Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  Later that afternoon, I returned the favor and sat down at Charlie’s table. The hippie eyed me suspiciously. It was obvious he resented my taking his precious time. Pin said the guy was living with Sandra Good in Hanford, and had helped her set up the Manson Web site on the Internet. I shot him a hard look, wondering if he was part of the crew that had dumped the witches’ brew on my porch.

  I took some photos with Charlie and Pin for old times’ sake, and then we bid our farewells. I’d basically accomplished nothing, but nonetheless, it had been worth the trip just to see Charlie’s shiny pate.

  On August 31, I tried it again. The same gang was in the visiting room, Charlie, Pin, and the hippie. Charlie was in a foul mood and apparently had been for a while. He’d thrown a major tantrum a few days earlier because the guards wouldn’t allow him to have an embroidered shirt Sandra Good sent. Ignoring his dark disposition, I dived right in, opening our conversation by asking if I could use Squeaky’s old, unpublished Rolling Stone article in the book. He ignored me and danced around.

  “Who’s ‘Green? I wondered, trying to match a face with one of his nicknames.

  “Irish.”

  “Like Susan Murphy?”

  “No. Like Greenland and Greenfield, Indiana, where I did some time.”

  “Don’t put that crazy act on me,” I snapped. “I’ve seen it too many times.”

  “And you’ll see it some more!”

  “I’m sure. Where’s Richard Rubacher?”

  “Somewhere along the coast. I sent him all my letters and he wrote to them [Stern?]. I guess he just made some money and retired.” Charlie shot me a cold, sinister smile that made me wonder if Rubacher had shared the spoils as promised.

  “What about Nuel Emmons? You gave him a book [to write],” I queried. It was an important question because Emmons’s well-written book, Manson in His Own Words, included the most damning passages I’d ever seen linking Charlie directly to the Tate-LaBianca murders. Though at times Emmons presented the clear-speaking Manson as a reluctant follower who lost control of his minions—the story Charlie always sold me—when it came down to those final nights of mayhem, he portrayed Manson as being firmly in control. Here Emmons quotes Manson quoting himself giving the order to Tex Watson:

  “It’s time to get something done for Bobby. The girls are ready to do whatever is necessary. They don’t have a plan or a place picked out, so it looks like it’s going to be pretty much up to you. But I think it would be best to hit some of the rich pigs’ places. Get some bolt cutters or something you can cut a phone wire or gate chain with. You know what else you need, so put it together and get going.… You know the neighborhoods, someplace like where Terry [Melcher] used to live. Just make sure the girls do it like Gary’s house was done. Maybe even take some rope and hang somebody, like a reverse of the Ku Klux Klan thing, that way it will put the heat on the blackies.”

  Now I was so much a part of it, I might as well have been in the car with the others, knife and gun in hand. I knew that each suggestion dropped to Tex would be followed as a course of action. Whatever they did, it would be the same as if I had done it with them. For one short moment, I had an urge to overtake the car and bring them back.… I turned away from the trailer … and took a long walk. Maybe sometime during that walk I thought of how wrong it was. Personally, I had never believed any tactics, copycat or otherwise, were going to get Bobby off the hook. Yet … I had shared in the madness. I had a moment or two of regret, but for the most part, bitterness and contempt for a world I didn’t give a shit about allowed me to go along with anything that might come of the night’s activities.… I hadn’t twisted any arms. I wasn’t sitting behind anyone with a gun next to their head, giving directions. Yet, I can’t deny making some of the suggestions that led to the events of that night. Nor can I deny that I was the one person who could have prevented that car from leaving Spahn Ranch. But—so goes the feeling of power when coupled with hatred.

