by Johnny Satan
Q: Do you think she was?
C.M: No, I don’t think she was even there. But she is going to condemn herself out of guilt for what she’s done. What she doesn’t realize is that she couldn’t hurt me anyway.
Q: What would you like to do if you are ever released?
C.M: If I had a desire, it would be to be free from desire. I would go out into the desert. The desert is magic. I love the desert, it is my home.
Nobody ever wanted me and nobody wants the desert. The stone that the builders rejected, do you remember that story? I’ll live in the desert, like a coyote. I know where every waterhole is, and every berry and fruit that’s edible. They will come after me in the desert and they will die. The desert is God’s kingdom. Once I was walking in the desert and I had a revelation. I’d walked about 45 miles, and that is a lot of miles to walk in the desert. The sun was beating down on me and I was afraid, because I wasn’t willing to accept death. My tongue swoll up and I would hardly breathe. I collapsed in the sand. Oh God! I’m going to die! I’m going to die right here! [Cries out in a pitiful voice.] I looked at the ground and I saw this rock out of the corner of my eye. And I remember thinking in this insane way as I looked at it, ‘Well, this is as good a place as any to die.’ And then I started to laugh. I began laughing like an insane man, I was so happy. And when I had snapped to, I realized what I was doing.
I’d let go. I wasn’t hanging on. I was free from the spell, as free as that stone. I just got up as if a giant hand had helped me. I got up with ease and walked another 10 miles and I was out. It’s easy.
Q: Do you think you will ever get out of jail?
C.M: I don’t care. I’m as at home here as anywhere. Anywhere is anywhere you want it to be. It’s all the same to me. I’m not afraid of death, so what can they do to me? I don’t care what they do. The only thing I care about is my love. Death is psychosomatic. The gas chamber? [Laughs] My God, are you kidding? It’s all verses, all climaxes, all music. Death is permanent solitary confinement, and there is nothing I would like better than that.
A bell rings. A deputy comes over to tell us the time is up. The jail is closing for the night. Charlie gives us a song he's composed in jail, "Man Cross Woman," written neatly on lined yellow paper ripped from a legal tablet.
Charlie just stands at the entrance to the attorney room, smiling. Outside, in the distance, Clem and Squeaky wave and smile back ecstatically at their captured kind, their fingers pressed against the glass. The deputies watch Charlie, puzzled, as he flops his head from one side to the other like a clown. They cannot see Clem and Squeaky behind them, imitating his every movement, communicating in a silent animal language.
(ROLLING STONE, June 1970)
AN INTERVIEW WITH BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL
Q: When and how did you meet Charlie Manson?
A: Listen, one thing that you should establish about me—I was not then nor am I now a member of the Manson family. There never was a Manson family. That didn’t happen until everybody got busted. There were a bunch of girls, a few guys, a couple of ex-cons, a bunch of kids, some runaways with no support from home, and they were living in a garbage dump called the Spahn Ranch.
Q: When did you first meet Manson?
A: I met him shortly after he got out of prison. I think he had been out ten months or so. This was ‘66, I believe. Living in Topanga Canyon.
Q: Were you living at Gary Hinman’s at the time?
A: No, I wasn’t living with Gary. I had stayed with him previous to that.
I joined a band, The Milky Way, that Charlie was in. That’s how I met him. He was a very talented songwriter, good musician, lyrically, just excellent. He was somebody with an incredibly intense, vivid, expanded imagination because of all the time he’s done.
Q: Was his imagination the magic that people attributed to him?
A: Charlie Manson grew up in a tomb. To describe his personality, you have to understand that aspect. Like I’ve been in a state of incubation for a decade. For Charlie, it was more than a decade. He had been locked up since he was a little kid. I mean locked up all the time. I think his first commitment to a prison environment was at 13 years old in West Virginia and his life before that was foster homes and orphanages. When he got out at 33, it was the first time he ever had anybody to care about him.
Q: Did he really care about his “family” or were they each disposable units?
A: That was the only family he ever had, the only people who ever really cared about him and showed it. Let me explain this: Charlie made a commitment that he would be willing to die for his family. And when you make this commitment, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of: “I would be willing to kill for the Family.”
Q: Did he have an hypnotic effect on people?
A: I never thought of him that way. I suppose with some people he did.
Q: Some sources say that the girls looked up to Manson, but that Manson looked up to you. And Kenneth Anger once said that you and Manson had a homosexual relationship.
A: I would say he was attracted to me, but not.... He’s not homosexual at all. Ken was indulging in wishful thinking, daydreaming. That idea came first from Capote’s interview of Andy Warhol in Rolling Stone magazine. And, of course that was Andy Warhol’s wishful thinking. Ken just picked it up. It was good gay gossip [laughs. Aside to the photographer]. Truman Capote just wants to get dicked in the ass and killed. There’s never been any homosexual relationship between me and Charlie Manson.
Q: Well, it’s certainly not uncommon in jails.
