by Colin Wilson
It was obviously a possibility, and although Ressler did his best to appear calm, his pulse began to race. He tried bluffing, saying he was armed; Kemper was clearly unconvinced. Ressler was deeply relieved when the guard finally showed up.
It is a curious story, because the reader has come to feel that, no matter how much of a threat he might be to women, Kemper would certainly not represent a danger to a federal agent who had been interviewing him. The anecdote suddenly makes us aware that this is not correct; locked in with this massive psychopath, Ressler could easily have found himself in trouble. From then on, he made sure he had a partner during the interviews.
We also note that Kemper talked about screwing off Ressler’s head. He clearly had a fetish about heads, which meant he experienced sexual excitement at the thought of removing them. When he arrived home with the bodies of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu in the trunk, and found his mother already home, he went and severed the heads in the car because he could not wait. But how does one develop sexual excitement at the thought of beheading somebody? A psychiatrist consulted before his trial suggested that he associated it with symbolic removal of his penis (which was undersized), but that sounds far-fetched. Another psychiatrist suggested at Kemper’s trial that he might not be a sociopath but a classic sadist, and that must surely be closer to the truth. Certain types of sadism may be inborn, possibly some kind of undesirable genetic inheritance—that is, an inherent tendency to associate cruelty with sex. And he seems to have been only about four when he cut off the heads of his sister Allyn’s dolls. The reason may have been the noisy quarrels between his father and mother, both over six feet tall, both with loud voices. He also fantasized about killing his other sister, Susan, six years his senior, and his mother.
Ressler uncovered another interesting clue to the behavior of serial killers. Kemper admitted that his first murder—otherwise unrecorded—occurred after a quarrel with his mother, in the spring of 1972, when he left the house in a fury and swore he would kill the first attractive young woman he saw. It was a case of rage and frustration overcoming normal inhibitions, (since Kemper was basically a mild person), like an angry person driving too fast.
In an interview in Margaret Cheney’s book on Kemper, The Co-ed Killer, Kemper explains: “It’s kind of hard to go around killing somebody just for the hell of it. It’s not a kicks thing, or I would have ceased doing it a long time ago. It was an urge, I wouldn’t say it was on the full moon or anything, but I noticed that no matter how horrendous the crime had been or how vicious the treatment of the bodies after death, still at that point in my crimes the urge to do it again coming as often as a week or two weeks afterwards—a strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people—risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldn’t take because they could lead to arrest.”
As with so many serial killers, it became an addiction, a strange compulsion, not unlike demonic possession.
Ressler’s interviews with Ed Kemper occurred in 1978. During the same period, Ressler went to interview Charles Manson.
Manson had always maintained that he was not guilty of any crimes. He had not been present at any of the murders, and he had not ordered his followers to commit them. Strictly speaking, this was true—although Manson had tied up the LaBiancas before he sent Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel in to kill them.
Manson was a little man who looked harmless. But the staring, hypnotic eyes betrayed a man of high dominance. When he arrived in San Francisco in 1967, he was thirty-two years old, and had spent most of his adolescent and adult life in reform school or prison. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was fifteen when she became pregnant with him; a few years later she was in jail for armed robbery. Manson was placed in a children’s home when he was twelve and began his career of burglary soon after. By the time he emerged from a ten-year jail sentence in 1967—for car theft, check fraud, and pimping—he had been institutionalized for more than half of his life and would have preferred to stay in prison.
Yet, San Francisco in the age of the flower children proved to be a revelation to him. Suddenly he was no longer an ex-jailbird but a member of the “counterculture.” He was well qualified, having learned to play the guitar from Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, a former Public Enemy Number One and last surviving member of the infamous Ma Barker gang. Busking outside the university in Berkeley, he met a librarian named Mary Brunner and soon moved in with her. He acquired a second girl—Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme—when he found her crying on the pavement after a quarrel with her family. Manson told her, “I am the god of fuck.” After years in prison he was as sexually active as a rabbit.
He attracted young women because he had a striking personality, yet seemed unthreatening—almost a father figure to them. He once told a friend: “I’m a very positive force . . . I collect negatives.” A prison report on him had stated: “Charles Manson has a tremendous drive to call attention to himself.” But now he no longer had to call attention to himself; teenaged girls stuck to him as if they were fragments of colored paper and he possessed some kind of static electricity.
Another young woman he picked up was nineteen-year-old Susan Atkins, who had left home at sixteen and served some time for associating with criminals. She invited him back to her apartment, and as they lay naked, he told her to imagine that it was her father who was making love to her. She claimed that it was the greatest orgasm of her life. Later she was to say of him: “He is the king and I am his queen. And the queen does what the king says.”
The drugs undoubtedly helped. Manson and his “Family” never used heroin; they preferred pot and psychedelics. It was on an LSD trip that Manson saw himself as Christ, and went through the experience of being crucified. It made a deep impression. His followers later said that he had “Christlike vibes.” He liked to point out that his surname meant “Son of Man.”
He somehow acquired a battered Volkswagen bus, and with his “Family” of young women, now grown to half a dozen or so, he shuttled around between California, Oregon, and Washington, gradually acquiring more followers. They exchanged the Volkswagen for a yellow school bus and removed most of the seats from it so that they could sleep in it.
