Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (28 page)

Charlie’s convoluted letter, sent to
Vacaville Reporter
city editor Greg deGiere, covered a host of subjects, including the Tate-LaBianca killings. “The murder list that was sent out was people who are responsible for the redwood trees being murdered,” Manson scribbled. “I didn’t kill anyone, but I broke no law. They are King James laws and old and somewhat useless for the space age. Lynn Fromme did more in my thoughts, and my attitude did and do effect her, as my attitude effects others, also others who know me and will be affected by my attitude. To put blame on Red [Squeaky], just reflects it back and reflects in thought balances that are not needed. Don’t pass the blame around. To run the blame in circles, that don’t put nothing in order, it just creates more confusion. What’s the big deal about me being violent? Since time began my Family has always been just as violent as it takes to survive. Whenever the need comes to kill, there is always someone created to do the job that no one else wants to do. Fear and violence are just different levels of thoughts.

“Yes, I’m from a violent family, but what’s new about that? Would you call a lawnmower violent when it is tempered and made to cut grass? The grass always grows up. Things on this earth that work for survival on this earth can live on this earth. Things like animals playing people who don’t work for a useful purpose will not survive on this earth. Red like Blue [Sandra Good] like Green like the rest of the people that were helping me to do a job that no one else seems to be doing and if after seven years you still haven’t seen the nine dead bodies and the writing in blood on the walls and the thoughts that started coming into the courtroom and the fears raining all over the world, then you will become what you have been killing your earth for, like the wildlife you’ve been killing for dog food.

“You all made me into a mass murderer and I have killed no one. Nixon dumped it all on me and covered it with a Watergate leaving me with what he had lost long ago, dispensation from the soul. As I was being made up as a mass murderer I seen how the people needed and wanted this because with the nuclear bombs we couldn’t have an old kind of war because it would destroy the earth. To save the earth, the need for mass killing was put into nations. I never even thought of killing but that’s what I’ve been programmed to balance. I didn’t want the job, but all the cards came to me. I don’t like sending a thing [the hit letter], like this out, but I don’t see no other way. I realize this will probably fall back on me, but if someone don’t get strong with the money mind, it’s gonna eat the earth.”

Charlie sent a follower a second letter that was passed on to deGiere that partially retracted the hits. “Murder is a penitentiary expression for a stupid act, a slow reaction to something, a mental retarded expression,” Manson claimed, furiously backpedaling. “It doesn’t mean a constant judgment of character.”

That spin was news to me—and everybody else at the prison. “Murder” means murder in any environment.

“On clear cutting trees in parks.… The vote [U.S. Senate] went all the way to 90–0,” Manson continued in letter number two. “That means some other country got a money knife running though the senate. My knife ain’t money it’s blood red and real to their wives. There is no place on earth to hide from the IPCR [International People’s Court of Retribution]. Trees give air and the air is in trouble as it is, and it’s sick in the waters from the fish because of the balance being off. If they [the senate] keep bringing up money laws that overlook their children, their wildlife, the trees, the water, the rest of the stuff I don’t have time to write about, and if we don’t stop it one way or the other the earth balance will get so bad that murder will be the only good thing left to do.”

Charlie’s puzzling, half-assed retraction was too late for Misty Hay. Encouraged by the original story, she threw away all subtlety in September 1976 and sent a signed death threat to the president of the Sierra Club. “Charles Manson has people watching you now … so do your part to stop them from cutting down trees, or else you’ll be chopped up yourselves. For every tree you let be cut down, you shall have your limbs cut off. Take heed of this mean letter or die!” A similar letter was sent to A. A. Emerson, owner of the Arcata lumber mill. “Stop cutting the redwoods NOW! Work for change (from death to life) or die.” This one was signed “M.”

Misty was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to five years to life in a federal prison on the charge of sending threatening letters through the U.S. Postal Service. On the day of her sentencing, she wrote Charlie, praising the influence of Squeaky and Sandra while bemoaning the fact that now that she was a fellow felon, their pen-pal relationships would have to end. “Red sent me a letter saying that if I wanted to be with or near the ‘Family’ I must be under her and Blue. Those women have captured my soul and heart, and I want to be like them. I really miss your letters and the honest truth you wrote.”

