Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  MANSON: Yes, I do.

  There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified to where everyone could understand exactly what the family was supposed to have been, what the philosophies in regards to the families were, and whether or not there was any conspiracy to commit murder, to commit crimes, and to explain to you who think with your minds.

  It is hard for you to conceive of a philosophy of someone that may not think.

  I have spent my life in jail, and without parents.

  I have looked up to the strongest father figure, and I have always looked to the people in the free world as being the good people, and the people in the inside of the jail as being the bad people.

  I never went to school, so I never growed up in the respect to learn to read and write so good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand.

  I don’t understand the courts, and I don’t understand a lot of things that are brought against me.

  Your write things about my mother in the newspaper that hasn’t got anything to do with anything in particular.

  You invent stories, and everybody thinks what they do, and then they project it from the witness stand on the defendant as if that is what he did.

  For example, with Danny DeCarlo’s testimony. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike, that him and I was a lot alike in our thinking.

  But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect himself back at himself.

  If he said he did not like the black man, I would say, “Okay.” I had better sense than tell him I did not dislike the black man. I just listened to him and I would react to his statement.

  So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and pat me on the back and he would say to himself, “Charlie thinks like I do.”

  But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.

  But maybe the girls and women in your world outside … Being by yourself for such a long time when you do get out you appreciate things that people don’t even see, you walk over them every day.

  Like in jail you have a whole new attitude or a whole different way of thinking.

  I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives.

  Well, my life has never been important to anyone, not even in the understanding of the way you fear the things that you fear, and the things you do.

  I know that the only person I can judge is me.

  I judge what I have done and I judge what I do and I look and live with myself every day.

  I am content with myself.

  If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.

  I like being with myself.

  But in your world it’s hard because your understanding and your values are different.

  These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.

  Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked them out or they did not want to go to Juvenile Hall, so I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love there is no wrong.

  I don’t care. I have one law and I learned it when I was a kid in reform school. It’s don’t snitch. And I have never snitched. And I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good, if they do it with a good thought.

  It is not my responsibility. It is your responsibility. It is the responsibility you have towards your own children who you are neglecting, and then you want to put the blame on me again and again and again.

  Over and over you put me in your penitentiary. I did not build the penitentiary. I would not lock one of you up. I could not see locking another human being up.

  You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad and even killers that your children are. You make your children what they are. I am just a reflection of every one of you.

  I have never learned anything wrong. In the penitentiary, I have never found a bad man. Every man in the penitentiary has always showed me his good side, and circumstances put him where he was. He would not be there, he is good, human, just like the policeman that arrested him is a good human.

  I have nothing against none of you. I can’t judge any of you. But I think it is high time that you all started looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

  I sit and I watch you from nowhere, and I have nothing in my mind, no malice against you and no ribbons for you.

  But you stand and you play the game of money. As long as you can sell a newspaper, some sensationalism, and you can laugh at someone and joke at someone and look down at someone, you know.

  You just sell those newspapers for public opinion, just like you are all hung on public opinion, and none of you have any idea what you are doing.

  You are just doing what you are doing for the money, for a little bit of attention from someone.

  I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you. You haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves because you are all crazy.

  And you can project it back at me, and you can say that it’s me that cannot communicate, and you can say that it’s me that don’t have any understanding, and you can say that when I am dead your world will be better, and you can lock me up in your penitentiary and you can forget about me.

  But I’m only what lives inside of you, each and every one of you. These children, they take a lot of narcotics because you tell them not to. Any child you put in a room and you tell them, “Don’t go through that door,” he never thought of going through that door until you told him not to go through the door. You go to the high schools and you show them pills and you show them what not to take, how else would they know what it was unless you tell them?

  And then you tell them what you don’t want them to do in the hopes they will go out and do it and then you can play your game with them and then you can give attention to them because you don’t give them any of your love.

  You only give them your frustration; you only give them your anger; you only give them the bad part of you rather than give them the good part of you.

  You should all turn around and face your children and start following them and listening to them.

  The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music. You are too deaf, dumb, and blind to stop what you are doing. You point and you ridicule.

