimee: For sure I’d move into like, Taylor Swift’s, like, penthouse in Tribeca. Like, that’s what we’re dealing with.

Arturo: Right, right.

Aimee: Like, we want the tippy top. Um–

Arturo: I wanna go to Madonna’s house and just be like, “OK, how do we live forever? Let’s figure this f***ing thing out.”

Aimee: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Cher. Cher’s house.

Arturo: Like, are we like, “Do we hang upside down?” Yeah. Cher’s. I’m like, “So who do we sacrifice? Let’s do it.” And I was like, “Do you believe in life after love?”

Aimee: I do believe in that facelift, honey bun!

Arturo: So Charles Manson had major ambitions at the music industry, right? We obviously don’t, cause we’ve just been talking sh*t about the icons of the music industry. So we’ll never make it in music, but f*** it.

It seemed like this new connection to the Beach Boys was his big ticket. But after getting in with Dennis, things didn’t go that smoothly.

You know, the Beach Boys were kind of a family band for the three Wilson Brothers, and it seemed like Dennis was the only one who really liked Charles. The others thought he was pretty f***ing creepy and tried to keep him at a distance. And actually, when we were getting ready for this episode, we discovered an old recording that the Wilson Brothers must have written about Charles.

Ben, can you play this little tape?

[Cassette SFX]

Ben Chugg: Yeah, let me uh, just put it in here. Just a second.

Arturo: Oh, oh, you have a tape player?

Ben Chugg: Yeah, it’s an old cassette.

Aimee: Oh, it is for real?

Ben Chugg: All right. Press play here.

“Little creepy dude
(little creepy dude)
(little creepy dude)
little creepy dude.
You know you’re kinda shy. You’re a bit like a mouse.
But, bro, this guy is weird. Get him outta your house.
He may seem chill cause he smokes a ton of pot,
But he’s got a bunch of weapons and murderous plot.
He’s a little creepy dude. Little creepy dude.”

[Cassette noise]

Arturo: Oh my God.

Aimee: Is this about you, Arturo?

Arturo: Oh my God. Yes, it’s my autobiography.

Aimee: That is hilarious.

Arturo: Um, dude that—Ben created that song just for this episode. Let’s give him a round of applause.

Aimee: Who, whose voice is that? I mean, come on.

Arturo: That’s Ben doing it all.

Ben: No, that’s the Beach Boys. I don’t know what you guys are talking about.

Arturo: Oh my God, Ben, that was f***ing gold. I wanna keep that forever.

Aimee: F***ing gold.

Arturo: I’m still not over the fact that there was a lyric that said “and a murderous plot” in a Beach Boys, uh, background. I will cherish that forever.

Aimee: So good.

Arturo: So one day in the recording studio, right, Manson pulled a knife on a producer who suggested changing some of his lyrics. So, that was kind of the final straw for the rest of the Wilson Brothers. They finally convinced Dennis to kick Charles, Lynette, and the rest of the Manson family out of his house.

Aimee: Get the f*** out.

Arturo: Yeah, so that September, the Beach Boys did record a revised version of a song by Charles. Can you believe?

Aimee: Oh, so he wrote the song or what?

Arturo: So, yeah, so they—they recorded a revised version of one of his songs, so apparently Dennis had changed the song and even gave it a new name. Manson had called the song “Cease to Exist,” and Dennis Wilson called it “Never Learn Not to Love.”

That is what I f***ing call—yeah. Also, none of these–

Aimee: But also like so different. Like he’s like, “cease to exist, I want to kill him,” and the other one’s like, “love.”

Arturo: But no, after the whole knife thing, would you even dare to steal someone’s work like that?

Aimee: I bet he was real pissed.

Arturo: F*** no. I’d be like–

Aimee: Get me outta here and I’m calling the cops—I don’t even like the cops. I’m gonna call the cops. They could have saved—you know what I mean? Like murderers just don’t go from like smoking weed to like murder. It’s like, there are—there were signs along the way, like what happened?

Arturo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. To smooth things over with Charles, apparently Dennis gave him some cash and a motorcycle.

CHAPTER 3: Swelter Shelter

Arturo: After about a year of living with Manson, Lynette moved with the whole family to a desert ranch outside of LA.

Aimee: Yep.

