Apr. 29 – A hard cold wind was blowing on the gray day last fall when a figure reemerged from America’s memories of revolution and reckoning. A reclusive newcomer to Vermont, known as Sandra Collins, revealed herself to be Sandra Good, an insider in the notorious 1960s cult, the Manson family.

The very elements seemed to signal her re-entry into the country’s consciousness. The wind tore across Lake Champlain and into the straw-colored, grass plains along its eastern shore. It grabbed at the unceasing plume of smoke coming from the International Paper Co. mill on the distant New York shore and shoved it at Vermont.

The sky grew darker as Blue — the nickname given to Good by Charles Manson because of her intense feelings for the sky and water — talked to a Burlington columnist in the living room of a solar-heated, lakefront house where she rents a room.

Like the November nor’easter that was about to unleash its fury, Sandra Collins was about to unleash Sandra Good, her other self, dropping the veil of anonymity that she had cultivated since being paroled from federal prison to Vermont in 1985, to bring attention to her latest cause: the slow death of her neighbor and spiritual sister, Lake Champlain.

To do that, Sandra Collins Good would reclaim her last name and give a series of interviews not unlike the interviews that landed her in jail 15 years ago. And she would invoke the specter of Charles Manson, the convicted mastermind behind seven murders in California in 1969, as part of her ploy to publicize the lake’s woes and finger those she felt responsible, the International Paper Co. and its government regulators.

It hardly mattered that there were other serious polluters of Lake Champlain. In Good’s mind, you were either for life or against life. And to her, the paper mill, owned by this nation’s largest landowner, was a corporation whose thirst for profits meant consuming mountainsides and destroying ecosystems. It stood for all that was against life.

Moreover, Good’s neighbors were poised to sign a pact with the devil. Landowners along the Addison County shore were about to accept a $5 million out-of-court settlement with International Paper to end a decade-long pollution suit.

The settlement money came with two ominous conditions: the mill would admit no wrongdoing, and the landowners would give up the right to sue for past pollution.

Good had to speak out against the unconscionable deal. “I feel like a Jew that is near a crematorium and my friends are being wasted. And their by-products are going to waste in a landfill,” Good confessed recently. “I feel the analogy is real. The trees are our friends. The thing is that the trees can’t replenish themselves like people.

“Once the trees are gone, the habitat for animals is gone. Plus you are contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer… I can smell the stuff in the air sometimes.”

Good’s remark contains the kernel of her personality. She is an emotional woman whose feelings and energy rise to a pitch where she confers nearly human attributes upon to trees and water and, conversely, relegates some people to a subhuman status.

She is an unwavering environmentalist who is quick to declare war on corporate America but has a hard time respecting people unless they are willing to join the battle on her terms. She empathizes to the point of personal pain with those she sees as victims and perceives herself as a lone, avenging figure in a world committing ecological suicide.

She is a solitary figure whose closest friends remain in prison for significant, violent crimes that she defends.

“I am as cold to people as they are to a dying Earth. I am as cold to people as they are cold to the fact that they have put their selfish lives over their kids’ future,” Good said. “I want people to look at everything they do. The great spirit has their number. Manson has their number. I am just laying it out. I am just putting the cards where they should be.”

I first met Good before her identity became known last fall. I was a reporter at a Middlebury newspaper doing a series on Lake Champlain. Sandra Collins first surfaced as a letter-to-the-editor writer, a driven environmentalist. Her letters, saying “the (paper) mill’s discharges… are substances not compatible with a living lake,” struck readers as both apt and eloquent. No one knew then this was a muffled Sandra Good just starting to emerge from her long period of self-imposed silence. She had not yet reached full cry.

After her past had been revealed, I visited her in her house on the lakeshore. I drove to the Champlain Valley’s western outskirts where desolate blond grasslands stretch for miles, drove up her long, treeless driveway where I parked next to the blue, two-story house exposed to the elements and the lake.

Good, a slight woman with blue-gray eyes and shaggy auburn hair that looks like an overgrown Beatles haircut, usually would greet me in a small mudroom and lead me to the nearby dining room. Sometimes she would be eating dinner, last summer’s broccoli or brussel sprouts steamed in a small crock pot. More often she would be drinking tea.

We’d sit at a table covered with her latest notes: a mix of legal pads, copied and highlighted articles, and index cards noting statistics such as, “one elephant killed every 10 minutes,” “one acre of rainforest is destroyed every second,” and “if present trends continue, 25 percent of life on Earth will be gone within a lifetime of today’s young people.”