  But it’s okay, it’s all okay. It doesn’t really make any difference because we are all going to the same place anyway. It’s all perfect. There is a God. He sits right over here beside me. That is your God. This is your God.

  But let me tell you something; there is another Father and he has much more might than you imagine.

  If I could get angry at you I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it.

  These children, everything they have done, they done for love of their brother. Had you not arrested Robert Beausoleil for something he did not do …

  (Interruption.)

  I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed.

  I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.

  I was given a name and a number and I was put in a cell, and I have lived in a cell with a name and a number.

  I don’t know who I am.

  I am whoever you make me, bu
t what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are.

  You only reflect on me what you are inside of yourselves, because I don’t care anything about any of you and I don’t care what you do.

  I can stand here in front of this court and smile at you, and you can do anything you want to do with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love, and it is all for me, and I give it to myself for me, because I look out for me first and I like me, and you can live with yourselves and your opinion of yourselves. I know what I have done.

  If I showed someone that I would do anything for my brother, include give my life for my brother in the battlefield, or give where else that I may want to do that, then he picks his banner up and he goes off and does what he does.

  That is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do.

  If we enter into an agreement to build a house, I will help you build the house and I will offer suggestions for that house, but I won’t put myself on you because that is what made you weak, because your parents have offered themselves on you.

  You are not you, you are just reflections, you are reflections of everything that you think that you know, everything that you have been taught.

  Your parents have told you what you are. They made you before you were six years old, and when you stood in school and you crossed your heart and pledged allegiance to the flag, they trapped you in a truth because at that age you didn’t know any lie until that lie was reflected on you.

  No, I am not responsible for you. Your karma is not mine.

  My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system, and each one of you, each one of you are just a reflection of each one of you, and you all live by yourselves, no matter how crowded you may think that you are in a room full of people, you are still by yourself, and you have to live with that self forever and ever and ever and ever.

  To some people this would be hell; to some people it would be heaven.

  I have mine, and each one of you will have to work out yours, and you cannot work it out by pointing your fingers at people.

  I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail.

  I have wore your secondhand clothes.

  I have accepted things and given them away the next second.

  I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you and I look how incompetent you all are, and then I say to myself, “You want to kill me, ha, I’m already dead, have been all my life!”

  I’ve lived in your tomb that you built.

  I did seven years for a thirty-seven-dollar check. I did twelve years because I didn’t have any parents, and how many other sons do you think you have in there? You have many sons in there, many, many sons in there, most of them are black and they are angry. They are mad, and they are mad at me.

  I look and I say, “Why are you mad at me?”

  He said, “I am mad at you because of what your father did.”

  And I look at him and I say, “Well,” and I look at my fathers, and I say, “If there was ever a devil on the face of this earth I am him.”

  And he’s got my head anytime he wants it, as all of you do too, anytime you want it.

  Sometimes I think about giving it to you. Sometimes I’m thinking about just jumping on you and let you shoot me. Sometimes I think it would be easier than sitting here and facing you in the contempt that you have for yourself, the hate that you have for yourself, it’s only the anger you reflect at me, the anger that you have got for you.

  I do not dislike you, I cannot dislike you. I am you. You are blood. You are my brother. That is why I can’t fight you.

  If I could I would jerk this microphone out and beat your brains out with it because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve.

  Every morning you eat that meat with your teeth. You’re all killers, you kill things better than you. And what can I say to you that you don’t already know? And I have known that there is nothing I can say to you. There is nothing I can say to any of you. It is you that has to say it to you, and that is my whole philosophy; you say it to you and I will say it to me.

  I live in my world, and I am my own king in my world, whether it be a garbage dump or if it be in the desert or wherever it be. I am my own human being. You may restrain my body and you may tear my guts out, do anything you wish, but I am still me and you can’t take that.

  You can kill the ego, you can kill the pride, you can kill the want, the desire of a human being.

  You can lock him in a cell and you can knock his teeth out and smash his brain, but you cannot kill the soul.

  You never could kill the soul. It’s always there, the beginning and the end. You cannot stop it, it’s bigger than me. I’m just looking into it and it frightens me sometimes.

  The truth is now; the truth is right here: the truth is this minute, and this minute we exist.

