MANSON DEATH THREAT 6 page

Was Manson behind the attempt? My instincts from the beginning were that he was not. Though Manson always spoke as if he had no fear of death, telling his followers that death wasn’t the end of life, “just another high,” even beautiful (“Living is what scares me. Dying is easy,” he’d also say, as well as implying he had been resurrected), I saw firsthand how hard he in fact fought for his life during his nine and one-half month trial. Having his death sentence removed just three years earlier, it made no sense to me that he would risk a new sentence of death against someone as remote to him and his interests as Ford. Prosecutor Keyes also believes that Manson was not involved, and his office found no evidence implicating him. Squeaky, the Little Orphan Annie-looking matriarch of the Family during Manson’s forced exile, was probably trying to impress Manson by her act. She had to know that successful or not in killing Ford, such a spectacular, grandly anti-societal act would be sure to please him.

Searching Squeaky’s apartment pursuant to a warrant after the attempt on Ford, police found a stack of letters, ready to go, from “The International People’s Court of Retribution,” an impressive-sounding organization whose membership, however, was rather limited—Squeaky, Sandra Good, and Susan Murphy. The letters threatened named corporate executives and U.S. government officials with death if they did not forthwith stop polluting the air and water and destroying the environment. A long list of other addressees was nearby. While on bail after her and Murphy’s arrest for conspiring to send threatening communications through the United States mail, Good proceeded to utter, on radio and TV, the same threats, constituting four new federal violations of transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce.

Good represented herself at her trial, was convicted on all five counts (Murphy on only the conspiracy count), and asked that she be sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years. The judge gave her fifteen. William Shubb, her appointed “advisory counsel” during the trial and now a U.S. Federal District Court judge in Sacramento, says that if she had been agreeable he is certain a plea could have been negotiated wherein her sentence would have been much less severe.

A ll of Manson’s co-defendants in the Tate-LaBianca murders are, like Manson, still behind bars serving their life sentences.

Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s chief lieutenant at the murder scenes and the principal killer of the Tate-LaBianca victims, has renounced Manson and is presently at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He was transferred there in April of 1993 from the California Men’s Colony (CMC) in San Luis Obispo, where he had been incarcerated since September 1972. At CMC in 1975, Watson, through the ministry of Raymond Hoekstra (a legendary prison evangelist known as “Chaplain Ray”), became a born-again Christian. As a student chaplain and associate administrator of the Protestant chapel at CMC, Watson baptized, led Bible-study groups, and preached to the inmate congregation. In 1980, Watson founded Abounding Love Ministries (ALMS), a California nonprofit corporation which he and his Norwegian wife, Kristin, run. The two married in 1979 and have three children. Ordained as a minister in 1983, Watson receives donations to his ministry of approximately $1,500 per month from people on a national mailing list to whom he sends religious cassette tapes and a Christian newsletter.

Watson’s 1978 book, Will You Die for Me? , which he wrote with Chaplain Ray, chronicles his life with Manson, the murders, and his ultimate conversion to Christianity. Speaking of Manson, to whom he writes, “I had given myself totally,” he says he served the power of death and destruction “through one diabolical man who wanted to be God.” Believing that Manson “was—perhaps still is—possessed” by the devil, he says Manson’s only interest “had been death, but Jesus promised life.”

A rather startling admission by Watson to his prison psychiatrist was revealed at his last parole hearing in May of 1990. (Watson elected to waive his January 1993 parole hearing, stipulating to his unsuitability for parole.) The psychiatrist wrote that it had only been “during the last three years of one-on-one therapy that [Watson had] begun to truly experience a sense of deep remorse, both for the crime victims and for the families of the crime victims.” When a troubled parole board member asked Watson what, then, had he been feeling the previous eighteen years, Watson responded: “Well, it’s not that I haven’t experienced that before, but there’s been things happening in my life over the last few years that have really brought it home more so.” Watson explained that ever since he became a Christian in 1975 it’s been “great to know that I have been forgiven by God for what I’ve done. But I think sometimes we can hide behind that, and the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to really see myself in a new light in the sense that I’ve opened myself up to really look at the crime through other people’s eyes other than just my own.”