In those first visits, we would talk about the lake and about the parade of reporters who were calling for interviews. I’d ask about the hunches of dried flowers that covered the walls. Good cultivates flowers and makes wreaths that sell in Middlebury. The flowers compete with gardening books on the room’s shelves. In a corner, worn records from mostly 1960s groups lie near a turntable.

Good would complain she had been too busy to make that wreathes that pay for her $125 a month phone bill and $250 rent. She would ask how to get information on the paper mill and who regulated its waste. Inevitably, as the topic turned to IP, her mood would become more intense, more serious. Her blue-gray eyes would stare straight at me.

She wanted to know who, in simple terms, in black and white, was responsible for allowing the mill to pollute the lake. State and federal government, I said. Good insisted I take her to government meetings on the lake because she does not drive. She wanted to meet the people in charge. We went and I watched as state officials steered clear of her, as the environmentalists who willingly had shared information with Sandra Collins on the telephone a few weeks earlier now distanced themselves from Sandra Good.

It was not until I told her that I, too, wanted to do a story that the Sandra Good personality showed its face with full force. It was a weekday afternoon in her dining room.

“The media are scum,” she yelled at me, her rage growing as she accused me of violating her confidence.

“Media lies are what put Manson in jail, kept the real story from coming out. Media lies are what put Lynette (Fromme, her ex-roommate who pulled a .45 pistol on then-President Gerald Ford) in jail and now she can’t have any children,” she said. “The media have made money at the expense of my people. I’m not going to get sold out again.”

I put it aside. Earlier this month, I looked at my notes and decided to write a story. I called Sandra to tell her.

“Steve, if you do me wrong, you will pay dearly,” she said. “That is a threat. It is a promise. I don’t have to do anything. You’ll do it to yourself. But I know…”

Good agreed to be interviewed. After several hour-long telephone calls that began as negotiating sessions, I visited her on a Saturday afternoon.

As soon as we started talking, I recalled what it felt like to be with Good. Always, the conversation begins in territory that most environmentalists would consider reasonable: respect for nature, anger at those who are destroying it. But then it moves beyond the realm of reason and into a land of emotional and philosophical extremism where murder and violence can be justified by the cause. If you reject her view, she lashes back.

Good was markedly different this time. Last fall, she was more circumspect. Good said she had censored herself the because she feared going back to jail. Now, with that fear gone, Good was embarrassed that she hadn’t spoken out.

“I was coming out from being Sandra Collins to being Sandra Good,” she said. “Sandra Good would have been on her feet. I was almost ready to do it … I was a coward.”

We talked for three hours. At best, Good emerged as a Cassandra with an important message about environmental destruction and personal responsibility. At worst, she was a deluded, existential figure, whose beliefs allow her to justify killing people to save trees.

Good said her role was to prompt people to serve life, the air, water, land and wildlife, and not their selfish desires. What do you think of environmentalists avoiding you, I asked.

“Truth sees itself,” Good said. “To people who are sincere, the issue of me being a Manson person is irrelevant.”

“But that’s exactly why people are avoiding you,” I said.

“The people who turn away from me are phonies,” she replied, her voice rising. “It just shows them for the fakes, phonies and moneyminds that they are. I am just separating the cowards and fakes and frauds. What you need is a small minority of people willing to make sacrifices. They need to know they are not alone.”

But it always comes back to the 1970 murders, I said, sparking her anger.

“The killings… if you visualize the Tate house, with all those dead bodies, with all that blood and gore, the whole country will be the Tate house, the My Lai massacre, Nazi Germany,” Good said, restating her belief that a violent doomsday would befall the world’s polluters.

“These (murderers) were kids in the 1960s who put their lives on the line to show where it was all headed. It points to the future homes of America when people will flip out. You have a country of moneyminds. You have to have a tradition of love that manifests itself in taking care of the Earth.

“The blood and guts and destruction is coming. It’s coming. We were trying to avert that whole anarchistic breakdown. This society has been built on a horror. We were just young people. We wanted to stop what we felt was responsible.”

But people cannot accept the murders, I said.

“People… how could people send their kids to Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua? How can they pay their taxes,” she replied. “People who want to point their finger at us have more blood on their hands then we do. We gave all to show where this country was headed.”

“The people who work at IBM and IP are complicit in murder. And it is a much bigger and larger murder. People who want to play act ‘all that violence’ are just trying to get out of their responsibility. The people who say bad things about us they will have it coming…

“All that is bullshit about a handful of dead bodies in the face of a nation that murders the world. We were a microcosm. We were a little-bitty revolution against the nation and the world. That is how revolution happens. That is history. All that mamby-pamby stuff justifies their own fear and greed.”

