by Greg King
For the most part, however, these evenings were filled with talk about death of the ego and loss of individualism in favor of the group. “I am you and you are me,” Manson told his Family. “What we do for ourselves, man, we do for everyone. There’s no good in life other than coming to the realization of the love that governs it.… Coming to ‘Now,’ dig? People, you know, wear all kinds of masks to hide their love, to disguise it, to keep themselves from conquering their own fear. But we have nothing to hide … nothing to be ashamed of. There is no right and wrong.”16
Steve Grogan later recalled how Manson repeatedly told the group “to get rid of our egos, because if our egos were involved in anything we do, it would bring in confusion.”17 “To lose the ego is to die,” Manson once said. “And when you die or a part of you dies, you release that part to love. So what it means is overcoming your fear of death. Fear is the beginning of growth. Yet, it’s what holds us back. Fear is a higher form of consciousness, ‘cause it gives us a glimpse of the love. So it’s like you have to submit to your fear … your fear is your pathway to love.”18
Manson became expert at testing his followers. Watson later recalled how Manson would walk up to him, gun in hand, and say, “Go ahead, shoot me.” When, inevitably, Watson refused, Manson would take the gun back, declaring, “Well, now I have the right to kill you.”19 To a large extent, this was, as Paul Watkins recalled, “a game of awareness, being aware primarily of what Charlie wanted, anticipating Charlie. My success in the Family was based on my ability to play the games. I learned to pick up on Charlie’s signals, knew when he moved a certain way or assumed a certain expression just what he wanted.”20
Such pronouncements were quickly absorbed by the various Family members. “Whatever is necessary to do, you do it,” Sandra Good later declared. “When somebody needs to be killed, there’s no wrong. You do it, and then you move on. And you pick up a child, and you move him to the desert. And you pick up as many children as you can, and you kill whoever gets in your way. This is us.”21
Manson’s philosophy duly impressed many of those he encountered. David Smith, who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and knew Manson, collaborated with Al Rose on an analysis of Manson and his followers which was written before the murders in 1969. Titled “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” the article eventually appeared in The Journal of Psychedlic Drugs in 1970.
Rose and Smith described Manson as:
a thirty-five-year-old white male, with a past history of criminal activity.… He was never arrested or convicted of a crime of violence, and, in fact, during the study expressed a philosophy of non-violence.… He was an extroverted, persuasive individual who served as absolute ruler of this group marriage commune.… Tales of Charlie’s sexual prowess were related to all new members.… Charlie would get up in the morning, make love, eat breakfast, make love and go back to sleep. He would wake up later and make love, have lunch, make love and go back to sleep. Waking up later, he would make love, eat dinner, make love, and go back to sleep—only to wake up in the middle of the night to have intercourse again. Such stories, although not validated, helped him maintain his leadership role. Charlie had a persuasive mystical philosophy placing great emphasis on the belief that people did not die and that infant consciousness was the ultimate state.… Charlie used the words of Jesus, ‘He who is like the small child shall reap the rewards of Heaven,’ as a guide for the group’s child-rearing philosophy.… However, Charlie’s mysticism often became delusional and he, on occasion, referred to himself as ‘God’ or ‘God and the Devil.’ Charlie could probably be diagnosed as an ambulatory schizophrenic.… Charlie set himself up as ‘initiator of new females’ into the commune. He would spend most of their first day making love to them, as he wanted to see if they were just on a ‘sex trip’ … or whether they were seriously interested in joining the group.… An unwillingness, for example to engage in mutual oral-genital contact was cause for immediate expulsion, for Charlie felt that this was one of the most important indications as to whether the girl would be willing to give up her sexual inhibitions.… Charlie felt that getting rid of sexual inhibitions would free people of most of their problems.… The females in the group had as their major role the duty of gratifying the males. This was done by cooking for them and sleeping with them.… Of the fourteen females in the ‘immediate family,’ two were pregnant at the time of our observations. Both said that Charlie was the father, although there was no way to verify the claim, as sexual relations in the group were polygamous. It should be noted that Charlie was held in such high regard by the girls that all of them wanted to carry his child.”22
Very early on, Manson was concerned with breaking inhibitions and standards, crushing the moral and psychological barriers in his followers. Part of this philosophy was designed to break the ego of the initiates, to reduce them to a common level, on which they became emotionally dependent on Manson. Once their resistance was broken, it was much easier for him to indoctrinate them to his way of thinking.
Manson also used humiliation and violence. “If someone didn’t do something just exactly the way he said it,” recalls Steve Grogan, “he would go into a tirade, break something or slap somebody around or slug them. And a lot of times—when I look back on it—it looks like he was using the girls to talk to different people through, people who just came to the group, like men. He would yell at the girls and tell them, ‘You’re stupid. Why don’t you do it this way?’”23
Manson was certainly crafty enough to recognize and play on his followers’ emotional weaknesses, but his eventual command of their bodies and minds rested more with their own inabilities to come to terms with life outside the Family than with any mythological powers which Manson purportedly possessed. Manson, for all of his influence and power, simply managed to manipulate in each of his followers that which already existed. He himself would always claim, in his self-serving fashion, that he had ordered no one to do anything, and that every one of his followers was free to come and go at will, to choose freely what to do and what not to do. Even though the evidence does indicate the large degree to which Manson was able to manipulate his Family, on this issue, at least, it is generally correct to take him at his word. All of the Family members were free to make their own decisions. That they all decided to believe Manson’s bizarre philosophy speaks more for their own disturbed states of mind than for Manson’s power over them.
