I asked Vicki to delve more deeply into what she knew about the murders. She told me that “Tex” Watson, who was convicted of the Tate/LaBianca murders, got into drug dealing after he left the Manson family ranch and went to LA. Apparently Tex owned a wig store. He fell in love with a woman named Luella and she got pregnant, but Luella went to Mexico and had an abortion. Tex became angry with Luella for terminating the pregnancy and at the same time he grew upset over one too many drug deals gone wrong. So he relocated back to the ranch, a move Vicki described as “a huge mistake for everyone there.” Vicki said that Charlie eventually moved Tex and Susan Atkins out of the main part of Spahn because “they were going out and starting their own little drug ring, and they would bring speed and all this other stuff to the ranch, which Charlie didn’t like.”
Vicki told me that the drug ring was “the beginning of the end.” She assured me that, judging by the extensive interactions she witnessed at the ranch, Manson never tried to manipulate anyone’s mind. “Charlie has always said, ‘You gotta do this on your own.’ I’ve never received any commands or orders. I heard things like, ‘You wear too much makeup’ and we’d all laugh at that.” Vicki said that Charlie only spoke the truth: “Everyone thinks that Charlie wants to stay in prison, that he’s happy there and never wants to get out; that’s not true. He has asked me so many times if I could help him get transferred back up to West Virginia; he wanted to go back there so bad.”
I asked Vicki about Susan Atkins, who was present during the Tate murders and died ofa brain tumor in 2009 while incarcerated for her crimes. Vicki told me about her friend Linda, who was very close to Susan. “Linda was staying with Susan every day until she died and she would call me almost every day saying, ‘Susan is so sick, it’s pitiful.’ You do have to have compassion; Linda was upset and crying-it was hard on her.” Apparently Susan told Linda her version of what happened the day of the murders. The account goes something like this:
Family members Linda Kasabian, Tex Watson, and Susan Atkins went to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s house so that Tex could continue a drug deal with Abigail Folger’s lover, Voytek Frykowski. Abigail Folger was a friend of Sharon Tate’s, and both Abigail and Voytek were guests at the estate that evening.Voytek told the group to come back and subsequently turned them away on their return. At one point, Linda Kasabian entered the house, Abigail Folger took her to the bathroom, and the two did a couple of lines of cocaine. At one point Voytek got upset, there was a scuffle, and he threatened to call the police. Tex left the residence, angry, and went back to the ranch.
There was a call from Spahn Ranch to Sharon Tate’s house. Tex gave warning on the phone that he was coming, which is why, according to Vicki, Voytek had his clothes back on. Abigail wasn’t afraid when she saw one of the girls pass by her bedroom, and Sharon canceled the party she’d planned along with the visit from her sister, Debbie Tate.
Vicki said, “Well, right before Susan died, Charlie use to send me letters he wanted me to forward to her. He wanted her to know, that if she just told the truth before she died, she would have nothing to lose.” Vicki said she tried to be the “letter passer,” but no one wanted to bring the subject of Charlie up to Susan. The answer was always, “No.”
I asked Vicki if the murders were simply part of a home invasion, and she assured me, “That’s all it was.” I was surprised to hear that the people murdered in the Tate house knew the people in the Manson Family. Vicki explained, “They knew each other. The Family was over there all the time; they were in and out and they swam in the pool at the Tate house.” Vicki told me her friend Sylvia knew Jay Sebring, who was also murdered at the Tate-Polanski residence. She said Jay and Tex Watson were both hairdressers who knew each other. “Jay was into some really crazy shit, but it was the ‘60s and everyone was. It went on everywhere-drugs, orgies-what happened at the ranch, happened in Hollywood. In fact, people from Hollywood went to the ranch as much as the people from the ranch went to stay in Hollywood.
