It’s bewildering that the court felt okay about allowing Leslie—who is, to this day, according to the DA and the parole board, a dangerous murderer—to live among us for six months only eight years after the murders and only three years after she had freed herself from Manson’s hold on her. I think of her driving to court every day and then I think about what it must have been like for her to go back to prison.
She told me that it wasn’t as terrible as it sounds because so many people really did believe it was just a matter of time, a short time, before she was paroled.
chapter thirty-seven
MULE CREEK PRISON
1998
It was early. The sun hadn’t fully come up, and tule fog softly blanketed the cars trickling into the parking lot of the Mule Creek Prison. I was looking for Tex Watson’s wife. (Tex no longer uses that nickname—he goes by his given name Charles—but I use it in this book for the sake of clarity.) When we’d arranged to meet, I’d forgotten to ask what make car she’d be driving. Also, I hadn’t counted on such low visibility. For a minute I worried that I wouldn’t find her. And then I saw a young woman emerge out of the mist and walk toward me.
Because she was a born-again Christian, because I’d heard an interview with her in which “praise the Lord” larded almost every sentence, marking pauses in her speech the way some people use “uh”—and because of the heaven-like swirls of fog, there was something otherworldly about my first glimpse of her. But then she waved and we were earth-bound again. She was pretty with dark hair, and she looked very young. She had a sober quality that tempered her youth. There were three children walking behind her.
I knew she and Tex had children, but I hadn’t expected her to bring them. Perhaps I should have. It was, after all, Sunday, visiting day, and, if they hadn’t come, they would have missed family time with their dad that week. Early on in this project, I had decided that I wouldn’t contact Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s henchman. Initially my reluctance was due to the desire to limit the scope of my inquiries, but as time went by and my feelings for Leslie and Pat intensified, I think I had another agenda, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I wanted him as backup to Susan Atkins for the role of scapegoat, in the event that she failed to continue serving that purpose. (And in fact, Susan eventually did fail in that role. As I observed her getting increasingly debilitated from cancer during my visits to the prison, it was difficult to continue conjuring her as a receptacle for the rage, fear, and sadness about the murders that I hadn’t shaken.) As it turned out, though, Tex wasn’t such a good substitute.
Two things changed my mind about meeting him: I read Will You Die for Me? A book he wrote with a chaplain nine years after the murders. I was surprised to find it very readable and, even more surprising, I trusted the voice. It seemed to be an honest rendering of what had attracted Tex to Charles Manson and a straightforward account of the murders. I wouldn’t say it was overflowing with psychological insight, but, on the other hand, it was not filled with the-devil-made-me-do-it rhetoric. It was an as-told-to book, so the quality of writing isn’t Watson’s, but I assumed it represented his experience and perspective.
The other thing that piqued my interest: I had heard that Tex had a friendship with Susan Struthers LaBerge, Mrs. LaBianca’s daughter. How in the hell did that happen? I certainly know relatives of victims who believe in forgiveness but not to the point of friendship. I wanted to learn more about it.
I wrote to Tex at Mule Creek Prison asking if I could visit. He responded by suggesting that I contact his wife, Kristin, who would make the arrangements. Kristin and I talked on the phone and planned to rendezvous at the prison the following month. (As with Pat and Leslie, I couldn’t formally interview him—no paper, no pencil, no recorder. I would have to visit as a friend.)
I didn’t know much about Tex, other than imagining him as a one-man killing machine on those two nights of terror. In the photos from his time with Manson, he looked a little deranged, springing from the same gene pool as Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. He did not look like the babe magnet he was purported to be. In his before-Manson photos, he looked like the strapping young man he’d been in Texas and later in California—a man to whom many women were apparently attracted.
In high school he’d been popular with his teachers and peers, excelled academically, lettered in sports, and he was a member of Future Farmers of America. After the murders, his mother had famously said, “I sent a nice boy to California and he came back a killer.” He was not with the Manson group when they were arrested. He fled home to Texas and was later extradited.
The day I drove to Ione, the town where Mule Creek is located, the tule fog was hugging the road, making the drive a little treacherous. Actually, one stretch always felt treacherous, even when there wasn’t a trace of fog. Whenever I drove past Rancho Seco, the decommissioned nuclear reactor, I noticed that I held my breath the way I did as a little girl going through tunnels. After the movie The China Syndrome was released in March 1979, I was sent to the area by an editor to interview people about how they felt living close to a nuclear reactor. Residents seemed equally divided between those who thought it was dangerous and those who thought it perfectly safe and blamed one of the stars, Jane Fonda, for fanning the flames of foolish paranoia.
As it turned out, the paranoia was not so foolish. Twelve days after the movie was released, there was a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania with the same design as Rancho Seco. Radioactive gases and iodine were released into the environment. Later, it was disclosed that there had been a series of accidents at Rancho Seco that had gone unreported in the press, and citizens voted to close the plant in 1989. The cooling towers were now empty, but abandoned air raid sirens scattered throughout the area were reminders of past danger.
