Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (26 page)

“Fuck you, Corona,” the officer shot back.

Even the other inmates wanted nothing to do with him. He remained a loner, without a single friend or lover. Manson regarded him the way he would a cockroach squashed on the bottom of his shoe. He wasn’t even a worthy topic of discussion.

Big Ed Kemper joined the circus around the same time. He was somewhat more interesting, if just in size alone. Six feet nine, three hundred pounds, he was both a literal and figurative monster. A passive, congenial man, he appeared totally harmless. He was—unless you happened to remind him of his mother. Then it was lights out. Unfortunately, too many women had had the misfortune of resembling the late Mrs. Kemper. Ed obviously hated his mom, painting her as a mean, vindictive witch who abused and tormented him throughout his youth. On his glorious day of vengeance, the tall, gawky teenager first cut off the head of his mother’s best friend and placed it on the mantel. When his mother came home, she was shocked and horrified—but not for long. Ed promptly killed her next, taking great pleasure in the act. He then killed his grandfather to spare him the heartbreak.

Ed was sent to Atascadero State Hospital and became the perfect patient. After a few years, the doctors announced that he was cured and ready to rejoin society. Once free, he seemingly dedicated his life to giving lifts to needy female hitchhikers. Nine out of ten came away with nothing more than a helpful ride from the jolly fellow. Those are good odds in everything except murder. The remaining ten percent—the ones who reminded him of his mom—were killed in a series of gruesome ways. He strangled some, stabbed others, and smothered at least one by sitting on her face.

Struggling with his conscience, Ed finally turned himself in to the disbelieving police. “Stop me before I kill again,” he begged. To prove his case, Ed led the cops to his victims’ graves. When the digging was done, nine “Mrs. Kempers” had been unearthed. Ed wasn’t just killing his mother, he was trying to eliminate the entire gene pool!

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” he explained to me after his arrival. “I just couldn’t stop.”

Ed’s main problem at CMF was that he couldn’t stop talking about his crimes. He related his stories with a fiendish relish, giving detailed descriptions of how he killed each girl, how their eyes popped out, how they gasped and struggled, how their tongues protruded as they died. It was almost like he was describing a sporting event. One story he told was particularly creepy. He picked up two girls and decided to do them both when one had that familiar maternal look about her. He locked the second girl in the car and dragged the first out in a field, where he repeatedly stabbed her. When he came back to the vehicle, he realized that he’d left his keys in the ignition! The girl was locked inside with the keys! All she had to do was hop into the front seat and drive away. Her life would have been spared and Big Ed Kemper’s reign of terror would have been over. Ed stayed cool. He calmly tapped on the window and pointed to the lock, ordering the petrified girl to kindly release it. Incredibly, she did—and died horribly shortly thereafter. “That was really stupid,” Ed cracked, recalling it with glee.

“You have to stop talking like that on the mainline,” I warned. “Don’t go telling everybody your war stories.”

“Why?” he asked, hurt that he couldn’t boast about the only thing he felt made his worthless existence significant.

“Because somebody’s going to kill you! Inmates don’t like guys like you.”

I found it interesting that Ed and Charlie had similar dysfunctional backgrounds—mothers they hated—then fed off the same niche of people—lost and alienated young women. After that, the differences were dramatic. Ed killed his women, while Charlie recruited, bewitched, brainwashed, drugged, and fornicated with his zombies, then sent them out to kill others for him. (A deciding factor might be that Charlie’s mother, though criminal, immoral, and neglectful, was not mean.) The only thing the pair—one a giant, the other a shrimp—had in common from the end-result aspect was they aborted the lives of lot of innocent people.

Richard Allen Davis, the sex offender who would later gain notoriety for snatching a young girl named Polly Klass from a slumber party at her California home, dragging her off, and fatally raping her, was also around CMF at the time. However, Davis was a nobody then, a “chomo” (child molester) everybody hated, so he wasn’t a factor.

