Catherine Share
("Gypsy")

From my first memories, being hidden from the Nazis in France, all I can remember is fear, loneliness and confusion.  I was born in the middle of the worst holocaust ever known, and I was born with Jewish blood.

My father was a Freedom Fighter in the French underground and both my parents died in the war.  My Grandmother on my mother’s side died in a Ghetto in Eastern Europe and both my grandparents on my father’s side died in concentration camps.  My father made arrangements with a French lawyer who was secretly helping the underground to take me out of what he considered Fascist France (French authorities had helped the Germans deport and kill most of the French Jews).

When the war was over, he did just that.  He found a wonderful woman to adopt me.  She was a left wing cause fighter with a heart as big and giving as any person I have ever known.

I saw a different part of life than most kids.  She married a Hollywood psychologist and gave me a loving family for many years.  I saw first hand the repression of the Un-American Activities Committee and fought for such causes as ban the atom bomb and civil rights - along with a lot of loving and some very famous people.

This rich and loving life came crashing down when my adoptive mother died of cancer and my step-father changed and rejected me at the tender age of sixteen.

I entered in ‘the sixties’ completely alone in this world, wounded, and looking for someone to love me and tell me the truth.  I tried just about everything to fill the empty gaping wound in my soul.  I became addicted to anything that would temporarily stop the pain of loneliness and rejection - including food, marijuana, sex and LSD (which completely destroyed my mind and made me like a little child for many years).  I was the Hippie of hippies and The ‘flower child’.

I thought I had found peace at last but I was still searching for the truth and the truth giver.  No family, I wandered around in a false euphoria of drugs and ‘relationships’.

I was a prime target for Charlie and his now infamous ‘Family’.  I came to the Family through a boyfriend, Bobby Beausoleil and when I met Charlie he seemed to have all the answers.   My wounded soul drank in all the attention he bestowed on me.  He was all things to all people and for me he became the revolutionary leader, the loving and free one that could free me from my pain and fear.  Night after night and day after day I listened to him and he became my truth giver and the closest thing to Christ I had ever experienced.  A true angel of light!  But it was a false light; like a moth goes to a light bulb and destroys itself, thinking it is the sun it is flying into.

I was so convinced that he had all the answers and that he was Jesus Christ personified that I convincingly told many ‘Family’ members that he was.  Since I believed it with all my heart, they believed me.  In the process I pulled Leslie Van Houten and Linda Kasabian into the family; a fact that still grieves me to this day.  I also looked the owner of this Web Site in the face, Dennis Rice, and told him that Charlie was Christ.  We were all looking for God and truth and we were all deceived.

There was never any talk of murder or any kind of violence really.  To me it was a dream come true.  I had the family I had never had, validation…and the attention I so desperately craved.  I believed we would all survive the coming holocaust together and save all the little children who would be crying on street corners in the burning cities. This appealed to my motherly instincts.

Ever so slowly, things began to change.  I was the oldest besides Charlie and I had a lot of fears that he constantly was ‘working on’.  I also had lots of unresolved issued that caused me to overeat, something I had done off and on most of my life.  This caused Charlie to leave me out of a lot of the ‘more advanced’ training sessions, that I actually only learned about after reading Charles Watson’s book.  The bottom line is that I was left out of the murders.

During the trial, from his jail cell, Charlie hooked me up with an escaped convict that nearly got me killed in a shootout with the police.  It took many years to fully see what Charlie was all about and even more years to see that I was hooked in much the same way to this convict.  I just wanted to be loved and accepted and would do just about anything for it.

While on the run and living in Canada, away from the direct influence of a man, I heard a song by Bob Dylan.  I had admired Dylan and bought and listened to every album and every song he ever did.  I thought he was a prophet of our times. 

Taking care of my young son, wanted by the FBI and hiding in Canada, a song came on the radio one day and changed my entire existence.  It was called… “You’re Gonna Have To Serve Somebody”.  The words went like this:

You may be an ambassador to England or France

You might like to gamble, you might like to dance

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world

You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

 But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

Yes you are, You’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Well it may be the devil and it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

You might be a rock and roller dancing on a stage

Money and drugs at your command, woman in a cage

You might be a business man or some high degree thief

They may call you doctor or they may call you chief

You might be rich or poor, you might be blind or lame

YOU’RE LIVING IN ANOTHER COUNTRY UNDER SOME ASSUMED NAME

That was me.  I had become a high degree thief and I was living in another country under ‘some assumed name’ and who was I ‘serving’?  And what was Dylan talking about when he sang ‘Lord’?  I couldn’t get the lyrics out of my mind.  “But you’re still gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed, serve somebody/ It may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

The song shook me to my bones.  I had never been posed that question before.  I looked everywhere for the record but it wasn’t in Canada and soon the radio stations took it off the air when they realized that he was singing about Jesus Christ.

Soon after, I was asked to come back to the United States to take care of a storage place for my then husband, Kenneth Como (the escaped convict who was back in prison).  That is what I thought I was coming back for.  God had other plans.  A friend brought me a Bible and alone on a mountaintop I opened the book to the Gospel of John. I was supernaturally transported into the pages of John and met face to face, the true “Truth, the Way and the Life”.  When I was finished and back on the mountain, I knew I had a decision to make. I decided to give what was left of my destroyed life to Jesus if He would have me.  He has never left me or forsaken me.  He has redeemed my life and I joyfully serve Him to this day.

Compared to the percentage of the world that come to the Lord Jesus Christ I believe that there will be a much higher percentage, if not 100%, of Manson Family members that come to know Him.   This is why…The Word says that “If you seek me, you will find me, if you seek me with all your heart”.   If you sought the Truth in the past and were deceived, and you keep on seeking, then you will find the True One.  “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there in no other Name under heaven, given among men, by which we must be saved.”  I didn’t say that…God did.

The Messiah, the Savior of the world is alive today.  He sits on the right hand side of the Father making intersession for us all.  There isn’t a sin He didn’t die for and by His ‘stripes’ we are being healed in every way.  He’s not a mystery.  If you want to meet Him like I did just pick up a Bible and start reading.  I suggest you start at the Gospel of John.  If you seek Him, you will find Him in the pages of this book.  He went willingly to the cross at Calvary for my sins and yours and then He rose from the dead and took His rightful place.  Yet, He did not leave us orphans.  He sent a Helper, a Counselor and a Friend called The Holy Spirit and He lives inside anyone who asks Him and wants Him there.

I’m not saying that all I had to do was read the Bible and all my problems were solved.  His yoke is easy but I still had a lot of wounds and hurts and soul issues.  I needed to renew my mind and it has taken years of the washing of the Word to become whole.  Today I walk forgiven and gratefully serve the Risen King and now can share the truth with any who are seeking Him.

Don’t be deceived.  I pray you learn from those of us that went so very wrong.  If it doesn’t give life and life more abundantly then it is not of God.  His blessings have no curse added to them and ‘you will know them by their fruits’. (In other words by what they do not just say)

God Bless you as you seek the Truth. The Truth will make you free.

Catherine