“My friend Sammy lives in Georgia and he believed he had Abigail Folger’s car, but couldn’t really prove it. He asked me if Charlie remembered anything unique about Abigail’s car. Through letters, Charlie said to go into the glove box, pull the felt lining out, and look there for cuts in the glove box. If there were cuts, that was her car. Charlie said they use to cut up cocaine, eight balls inside the glove box. Sure enough, Sammy discovered the lining had been redone, and when the lining was taken out, the cut marks were there. Sammy traveled out to see Tex Watson and Tex told him ‘the truth.’ He said, ‘Yes. It was all me. Charlie never told anybody to do anything. I was in a rage and it was a drug burn.’ Tex can’t tell the truth now; he doesn’t want to lose his ministry. He can’t go back on what he said. God has forgiven him, and he needs to move on with his life. He said if he told the truth it wouldn’t change anything. Tex is probably right.”
Suzan LaBianca, Leno and Rosemary’s daughter, attended Watson’s 1990 parole hearing and told the parole board that, because of Tex’s newfound Christianity, he was a new man, no longer dangerous, and should be released from prison.
Vicki told me a lot, and everything she said seemed believable. But, with this story, nothing is really what it seems. With every question answered, the number of further unanswered questions increased exponentially.
Understanding
For me, Venice beach is a place in my head, you know, steps that I walked on. I’m living on the ground that I walked on. I’ve been out four times. Whatever out is to most people’s minds is not really out, that’s just what they’ve got in their heads. Out is not where they think it is.
There are some things that cannot be understood by the analytical mind. It’s not possible to understand some things unless you’ve transcended the physical level, and that’s on the level of impossibility, it just can’t happen, it’s beyond words. So when you explain something that’s taken twenty or thirty years to transpire, and you try to explain it as common sense…it don’t fit. I’m going to give you an example. There’s an actor named Carradine who used to play all the monster movies. He was a hillbilly out of Kentucky. He was related to grandma, he was related to the Maddox clan, the Ku Klux Klan, all of those old sharp shootin hillbillies, coons on their heads, shit like that. A lot of people don’t understand the Ku Klux Klan. They understand the publicity of it. The Klan is an empty hood in a circle of colors; it doesn’t have anyone in it. You can’t explain something to someone when there’s no such thing. How can you explain no such thing as being no such thing? If there is no such thing, then how can you explain no such thing is no such thing? But, there is such a thing, as no such thing, and in that chamber of no such thing is no such thing. Nobody exists to start with. So there’s no complications, or confusion. It’s only what it is, and what it is could go to the Dalai Lama, but actually he would be a bitch, ‘cause he would do as he was told. In order to exist, you’d have to have words, and the words would need to be true, and how could the words be true when they’re founded on shit to start with? The whole fuckin’ thing is a big garbage dump, man.
My Life
My life is the only life I got to live in and I’m trying to live my life draggin a lot of other people around with me, and it’s not easy all the time. In order to succeed you’ve got to have the truth. If the truth is not involved, it wont work. All that morality, and all that garbage that they are preaching, and teaching, but they’re not doing, because it doesn’t exist to start with. It’s all a big rerun, of a rerun, of a rerun.
I stand sixty-three years witness. I haven’t done anything. The only thing I’ve done is fight to stay alive. I don’t know anything. I haven’t stood up for anything, or rejected anything. I haven’t done anything. All I’ve been is a hard dick and that’s it, man, all I’ve been is fuckin’ feeling good and making weird sounds. I make some weird sounds, you know. Half the time, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. I really don’t care, it doesn’t mean anything anyway. It only means somet
hing if I mean something to you. If I mean something to you, then I wouldn’t be in here. All I mean to you is what you can make out of it, what you can get out of it. It’s just the human condition.
I’m the money, I’m the card game, I’m a deck of cards. I was raised by those cards all my life. I’ve been running with those cards. Those are my only friends. Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it?
Trying To Trick Me?
