Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Under case number A-267861, the prisoner was received into the institution on December 13th, 1971, for violation of first-degree murder concurrent with prior term.

  The Murder of Gary Hinman

  The Tate and LaBianca murders were not the only killings, nor were they the first ones.

  [A] pistol, knives, and swords were used in the following crimes, which the prisoner committed with crime partners Beausoleil and Atkins and [Brunner] and Davis. The prisoner directed the crime partners to go to the home of victim Gary Allen Hinman and have him sign over his property. The crime partners followed the prisoner’s directions and on July 26th, 1969, they contacted the prisoner from the Hinman residence. Prisoner and Davis then went to the Hinman home and the prisoner struck Hinman with a sword, severing a part of the right ear and causing a laceration to the left side of his face from his ear to his mouth. The prisoner and Davis then drove away from the crime scene in Hinman’s automobile.

  On July 27th, 1969, after suffering three days of torturous treatment, Hinman was killed by a stab wound through the heart, which was inflicted by Beausoleil.

  When Hinman was found in the Topanga Canyon home on July 31st, 1969, he had been stabbed through the heart in addition to suffering a stab wound in the chest, a gash on the top of his head, a gash behind the right ear, and a laceration on the left side of his face, which cut his ear and cheek.

  The complicity of so many young women in these brutally violent crimes mesmerized the media as did the image of the female Manson followers who were not charged and who loitered, chanting and singing and demonstrating outside the court building.

  The Manson killings are an anomaly in the history of serial murder. Except for the murder of a drug dealer in a dispute, for which Manson was never charged, Manson did not physically kill any of the victims nor was he present at the moment of death of any of the murders. Two of the incidents were a type of serial mass murder—the people killed together in the Tate house and the LaBianca house. Some of the killers, while actually committing Manson’s serial murders, themselves personally killed only once, while others did not kill at all but participated as accomplices. The leading presence of a male in charge, Tex Watson, at the killings further clouds the issue. But in the end, three women were convicted of murder along with Manson, and today still sit in prison.

  Who Was Charles Manson?

  One cannot really begin to tell the women’s stories without telling Charlie’s first. The man the women followed had come from far away and had been kept locked up for decades before he burst on the scene. When Manson said at his trial that he went to jail when he was 8 years old, and got out when he was 32, that was not an exaggerated claim. The last time Manson had been released from prison, in March 1967, he was, in fact, 32 years old, and he had spent by then an accumulated total of seventeen years in various reformatories, jails, and prisons—more than half his life. He was 8 years old the first time he was arrested for theft, and he was 9 when he was confined to a reformatory.

  It was not just how much time Manson did, but how and when he did it. Charlie likes to say he had gone to prison the last time on a ten-year sentence for attempting to steal $37.50. And it’s true. He tried to steal a check from a mailbox, and mail theft is a heavy federal offense. But his sentence was suspended. Then he went out and committed more offenses, so the sentence was automatically reinstated and he ended up serving seven years of it. Again—remember the warning: “Charlie has a way of taking the truth and making it into a lie.”

  When they locked him up in 1959, Charlie was 24 years old and Eisenhower was President. When he got out in 1967, he was 32 and Kennedy was long dead. What more can one say? Manson had sat out in prison more than half of the sixties and more than half of his own twenties.

  But Manson did not waste his time in prison. He learned Scientology techniques. The Church of Scientology looked into it after Charlie made the news. An internal document from the church’s security unit, seized by the FBI during an unrelated investigation and released through the Freedom of Information Act, reads as follows:

  (22 June 1970)

  Report of interview with Raul Morales, Re: Charles Manson.

