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U.S. News

She Almost Killed Charles Manson

OUT OF THE SHADOWS
BEAST INSIDE

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.

M.L. Nestel

Updated Oct. 21, 2019 3:57PM ET / Published Feb. 12, 2017 12:15AM ET 

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.”

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