Whoever Fights Monsters Page 8

  Nearly everyone wants to talk to Charles Manson, primarily in order to be able to say they’ve done so, not really because they have a need to hear what Manson has to say. Manson and some of the others have been interviewed repeatedly by journalists and sensation seekers of one sort of another, and are sick of such treatment. I recall an interview that television and radio host Tom Snyder did with Manson a few years ago in which Snyder asked Manson what it felt like to slice off an ear. That was just the sort of question that could have been calculated to turn off Manson, to make him ease into glibness and evasion and hostility toward the interviewer. I could tell from watching the interview that at that point Manson’s respect for Snyder declined to nil. “This guy’s a dummy,” I could almost hear Manson saying in his mind. “He’s playing games, so I’ll play games, too.” That was the end, as far as extracting any serious information was concerned. Snyder might profitably have asked Manson what reason he had for slicing off an ear, and might have obtained an interesting answer, one that would probably have to do with the relevance of that bizarre act to Manson’s fantasy. Snyder went in a different direction, however, and ended up with nothing of value to anyone, except perhaps in terms of titillating the audience.

  In talking to these spectacular criminal personalities, I found it was imperative to be extremely well prepared, so that they understood I wasn’t there to waste their time. I had to impress on them that I was worthy of being talked to. Being well prepared about their lives and cases was one aspect of my presentation of self that convinced them I might be deserving of trust. For instance, when the inmate was in the midst of a story, it always helped if I knew the names and other antecedents to which he referred. “Now Bobby would take me along to meet some drug dealers,” Manson began a story, and before he could continue, I butted in.

  “Bobby Beausoleil?”

  “Yeah,” he responded, and then he went on, secure in the knowledge that his questioner had done enough homework to be familiar with every known fact in his life story, that I understood all the references. I had made the interjection to demonstrate just that, to tell him that I knew what he was talking about and considered it important. In reaction, he raised the level of his candor. Talking with Tom Snyder, Manson had to go slowly and explain everything, and as a consequence said nothing of importance. To an interviewer who approached him with respect, as I did, Manson could clip along, rattle out matters he’d thought about, portions of his story that no law-enforcement person had ever heard before, confident that I knew enough of the background to be able to follow what he was saying.

  Another aid to my interviews was my consistent attempt to find and discuss something positive in the lives of these killers. Tex Watson had been born again; we could start with that. Heirens had been an exemplary prisoner. It was more difficult to find something positive with a man such as Manson, of course, but at least I could zero in on something that he might consider positive in his world, even if the rest of humanity might not consider it in the same way: In Manson’s case, it was the way in which people related to him.

  Manson wanted to inform me—once we got past what I later came to label as the courtship phase of a conversation—that he really didn’t know why he was in prison this time, because he had not been present when the murders were committed; more deeply, he wanted to impress on me that he was not truly guilty. If you hold up a photographic negative, Manson maintained, you see a version of the world that is reversed; Manson said he was that sort of negative of society, a reflection of society that showed all of its bad aspects.

  Key to deciphering the enigma of Charlie Manson is the fact that, indeed, he had had a rotten early life. By the time he was thirty-two, he had been in prison or juvenile institutions twenty years, from his teenage years up until the day when he emerged from the Terminal Island facility in California with the determination to remain out of prison for the rest of his life. (Many men who were criminals in their teens and twenties mature out of their antisocial behavior in the early thirties and do manage to sustain noncriminal lives after getting out.) A small man, physically unprepossessing at five-six and 130 pounds, Manson was perceptive emotionally. In prison, he had learned to play the guitar, and even wrote some music. He planned to be a musician and earn his living that way. When he got out of prison, it was the middle 1960s, and he was able to slip right into the counterculture life that was then becoming prevalent among young people on the West Coast. He locked into the youth movement and rode it.

  “I could see the kind of people the kids were shining up to,” Manson told me, “so I became that.” He understood perhaps better than the youngsters what and who they respected: people with long hair, people who wore sandals on their feet, people somewhat out of the ordinary who spoke in metaphysical terms, played guitars, and wrote songs that few could comprehend. Manson found that he could walk up and down the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco—the heart of the acid (LSD) culture—and that because he was older than the hippies by a dozen years, because he appeared in certain garb and behaved in a certain way, the kids would flock to him. “I looked at what they wanted to see, and I became that.”

  Soon he was getting “free meals, free lodging, free sex, free dope” and had set himself up as a sort of guru. “I became a negative,” he told me, “a reflection of these kids.” Manson explained this image by saying that when you hold up a mirror, you don’t actually see the mirror but, rather, what is reflected in its shiny surface. “They were looking for themselves,” Manson avowed. “Hey, I’m not a real big guy. I can’t go kicking ass, I have to get things by using my brain.” The staring, hypnotic eyes served him well; he found he could control some youngsters better than others, and that these would do whatever he asked. In the desert near Death Valley, he ran what amounted to a summer camp for aberrant, wayward kids. Older than they were, more experienced in the methods of manipulation learned in twenty years of being a convict, he broke down the kids’ defenses and began to require more and more of them, until they went beyond marginal incursions into illegality and committed serious crimes.

