Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (85 page)

W
hile a Mansonesque culture and mystique grow outside his prison walls, Charles Manson, inmate I.D. # B-33920, and now fifty-nine, is incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California, a town of approximately nine thousand people located in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California, sixty miles south of Fresno. Corcoran is built on what was once Tulare Lake, home of the Tachi Indians.

Transferred from San Quentin’s Death Row to Folsom State Prison near Sacramento on October 6, 1972, Manson was sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville on March 20, 1974; back to Folsom on October 22, 1974; back to San Quentin on June 7, 1975; and back to Vacaville on May 11, 1976, where he remained until July 17, 1985, his longest stay at one prison. He returned to San Quentin on July 18, 1985, and was sent to his present location, Corcoran, on March 15, 1989.

Tip Kindel, public information officer for the California Department of Corrections, says the reason for all the transfers of Manson is that Manson has been “both a disciplinary and a security problem for the Department.” It would appear that the fame and outlaw reputation Manson acquired far and wide for the Tate-LaBianca murders has had a measurable effect upon how he perceives himself, causing him to act much more belligerently behind bars. Though he was never a model prisoner, I could find no reference in his prison records during his many years of incarceration before the murders of any assaultive behavior by him against prison personnel. But Kindel reports that since Manson’s conviction for the murders, he has physically assaulted prison staff (striking them with his hands, throwing hot coffee or expectorating on them, etc.) six times, the last time in February of 1992, and threatened them on numerous other occasions. Altogether, Manson has been found guilty of fifty-nine “C.D.C. 115s,” California Department of Corrections disciplinary write-ups. For the past year, however, according to an official at Corcoran, Manson “has not been disruptive” and “hasn’t gotten into any trouble.” Prison counselor Ernest Caldren observes that Manson “has a pattern of cycling in his behavior. There are brief periods of cooperation, and then he turns and threatens staff, particularly the inexperienced, with violent behavior.”

In 1972 and 1973, while at Folsom, Manson himself was assaulted on two separate occasions by fellow inmates. And a California state prison official says that throughout the years reports have reached prison personnel that one prison gang or another “had a contract on Charlie.” However, the only known attempt on his life was while Manson was at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. The primary reason for sending Manson there was not because of the psychiatric facilities, as many imagined, but because it is considered to be the best place in the California correctional system to take care of a special prisoner like Manson. Vacaville, for the most part, houses the weaker segment of the prison population: those who, because of their physical or mental disability, are more apt to be victims than predators behind bars. On September 25, 1984, it was Manson’s misfortune to be working in the hobby shop at Vacaville with one Jan Holmstrom, a member of the Hare Krishna religious group serving a life sentence for the 1974 shotgun murder of his father, a Pasadena gynecologist. (In an ironic scene reminiscent of the Manson murders, Holmstrom wrote “baby killer” in blood on a wall of the family home.) Holmstrom doused Manson with paint thinner and then set him on fire, causing second-and third-degree burns to nearly 20 percent of his body, mostly his face, scalp, and hands. Holmstrom, described by prison officials as a “psychiatric case in remission,” said he set Manson ablaze because Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chants and had threatened him for his religious beliefs. He also claimed, “God told me to kill Manson.”

True “solitary confinement” does not exist in the California prison system today. Inmates still use the popular term, however, to refer to the situation where no other inmate shares their cell with them and they are segregated from the general prison population, mingling only with selected prisoners. Manson has spent the majority of his twenty-three years of incarceration for the Tate, LaBianca, Shea, and Hinman murders in this type of housing.

At Vacaville in August of 1980 Manson was given his first prison job—gardener and maintenance man for the Protestant chapel. “It’s taken me ten years to get a breath of fresh air,” he said. “I’m not about to screw up.” Maintaining a clean disciplinary record for close to two years, in June of 1982 he was placed, per his request, on the “main line,” the general prison population. Manson’s resolve not to screw up lasted (or the lack of it remained undiscovered) until October 29, 1982, when a hacksaw blade, along with marijuana, was found in his cell.
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A subsequent search of the chapel uncovered four bags of marijuana, one hundred feet of nylon rope, and a mail-order catalog for hot-air balloons. If Manson couldn’t hack his way out of prison, he apparently was thinking of “flying the coop.” In what must be considered a vapid display, prison officials actually asked the state attorney general’s office to file possession of marijuana charges against the man serving nine concurrent life sentences for nine murders, but saner counsel prevailed and no charges were filed.

