The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  It therefore seems within the realm of possibility that when he was stealing money from that older couple, he was acting out against my parents; there was more than a little anger involved. When he was arrested at the Mexican border he said, “Call my father, he’s a big shot at the IRS.” A shrink wouldn’t have needed to administer a Rorschach test to figure that out. So my problem is not that psychiatric evaluations are without value, my objection is the certainty with which the conclusions are asserted.

  At the park, when I saw Mrs. Van Houten get out of her Toyota Camry, I smiled. She was wearing slacks, a blue denim jacket, and a turquoise Mickey Mouse T-shirt. When we shook hands, she looked at my dress and apologized for her informal attire. “I’m taking my granddaughter to the zoo when we’re done.”

  I had made her uncomfortable, not the other way around. What else was I wrong about?

  We sat opposite each other at a picnic table. There was a young couple with a toddler having a picnic on the lawn. The baby, her legs bowed, her diapers droopy, was clearly new to the business of ambulation. “That baby is adorable,” she said. Was she thinking about Leslie, who’d also been an adorable baby? I have seen photos. The parents hovered anxiously, and when the baby teetered they both rushed to catch her. “I love the way young fathers are so involved with their kids these days,” Mrs. V. said. Was she referring to Mr. Van Houten’s lack of involvement when Leslie was a baby? I was no better than the shrinks. Everything she said to me, even about other families, seemed freighted with meaning.

  We discussed many things: the marine layer, the jacarandas, the end-of-an-era death of Frank Sinatra. From there, we somehow slipped into talk of her childhood in Cedar Falls, Iowa. She reminisced about long summer days, walking in the woods, building mud dams on the Cedar River, and unearthing relics from the Mesquaki and Sauk Indians, the first inhabitants of Black Hawk County. As I listened to her describe the hushed solitude of the woods, the chance to daydream, the feeling of endless space and time, I was struck by the similarity between her observations—her dreamy love of nature, of solitude, even of Native American culture—and those of her daughter. In prison Leslie is exposed to only a sliver of the natural world, but she makes the most of it, describing to me the robins who perch outside the window of her cell, the redolence of the rosemary bushes on the prison grounds, the clarity of the sky on those rare smog-free days, and the lessons she’s learned from Native American inmates at Frontera who regularly invite her to their sweat lodge rituals.

  After graduating from high school, Mrs. Van Houten attended Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, now called the University of Northern Iowa. She got a job teaching in a small school in a tiny town—Dumont, Iowa. As was the custom for such teachers in rural America in the 1940s, she lived with a local family but she often ate dinner at the Home Café, which is where she met Paul Van Houten in 1942. He had just come home from five years in the Army. Events went quickly after that. They got married and then he was sent overseas to fight in World War II. He was stationed in Italy and after that Africa. During the war, Mrs. Van Houten taught at a teacher’s college.

  When the war was over, the Van Houtens were part of a massive influx of Midwesterners into California. Many of the immigrants were GIs who had tasted the fruits of the state—the weather, the beaches, the jobs, the wide open spaces, and, literally, the fruit from the miles of orange groves—on their way to the Pacific theater or when they were stationed in California. This continuous wave created the vast metropolis that is now L.A.

  Mr. Van Houten established a well-paying career as a car auctioneer, and with the help of the GI Bill they bought a house for $10,500 in Mayflower Village—the first subdivision in Monrovia. To outsiders, the town is indistinguishable from scores of other suburban tracts in the San Gabriel Valley, but the town, which calls itself “The All-American City,” takes pride in its stalwart character and commitment to tradition. Two of its former residents have achieved national attention: writer Upton Sinclair, who lived there in the 1930s, and three decades later, Leslie Van Houten. Sinclair is mentioned in the city’s 1986 Centennial Review; Leslie Van Houten is not.

  Monrovia in the 1950s was “relaxed and nifty,” according to the recollections of longtime resident Mary Lou in a nostalgic piece in the Monrovia News Post the year of the centennial. “The second big war had ceased a few years before, Eisenhower was President, and the economy was on the way up.”

  “Van had survived the war. Life was wonderful,” Mrs. V. told me. “We were living an Ozzie and Harriet existence.”

  In 1947, the couple had a son, Paul; Leslie was born in 1949. The house was only one thousand square feet, but it grew along with the family. They remodeled the kitchen, built another bedroom, and then added a swimming pool. Mrs. V. remembers planting raspberry bushes in the front yard.

  The Van Houtens were an enterprising couple. They helped to establish a Presbyterian church in their community, part of the religious revival that swept over the United States after the war, and to build a new school. Once the school was established, they started the PTA. Their community engagement was in full throttle.

  After the Korean War, the couple started to hear through their church about what Mrs. Van Houten described as “the mess” the 8th Army had left in Korea. She said it was Mr. Van Houten’s idea to adopt one or two of the mixed-race kids abandoned by American soldiers. When Leslie was seven years old, they adopted two who were among the first wave of Korean children coming to the United States.

  When Mrs. V. talked about her two adopted kids, I mentioned that I’d read in the court transcript that one of the psychological experts claimed that even as a little girl, Leslie had exhibited an explosive nature, testifying that she’d had tantrums and one time hit her adopted sister with a shoe.

