MANSON DEATH THREAT 5 page

Although all of these elements have undoubtedly contributed to the durability of the case, I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with it at such a late date is that the Manson murder case is almost assuredly the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime. And for whatever reason, people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. If these murders had never happened, and someone wrote a novel with the same set of facts and circumstances, most people would put it down after a few pages; because as I understand it, to be good fiction it has to be somewhat believable, and this story is just too far out.

There is another compelling reason for the continuing fascination with the case. The very name “Manson” has become a metaphor for evil, catapulting him to near mythological proportions. Charles Manson has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity; and again, there is a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil. On a lesser scale, why are there so many popular books and crime shows on television dealing with murder—evil’s ultimate act? (Across the water, one recalls George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Decline of the English Murder,” in which he speaks of the pleasure he and his countrymen receive from reading about a sensational murder in the comfort of their drawing rooms.) Since we place so much value on human life, why do we glorify, in a perverse sort of way, the extinguishment of life? The answer to that question, whatever it is, is at least a partial answer to why people continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Jack the Ripper—Manson.

As with evil, fright also has its allure. The quality of a horror movie, we know, is generally considered to be directly proportionate to the extent to which it terrifies. Manson, of course, delivers on the fright meter like perhaps no one else; his Hitlerian stare fixed upon us from places as diverse as the television screen and the covers of magazines, to the underground albums of his music and his wax frame at Madame Tussaud’s in London. “People worry about this man the way they worry about cancer and earthquakes,” a reporter wrote in 1979. “Just recently”—he quotes a California state prison official—“a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there’s no chance he can escape.” Los Angeles Times columnist Howard Rosenberg calls Manson “America’s preeminent bogeyman.” Not only were the murders he ordered the type one doesn’t even see in horror movies, but Manson, like no other mass murderer of this century, has added a shivering new dimension to the fright quotient—his diabolical and singular talent for getting others, without asking any questions, to kill complete strangers for him at his command. Dr. David Abrahamsen, a noted psychiatrist who has studied the history of violence in America, says he has never heard of any parallel for such a phenomenon. With other prominent mass murderers—from Charles Starkweather, David Berkowitz, Henry Lee Lucas, Charles Whitman, and Richard Speck to Ted Bundy; from Juan Corona, Dean Corll, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez to Jeffrey Dahmer—without exception they committed the murders by themselves or participated with others in the act. The fright generated by these heavyweights of homicide’s rogue gallery, then, was always finite. Because of Manson’s ability to control others and get them to vent his spleen on society for him, the probability of death has always been exponential, and therefore much more frightening.

Some have compared Manson with the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh. Although to their followers, Jones, Koresh, and Manson were all messianic, and each possessed the uncommon ability to totally control and dominate the lives of those who believed in them, the comparison ends there. During the final moments of Jones and Koresh, in a state of dementia they ordered the suicide of their followers, then proceeded to take their own lives also. Turning their power over others inward by ordering and participating in mass suicide is a far cry from Manson driving down dark streets with his followers randomly looking for homes into which he could send them to commit human slaughter. Prior to the last days of Jones and Koresh, there is no evidence that either had ordered others to murder anyone for them. With Manson, murder was his religion, his credo, his way of life. As Paul Watkins said, “Death is Charlie’s trip.”

Derivatively, Manson’s slavishly obedient followers had come to share this hellish passion. Telling cellmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham about the act of murder and the Family’s plan to start traveling throughout the country, killing people and whole families at random, Susan Atkins had said animatedly, “The more you do it, the better you like it.”