A: Yeah, I’m sure he’s fucked a few fat butt boys, yeah. So have I. In that respect, maybe I’m homosexual, you know? But it’s a different kind of thing. There was a Truman Capote interview that took place in 1973, a television interview by CBS. It was going to be a series, but I think that a one-hour special was the extent of it. What Truman Capote did was to take a few fragments of that original television interview and re-write it. I have the actual original transcript somewhere and it doesn’t match at all with his interview in Interview magazine. Most of it was a complete fabrication.
Q: Why do you think he did that?
A: Well, I can assume by his Rolling Stone interview with Andy Warhol that he’s trying to relive In Cold Blood or something, I really don’t know. But he seems to be obsessed with this idea, and no matter what I say to him, he’s not going to get that idea out of his mind.
Q: Did you personally dislike him when you met him?
A: Oh, the moment I met him I didn’t dislike him. I was open to doing something with him. The only thing I knew about him was that he had tried to do some prison reform work, or something like that. Everyone in San Quentin at the time he came there was interested in cooperating with Truman Capote in the hopes that he could do something for them. Truman Capote, to put it mildly, did not meet their expectations.
Q: Did everybody at San Quentin feel that way?
A: Everybody at San Quentin assumed that he came in there for the purpose of discussing prison problems and trying to educate the public as to what was really going on in prison. And things were bad in a lot of respects. Everyone was interested in having that opportunity. It turned out that Truman Capote was only interested in coming there to have some conversations with the so-called “notorious” murderers. I would never have cooperated with him had I known this. The day before he interviewed me, he had a short personal interview with me, to explain his intentions. And what he explained to me was that he wanted to expose prison problems, discuss prison problems, and let the public know what’s going on. The next day we’re in front of the TV camera and he comes on with “This thing with you and the Manson Family” and he never got off of it. I fenced with him the whole time in front of the cameras.
Q: Did you ever protest to the news station that this was inaccurate?
A: It’s like appealing Capote to Capote. I hadn’t found one corner in the media where I could get a fair hearing.
Q: Who else did he interview at San Quenti
n?
A: He interviewed several people...I don’t recall.
Q: Sirhan Sirhan?
A: Sirhan Sirhan wasn’t there. He wasn’t in San Quentin at that time. He interviewed mostly murderers on death row. He specifically chose murderers.
Q: But in Interview he did say he saw Sirhan Sirhan at San Quentin.
You’re saying he wasn’t there?
A: He wasn’t there, no. In his Andy Warhol interview with Rolling Stone and in this interview in Interview magazine, Truman Capote seems preoccupied with himself and reliving what...I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I’m not a psychologist.
Q: I find that interesting, because he [Capote] said he had a little talk with Sirhan Sirhan. He says that you say, “So does Sirhan beef about being kept in special security?”
A: He asked me that?
Q: He has you saying that.
A: Fabrication.
Q: Sirhan Sirhan wasn’t in jail, then?
A: No. You can tell how long ago this was. He tries to sell himself on this preoccupation with murder. I don’t know; maybe he’s got a death wish—I don’t know.
Q: In this interview he has you being very pro-Manson Family. About how it was all justifiable homicide and that’s the way it was, very California sixties business and that kind of thing. Have you changed your views?
A: My stand on that, if you want to call it that, hasn’t changed. What I’ve been explaining to you is basically what I was trying to explain to him. I tried to take it [the murders] in some way out of that interpretation of the senseless robot murder machine type of image and make them perhaps just a little bit more understandable...Oh, this is sick. Anyone who would do something like this is, as far as I’m concerned, sicker than anything he’s trying to call sick. That is totally irresponsible journalism. And this guy [Capote] is supposed to be somebody....
Q: What else did you and Manson do together?
A: Made love to women once in a while.
Q: How long did you know Manson?
A: About three years.
Q: What were some of the things that you did together?
A: Oh, mostly played music. And a million crazy things that a lot of crazy guys do together. One time Charlie and I drove two trucks through Death Valley, just for the hell of it. We didn’t drag race. We just wanted to ride through that kind of terrain. We took two 4-wheel drive Army surplus power wagons. He had his group in the desert. It took two days.
We left the trucks, ate their beans and rice, stayed a couple of days. We wanted to hellraise and it was a blast.
Q: Did Manson have many male friends?
A: A few. Charles Manson was lonely. He used his women to attract a man because he liked having other men around to do “men things” with.
What man couldn’t be attracted by having the opportunity to go to bed with several women? To cater to his every fantasy, whatever. I didn’t have that attraction to that group. I didn’t need it. His women could not attract me. He could attract me because I admired his creativity.
Q: Then, you were indifferent to Charlie’s girls?
A: Oh no. I wouldn’t say that. Some of the girls were awfully cute, and I went to bed with some of them. But, it was never because I needed that.
I never lacked having women around me.
Q: Did Manson really care or like women?
A: Oh, Charlie loved women. He showed them plenty of respect. He treated those women better than most men ever treat their women.
Q: Were there many orgies and group sex events?
A: Once in a while. They were beautiful. Usually ten women, at least.
And three or four men.
Q: When did you first meet Gary Hinman?
A: I guess about six or eight months after I came down [to L.A.] from San Francisco.
Q: That was in 1966 and he invited you to stay at his home?