Arturo: And by then, the Manson family had grown to five men and 13 women. Now the owner of the ranch, George Spahn, had been a dairy farmer in his younger days, but by this point he was mostly blind and had trouble doing the work of maintaining the buildings and the land.

Overlords, how did they meet this George? Do we know?

Tory Smith: There was a mechanic who lived on the ranch, and Manson had gone there to see if he could fix the cult bus, but as soon as he arrived, he realized what he really wanted was to move in.

Arturo: To George Spahn’s Spahn Ranch.

Aimee: Oh.

Arturo: Of course they had a f***ing bus, alright, in the ’60s. Could you even be a cult if you didn’t have a bus to drive around with?

Aimee: Yeah, you needed that bus. You needed the bus. You needed to be barefoot, and you needed, like … lots of dirty things.

Arturo: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So famously, the ranch had previously been a movie set. It was 55 acres dotted with buildings that had been used to film episodes of The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and a bunch of B-list Westerns, right?

But by the 1950s, George Spawn mostly made his money renting out horses. His deal with the Manson family was that they would move into the property and help out with the horses. And actually this wasn’t that odd, cause the ranch had already been home to out-of-work stuntmen, and ranch hands who lived there for free in exchange for taking care of the animals.

Aimee: Mmhm.

Arturo: Does this seem like an extremely weird or bad idea to you? Or is this like, Hollywood normal? What do you think?

Aimee: No, this is a bad idea, but do—do you remember—I mean, it’s hard to get the image out of my head because in that Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—did you see that movie?

Arturo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw it.

Aimee: There’s … they—they have a George Spahn character, which is Bruce Dern, and he’s like, in that back house or whatever.

Arturo: Yeah, throw it out there. So, prison officials didn’t know how she had done it, and they had no idea what would happen next. If you remember that 15 people had escaped from the prison just in two years, is it really about the talent of the escapee or is it more about the prison? They were like, “we don’t know how the f*** she did it!”

Arturo: Yeah, yeah. It was a little more run and gun ‘em. Yeah.

Aimee: You know what I mean? I think that maybe people weren’t as like, uh … I don’t know. Uh, thinking people were horrible, I guess. I don’t know. But … but yeah, I–

Arturo: Which changed with the—with the Manson family, I think, a lot.

Aimee: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you’re like, “Oh, peace and love—hippies are peace and love.”

Arturo: Yeah, and “peace and love” was still the reputation when the family moved to the ranch.

Now, Charles Manson was the head of the family, but it’s pretty clear that Lynette was the one behind the scenes keeping the family organized. She did whatever paperwork the family needed and, you know, helped them–

Aimee: Paperwork.

Arturo: Yeah. Paperwork. “Yeah. So how many sexual favors are we handing out today? OK. And how much marijuana?” Uh, that f***ing—that Excel chart must have looked f***ing weird.

Aimee: Yeah. “A blowjob for a dime bag.”

Arturo: Yeah. Oh my god. So weird. Speaking of which she helped them actually get to the doctor when the STIs spread through the group, which was obviously pretty frequent.

Aimee: Oh for f***’s sake.

Arturo: Yeah, they were right smack in the middle of the Sexual Revolution thanks to the invention of the pill. But groups like the Manson cult obviously weren’t protecting themselves. So for George, she cleaned up the house, got it painted, kicked out the cowboys and started helping with meals and other daily routines as they got to know each other—oh God, this is so f***ed up—George gave nicknames to the women in the Manson family, right? He called Lynette “Squeaky” for the way that she would react when he pinched her. Like, what a gross old man way to give somebody a nickname.

Aimee: OK, well now here we go. Even though he was almost blind, you know, I think he probably wanted to have young women around him and clearly he was pinching their asses and sh*t.

[Squeak]

So he was a dog.

Arturo: Is that the sound of an ass–?

Aimee: [makes sound]

Arturo: So the most salacious stories say that the Manson family women offered George sexual favors to stay on the ranch, and they called Squeaky his defacto wife.

Aimee: Listen, they committed murder for sure. There were some. You know–

Arturo: Hey man, hey, somebody’s gotta pay rent.

Aimee: “You pay another way: ass, cash, or gas. No one rides for free.”