Why do I have to spend my life in prison because someone else wanted to use my life? The Roman Catholic Church have been using me ever since reform school. They recognized me as the devil right off. I wouldn’t study their stuff. I threw their books at them. I refused to stand in their confirmation line. So, what they did is they tricked me. They send another inmate to me who said, “Let’s run away.” And I said, “How could we do that?” He said, “We’ll go to the corn field down there, and there will be two bicycles there. We’ll steal the bicycles, then we’ll go out on the highway, and we’ll hitchhike back to the city, and find your mom.” I thought that was a good idea. When I was ready to do it, he said, “I changed my mind. I don’t want to go.” So, I ended up going by myself. It took me a lot of years to wake up, and they put me up to that. See it? They tried to beat me. There was a monk named Thomas. They use to pick on me when I was a kid, so he took me over to the gym and showed me how to box, told me how to hold my hands up. Took me to the boxing ring, showed me how to fight, so I went into boxing. I went to Chicago and won a jacket, that’s at ten years old.
Religion
Well, you wake up. There’s no ending to anything. That there’s no beginning, that everything has always been and will always be, that the only reality is eternity. The eternal moment is all that’s real. All the rest of it is a play or given to you by somebody that’s already gone. They start giving it to you the minute you’re born. They start piling it in your brain. See, I noticed that when I got out last time. When this kid was born they started putting shit over on him, you dig? And I wonder what the fuck are they doing that for? And then I seen that everything is one, everything you look at is you, so there is nothing else. Only ifyou allow it, ifyou let it into your existence, but you can only do what you’ve [learned] to do in that syndrome or that episode or that enclosure. You know that enclosure is you. Where that begun and where it ends is never. It only begins and ends in your mind. When you wake up all your thought patterns are just program implants that don’t really mean anything because you’re as much a robot as a robot is, because there ain’t no such thing as no such thing. The universe travels around you. Everything travels around you because you’ve never moved, it’s impossible, unless you were God. God never lives and never dies. God is always there.
Yeah, heaven was right there but you didn’t know it. I mean all you knew is what they were telling you, and they were telling you, “You need this and you wanna buy that, we got that for you, and this don’t cost lots.” And you go through everything there is to go through, and you need to find the holiest most religious person in the world, and he wants to suck your peter. And you say, “Oh well,” you don’t know, you only know what you’re told. I run back and say, “Yeah, this holy man wants to suck my dick and he beat me up, man, whipped me.” [They] said I was lying and this holy man wouldn’t do that, so then I find out that it’s all about the thrill, all about those feelings that you get when no one’s around, which all boils down to “don’t give a fuck and why are you always helping those rich middle-class people.” How come you ain’t over there helping the poor like you say. You know, we tell the rich we’re helping the poor. We’re actually not helping the poor, we’re helping ourselves. Well, you say that makes more sense than the other thing you were playing with. Because if you helped them other people they’ll eat you up. If you want to give everything to the poor people then that puts you a couple steps under poor because they’ll eat you up, man. Go back in that back alley and see if the winos don’t pick your bones. So if the most holy want to go back, they built the monasteries high up in the mountain where no one can get to them. They send soldiers to die in war because they can’t face the reality out the back door. The trash can reality of the garbage people. You know, they’re the ones that have to work it all out and virgins are not sacrificed on the pyramids for good. They’re sacrificed on the back streets for drugs and money and bureaucrats and politicians and preachers, double-dealing lying preachers.
XIII
UNCOVERING THE FINAL DETAILS
It was Stanton LaVey who told me about John Aes-Nihil. Stanton has known John since he was a kid, when John was his mother’s and stepfather’s (Zeena and Nikolas) roommate. Stanton and John were close and John used to drive Stanton to school. Stanton told me that what makes John unique, aside from the deep connection he feels with the Manson Family, is the fact that he has been interested in Manson from the beginning: 1969.
John created the market for Charles Manson memorabilia, the now-popular nostalgia scene surrounding the stuff of serial killers, true crime, and all things underground. According to Stanton, “John Aes-Nihil is the original swap meet, flea market, smut peddling, bootlegging pirate.” Most important, Stanton said, is that John does what he does for the right reasons, “taking care of people” along the way. “His intentions personally are deeper, philosophical; he wants to carry this information forward into the future, in one of the oldest, truest ways tested: through magazines, literature, books, and archives.” Stanton said he could guarantee that John is the authority on all things Manson, that he “knows all.” His archives have been accessed by virtually everyone attempting to discover or produce anything related to Manson. He owns every piece of video and the rarest photos. He has personally interviewed hundreds of people related to the Manson Family and documented it all. His interest borders on obsession; it’s staggering.