While Manson had little use for Corona, Kemper, or Davis, the same couldn’t be said for Willie Spann, another of CMF’s resident celebrities. Spann, thirty-three, was the son of then-president Jimmy Carter’s sister Gloria, making him the President’s nephew. The affable young man with long, curly brown hair had been in and out of jail for years, mostly for drugs, robberies, and burglaries, and came to CMF after faking a stabbing at San Quentin. He wanted out of there because he said the gangs believed he snitched on someone back in 1971 and were planning to kill him. Prior to Carter’s surprise, come-from-nowhere election, nobody cared about Willie Spann. He was just another unstable, bisexual hype clogging the system. Then his uncle became President, and suddenly the lifelong loser magically transformed into a somebody—at least from our perspective. Actually, nobody seemed to care about him in Washington. He was a black sheep who was an embarrassment to the President, and Carter was already having enough trouble in that department with his loony brother Billy. Willie wasn’t very close to his mother either. A party girl in her youth, she matured into the quiet Carter sibling who stayed out of the limelight and spent her whole life down on the farm. She was no doubt overwhelmed by the antisocial behavior of her troubled son combined with the sudden fame of her brother. (Jimmy Carter’s youngest sister, Ruth, was the vibrant one who became a traveling evangelist.) The only person who appeared to care about Willie, aside from the media, was his grandmother, the extremely famous and much beloved Miss Lillian. A kind, decent woman, she sent Willie money and wrote him frequent letters of encouragement.

Because of Willie’s connections, the corrections department decided to let him finish his sentence at CMF. To keep him out of harm’s way, he was sent to my lockdown unit. I placed him in a cell right next to Manson because it was easier to deal with the celebrities that way. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t one of my better ideas, but at the time, it seemed logical.

Manson was impressed by his new neighbor’s heavy connections, but as always, downplayed it, preferring to elevate himself to Willie’s uncle’s level. Despite this foolishness, the two hit it off. They became friends, talking, dreaming, playing music, and sharing their life stories. I don’t know if Charlie really liked the guy, or had some greater scheme going—probably both—but for a while, they appeared to do each other some good. Willie even began talking about joining the Family. The fast friendship ended over petty jealousy. A floor officer gave Willie the tier tender job that Manson coveted. Manson threw a tantrum and took a swing at the burly African-American guard, earning himself a stint in isolation (with Juan Corona nearby). When he returned to his “home” cell, he was still in a snit. He demonstrated his unhappiness by smashing his latest guitar—a six-hundred-dollar beauty a fan had sent—into tiny pieces. (It was the fourth guitar Manson destroyed on my watch, including one at San Quentin.)

Willie loved music and was pissed at Manson for destroying the finely crafted instrument. “What did you do that for?” Spann demanded. “There’s a hundred guys on this floor who’d love to have a guitar but can’t afford one, and you go and destroy yours during a tantrum. What a stupid asshole!”

After that, things went from bad to worse. Willie never forgave Charlie for bashing the guitar and got on his case every time he threw a similar fit. President’s nephew or not, Charlie fumed over being constantly criticized by some “punk.” After one nasty exchange, Manson played his trump card. “It’s about time I sent some followers to Plains, Georgia, to see an old lady!”

Miss Lillian was probably the only person in the world Willie cared about. She had helped raise him, and stood behind him through all his troubles. Manson’s threat caused him to go ballistic. “I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ bastard!” he raged. “Don’t you ever threaten my grandmother!”

Manson repeated his threat, and Willie repeated his. They went at it until the guards had to quiet them down. When I arrived at the cells, I could see that Manson was just dicking him around, but Willie was red hot. I was certain he was going to kill Charlie the first chance he got. That would have been some headline. To check out Willie’s state of mind, I pulled him out for a long interview. Among the revelations was his boast that when he was a lad, he’d managed to catch a glimpse of First Lady Rosalyn Carter naked and that “she had a hell of a body!”

“When I was five, my mother went off, married this guy I never met and she didn’t tell me. I was living with my grandmother, Miss Lillian. My mother was running around a lot and neglecting me, so she [Miss Lillian] took up the slack. Nobody was rich then, but the Carters were well-to-do. I’d be in rags, not many toys, alone. Billy Carter, my cousin, had nice clothes, a pony, and lots of toys. Anyway, when Gloria, ‘Go, Go,’ came one day to pick me up at Mrs. Lillian’s, she was with this guy I never saw before. They took me off to his place. I was never accepted by this man, my stepfather. They had an outhouse that I was scared to use. I was terrified by it. I had to sleep in a pitch-dark room. I’d see monsters tracking me, trying to eat me, tear me apart. I had no one to run to.