Arturo: I see. So Squeaky has said that she didn’t have a sexual relationship with Spahn, but Manson was preaching a kind of free love approach to sex, so honestly, at this point, it’s hard to f***ing know whether she did or she didn’t.

And you know, let’s not get romantic about what Charles Manson was teaching. For example, his Helter Skelter message. If you know much about this story, which I know you do, you probably know that by this point he was teaching that there was gonna be a race war coming that would pit white and Black Americans against each other. Manson said that the white Americans would lose, but then he and his family would be able to hide in the desert, and once the rest of the whites were slaughtered, he would emerge and rule over the non-white population.

Aimee: Oh, for f***’s sake.

Arturo: This is both super racist and extremely narcissistic.

Aimee: Yeah dude—nobody talks about the racism.

Arturo: You couldn’t even get a record off the ground, a**hole. Like, how does this rank in the most delusional cult stories you’ve heard? It’s pretty up there, yeah?

Aimee: Well, I mean that—I think you have to be delusional. That’s like, requirement number one, is to be delusional.

Arturo: It’s that sense of grandeur.

Aimee: He probably had some f***ing Hitler fantasies and sh*t. But it’s funny cause nobody ever brings up the racial aspect of the Charles Manson thing.

Arturo: No. And also at the time they used it so much as like, I guess square Americans used it as proof of, “Look, f***ing hippies are f***ing bad and they’re murderous motherf***ers.” It really kicked–

Aimee: Yeah, yeah.

Arturo: –off a … a dark period for—for trust of free spirited people, I guess.

Aimee: Right, right, right.

Arturo: Manson’s fantasies of world power were obviously f***ing bananas, but when things would get in his way, he would absolutely lose his sh*t.

Like when a couple of drug deals to the family went bad, Charles started using the members of the family as an attack squad, and that’s they started killing people. Now, at first it was a couple of isolated murders that the cops couldn’t solve. But in the spring of 1969, a music producer refused to sign Manson to a record contract.

Aimee: Was this the music producer who then rented the house to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate?

Arturo: There you go. There you go. So what comes next were the infamous murders on back to back nights. Right?

So first were the killings [at] Sharon Tate’s house. Right? She had moved into the house where the record producer used to live. Exactly. They killed her along with another four people in her house. And then the next night, Manson said he was going to show his killers how to do it right.

They randomly picked a house in a familiar neighborhood and killed the couple living there. [Editor’s note: Manson chose the LaBianca home, helped tie the couple up, and ordered his followers to kill them, then left before the murders occurred.]

Aimee: An older couple. But you know what I think too, this was crazy, and I don’t know if this is like actually true or if it was just in the movie, or I read it somewhere, but I thought that Charles Manson actually went to that house where Sharon Tate was staying and was like, “I wanna talk to Roger,” or whatever the name of the music producer was.

And like Jay Sebring, who is like—was Sharon Tate’s like, friend, that was staying with her was like, “Oh no, he doesn’t live here anymore.” So they knew that they didn’t live there anymore and they still killed the people in that house.

Arturo: Right. Right. I—I do know that he, he knew that the producer lived there. I don’t know if he had that interaction with Jay, but–

Aimee: They definitely—I don’t know if he like, had the conversation, but I know that he—they found him in the back house one day. Like, he was lurking. He was creeping. And they were like, “get the f*** outta here.”

Arturo: So the story has been told a lot of times, right? So we won’t go into detail about the the Sharon Tate murders. But for Squeaky, the important part was what happened when they were finally linked to the Manson family. They took a little time, but the Manson family was already in trouble with the law.

So the cops had arrived at the ranch a week after the murders, but they were looking for stolen vehicles, they smashed up the ranch and arrested the entire Manson family for grand theft auto, but had to drop the charges. For a few months, it seemed like the family had actually gotten away with all their crimes. And  we can’t even be completely sure that Squeaky knew about the murders, but could you f***ing believe that she didn’t know anything at this point?

Aimee: Oh no, for sure she f***ing knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arturo: Like, of course she did. She was like number two.

Aimee: Oh.

Arturo: So two months later, the cops came back and arrested everyone again. And this time the cops were able to make the car robbery charges stick to a few of the family members.

