We talked about collecting, some of the other creations Charlie works on in his cell. Graywolf sat beside me on the couch and presented a small black box. He carefully removed the lid, revealing an object obscured by thin tissue paper wrapping. Graywolf gently uncovered a miniature string-art spider, the most rare of all Manson collectibles, handmade in secret from thousands of knots formed in the thread Charlie unravels from his underwear. Graywolf explained the tenderness with which Charlie forms his art-animals. He talks to them, even sings to them while he shapes their rounded bodies and spindly legs, as if to infuse them with life. They take months to make and are extremely rare, so, though I had heard about them, I had never actually seen one.
I’d spent a full day with Graywolf and Star. It was getting late, and I was getting ready to leave. Graywolf asked me what my plans were for the next day. I explained that I was going to meet and visit with William Harding, another friend of Manson’s, a collector of true crime memorabilia who visits numerous convicted killers across the country. William had amassed one of the largest collections of true crime artwork and artifacts in the world.
Graywolf and Star said they wanted to send me off with some music. Graywolf got his guitar, Star picked up her violin, and they proceeded to play some of the finest traditional music I have ever heard. I was completely taken aback. They played three or four songs for me, we said our goodbyes, and made plans to get together in a few days. As I walked to the door, Graywolf called after me, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I was confused until he handed me the small black box with the string spider inside. “Serious?” I asked. Graywolf smiled and said, “Yah, just make sure you give him a good home.” The door closed behind me. I could hear Graywolf and Star resume playing, the music slowly fading as I walked to my car.
Manson called later that evening. He said he’d been ready to visit that day, but hadn’t gotten called down to the visiting room. I explained what happened, and assured him I would contact the warden as soon as possible. I told Manson about the rest of my trip. He seemed pleased I’d connected with Graywolf and Star.
The News
Prison is something that was invented hundreds of years ago that had a reason, but there’s no reason for that anymore. They’re still living in the shadows of forcing people to be in cages and they don’t realize what’s really going on, that everybody that’s doing that is going to be killed. What are you doing? What are you doing with all these kids locked up in cages? What is it doing? It’s not doing anything. It’s just making it worse. What is crime? They don’t care because they don’t believe it, they don’t know what it is. It’s got to be a movie. They’re starting it at the border but then the news press won’t give it to you. What the news will do is they’ll give you a little bit and then they’ll take advantage for their news and work it out for what they’re doing.
They got the little community, the news community, like, they’re not going to tell you that they’re running out of water. They’re going to go somewhere where they can have water, and if you’re running out of water then you won’t know it until after it happens because they’re not going to give you the news. They’re going to give you what they want you to hear. They’re dealing you what they want you to know. And unless there’s a whole bunch of people getting killed at one time, they’re not telling you that there’s a war going on around you. You know, they’re saying, “Oh well, thirteen people got killed at the border over there, but that was drug related, that’s all.” There’s nothing wrong with drugs. They’ve got a big problem made out of drugs. Sell them in a drug store. If somebody wants drugs, give them drugs. They want to arrest everybody, put everybody up against the wall, lay them down on the ground and ruin their manhood over nothing. It’s still a stupid fucking game left over from old movies.
That’s what this state is doing now, man. By the time you get the news it’s too late. By the time you find out I mean, and then when people find out they just read it like it’s coming from somewhere else, like it’s an act, and all you got to do is change the channel, and it’s all right. Man, you can’t talk to them. They won’t listen. You tell them something, and they look at you and say, “Yeah, you’re right.” They shake their heads and get right back in their cars and drive down the road. You tell them they got to give that automobile up, man. They say, “Yeah, we know.” They’re not going to give it up, man. They got airplanes that fly over this place and they got contrails that stretch out fifty miles. And then the guy that owns it, he’s got his own airplane, he’s flying it to Canada.
He thinks that his ranch in Canada will survive because he’s using up all the land here for cotton. And he’s sucking all the energy up out of the planet over here, thinking that he’s got his little biosphere, that he can hide somewhere else and get away because he’s got all kinds of money and lawyers doing what they say and all that crap, so there’s just no end to it. It’s just so big, man.
Butcherman
Butcherman got out of San Quentin and picked up this little hippie chick, and he says, “You know, I just got out of prison, I want some pussy.” She says, “No, I don’t think so.” He says “I’m gonna take it.” She says, “You can’t take it. I’m protected by Jesus.” He says, “I’m Jesus. I’ll just take it, and I’ll be Jesus.” So, he just took it, and said, “See, now I’m Jesus.” She said, “No you’re not.” He says, “I’ll just kill you, and I’ll be Jesus.” She says, “You can’t kill me. Jesus protects me.” So, he hit her in the head with a wine bottle, and put her head under the tire. When the highway patrol busted him, he was driving back and forth over her head on the highway, and he had his Bible with him. They got him and put him back in the nut ward, and put him in the cell next to me. He had a single-edged razor blade, and he was using it to make picture frames. This cop came up to him, and said, “You’re not bad, you’re just a punk.” And here’s where he got the name Butcherman.
