The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  The most surprising aspect of the initial attraction to ISIS is that for most of these young people, idealism is what prompts the appeal. They want to be a part of something that enlarges their lives and makes them more meaningful. And that was certainly true of Pat and Leslie who say that initially, Charles Manson stood for peace and love, a beacon of hope in a society torn apart by disagreements over the war in Vietnam. Even more important, he offered a family to these girls who were adrift from their own. This is also true of the young people attracted to ISIS.

  Who was Malik’s inspiration? His name was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader to whom she posted her allegiance on Facebook the day she prepared to slaughter her husband’s co-workers. Al-Baghdadi was, in many ways, Charles Manson writ large. According to David Ignatious in a June 24, 2015, issue of The Washington Post, al-Baghdadi was a master opportunist with gang leader charisma. Like Manson, he was schooled in American prisons. He spent time as a prisoner at Camp Bucca, a U.S.-run detention facility. Manson claimed the mantle of Jesus Christ; al-Baghdadi claimed to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Like Manson, he was an unexceptional child. He never excelled at religious scholarship but was talented at the recitation of Quranic verse. In spite of his other limitations, al-Baghdadi was a genius at exploiting the anarchy in the Middle East, leveraging his biography, and taking advantage of the far reach of the Internet. Manson, who encouraged the belief that he was the embodiment of Jesus Christ, leveraged his knowledge of scientology, the Bible, and Dale Carnegie to the same effect.

  Time magazine called al-Baghdadi “the brooding muezzin of death” because of the way he turned an early affinity for Quranic recitation into a grandiose claim to be the caliph. (Muezzin is a man who calls Muslims to prayer from the tower of a mosque.) Rumors of his death have been reported sporadically since 2014 when the cleric made a public appearance announcing the creation of Isis’ so-called caliphate from the Iraqi city of Mosul. In June 2017 Russia claimed to have killed him in an air strike in Syria. As of this writing, the United States has not confirmed his death.

  Dead or alive, his ability to attract new followers or keep his existing ones has not diminished; he lives on in perpetuity through videos. Al-Baghdadi, like Manson, is able to inspire such intense support that his fighters seemingly will go anywhere and do anything for the cause, either destroying themselves or others in the process.

  One of the researchers who’s been studying young jihadists is Dr. Bill Swann, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. In late 2016, I sent him some background on Manson and the former Manson Family, and asked him to compare the techniques employed by Manson and what is being discovered about ISIS leaders today. In a subsequent phone interview he said there were many parallels. Both targeted people whose social identities were deficient in two crucial ways: they lacked closeness with individuals as well as collective ties to a group. The resulting void left them without a sense of worth or competency. This sort of dislocation is problematic for everyone, but according to Swann, the sense of isolation and insignificance is particularly hard on young people.

  What Manson provided four decades ago and what al-Baghdadi (or his avatar in videos) serves up today, in its simplest form, is a sense of an all-encompassing family. It’s not surprising that Manson could snare vulnerable youth in his trap, he had 24/7 access to his acolytes, but ISIS manages to do the same through the Internet. It’s a testament to the power of carefully honed messages sent to targeted populations, but it also points to the power of screens. I find it astonishing that inspiring young people to change their lives so profoundly can be accomplished through computers, iPads, and cell phones, and even more astonishing that such transformations can be sustained remotely.

  Swanson calls the experience that results from these recruitment strategies “identity fusion”: an exceptional form of alignment in which members experience a visceral sense of oneness with the group. The power it wields is formidable.

  chapter forty-nine

  THE SHADE TREES OF HOLLYWOOD HIGH

  Spring of 1960

  When we walked into our first-period class, our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Jimenez, who usually greeted us standing ramrod straight at the blackboard, was slumped at her desk weeping. No conjugating irregular verbs today. “I’ve been at Hollywood High for twenty years,” she said, removing her glasses and dabbing her cheeks with a handkerchief. “Nothing like this has ever happened.” Over the weekend shade trees on the quad had been chopped down. The carnage was the result of yet another battle in the ongoing war between the school administration and the social clubs they were attempting to banish.

  The administration’s first salvo was aimed at the clubs’ dominion over the benches in the inner quad. The benches surrounded hundred-year-old pepper trees whose spreading branches provided the only shade to the central part of the campus. There were no signs—DELTAS ONLY or BETAS ONLY—the control was exerted by tradition. Actually, if signs had been posted it would have been less humiliating for new students.

  I remember watching a boy wander over to the Athenian bench with his lunch box and sit down. He was a reedy kid with a crew cut and wearing jeans that were a little too short. I remember how skinny he was because I also remember thinking he had selected the worst bench for his introduction to Greek life at Hollywood High. The Athenians were husky, well-muscled football players, guys who had five-o’clock shadows. This boy didn’t even have peach fuzz. Both he and I must have gotten out of our third-period class early because at first we were the only ones around. I watched him from an adjacent bench, the bench that “belonged” to my club, Gamma Rho, wondering what to do. Do I walk over there and warn him? I’d be saving him from embarrassment, but I’d also be enforcing the part of club life I knew was wrong.