Watson’s belated epiphany was brought about in large part, he informed the board, by a somewhat incongruous relationship with Suzanne LaBerge (formerly Suzanne Struthers), Rosemary LaBianca’s daughter from a relationship before she met Leno. The thrice married and divorced Suzanne, who was twenty-one years old at the time of the murders, began visiting Watson at CMC in 1987. She appeared at the 1990 parole hearing and actually made an impassioned plea for the release of her mother’s killer, telling the board Watson had atoned for his terrible crimes, had overcome his past by turning to Christ, and no longer was a threat to society.

In a June 5, 1994, letter to me, Watson wrote: “With my deepest remorse, I apologize to the people of the world for my part in making Manson what he has become. To the many victims, my heart is full of sorrow for my actions…. If anyone should have received the death penalty for their crimes, it was me. I believe that God and his grace gave me a second chance, having a different plan for my life…. I have no great ambitions, other than allowing the Lord to use me as a testimony, urging others to Christ.”

While at CMC, Watson completed courses in vocational data processing and office machine repair. His current work assignment at Mule Creek is “tier tender,” i.e., keeping clean one of the two tiers in the building where he is housed. A prison spokesperson at Mule Creek advises that since Watson’s incarceration for the Tate-LaBianca murders he has received “one disciplinary infraction, of a minor nature, in 1973. He continues to program without incident.”

Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, like Watson, have each renounced Manson and expressed remorse for the killings. All are still at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. One of only three prisons for women in the state, Frontera has been described by one wag as “a college campus with barbed wire around it.” Each of the three Manson girls lives in a cottage-like housing unit (two inmates to a unit) at the attractive, well-manicured institution. All three girls have been reviewed for parole consideration, and denied, ten times thus far. It is the common consensus that if any of them are ever released, Van Houten will be the first one, primarily because unlike Atkins and Krenwinkel, she was only involved in the LaBianca, not the Tate murders. Additionally, a well-organized group, “Friends of Leslie,” consisting of hundreds of supporters, regularly urge her release to the parole board.

According to a prison spokesperson, “the institutional behavior [of the girls] is viewed as good.” (Krenwinkel, in fact, has not received one disciplinary write-up in twenty-three years, called “unusual” by a member of the parole board.) Their current custody level is medium security, they are each in the general prison population, and reportedly Krenwinkel and Van Houten are closer to each other socially than either one is to Atkins.

The most well-known of the girls, Susan “Sexy Sadie” Atkins, converted to Christianity even before Watson. Through the intercession in early 1974 of former Family member Bruce Davis, in prison at Folsom for the Hinman-Shea murders, Susan began to contemplate a Christian life. Davis, who had become a born-again Christian, wrote many letters to her, offering guidance and recommending Christian literature, including the New Testament, for her to read. In her 1977 book, Child of Satan, Child of God (written with Bob Slosser), she recounts an evening in late September 1974 when, alone in her cell, she softly but solemnly uttered the words that she wanted to be forgiven for her ghastly crimes. “Suddenly,” she writes, “there in my thoughts was a door. It had a handle. I took hold of it, and pulled.” When the door opened, she says, a flood of brilliant light poured over her. In the center was an even brighter light, which she knew was Jesus. “He spoke to me—literally, plainly, in my nine-by-eleven prison cell. ‘Susan, I am really here. I’m coming in your heart to stay. Right now you are being born again…You are now a child of God. You are washed clean and your sins have all been forgiven.’” Atkins goes on to say that that night, for the first time in many years, she “slept soundly, free of nightmares—unafraid and warm.” On the last page of her book, she writes that she believes “the Lord will one day release me from this place [Frontera] and give me a ministry to people of all kinds, but especially those who are as twisted and lost as I was from my earliest teen years.”