  Manson had concluded that because he had done nothing more than mirror what his disciples wished to become, he was not really responsible for their murderous actions; that was the reason he “didn’t know why” he was in prison. This explanation was baldly ingenuous, of course, because Manson refused to take into account his own lifelong psychopathic personality and his bent toward achieving power; but still, in our discussion, he expounded in an unmistakable way on the techniques by which he had dominated the young people around him. An understanding of his manipulative genius is key to decoding the murders that he and his disciples committed. He didn’t point-blank order the murders—as prosecutor Bugliosi charged—but, rather, he created the climate in which his disciples knew what they had to do to please him, and they wished to do so. At that moment in the La Bianca home when the murders themselves were about to be committed, Manson told his kids that he was leaving the house to go outside, because as a former convict he ought not to be present when the actual crime went down, because it would violate the terms of his parole. His disciples believed this explanation.

  Once, during our interview, Manson became a bit wild, jumping on the table to demonstrate the ways in which guards controlled prisoners in the institutions. I would have let him rant and rave some more, but John Conway told him flatly, “Charlie, get off the table, sit down, and behave yourself.” In this instance, Conway’s unwillingness to indulge Manson’s theatrics was the appropriate response, for after the table-hopping, Manson did sit down, and was more forthcoming about his techniques of mental control.

  Near the end of the interview, Manson begged me to give him something that he could take back to his cell; he wanted a souvenir so that he could say he’d “ripped off” an FBI agent. Otherwise, he suggested, no one would believe he’d spent all this time talking to us; he’d have a lot of explaining to do, and that might lower his status among the inmates. He grabbed my FBI
badge and held it up to his shirt, then acted as if he was issuing orders to guards and other inmates. I told him he couldn’t have that. Manson admired a pair of old aviator sunglasses I’d brought with me, and I decided they were certainly a gift I was prepared to donate. He took them and put them in his breast pocket, but cautioned that the guards would probably accuse him of stealing them; sure enough, that’s precisely what happened. Manson was brought back in to me by the guards, straining and protesting all the way about the perversity of anyone believing him capable of pilfering. With a straight face, I attested that I’d given the sunglasses to him. The guards looked at me as if I was a jerk. Then, with his best strut, and with the glasses incongruously perched on his face—hiding those fearsome eyes—Charlie Manson strode down the hall. I have no doubts that once back in the population, he bragged about having put one over on the FBI. It was a shining example of Manson’s manipulative tricks. For me, the glasses and the momentary loss of dignity were a small price to pay for unique insight into the mind of a murderer.

  * * *

  On my initial trip through the prisons, I proceeded from Manson’s prison down the California coast to the San Luis Obispo prison to interview Charles “Tex” Watson. Watson claimed to have found Jesus in prison; he had been saved and born again, and had actually become a rather renowned preacher; people would come from surrounding communities, as well as from the prison population, to hear him on Sundays. Frankly, he seemed to have the penal authorities snookered; he walked around as if he owned the place. The administrators there thought of him as doing good work, that he was a shining example of rehabilitation. To my mind, there was no question that he was doing good work and helping people; whether his proselytizing was completely genuine, or a line that he pursued in the belief that it would eventually assure his parole, I could not be certain.

  Watson was a rather normal-appearing man—certainly so to me, just then, after having visited Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, and Ed Kemper. He readily admitted that at the time of the Tate–La Bianca murders, he had been out of his mind on drugs and under the total influence of Manson; had justice been served then, he said, he would have been executed right after the trial. But he was spared, Satan had left him, and he had been taken into the hand of the Lord and was truly a different man than the one who had committed the crimes.

  In the book Will You Die for Me?—written with the prison chaplain, Ray Hoekstra—Watson placed all the blame on Manson, saying that Manson ordered his disciples to kill. Just before the Tate murders, Manson had taken care of a bad situation for Watson—by stabbing a drug dealer they had ripped off—and told Watson to reciprocate and kill some “pigs” for him. In his conversations with me, Watson admitted that Manson had not given him direct and explicit orders to commit murder, but that there had been no question that Manson understood what Watson and the others were going to do, did not stop it, and that Manson later reveled in the knowledge that it had been done for him.

  Watson had grown up in a small Texas town, and had been the all-American boy—“honor student, track star (my record in high hurdles still stands), Yell Leader, the boy next door with the crew cut and the prizewinning calf,” he described himself in his book. Graduating from college in the late 1960s, he drifted to California, he told me, yearning to experience the beach, the sun, the girls, the mind-bending drugs, the easy life. He fell in with Manson by chance, began to hang around him, and then gave up everything else in his life to be near Manson. Now, after having been in prison for some time, Watson understood Manson: Charlie had acted like an old convict, he told me, wrapping a new one around his finger. Manson hadn’t turned him into a homosexual as he had done to others, Watson told me, but Manson had made him into a slave.

  “When I started taking acid,” Watson wrote, “Charlie was not an important figure in my life.” However, one friend was an evangelist for the “gospel according to Charlie,” and the “Family girls” echoed the philosophy constantly.