  Though the exclusion at Hollywood High wasn’t racial, if I’d been honest with myself, I would have acknowledged that the invisible signs on campus reminded me of the WHITES ONLY signs I was exposed to on my family trip to the segregated South. As I debated what to do, I watched him take out the contents of his lunch box and pictured his mom packing that lunch, chopping the carrots, washing the apple, spreading tuna salad on whole wheat bread, feeling good about sending her son off to school with a nutritious meal. Could she have imagined that there was a system in place that conferred second-class citizenship on him, a system that prevented him from eating that lunch wherever he wanted to?

  “You can’t be here,” a burly Athenian said, walking up to confront him.

  The kid looked around. “Why?”

  “This bench belongs to my club.”

  “Where does it say that?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  The boy started to reply, “But, I . . .” The enforcer edged closer. The boy shrugged and put the contents back in his lunch box. He looked around, apparently trying to scout another bench on which to alight. The Athenian read his mind: “You can’t sit on any of these benches,” he said with a sweep of his hand, “unless you’re in a club and”—he gave the boy an appraising look—“I don’t think you are.”

  Again, for a moment, the kid seemed like he was going to say something . . . ask a question? Challenge the rule? Ultimately, though, he said nothing and walked away.

  Later in the semester, the principal called an assembly to announce an end to the practice. The benches belonged to all students. Excluding non-club members would no longer be tolerated.

  Outrage erupted. Club members said the new rule was un-American, unconstitutional, something Communists would do. Nothing changed. Club members continued to eat their lunches under the shade trees, shooing away everyone else. The administration devised a new tactic: one Monday morning when we arrived on campus there were fat white lines painted around each tree. In homeroom that morning it was announced that everyone would have to stay outside the white lines. The benches on the inside of the white lines would now be off limits to everyone.

  The clubs continued to commandeer the space by standing along the whi
te lines that defined their former benches. It was inconvenient to eat lunch standing up, but, hell, this was war. For a while, club members got a thrill out of sabotaging the new rule but soon tired of standing for the whole lunch hour. The anger mounted. And then one weekend, a girl I’ll call Melody, a budding starlet who landed a starring role on a popular TV show, got together with a couple of her guy friends, one of whom was a freshman at University of Southern California and a recent graduate of Hollywood High where he’d been in a club. Melody was a Delta. Rumor had it that they got drunk and decided to exact revenge. They drove to the school and chopped down trees.

  Even before that, Melody had made news in club circles. She had dropped out of the Lambdas to join the Deltas, something heretofore unheard of. Both were top-tier clubs, but the Deltas were at the pinnacle. They were the beauties. The speculation was that the plastic surgery Melody had to repair an alleged broken nose the summer before newly qualified her for the super elite.

  When we arrived on campus the next morning, it looked as though a tornado had swept through. As we stepped over the piles of broken limbs—you could no longer see the white lines—even club members were stunned. It felt shockingly violent, the more shocking because a girl was involved.

  Had it really been a drunken whim? Did Melody carry around an ax in her car? Or was it planned?

  “I feel as though someone has amputated my limbs,” Mrs. Jimenez said to the class, hugging herself. “I loved those trees. They were so beautiful.”

  I don’t remember what happened after that. Was Melody arrested? Suspended? What about the white lines? I do remember that the next year Melody starred in the school musical and both her talent and her confidence made it clear she was headed for fame. Maybe her obvious star quality made people forget the damage. It didn’t make me forget. I had tried to pretend, if only to myself, that my club membership had not compromised my values, had not compromised me. The destruction of the trees symbolized ugly entitlement. And though my club wasn’t directly involved, Melody represented the club culture and I was a part of that culture. I was on the wrong side of this war, a war my father had implored me to be on the right side of.

  chapter fifty

  FUSED IDENTITIES

  Most of us, at some point in our lives, identify, to varying degrees, with a group: girl scouts, fraternities, labor unions, political parties. How is identity fusion different? According to Bill Swann, a professor at University of Texas, allegiance to the group in most associations, even active ones, does not eclipse the self. Fused identity does. (I recall that early in my relationships with Pat and Leslie, they both, independently, said that they had “no self” when they were with Manson.) “You give the group strength and the group gets strength from you,” says Swann.

  The concept of identity fusion has provided a different way of looking at the dynamics of the Manson Family. So much of my thinking about the women and much of the research on violent group behavior has emphasized the primacy of the leader and the way the situation, as designed by the leader or institution, manipulates and enforces obedience (as it did at Abu Ghraib). More recent research has focused on the relationship between the members of the group and the influence that has on behavior.

  Identity fusion may explain one of the most puzzling aspects of the behavior displayed by Pat and Leslie in the aftermath of the Tate-LaBianca murders—the five years it took for them to have any feelings about killing their victims.

  I had assumed that the women continued to be disconnected from the reality of their behavior because Manson was still managing to control them even though they were in prison. If, however, identity fusion is as powerful as Swann suggests, it seems just as likely that it was because the three women, Pat, Leslie, and Susan Atkins, continued to reinforce and gather strength from each other at Frontera.