She now denies stabbing Sharon Tate, adding, however, that her moral culpability is still the same because she was there and “did nothing to stop it.” When she was asked by a reporter in the mid-’80s if she would be willing to say she was sorry to Sharon Tate’s mother for her involvement in Sharon’s murder, she replied: “There are no words to describe what I feel. ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me,’ those words are so overused and inadequate for what I feel.”

Atkins married one Donald Lee Laisure, a fifty-two-year-old Texan, in September of 1981. Laisure spells his last name with a dollar sign for the s . At the time of the marriage he claimed to be worth “999 million dollars plus, and seven times that in foreign countries,” and he said he planned to build a $12 million solar home near the Frontera prison so he could be close to his bride. Per news reports, Laisure appeared for the wedding in the prison chapel “resplendent and bespangled in diamond rings, diamond clips, a huge gold belt-buckle, sunglasses, cigar, Western-style hat and an orange leisure suit.” Atop his rust-colored Cadillac in the prison parking lot outside was an unfurled Lone Star flag of the state of Texas.

Although Susan had corresponded with Laisure for several years, there were two small details she regrettably had not learned about him. His wealth was nonexistent. Perhaps more importantly, Laisure had the troubling habit of getting married about as often as Paris changes skirt lengths. Susan was his thirty-sixth bride. Three months later she told Laisure, who had had conjugal visits with her in the Prison Family Living Unit Apartments, to “go back to Texas,” concluding the marriage was “a drastic mistake.” Laisure filed for divorce the following year. In 1987, Susan remarried. Her husband, fifteen years her junior, attends law school in Southern California. She describes this marriage as “the first healthy and successful relationship I’ve ever had in my life.”

In a long, typewritten letter to me on May 11, 1994, Atkins wrote: “Twenty-five years ago you tried three girls between the ages of twenty and twenty-two years old, and one thirty-five-year-old ex-con. Now, twenty-five years later, there are three women about the age of forty-five, all of whom have exemplary prison records, have taken advantage of the educational programs to earn college degrees, have contributed to every charity organization and program available, and have expressed remorse, shame, and regret for their parts in this hideous crime…and you have one sixty-year-old ex-con who shows up at his parole board hearings with a swastika carved on his forehead. I think that says it all.”

Though Atkins is very critical of Manson, she has said she still prays for him, “that Charlie will turn to Christ.” Atkins has obtained, through correspondence, an Associate of Arts degree (two years), graduating with a 3.5 grade point average. She also has completed a course in vocational data processing, and is presently taking paralegal classes. Her current work assignment at Frontera is that of a sewing operator in the Prison Industries program.

In 1976, Leslie Van Houten’s conviction for the two LaBianca murders was reversed and sent back for a new trial by the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, on the ground that Judge Charles Older had erred in not granting her motion for a mistrial when her attorney, Ronald Hughes, vanished near the end of the trial. After a hung jury in the first retrial, she was finally reconvicted of the two murders in 1978. As opposed to the guilt phase of her original trial back in 1970–71, in her two retrials Van Houten readily admitted to the jury her full participation in the LaBianca homicides. Her defense was diminished mental capacity based on mental illness induced, in part, by the chronic, prolonged use of hallucinogenic drugs. For a few months before her last trial she was released on a $200,000 bail bond paid for by friends and relatives, and lived for a while with a former writer from the Christian Science Monitor who was writing a book about Van Houten. The book reached the first draft level, but was never published.

Van Houten had a short-lived marriage to a man named Bill Cywin in the early ’80s. Though not connected to any misbehavior or complicity on her part, during the brief marriage Cywin was found to be in possession of a female prison guard’s uniform.

Through correspondence courses, Van Houten acquired a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. She also writes short stories, one of which was included in an anthology of prison literature, and at one time edited the prison newspaper. She is part of a small inmate group that sews quilts for the homeless. Van Houten says she “takes offense to the fact that Manson doesn’t own up” to his responsibility for the murders. “I take responsibility for my part, and part of my responsibility was helping to create him. Being a follower does not excuse.” Van Houten is presently doing secretarial work at the prison.

