Nancy Pitman aka Brenda

Brenda's mugshot, October 1969

Nancy Laura Pitman was born on January 1, 1951 to an engineer father and a mink-clad, high-society mother. She and her two younger brothers grew up in affluence in Malibu, California. Yet life in the Pitman home was apparently not as ideal as it may have seemed from the outside. According to the 1973 documentary MANSON, Nancy left home to join the Family at 16 because "I had nothing to keep me there. It wasn't a family; we just occupied the same house."

Despite her young age, the former Malibu surfer girl quickly became one of the most hardcore members of the Family. She was present when Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian came back to Spahn's Ranch after their night of murder and mayhem at the home of Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969. It is also widely believed that she went back to the actress's house with Manson later that night to survey the crime scene and leave false clues to throw off the police.

Brenda, as she had come be called in the Family, managed to make quite a few headlines during the Tate-LaBianca trial. She wasn't part of the trial itself, but she was one of the most loyal and visible amongst the girls who sat day and night outside the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. During this nine-month period she was arrested for trying to pass Charlie a tab of LSD in the LA County Jail's visiting room. Not long after that she was arrested on a forgery charge. Instead of facing her jail time, though, she went underground, literally, living in the city's sewers with fellow Family fugitive Bruce Davis. The two of them, obviously stoned out of their minds at the time, surrendered to police in December 1970.

After the trial was over Brenda and Squeaky moved in with Aryan Brotherhood members Michael Monfort and James Craig in a house in Stockton. When another housemate's body turned up in the basement, Brenda was promptly arrested and spent a year in jail for being an accessory after the fact to the murder of 19-year-old Lauren Willett. She later married Monfort (who was still imprisoned at the time) and they had four children. Today she is divorced, living in Oregon, and has disassociated herself completely from Manson.