How did this mild, inoffensive, guitar-playing hippie turn into the maniac who made his followers believe that he wanted them to kill half a dozen people he had never met? When he arrived in San Francisco, he saw himself as a gentle pacifist, trying to spread the gospel of love and understanding. Within six months he had a group of followers over whom he exercised almost absolute control. He found the role of leader hard work; at one point he even announced the dissolution of the group and sent most of them away. But they soon drifted back, and he realized that, whether he liked it or not, he had to play the role of patriarch and guru.
But what is a patriarch and guru supposed to do? He has to demonstrate his power. Unlike many “messiah” figures, Manson never claimed to be God, or even Moses—although his sermons on modern corruption could also last for hours. He merely claimed to be a good musician—as good as the Beatles—but no one in the music business seemed to agree with him. Little by little, he became accustomed to exercising power. When he and disciple Paul “Tex” Watson came upon a rattlesnake, Manson ordered Watson to sit in front of it. Watson did (“I must have been crazy, but that’s the kind of effect he had on me”), and the snake rattled and slid away. Watson was convinced Manson had some strange power over animals. When Charles Melton, whom Family member Linda Kasabian had robbed of $5,000, went after them in search of his money, Manson handed him a knife and said he was welcome to kill him if he had any quarrel. Melton said he hadn’t, but he wanted his money. Manson said that in that case, he had better kill Melton, to prove that death did not exist. Melton decided to leave without the money.
When a drug dealer named Crowe went in search of $2,400 worth of marijuana he had paid for, Manson pointed a revolver at him and pulled th
e trigger. Nothing happened, and he fired again; this time Crowe collapsed with a bullet in his torso. Manson left, convinced that he had killed Crowe; in fact, Crowe survived, but did not report the shooting. Again, Manson had proved his ability to protect “his own.”
When another follower, Bobby Beausoleil, was ordered to persuade a musician named Gary Hinman to give the Family $20,000, Hinman refused, and Beausoleil rang Manson. Manson arrived with a sword, with which he slashed Hinman’s face, half severing his ear. After this, Manson left, leaving Beausoleil to try to beat Hinman into divulging the whereabouts of his money. When this failed, Beausoleil rang Manson again and asked what he should do, and Manson ordered him to kill Hinman. Beausoleil did not hesitate. He stabbed him twice in the chest, and Hinman died from loss of blood.
The gruesome Tate and LaBianca slayings of 1969 shocked the American public. Here, the accused Charles Manson walks into the courtroom in Santa Monica, California, on October 13, 1970. When his name was called to enter his plea, Manson stood, folded his arms, and turned his back on the judge. Susan Atkins, seated, a fanatic member of his family of followers, did the same. (Associated Press)
Two weeks after Hinman’s death, on August 8, 1969, four of Manson’s followers—Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian—set out to commit murder at a house in Cielo Drive, where an acquaintance in the music business lived. They encountered a friend of the houseboy, Steven Earle Parent, about to leave the drive, and Watson shot him in the head. After this, they went into the house and held up its inhabitants at gunpoint—film star Sharon Tate (who was eight months pregnant) and three friends, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Polish writer Voytek Frykowski, and hair stylist Jay Sebring, who were there for dinner. When the Manson clan left, all four were dead—brutally stabbed or shot.
The following night, Manson walked into the house of supermarket owner Leno LaBianca, held up LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, at gunpoint, and tied them up. After that, he left, and Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten stabbed the LaBiancas to death.
Two months later, Susan Atkins was in custody, being questioned about the Gary Hinman murder, and confided to a fellow prisoner her part in the Tate killings. The prisoner told someone else, who told the authorities. In December 1969, Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian, and Van Houten were charged with the murders. In March the following year, Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten were sentenced to death (Linda Kasabian turned state’s evidence). This was reduced to life imprisonment when the death penalty was abolished in California in 1972. Watson, because of legal complications, did not stand trial with the rest of the Family, but was instead found guilty of murder in a separate trial several months later.
After encountering the mild—if alarmingly huge—Kemper, Ressler could hardly have encountered anyone less similar. Manson was completely nonthreatening, but highly—almost maniacally—articulate.
Ressler made a point of studying the lives of his interviewees before he confronted them, and in the case of Manson, this quickly established a rapport. Manson explained to him how he became a kind of guru to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury. He was, as Ressler noted, physically unprepossessing, at five foot six inches and 130 pounds, and more than a decade older than most of the kids he encountered—a father with unkempt hair, dressed in tattered jeans, and carrying a guitar. He told Ressler: “I became a negative, a reflection of these kids.” What he meant, he explained, was that he thought they used him as a kind of mirror in which they saw their own faces. And that, he implied, was why he should be regarded as innocent.
At one point in the interview, Manson jumped up on the table to demonstrate the way the guards controlled prisoners. Ressler would have been willing to let it pass, but his fellow interviewer John Conway said sternly “Charlie, get off the table, sit down and behave,” and Manson did as he was told, and tried to make up by talking about his techniques of mind control. Then he asked for a souvenir, and attempted to take Ressler’s FBI badge. Ressler compromised by giving him a pair of sunglasses.
