Snapping

by Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman

  Who, then, is responsible for the actions of people who may have snapped and become imprisoned in a less than fully human state? The individuals themselves? Their parents? Their cult leaders? Society in general? And who is to be punished when those deeds are serious crimes -- even murder?

  In the last ten years, a number of horrifying crimes have been committed by young Americans, men and women in their late teens and early twenties, all unlikely candidates for the crimes with which they were charged. In none of these cases, however, was the individual proven to have a Jekyll-Hyde split personality. Rather, all had, in the period preceding the commission of their criminal acts, undergone complete and drastic transformations of personality, if not in a sudden moment, at least over a relatively short, identifiable span of time.

  The three most notorious and perplexing cases were mentioned at the beginning of this book: the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by members of the Manson Family in 1969, the armed bank robbery and other acts committed by Patricia Hearst following her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, and the series of random street murders in New York City allegedly committed by a young postal worker named David Berkowitz, apprehended in August, 1977, and charged with being the .44-caliber killer who called himself the "Son of Sam." In its own way, each of these cases continues to confound traditional psychological and legal interpretation.

  Our investigation of snapping, however, has provided us with a new vantage point from which to view and understand these crimes. We examined the information made public concerning the circumstances of these events and studied the material we were able to gather in private interviews and confidential communications. It seemed to us a worthwhile and potentially important contribution to see if these cases and the questions they raised could be further illuminated from our perspective on snapping and information disease.

  Without exception, we found that they could. The sudden changes in personality common to the people who were recruited by Charles Manson into his Family, to Patty Hearst, and to David Berkowitz, as well, are all traceable to specific intense experiences, techniques of manipulation, or systematic and sustained changes in the individual's general information environment. The result was a recognizable alteration or shift of personality from the individuals they were before to the individuals they were at the time they allegedly committed their crimes. We offer the following interpretation of these notable instances of sudden personality change as an alternative to the various psychological, legal, and media explanations that, in our opinion, have proved to be of limited value in informing courts, juries, and the public of the overriding significance of these human tragedies.

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  Although it is public knowledge that Charles Manson was deeply interested in Scientology before he formed his Family (though he never joined the church), the possible resemblance between some Scientological practices and Manson's methods of controlling his band has never been fully explored. We do not balieve or intend to imply that there was any formal or informal connection between the Church of Scientology and the murders of actress Sharon Tate and her houseguests and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. We are, however, suggesting a similarity between the techniques used and taught by Scientology and the manner in which Charles Manson manipulated the members of his Family.

  Vincent Bugliosi, prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, made frequent mention of Scientoiogy and one-time Scientologists with reference to Manson's life and career in his best-selling account of the case, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, published in 1974. Bugliosi served up all the details of Manson's drifting, troubled youth -- an illegitimate child, he bounced from town to town, engaging in a haphazard string of petty crimes and larcenous acts. Over seventeen of Manson's first thirty-two years were spent in jails and prisons, yet, Bugliosi noted, Manson's criminal record to that time showed no sustained history of violence.

  "Burglar, car thief, forger, pimp," he wrote, "was this the portrait of a mass murderer?"

  It was in prison, apparently, that Manson became interested in Scientology. According to Helter Skelter, in the early sixties, Manson's tutor in Scientology was another convict, Lanier Rayner, and under his direction Manson claimed to have achieved Scientology's highest level, which he described as "Theta clear." Bugliosi wrote that Manson remained interested in Scientology longer than in any other subject except music (his continuing career goal was to gain recognition as a rock musician). A prison progress report written during that period asserted that Manson "appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through his study of this discipline."

  There is no way to determine whether Charles Manson actually experienced becoming a Scientology clear. It is known that not very long afterward, upon his release from prison in 1967, Manson began to formulate his grand delusionary and messianic schemes. It was also during this period that he began to demonstrate an uncanny ability to exert influence and control over other people.

  There were many other influences during those years, psychedelic drugs being the most prominent, of course, along with the culture-wide impact of the San Francisco scene to which Manson gravitated during the Haight-Ashbury's famous Summer of Love. Another powerful element in that tumultuous environment was the music of the Beatles, who wrote Helter Skelter and many of the other songs that Manson took to be direct communications from cosmic forces. Of even greater impact was the biblical Book of Revelation, which Manson interpreted as an explicit battle plan for the coming apocalypse. He read into its prophesies hidden meanings that licensed him to initiate his campaign of mass murder. Manson's interest in Revelation may have been derived in part from another cult, for throughout the spring and summer of 1967, when Manson was recruiting members from the hippies, drifters, and runaway flower children of the Haight, his fledgling Family had frequent interaction with another ominous tribe that lived just two blocks away. This was the early religious cult called the Process, or the Church of the Final Judgment, a group who walked the streets in long black robes, preaching the imminent arrival of a violent Armageddon as presaged in the Book of Revelation. According to Bugliosi, the Process was founded by a former disciple of L. Ron Hubbard himself who broke with Scientology to form his own group after attaining an important position in Scientology's London headquarters. Bugliosi cited numerous elements in Manson's world view he believed were borrowed from the Process: distorted attitudes toward life and death, the worshipping of fear and violence, and a variety of satanic delusions and black revolutionary schemes.

