Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (7 page)

“I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I’ll tell you just once, you better start getting along,” he ordered. “There’s too much at stake for this kind of bullshit. You understand?” I was so locked into my fight-or-flight mode that I failed to realize that Rees’s scolding meant that I wasn’t going to be fired. Not this time, anyway. “If you can’t work things out, somebody’s got to go,” he threatened. “And that’s usually the guy lowest on the totem pole.”

“Yes sir, I understand,” I said, getting the picture. I had the Polaroid, but I still couldn’t shut my mouth. “I know I’ve put you on a cross, Bob. I’m really sorry. That wasn’t my intention. You can fire my ass, but let me say just one more thing. Rinker has little understanding of what motivates people. He thinks just like Manson, that fear is the only thing that motivates. That’s how Rinker works. Fear does motivate some people, but it just pisses me off! Rinker busted into my unit and allowed the gooners to drag that little bastard the whole length of the upper yard with his hands cuffed behind his back. Many inmates saw that and by now the rest have heard about it. Further, he didn’t tell my staff why the hell he was there or what the hell he was doing. He’s on a power trip. They could have taken Manson out and lynched him for all my men knew. He let the gooners act like a bunch of vigilantes. This from a man who preaches treating inmates fairly, no more barbed wire and bullets? I’m sorry, boss, but that man’s an asshole!”

My hands trembled with fear and frustration as I stormed out of the room. It was a great speech, filled with kindness and humanity for all, but I was talking about Charles Manson! Why was I taking such a fervent stand for that homicidal creep? The answer came to me as I reached my office. I remembered reading somewhere, or maybe hearing during an episode of
Star Trek,
that a society can be best judged by the way it treats its worst criminals. If we look the other way when someone—even a subhuman like Manson—is brutally dragged across a prison hallway, what does that say about ourselves? Will we still look the other way when it’s a protester being manhandled instead of a condemned felon? Or how about a member of a rival political party?

Noble thoughts all. The bottom line was, I hadn’t drawn the line in the sand because of a protesting college student or a rowdy libertarian, I’d done it for Charles Manson. That had to count against me. How much I’ll never know. What I do know is that not only did I keep my job, but I wasn’t even written up. My guess is that my mentor, Rees, respected my stance and defended me to some extent when Rinker roared in demanding his pound of flesh.

I tempered my elation and feeling of victory with the understanding that however intellectually founded my cause, I couldn’t escape the fact that I had fallen, to some extent, under Manson’s spell. Even if it was nothing more than a morbid fascination combined with a curious desire to know what made his twisted mind tick, I’d risked everything for a cause some might find hard to swallow. I’d have to be more careful the next time.

Two weeks later, I spent a few nervous hours convinced that “next time” had arrived. Another strange woman, Sara Jane Moore, forty-five, fired a shot at Ford in front of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. For all his famous physical bumbling, Ford was certainly becoming nimble as a chipmunk when it came to sidestepping female assassins. Moore’s shot missed. Everybody at San Quentin, including me, was convinced this was another Manson production—even if Moore was a little out of fashion and threadbare for his tastes.

“Don’t look at me, I don’t know the old bitch,” Charlie, a spry forty-one, cracked. “She ain’t one of mine. Don’t be sending those FBI/Secret Service goons up here again gettin’ on my ass.”

Although Moore was indeed some kind of wacko revolutionary, Charlie was right—she wasn’t aligned with him. Not only wasn’t Sara a Family girl, she was a socialist and strongly anti-Manson. She and Squeaky ended up in the same prison and hissed like a pair of warring bobcats the entire time. Obviously, their shared failure wasn’t enough to unite their troubled spirits.

It had, however, poured additional anxiety into mine. The way I saw it, I’d dodged a bullet again. To keep from catching the next slug squarely between my eyes, I thought it would behoove me to learn all I could about Manson. Not only him, but about his followers as well. I wanted to know who the next Squeaky might be, and get a head start on trying to figure out Manson’s next move. I started by boning up on Manson’s life in “the system,” both before and after the Tate-LaBianca murders. That was critical. The police detectives, prosecutors, journalists, and authors who had studied him in the past had centered their investigations almost exclusively on the small segments of time he spent on the outside. Yet, Manson himself had said many times that he wasn’t a product of the outside world. His strange persona was not a result of his broken home, Kentucky/Indiana/ Ohio/West Virginia environment, a promiscuous, uncaring, bisexual mother, the copious amounts of drugs he ingested, or even the rebellious 1960s. He viewed himself as a casualty of the American prison system.

Manson had been in and out of boys’ homes and jails since committing his first armed robbery at age thirteen. His much publicized twisted value system was little more than typical con behavior. He didn’t fear social rejection, and seemed incapable of feeling guilt. The basic convict code was ingrained in him at a young age: One should be hedonistic, self-centered, and think only of survival; show defiance toward the system, and beat it any way you can; and never, ever snitch.

Hedonism, defiance, and hatred toward snitches were the tenets that the third-grade dropout later taught his gullible young followers. The “peace and love” flower children were simply fed a cherry-flavored syrup that disguised a bitter spoonful of jailhouse poison.

In order to do that, Manson had to first develop his extraordinary ability to collect, control, and manipulate people. Although manipulation skills are common among prisoners, Manson had apparently mastered the persuasive arts long before his first bust. His relatives described him as a pleasant child who always knew how to get his way.

“If Charlie wanted anything, I’d give it to him,” his mother told the
Los Angeles Times
in a rare interview before her death. “My mother did, too.… He never had to do a thing to earn what he wanted.… Charles had a wonderful personality and always charmed people at a first meeting.… He was real musical and had a real nice voice, so I gave him singing lessons. Then he got so conceited about his music that I made him stop, but he still sang special solos in church, and people always talked about how good he sang. I think that made him over-confident.… Everything was just handed to him.”

Charlie’s mother was just fifteen when she gave birth. A short-term marriage to William Manson gave the child a name, if not a father. In direct contrast to the plethora of books and articles written about him, along with dozens of psychological evaluations, Manson’s life was influenced, possibly to a major extent, by his biological father—a man he’s insisted he never knew. The elusive “Colonel Scott” didn’t marry Manson’s mother, and to this day, very little is known about him other than that he died in 1954. However, unlike previous reports, Mrs. Manson says that Scott was the love of her life and hung around long enough to establish a relationship with his bastard son. The Colonel (there was no record of a first name) was a wily young man with a weakness for pretty teens. His nickname, common in Kentucky, may have indicated that he had a military background. This would explain Manson’s love for military ideals, as shown by his admiration for Rommel and Hitler, his collection of guns and swords, and the military-like maneuvers he performed in dune buggies during his desert-rat days. (Then again, Kentucky men with no military background are often called Colonel, like fried-chicken king Colonel Sanders. If Colonel Scott was merely a “Kentucky Colonel,” the military influence obviously doesn’t apply.)

Manson idolized his father and was deeply hurt when his mother moved from Ashland, Kentucky, to West Virginia. It was only after he lost contact with his dad, and his heavily drinking mother started bouncing from man to man, that the four-year-old’s life began careening out of control. Knowing Charlie’s “no pain, no regrets” thought process, it’s obvious why he’s always denied knowing his father. To do otherwise would force him to confront the anguish he still harbors. The prison-hardened Charlie I knew was not one to reveal anguish about anything.

Two years after leaving Ashland, his mother was convicted of robbery and sent to prison. Manson was passed around to relatives, one of whom, an uncle, made him wear a dress to the first day of school as punishment for whining and crying. The shame and humiliation were staggering, turning him into an angry whirlwind who lashed out at those who taunted him.

Manson’s mother was released when he was eight. Charlie has often referred to her homecoming as one of the happiest days of his life. Four years, four states, and myriad towns and “uncles” later, his mom remarried and turned him over to the state, leaving her son angry and bitter.

Tragically, as with so many other felons, the beginning of Manson’s lifelong criminal pattern coincided with the one-two punch of losing his parents. He hated the boys homes and juvenile halls and escaped whenever he could, stealing bicycles and food, unaware that he was building a rap sheet that would haunt him forever. He frequently fell to his hands and knees, asking God for deliverance, and for someone to come into his life who loved and needed him. Escaping again, he located his mother and begged her to let him stay. She did—for one night. The next day, she turned him in. Charlie had been snitched out by his own beloved mom! “I didn’t feel like a boy anymore,” he told convict turned author Nuel Emmons. “There were no tears, but I also knew I could no longer smile or be happy. I was bitter and I knew real hate.”

