Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (50 page)

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Okay. One last thing I have. Somewhere I read that you were getting $500 for an autographed picture on the outside.

INMATE MANSON: Uh-huh.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Is that correct?

INMATE MANSON: Yes.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: How is that done?

INMATE MANSON: Well, you see I live in the underworld. You live in the over world. I do a lot of things under world that you guys don’t see. I made about 75 albums in Vacaville and I bootlegged about three times more music than the Beatles put out.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Music?

INMATE MANSON: Yes. I had the surfboard of the Beach Boys but I didn’t sell it because every time I would go to the music, they’d want to change the music. So rather than change the music, I went into the subculture with it. I got in an old nuclear submarine that I had from the Navy when I was Section 8 in Leavenworth, Kansas, with brother Dynamite and the Mafia coming off of Frankie Costello and the Horseshoe Pits in Pennsylvania in 1952. And it was like, I’m an awful big fellow. I’m really big. I’ve got a great big body, because my body’s underground.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Tell me about the albums.

INMATE MANSON: This is music about the ecology, the air [inaudible].

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: The pictures—the autographs were on the albums. Is that what you’re saying?

INMATE MANSON: No, no. That’s just a backlash of the younger generations, like—

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: You got me mixed up then.

INMATE MANSON: Remember the old movie where the piper—the pied piper, they said you play all the rats into the river and that they would pay you. And then the people never paid the piper so they always kept losing their children. Well, you’ve lost six generations of children to me, because you won’t pay me what you owe me. Because I didn’t break no law. I didn’t kill nobody. I didn’t tell nobody to get killed.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Okay.

INMATE MANSON: I didn’t get no trial, you know.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Okay. Okay, Mr. Manson.

INMATE MANSON: We don’t want to hear none of that, see—

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: That’s it. I don’t have anything—

INMATE MANSON: We don’t want to mention anything up in the truth.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: We’re back to me. I’m the Chairman.

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: I’m all done.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. And this is time for questions by any one of the panel members and the District Attorney. I have a couple questions. Do you feel any responsibility for the murders?

INMATE MANSON: Sure.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. Could you elaborate briefly?

INMATE MANSON: I influenced a lot of people, unbeknownst to my own understanding of it. I didn’t understand the fears of the people outside. I didn’t understand the insecurities of people outside. I didn’t understand people outside.

And a lot of things that I said and did affected a lot of people in a lot of different directions. It wasn’t intentional and it definitely wasn’t with malice or aforethought.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. You answered it. Do you have remorse, Mr. Manson? Do you feel any remorse for the victims whatsoever?

INMATE MANSON: Now, we’ve reached an impasse here, man. We’re in pawn four, bishop four and seven—let’s see. How do I finesse that? You say in your minds that I’m guilty of everything that you’ve got on paper. So therefore, it would run logic that I would need to have remorse for what you think is reality, and if that be true, then all the oceans’ contents, if it were my tears, there would not be enough to express the remorse that I have for the sadness of that world that you people live in.

But I don’t have—on the other side of that, I ask you back the same thing, you know. You’ve been using me ever since I was ten years old. You used to beat me with leather straps, you know. It’s like, does anyone have any remorse that I’ve spent 23 years in a solitary cell and even on Devil’s Island, you didn’t keep anyone over five years. You broke every record that they’ve ever set in the planet Earth. You only kept Christ on the cross three days.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Manson, I think you answered the question. Do you have a—still have a family, per se, that is, the type of family you had at the time of the crimes? Do you still have a family?

INMATE MANSON: Family?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Uh-huh.

INMATE MANSON: That’s another one of the District Attorney’s—see, when they set that case into the paper were to make it real, they had to get—catch a little words so they could turn all that into—make it into a reality. Hippie cult leader, is a word that they used, leader, family.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Well, I believe I read in the reports where you yourself mentioned your family [inaudible]—

INMATE MANSON: Yes, well, you—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: [Inaudible]—

INMATE MANSON:—you keep driving that on me, and then I have to refer to what’s already on me.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: My simple question is, do you still have a family as existed at that particular time?

INMATE MANSON: Well, I can’t—I can’t answer that in just a—you know, it would take more time than you want to listen to me—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Well, yes or no? You either have a family [inaudible]—

INMATE MANSON: Well, there’s no yes or no [unintelligible].

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. All right.

INMATE MANSON: Yes, no, or [unintelligible] you know, like you is stuck in yes or no, yes, all right.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. Mr. Brown, do you have any other questiens?

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I have no further questions. Thank you.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Aceto?

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: No.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. Mr. Kay, we’re going to go to questions by the District Attorney on something that has not been covered, anything that has not been covered or something that he would like to emphasize. He will pose the questions to the panel and when you answer the panel—the questions, Mr. Manson, would you answer the panel, please.

INMATE MANSON: All right.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. Go ahead, Mr. Kay. Do you have any questions?

INMATE MANSON: And do we get to do this back the other way?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: No.

INMATE MANSON: Oh, yes, yes. Now what do all you people think about that? Yes, yes. We have fair play, huh?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: This is—[inaudible]—

INMATE MANSON: [Inaudible]—

BOARD COMMISSIONER ACETO: Don’t look at the camera. Look at the panel.

INMATE MANSON: Yes, I know, yes, I know [inaudible].

MR. KAY: Thank you. I think the interesting thing for the Board to do here is to question Mr. Manson about the ninth murder he was convicted of. He doesn’t mind talking about the Tate-LaBianca murders and Hinman murder because he’s never accepted the law of conspiracy and aiding and abetting in California. And he always thought that if he didn’t physically do the murder himself, that he wouldn’t be guilty. His followers would be guilty, but he didn’t really care about that.