  How does fused identity lead to cold-blooded killing? The necessary ingredient for that conversion, according to Swann, is the perception that the group is threatened and that dramatic action is required to defend it. “This completes or amplifies the process of fusion with the group.”

  Before this step, however, the leader must get them to sever ties with their existing groups, usually families. Swann calls this, “switching worlds.” Manson not only discouraged his followers from maintaining contact with their families, he used those relationships as weapons. “I still see your mother in you,” he would yell at Leslie if she challenged his dictates or expressed values he considered bourgeois. ISIS, who targets vulnerable young people through various social media outlets, has a similar approach, pressuring recruits to cut off ties with their families and to renounce their countries of origin.

  The following is an appeal by Aqsa Mahmood, a British woman living in Syrian territory controlled by ISIS. “The family you get in exchange for leaving the ones behind are like the pearl in comparison to the shell you threw away into the foam of the sea, which is the Ummah [community of believers].” Mahmood is involved in a campaign to urge Western women to abandon their homes and join her there. “The reason for this is because your love for one another is purely for the sake of Allah.”

  For ISIS, there is no shortage of enemies. Any infidel will do. The formula is simple: people who don’t practice the ISIS fundamentalist brand of Islam are infidels. An infidel is an enemy. All enemies must be destroyed.

  Swann describes members of these groups as having a “visceral sense of oneness.” When I imagine how the Manson Family defended itself from external threats I picture a sea anemone. When you poke it with a stick, the whole organism shrivels in response.

  chapter fifty-one

  A DROP OF JEWISH BLOOD

  Summer of 1961

  It was Sunday, family day at Don Lugo, the then minimum security wing of the California Institution for Men where my brother was incarcerated. There were four of us that day: my brother, his girlfriend, Candace, me and my college boyfriend, Craig. We were sitting at a picnic table in a grassy area dotted with ironwood trees and next to a pasture of grazing Holsteins. (My brother always joked that the men were so hard up for females they referred to the herd as “the girls.”)

  Although that campus is close to the prison where Pat and Leslie are now housed, the methane haze that persistently hovers over them was not there—at least, not in my memory. Instead, when I picture the sky that day, it’s a lovely David Hockney blue with a mottled scattering of clouds. I even remember a babbling brook running through the grounds. If there was no babbling brook, the fact that I remember one is a reflection of how idyllic that day seemed. I also picture us eating fried chicken and potato salad served on a red-and-white-checked gingham tablecloth that Candace brought in an old-fashioned wicker picnic hamper.

  Is it possible that life was so different then that the prison allowed outside food? Or is this a complete distortion? Maybe because of what came before and immediately after, that day seemed near perfect. Near perfect, or any kind of perfect is not what one normally associates with prison memories, but there was something joyful about that day. The only exception was how uncharacteristically distant my boyfriend was. I passed it off as a hangover. He’d been out late the night before.

  My brother was a changed guy since those first days when we talked through the thick glass in the maximum security unit. He was certainly in better shape than he’d been before his arrest when he was using drugs and leading a life of debauchery. I don’t actually know if he’d been leading a life of debauchery. That’s how my mother referred to it. But he was, by his own admission, taking drugs—most of them, as far as I know, hallucinogens—and he had that pallor and slightly wasted look that people who take drugs and spend a lot of time debauching indoors have.

  In prison he was tan and muscled, not from lifting weights but from hard physical labor. He was fighting fires every day—all of Southern California was ablaze, as is usual every summer. He also radiated emotional well-being. This I attributed to therapy. Every evening the inmates at Don Lugo, no matter how fatigued
from a day on the fire line, were required to participate in group therapy. The program was experimental, and the guys were hand selected for their intelligence, their attitude, and their promise. As far as I know, it was very successful.

  I later wrote a paper on the unique features of Don Lugo for a criminology class at U.C.; I don’t now remember the exact stats on recidivism, but I do know that the data looked very good. Don Lugo no longer exists; such programs were not repeated once California took a hard right and decimated budgets for rehabilitation.

  (This destruction was not only Ronald Reagan’s handiwork; Jerry Brown, in his first two terms as governor, was a criminal justice hardliner. His father, Pat Brown, was the governor during my brother’s incarceration. He wasn’t exactly progressive but compared to his son, he was the Charles Dickens of California prison reform.)

  The warden at Don Lugo was a humane, good-humored guy with a smart, pretty wife who was equally good humored and humane. They were an energetic couple who lived on the grounds with their young children. With them at the helm, Don Lugo felt like a family.

  There was another reason my brother glowed. He was in love. A few months after he was sentenced, Candace, who’d been his junior high school girlfriend, called my parents to say hello. When they told her what had happened to my brother, she wept and then she asked when she could see him. She was an almond-eyed beauty whose loyalty and girlish sweetness was irresistible to him. People laugh when I say this, but prison relationships have all of the ingredients of a perfect romance: intensity, thwarted sexuality, idealization, and singularity of focus. One of the most joyful magazine articles I wrote as a young journalist was “Wedding Day at San Quentin” for California Living, the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner.