Criminal Minds (31 page)

In 1947 Kathleen tried to put him in a foster home. None was available, so Manson went into the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he stayed for ten months before running away. His mother didn’t want him back, so he took off again, living on the streets and supporting himself through theft. He was arrested but escaped after a single day in jail. Recaptured, Manson was sent to Father Edward Flanagan’s Boys Town, where he lasted four days before skipping out. Arrested again at the ripe old age of thirteen, he was sent to a boys’ reform school, where he claims to have suffered frequent sexual abuse at the hands of other inmates and some of the guards.

In “Minimal Loss,” Prentiss and Reid are taken hostage by an underground cult during a federal raid.

From there, Manson’s life was a collage of crimes and prisons. When he was paroled in 1967, after serving time for pimping and transporting women across state lines for sexual purposes, it was over his own objections. He knew where he belonged and where he felt at home.

Nonetheless, San Francisco during the Summer of Love appealed to Manson. Drugs and sex partners were easy to come by, especially for an older guy who had been around the block a few times and had a certain amount of charisma. Manson was not a big man, but if his incarcerated life had taught him nothing else, it had schooled him in how to be a masterful manipulator of people. Manipulation, domination, and control are the hallmarks of a psychopathic personality, and Manson had all those in spades. He grew his hair long and dressed like a hippie. He could play guitar and was not without talent as a songwriter. Young people flocked to him, seeing him as a sort of guru.

Soon enough, the people, mostly young women, who congregated around him became essentially slaves to his whims. They became known as “the Family.” As the 1960s wound down, Manson spun a web of words and dope and sex, free love and revolution and apocalypse, and he led the Family onto an old school bus and out of San Francisco. Manson wound up in Los Angeles, where he hooked up with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, and for a while the Family lived at Wilson’s estate.

A man named Charles Watson, eventually nicknamed Tex, met Manson at Wilson’s. The Family caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage before Wilson kicked Manson and his friends out. They moved to new digs at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, which had been built primarily as a set for western movies, and Watson joined them there. Manson then set his sights on Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who sang with a surf band called the Rip Chords and produced records. Manson wanted Melcher to record his music; Melcher listened to it but passed. Manson fumed.

Toward the end of 1968, Manson established a new headquarters near Death Valley, at the Myers and Barker ranches. Manson had more on his mind than making it in the music business. Some of the ideas he riffed on to his Family concerned a coming apocalypse and a race war between blacks and whites. When the Beatles released their album
The Beatles
, which would come to be known as the White Album, one of the tracks, “Helter Skelter,” spoke to Manson, seemingly confirming his most psychotic hopes and fears. He began using that song title as the name for his imagined race war. Blacks would win the war, he believed, but he and the Family would be safe underneath Death Valley. The Family would grow until its members outnumbered the victorious blacks, then they would emerge from hiding and take over.

As 1969 wore on, the Family’s activities grew darker and more destructive. Instructed to raise money for the Family, Watson ripped off a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe. When Crowe threatened retaliation, Manson shot him in the stomach, believing that he had killed the dealer. Crowe lived, however, but he didn’t report the shooting.

Still after money, three Family members dropped in on Manson acquaintance Gary Hinman. Hinman refused to turn over any cash, so they held him hostage for a couple of days. During this time Manson sliced Hinman’s ear with a sword. After Manson left, Bobby Beausoleil, a Family associate, stabbed Hinman to death, and one Family member wrote “Political piggy” on a wall in Hinman’s blood. Someone also drew a panther’s paw, the symbol of the Black Panthers; Manson, who wanted to fan the flames of his desired race war, hoped that the radical black group would be blamed for the crime. Hinman’s murder was the Family’s first definite murder—although there were others that might have involved members of the Family—but not its last.

Beausoleil was arrested while driving the car he had stolen from Hinman, and he still had the murder weapon with him. Two days later, on August 8, 1969, Manson told the Family, “It’s time for Helter Skelter to begin.”

Terry Melcher had lived for a while on Cielo Drive, a road that wound up through a canyon above Beverly Hills. He had moved out, and that house was now occupied by actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Manson had been by the house a couple of times since Melcher moved out, and he knew that the record producer no longer lived there. He instructed Watson to take three other Family members to the house and “totally destroy everyone” inside. Watson later said that Manson had not given specific orders to kill but that this was how he interpreted the directions. Watson, at the time, was seeking more power and influence in the Family, and killing for Manson was a step in that direction.

The Family members did as they were told. Polanski was working in London, but Tate, nearly nine months pregnant, and her unborn child were slaughtered, along with four guests: Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent. The murders were brutal and bloody. One victim, Frykowski, was stabbed fifty-one times, clubbed in the head thirteen times, and shot twice. Tate was stabbed sixteen times. On the way out, the murderers wrote “Pig” on the front door in blood.