The scary part here is that Misty Hay had never visited or spoken to Charles Manson. She sacrificed her life for an illusion.

Scarier still was that Misty wasn’t alone. A fifteen-year-old wrote a letter that was so loathsome that I called the FBI and read it to them over the phone. The writer begged Charlie to send her out on a murder mission, adding that even if the target was the President, that was okay. The FBI scooped her up a few days later. Her room was a shrine to Manson, complete with pictures of the cult leader pasted on her walls. Books and newspaper and magazine stories about him were scattered everywhere. Absorbing the Manson philosophy, her letter contained the parroted phrase “sometimes a little evil is necessary to accomplish a great thing.”

The incident foreshadowed the strange “Lady in White” who appeared unannounced one day at Vacaville. The odd middle-aged woman with glassy blue-gray eyes wandered through the administration building dressed in a white flowing gown, white stockings, and white shoes. She sported a pearl-colored ribbon in her delicately curled, but somewhat unkempt, long brown hair. Those who saw her said she reminded them of Bette Davis in the movie
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Despite her weird garb, Vacaville’s Baby Jane made it all the way to the warden’s office before her odd behavior and hesitant motions drew enough attention to have her questioned. Disturbed by her freaky answers, the guards searched her shiny white purse. They found she was hiding a twenty-four-inch railroad spike sharpened to a razor’s edge in the folds of her dress.

“I’ve been sent by Charles Manson to perform an exorcism,” she announced, raising a host of eyebrows. “Jesus was crucified with this spike. I’m going to use it to slay the demon who has possessed Manson’s soul.”

The startled guards called the police. Baby Jane was whisked away and booked as a “50/50,” i.e., a crazy. She was charged with bringing a deadly weapon into a prison, a felony. The judge took one look at her, dropped the charge, and ordered some much needed psychiatric treatment.

Misty Hay, the teen, and Baby Jane were clumsy and obvious, making them easy to squash before they did any real harm. But sometimes blood was shed.

On January 26, 1977, a Hollywood movie producer named Laurence Merrick was shot to death from behind as he walked to an L.A. film school at 870 North Vine Street. His young assailant stalked him, fired in broad daylight, then ran off, never to be seen again. Merrick’s name rang a bell with me, so I checked it out. What I discovered was frightening. Merrick, fifty, had teamed with a man named Robert Hendrickson to produce a damning documentary titled
Manson.
The producers befriended the post–Helter Skelter Manson Family and were granted widespread permission to film them at work and play, including a Woodstock-like nude group bathing scene. When the film aired, Squeaky and gang were shocked to discover that Hendrickson and Merrick threw out the flowers, serenity, and environmental activism and homed in on the drugs, sex, murders, and degradation. One of the few efforts to focus on the commune’s children, the documentary painted a horrible picture of the youngsters fathered by Manson and others. According to the narrator, the hollow-eyed ragamuffins were required to smoke pot, drop acid, and participate in the widely publicized orgies. Despite its title, the film contained minimal footage of Manson himself, thus failing to capture his charisma and seductive powers. It did offer chilling interviews with many of his followers, including baby-faced Paul Watkins’s comments that Manson once told him that he wanted to go on a murder spree to “cut the dicks off of little boys and put them in their mother’s mouths.” Criticized in some circles for its emotionally exhausting graphic scenes and shocking language, it was nevertheless justifiably nominated for an Academy Award.

San Francisco Examiner
reviewer Jeanne Miller wrote in 1976 that “the most frightening aspect of the film were interviews with Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good, bright-eyed, apple-cheeked … who discussed their gruesome activities with serene smiles and unremorseful comments like What’s the big deal? Five or six people get killed and you all freak out and put it on us.’” (Putting Good’s face and voice to that often repeated quote.) Fromme went on to fondly caress barrels of rifles and knives as she and Sandra described how Charlie convinced them that murder was a creative act. “If somebody needs to be killed, you do it. Death is love.”