What was happening, fairly clearly, was that Manson was deliberately behaving like a naughty schoolboy, as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. He was obviously delighted when, on his way back to his cell, the guard found the sunglasses, assumed he had stolen them, and marched him back to Ressler—who then confirmed that he had given them to him. Manson was demonstrating to the guard that he had a powerful authority figure on his side.
Manson’s plea of innocence becomes absurd when we recollect how he had slashed off half of Gary Hinman’s ear and then told Beausoleil to kill him. Ressler obviously realized this, since he speaks of Manson “with the sunglasses incongruously perched on his face—hiding these fearsome eyes.” He recognized that Manson was a king rat merely pretending to be a playful mouse.
This is undoubtedly the real key to Manson—high dominance. And to fully understand him it is also necessary to know something about the psychology of “rogue messiahs.” People such as Manson, who discover that they can exert their charisma on a group of followers, quickly become intoxicated with a sense of power. The Reverend Jim Jones, who committed suicide with a thousand followers in Guyana in 1978, and cult leader David Koresh, who died in the FBI siege at Waco in 1993, demonstrate the same mechanisms at work. Dominating their followers, and being allowed to take their sexual pick of the females, is obviously as addictive as sex murder is to the serial killer, but has the additionally strange characteristic of developing into paranoia that quickly turns murderous. It was Manson’s ability to control his followers, and the heady delight of exercising dominance, that led to the Tate and LaBianca murders.
Ressler went on to interview Tex Watson, who had killed Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. As he expected, Watson was not a dominant male, although he had led the girls who helped him in the killings. Manson had permitted this, presumably as a kind of reward to his lieutenant, but had told Ressler that letting “that SOB Watson have too much power in the Family” was the dumbest thing he had ever done. Ressler noted that “the rivalry between Manson and Watson, which I learned about from both men, was a definite factor in the dynamics of the murders.”
Watson had made his own kind of peace with society by his conversion to born-again Christianity; he had become a renowned preacher and, Ressler noted, “walked around as if he owned the place.” So, in a paradoxical sense, Watson had achieved his aim of becoming the dominant male, even though he had paid for it with his freedom. Watson had written a book placing all the blame on Manson, claiming that Manson had ordered them to kill. Manson had not turned him into a homosexual, as he had done with others, said Watson, but he had wrapped him around his finger, like an old convict with a new one. The psychedelic drugs, he said, were used by Manson to bring people under his control. Every night after dinner, when everybody was high, Manson climbed up on a mound at the back of the ranch and preached for hours.
All this, says Ressler, gave him the insight he wanted. Manson was not a homicidal maniac, but a cunning manipulator. And when Ressler got back to Quantico, he verified this by interviewing two of the Manson girls, Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good, who were in a nearby prison. The two wore matching hooded outfits, and approached him like nuns, walking in unison. Manson had obviously done a brilliant job of brainwashing them; they said they were “sisters in the church of Charles Manson, and that they had kept the faith.” The faith, apparently, was that our egos prevent us from seeing the truth. We must let go of the ego, “cease to exist,” as Manson sang in one of his songs. Once you cease to exist, you become totally free.
Ressler comments that they were simply inadequate personalities who had submitted their destinies to a male whom they adored. One day, they believed, Charlie would come out of jail, and they would be waiting, ready to start where they had left off. They had both proved their fidelity: Good by writing letters to directors of large corporations threatening them that unless they stopped polluting the earth, Manson disciples would kill them
; Fromme by pointing a revolver at President Gerald Ford and pulling the trigger. (Fortunately a Secret Service agent had aborted the assassination attempt by interposing his hand between the hammer and the firing pin.)
In fact, when Sandra Good was released in 1991, she moved to a town close to Manson’s prison in California.
5
The Behavioral Science Unit
When he returned to Quantico from California, Ressler told his immediate superior, Larry Monroe, what he had been doing. Monroe was aghast. “You saw who?” But he allowed Ressler to visit Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good on condition that he did not officially know about it, and that Ressler would later make it official by putting something on paper when he got back.
But their scheme was revealed prematurely. A colleague to whom Ressler had spoken about his interviews talked to someone about them in the lunchroom, within earshot of the FBI Academy chief, Ken Joseph, a member of the Hoover old guard. Monroe and Ressler were ordered to present themselves in Joseph’s office.
Asked why he had not been told about the initiative, Ressler was able to point out that Joseph has issued a memo a few months ago encouraging instructors to do research. That, Ressler said, is what he was planning.
Joseph pointed out that interviewing people like Sirhan and Manson could cause problems for the Bureau. Ressler replied that he had put his intentions in a memo before he left for California, and Joseph said he hadn’t seen it (which was inevitable, since no memo had been written). Ressler was told to go and dig out the memo. He did this promptly, by writing one up, backdating it, and crumpling and Xeroxing it to make it look bedraggled. It said that he planned to interview some serial killers to see if they would be willing to participate in the research. He called it the Criminal Personality Research Project.