He stood up to the cop and said, “Mister, you don’t even have any idea what bad is.” The cop said, “I know what bad is.” Butcherman took the single-edged razor blade, and grabbed his [own] ear and cut it off, and then he grabbed his other ear and cut it off. He had both his ears in his hand, and he stuck them in his mouth, and he chewed them up, and he spit them in the cop’s face. He said, “That’s bad, you son of a bitch!” He said, “As soon as I get out of my cell, I’m going after your motherfucking ass. If I did that to myself, you know what I would do to you.” He said, “I’m Wilson, you remember that!” And I said, “I christen you Butcherman Wilson.”
So, Butcherman would come out on the same exercise yard as me, ‘cause everyone was trying to get me pushed over the edge, and they sure wanted someone to take care of Butcherman ‘cause they couldn’t handle him, no one could handle him. All the doctors turned tail, and ran like rabbits, like they was all runnin to Canada, trying to get out of the rain. You know how that goes. That place was thriving with insanity, everybody was crazy. You up on Pat Kearney? He was the guy who went and got all those Roscoes. He cut them off and put them in mason jars, the trash bag killer. He was a hell of a dude, man. He had a valid point of view, according to me. He didn’t think that fear should be God. People were using fear to get that Roscoe over as God, so he said he had God in a mason jar.
Can You Lie?
Well, an intelligent person realizes you got to have someone to blame so everyone else can get off, you know, find someone that you can put the blame on and you blame them and then you go on about business as usual. I find there’s two people you can’t lie to: first person or the last person. If you lie to the first person, there ain’t nowhere you can go to get away. You can only run in one direction. If you lie to the last person, there’s no way to get away. You can only run in one direction. And if you’re in the middle and you lie, you can most of the time get away with it for a long time before it catches up with you. But the idea is, like, to give a fuck, really?
IX
MURDER FOR SALE
After
I left Graywolf and Star, I found my way back to LA, then to Hollywood. I had driven by a tourist spot, The Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard, several times over the previous few years, but I’d never stepped inside. Things were different this time. The next day I would be meeting with William Harding. An expert in true crime and serial killers in general, he is often consulted for various projects, papers, articles, and books. William is unique, not only because he has amassed one of the largest collections of true crime memorabilia in the world, but also because at the same time he has befriended some of the most notorious inmates in the American prison system. As I endured everything on my mind, Hollywood seemed to lose its luster; things began to seem surreal. The Museum of Death looked like the perfect destination.
The Museum is situated about a mile from the tourist area of Hollywood Boulevard. The building itself invokes a curious combination of charm and foreboding. I noticed first the huge, white, wrought-iron gates guarding the exterior, designed to intimidate any would-be thief. Atop the gates grow thick, impenetrable vines, which burst into a halo of red blooms about the cranium of a large cross-hatched rendition of a grinning human skull.
I had seen Manson memorabilia on display before. I’d encountered his art for sale in a New York City gallery and, in Tennessee, I’d visited the Ripley’s museum, which boasts a Charles Manson exhibit complete with a set of Charlie’s prison clothes. The last time I traveled to Niagara Falls, I found myself face to face with a Charles Manson replica in a wax museum. Manson is a pop culture phenomenon, an icon, and so I felt pretty confident that the Museum of Death would possess some interesting Charles Manson relics.
A soon as I entered, I was greeted by its curators, JD and Cathee. They were incredibly knowledgeable and excited to explain the exhibits. I paid the small admission and ventured inside. One of the first rooms was dedicated to the entire embalming and burial process. There were rows upon rows of equipment beside funeral-home handouts like promotional fans and matchboxes. The size and content of the collection could be overwhelming; there was truly a lot to take in. JD and Cathee told me they’d spent years collecting the macabre treasures and the carefully laid out displays showed how prized each piece was. Taxidermy, specimens suspended in jars, and some of the most disturbing photos I’d ever seen. Suicides, autopsies, murder scenes, the aftermath of a man hit by a truck. There was graphic documentation of just about every way a human being can cease to exist. I saw stuffed remains of animals that had once been the pets of celebrities like Jayne Mansfield and Liberace. A diorama featuring the Heaven’s Gate suicides had been constructed; it featured an actual bed seized from the scene and clothing worn by one of the deceased draped over a lifeless, life-sized figure. The purple cape adorned with patches of the cult’s logo was mind boggling to behold. I walked through a room dedicated to serial killer artwork, which featured pieces by Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, and Ottis Toole. I was surprised to find nothing of Manson’s on the walls.
I came across the crime scene photos from the Sharon Tate murders in full color, hung like art. It was like looking at a most terrible train wreck, yet I couldn’t look away. This event had somehow brought me to the spot in which I was standing. Throughout my stay in Hollywood I had started hearing my inner voice ask, “What the hell are you doing?” Standing here, staring at the young mother, stabbed about her swollen belly and tied from the neck by a rope, that question echoed in my head louder than ever before. I felt as though I were seriously invading someone’s privacy; no one deserved to be seen butchered like this. I couldn’t help but question what becoming a voyeur to this bloodbath said about me. I was overwhelmed by the thought that whoever did this deserved at least equitable retribution. The idea that Charlie was somehow behind all of this had been ingrained in my mind since childhood. I turned away from the images with this thought: How could you carry the blame for such a horrendous act, whether you were responsible or not?