More escapes followed, and Manson, now thirteen, was sent to the Indiana School for Boys in Plainfield, Indiana. The place was a barbaric misery pit teeming with psychotic youths and vicious, perverted guards. By his own account, he was repeatedly raped by older boys, sometimes after being prepared by a guard who rubbed burning tobacco juice up his anus for lubrication. “Every day was some kind of unimaginable experience,” he confided to Emmons, who produced a revealing book entitled
Manson in His Own Words.
“… At an age when most kids are going to nice schools, living with their parents, and learning all about the better things in life, I was cleaning silage and tobacco juice out of my ass, recuperating from the wounds of a leather strap and learning to hate the world and everyone in it.… I had some help in becoming the person I am.” The rapes ended when Manson clubbed one of his attackers with an iron window crank as the youth slept, severely wounding him. He hid the bloody weapon in the bed of another attacker, thus cleverly misdirecting the blame and killing two birds with one crank.

He escaped for good at age sixteen, making it to Utah before being arrested. This time, he was sent to a federal reformatory in Washington, D.C., that was far more civilized. The homosexual sex there, at least, was by consent. Manson, for all his bad experiences, freely admits he willingly participated when he was on the other end of the pitcher/catcher exchange.

The orphaned teenager kicked around three more federal reform schools, then was paroled when he was nineteen. He got a job shoveling shit at a racetrack and married the first woman he ever made love to, a coal miner’s daughter he met inside a cardroom in Dean Martin’s wild and woolly red-light hometown, Steubenville, Ohio. For a while, he was happy again. His wife became pregnant with Charlie junior (who has no doubt long since changed his name), and Manson was content to play the young husband role. Financial problems and the limited opportunities available to a man with his education and background caused him to turn back to crime. An auto theft arrest sent him to his first adult prison, Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. His son was born while he was on the inside. Mrs. Manson dutifully visited—for about a year. Then, without so much as a Dear John, she left him for another man. He never saw either her or the child again.

“I went back to being bitter and hating everyone,” he told Emmons. “I had been bitter when my mom turned me over to the court when I was twelve. I hated her when she refused to let me stay with her after my first escape.… The bitterness I had learned at Plainfield never left me. And though I don’t blame her or feel bitter toward her now, my wife had the full brunt of my hate then.… Until my wife left me, I was filled with honest thoughts for our future together.… The letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was the turning point in my life. I figured, screw all that honest-John bullshit. I’m a thief, and I don’t know anything else.”

Manson was released in September 1958 and set out to be a big-time Hollywood pimp, a profession he thought was at the top of the bad guy food chain. He ran a few girls with moderate success, fathered another son—this one he never even saw—took a fall for passing a bad check, took a bigger fall bringing prostitutes across state lines, hid out in Mexico, was shipped back to the United States, and was slapped with a new, ten-year sentence. He served seven, bouncing between McNeil and Terminal Islands in Washington and California.

With these critical pieces of the puzzle correctly in place, a picture emerges that better explains how Manson emerged as a 1960s guru. He merely had to look within himself to gain the insights needed to further alienate youthful recruits from their distracted parents. To this day, dysfunctional, loveless parents remain a constant theme with Manson.

Prison, combined with his diminutive adult stature (five three, 135 pounds), shaped Manson’s well-known half-crazy mental attitude, along with his bizarre posturing. An unintimidating man who lacked physical prowess, he learned early on that in a grown-up prison, he desperately needed a psychological shield to ward off predatory inmates. He compensated for his shortcomings by enveloping himself in an aura of creepy evilness, spiced by a quick, sarcastic wit. Later, he added the body contortions and sudden jerky movements that would one day mesmerize the media. This gave him an air of unpredictability that scared bigger cons away. As every inmate knows, a “psycho” can go off without warning, inflict serious injuries, and/or force sudden confrontations that end with both participants being dumped into the dreaded isolation “hole.” Thus, the crazier Manson acted, the safer he became.