If Manson has continued to fascinate mainstream America, he has also done so with its fanatical elements. Today, almost every disaffected and morally twisted group in America, from Satanists to neo-Nazi skinheads, has embraced Manson and the poisons of his virulent philosophy. He has become their spiritual icon, the high priest of anti-establishment hatred. As columnist William Buckley put it, Manson has become “the nation’s leading anti-citizen.” Wayne McGuire, in Aquarian Journal , predicts that “sometime in the future Charles Manson will metamorphose into a major American folk hero.” Though Frenchmen will likely stop drinking wine before that happens,[94]Manson is indeed a hero to many on the jagged margins of our culture. In a 1994 interview, seventeen-year-old +Natalie,[95]a Satanist, says: “Charles Manson is an idol and role model.” The murders happened, she says, because “Manson wanted a new government and anarchy to clear out the garbage, the useless people.” Her twenty-year-old boyfriend, +Robert, a fellow Satanist with whom she lives in San Francisco, adds about the Tate-LaBianca victims: “I feel that might is right, and whoever isn’t prepared to defend their own life shouldn’t cry when their life is taken.” +Willie, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist, says he “got into Manson on the twentieth anniversary of the Tate killings when I went to this heavy metal tribute to him. I had already met all the peace and love cult people and when I ran into the Satan types I liked all the negative aspects they stood for. So ever since, I’ve been hanging out with people that support Manson.” Willie feels that as a white man he is the victim of racism in our society, that blacks are “like Neanderthals and overpopulating our culture.” If Manson got out, “he would improve the quality of life.” +Alex, a forty-two-year-old neo-Nazi who has corresponded with Manson for years, says his “discovery” of Manson can only be compared to his earlier discovery of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. He calls Manson “the foremost revolutionary leader in the world today,” and is special “by virtue of a one in a hundred million shot of gene combinations that gives him his ideas, personality, and physical presence.”

To the extremists, mass murderers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer are no more intriguing than they are to the average citizen. They are merely very sick psychopaths who kill for no reason other than to satisfy their unchecked homicidal urges. Though these killers attract inevitable media attention and interest for a while, they have no followers nor anything to say, and if and when they do talk, not even the extremists listen. The only message these homicidal monsters have to give by their violence is horror. Manson and his murders, on the other hand, are downright hip to the extremists. As misdirected as it was, his violence was political, revolutionary, and therein lies his main appeal to those on the fringes. Also, aware of the flat intellect of most mass killers, the extremists admire and are impressed with Manson’s unquestioned intelligence, the offbeat and sometimes searing nature of his insights, his enigmatic answers and allusions, and a mental deftness that allows him to speak in riddles, always with an underlying message. In short, they are drawn to the mystery of Manson.

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.[96]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.[97]

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.

Near the conclusion of his book, Manson writes: “There are days when I get caught up in being the most notorious convict of all time. In that frame of mind I get off on all the publicity, and I’m pleased when some fool writes and offers to ‘off some pigs’ for me. I’ve had girls come to visit me with their babies in their arms and say, ‘Charlie, I’d do anything in the world for you. I’m raising my baby in your image.’ Those letters and visits used to delight me, but that’s my individual sickness. What sickness is it that keeps sending me kids and followers? It’s your world out there that does it. I don’t solicit my mail or ask anyone to come and visit me. Yet the mail continues to arrive and your pretty little flowers of innocence keep showing up at the gate.”

From these relatively benign words, Manson abruptly changes, and after saying he doesn’t think he’ll ever be released, closes his book in vintage fashion with these ominously ambiguous words: “My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So…know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.”

Life behind bars hasn’t dashed Manson’s desire to be a recording star. From his cell in Vacaville in 1982, Manson recorded his second album, titled Charlie Manson’s Good Time Gospel Hour . Manson sings ballads he composed about his life and that of his pals on San Quentin’s Death Row. The sounds of nearby television and flushing toilets can be heard in the background. Manson’s first album, called LIE (the photo on the jacket is the one of him on the December 19, 1969, cover of Life magazine), was taped, portentously, on August 9, 1968, exactly one year before the Tate murders. With several of the Manson Family girls providing choral backup, Manson sings his own compositions. Both albums have gone through several bootleg editions and are considered such rare collectibles that one alternative music store owner told me if he ever got his hands on either one, “I wouldn’t sell them. They’re too valuable.”

Remarkably, there are some who heap scalding criticism on those in the music industry who never gave Manson a chance when he got out of prison in 1967. If he had been given a real opportunity, they add, most likely the murders would never have taken place. While this is possibly true, that type of “but for” causation could be used to argue that if someone had bought Hitler’s paintings in Vienna in 1912 perhaps we wouldn’t have had the Second World War.