  On that evening, I was aware of being totally without conscience.… I can’t put a finger on when I became devoid of caring emotion.… Here I was, waiting for a report of murder to come back to me, not caring who had died or how many victims there were. And the closest I could come to disliking myself was “Charlie, you are your mother’s son—one dirty bogus bastard.” Thinking of my mother quickly altered any softness that may have been creeping into my mind. I saw my mother guiding me through the courtroom door, and heard her speak the words, “Yes your Honor, I want my son, but I just can’t afford to support both of us at this time.” I remembered the argument she had had with her boyfriend a few nights prior to that day in court, and I heard him saying, “I don’t give a shit, I’m leaving. I can’t stand that kid. Get rid of him and we can make it just fine.”

  I saw four larger and older guys beating the hell out of me and wrestling me to the floor, and I remember them holding me while one ripped my ass with his big cock and then the others took their turn. I thought of good old Mr. Fields, in charge of all the boys and paid to teach us the responsibility of being honest citizens, lubricating my asshole with tobacco juice and raw silage and then offering me to his favorite pets. My head was straight now. Fuck this world and everyone in it. I’d give them something to open their eyes, and then take our group out into the desert.…

  Emmons further detailed how Manson, worried that Tex and the girls had left incriminating evidence at the crime scene, went to the Tate house later that same night and wiped everything down to eliminate fingerprints. The horror Charlie found inside did not appear to disturb him.

  “So what about that, Charlie? Was Emmons on the mark?”

  “He was a convict who had a body and fender shop on the street [in L.A.]. He fixed up my car and saved me from getting arrested,” Manson explained, dodging the details. “I owed him, so I let him write a book. He called it Manson in His Own Words, but it was really Manson in his [Emmons’s] words,” Charlie added with a laugh.

  “Was it accurate?” I repeated, having heard that Charlie was angry when the book came out.

  “It was no different than all the others. Same bullshit.”

  “I’ve written to Emmons twice, and he hasn’t responded,” I mentioned.

  “That’s because you’re a cop and he’s a convict. He don’t trust you.”

  “I thought he was an author now?”

  “Once a con, always a con.”

  I eventually tracked Emmons down. To the contrary, he turned out to be super friendly. He gave me some photographs of Charlie and the old gang, and even showed me a pair of false teeth that Manson had given him.

  “What about that Hare Krishna guy?” I asked Charlie. “What was the deal with that? Why’d he light you up?”

  “The dude showed me a photo of his wife with this Hare Krishna guru from India. I said, ‘A light-skinned Negro guru like that must enjoy fucking nice white girls.’ He didn’t like that remark. Then I told him that his guru wasn’t God, that Jesus was, and that he should follow Jesus. He didn’t like that either. A few days later, he came after me with the match [and paint thinner]. I exploded like a bomb.”

  That was a switch. I’d never known Charlie to defend the faith before. He must have gotten hold of a Bible and stumbled across Matthew 5, verses 11-12, the part that promises great rewards to anyone who suffers in the name of Jesus. Was Charlie seeing the end in sight due to his advancing age? Was he, like so many people, trying to get his house in order before going to that big isolation cell in the sky? Probably not, but it was a development worth watching.

  In keeping with Charlie’s more familiar mind-set, he told me that the karma gods had already taken vengeance for what the Hare Krishna had done. “If you send a scorpion out to stick someone, and they don’t have it coming, the scorpion will spin around and come back at you. After that Hindu burned me and I survived, their leader in India was shot dead and twenty-five hundred of his followers were consumed in a fire. The Hindu’s evil was reflected back.”

  Return
ing to Pin, I found my old pal disquietingly concerned. “Don’t get too close to Manson and his people,” he warned. “You could get hurt.” That caught me off guard. Pin and Manson were tight. He usually defended Charlie. It wasn’t like him to come down on the guy.

  “I’ve gotten to know him a lot better this time around,” Pin explained. “I can see how crazy he is. Behind that screwball face is a man you don’t understand. There’s something wrong with him. There’s an evil there beyond your comprehension. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’ve never murdered anyone. You don’t know what it takes, and what it does to you afterward.”

  That was certainly true. Since Pin was well acquainted with the homicidal beast that can reside inside a person, his warning had to be taken seriously.