  “Of course there was competition between them,” she said, shaking her head and clearly exasperated. “Of course there was sibling rivalry, but whoever said Leslie had tantrums was lying. The problem wasn’t tantrums, the problem was that Leslie didn’t want to fight back. Her sister would sometimes hit her and she’d just keep taking it. Finally, I told her she had to stand up for herself. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Mom, I can’t.’

  “I have no idea where they get that stuff. Leslie was simply delightful. She was the sweetest, cutest kid—a kid who required no discipline. It was her way to try and understand. It was her way to try and avoid conflict, to try and work things out.”

  In 1963, the year that John Kennedy was killed, Leslie’s parents filed for divorce. While Mrs. Van Houten was attending PTA meetings, her husband found another woman, a woman who was younger, richer, and unencumbered by children. I only know this, however, because Leslie told me. Her mother said simply, “Van departed.” I started to ask more but she looked away, which I took as a signal that the topic was not up for discussion. It was clear that thirty years later the wound had not completely healed. At first I was struck by the fact that the ancient divorce seemed as emotionally charged for her as her daughter’s involvement in the murders, and then I realized that, in her mind, the two were intimately connected. It seemed clear that she blamed the divorce for Leslie’s eventual attachment to Manson.

  After her husband left, Mrs. Van Houten went back to school, taking classes in special education so she could resume her teaching career. Though she was devastated by the divorce, she loved her new career. She was eventually hired to be part of a groundbreaking program funded by War on Poverty monies. The kids who were brought in from all over the city were high-risk, underachieving, and from the poorest families.

  “It was a team approach and we used innovative techniques,” she said, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. “And you know what? It worked. We made a difference.” She explained that the education department did pre-tests and post-tests that demonstrated how much the kids improved as a result of the program. “It was a thrilling time of my life. I woke up every day excited about going to work.”

  She loved
her new career though she did worry about not being home for her kids after school. But in those first years after the divorce, Leslie seemed to be the same smart, energetic little girl she’d always been. And then she wasn’t.

  chapter twenty-nine

  DECODING MANSON

  Summer–Fall of 1998

  It was a particularly dreary day at the prison. There was a cloud cover and the sky looked close to a downpour, so everyone crowded into the visiting room instead of going outside. The atmosphere was always close in there; on this day it was even closer and stuffier. I was always struck by how good-natured and polite everyone was, even when we were all bunched together with no privacy for conversations.

  I got there late and Pat was clearly irritated. She always seemed this way when I first greeted her, but then again, I was quite often late. On the days that I flew directly from Northern California, there were many variables beyond my control—traffic to the airport during rush hour, flight delays, car rental hang-ups—all of which I explained or attempted to explain, but I’m not sure she ever bought my lack of culpability. Or maybe my tardiness wasn’t the issue at all. Maybe she was just moody.

  I asked her if she wanted “the usual.” The usual was French vanilla coffee from the vending machine. She nodded. Pat had introduced me to this brew. Despite its ersatz ingredients, I liked the creamy sweetness. At the machine, we worked as a team: I put the dollars in the slot—prisoners are not allowed to handle money— and she retrieved the coffee. When she handed me my cup, it was too hot to drink. It always was and it always cooled in reverse proportion to Pat’s warming up to me. By the time the coffee was perfect drinking temperature, her attitude had softened. She smiled more readily, she even laughed. By then she would be asking me questions about my life instead of lecturing me on the bad state of the prison, the Department of Corrections, the country, the world. At the point in our visit when my coffee was decidedly cool, she was making me feel welcome rather than treating me like someone imposing on her time.

  On my previous visit, Pat had just started talking about the process of freeing herself from Manson when the guard announced the end of visiting. Today, I asked her about it again. At first, she simply repeated what she’d said before: “It took a long time.” When I asked for more—What changed for you? What were the influences?—her replies consisted of shrugs, one-word answers, and short declarative sentences. But then, slowly, question by question, she started elaborating. She told me that the first tentative steps away from Manson occurred because of her relationship with Jean Oliver Carver, an inmate who shared the makeshift death row with Pat, Susan, and Leslie.

  Carver, who had killed a woman evangelical minister in the course of a robbery, had seen much of the world’s dark side, generally, and a lot of the dark side of men, specifically. When Pat had first arrived she often talked dreamily about Manson, elaborating on the way he made her feel good about herself, the way he was endowed with special powers, the way he knew secret things about her and other people. Carver would say, “Honey, those are all old tricks. He sounds just like dozens of men I’ve known—hustlers, pimps, convicts.”

  “That was the beginning of my deprogramming,” Pat said.

  With Carver’s help, Pat started to question her passivity when she’d been with Manson. Fear of his diatribes kept her head down. But it wasn’t only fear that made her obedient. The entire time she was with Manson, in spite of his sexual relationships with other women, she harbored the fantasy that one day she would have children with him and they would be a family. “He knew how to pay just enough attention to me to keep that fantasy alive.” If he sensed that she was unhappy he’d make love to her or compliment her or make her feel special in some other way. But he also constantly assured her that no one else would ever love her or understand her the way he did. If she ever left him, he’d warn, she’d be dooming herself to a life without love.