But while they were locked up, one of the women named Susan Atkins started bragging to the other prisoners that she and the family had committed the mysterious murders. OK? So murderers are always bragging, right?

Aimee: Dude.

Arturo: Like, if this was so, why—why is there always—well, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that he got caught, but why are they always going to other people in jail and being like, you know, “f***ing–“

Aimee: They should have named her ass Squeaky. She was—she was a loose cannon. I mean, she was–

Arturo: That’s a squeaky wheel that you need to grease right there.

Aimee: Yeah. Loose—loose lip sink ships, and that’s what happened there.

Arturo: So—so by December, Susan the Tattletale had a deal with the police, plus her lawyer had in fact, actually gotten her a book contract.

Aimee: Oh sh*t.

Arturo: Her testimony before the grand jury about the murder splashed into the newspaper. It even became the cover of Life magazine.

Now the five members of the Manson family who committed the murders were convicted and sentenced to death. The rest of the cult didn’t really have a plan, so they scattered across California.

Now, Squeaky moved into a motel with another member, and they tried to figure out how to support Manson through his trials.

Aimee: Yup.

Arturo: She even answered the letters that were sent to him saying that he was innocent and that he was being crucified by the authorities who didn’t want him to remake the world. Personally, I’m not team, “Let Charles Manson rule the world” Like, what—I don’t know how you feel about this.

Aimee: It’s a bad idea. It’s f***ing terrible. No, thanks. And then there were people that were like fans of his—like, you know, some b*tch married him in jail.

Arturo: There’s some sick people out there.

Aimee: Sick.

Arturo: Also that he tried to spin it as in like, there’s this ideological race war where all it really was was he was sending his followers to like revenge kill somebody that thought—that didn’t give him a f***ing contract.

Aimee: Listen, I’m not—not to boil it down to something like so reductive, but like, I think part of the reason, like Hitler had a f***ing, like—whatever he … f***ed up sh*t he had in his mind is cause he was like a failed artist. You know what I mean? And then he got really angry and then just—and it became this whole other thing and so–

Arturo: Small, fragile men tend to—once given power, they tend to f***ing take it out in the world.

Aimee: Yeah, they get rejected and then they’re just like, “Well, now I’m just gonna be a mass murderer.” And I think that that’s, uh—you know, with Charles Manson, it was like he was, you know, rejected.

Arturo: That feeling of inadequacy, just like—yeah, he was like—he had power in his little bubble and he abused it, and I hope he rots in f***ing hell for the rest of his eternity.

Aimee: Oh, he’s in there, he’s in Hell for sure.

Arturo: So in the fall of 1970, a wildfire burned through the Spahn Ranch, and anyone who still had dreams of reviving the Manson family would have to find somewhere else to do it.

[Stinger]

Are—are we in a spy novel? Is this—yes, this is the James Bond, ’70s part of it.

Aimee: Yeah, sounds like it.

CHAPTER 4: Run and Gun

Arturo: Charles Manson was sent to death row at St. Quentin Prison. Now outside, Squeaky started working on a book telling the story of the Manson family. Lynette felt that the whole trial had been stage-managed by the authorities to give the wrong impression about Manson, and she still wanted to recruit new members to their way of life.

Now, meanwhile, in prison, Charles Manson was kind of undermining her at every turn because he was currently joining the Aryan Brotherhood, which is a white supremacist prison gang, which was a shock to absolutely f***ing no one.

Aimee: No one.

Arturo: Kinda, yeah. Kind of hard to get the wrong impression about that, right? Like, say—say you’re a bystander in the 1970s: Is there anything in the world Lynette could do that would change your mind?

Aimee: Here’s the thing. I mean, it happens now too. It’s like, people tell you who they are, they show you who they are over and over and over. You could literally have a picture, you know, with like a—a Grand Wizard of the KKK and people are like, “Well, that was just—I don’t know, like, is he? He’s not—we don’t know if he’s racist.” You know? It’s like people are just making up stori-

Arturo: It’s incredible what people are able to f***ing deny, like the denial that people can go into.

Aimee: Oh, yeah. Rationalize away. You know, it’s funny because it’s like she drank the Kool-Aid, but she also made the Kool-Aid too, so she was in too deep. She was never getting out.