Being behind bars also hasn’t inhibited Manson from reaching America’s vast television audience. The media (NBC’s Today Show , CNN, BBC, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, the ABC Special in March of 1994, etc.) have sought him out, enabling him to verbally spew his venom. In a 1988 interview with Geraldo Rivera, he said: “I’m going to chop up some more of you mother-fuckers. I’m going to kill as many of you as I can. I’m going to pile you up to the sky. I figure about fifty million of you. I might be able to save my trees and my air and my water and my wildlife.” When Rivera later said, “There’s nine dead people out there” (referring to Manson’s nine murder convictions), Manson answered, “There’s a lot more than nine, son, a whole lot, and there’s going to be a whole lot more.” When Rivera asked if he told the women in his Family to kill, he responded, “I don’t deal with women I got to tell what to do. They know what to do.” He told Rivera: “I make laws. I’m the lawmaker. I’m the one that lays down the track.”

I n the twenty-five years since the murders, no event thrust the Manson Family back into the news once again as much as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. After Manson was transferred from San Quentin back to Folsom in October of 1974, Squeaky and Sandra Good moved to Sacramento (fifteen miles to the west) to be as close to him as possible.[98]Squeaky, Sandra, and a part-time nurse they had recruited into the Family named Susan Murphy, rented a run-down attic apartment in an old, downtown boardinghouse just a few blocks from the state capitol. On the sunny and crisp morning of September 5, 1975, President Ford was walking through a park in front of the capitol to meet Governor Jerry Brown.

Not only wasn’t Squeaky on the Secret Service’s list of dangerous people in town to watch—particularly remarkable when weeks earlier she and Sandra had issued a communiqué to the media in Sacramento that “if Nixon’s reality wearing a new face [i.e., Ford] continues to run this country against the law, your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca homes and My Lai put together”[99]—but the President’s men inexplicably paid no attention to an elfish woman nearby attired in a bright red robe and matching turban. As Ford stopped at a magnolia tree to shake hands with a cluster of smiling supporters, Squeaky materialized out of the group, grabbed a gun from under her robe and pointed it at Ford, just two feet away. Instantly, Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf seized Squeaky’s gun arm and threw her to the ground. In apparent anger, Squeaky cried out, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” The reason it didn’t go off will probably never be known beyond all doubt. To be sure, Squeaky’s .45 caliber Army Colt pistol, though loaded with four bullets, had no bullet in the chamber ready to be fired. To fire the gun, Squeaky would have first had to pull the slide back on top of the gun to raise a cartridge from the magazine into the firing chamber, which she hadn’t done. Had Squeaky mistakenly thought that squeezing the trigger (Buendorf and another witness reported hearing a metallic clicking sound, which could have been the hammer striking the rear of the firing pin) would be enough to fire the weapon? Because of the belief that Squeaky knew how to operate guns (on the documentary Manson she is seen operating the bolt of a rifle), many people, including some in law enforcement, are convinced she had no intention of hurting Ford. Nevertheless, prosecutor Dwayne Keyes, now a Superior Court judge in Fresno, told me he is “absolutely positive she had every intent to kill the President,” a state of mind the prosecution had to prove to secure a conviction.

In any event, Squeaky was now competing for the limelight, at least for a while, with her God, Charlie, making the September 15, 1975, covers of Newsweek and Time magazines. At her federal trial she was so obstreperous the judge had her removed from the courtroom for most of the proceedings, but not before she told him that one of the issues at the trial “was as clear as the piano in the front window of your home,” an accurate reference. During jury deliberations after a three-week trial in which Squeaky did not testify, “a lot of people,” juror Robert Convoy recalled, “believed that with no cartridge in the chamber, the gun wasn’t a weapon.” Ultimately, however, the jury found Squeaky guilty of attempting to assassinate Ford (prior to 1965, presidential assassination was only a state, not a federal, crime), the first female in American history so charged and convicted. Squeaky was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 732