She Almost Killed Charles Manson
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Nearly 50 years after testifying against him, Windy Bucklee is telling her story for the first time of meeting the murder mastermind in the years leading up to Helter Skelter.
Charles Manson introduced himself with a closed fist.
It was 1968 when the ex-convict drifter barged into Windy Bucklee’s house in Canoga Park, just north of Los Angeles, and hit the 26-year-old woman so hard in the face that she slid across the kitchen’s freshly waxed floor, past the sink where her roommate Frances stood clutching a butcher knife.
Though bleeding and seeing stars, Bucklee made it to the bedroom where a loaded Luger pistol was resting on top of a highboy dresser. Her cousin Rusty had brought it back from Europe and warned her: “Watch it, cousin, because it’s loaded.”