  “I told Charlie that if anything happened to you or your family, he’d have to deal with me,” Pin added.

  That was sure nice of Pin. All the kindness I’d showed him over the years was paying dividends. And Pin’s brave threat was not without risk, as Charlie didn’t take kindly to such talk.

  “Let me worry about that in here. You just take care of yourself out there,” Pin said.

  I left the prison that evening enveloped in a sense of dread. It wasn’t Charlie’s mood or even anything he said. I was used to all that. It was Pin’s concern that got to me. What did he know that he wasn’t saying? Despite our friendship, the snitch code was deeply ingrained in all prisoners, Pin included, so if anything specific was coming down, Pin would try to handle it himself without giving me the details. It was obvious that he’d done precisely that. Hopefully, Manson got the message. I didn’t relish the thought of having to clean any more voodoo stews off of my porch—much less deal with something decidedly more sinister.

  * * *

  Recently, a movement of militant white supremacists known as “the Order” approached Manson about being their leader. Searching for a resurrected Hitler, they spoke of a grand coronation that glorified Manson’s mystical qualities. The FBI busted some of their members, and their previous guru was burned to death in a shoot-out, leaving them leaderless. They came to Manson searching for a shepherd to recruit “true believers” like Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, or Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber.

  Manson has intensely followed the growth of these burgeoning militias, often sending me articles that he’s come across. With a little updating and fine-tuning, his philosophy would fit in perfectly with theirs. If he’s ever released from prison as a “harmless old man,” I could easily see him uniting these strange groups that fester all over the country and building them into one large, scary army. Just as Adolf Hitler rose from being a misfit and a petty criminal to become the racist dictator of Germany, so these white supremacist groups lust for Manson to become their unifying leader.

  We may not have seen the last of him yet.

  UPDATE 1998

  IN LATE AUGUST 1997, Charles Manson was transferred from Corcoran State Prison to Pelican Bay State Prison—one of the top maximum security facilities in the United States. Set on a bleak strip of land a few miles from the Oregon border, Pelican Bay is basically a series of isolation cages that house the most violent and incorrigible offenders in the California prison system.

  Long before this move, I warned Charlie that if he didn’t stop threatening officers, dealing drugs, and operating illegal businesses (selling autographed photos of himself at $50 a pop), he was going to end up at Pelican Bay. Naturally, he didn’t listen.

  I almost feel sorry for him now. Pushing sixty-five, Charlie is starting to show signs that Father Time and the prison system have finally worn him down—something he vowed would never happen. He complains of an ear problem “eating up my brain, man,” and writes that his eyes are dimming to the point that he sometimes stumbles and falls. I don’t completely buy it. Charlie’s whined before, and in the next moment he can hear like a rabbit, see like an eagle, and throw a tantrum with enough volcanic energy for a half-dozen men.

  His recent letters and conversations wander into fantasy and utter confusion—but then again, they always did.

  How Charlie will handle the isolation and oppression of Pelican Bay at this stage of his life is anyone’s guess. I sense that he will die there. However, as Dylan Thomas wrote, he will “not go gentle into the night.” Charlie is sure to “rage against the dying of the light.”

  EPILOGUE

  “You can try to kill me a million times more but you cannot kill soul. Truth was, is, and will always be. You have beaten me, broken my neck, knocked my teeth out. You’ve drugged me for years, dragging me up and down prison hallways, laying my head on every chopping block you’ve got in this state, chained me, burned me, but you cannot defeat me. All you can do is destroy yourselves with your own judgment.”

  —CHARLES MANSON

  AT HIS 1986 PAROLE HEARING

  WHEN I WAS a small boy, the highlight of the week was a Sunday afternoon walk with my father. We lived in the geographical center of San Francisco near a hill that people called Mount Olympus. The name was not a tribute to the mythological home of the gods. It was a politically incorrect joke on the local milkman. The guy had a bad leg and was known as “Old Limpy.” He dragged that leg up the hill so many times everyone began referring to it as Mount Olympus.