Arturo: Yeah. The deal that Manson struck with the Aryan Brotherhood was a trade: They would protect him inside the prison, and then on the outside, the Manson family would look after the gang members. Members of the Manson family even helped an Aryan Brotherhood member escape from prison in August of 1971. And Squeaky’s roommate was the f***ing getaway driver.

Aimee: What?

Arturo: And this sh*t is dark, right? So one night when Squeaky was away, Aryan Brotherhood members murdered one of her friends inside the house where they lived. The police later found the body buried in the basement. Oof. So you know what this proves more than anything? That none of these girls had a Latina mother.

Aimee: Mira.

Arturo: If I went to my mom and I’d be like, “Yo, yeah, so I’m gonna join a cult,” she’s like, “OK. Yeah. And you and what Army?”

Aimee: OK, mira, you’re never leaving the house again.

Arturo: “OK, cool. I hope you—I hope you enjoy being here until you’re 35.”

Aimee: A hundred percent.

Arturo: So for both the prison escape and the murder, Lynette was arrested as a member of the conspiracy and held for as long as possible. Both times, the police—they had to release her, right, cause they never had direct evidence that she was involved in the plans. All they did have was her constant stream of letters to Charles Manson in prison as he awaited execution.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love, Aimee Carrero?

Aimee: I would probably say I gave up my very nice apartment that I loved to move in with my husband.

Arturo: There you go.

Aimee: That’s it. That’s it.

Arturo: That’s it. That’s all you getting.

Aimee: Love is not supposed to be a suffering situation.

Arturo: No, no. OK. This is a two-way street with two ways point to me. OK?

Aimee: OK?

Arturo: Before Manson’s sentence was carried out, though, California’s death penalty was ruled unconstitutional. Manson and the other murderers were not gonna be executed for their crimes. Charles was moved out of St. Quentin to another prison further inland.

So Lynette decided to follow. She moved into a small apartment in Sacramento. Now, she wasn’t allowed to actually see Charles, but she still went to the prison regularly just to ask how he was doing. God!

And then came September 1975.

That’s when Lynette decided to kill the President of the United States!

Aimee: The president!

Arturo: The president!

Aimee: Man. What was her gripe with the president? What’s happening?

Arturo: So Charles Manson hated authority and his whole persona at this point was about the United States being overthrown. But he had taken a particular dislike to Richard Nixon after Nixon had made fun of him during the murder trials, cause he’s a f***ing small man with a very fragile ego.

Aimee: Small man!

Arturo: You see what I’m talking about? He’s like, this is the particular gripe. He embarrassed him and that’s–

Aimee: Yeah. He embarrassed. It’s not—never mind like the Vietnam sh*t. It was like, “no, you made fun of me, therefore you must die.”

Arturo: That’s it. Yeah. So the president was Gerald Ford now, but that didn’t make a whole lot of difference. Right? The Manson family hated whoever the president was. Very discerning people, these people. So when President Ford was visiting Sacramento in 1975, Squeaky had her chance. He was giving a speech downtown right in her new stomping grounds.

Aimee: Oh sh*t.

Arturo: Now, between appointments, Ford decided to walk through the park and say hello to the good people of Sacramento. A path was cleared for him and as he went along, shaking hands until he reached a small woman in a red coat. Lynette Squeaky Fromme. From under that red coat, Squeaky pulled a Colt .45.

Aimee: Oh god.

Arturo: She raised the gun… and pulled the trigger.

But … it didn’t go off.

Aimee: Oh f***. That was lucky—but lucky for Ford.

Arturo: Yeah. The gun clicked, but no shot was fired. Despite being loaded with four bullets, the gun simply didn’t go off.  The secret service officers around Squeaky dove forward. They crashed into her, and they threw her to the ground. Witnesses remember that she yelled, “It didn’t go off!” as she went down. It’s like, “Thank you for the info, we were there!”

Aimee: “Yeah, we know.”

Arturo: So when the police searched Lynette’s apartment after the arrest, they found letters from the International People’s Court of Retribution.

Aimee: What the f*** is that?

Arturo: They were full of threats against other government officials and the leaders of big companies. Apparently, President Ford had just been the first target on the list. Now, the International People’s Court was completely made up by Squeaky and her roommate.

Aimee: I was gonna say—I was like, “never heard of it.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arturo: Also I love the, like, workshopping of the title. Be like, “OK, so the—the Vengeful People. No, it’s too harsh. It’s too harsh.”

Aimee: “No, it’s too much. It’s too harsh. Let’s make it sound more official. International. Yep. That’s good.”

Arturo: “Yeah that’s right. Yeah, cause we’re everywhere.”

So this time, the case was very simple. At the federal trial, Squeaky didn’t even try to fight the charges. She just pled guilty to her assassination attempt.

Aimee: OK.

Arturo: It made her the first woman in the U.S. to be convicted for the crime.

CHAPTER 5: True Crime

Arturo: So Lynette was giving a life sentence and things didn’t go exactly smoothly in prison. Right? In March 1979, Squeaky attacked a fellow inmate with a claw end of a hammer.

Aimee: Goddamn.

Arturo: She said that the other woman was, get this, “A white middle-class rich b*tch who doesn’t deserve to live.” I’m like—is this the Battle of the Karens, or what?

Aimee: I mean battle of the Karens? Listen, she’s—she is a white, middle-class rich b*tch. That doesn’t even make any sense. You can’t be middle class and rich, b*tch!

Arturo: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. She, uh—she’s a white, poor, middle class, rich, and communist b*tch, and it’s like, I don’t—there’s a lot going on in the International People’s Court. Also, who the f*** is giving inmates hammers?

Aimee: That’s another good question, Arturo. What—what is this prison? Was it like, a f***ing kindergarten? Like … geez.

Arturo: It was fantastic for the inmates. So she was still trying to Helter Skelter, apparently. Even long after that, in December 1987, she wrote to a friend that she only felt alive when she was thinking about Charles Manson. And so a few years later when Squeaky got a phone call telling her that Charles Manson was dying of testicular cancer, she was desperate to see him again. Ninety minutes after the call, she disappeared from her prison in West Virginia.

So now we’ve gone through her story up to that point. Do you feel any differently about the fact that she was able to just f***ing disappear from custody?

Aimee: No man. It shouldn’t have happened. Shouldn’t have happened. You know, who cares why she did it?

Arturo: Yeah. F*** the reasons.

Aimee: F*** her motive!

Arturo: F*** her motive. That’s right. She’s clawing people. She’s—she’s hammering people.

Aimee: Come on!

Arturo: So, Squeaky apparently escaped without leaving any traces as to how she got out. She didn’t even leave a trail out of the prison, right? She had just up and vanished.

Aimee: She had help for sure. I’m, I’m just—I’m just going for it. I’m gonna say she had help. OK.

Arturo: Yeah, throw it out there. So prison officials didn’t know how she had done it, and they had no idea what would happen next. If you remember that 15 people had escaped from the prison just in two years, is it really about the talent of the escapee or is it more about the prison? They were like, “we don’t know how the f*** she did it!”

Aimee: “We have no idea how she did it.”

Arturo: They were just climbing the 8-foot fence and heading into the woods. That’s all they were doing.

So when Lynette escaped, the president wasn’t the only one who went on alert. One of the prosecutors who had handled their case started carrying a gun during her trial, and he was worried that she would come after him.

Another prosecutor on the Charles Manson case worried that Lynette was on her way to break Manson outta jail.

Aimee: Hmm.

Arturo: So he started spinning up some crazy stories for the press, telling them that Lynette might even take hostages somewhere and demand Manson’s release. No one was safe. Like, what are you doing, man?

Aimee: Just spreading public panic.

Arturo: “Yeah, she’s gonna drop from the air, you see? She’s got flying people, you see?”

Aimee: “Yeah, she’s gonna take ya hostage!”

Arturo: They all like regressed to 1915, uh–

Aimee: They’re like, dude, it’s the ’80s.

Arturo: Despite the fear jumped up in the headlines, Lynette wasn’t raiding homes across the Midwest to take prisoners. In fact, she didn’t even get very far. That afternoon, two prison officers driving on a nearby road saw a woman walking on the shoulder of it. She was wearing a green Army jacket and khaki pants, and she was soaked–

Aimee: Change your clothes, b*tch. What are you doing?

Arturo: –through from the rain. That’s right. They just didn’t go with the red hair. They pulled the car over, opened the door, and Squeaky just climbed inside. After all that, she just f***ing gave up. I mean, if you were that die hard, what would—you think would break commitment like that?