“I had to work like a dog, a nigger, pickin’ cotton and diggin’ peanuts. My stepfather was a hardworking man, got rich, earned it hard. But they were more interested in each other than me. ‘Back Seat Willie’ I called myself. Never rode in the front seat of a car. Go to sleep on the floorboard. Keep quiet. When company came over, I was sent to my room and told to be quiet.”

At this point, I couldn’t help thinking how similar Spann’s childhood was to Manson’s. They were both ignored and neglected and neither had a strong father figure.

“Once, I got caught stealing at the local store,” Willie continued. “The whole family was extremely upset because they were in competition with some of the local ‘Joneses.’ They wanted to look better than each other, and I made the family look bad. School grades were important.…

“… In my mind, I killed my mother and my stepfather many times. I wanted them to love me, especially my mother, but it never came. She couldn’t give it because she was more interested in impressing others and keeping her marriage together. They hit it off and I was left out.

“I always felt that something was always missing inside of me because of my mother’s failure to love me. Some part of me failed to grow and mature. It stopped when I was twelve or sooner. Once, when I came home from school with poor grades,… they told me to think about it, how ashamed I should feel, how embarrassed for the family to have such a terrible child.

“There was a gun case in the hallway with a latch that made a
bing
sound when it was opened. Sitting there, sacred out of my wits, I heard that
bing.
I ran out of the house through a screen door naked, thinking I was going to be shot. They took me to my uncle Jimmy’s house, who realized that I was sick. Jimmy took me to the same psychiatrist who was the one in the movie
The Three Faces of Eve.
They said that I had a brain tumor that would grow and worsen with time. But nothing ever came of that. It was probably better than saying I was crazy.”

It should be noted that this was just Willie’s story, and cons often fabricate horrible childhoods and monstrous parents as an excuse for their own shortcomings. While Gloria Carter did go through some tough times early in her life, there is no concrete evidence that she and her husband treated Willie as he claims.

After escaping his self-professed childhood hell, Willie moved to Los Angeles and began a life of drugs and crime, a criminal existence that eventually dropped him inside a prison cell next to Charles Manson.

Willie apparently shared his sad life story with Charlie because Squeaky was moved to write Gloria Carter a scathing letter condemning her for not accepting her responsibilities as a mother. Squeaky mercilessly ripped Gloria’s alleged preoccupation with money and status, while sacrificing her child. This, however, was before Willie and Charlie had their violent falling-out.

Alas, the
PRESIDENT’S NEPHEW KILLS MANSON
headline wasn’t to be. Willie was paroled a year later and was picked up at the gate by a twenty-two-foot Cadillac limousine. No, it wasn’t from the government. It was a gift from the ever present
National Enquirer.
They were paying Spann for an exclusive interview and sent Willie and his new bride, an insurance broker he married at CMF months before, on a nice vacation. (The pen-pal marriage didn’t last more than a few months.)

The kicker is that not long afterward, I was aimlessly walking past a television one afternoon when I glanced up and spotted someone who looked like Willie gabbing on
The Phil Donahue Show.
I turned up the volume. Sure enough, it was Willie. He was playing tape recordings of his conversations with Manson, which he’d made at CMF. That was interesting because tape recorders were illegal in prisons. It turned out that Willie, ever the opportunist, had taken apart a cassette player and transformed it into a recorder. Now he was using his connection to Manson to play celebrity on television. Touché Willie.

11.

I
WAS OFTEN
frustrated, or downright appalled, by the thoughts and statements made by Charlie and Squeaky. They were two peas in a pod, and it was one rotten pod. Collectively, however, if observed solely as star-crossed lovers, they could be viewed in a softer light. Their love had survived horrors, headlines, assassination attempts, and dual incarcerations—not to mention the forceful arguments of a certain correctional administrator. Beyond their ramblings of hate and destruction, they shared a dream of survival, escape, and reunion. With that goal always in mind, Lynette continued her drumbeat plea to write to Charlie. Admiring her sheer tenacity, I finally relented, only to have the mellow Dr. Clanon, curiously, disapprove.