Even knowing that the cooling towers were empty and the plant decommissioned, as usual, I held my breath. The twin towers, as they appeared through the fog, seemed particularly ominous that morning, but I was on my way to meet a man who had murdered seven people and it was hard to separate my uneasiness about lingering radiation from the horror I always felt whenever I thought about the murders, the murderers and the victims.
Tex’s children sat very quietly in the visiting room. It was difficult to tell if they were shy or extremely well behaved. The oldest boy stands out in my memory—a kid with neatly combed dark hair, fair skin, and freckles. I think he was probably twelve or thirteen. He was wearing slacks, a white dress shirt, and a blazer. His mom, Kristin, was wearing a navy shirt-waist dress. Sunday best. No jeans and sweatpants for this handsome family. (There are now a total of four children.)
The children are compliments of the conjugal visit program started under the administration of Governor Ronald Reagan in 1971. When the program was proposed initially, there was much opposition from the guards, who claimed that it would increase drug smuggling, violence, and child molestation. There was, however, abundant research demonstrating that conjugal visiting strengthened families and encouraged rehabilitation. Doris Tate, Sharon’s mother, cared not a whit about this research. Before she died in 1992, she was one of the most insistent voices demanding that the legislators end the program, which they eventually did in 2000 for inmates serving life terms. (As I indicate in an earlier chapter, family visits were eventually reinstated for lifers, but only for those whose crimes did not involve violence.)
Tex, his family, and I sat at a table in the visiting room. As their dad and I talked, the kids sat looking sober, which I interpreted as boredom. I wished I’d brought something for them to do. I wondered why their mom hadn’t thought of that. On second thought, other than a coloring book, not exactly a pre-teen boy’s métier, I’m not sure what would have been on the approved list. So Dad and I talked while Kristen and the kids observed.
I asked Tex how he happened to become friends with Mrs. LaBianca’s daughter, Susan Struthers LaBerge. I knew from Steve Kay that Frank Struthers, Susan’s younge
r brother, had struggled mightily, both as a kid and as a young adult. I’m not sure precisely what “struggled” referred to but could imagine the kind of suffering a boy who found his parents dead would endure. At one point, Steve used the term “lost.” Somewhere along the way he seemed to have found some footing by allying himself with Debra Tate, the youngest of the three Tate sisters. He now shows up at parole hearings along with the ever-growing crowd of parole deniers, arguing against release for any and all of the people involved in the murders. His testimony seems to get ever more bitter as the years go by.
His sister, Suzan, was a teenager when their parents were killed, and her life was in no less turmoil after the murders than her little brother’s, but as part of her quest to make sense of what happened, she started writing to Tex under a different name. After corresponding for months, she asked if she could meet him. He agreed and at that meeting she told him who she was. At first he didn’t believe her, but eventually he did and after he recovered from the shock, they slowly built a friendship. They were both born-again Christians, and that helped intensify their bond. In a subsequent interview on a Christian network, Suzan explained how getting to know Tex and forgiving him released her from her grief. Her explanation: “He’s new in Christ. I’m new in Christ.” She also became friends with Kristin.
At the time of my visit, the two women and their children lived in the same neighborhood not far from the prison. Eventually, Susan came to believe that Tex should be out of prison and started attending his parole hearings to promote his release. Sharon’s mother, Doris Tate, was outraged. After one parole hearing, she accosted Susan in the prison parking lot, demanding that she reconsider her support for Watson, a verifiable serial killer.
Charles “Tex” Watson grew up in Copeville, Texas, thirty-five miles north of Dallas. After a promising tenure in high school, he attended North State University in Denton, Texas, but he didn’t graduate. According to his first memoir, he was lured to California by the drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll of the 1960s. He found all three in abundance when he arrived.
After he’d been in California for a few months and living in Malibu, he picked up a hitchhiker on Sunset Boulevard who was also heading to the beach. The hitchhiker was Dennis Wilson, the drummer for The Beach Boys, who explained he was without transportation because he had wrecked both his Rolls Royce and his Ferrari. Tex had grown up listening to the band—his brother was a fan—so when Wilson invited him to come into his house in Pacific Palisades, Tex accepted enthusiastically. This is where he first met Charles Manson, who was sitting on the floor in the living room surrounded by five or six girls and strumming his guitar. Watson said that when his eyes met Manson’s, he felt “a sort of gentleness, an embracing kind of acceptance and love.”
Though, initially, Wilson was also taken with Manson’s message of love and acceptance, he subsequently tired of the hangers-on and kicked them out. Tex left with them.
Tex, like Pat and Leslie, was besotted with Charles Manson, the embodiment of all things mystical. At one point, he telephoned his parents in Texas and told his mother that he had met the Jesus she had preached about his whole life. “Charlie was Jesus. He was my messiah, my savior, my soul,” Tex wrote in Will You Die for Me?
The book’s title came from an incident after the Tate-LaBianca murders when Manson pressed the point of a long knife against Tex’s chest and asked, “Would you die for me? Would you let me kill you?”
Tex wrote that his reply was instantaneous and automatic. “Sure, Charlie, you can kill me.”
