LOS ANGELES Forty years ago, they were kids. Vulnerable, alienated, running away from a world wracked by war and rebellion. They turned to a cult leader for love and wound up tied to a web of unimaginable evil.

They were part of Charles Mansons Family, and now, on the brink of old age, they are the haunted.

I never have a day go by that I dont think about it, especially about the victims, says Barbara Hoyt, who was 17 the summer of the Sharon Tate-LaBianca murders. Ive long ago accepted the fact it will never go away.

The ones who arent in prison are scattered across the country. Some live under assumed names to hide their past from friends and business associates. Some have undergone surgery to remove the X that Manson ordered them to carve on their foreheads, showing they were Xed out of society. Some live with endless regret.

Those who escaped taking part in the spasm of terror that snuffed out at least nine lives would seem to be lucky. But their lives have been linked forever to one of the craziest mass murders in history.

Manson made a lot of victims besides the ones he killed, said Catherine Share, who once lived with the Manson Family under the nickname Gypsy. He destroyed lives. There are people sitting in prison who wouldnt be there except for him. He took all of our lives.

It was 1969, the summer of the first moon landing. War was raging in Vietnam. Hippies were in the streets of San Francisco, the last bastion of the waning counterculture movement.

For many, that summer is remembered for one thing the most shocking celebrity murders to ever hit Los Angeles. Mention of the Sharon Tate murders or the name Manson four decades later is enough to make people shudder.

On the morning of Aug. 9, a housekeeper ran screaming from a home in lush Benedict Canyon. She had discovered a scene of unspeakable carnage. Five bodies were scattered around the estate. The most famous, actress Sharon Tate, 26, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, had been stabbed multiple times. But there were four others that day and two more the next.

Abigail Folger, 25, heiress to a coffee fortune; Jay Sebring, 35, celebrity hair stylist; Voyteck Frykowski, 32, a Polish film director, and Steven Parent, 18, friend of the caretaker, were found stabbed or shot.

The city was thrown into a state of fear. If that was not enough, a similar murder scene was discovered the next night.

These murders were probably the most bizarre in the recorded annals of American crime, said Vincent Bugliosi, the former deputy district attorney who prosecuted the killers and wrote the book Helter Skelter.

It would be more than three months before the name Charles Manson was linked to the crimes. And then the story became even weirder.

The discovery of Mansons clan living in a high desert commune opened up the astounding story of an ex-convict who had gathered young people into a cult and ordered them to kill. His reasons still remain a subject of debate. Some say he wanted to foment a race war; others say it was senseless.

It was a real-life horror story, recalled Stephen Kay, who also prosecuted the Manson Family. Manson is the real-life Freddie Kruger.

Those cult members lucky enough not to have killed for Manson on Aug. 9-10, 1969, have spent decades trying to bury their past and free themselves from his grasp.

For her part, Share went to prison for five years for involvement in a Manson Family robbery and later did more time for credit card fraud. She said the time in prison helped her recover, and she became a Christian. Shes now involved in retail sales and has just finished a book on her experiences with the Manson Family.

She is sympathetic to those who were convicted. Everyone wants to make them monsters, Share said. They werent monsters. They did a monstrous thing and now theyre older people, and theyre not monsters anymore. None of those people ever would have been violent if it werent for Manson.