The next night, Manson wanted more. This time he accompanied the four killers, and two more Family members joined them. They went into the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, husband-and-wife entrepreneurs who lived next to a house where Manson had attended a party. Manson and Watson tied up the LaBiancas, and Manson left the premises.

While he was out of the house, the others stabbed Leno twenty-six times, some of those with a carving fork, and Rosemary forty-one times. Watson carved “WAR” on Leno’s abdomen, and Patricia Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter Skelter”—misspelling what had become Manson’s raison d’etre, by this point—on the refrigerator in Leno’s blood.

The double whammy of vicious home-invasion murders terrified Los Angeles, but it took police a long time to connect the dots. After three months, the detectives with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office who were working the LaBianca case decided that the two assaults were connected, and among their suspects was Charles Manson. Their investigation led to Spahn’s Movie Ranch and the Family, and ultimately to the Death Valley ranch, where Manson was found hiding under a bathroom sink.

On his first day of testimony, Manson arrived in court with an X carved into his forehead (which he later turned into a swastika), which was a statement that he had “Xed” himself out of the establishment world. Most of the other family members, including the female defendants, copied the mark on themselves. The prosecution argued that the murders were meant to trigger Helter Skelter.

On January 25, 1971, Manson and the other three defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and other crimes—twentyseven separate counts against each one. All four were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty in 1972. Manson, who had never actually killed anyone himself, was convicted on the basis of the joint-responsibility rule, which holds all of the participants in a conspiracy guilty for the crimes committed in pursuit of the conspiracy’s goal.

On September 5, 1975, Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, where she had moved in order to be close to Manson’s new home at Folsom State Prison. Sentenced to life, she was released after serving thirty-four years in prison. Manson is currently ensconced at Corcoran State Prison, where he has applied for parole and been denied eleven times. He’ll be eligible to apply again in 2012.

 

 

IN CONTRAST
to Charles Manson, Kevin Foster rates only one mention on
Criminal Minds
, in the episode “3rd Life” (312), about a pack of teenage killers.

After a night of vandalism that earned scant coverage in the newspapers, four teenagers in Fort Myers, Florida, led by high school dropout Kevin Foster, decided to present an organized face to the world. They would be the Lords of Chaos. In their manifesto, they wrote, “During the night of April 12, the Lords of Chaos began a campaign against the world. Be prepared for destruction of Biblical proportions. The games have just begun, and terror shall ensue.”

The other core members of the group were three high school seniors: comic book nerd Pete Magnotti, computer geek Chris Black, and band member Derek Shields. Other kids moved about the group’s periphery and were involved in some of the escapades. Foster, eighteen and described as smart and strong, was their natural leader. His mother owned a pawnshop, and he seemed to have access to an almost limitless supply of guns.

The teenagers began their campaign of terror on April 20, 1996, by blowing up an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. Six nights later they carjacked and robbed the landlord of one of the group’s hangers-on.

Their big night came on April 30. They had planned to steal clothing from a department store and then wear the stolen clothes to a senior night event at Walt Disney World, where Foster hoped to steal a character costume and use it as a disguise that would enable him to shoot minorities in the park. When the smoke bomb they wanted to use as a distraction at the department store failed, they gave up that effort and instead went to their high school. After setting the auditorium on fire, they were spotted by Mark Schwebes, the school’s thirty-two-year-old band director. He confiscated some items they had stolen from the school and warned them that he would alert the police. After Schwebes left, Black said, “He’s gotta die tonight.”

Some of the teens went home, but the four original Lords of Chaos members went to Schwebes’s home and rang the doorbell. When Schwebes opened the door, Foster fired a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun into his face at close range, killing him instantly. Foster, believing Schwebes to be gay, fired a second blast at the band director’s buttocks. The killing made Foster feel as though he was on top of the world.

That feeling didn’t last long. Foster bragged about the murder to other members of the group. One of those told his girlfriend, and soon enough word reached the police. While the boys were on their way to rob a Hardee’s restaurant, the police closed in and took them into custody.

Some of the hangers-on weren’t charged, or they turned state’s evidence and walked. Shields, Magnotti, and Black pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. Black and Shields got a life sentence, and Magnotti was sentenced to thirty-two years. Foster had a three-day trial; it took the jury slightly more than two hours to reach a verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to death on June 17, 1998.

At this time, Foster remains on death row at Florida State Prison. He and his mother—who testified that he was home with her at the time of the murder—were later convicted of conspiring to murder some of the Lords of Chaos who had testified against Foster.

 

 

IN “THE POPULAR KIDS”
(110), which features a pack of teenagers who appear to be engaged in satanic ritual activity, there is a reference to the satanic panic of the 1980s. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, there was a rash of claims, mostly in the mass media, about satanic rituals, sacrifices, and abuse. Most of these claims vanished into nothingness when exposed to the light of day, but talk-show hosts like Geraldo Rivera fed the scare for as long as they could, because satanism meant big ratings.