A: Yeah. He had a two level house and I stayed in the basement for two or three weeks. I never knew the man very well. He was a recluse.
Q: But you did live with him?
A: A very short while. He gave me the loan of his basement, and he was very rarely home. Gary Hinman was not somebody you could be close with. I was never a close friend of Gary Hinman’s. He was just somebody that I knew among a crowd of people in Topanga Canyon. His ideologies were very different from mine. He was into communism and all that sort of thing. I couldn’t relate to that at all. He was a political science major with a piano on the side for some kind of an income.
Q: Did you play music with him?
A: I did a little work with Gary. I didn’t know how to read or write music. He gave me a few basic lessons on how to notate.
Q: Why did you go to Gary Hinman’s home on July 25th, 1969?
A: I didn’t go there with the intention of killing Gary. If I was going to kill him, I wouldn’t have taken the girls [Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins]. I was going there for one purpose only, which was to collect $1000 that I had already turned over to him, that didn’t belong to me.
Q: When had you given him the $1000?
A: The night before.
Q: You paid Hinman $1000 for 1000 tabs of mescaline and then returned to the Spahn ranch?
A: Right. The whole transaction with the Straight Satans motorcycle club took place at Spahn’s Ranch. There were a few Satan Slavers hanging out there as well. The Straight Satans took the mescaline back to the motorcycle club at Venice where they were intending to party. They were really mad about it.
Q: How did you know that it was strychnine instead of mescaline in such a short time? If you didn’t try the drug yourself, how could you be certain that it was bogus or poison?
A: I don’t think that those guys would have lied to me. They wouldn’t have been that mad.
Q: How long had you and Hinman been doing these transactions?
A: Very rarely. I just happened to know that he had something. I was trying to be a nice guy, trying to be in with the fellows, trying to impress somebody.
Q: Impress the bikers?
A: They represented to me an element of freedom in America. On the road, and in their lifestyle, the freedom that they express with each other. I felt so desperate in this situation, being put in a cross with the motorcycle club. Naturally, they are going to mad at me—not at him. They didn’t even know him. I’m the one who took their money and brought back this mescaline, supposed mescaline. I’m in a helluva bind. If I don’t give them something, who knows about their plans.
Q: Why did you bring Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner to the Hinman house?
A: Because they were friends of Gary Hinman. Mary Brunner was close to him because she stayed with him for a while. She was as close as anybody could be with him. The girls didn’t even know what was going on. They just wanted to go and party and see him. No one was going there with any intention of killing Gary Hinman.
Q: In neither of your trials, nor in Ed Sanders’ or Bugliosi’s books, is there any mention of the Hinman murder stemming from a drug burn.
A: I never testified about it. I never told anybody. I didn’t know how to deal with it. What happened to me that day was the culmination of a whole lot of pressures that had been on me for several years.
Q: Alright. You arrived at Hinman’s and asked for your money back?
A: I demanded it. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I had a motorcycle band on my back.
Q: And Hinman refused to return the money?
A: Right. I was carrying a knife in a sheath at the time, more for utility than anything else. I had been wearing a knife for three to four years prior to that because I was always on the road.
Q: Who gave you the gun?
A: I gave the gun to Susan Atkins. We were sitting at the kitchen table.
I was looking for something worth $1000 that I could take back to these people. “If he moves,” I said, “shoot him.” She wasn’t going to shoot him. I was right about that. But he decided to be a hero and dove at the gun. And she’s yelling and
screaming, “He’s got the gun, he’s got the gun.” Oh God. We had a hell of a night. I wasn’t going to let him get the gun.
Q: How long were you in Hinman’s house?
A: A little less than 24 hours. It got dark again.
Q: When you killed Hinman, were you high or anything?
A: No. Nothing. I think I had a glass of wine at Gary’s that night.
Q: It was stated at your trial and assumed by virtually all parties that Charlie Manson made an entrance at the Hinman house, sometime during the period when you were there. Didn’t Manson show up at one point?
A: No, no, no. You see the Sheriff’s Homicide Department wanted to get Manson involved in my case, which was very difficult because Manson was not involved.
Q: Both prosecutor/author Vincent Bugliosi and Ed Sanders (in his book The Family) maintained that Charlie Manson came to Hinman’s during the night and slashed off Hinman’s ear with his knife. Now you say that you alone cut his face and killed him.
A: Yeah, yeah. That was the prosecution’s theory because they wanted to get Manson into the act [laughs]. They tried every trick in the book and I’ll tell you why. The Tate-La Bianca murders fell under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. However, the Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman murders both came into the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department [LASO]. And the Sheriff’s Dept. was in competition. Actually Hinman’s ear was never gone, never cut off. It was more his cheek sliced, actually a cut on his cheek that intersected the edge of his ear. That slash across his face occurred the night before he died in the fight over his gun.
Q: If you had no intention of killing Hinman, why did you bring a 9mm.
Radon pistol?
A: I borrowed it from Bruce Davis. I didn’t actually ask him. It was around [the Spahn Ranch]. I just borrowed it. I didn’t even know how to use the damn thing.