  Yesterday you cannot prove yesterday happened today, it would take you all day and then it would be tomorrow, and you can’t prove last week happened. You can’t prove anything except to yourself.

  My reality is my reality, and I stand within myself on my reality.

  Yours is yours and I don’t care what it is. Whatever you do is up to you and it’s the same thing with anyone in my family. And anybody in my family is a white human being, because my family is of the white family.

  There is the black family, a yellow family, the red family, a cow family and a mule family. There is all kinds of different families.

  We have to find ourselves first, God second, and kind, k-i-n-d, come next. And that is all I was doing. I was working on cleaning up my house, something Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road picking up his children. But he wasn’t. He was in the White House sending them off to war.

  I don’t know the different people that have got on the stand; one friend said I put a knife to his throat. I did. I put a knife to his throat. And he said I was responsible for all of these killings.

  I have done the best I know how, and I have given all I can give and I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to say any wrong.

  I never found any wrong.

  I looked at wrong, and it is all relative.

  Wrong is if you haven’t got any money.

  Wrong is if your car payment is overdue.

  Wrong is if the TV breaks.

  Wrong is if President Kennedy gets killed.

  Wrong is, wrong is, wrong is you keep on, you pile it in your mind, you become belabored with it, and in your confusion …

  I make up my own mind. I think for myself. I look at you and I say, “Okay, you make up your own mind, you think for yourself, then you see your mothers and your fathers and your teachers and your preachers and your politicians and your presidents, and you lay in your brain with your opinions, considerations, conclusions.” And I look at you and I say, “Okay, if you are real to you it’s okay with me but you don’t look real to me, you only look like a composite of what someone told you you are. You live for each other’s opinion and you have pain on your face and you are not sure what you like, and you wonder if you look okay.”

  And I look at you and I say, “Well, you look alright to me,” you know, and you look at me and you say, “Well, you don’t look alright to me.”

  Well I don’t care what I look like to you. I don’t care what you think about me and I don’t care what you do with me. I have always been yours anyway. I have always been in your cell.

  When you were out riding your bicycles I was sitting in your cell looking out the window and looking at pictures in magazines and wishing I could go to high school and go to the proms, wishing I could go to the things you could do, but oh so glad, oh so glad, brothers and sisters, that I am what I am.

  Because when it does come down around your ears and none of you know what you are doing, you better believe I will be on top of my thought.

  I will know what I am doing. I
will know exactly what I am doing. If you ever let me go before you kill me. And then I don’t really particularly care anyway, because I still will be there and I will still know what I am doing.

  In my mind I live forever.

  In my mind I live forever, and in my mind I have always lived forever.

  I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.

  I have done everything I have always been told. I have mopped the floor when I was supposed to mop the floor. And I have swept when I was supposed to sweep.

  I was smart enough to stay out of jail and too dumb to learn anything. I was too little to get a job there, and too big to do something over here.

  I have just been sitting in jail thinking nothing. Nothing to think about.

  Everybody used to come in and tell me about their past and their lives and what they did. But I could never tell anybody about my past or what my life was or what I did because I have always been sitting in that room with a bed, a locker, and a table. So, then it moves on to awareness: how many cracks can you count in the wall? It moves to where the mice live and what the mice are thinking, and see how clever mice are.

  And then, when you get on the outside, you look into people’s heads. You take Linda Kasabian and you put her on the witness stand and she testifies against her father. She never has liked her father, and she has always projected her wrong off to the man figure. So, consequently, it is the man’s fault again, and the woman turns around and she blames it on the man. The man made her do it. The man put her up to it.

  The man works for her, the man slaves for her, the man does everything for her, and she lays around the house and she tells him what he should do, because, generally, she is an extension of his mother. His mother told him what to do and she trained him for twenty years and passed him on to the wife. Then the woman takes him and tells him what to wear, when to get up, when to go to work.

  Then when she gets on the stand and she says when she looked in that man’s eyes that was dying, she knew it was my fault.

  She knew that it was my fault because she couldn’t face death. And if she cannot face death, that is not my fault. Why should she blame it on me? I can face death. I have all the time.