But the one murder that he doesn’t like to talk about because the evidence came out in court that he personally stabbed Shorty Shea to death. He stabbed him, Bruce Davis stabbed him, Tex Watson stabbed him.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Excuse me, Mr. Kay.

MR. KAY: Yes.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: This is time for questions.

MR. KAY: Yes.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Do you have any questions?

MR. KAY: Yes. That’s the question I would like you to ask Mr. Manson, what he did to Shorty Shea and how Shorty Shea died.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. You heard the question, Mr. Manson. Would you answer—face the panel and answer, please?

INMATE MANSON: Shorty Shea was not short. He was a great big guy and he’s very tough. He had everybody bullied, he had everybody buffaloed and there was a whole bunch of guys around. And he was pushing on Steve and he was pushing on someone else and I moved in and I said, if you go into combat with someone you don’t hesitate, and I’m going to show you kids how to do this one time and then don’t invoke me to no violence anymore.

And I moved on Shorty and I put him in a—in a situation where he couldn’t move. And then I said, “Now can you understand what I’m saying to you?” And he said, “Yeah.” I stepped up on the highway and hitchhiked a ride. And about three or four minutes later, somebody stabbed him and he was stabbed to death and he was killed.

Now wait a minute—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Go ahead.

INMATE MANSON: Anybody that knows anything about combat knows that when you go into a combat situation and you’re on a line with something, that line can mean your life or your death. If you’re on the line of life and death and you’re gone and you’re up on another line, that other reality’s a completely different reality. It hasn’t got anything to do with the other side of that line.

I was on that side of the line and it was a violent situation and I did deal with it and I put it into where it was—let me say this—there’s only one way I can explain it. Duke in the joint is a guy that can fight with his fists.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Kay—

INMATE MANSON: Wait a minute, let me explain this.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right.

INMATE MANSON: This will explain it. The count is somebody who don’t fight with his fists. He fights with his mind. He sits up on top of the count. When the count is clear, he runs the radio and the duke does all the physical things, like the first cop does his level, then the sergeant—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Manson, just a second.

INMATE MANSON: I can’t explain it to you, man.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Now, wait a minute.

INMATE MANSON: Don’t have a yes or no.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: The question was, did you kill Shorty Shea?

INMATE MANSON: No, no, I didn’t have—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: You didn’t personally kill Shorty Shea?

INMATE MANSON: Not personally, no.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Did you order him to be killed?

INMATE MANSON: I know there was a fight, man—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Did you order him to be killed?

INMATE MANSON: No.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. Another question, please?

MR. KAY: All right. The last question, because I don’t want to take up a lot of the Board’s time, but I’d like the Board to ask Mr. Manson whether on the night of the Tate murders at the Tate house, after the murders were committed, did he go to the residence to see what had been done? And if so, what did he do when he was there?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: You heard the question, Mr. Manson. Answer—

INMATE MANSON: I had a traffic ticket in San Diego, but ask him why the District Attorney moved the highway patrolman to the East Coast along with the traffic ticket.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Manson, did you go to the residence afterward?

INMATE MANSON: No, no. Let me—let me explain that to the Board. The reason they want to say that is because they should’ve let me out of here three years ago because if I’m not on any scene of the crime, he can only keep me 18 years. You’ve already had me 23, so I can sue you for Hearst Castle, probably.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. Did that answer your question?

MR. KAY: Yes, thank you.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Are there any other questions you have, Mr. Kay?

MR. KAY: No.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Thank you.

INMATE MANSON: Thank you.

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Now, this time we’re going to have closing statements. First by the District Attorney and then you’ll have the opportunity for the final closing statement before we recess. Okay, Mr. Kay.

MR. KAY: Thank you very much. Penal Code Section 3041.5(b)(2), subsection (c) empowers the Board to deny a life prisoner a new parole hearing for five years if you find three things: (1) that the prisoner is unsuitable for parole, (2) that he has been convicted for more than two murders, and (3) it would not be likely that he would be suitable for parole during the period of five-year denial.

Charles Manson, through his actions and [inaudible] to the murders of nine innocent people, plus the attitudes and actions that he has shown while in prison for those murders. By those actions and attitudes, he has demonstrated unquestionably that he is deserving of a unanimous finding of unsuitability by the Board and the maximum five-year denial.

Charles Manson attained his status as America’s most famous and feared criminal by his powerful ability to control his followers. And from July 25, 1969, through and including August 28, 1969, led them on a monthlong murderous rampage.

That murderous rampage started at Gary Hinman’s residence on July 25. Mr. Hinman was not killed until the 27th, but he was tortured over a three-day period, and then went to the Tate house, where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Stephen Parent were killed on August 9. Then on August 10, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and on August 28, Donald Shea—and I should repeat that the evidence was clear in his trial that Mr. Manson did stab Mr. Shea.

The first three murders involving eight victims were all tied into Mr. Manson’s desire to ferment or take advantage of black-white race war. The murder of Shorty Shea was caused by Mr. Manson wanting to get revenge against him.

The enormity and cruelty of these murders almost defies belief. The motive for the Tate and LaBianca murders is enough in and of itself for the Board to deny Mr. Manson parole and Mr. Watson and the three girls parole forever.

Helter Skelter, what was this and how did it start? Well it was started by Manson, who was the guru on L.S.D. trips leading his Family members through the trips. They would listen to the Beatles White Album. And Mr. Manson and the others—and it wasn’t just Mr. Manson alone, because they would kind of feed on each other—and they determined, listening to the “White Album,” with songs like “Helter Skelter,” “Revolution 9,” “Black Bird,” “Piggies,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” that the Beatles were the prophets.