While at Vacaville, Manson refused to take part in group psychiatric therapy and largely just played word games with psychiatrists during the individual sessions he consented to. One psychiatric evaluation of Manson made by prison doctors stated: “He has above-average intelligence, and the [Rorschach test] drawings seem to point to schizophrenia. This doesn’t mean his entire performance was schizophrenic…Manson is a passive-aggressive personality with paranoid tendencies.”

Manson’s response? “Sure I’m paranoid. I’ve had reason to be ever since I can remember. And now I have to be, just to stay alive. As for schizophrenia, take anybody off the streets and put them in the middle of a prison and you’ll see all kinds of split personalities. I’ve got a thousand faces, so that makes me five hundred schizophrenics. And in my life I’ve played every one of those faces, sometimes because people push me into a role, and sometimes because it’s better being someone else than me.” After spending a short time in the psychiatric ward at Vacaville, Manson was transferred out on the recommendation of a psychiatric report which said he was nothing but “a psychiatric curiosity or oddity.”

Knowing he may well spend the rest of his life in prison, Manson has either boycotted his parole hearings since his first one in 1978 or used them merely as a forum to sermonize or simply have some fun. In 1978 he regaled the parole board with his comments for three hours. “I’m totally unsuitable for that world out there. I don’t fit in at all,” a bearded and shaggy-haired Manson allowed in saying he should not be released from prison. But then Manson, never a model of consistency, added: “I’m mad. I’m indignant. I’m mad to every bone in my body that I have to come back to the penitentiary when I didn’t break no law.” Waving his arms in exclamation and half singing his presentation, Manson said, “I’m not your executioner. I’m not your devil and I’m not your God. I’m Charles Manson.” Reminding the board he had spent most of his life behind bars, he said, “I was born and raised all my life in prison.” He told the board he had been “asked to come to Scotland, Germany, Australia,” but that he wasn’t interested. When asked where he would go if released, he responded, “I’d go to the desert, talk to the animals and live off the land.” The parole board, in denying parole, said that Manson’s crime “eclipses the imagination.” The following year Manson sent word from his cell that he had nothing to tell the board, and gave his unit sergeant several $100 bills from a Monopoly set and a Chance card that said “Advance to Go. Collect $200” to deliver to the board members.

Delighting in talking to reporters covering his parole hearings, he told one, “You’re in prison more than I am. You’ve got more rules to live by than I do. I can sit down and relax. Can you?” Grabbing another reporter’s arm and pressing his mouth close to her ear, he whispered, “Do you know a way out of here? If you get me out, we can go to the desert and I’ll show you things that’ll blow your mind.”

At his parole hearing in 1981, Manson, in a T-shirt with a small skull and crossed bones, repeatedly stood, sat down, paced, and interrupted the hearing, frequently shouting at the board members. He told the board: “I’ve been in solitary for ten years. I ain’t got no mind. It’s gone, man. I don’t understand half the things you’re saying.” Then, “I never really grew up. I went to prison at nine. I don’t read or write too good and I’ve stayed like a little kid. I stopped thinking in 1954.”

In 1986, Manson did not appear at his parole hearing, sending the board, instead, a lengthy written statement. “All of the judgments and the blame that is pushed off on me will be reflected back in the fires of the Holy War that you call crime,” he wrote. “I did invoke a balance for life on Earth. From behind the time locks of courtrooms and from the worlds of darkness, I did let loose devils and demons with the power of scorpions to torment. I did unseal seven seals and seven jars in accord with the judgments placed upon me…You’ve drugged me for years, dragging me up and down prison hallways, laying my head on every chopping block you’ve got, chained me, burnt me, but you cannot defeat me…In the all that was said about me, it was not me saying it, and if you see a false prophet, it is only a reflection of your own judgments.”