Patricia Krenwinkel received a Bachelor of Science degree through correspondence while at Frontera and has also completed a course in vocational data processing. Krenwinkel has never married. The most athletic of the three Manson girls, she plays on the prison softball team and presently is a “camp trainer” in the inmate firefighter’s program, training those under her to meet a physical fitness standard they must have in order to fight fires. Both she and Van Houten serve as counselors in a program in which young people with drug abuse problems are brought to the prison.

In 1988, while stating her deep remorse for the murders, Krenwinkel nonetheless told her prison psychiatrist that Abigail Folger, the person she murdered on the night of the Tate murders, “could have been something more than she was, a drug abuser.” At her 1993 parole hearing, Krenwinkel, crying and her voice cracking, told the board: “No matter what I do, I cannot change one minute of my life. There’s nothing I can do outside of being dead to pay for this. And I know that’s what you wish, but I cannot take my own life.” In the 1994 ABC special, she said that every day “I wake up and know that I’m a destroyer of the most precious thing, which is life, and living with that is the most difficult thing of all.” But, she adds, “that’s what I deserve—to wake up every morning and know that.” Responding to Manson’s claim he did not order the murders, she said, “Charlie is absolutely lying. There wasn’t one thing done—that was even allowed to be done—without his express permission.” She is very concerned about young people who write her and “seem to think that what we did was all right. There is nothing, nothing that we did that is all right. If there is anything I can say to these children, it’s that he [Manson] is not the man to follow.”

All other family members convicted of Manson-related murders, with the exception of one, are also still behind bars. Bruce Davis, convicted of the murders of Donald “Shorty” Shea and Gary Hinman, is presently at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, California, and Robert Beausoleil, also convicted of the Hinman murder, is at the California Correctional Center at Susanville, California. Only Steven Grogan (“Clem Tufts” in the Family), convicted of Shea’s murder, has been released.

Grogan was by all accounts the most unhinged and spaced out (on psychedelic drugs) of all Manson Family members. Even in the Family he was considered crazy. Yet the transformation behind bars for Grogan, eighteen years old at the time he participated in Shea’s murder, was remarkable. Burt Katz, who prosecuted Grogan, and is now a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, says he was “favorably impressed” by the change in the openly remorseful Grogan, and felt he had matured into “a thoughtful, sensitive young man.” Sergeant William Gleason of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a lead investigator in the Shea murder, was similarly impressed, calling the change in Grogan “amazing.” Grogan became very adept behind bars at painting watercolors and playing his guitar, and obtained an airplane engine mechanic’s license.

One of the enduring Manson Family mysteries was cleared up by Grogan. It had become part of Manson Family lore, possibly to frighten all members who had a mutinous thought, that Shea was decapitated by Grogan and had been cut up and buried in nine separate places at Spahn Ranch. However, extensive digging at the ranch by law enforcement had failed to uncover Shea or any part of him. In 1977, Grogan, while at the Deuel Vocational Institution at Tracy, California, asked to see Katz. Determined to prove he had not beheaded Shea, and that Shea had not been cut up into nine pieces, he drew a map for Katz, pinpointing the location of Shea’s body. Subsequently, Sergeant Gleason and his partner found Shea’s remains in one piece at the spot designated by Grogan—the bottom of a steep embankment about a quarter mile down the road from the ranch. On November 18, 1985, Grogan was released from prison, and was discharged from parole on April 13, 1988.

A lthough Manson, today, has far more supporters and sympathizers than ever were members of his Family, I know of no group at the present time, in or out of prison, calling themselves the Manson Family and trying to keep the flame alive. The nomadic band of minstrels, waifs, and latent killers he assembled around him in the late ’60s is no more, and no new group has emerged to take their place. With two exceptions, all of his former followers have severed their umbilical cord to him, starting new lives. Only Squeaky and Sandra (“Red” and “Blue,” Manson calls them), their faces still suffused with a missionary glow, have remained irrevocably wedded to him, and still fervently preach his gospel.

