He was one of America’s most notorious killers, who in the summer of 1969 slaughtered nine innocent people including the actress Sharon Tate at her Los Angeles home. But the murderous career of crazed cult leader Charles Manson was nearly over before it began – thanks to a pair of ranch hand movie extras.    

The revelation comes in the book The Last Charles Manson Tapes: Evil Lives Beyond the Grave, by investigative journalists Dylan Howard and Andy Tillett. They explain how Manson had spent 1968 recruiting members – mostly young women – to his “Manson Family” cult, and set up base at the sprawling Spahn Ranch, a 500-acre former movie set and horse rental stable in the Santa Susana mountains outside L.A. 

Amongst the few employees still working at the ranch were cousins Donald “Shorty” Shea and Windy Bucklee. 

"Shea had worked at Spahn as an animal handler and general maintenance man since October 1962, well before the Family had shown up,” explain Howard and Tillett. “He also was a manager at a strip club, ran adult bookstores in Las Vegas, and took mining and truck driving gigs when they came along.  

"All this was in addition to his low-level film career. Shea would do animal handling and stunt work during movie shoots, and even appeared onscreen in an uncredited role in a Prohibition-era gangster flick titled The Fabulous Bastard from Chicago (1969)."

"Shea’s cousin, Windy Bucklee, was similarly employed-as-needed at Spahn Ranch. She had been a stagecoach driver in live Western shows.” 

If Shea was mostly relaxed about the presence of a rag-tag commune of hippies installing themselves at the ranch, his cousin was a little more prudish. “Bucklee had been alarmed when the Manson Family moved in,” say the authors, “as she saw them taking a family-friendly horse ranch and turning it into a hippie paradise, which meant minimum cleanliness and maximum nudity. She approved of neither.” 

As it turned out, Windy Bucklee’s resentment towards the Family was to threaten to undo all of Charles Manson’s plans. But perhaps ironically, the catalyst for their confrontation was to come from Manson’s association with another property.  

As well as their main base at the Spahn Ranch, the cult would also hang out at a house in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley. The residence belonged to Bill Vance, an old prison mate of Manson’s, who was also friendly with Shea and Bucklee – so much so that he even kept a set of keys to Windy’s truck. 

As Howard and Tillett explain, that set of keys was almost to prove fatal to Charles Manson, after Bucklee was pulled over by the police while driving in late 1968. “The police officer stopped her and explained her truck had been seen close by to where four small businesses had been robbed,” they write. “As she was able to prove she had clocked in at her job on the nights of the robberies, Bucklee was quickly removed from the suspect list. But she knew what had happened.”