  According to Raul: Raul arrived in prison on McNeil Island, Washington, in 1962 and became a cellmate of Lafayette Raimer, allegedly a trained Scientology auditor (about Level I in Raul’s estimation) and was introduced to Scientology at that time. Raimer was auditing in prison at that time and in one ten-man cell had managed to gather a group of about seven, all in Scientology. Charles Manson entered later and studied, did TRO, etc., along with his cellmates and received approximately 150 hours of auditing from Raimer. Processes used were CCH’s, Help processes (Who have you helped—Who have you not helped), and other Dichotomy processes (Raul’s terms, such as What can you confront, what would you rather not confront), Havingness (such as What can you have? Look around and find something you can have. Look around and find something you’re not in.) Raimer kept records of his auditing. Manson got super-energetic & flipped out when he’d been audited and would, for a time, talk about nothing but Scientology to the extent that people avoided his company. After a while, however, Manson was screaming to get away from his auditor (in Raul’s opinion, he’d been severely overrun or something). He eventually managed to get put in solitary confinement to get away from his auditor. Eventually prison officials got suspicious of the group’s strange activities and broke up the group. Subsequently, Raul was released from the prison in 1965.

  Raimer’s wife was in training here at the L.A. Org in 1965–66; she had disconnected from Raimer. Raul just found out yesterday that another friend, Marvin White, later sent Manson books (after the Scientology group was broken up) on hypnotism and black magic.241

  Manson’s story gets wilder: at McNeil Island Penitentiary he also learned how to play the guitar. His teacher was Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, one of the few surviving gangsters of the classic era of Public Enemy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis had been a member of the murderous Ma Barker Gang and held the record for the longest imprisonment on Alcatraz Island. He had been in prison since 1936, serving a life sentence for bank robbery and kidnapping and had recently been transferred to McNeil Island where he met Manson. Karpis was a bad-boy talented guitar player and taught the eager Manson all he knew.

  At 8:15 a.m. on March 21, 1967, Manson was released from Terminal Island Reformatory in Long Beach. One can wax all manner of lyric about what the world was like in 1959 when Charlie went in and what it had become by 1967 when he came out, but enough said.

  He claims that he never wanted to be released. That he was content in prison. On his release, Charlie was given thirty-five dollars, exactly two dollars and fifty cents less than the amount for which he had been locked up seven years before. Manson was transported to nearby Los Angeles. He carried a little suitcase with the clothes in which he had been arrested, and rode the bus for three days. He slept on the buses until the drivers kicked him off. Manson said it kept reminding him of being kicked out of prison. Then, because he had some acquaintances in San Francisco, Manson headed north.

  Charlie crash-landed in the epicenter of America’s counterculture movement—the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in March 1967 on the eve of the “Summer of Love,” when the hippie movement came into being. This was the time of Flower Power, Make Love Not War, Turn On / Tune In / Drop Out, peace rallies, sit-ins, love-ins, share-ins, guerrilla theater, communes, underground newspapers, Day-Glo posters, Owsley’s acid, and music and music and music. And Charlie hadn’t even smoked a joint yet—he had been strictly a Jack Daniel’s man. The rest of Manson’s history is pure legend, myth, and speculative bullshit.

  Flowers and Acid—Manson in the Valley of Thousands of Plump White Rabbits

  There are two versions of how Charlie Manson became. One is that he dropped LSD for the first time at a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom, curled up in the middle of the crowded dance floor i
nto a fetal position, and was reborn, “innovating” to the music and drawing applause as he neuro-spun like a dervish acidhead.242

  The other version is that a young girl named Nancy Hart, a petty check forger and would-be folk singer, introduced Manson to LSD. She says that she was sleeping in the park under a pile of blankets one spring night, when Manson approached her and asked if he could get in under with her, because “she was giving off this tremendous heat.”243

  “Charlie wasn’t a great lover, but he acted out the role of it,” Hart recalled. “And he was a great con artist, perhaps the best I have ever seen or come across in the business. He went around with me and hung paper [passed bad checks] around San Francisco and he’d rap on all the con tricks he’d gathered. What he knew could blow minds…”

  “We’d ball and he’d get bored with what we were doing, so he screwed me with a broom handle after he got tired and had me do it with a Coke bottle, both sides, and to myself so, while he jerked off. And he had me rap it all, like relating to him how I was experiencing and what it was that I felt from him—from his nearness, if you can dig it. On acid it was that especially, that no contact thing and his relating what was happening.”

