Nancy Pitman entered the Manson Family as a 16-year-old from an affluent Malibu household. Petite, tanned, and ash-blond, she had grown up the only girl in a large, well-positioned family. Her father worked in high-level aeronautical engineering, including work for the Pentagon; her social circle included Deirdre Shaw, daughter of actress Angela Lansbury. Nothing in her background suggested the role she would eventually play inside the Manson Family.
Within the group she became “Brenda McCann,” an early and committed member whose loyalty earned her a position of trust. George Spahn called her “Brindle,” and former members described her as one of Manson’s “heaviest” girls—serious, reliable, and able to repeat his rhetoric with precision. She was consistently characterized as tough and headstrong.
Pitman played several functional roles inside the Family. She served as the group’s seamstress, producing clothing and detailed embroidery, and acted as the makeshift barber. She could cut, stitch, and tailor well-fitting clothes from scratch within hours and without patterns, a skill that made her valuable within the group’s closed system.
She also became known for her ability to disappear into the landscape—slipping into ivy, brush, or dumpsters to avoid police detection, sometimes for hours at a time. Her stealth became an asset during raids. During the raid at Barker Ranch, she ran half-naked through the sand, detoured long enough to hide the Family’s LSD supply, and was captured only afterward.
In early 1969, Pitman found a piece of belladonna root behind the ranch, boiled it in the kitchen, and gave it to Tex Watson. The drug triggered a days-long hallucination that led to his arrest for public intoxication and produced the widely circulated mug shot of him smiling at the camera. The arrest also yielded the fingerprints later matched to the print found on the front door of 10050 Cielo Drive. After the Tate murders, when Watson returned to the ranch, he found Manson dancing naked in the moonlight with Pitman beside him. Manson’s first words reportedly were, “What’re you doing home so early?”
In 1972, Pitman became involved in the murders of James and Lauren Willett. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in Lauren Willett’s killing and served 18 months of a five-year sentence. She later married Michael Monfort—another Willett suspect—in a jailhouse ceremony. Their three children were conceived during conjugal visits while Monfort remained incarcerated. He was paroled in 1984, reoffended in 1996 after admitting to more than thirty armed robberies, and received a sentence of 878 years to life. He died in 2005.
Sources
The Nancy Pitman profile above is compiled from primary source memoirs authored by former members of the Manson Family and contemporary newspaper reports.
- 1977: Child of Satan, Child of God by Susan Atkins
- 1978: Will You Die For Me by Tex Watson
- 1979: My Life with Charles Manson by Paul Watkins
- 2017: Member of the Family by Dianne Lake
- 2018: Reflexion by Lynette Fromme