Sandra Good is no ordinary child of the 1960s.

Good’s odyssey with the Manson family began 23 years ago. She was a college student living in San Francisco who bummed an airplane ride to Los Angeles with a well-to-do artist. Her goal was to go surfing. Her ride took brought her to Manson’s spread, an old run-down movie set in the southern California desert. There, Good impulsively joined other young, restless and searching children of middle-class families. All came under the spell of Manson, a small-boned, dirt-poor man who grew up in reform schools and jail cells. He preached a gospel that saw an approaching apocalypse fueled by America’s insatiably greedy, war-addicted, nature-killing corporations and partner in crime, the U.S. government.

Good didn’t look back. The stockbroker’s daughter whose parents were divorced shortly after she entered grade school, the little girl who had a hard time learning to read and had breathing problems, the teenager who dated football players because it was the ‘right’ thing to do, abruptly cut off her past. She called up her San Francisco roommates and told them to dispose of her skis, scuba gear and possessions.

The Spahn Ranch’s searchers and drifters became her friends and family. Good didn’t need to go back to college because she already knew all she needed to know, Manson told her. And Good believed Manson, a mentally intense man who, she said, never lied, a man who was able to manipulate his face to mirror the expressions of people speaking to him.

Good was in a sheriff’s lockup for credit card fraud the nights of Aug. 9, 1969, when actress Sharon Tate and and four others were murdered, and on Aug. 10, 1969, when Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were murdered — all by members of her adopted family. Good joined a handful of young woman who shaved their heads, burned Xs into their foreheads to symbolize the fallen cross, and kept an 18-month streetside vigil when Manson and six others stood trial for the murders.

Good gave up a son fathered by Manson to join the vigil.

“I had a choice. I gave him to friends to raise so that I could dedicate myself to working for his future and the future of all children,” she said. “He is a football player. He chases girls. He is regular guy. He called me up and said, ‘I want to know what is happening to the Earth.’ I knew when he reached 20 years old he would see why his mother gave him up so I could be on a street corner where Manson was in jail, why I started speaking publicly.”

As Good and the other Manson devotees slept in a parked van outside the Los Angeles courthouse and used its restrooms to get water and wash, they met Black Panther leaders and other revolutionaries that passed through the courts. Her ties to other radicals grew, she said. These connections would enhance her mystique in the next chapter in her life. After Manson and the others received death sentences. Good and fellow family member Lynette Fromme moved to Sacramento to be close to Manson, who was in nearby Folsom Prison. In Sacramento, Fromm, known as Red, worked on writings while Good researched American companies that were polluting and compiled lists of their executive officers.

“I was researching all the corporations and industries in the U.S. that were polluting — the oil, chemical, lumber, paper, drug companies, the media, processed food industry,” she said. “You find out they are all so connected. I was researching companies that were in any way responsible for the destruction of the air, trees, water and animals.”

Good had files for polluting companies from each state and lists of corporate officers taken from Standard & Poors’ corporate directory. She categorized each company according to its specific sin, then composed letters for each. By mid-1975, she had 3,000 ready to mail.

“They weren’t personal threats, but the consequences of putting money over life,” she said. “Some said, ‘You murdered our world, you know what you have coming.’ Those letters went to Exxon, the company that had the Bhopal plant… Union Carbide. Some of these people were so, so criminal, you couldn’t say. ‘Dear so and so, will you stop murdering villagers and the ecosystem.’ Like Hydro-Quebec, International Paper, for the magnitude of their destruction of life… there will be retribution. They are living in hell right now and they are bringing us into that hell.”

The letters were signed by the “International People’s Court of Retribution,” an organization that existed only in the mind of Sandra Good, created to speak for environmental revolutionaries everywhere.

“The International People’s Court holds court day and night,” Good wrote in the letters. “Your time is running out.”

On Sept. 5, 1975, Fromme planned to go to Las Vegas to confront some car industry executives about their polluting ways. The day before, she had heard that President Gerald Ford was going to be in Sacramento. Fromme grabbed her .45 pistol and walked four blocks from their apartment to Capital Park where she, according to Good, came within six inches of Ford and then decided not to use the gun. Witnesses later testified they heard a click from Fromme cocking the gun.

Fromme was taken to jail and Good, whom FBI agents couldn’t implicate in a conspiracy, went on the talk-show circuit.

Because the FBI had taken her letters, Good used the radio, television and newspaper interviews to get her message out. She spoke of her work to expose America’s worst polluters. She pointed to local companies and named prominent names.

“The interviewers would say, ‘When will you start killing people?’” Good recalled. “I would say. ‘I am one person. I have no intention of killing. I am a spokesman. I have no intention or ability to give these 3,000 executives justice’.”

Several national publications wrote about Good’s statements. The articles questioned if she was breaking the law. The FBI initially said she was not explicitly threatening anybody. On the day a jury found Fromme guilty, federal agents arrested Good on several charges of issuing threatening statements through interstate commerce. The indictment cited her television interviews. The case went to trial.

“I was my own lawyer,” Good said. “I picked up the law real quick. It was a game. My goal was to introduce into evidence the content of the letters as written since the letters didn’t get mailed. I was going to get the message out through the press that was there at the trial.”

Good was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She served her time in several prisons. The most difficult part, she said, was “listening to ghetto-blasters day and night.” She spent her time with Fromme and other radicals who were serving time for non-violent protests at American military bases. She did not apply for parole because she felt she hadn’t committed a crime.

In mid-1985, nine years into her sentence, Good’s jailers decided to release her. She wanted to go back to California to be near Manson. When a California congressman made a lot of noise about her pending probation, she told the warden at her West Virginia prison that she didn’t want to leave. Offered resettlement in Camden, N.J., she refused, calling it a “toxic waste dump.” Five months later, they offered to send her to Vermont and she reluctantly accepted.

Good was tiring of her fourth year in exile as last fall’s November winds peeled white-caps off the slate-gray waters behind the house she shared with Earl Parsons. Good had been keeping an unnaturally low profile since she got off a bus in Burlington in December 1985. After working for a few months as a farm hand, she moved to the Bridport shore.

At first, the quiet lakefront suited her fine. The view from the large windows in the solar-heated house stretched across sweeping grasslands and a mile of water to New York state’s Crown Point. Good started a garden and went for long walks. But she smelled the paper mill’s emissions and knew the water was not healthy. She felt it was dying. But Good was afraid of getting arrested during a protest and did not want to go back to prison. So she kept quiet.

Good’s silence lasted until mid-October when she learned that scores of her neighbors all along the Addison County shore were poised to settle a decade-old lawsuit with the paper mill. International Paper proposed settling the lawsuit for a $5 million cash payment to the lawyers and lakefront residents. Before taking the money, however, property owners had to
sign a document agreeing that no pollution-related suits would be filed for any past or present activities at the mill. Strictly speaking, the corporation could be sued for any future pollution. Good felt she could no longer be silent.

“I felt a growing guilt when I left prison,” she said. “If they had offered me any other part of the country I would have said no. I would not have given in. It was a very difficult decision to leave prison. I said I can’t bear to live in your society while pollution is going on without making moves to stop it… and here I was hiding, not speaking out.

“I don’t just act out of the facts. I have to go through periods of intense grieving. It wipes me out. For 20 years I have looked at the world and what white people have done to it. I take responsibility for the dying of the planet.”

Good’s anguish set her on a month-long collision course that would peak in mid-November, when she would be recognized from a newspaper photograph and briefly become Vermont’s latest outspoken environmentalist.

This re-entry into the public’s eye began when Sandra Collins started writing letters to a Middlebury newspaper criticizing her neighbors for the settlement. She allowed herself to be interviewed, saying, “This may be the best we can do under existing law, but it simply isn’t enough. We need better laws. We need better standards. We need to trust ourselves to follow our hearts and our common sense and not be fooled by what the lawyers tell us.”

When the final settlement hearing took place on October 31, Halloween, Collins took her protest to U.S. District Court in Burlington. Outside the court, Joe Gleason, her friend and organic farmer neighbor, wore a home-made mask of a “two-faced corporate executive” and held a small poster saying, “Lake Champlain has had ENOUGH!” Collins held picket-size sign saying, “We Can’t Drink Money.”

Inside the courtroom, she spoke up when Judge Albert Coffrin asked if anyone objected to the suit. A settlement did not clean up the lake or lead to tougher pollution standards, Collins said. Coffrin said that the settlement, which put aside $500,000 for lake research, was the best solution possible. He suggested she lobby New York environmental officials to toughen their pollution standards. Collins listened quietly. The judge then accepted the settlement.

As Collins left the courtroom she passed Fred Chasse, the Ticonderoga mill’s manager. She muttered, “You are the worst kind of criminal I know.”

Good’s life sped up after the court hearing. A photograph of her and Gleason at the court hearing was published in the Vermont Vanguard and Collins was recognized. That prompted requests for interviews from newspapers and television stations. As was the case 14 years before when Fromme was arrested, she decided to use her newfound notoriety to promote her agenda: saving the lake.

Long-time Lake Champlain advocates weren’t exactly pleased with their new media-attracting ally. Lake Champlain had just started to get attention from politicians who were genuinely convinced the lake’s future was imperiled. While groups such as the Lake Champlain Committee and the interstate Citizens Advisory Committee for Lake Champlain appointed by Vermont and New York’s governors desperately needed new grassroots activists, they felt Good would jeopardize their cause.

Moreover, Good didn’t understand the odds against her. She thought people would look past her explanation of the Manson family murders and focus on the lake’s ills. And she thought the media, at a time where global warming and acid rain were front-page issues, would respond to the ills of the nation’s sixth-largest freshwater lake.

The environmentalists’ and Good’s expectations both missed the mark: state and federal legislation to help the lake is evolving today while Good’s brief media splash — which contained varying mixes of Manson and Lake Champlain — has faded into obscurity. For her part, Good’s track record as local activist has turned out to be unremarkable, given people’s expectations for the sharp-tongued Manson devotee.

Peel off her Manson armor and revolutionary rhetoric for a moment and another side of Good emerges. She is as good at making sweeping connections between environmental problems and societal behavior as she is bad at managing the detail work that would be part of any grassroots movement. The lawyers involved in the IP case tried to feed Sandra Collins material with the hope that she would start a new lake advocacy group. But she didn’t want to hear about the suit’s limitations, or that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Vermont could not change IP’s New York pollution permits, or that no suit could shut the mill.

Instead, she has held onto her views, some of which are simply outdated. Good clings to a 1960s-era belief that a violent reaction to pollution is inevitable. Scientific evidence today suggests pollution indeed is destroying life on Earth, but destroying it over a span of generations — not a biblical doomsday.

She is a peripheral figure working on small crusades, such as encouraging teachers at a local school to stop using paper milk containers because they may contain dioxin, a highly toxic substance, or organizing a petition drive calling on Vermont ETV to drop IP as a sponsor of the program, ‘Nature.’ She spends most of her days alone.

Day by day, Good is somewhat of a monastic figure. She doesn’t drive, barely earns a living, wears aging clothes, has few possessions. This makes it easy for Good, who at 45 is entering middle age and has served her time in prison, to position herself as a self-appointed voice of conscience in the modern pollution epic. It makes it easier to speak to those who come to her rather than digging in for the long battle from today’s front-line.

In a world where society’s crimes have Biblical proportions, where those she sees as redeemers and faithful disciples are locked away in prison, in a world where she lives a life of self-denial and the future holds the promise of going back to California to he near Manson’s jail cell, it is not surprising that Good would turn out to be a homeless preacher whose pulpit is society’s margin.

“I am a passer-through,” she said, during the interview earlier this month. “This is not my home. I don’t own a car. I don’t really have a personal life. For some reason I was sent here… But I have work to do.”

“I am a white woman from a southern California middle-class background,” she said. “And because of my empathy with more than just people of my background, I wish to be the conscience for as many people as possible. I can be very harsh on the people of my background because the debt owed by the upper middle-class white woman is enormous.

“It is a debt based on destroying the Earth, Indians, third-world countries, the animals, trees… She must pay it back one way or another. She must give up her selfish lifestyle.”

And so Good will continue to live on Vermont’s perimeter until her probation ends and she returns to California to be near Manson. Give her the opportunity and she’ll preach.

“People have to accept the thought that a personal life, or a selfish life, is immoral and violent. Just the thought that you can have a personal life makes a person complicit in the violence against everything that is life-sustaining…”

To this day, she defends the Manson family.

“Manson didn’t kill anybody. There are an handful of middle-class kids that killed. But nobody can point their fingers at them…”

She remains loyal to Manson, she said, because he is the wisest person she knows. When her probation ends in December, she plans to return to California to begin a vigil near his prison.

“I want to see Manson. I have been waiting 20 years to see him. I didn’t want to leave prison unless they let me be near him. The man is wise. The man didn’t kill anybody. His is probably the number one political prisoner in this country. He has been scapegoated by the system to take the heat off its criminality and the government’s criminality.”

By STEVE ROSENFELD