  Manson's activities as a pimp and forger and his years in prison certainly schooled him in the basic skills of an expert conman. But it may have been his experiences with Rayner that provided him with some of the communication tools he used to manipulate the minds of his young followers. "Undoubtedly," wrote Bugliosi, "he picked up from his 'auditing' sessions in prison some knowledge of mind control, as well as some techniques which he later put to use in programming his followers." Bugliosi also noted that one of Charles Manson's chief disciples, Bruce Davis, was heavily involved in Scientology at one time, also working in its London headquarters until April, 1969. According to Scientology spokesmen, Davis was kicked out of the cult for drug use, and shortly after that he returned to America to join the Family and participate in two brutal crimes of murder and dismemberment that preceded the Tate-LaBianca murders.

  Bugliosi identified all these influences in his attempt to explain how Charles Manson formed his philosophy and recruited the Family. He declined to make any connection. however, between Manson's background and his protracted exposure to rudimentary techniques of controlling others and the almost unbelievably twisted states of mind of his followers, in particular, the three women who were convicted along with Manson for the Tate-LaBianca murders: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.

  No one knows how Manson worked each individual conversion, but as we have come to understand it, his technique was classic -- and potent. In the
Haight's atmosphere of psychedelies and free love, Manson approached prospective Family members, most of them young women, with the standard cult leader's ploys of affection and acceptance. More importantly, he relied on those specific suggestions to stop thinking and refrain from questioning that, if heeded, may in themselves evoke the powerful snapping moment and the condition of vulnerability that follows.

  Susan Atkins, in a recently published book about her experiences with Manson, described what went on "in the storm of my mind" when she first met Manson. During a typical early Haight scene of loud rock music and easy encounters, Manson came up behind her and began dancing with her, putting his hands on her hips and guiding her body in rhythmic, sensual movements. As she remembered the scene, he also planted powerful suggestions that opened her up to his advances -- both psychological and sexual.

  "He whispered into my left ear," wrote Atkins, " 'That's right. That's good. . . . In reality . . . there's no repetition. No two moves, no two actions are the same. Everything is new. Let it be new.' "

  From our perspective, it seems that in this simple moment of contact, Manson managed to induce a profound snapping experience in Susan Atkins.

  "Suddenly I experienced a moment unlike any other," she wrote. "This stranger and I dancing, passed through one another. It was as though my body moved closer and closer to him and actually passed through him. I thought for a second that I would collapse. What had happened? Was I crazy? It was beyond human reality."

  In the days that followed, Manson moved in on Susan Atkins in a total sexual and psychological assault. In their first sexual encounter, Manson took full advantage of the experience to bring her under his direct control. "You must break free from the past," Manson told her. "You must live now. There is no past. The past is gone. There's no tomorrow." The sentiment was commonplace in the sixties, a touch of Eastern philosophy and a touch of Western existentialism. Taken literally, however, in the context of the cult's world of sexual and psychedelic orgies, Manson's young followers slid easily into sustained altered states of consciousness. They totally identified with his satanic prophecies, including his claim to be Christ or the Messiah, and his plan to set off a worldwide revolution with a series of random ritual murders.

  In the aftermath of the Tate-LaBianca murders, however, the trial of the four accused murderers turned into a ghastly public sideshow, complete with garrulous courtroom outbursts by the defendants and a noisy street scene outside the L.A. courthouse orchestrated by other members of the Manson Family. At the time, in the thick of pandemonium, no one in the courts, the press, or the public asked the very serious, sensitive question of what in the world had happened to Manson's girls?

  Least of all Bugliosi. Riding a tidal wave of public opinion, Bugliosi, District Attorney of Los Angeles, pressed hard for the swift conviction and execution of the defendants. Calling a succession of psychiatrists as expert witnesses, Bugliosi shot down every possible contention of the defense concerning Manson's conversion tactics, the role of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and the psychological histories of the defendants, asserting that each was mentally competent and a willing participant in the Tate-LaBianca murders. During the penalty trial to determine the sentences of the convicted murderers, Bugliosi contended that each of the accused Family members possessed some kind of "inner flaw" that would have prompted her to kill -- even without Manson's orders and influence. Bugliosi called upon the jury to "have the fortitude" to return verdicts of death for all four defendants.

  "These defendants are not human beings, ladies and gentlemen," said Bugliosi in his final statement to the jury. "Human beings have a heart and a soul. No one with a heart and a soul could have done what these defendants did to these seven victims.

  "These defendants are human monsters, human mutations."

  The jury in the Manson trial did return verdicts of death for Manson and the three women. In 1972, however, before the executions could be carried out, the California State Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in that state by a vote of 6-1 on the grounds that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The sentences of all four were commuted to life imprisonment, and throughout the decade of the seventies, Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten have remained in prison, first on death row and then in isolation.

  During our initial stay in California, we attempted to arrange interviews with various members of the Manson Family in order to determine whether their transformations could be interpreted from our perspective. We soon discovered that there would be little to gain from personal conversations with three out of four of them.

  Manson himself turned out to be the most unreachable and unlikely prospect. "Charlie?" one official at the California State Prison at Vacaville told us. "Charlie is anyone he wants to be these days." From all reports, Manson had not changed noticeably in prison. He was said to be still shuffling his conman roles, at times appearing to play the part of a model prisoner yet, from everything we heard, showing little sign of genuine rehabilitation, refusing, as is his prerogative, nearly all requests for interviews from concerned journalists and psychological and sociological researchers (although, we were told, Manson did grant one interview to the tabloid National Enquirer). Because of numerous threats he has received, for the most part Manson stays away from the other prisoners at Vacaville. Nevertheless, he has not become a total recluse. He is said to keep in loose contact with his remaining followers.

  Patricia Krenwinkel, we were told by those who had followed her activities at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, was still struggling to find her identity.

  Susan Atkins, on the other hand, had become a self-confessed Jesus Freak, after having been baptized in a water tank in her prison yard in early 1975. From accounts we gathered, it appeared that, like many other individuals we interviewed, she had found her personal answer to an irresolvable emotional crisis in America's most widely accepted form of spiritual renewal. In her recently published book, Susan Atkins: Child of Satan -- Child of God, she declared that Christ had come to her in her prison cell, in a scene complete with blinding white lights and swinging portals. "Susan, I am really here. I'm really coming into your heart to stay," he said, as she recalled it. "You are now a child of God. You are washed clean and your sins have all been forgiven." Following that experience, she claimed, "There was no more guilt! It was gone. Completely gone!"

  Of the four, Leslie Van Houten was the only one who appeared to have emerged from her cult state of mind.

  By every measure, Leslie Van Houten was the most unlikely of the accused Manson family members. A one-time high school homecoming princess, she grew up in an active, concerned home where her childhood was shared with an older brother and two younger adopted children. When she was fourteen, however, her parents separated and divorced, and Leslie was profoundly affected by the breakup. During that turbulent sixties era in southern California, Leslie began taking LSD fairly regularly with a young man with whom she had fallen deeply in love. In time, the young couple drifted apart and Leslie, barely eighteen, dropped out, became involved in the Haight-Ashbury scene, and ultimately found her way to Manson and his Family at Spahn Movie Ranch, an isolated, dilapidated old Western movie set at the mouth of the San Fernando Valley.

  Unlike Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten had no part in the murder of Sharon Tate and her houseguests. She was tried and convicted along with the others of the gruesome murder of Rosemary LaBianca, but the case against her was sufficiently cloudy to justify a second trial, completely separate from the confusion and chaos of the first proceedings against the four accused. Late in the course of that original trial, Leslie's attorney disappeared mysteriously while on a weekend camping trip. (He was later found dead in what some have speculated to have been the first of the Manson Family's "retaliation murders.") In his absence, another lawyer, Maxwell Keith, a prominent and highly respected Los Angeles attorney, took over Leslie's defense. It was largely through Keith's efforts that the courts granted Les
lie a retrial in 1977.

  In early February, 1977, a month before the scheduled retrial, not yet attuned to any of the details of the case, we contacted Maxwell Keith in his downtown Los Angeles office, telling him a little about our backgrounds and our project and expressing our interest in speaking with Leslie. At first, Keith was leery of us, but he admitted that he was still in the process of formulating his defense and that he was interested in hearing our thinking and our findings. Making no promises, he invited us to have lunch with him, and a talk.

  At lunch, Keith informed us of his conviction that his client was now a totally different person. Leslie, he explained, had completely come out from under Manson's spell. "You wouldn't recognize her," he said, contrasting her to the fanatic individual last seen publicly in 1971. In the intervening years on death row and then in isolation, Keith told us, while many women members of the Family had remained unswervingly loyal to Manson, Leslie was talking with prison psychiatrists, other prisoners, and her family -- who had given her a great deal of support -- in an attempt to understand the transformation that had come over her. This personality change, one of her early lawyers once pleaded to a California judge, had made her "insane, in a way that is almost science fiction."