  When she gave Charlie his first tab of acid, Hart told him, “You’re already there, you don’t need it, but it’ll help straighten the currents.” After spending several days with Manson, Nancy Hart was arrested and Manson went on his own way.

  Manson said, “My awareness after acid of what was going on became that much more enlightened. I was with them, part of them. We were all really a part of one another.”

  LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—acid. It was discovered in Switzerland in 1938, four years after Manson was born. It was of no interest to anybody and was filed away without any further testing. Then, on April 16, 1943, one of its discoverers, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a chemist working at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, accidentally ingested a small amount of the substance. Hofmann later wrote in his notebook:

  Last Friday…I had to interrupt my laboratory work in the middle of the afternoon and go home, because I was seized with a feeling of great restlessness and mild dizziness. At home, I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant delirium, which was characterized by extremely excited fantasies. In a semiconscious state, with my eyes closed (I felt the daylight to be unpleasantly dazzling), fantastic visions of extraordinary realness and with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors assaulted me. After two hours this condition disappeared.244

  LSD is classified as an hallucinogen—from the Latin halucinari (to wander mentally) and the Greek genes (to be born). It is also classified as a psychedelic—from the Greek psyche (soul) and delos (visible or evident).

  Psychedelic drugs, those that make the “soul visible” can be found in natural substances, and have a long history of religious and mystical use among Mexican and Central American Indians prior to the arrival of Europeans. Peyote cactus buds, when chewed, produced a psychedelic effect. Mescaline is derived from peyote, and is named for the Mescalero Apaches, who first brought it north from Texas and New Mexico. Mescaline has fewer unpleasant side effects than peyote. Psilocybin produces similar psychedelic effects and is found in certain types of mushrooms—so-called “magic mushrooms,” which were also consumed in religious rituals by native Indians (and gobbled down today by new-agers in the northwest).

  The effect of these substances is difficult to describe. First, time slows down. A minute feels like ten minutes, but one does not perceive things in slow motion. One’s way of thinking and brain functions are altered. One might see sounds and smell colors and hear smells and touch tastes. One might be able to look at oneself from the outside—make new connections between ideas and gain remarkable insights into oneself, if one is predisposed in that direction.

  Among the Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, peyote was used to treat alcoholism and to alleviate postmenopausal depression in women. Guided by Indian shamans, their awareness sensitized by the effects of peyote, many women who felt depressed about the passage of their childbearing capacities, found new meaning and hope in their existence.245 Unlike antidepressants, which chemically simulate a “happiness” that wears off with the drug, psychedelics focus natural thinking processes in a search for a cerebral discovery, which can remain fused in the psyche long after the drug is gone. It is said the drug can reveal a new path in one’s thinking process, which once learned, is not forgotten and is not dependent on further ingestion of the hallucinogenic substance. This is precisely why, during the 1950s and 1960s, LSD was adopted as a possible miracle drug by some psychiatrists.

  LSD is about a hundred times more potent than peyote or mescaline. It is a very powerful drug that induces a psychedelic trip some ten hours in duration. Pharmaceutical LSD, only produced by Sandoz, was privately consumed in small, closed circles of psychiatric employees and their friends and relatives throughout most of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was unknown outside these circles.

  In the meantime, Harvard instructor Timothy Leary was discovering psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1960. He said, “It was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man. You are never the same after you’ve had that one flash / glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn.”

  Leary then turned to LSD, and in 1963 he began talking about it to the press. By 1965, thanks to Leary, it had become the demon drug and was banned and outlawed. Sandoz stopped making it and a whole army of small underground laboratories began manufacturing it. LSD became instantly popular.