Squeaky has served most of her life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution at Alderson, West Virginia. She is presently at the Federal Correctional Institution at Marianna, Florida, transferred there from Alderson on March 3, 1989. Some time back the Associated Press reported her saying that “the curtain is about to come down on all of us, and if we don’t turn everything over to Charlie immediately, it’s going to be too late.” In a 1977 unpublished manuscript about her life with Manson, Squeaky wrote: “People said that I was Manson’s main woman…[but Manson’s] main woman is the truth. She comes before anyone or anything, and he’s with her always in life or death.” When Squeaky learned, on December 23, 1987, that Manson had written to some friends in Ava, Missouri, that he had testicular cancer,[100]she escaped within hours from Alderson to come to him, but was apprehended a few days later only two miles away. In a letter to a friend earlier that month, she wrote: “I only live and feel alive when I think of him.”

Sandra Good served ten years (five of which, from 1980 to 1985, she spent with Squeaky at Alderson) of her fifteen-year sentence. She now lives in Hanford, California, a town near Manson’s prison at Corcoran. Though she does not have visiting privileges, she is content to be geographically close to Manson, and has become the main spokesperson and cheerleader for him on the outside, telling whoever will listen, including national television audiences, that Manson is innocent of the Tate-LaBianca murders, and would be a “fantastic” person for the country to follow, one who would “give the children back to themselves.” Good’s boyfriend, George Simpson, does have visiting privileges, and reportedly is an intermediary for Manson.

Good is believed to be the proud guardian of the vest Manson frequently wore during the Family’s heyday, embroidered by “Charlie’s girls” through the years with the images of devils, witches, goblins, and other symbols of black magic and demonology. Also sewn into the vest is the hair of those girls who shaved their heads while conducting their round-the-clock vigil for Manson outside the Hall of Justice during his trial.

As to those who were once members of Manson’s flock, or associated with the Family, they have scattered to the four winds and are very protective of their privacy from the media. Because the Manson Family has become synonymous with terror, like those in the Bible’s Revelation 9 whose identifying seal on their foreheads their leader often spoke about, all of its former members (even those who, as far as we know, did not participate in any of the execrable crimes committed by the Family) are marked for life. Since they know that few who are aware of their background can ever feel serene in their presence, nearly all of them keep their history a secret in their new lives.

My latest information is that Linda Kasabian moved from New Hampshire and is now living under an assumed name in the Pacific Southwest with her husband and three children. A friend of Linda’s when she lived in Milford, New Hampshire, told a reporter that Linda “led a normal life. She drove her kids to school, participated in the PTA, that sort of thing.” Barbara Hoyt, whom I was happy to help get into nursing school, is now a registered nurse in the Northwest. Barbara is divorced and living with her daughter in a townhouse she just purchased. She leads a very active life “camping, fishing, painting, and playing volleyball.”

Contrary to other reports, Dianne Lake never became a corporate executive or vice-president of a bank. She worked as a bank teller for years, and describes herself today as a “happily married, well adjusted and committed Christian living with my husband and three children in the western part of the United States.” Kitty Lutesinger is divorced and raising her two children in California. Steve Grogan is not, as has been reported, working as a house painter in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Someone very close to him informed me that his occupation (undisclosed) takes him to various states and “he is doing exceptionally well, better than anyone could have anticipated.”

Mary Brunner, the first female member of the Family, who was an assistant librarian at the University of California at Berkeley when she joined Manson, served six and one-half years for her participation in the Western Surplus Store robbery in Hawthorne, California. She is presently living in the Midwest under an assumed name, is single, and is doing clerical work.

Catherine Share served five years for her conviction in the Hawthorne robbery. She now lives in a Southwest state with her second husband and a twenty-three-year-old son who is a senior in college. After divorcing Manson Family associate Kenneth Como in 1981, she says she completely separated herself from the Family. Like Dianne Lake, she says she is “happily married, and a Christian very active in church affairs.” Share, who was born in Paris to a Hungarian violinist father and German-Jewish refugee mother, both of whom were members of the anti-Nazi underground French resistance during the Second World War, describes her life today as so clean she hasn’t “gotten a traffic ticket in ten years.” And like Patricia Krenwinkel and other former Family members, she is deeply concerned about the many young people today who look up to Manson and want to follow him. Because of this, she is in the process of working on a book (She Was a Gypsy Woman ) with a Texas-based writer which will “tell the truth” to these youths about “who Charles Manson really is.”

During the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, Share had testified that the motive for the murders was not Helter Skelter—which I had tied firmly to Manson—but the so-called copycat motive, which had nothing to do with Manson. In a conversation with her in early April of 1994, she acknowledged to me what I had already known (of the text): that her testimony was untruthful. She said the copycat motive story (as well, of course, as her testimony that Linda Kasabian, not Manson, had been behind the murders) was a fabrication to save Manson from the gas chamber, and that she had testified to it under his explicit direction.

Catherine Gillies is divorced and living on welfare with her four children near Death Valley. She is very proud of the fact that her twin teenage daughters are both honor students. No one seems to know what became of Stephanie Schram. Nancy Pitman married Michael Monfort, a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a group Manson allegedly had a loose, arms-length relationship with in the mid-’70s. She served one year for her accessory-after-the-fact conviction in the murder of Lauren Willett, a homicide Monfort pled guilty to. Pitman divorced Monfort in 1990. She is now single, employed, and living with her four children in the Pacific Northwest. Her main concern these days, she says, “is to protect my children” from any harm brought about by her having once belonged to the Manson Family.

Little Paul Watkins, the intelligent and articulate youth who provided me with the missing link for Manson’s motive of Helter Skelter, died in 1990 from leukemia. Paul and his second wife, Martha, had two girls and lived in Tecopa, a small desert town at the southernmost edge of Death Valley. Paul was the founder and first president of the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce and the unofficial mayor of Tecopa. He and his wife mined rocks in the area and sold them in their Tecopa jewelry store. Paul also lectured extensively on the psychology of cults and the pernicious effects of substance abuse. His book, My Life with Charles Manson , was published in 1979.

For years, Paul (who composed, sang, and played the saxophone and flute) and his close friend Brooks Poston (composition, guitar) had a rock band called the “Desert Sun” that played at night spots in the Death Valley area. Brooks, the self-described hayseed from Texas, is now reportedly a member of a non-violent cult in New Orleans, but I have been unable to confirm this.

Dennis Rice served five years for the Hawthorne robbery and an additional two for violating a condition of his parole that he stop associating with members of the Manson Family. Today, he is an ordained minister and president of “Free Indeed” Ministries, Inc. He lives with his second wife in a Southwest state and speaks, he says, “in high schools, jails, and prisons all over America on the power of Jesus Christ to change lives.” He has six children, all of whom, he notes proudly, are “Christians serving God.”

Ruth Moorehouse is living with her husband and three children in a midwestern state. The Panamanian cowboy, Juan Flynn, returned to Panama, where he works on a ranch. In early 1994, Juan returned to the Death Valley area to visit old friends. In the late ’70s I received a call from Canadian law enforcement looking for Danny DeCarlo, who was born in Canada. I have been unable to find out from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa what became of this matter because the Privacy Act in Canada prohibits the release of this information. I have no idea where DeCarlo is today.

I am frequently asked what happened to the “Manson children.” There were eight of them, four belonging to Dennis Rice by his first wife—three boys and a girl. Two of Rice’s boys are now pastors in churches located in a Southwest state. The other boy and the girl also live in the Southwest and are very involved in the activities of their local Christian church.

Little is known of Sandra Good’s son, Sunstone Hawk, except that he went to college on a football scholarship and was a lineman on the team.

Linda Kasabian’s daughter, Tanya, grew up with Linda in New Hampshire.

She now lives in the Pacific Northwest, is married, and recently made Linda a grandmother with her first child.

All I was able to learn about Susan Atkins’ son, Zezozose Zadfrack, was that he was adopted, reportedly by a physician. The court records have been sealed and Atkins herself does not know where her son is.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 708