That same year he wrote President Ronald Reagan at the White House with this advice: “Keep projecting [to kids] what not to do and you make the thought in their brains of what can and will be done.” Before signing off with “Easy, Charles Manson,” he told Reagan: “I’m the last guy in line but I’ve got all the thoughts for the balance of order and peace with a one-world government if we all are to survive.”

At his last parole hearing on April 21, 1992, Manson, the defiant swastika still very visible on his forehead, responded to the accusation he had ordered the murders by telling the three-man parole board (now called the Board of Prison Terms): “Everyone says that I was the leader of those people, but I was actually the follower of the children…I didn’t break God’s law and I didn’t break man’s law.”

As with each of his prior appearances before the board, he did virtually all the talking. The most routine questions launched him into unstoppable, stream of consciousness lectures that contained references to God, the economy, Rambo, the Queen of England, World Wars I and II, the Pope, J. Edgar Hoover, winos, Vietnam, chess, Christian ethics, General MacArthur, President Truman, Ninja warriors, the San Diego Zoo, J. R. Ewing, gangster Frank Costello, and a myriad of other people and subjects, including the relationship between does and bucks, and dogs and chickens. And, as always, that which he always returns to—the need to stop the destruction of the environment. He told the board they live in a matriarchal world, he in a patriarchal one. “You back up to your women. I don’t back up to my women.” Although the details did not emerge, Manson acknowledged at the hearing that he has been getting $500 for his autograph from people on the outside.
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The board, in finding Manson unsuitable for parole, set 1997 for his next hearing, the maximum time (five years) between parole hearings allowed under the California Penal Code.

Until her death from cancer in July of 1992, Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, attended most of the parole hearings for Manson and his killers, and was successful in mobilizing national support in the form of 352,000 letters to the parole board to keep Manson and the others behind bars for life. “I live with her [Sharon’s] screams and her begging for the life of her baby,” she often said. In the late ’70s, Mrs. Tate co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a group providing mental, emotional, and other support to its members. Just before her death, Mrs. Tate, who was the United States’ representative at an International Victims’ Rights Conference in Stockholm in June of 1990, formed the Sacramento-based Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau. The bureau promotes, among other things, the enactment of legislation for the rights of crime victims.

Since her mother’s passing, Patti Tate, who was eleven years old when her twenty-six-year-old sister was slain, and who bears a striking resemblance to Sharon, has been faithfully and effectively carrying on all of her mother’s important work. Speaking of her sister, a misty-eyed Patti says: “She was so sweet and such a gentle soul. I idolized her and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for her.”

C
orcoran is a medium-maximum security institution. Manson is housed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in a 6½' × 12½' cell he shares with another inmate. Called a “prison within a prison,” SHU is the maximum security section at Corcoran. Manson is issued three meals a day by correctional officers. The food is served on trays through a food port located in each cell door. Breakfast is at 6:30 A.M., lunch at noon, and dinner at 5
P.M
. No less than ten hours a week he exercises in a nearby walled yard with ten co-inmates of his. Manson has a radio and television set in his cell, but does not have his beloved guitar, the latter not permitted in SHU. Like all inmates in this unit, he does not have a work assignment. Per the California Department of Corrections, the current annual cost to the taxpayers for housing Manson is $20,525.

Manson carries on running correspondence with as many of the people who write to him as he can. He also apparently writes to some who have no desire to be his pen pal, sending four letters to me in the preceding years. In 1986, the book
Manson in His Own Words
(“as told to Nuel Emmons”) was published in hardcover. The thoughts may be Manson’s, but the diction clearly is not. Dedicated “to destroying a myth,” Manson, instead, tries to perpetuate the myth he and his most ardent followers invented, that the Tate-LaBianca murders were “the girls’” idea. Manson admits, in a roundabout fashion, that he thereafter ordered the two LaBianca killings, but continues to deny ordering the five Tate murders on the first night.