Aimee: She didn’t want it bad enough, man. Yeah.

Arturo: She’s like, “you know what, it’s cold. I’m wet. F*** it.” Right?

Aimee: I wanna go home.

Arturo: So in the battle of Nature versus Squeaky, Nature came out on top. When she went to trial for the escape attempt, she put in a plea of no contest, and it added 15 years to her sentence. She was sent back into custody and eventually transferred to a prison in Lexington, Kentucky, where they actually had uniforms. What do you know?

Aimee: Whattaya know!

Arturo: So Lynette’s fight was over. She didn’t escape prison again. But even in 1994, the deputy DA who prosecuted Manson said that he believed Squeaky was still keeping the flame alive for Manson. His book about the murders, Helter Skelter, became one of the best-selling true crime accounts in history.

In 2009, Lynette was paroled. She was 60 years old. She self-published a memoir on the Manson family in 2018, and she writes about her time with Manson in such happy, glowing terms that it basically seems like she still believes that the things that they were doing were good, you know?

Aimee: Oh yeah. No, she’s a goner.

Arturo: The final sentence insists that she never meant to kill the president. It says, “There was no bullet in the chamber of that gun.” Yeah, they were there. OK?

Aimee: Just didn’t go off.

Arturo: Yeah, it didn’t go off. OK. You got lucky. He got lucky.

Aimee: Right.

Arturo: Charles Manson finally died in custody in 2017. Any possibility of him ruling the world was finally over.

Aimee: Thank god.

Arturo: And one final note on the Alderson Prison today: They require the inmates to wear khaki uniforms! Did she just set a trend?

Aimee: She’s a trendsetter!

Arturo: At least that should save the local Army jacket fans some hassle.

Aimee: Wow. That b*tch just climbed the fence. That’s all she did.

Outro

Arturo: And that’s it! That’s our story. What did you think? Any major takeaways from Squeaky’s story?

Aimee: You know what? I think Squeaky could have had a much better situation, a much better life, if she had just learned not to dye her hair red. You know what I mean? That was her biggest—that was like, her biggest thing.

Arturo: We find out in her memoir she was actually blonde the whole time.

Aimee: She’s a blonde. Yeah, a blonde.

Arturo: Also after they—everybody else goes to prison, like … she had a chance to start a new life.

Aimee: D’oh. La estupidez! Like, she couldn’t have played it worse. She’s done with—if she didn’t actually commit the murders, like that was her chance to turn her f***ing life around and be like, “You know what?”

Arturo: “I’ve seen the light.”

Aimee: “This is a new start.” No.

Arturo: “And—and that guy from—that drummer from the Beach Boys who was actually kind of cute. I’m gonna go see what the f*** he’s up to, you know?”

Aimee: “Yeah, I’m gonna make amends. I’m gonna join a 12-step program.” Like, she really could have had a good life, but oh, she—listen, Squeaky’s gotta squeak.

Arturo: Listen, thank you so much for doing this. Can I ask you for our listeners where they can check you out?

Aimee: Yeah. I mean, listen—thanks for having me, first of all. You can find me on Instagram, at Aimee, A-I-M-E-E C-A-R-R-E-R-O, and the Twitters. But mostly I just talk about politics and Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know. This is fun.

Arturo: Of course. Thank you so much, Aimee. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Aimee: See ya.

Credits

Arturo: Greatest Escapes is a production of iHeartRadio and FilmNation Entertainment, in association with Gilded Audio. Our executive producers are me, Arturo, Alyssa Martino and Milan Popelka from FilmNation Entertainment, Andrew Chugg and Whitney Donaldson from Gilded Audio, and Dylan Fagan from iHeartRadio.

The show is produced and edited by Carl Nellis and Ben Chugg, who are also, respectively, our research overlord and music overlord. Our associate producer is Tory Smith, who is our other overlord.

Nick Dooley is our technical director. Additional editing by Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Dan Welsh, Ben Ryzack, Sara Joyner, Nicki Stein, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright.

Hey, thank you so much for listening, and if you’re enjoying the show, please leave a rating or review. My mom will call you each personally and thank you, and we’ll see you all next week.