  At one point when she was talking to me, her mood shifted abruptly. Her mouth morphed from its vinegary pucker to a wider smile; her severe eyes softened, seemed bluer, more liquid, and she seemed far away. I asked what she was thinking about. “All of this talk about family makes me think about Anne Tyler. She’s my favorite writer. All of the families in her novels have problems, but reading her books fills me with longing. That’s when I most regret that I’ll never have a family.”

  We were both quiet, sipping our very cold coffee.

  chapter thirty

  BROKEN EMPATHY CIRCUIT

  Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that mirror neurons in the human brain exist and play an important role. There are researchers who theorize that there are people whose mirror neurons are absent or whose mirror neurons malfunction. Autism, some researchers believe, may involve broken mirror neurons. A study published in the January 6, 2006, issue of Nature, Neuroscience by Mirella Dapretto, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., found that while many people with autism can identify an emotional expression, like sadness on another person’s face, or imitate sad looks with their own faces, they do not feel the emotion associated with the expression. They do not know what it feels like to be sad, angry, disgusted, or surprised from observing other people.Though many studies like Dapretto’s have been replicated, there is no agreement that the cause is a disruption in the mirror neuron system. One proponent of this theory is Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychologist who received considerable flack for it when his 2011 book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty was published. He is the parent of an autistic child and is not suggesting that people with autism are more prone to violence. In fact, in a chapter titled “When Zero Degrees (of Empathy) are Positive,” he makes a distinction between the lack of empathy in autism and the lack of empathy in psychopaths.

  The book is somewhat limited for my purposes because his major focus isn’t on violence committed by ordinary people but on violence perpetrated by people who are borderline, narcissistic, or psychopathic. What was helpful to me, however, was his use of the term “empathy erosion.” Erosion implies a process, not an either/or condition or an on/off switch. A decade or so ago the idea of “snapping” was in vogue and people have suggested to Pat and Leslie that they “snapped” and that’s what caused them to be violent. But their descriptions of what happened to them with Manson reflect a process that occurred over a period of time.

  If, when they first met him, Manson had presented them with a plan to randomly murder people in their homes, they would not have been attracted to either him or his philosophy. Instead, there was a gradual, steady erosion of their core being. (What could be more core than one’s empathy circuit?) In framing empathy erosion, Baron-Cohen uses the analogy of a dimmer switch. If we’d been able to hook up Pat and Leslie with electrodes after they’d been with Manson for a while, and if the science had been there, would we have discovered damage to the empathy circuit? Of course we don’t know, but there are some tantalizing clues as to the complex interplay of biological and social factors.

  By examining the environment created by Manson, it’s possible to speculate about what variables might have eroded their empathy. (I’m not proposing that they were totally passive—at this point I’m not willing to abandon the concept of free will. They may have been manipulated by a cunning psychopath, but they did choose to be with him.)

  One of the techniques for mobilizing ordinary people to commit mass murder is to identify potential victims as subhuman. None of this is new. The Nazis called the Jews vermin, the Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches, the Guatemalan military called the Mayans demons during the systematic torture and murder of Mayan Indians in a thirty-four-year civil war. But now there is scientific evidence of how that works in the brain. Numerous studies demonstrate that the empathy circuit can be fired up or tamped down, depending on how people are labeled.

  In his 2008 book, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others, Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a U.C.L.A. neurologist and neuroscientist and a leading author
ity on mirror neurons, describes an experiment he performed during the 2004 presidential election. He hooked up people to functional MRIs and he and his colleagues showed Democrats and Republicans photographs of candidates. (The functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] is sister to MRIs. The former measures blood flow; the latter takes images of anatomy.) Whenever they showed a Democrat an image of a Democratic candidate, that individual’s mirror neurons fired strongly, indicating empathy for his or her fellow party member. No surprise there.

  When they showed that same individual an image of someone in the opposite party, however, it triggered a sequence of activity that did surprise the Iacoboni team. At first, the individual’s mirror neurons fired, indicating natural human empathy, but then it seemed that his or her conscious mind kicked in, suppressed the mirror neurons, and reduced empathy. The implication of this sequence is significant. According to Iacoboni, it means that our natural impulse is to create an immediate emotional connection with people. It’s only after we label someone as belonging to a different group that we consciously force away that emotional connection.

  In another example, subjects who were hooked up to fMRIs were shown photos of people in pain who were sick with AIDS. There was a marked difference in the reaction to that pain. If the subjects were told that the patients had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, there was intense firing of the mirror neurons. If the subjects were told that the patients had contracted AIDS from needle sharing, that is, by being drug addicts, there was significant less empathy for their pain. In a rather complicated study, social psychologist Tania Singer at the Institute of Neurology at University College London tested subjects’ willingness to administer shocks to people they perceived as cheaters in a card game. (As in Milgram’s study, the shocks were fake.) The empathy circuits in the brains of the subjects were less reactive to the pain of people they saw as “unfair.”