The film was fraught with problems from the onset. Finished in 1972, a series a legal hurdles, including judges banning its showing prior to the trials of various Family members, stalled its release until November 5, 1975. (The delays may have lengthened Merrick’s life.) The documentary aired on television in early 1976 while Manson was still at San Quentin. It was broadcast shortly after I’d instituted a new policy that allowed inmates to watch television. Manson was thus able to see the program. “Lies! Lies! Lies!” he raged, cursing the show and threatening its producers.

After Merrick’s murder, the investigating homicide detectives interviewed some of the film school’s students. They reported that on the morning of the murder, a scraggly young man had been seen loitering across the street near a small store. He was about five feet ten, stocky, and wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, a yellow cap, and sunglasses. The youth pestered the budding filmmakers about Merrick, the school (which Sharon Tate once attended), and the Manson documentary. After the shooting, the strange young man vanished into the cracks.

In a conversation with me, Manson appeared to take credit for the hit. Fuming over some minor incident shortly afterward, he threatened, ‘You know, Ed, the same thing that happened to Merrick could happen to you!”

Merrick had been embraced by Manson and his Family, and then turned “snitch” when he skewered them in his finished product. Of all the world’s sins, snitching was the one the prison-reared Manson could never tolerate.

As I followed the Merrick investigation, I wondered which one of the letters that had crossed my desk may have come from the mystery man who killed the producer.

In May 1977, Charlie used his powers of persuasion to turn his own assassin into a follower! A psychiatric patient at CMF told prison authorities that he had been ordered to clip Manson by the Aryan Brothers. To get close to his target, he befriended Charlie and waited for the right opportunity. However, a funny thing happened on the way to Manson’s funeral—the inmate began to fall under the cult leader’s spell! A few sessions at the feet of the master were all it took to convince this hardened killer to abandon his plot and join the revolution. The inmate’s feelings were so strong that he chose to double-cross the ABs, an act of suicide considering the gang’s vast influence inside the California prison system. Three weeks later, the paranoid inmate slit the throat of another prisoner in the psychiatric unit. The attacker testified that the victim, who survived, was an assassin coming to erase him for refusing to take out Manson. Charlie’s newest disciple—his life in tatters in record time—was placed in psychiatric lockup for his, and everyone else’s, safety.

After the assassin problem was defused, a young ragamuffin named Linda started camping at the front gate with a small boy in tow, begging to see Manson. When she wasn’t hassling the guards, she was on the phone pleading with me. The pair was destitute and apparently had nowhere to go. I referred her to the local social service agency, and she was provided with lodging near the prison. Linda never really explained what she thought Manson could do for her, but continued to call and write for months before she simply vanished.

Next, a young man stumbled to the gate stoned on acid, demanding to see Manson. He walked around in circles, screaming that his head was on fire and electricity was shooting between his ears. Manson, he said, was the only person who had the ability to ease his torment. The police came and carted him away.

In September 1982, yet another person connected to Manson was involved in a murder. The victim was a diminutive teenage drifter named Joe Hoover. The motive, as usual, was snitching. Hoover’s executioner was Perry “Red” Wartham, a skinny, bespectacled Nazi sympathizer. A post—Helter Skelter follower, Wartham visited Manson at CMF numerous times beginning in the early 1970s and expressed his dream of starting a chapter of the National Socialist Party in Oroville. Arrested for murder once, Wartham was acquitted. Neither that nor a subsequent stay in a mental institution was enough to allow us to legally prevent the visits from continuing—even when we knew the pair were up to no good.

Wartham and Manson began their relationship by trading letters filled with plans for setting up a ranch to train an army of young neo-Manson Nazis. Manson was interested enough to send his queen, Squeaky, to check him out. Wartham apparently passed the Squeaky test, as the correspondence progressed to face-to-face visits. The more he associated with Manson, the more Wartham came to be like him. He told anyone who’d listen that he wanted to build his organization from the sturdy young white stock Manson used, the uncared for, unwanted runaways who were willing to kill and die fighting the system. Unlike others who were all bluster, Wartham actually set out after his prized recruits, frequently wandering through area towns passing out vile Nazi literature and hustling naive teens.