SACRAMENTO, Sept. 6 – Lynette Fromme and two other followers of Charles Manson — Susan “Heather” Murphy and Sandra Good — had a reputation among their neighbors as “nice girls” and “good neighbors.” .

However, one young woman, Chris Daugherty, who lives near the 1725 P St. address of the three, quoted the Fromme woman as saying that she and others planned “something bigger than the Tate killing and it would happen in the next few weeks.”

Ms. Daugherty said she recently became nervous about conversations with the acknowledged Manson disciple and had obtained a gun for self-protection.

She said Ms. Fromme never talked about politics but seemed fascinated by death and often asked questions about death.

“She was always nice but kinda strange. She’s very touchy — I mean always touching you, parts of your body, with her hands,” the woman said. She said Ms. Fromme did nothing to indicate she planned to kill anyone but that the conversations had made her somewhat fearful anyway.

Another neighbor who lives in a nearby apartment, Mona Lynch, said that she knew the girls were part of the Manson group but felt they had straightened out their lives since. “I don’t know what got their minds so warped,” she said. “They’re not dumb. If they could just put their intelligence to some advantage.”

She said they dressed normally, sunbathed in bikinis in the backyard and “brought me vegetables now and again.”

The supervisor of the Community Garden at 15th and Q Streets, Charlene Jacobs, said the Manson women were a problem because they stole the vegetables of other gardeners. Ms. Jacobs said she had angry exchanges with Sandra Good over the stealing of vegetables.

“They’d send five or six or seven people over the fence and just harvest the whole place,” the woman said.

“Their own garden was getting so awful.”

When she confronted Ms. Good about the vegetable stealing, she said, Ms. Good “just kept going back to how they were going to improve the world,” the woman said.

“They said they were doing bigger things than anything we could do in that garden, and I just said, ‘Why don’t you start by improving your garden?”‘

She said Ms. Fromme had started the garden and had worked hard on it and was friendly toward her.

Other neighbors said they hadn’t realized the women were part of the Manson group but that they had found them pleasant neighbors. The manager of a nearby apartment house said he had enjoyed seeing them sunbathe in the backyard of the old Victorian house where they lived in an attic apartment.

The comment of a detective at the Fromme house on P Street reflected the close-mouthed policy clamped on all police statements by Chief William Kinney.

“The last word we got from the very top echelon,” the detective said, “was to smile a lot and say nothing.”

And that’s just what he did.