Many of the Family members were later to claim that it was only after they met Manson, and he broke down all of their previously held beliefs, that they came to such a state of dependence and unquestioning trust. Often—and particularly in the cases of two of the most prominent future murderers, Susan Atkins and Charles Watson—they insisted that it was a combination of Manson’s powerful hold over them, along with his incessant distribution of drugs, which led them to commit their crimes. In effect, they presented themselves as good-hearted, all-American youths, corrupted through both Manson’s evil influence and by the use of mind-altering drugs.
At the time of their trials, much was made of their seemingly ordinary backgrounds: Leslie Van Houten, a former church choir member and honor student; Patricia Krenwinkel, a Bible student; Charles Watson, a gifted athlete and scholar in high school. Only through such terrible factors, they, their defenders and the media proclaimed, could such normal, average and decent youths—who might have come from any family across America—become mindless killers. Defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald, for example, took great pains to tell the media that the members of the Family on trial for murder “had not so much as smoked a cigarette before they met Charles Manson.” It was a comfortable, convenient view which eased the minds of many parents unable to come to terms with the fact that their own children might also be capable of such horrible crimes.
None of Manson’s followers, however, came to him without the fundamentals upon which he himself capitalized to launch the murders. They were not zombies, controlled through their leader and through drugs, lack
ing the elements within themselves to become criminals. Those who participated in the eventual murders had all been heavily involved with multiple sexual partners and engaged in frequent drug use long before they came into Manson’s orbit. As Dr. Clara Livsey has pointed out in her study of the Manson Family, Susan Atkins, “after telling of her gross promiscuity, her abuse of drugs, her disavowal of any decent conventions before she met Manson … states that Manson ‘worked on ridding us of our inhibitions.’ What inhibitions, one wonders, did she have left before she met him?”24 Thus, it is impossible to ascribe their enthusiastic willingness to murder simply as a symptom of their lives with, and influence by, Manson.
“These men and women who came to Manson brought an element within themselves which he was later able to exploit to his own criminal ends,” says Vincent Bugliosi. “None of them had to be coerced to commit their crimes. There was something in them which reveled in their crimes, which refused to fight against the notion of right or wrong as you or I would do. It was Manson’s ability to recognize this ingrained willingness to kill which led to the murderous events of the summer of 1969.”25
Chapter 21
The White Album
By the fall of 1968, Manson’s disillusion with his Hollywood circle of friends was growing. He approached both Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson at the latter’s Malibu beach house and demanded that they make a choice: either join his Family or stop playing with them. Both men were startled by the demand. Wilson, although he continued to associate with Manson, was certainly not about to run off to Spahn Ranch and abandon his career; and Jakobson, still attracted to much of what Manson said, luckily had the more stabilizing influence of his wife to dissuade him from making the move. Both men refused. Thereafter, Manson’s relationship with them took a turn for the worse.
In late October, 1968, Manson moved his Family to Death Valley. There, they divided their time between two remote, ramshackle properties, the Barker and Myers Ranches. “Death Valley,” wrote Paul Watkins, “marked a turning point for the Manson Family. It is not easy to make sense of what happened there.… But I do believe that coming to the desert stamped the fate of the Family, and subsequently, the fate of its victims.”1
It was Catherine Gillies, known in the Manson Family as Capistrano, who first suggested a move to Death Valley. Her grandparents Bill and Barbara Myers owned the motley collection of buildings which comprised Myers Ranch, and she obtained permission for the Family to temporarily stay there. The remote location suited Manson: in order to reach either of the two ranches, which stood a half-mile apart, he and his Family had to leave what little civilization existed in Death Valley and traverse Goler Wash, a desolate and dangerous ravine at the edge of the Panamint Mountains where once an old mining road had cleaved its way through the rocks.