In the book he explains that he was so filled with the love of God that nothing was too great to ask. “I was filled with Charlie. He was God to me. He could ask anything, even my life . . . And it wouldn’t be any great thing, giving him my life, because I knew everything but my physical, animal body was already dead anyway. My ego was dead; anything that asserted I, me, or mine was dead. My personality had died, now I was only Charlie, and Charlie was all of me that mattered.”
When he told Charlie that he could kill him he knew that the person he had been before was “totally dead.” He felt no remorse for the murders, no revulsion at the brutality of the killings. He felt nothing at all.
In the prison visiting room, Tex and I talked about his history, his life at Mule Creek, and his religion, which figured prominently in his life. It was through his church connections that Tex and Kristin had started corresponding. She lived in New Jersey, and at the time, he was incarcerated at California Men’s Colony in San Louis Obispo. He persuaded her to move to San Louis Obispo, and they got married when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-three.
Tex was “born again” in 1975, six years after the murders, and ordained as a Methodist minister in 1981. At the time of our meeting, he was assisting a minister from the community who came weekly to hold services for the prisoners. Our conversation was easy and friendly until I referred to “the murders.” He shot me a “look,” the kind I used to get from my mother when I mentioned a family secret in front of outsiders.
Clearly he hadn’t told his kids. He must have told them he was convicted of something—he was, after all, in prison—but I didn’t know what. Given that, I wondered why he had wanted his kids to be present for the interview. What did he think we would talk about? Later, I thought about the conversation he would eventually have to have with them. How and at what age do you tell your kids you murdered seven people?
Aside from that bit of discomfort, the visit was pleasant. I hadn’t expected to like him but I did. I’d anticipated that his religiosity would dominate, but it didn’t.
At one point, Kristin and the kids walked over to the vending machines to buy chips and sodas. In the short time they were out of earshot, I told him that I was getting to know Pat and Leslie.
“Those poor girls,” he said, a pained look coming over his face. “They just got caught up in it.” He looked genuinely aggrieved.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean they just got caught up in the moment. They didn’t kill on those nights.”
At first I thought I’d misheard him. What did he mean they didn’t kill? Leslie stabbed Mrs. LaBianca nineteen times.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
And then I remembered Pat telling me that she stabbed Abigail Folger first and then got Tex to come and finish killing her. So I assume what Tex meant was that they didn’t administer the coup de grâce—he did. Of course, in the eyes of the law, that made no difference. They were as guilty as he was. (Though, when I was driving home that night, I thought that if the women hadn’t been so sturdily under Manson’s influence at the time of the trial, a good lawyer might have been able to use this testimony as a mitigating factor. Then again, if they hadn’t been under Manson’s influence none of it would have happened in the first place.)
I was surprised. It seemed like a generous thing to say because the implication was that he was responsible for doing it all, if not legally or morally, then physically. I couldn’t think of any benefit he would gain from portraying them as more innocent than he. At that point, anyway, his account of the murders didn’t seem strategic.
Since then, Tex has changed his story a bit. Tex now says that Pat is the one who killed Abigail Folger. According to an April 6, 2016, article in the Daily Mail, he has written to Wikipedia asking that the entry on him be corrected to reflect that Pat was the primary killer of Abigail Folger, although he admits he “assisted.” Patricia has never denied her involvement in Folger’s murder. It does seem to contradict what he told me about the primary responsibility for the murders.
I’m not sure why he took so much of the blame when we talked or why he later changed his mind. At the time, he clearly expressed sympathy for both Pat and Leslie. I don’t attribute any sinister motives to his change of heart. Perhaps it was on the advice of a lawyer. It’s possible that a fact like this could make a difference at a parole hearing. Or, maybe now that his kids are older and might read these accounts
, he wants to minimize his culpability in any way he can.
* * *
On the drive home from Mule Creek, I wondered again about the presence of his kids. Had it served a purpose other than (or in addition to) the fact that it was visiting day? I suspected that the tableau of the perfect Sunday best family was contrived to counterbalance the criticism they were getting for producing a family in the first place. If I’m right, they needn’t have bothered. While I understand why this sort of thing makes taxpayers angry (there is a possibility that the kids were on Medi-Cal), and especially taxpayers who have in any way been victimized by violent crime, it’s simply not in me to be upset about creating a new family in which the kids are wanted, loved, and treated well.
According to information in the transcript of his last parole hearing, the couple has since divorced and Kristin has remarried, but Tex told the panel that the two have an amicable relationship and continue to co-parent the kids.
In 1980, Tex founded Abounding Love Ministries and it now has a website, AboundingLove.org. (Someone else must manage it for him. He wouldn’t be able to do that from prison.) The website tells his story, quotes Scripture, and talks a lot about love and forgiveness. I may not have a problem with Tex fathering children while in prison, but the website doesn’t sit well with me. He’s capitalizing on the interest people have in Manson and it seems dishonest, especially because he states on the site that he “no longer allows his crime to identify who he is.”
The Manson Women and Me Page 18