I rushed out of the Tate murder scene and right into a room dedicated to Charles Manson. The space was filled with a ton of photos, newspaper clippings, odds and ends including a Manson-autographed baseball, and a few of Charlie’s paintings. The paintings were a lot larger than the ones Manson had sent me, but I could immediately recognize his technique. Among the quintessential Manson paintings was a piece that depicts a detailed, glow-in-the-dark, underwater scene: a colorful collection of amoebas set starkly against a background of black lines scrawled on white canvas, markings that seemed to stem from careful calibration at the same time invoking a feeling for the artist’s compulsion. Some of the sea creatures were detailed down to the cellular level; round, asymmetrical shapes composed of clustered, conjoined circles, each filled with tiny dotted nuclei.
I remember seeing, as I passed through the few remaining rooms, some artwork GG Allin had made with his own blood and hair and some kitchen cabinet doors from which some other rock star (I can’t remember whom) hung himself. This completed my tour.
JD met me at the exit, eager to see my reaction. “What did you think?” he asked, as I struggled to find the words to express my astonishment. “That’s pretty fucked up,” was all I could manage in reply. JD smiled and laughed; I did too. I ended up spending a couple of hours talking with JD and Cathee, who both struck me as wonderful people. JD and I share a deep love and fascination for the bizarre. The three of us chatted about the people that visit the Museum and their various impressions of the treasures inside. “Our favorite reaction,” Cathee explained, “is something we like to call ‘the falling down ovation.’“ Apparently quite a few Museum guests are unable to resist the urge to pass out as well as I was. I was interested to learn how a museum dedicated to death and destruction could originate from such lovely, lively people. I discovered that JD’s interest in death stems from his childhood, during which his healthy curiosity about what happens when we die was discouraged and labeled “weird.” As a result, he wanted to create a place where death could be explored as a fact of life, where people could learn, ask questions, and confront their worst fears without feeling the taboo. While the images displayed inside the Museum are graphic and unsettling at best, Cathee and JD insisted that just because death isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it’s disrespectful to display it. The couple regards the exhibits and collections as part public service, part artistic expression.
I told Cathee and JD about my relationship to Manson and filled them in on the visits I planned to make throughout the rest of my trip. Through their collecting, they both knew Stanton LaVey, Matthew Roberts, and William Harding. When it comes to circles centered on true crime and serial killers, it truly is a small world. As I prepared to leave, JD told me he had something else to show me. “You’ll love this,” he laughed. He ducked back into the Museum and returned with a living, conjoined, two-headed turtle. I had never seen a live conjoined animal, and, to me, the turtle was a living miracle, the sight of which totally made my day.
The following afternoon, I met up with William Harding at his home. He was in the process ofmoving, and most ofhis collection had already been meticulously packed into crates and boxes. The sheer volume of stuff struck me immediately. William pointed to a large pile of oversized envelopes, artwork, and God knows what else. “That stuff just came in these last couple of weeks,” he shrugged. “I just haven’t had time to go through it yet.” I learned that William is almost constantly sorting and organizing. It goes without saying that the inmates he’s befriended throughout the world’s prison systems have quite a bit of time and enthusiasm to create things for appreciative prison art connoisseurs.
We went upstairs to the master bedroom, where William showed me his most prized possessions: prison IDs, fingerprint charts, corporal artifacts like hair and teeth. William showed me four teeth, two of which had belonged to cannibal killers, preserved in little plastic containers, almost as if they were rare coins. While he flipped through various boxes, I noticed a lock ofManson’s hair. He showed me an authentic Manson fingerprint chart. “How in the
hell did you get this stuff?” I asked. William told me that was something he really couldn’t talk about. I didn’t press him. Instead, I asked him to show me his absolute favorite piece. Without hesitation, he turned to face the wall behind us. “That,” he said, and pointed to a black matted frame surrounding a pentagram necklace Charles Manson had made. It was intricate and original in that it was a true piece of prison craft; Charlie had constructed the satanic symbol out of toilet paper and dental floss. I was starting to feel that my trip had really become rich with satanic undertones.
When I’d met William the day before, I immediately decided that I liked him. He has a lot of contained energy, which creates an aura that’s more hyper than intense, so he comes across as being very alive. He emits a great deal ofconfidence and enthusiasm, yet at the same time he seems comfortably average and unassuming. I sometimes try to predict a person’s nature before we’ve met, based on what I know about him or her. For some reason, my idea of what a person is “supposed” to look or act like is almost always completely wrong. Such was the case with William. The more time we spent talking, the more I realized I couldn’t find any trace of evil about him. He seemed a complete contradiction to his home, a space filled with the most intimate keepsakes of people held responsible for the world’s most heinous crimes.
Charles Manson Now Page 14