Susan Denise Atkins was born on May 7, 1948 in San Gabriel, California, to a lower middle-class family. Her father was a construction worker and her mother took various odd jobs (such as doing surveys over the telephone) to help support Susan and her two brothers. When Susan was still very young, the family moved to northern California, living in San Francisco suburb of Millbrae, and, after that, San Jose. By all accounts hers was not exactly an idyllic childhood. Both of her parents were alcoholics and often got into violent conflicts with one another. Susan has also claimed that she was molested by her older brother and some of his friends. To top it all off, her mother died of cancer when Susan was just fifteen. After Mrs. Atkins's death, Susan's father sank deeper and deeper into depression and alcoholism and eventually left her and her younger brother Steven in the care of an aunt. It was around this time that Susan quit school and headed for San Francisco, barely subsisting on a series of dead-end jobs and associating with the likes of drug addicts and car thieves. When she was eighteen she got a job as a topless dancer at the Kandy Kat club in San Francisco; perhaps her biggest "accomplishment" during this period was dancing topless in a pseudo-Satanic revue staged by none other than Anton LaVey. Her success was short-lived, though; her drug use and promiscuity landed her in a hospital for several months with a nasty case of the clap. This did not deter Susan from her free-wheeling lifestyle, though. Soon after she was released from the hospital she moved into a commune in Haight-Ashbury right next door to Janis Joplin. The group's main source of income was from selling narcotics, and thus Susan was supplied with a steady stream of the drugs that she had grown so dependent on. Her appetite for sex and drugs had been satiated; apparently, though, there was still something that she was missing. She came to believe that the answer that she had been looking for came to her in the form of a grubby, thirty-two-year-old ex-convict named Charles Manson. She met him one day while he was visiting friends at her pad in the Haight. She was the fourth girl to join the growing "Family" and hopped on the group's black bus without a moment's hesitation. Little did she know what kind of a ride she was in for...