  In 1965, at a psychiatric conference on the therapeutic use of psychedelics, the following was reported about LSD and mescaline:

  They reduce the patient’s defensiveness and allow repressed memories and conflictual material to come forth. The recall of these events is improved and the abreaction is intense.

  The emerging material is better understood because the patient sees the conflict as a visual image or in vivid visual symbols. It is accepted without being overwhelming because the detached state of awareness makes the emerging guilt feelings less devastating.

  The patient feels closer to the therapist and it is easier for him to express his irrational feelings.

  Alertness is not impaired and insights are retained after the drug has worn off.

  Under skilled treatment procedures, the hallucinogens do seem to produce these effects and one more, which is not often mentioned. That is a marked heightening of the patient’s suggestibility. Put in another way, the judgmental attitude of the patient toward the experience itself is diminished. This can be helpful, for insights are accepted without reservations and seem much more valid than under nondrug condition.246 [My emphasis.]

  Charles Manson, a 32-year-old outlaw, who spent seventeen years in jail, was now into LSD, jacked up on Scientology, and musically fathered by Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. It was like North Korea with a nuke. The “Gardener” was loose among the flower children who were desperately looking for themselves during the great Summer of Love—especially the lost young women. And there was Charlie, all bullshit and rage, and now a pocketful of acid.

  It is hard to say when Manson transformed himself into his long-haired, shaggy, hippie persona. On July 29, 1967, Manson was arrested on a minor charge of “interfering with a police officer.” It was nearly August of the great, hippie, flower-powered Summer of Love, but Manson’s mugshot that day shows him with his hair styled quite conservatively. It is slightly long and curly on the top and front in that late fifties greaser kind of way, but neatly barbershop-trimmed short around his ears and neck.

  Manson was keeping his wits about him. He didn’t buy into any of it. Thirty years later, in 1997, he recalled:

  When I got out last time, I knew it was all a bunch of rotten apples. But I didn’t figure I was any better than the worst of them, or any worse than the best. It’s the same fucking thing, it’s just a pile of shit anyway, so why not try to grow some flo
wers in it? That’s when I got out, and I went through these other things, and then I got trapped up in these kids of the sixties. But I’m not a kid of the sixties; I’m a kid of the forties. Bing Crosby was my hero, not Elvis Presley.247

  Charlie Manson began homing in on young, impressionable flower kids emerging alone into a truly brave new world, a world that had never existed before for the young—especially the girls who were double-locked and chained by society’s old values, which discounted both youth and women exponentially. Charlie offered to throw off their chains, and nobody knew better, because there was nothing like the sixties before—not even the twenties. There were no rules—nothing from the past to compare the present to—anything seemed possible.

  Charlie once said of those times:

  I could see these people on the street—see them with clean eyes, you know. These people on the street were like me—thrown out of life like your paper coffee cups and hamburger sacks and rags and stinking Kotex pads and dirty rubbers. They were the garbage floating around and shit sticking to the sides of your toilet and your drain holes…I took these people that were your garbage that’d been thrown away by society, and I put them to use. I made them put water in cans and make things work in order to keep living on the outside.

  Ed Sanders, from the band The Fugs, said that the Summer of Love in the Haight was free and beautiful, “but there was a weakness: from the standpoint of vulnerability the flower movement was like a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”

  When the whole hippie movement in Haight-Ashbury was overrun by speed freaks and bikers and got all nasty and syphilitic by the foggy cold autumn of 1967, Manson moved himself and his followers to warmer climes—down to Los Angeles.

  Mary Theresa Brunner—the Manson Family Matriarch

  In the spring of 1967, six months before the move, Manson was hanging out in front of the gates of the University of California at Berkeley, panhandling and playing his guitar. There he attached himself to a small poodle and then to the somewhat unattractive, bespectacled redhead walking it—23-year-old Mary Theresa Brunner. Born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on December 17, 1943, to parents John and Evelyn Brunner, Mary was a good Catholic girl, who graduated in history from the University of Wisconsin and had recently moved to California to accept a librarian’s position at the UC Berkeley Library.