  They said that each one of us has an ego, a desire to assert ourselves and our existence as something separate and cut off from the rest of life around us. We hang on to that ego, thinking that independent self is the only thing that lets us survive, thinking without it we’d perish. But … True freedom means giving up ourselves, letting that old ego die so we can be free of the self that keeps us from one another, keeps us from life itself. “Cease to exist,” Charlie sang in one of the songs he’d written. “Cease to exist, come say you love me.” The girls repeated it, over and over—cease to exist, kill your ego, die—so that once you cease to be, you can be free to totally love, totally come together.

  Manson broke down the personalities of those around him by means of mind-altering drugs, by verbal assaults on his disciples’ personalities, by embroiling them in orgies. Every night after dinner, Manson would climb up on a mound in back of their ranch and spout his philosophy to an adoring audience stoned on drugs. The past, he preached, must be put behind them and ridiculed, especially their birth families and middle-class roots. All that mattered was the new family, the Family. Manson was in his early thirties, and the Family was urged to think of him as the new Christ, who had also been in his mid-thirties when crucified. Like Christ, Manson was going to change the world. Manson, too, spoke in apocalyptic phrases and derided the teachings of the fathers and preached love. To symbolize the new personality of each acolyte after he was exposed to Manson’s truth, Manson gave them new names. Watson became Tex, not only because of his origins and the twang in his speaking voice but also because there could be only one Charlie in the Manson Family. Actually, the rivalry between Manson and Watson, which I learned about from both men, was a definite factor in the dynamics of the murders.

  The key was the sermons from the mound, though. Manson would say that the old world was about to come to an end, that he would lead his flock into a secret entrance in the desert where they would wait out the apocalypse and then emerge to repopulate the earth. To provoke actions that would hurry up the coming destruction of the present world, Manson said, there ought to be some bloody murders. Charlie repeated a litany from his hill: He had been cheated out of childhood, he had never had a birthday party or a life, he had been “screwed” since the day he was born. To balance what had been done to him, Manson preached, some “pigs” had to be killed. He defined pigs as middle-class, advantaged people, who he thought should be rousted out of their comfortable lives by being confronted with torture and bloody murder.

  “As bizarre as Charlie’s teachings might sound to an outsider,” Watson wrote, “it was compelling to us. The more acid we took and the more we listened, the more obvious and inevitable it all seemed.” Manson would talk to them while they were in the throes of LSD, and paint compelling word pictures of killing and torture. Then, “We’d all follow Charlie’s lead and imagine the butchery and the terror, and even though it was all just a game, the images stayed locked in our brains after the game was over.”

  One night, after some of this role playing, Watson gathered up a few of the girls and told them and Manson they were sallying forth to do the devil’s work. He, Watson, would be the ringleader and take the responsibility for the actual killings; the women—trained by Manson in the need to devote their lives to serving men—would be his accomplices. Watson claims that he told Manson, “We’re doing this for you, Charlie,” and that Manson responded, “Yeah, Tex, do it and do it right.” Manson told me that he had merely advised Watson, “Do what you have to do.”

  I believe their two stories essentially coincide and are not contradictory: if Manson did not directly order the murders, he nonetheless made it eminently clear that he condoned them and would not stop his disciples from killing. Though the murders were Charlie’s fantasy, conveyed to his kids often in verbal descriptions that were overtly violent, they (not he) would make that fantasy into a gruesome reality, and thereby hasten the end of the “bad vibrations” world that had to end before Charlie’s peace and love would start a new one. Since on th
e basis of Manson’s instructions all of his disciples had earlier committed burglaries and stolen cars and money, and the women had slept with men at his direction and generally obeyed his every whim, when Manson did not overtly prevent Watson and the women from going out to murder, he more than blessed the action.

  That wasn’t the whole story, however. In his own interview with me, Manson had confided that the dumbest thing he’d ever done was to “let that SOB Watson have too much power in the Family.” And Watson casually acknowledged to me that he certainly had been attempting to elevate himself in the Family power structure, to get the girls to look to him for authority. By committing murder, Watson sought to become, if not the leader of the Family, then Manson’s chief lieutenant, a man who all must respect because of the enormity of his crimes and his familiarity with violence. So the Tate–La Bianca murders were not carefully planned, masterminded executions, but, rather, snowballing events in which a bunch of screwed-up, runaway kids, their personalities burned out of them, and caught in a “familial” power struggle, took part in disasters that snuffed out a half-dozen lives.

  I had wanted to speak with other members of the Manson Family in the California prisons, principally Susan Atkins, who had assisted in the murders, but could not manage that on my initial trip. At the Alderson Federal Women’s Penitentiary in West Virginia, however, I did see Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandra Good. Neither one had been present at the actual murders, but they had been around Manson for a considerable amount of time. When these two “girls” came into the interview room, it was like something out of a movie. Squeaky wore a red outfit and a matching red bandana around her head, and Sandra wore a green outfit and a green bandana as a headband. They approached in the posture of nuns, walking together, moving in unison. In their conversation, they called each other Red and Green, and proclaimed they were sisters in the church of Charles Manson.