  My dad and I used to spend many wonderful hours hiking the winding road to the top. There was a magnificent statue set high on a pedestal overlooking the city and the Pacific Ocean. The statue held a torch high over her head in one hand, and a sword ready to strike in the other. It was a riveting piece of art that never failed to captivate me, no matter how many times I saw it.

  “Do you know what it means?” my father asked.

  “No, Dad, what?”

  “It’s the statue of light. She carries the torch of truth over her head. The sword is there to protect the torch from those who want to put it out.”

  Six years later, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was called into the service. He and other soldiers set up a lookout post on Mount Olympus, scanning the coast for enemy ships and submarines. I was ten then, and used to go up there with him. We spent long hours together looking into the ocean on the night watch. The whole city was blacked out, and the view was glorious. When I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I’d curl up at the foot of the statue, braced from the whistling wind, and fall asleep. Those were the best of times.

  My father was eventually transferred to the battle front overseas and never returned home. No, he didn’t die, but he might as well have as far as a young boy was concerned. He met another woman in a foreign land divorced my mother, remarried, and moved away. I was devastated.

  For years afterward, for decades, I returned to that hill, remembered my father, and fed a pain that wouldn’t go away. When I came home from college a grown man, my car mysteriously headed for the old statue. I married and became a father myself, six times over, and still kept coming back. Finally, I arrived one foggy day to find the statue gone. It stunned me, depressing me further, but did nothing to stop my lemminglike treks. Year after year I came, staring up at the empty pedestal, trying to heal a wound that would never stop hurting.

  One night, a dream carried me to the haunting spot. I climbed on the pedestal and stood facing the wind and ocean. Suddenly, my limbs froze. I looked down. My arms and legs had turned to stone. The rest of my body hardened as well. Unable to move, I watched as a parade of fathers and little boys came to see the magnificent statue on the hill. Tears were burning into my pillow when I awoke.

  The dream was so unnerving that I immediately embarked upon an almost frantic search to find out what had happened to the statue. A trip to the library and some old news clippings directed me to a dank city warehouse that served as a retirement home for broken-down sculptures. Searching though the rubble, I found it. She stood alone in a corner, vandalized almost beyond recognition. Her torch and arm were missing, the sword broken off,
her head gone. I wondered at that moment if there was a heaven for statues that no longer served a purpose.

  I stared at the battered remnant for over an hour, remembering all it had meant to me. Once, she had been a proud landmark for sailors entering the bay, guiding them safely to shore. For a half century, she stood tall as a symbol of truth. And most important of all, she had been a little boy’s bond to a father who abandoned him.

  Charles Manson lost his father in a similar fashion when he was four, a fact that he continues to try to hide from the world to this day. For all his bluster and uncaring ways, it’s a pain that he’s never been able to face. How much of what he became, of what he did, of the rage that never dies, can be blamed on a mother who decided to leave town one day to search for greener pastures, and gave no thought to a sad little boy who was forced to leave his beloved father behind? A sad little boy who was later dumped by that same mother, and became a horribly abused, institutionalized teenager who used to get down on his knees and beg God to send someone who loved him.

  From my experience, I’d say virtually all of it.

  NOTES

  Chapter 1

  1. This name is a pseudonym invented by the authors.

  Chapter 3

  1. Jackson’s attorney denied smuggling in the weapon for his client. In 1985, he was acquitted of murder and conspiracy charges in connection with George Jackson’s failed prison break.

  Chapter 5

  1. Pseudonyms have been substituted for the names of Pin’s Attackers.

  Chapter 7

  1. In 1977, “Geronimo’s” murder conviction was overturned on appeal, and he was released on bail pending appeal of the reversal of his conviction.

  APPENDIX I

  THE TESTIMONY OF CHARLES MANSON, NOVEMBER 19, 1970

  THE COURT: Do you have anything to say?