Barker Ranch stood at the head of the Wash, an old stone house with a wide porch, surrounded by cottonwood and cactus. The only heat came from an oil-drum wood stove and a wood-burning kitchen range. A bunkhouse, constructed of old railroad ties, stood at the back of the main house. Myers Ranch was even more rustic: a small stucco building heated by a fireplace and facing a seemingly endless stretch of bare desert.2
Isolated in these new desert outposts, Manson began to speak of a coming race war, with blacks pitted against whites. “Dig it, man,” he told his followers. “This shit can’t go on forever with blackie … pretty soon he’s gonna revolt and start kickin’ whitey’s ass. I’ve seen it buildin’ up for years. It was bad enough at Watts and San Francisco, but now that they wasted that jive-ass Martin Luther … well, that’s a heavy number, man. I mean, you gotta figure whitey’s karma’s gotta turn one of these days … it’s just a matter of time. Yeah, it’s gonna come down hard … a full on war. And when it does, we’re gonna be glad we’re out here.”3
In time, Manson grew increasingly convinced that the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world foretold in the Book of Revelation in the Bible was at hand. Although he himself would later claim that he had never really believed the idea, he certainly spent time and money searching Death Valley for the entrance he thought was there, a portal to The Hole, the bottomless pit spoken of in the Bible. Manson thought it was a buried paradise; but scripturally, the bottomless pit was another name for hell, one of many mistakes Manson was to make in his interpretation of both the Bible and the music of The Beatles.4
At the end of 1968, members of the Manson Family were scattered among various houses and apartments in Los Angeles, shacks at the Spahn Movie Ranch, the desert ranches in Death Valley and a rented house on Gresham Street in Canoga Park which they dubbed the “Yellow Submarine” because of its color. Manson disliked having his followers so dispersed, and gradually tried to round them up and bring them to Canoga Park. Among those who voluntarily returned to the Family was Charles “Tex” Watson, who had, for a time, been living on his own, away from the Family. The group now included several new members, including Straight Satan motorcycle gang member Danny De Carlo, who was later to provide important information during the murder investigations.
In December, 1968, Capital Records released their White Album by The Beatles, their follow-up to the highly successful Magical Mystery Tour album. It was a double album, with two discs containing thirty songs. For Manson, everything about the album was of incredible significance. Even the stark album cover, unadorned except for a slightly embossed name of the group, carried a message: the White Album, according to Manson, was a declaration of the beginning of a race war between the whites and the blacks, and The Beatles had fired the first shot by proclaiming their allegiance to the white race.
During the first months of 1969, Manson spent hours at the house in Canoga Park, listening to the White Album over and over again. Many of the songs seemed to convey—or affirm—special messages to Manson and his Family. That The Beatles wrote a song called “Sexy Sadie” long after he had christened Susan Atkins with the nickname was, for Manson, proof that he and the musicians from Liverpool were psychically connected. Manson also saw warnings about the upcoming race war in songs like “Blackbird,” and “Rocky Racoon.” In the first, the lyric, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly; all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise,” meant, for Manson, The Beatles were aware of the coming black revolution—that they were saying that it was time for the black man to arise. Later, at the LaBianca house, the killers would print the word Rise in blood at the scene of their second set of murders with which they hoped to ignite “Helter Skelter.” In the song “Rocky Racoon,” Manson believed The Beatles were referring to black people as “coons,” and sending out secret messages for the attuned.
The song “Piggies” was also significant for Manson. It described the wealthy members of the establishment, “piggies,” getting rich on suffering and poverty, dining out with their knives and forks, interspersed with the sounds of snorting and screams. One line in the song declared that what the “piggies” needed was “a damned good whacking.” Manson took this to heart, believing The Beatles were again declaring that the establishment figures needed to be taught a lesson.
There were two songs that Manson took as deliberate urgings to blacks to begin an uprising, “Revolution,” and “Revolution 9.” In the first, the lyrics declared, “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world.… But if you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.” On listening to the version on the White Album, however, Manson discerned the scarcely audible word “in” immediately following “out.” It was but one of the hidden messages buried in the album’s songs, and Manson believed the group was declaring that they were all in favor of the coming revolution. “Revolution 9” was a peculiar song, containing no lyrics, but rather comprised of an unnerving collection of shouted phrases, bits of classical music, machine gun fire, pigs snorting, people screaming, spoken dialogue and car horns, interspersed with a frequently repeated chant of “Number 9, number
9, number 9.…” Manson believed this song was a preview of the coming revolution, what the race war would sound like: total anarchy. He also matched up the song’s title with Chapter 9 in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, which predicts the end of the world.
For Manson, however, the most important song was “Helter Skelter.” Although a “Helter Skelter” in England is a giant slide, Manson took the word at its American meaning of total chaos and confusion. The chorus, “Look out, Helter Skelter … she’s coming down fast!” was, for Manson, a pure declaration that the race war was on, and that it was happening right now. Only those people hip to what was going on—those attuned to what Manson and The Beatles were saying—would escape the coming slaughter.
Before the release of the White Album, Manson had spoken in vague terms of a possible race war. The album reinforced his vision, and made it concrete. He began to speak confidently, describing the scenario he felt would unfold. According to Family acquaintance Paul Watkins, “He used to explain how it would be so simple to start out. A couple of black people—some of the spades from Watts—would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district … up in the rich piggy district … and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the walls in blood … all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad.…”5 Another Manson acquaintance, Brooks Poston, told Vincent Bugliosi the same thing, describing how Manson said the victims would be killed, with messages written in their own blood on the walls of their houses. “He said a group of real blacks would come out of the ghettos and do an atrocious crime in the richer sections of Los Angeles and other cities. They would do an atrocious murder with stabbing, killing, cutting bodies to pieces, smearing blood on the walls, writing ‘pigs’ on the walls … in the victims’ own blood.”6 This would prove to be a powerful link during the murder investigation.