I made the drive out to the Mojave Desert where John has lived for a while. He has since told me that the desert, out in the middle of nowhere and away from everyone else, is a haven for Satanists. John is pretty soft spoken; he has a deliberate way of talking, as though he thinks about everything first. In a way, he has the composure of an artist and, after spending about ten minutes with him, it was clear to me that this man was one of the most fascinating people I have ever met. I was disappointed I had only a few hours to spend with him. I wished I could have spent a week out in the desert, learning as much as I could from John.
John started filming and directing The Manson Family Movies in 1974 while living in Oakland. The focus of the project was to reproduce the rumored films Manson family members made of each other’s exploits leading up to and including the events of August 1969. John embarked on an immense amount of research before he began shooting the home video style footage. He tried to keep the reenactments as authentic as possible, using the same locations, and keeping the family’s “feel.” The film premiered in 1984.
John told me how the real Manson Family movies (ifthey ever, indeed, existed) might have gotten started. According to the story he was told, a TV station had been doing a shoot at Spahn Ranch when some of the crew’s equipment was stolen. Filmmaker John Waters asked Tex Watson about the alleged theft, a crime Tex said never happened. Ed Sanders, author of The Family, claimed that the family filmed a satanic cult snuffing someone at Ventura Co. Line beach. According to Sanders, the filming of this event led to the family’s filmed recreation of its own murders. Sanders’ account alleges that a “famous New York Artist,” which to some sounds like code for “Andy Warhol,” acquired these films. John said he once asked John Waters if he ever talked to Warhol about this. Waters had; when he’d asked Warhol if Warhol owned the movie, his response was simply “I don’t know.”
John believes he got the real story about the family films from interviewing Robert Hendrickson, director of the 1973 documentary Manson. John said that Robert and his friend Craig had been working on a movie about Jesus, when they somehow ended up at Spahn Ranch and started making a movie about the family. Eventual
ly, director Laurence Merrick got involved and told Hendrickson, as well as the family, that he could make everyone rich from the resulting documentary. “Apparently,” said John, “Merrick never gave the family any money-and you know what happened to him.” (Merrick was shot in the back by a deranged student of his acting school in 1977.)
John started the Manson Archives and the Archives of Aesthetic Nihilism around 1980. John coined the term “Aesthetic Nihilism,” which is art or music so extreme it “verges on destruction.” He then started work on the first of the Tennessee Williams Trilogy, while living with Nikolas, Zeena, and Stanton in Hollywood. John’s next project was The Ma Barker Story, the prequel to the Manson Family Movies, to be filmed at Barker Ranch. He has also contributed volumes to the music and photography scenes; he’s collaborated with everyone from Kenneth Anger to William Burroughs.
John told me he acquired a lot of his Manson archives from Bill Nelson. Nelson has self published a couple of books about Manson and Tex Watson. When John mentioned Nelson, I recognized his name but could recall little else. “Oh, Boy-Nelson,” said John. “I met him when I lived in Hollywood and we started trading Manson materials. He said that he used to work for the Secret Service; he also said he had been a minister and a used car salesman.” John told me he and Nelson used to meet at various Denny’s parking lots to go through all of their Manson memorabilia. Once, Nelson showed up to one of their meetings and said his wife wanted him to get rid of his collection. John bought Nelson out-or so he thought. John told me that Nelson’s sale was “the ultimate deal” because it included thirty-six slides of the photographs Roman Polanski took of Sharon Tate on the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers. John said the most amazing of these slides are all stamped August 1969; they are the photos that Voytek, Jay, and Sharon took of each other on August 5th, just days before they were slain.
Charles Manson Now Page 22