Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Charlie charmed Mary on the spot, and with the hippie campus abandon of that spring of ’67 in her nostrils, Mary thought she’d take a taste. She invited the charismatic street musician to crash on the couch of her apartment. No sex—this was strictly platonic. Then Charlie starting bringing girls to her apartment for sex. And Mary, who by now was smitten, wanted some, too, and brought him into her bed. But Charlie kept on bringing girls home, first one, then two, and eventually there would be eighteen. That’s how the Family got started—with Mary Brunner. It was never called the “Manson Family”—that’s a media thing. They referred to themselves only as “the Family.”

  Brunner would become the Family matriarch, nicknamed Maryoch or Mother Mary Manson. She would have a child by Manson, which he delivered himself and named Michael Pooh Hoo. She was one of the women that went to Hinman’s house and at least witnessed, if not participated, in his three-day torture before he was stabbed through the heart.

  After Manson was convicted in the Tate-LaBianca murders, the ex-librarian was involved in a dramatic shootout in 1971 at a gun store in Los Angeles on South Hawthorne Boulevard. She and several accomplices had forced the clerks and customers to the floor and had loaded hundreds of powerful weapons into a van. The weapons were to supply a plan to rescue Manson from prison by hijacking a 747 jet, whose passengers would be killed one at a time, every hour, until Manson was released. But instead of fleeing, they began to argue amongst themselves as to whether they should kill all the people inside the store. By then, police responding to a silent alarm surrounded the store and there was a ten-minute gunfight before the robbers surrendered.

  Brunner became involved with the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), an ultra-violent white-power convicts’ group. Several other Manson followers also moved on to the Aryan Brotherhood after Manson was sent away, and were close to the core founders of the AB. There developed a sort of Aryan Brotherhood breakaway faction of the Manson Family after 1970.

  Brunner testified against the others on the Gary Hinman murder, and after serving some time for the Hawthorne gun store robbery while her parents took care of Pooh Hoo, she was released and subsequently vanished into obscurity in the Midwest to raise Charlie Manson’s son, who must be turning forty soon.

  Lynette Alice Fromme—Squeaky

  Mary Brunner was joined by a second female recruit, a studious teenage girl from Redondo Beach, the slender, freckle-faced Lynette Alice Fromme, who became known as “Squeaky.” Resembling Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Fromme was 17 when her unusually domineering father kicked her out of the house.

  Lyn was born on October 22, 1948, to Helen Fromme and her husband, William, an aeronautic engineer employed in the Los Angeles aircraft industry. She had a younger brother and sister. She was a talented and smart girl, averaging B plus and A minus during most of her academic career. She was an editor of the high school yearbook and an “expert” on the poet Dylan Thomas. But at home her father was rigidly controlling, specifically of her. She would inexplicably be subjected to stringent codes of conduct and made to eat separately from the rest of the family members.

  Lyn ran away from home several times, but would return, reconciling with her mother and controlling father. By 1966, she was hitchhiking up and down the California coast, drinking, dropping acid, and having sex, which she found unsatisfactory. In 1967, she returned home and enrolled in El Camino College, signing up for French, theater arts, psychology, and modern dance. Her plan was to keep her grades up and transfer the next year to the University of California. But she had a final break with her crazy father instead. “We argued over some kind of definition from the dictionary, that’s how dumb it was,” she later said. “His way or no way. I said, ‘yes, but,’ and he said, ‘yes but nothing.’”248

  Taking nothing but her schoolbooks, Lyn walked out of her home with no place to go. She hitchhiked down to Venice Beach. At Manson’s sentencing hearing, she would testify, “I was in Venice, sitting down on a curb crying, when a man walked up and said, ‘Your father kicked you out of the house, did he?’ And that was Charlie.”

  They spoke only for a few minutes. Charlie played the wise, fatherly figure for her, telling her, “The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don’t want out, and you’re free.” Cool, thought Lyn.

  Charlie told her he was heading up north back to San Francisco. She could join him if she wanted to. When? Right now, he told her. Lyn was a little incredulous and Manson said, “I can’t make up your mind for you,” and walked off. Lyn had only three more weeks to go on her freshman semester. She said that she grabbed her books and ran to catch up with him.

  Lyn joined Manson and Mary Brunner, who had by now quit her job as a librarian, and with her last paycheck financed a trip for the three of them to Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. There they rented a small cabin near the ocean and Charlie began to work his sex magic, breaking down both Mary’s and Lyn’s taboos, eventually taking them both to bed. After the stupid sex Lyn had been having with her clumsy high school lovers, sex with Manson was mind-blowing, she recalled. He led her to discover her clitoris—“a tiny, hard, supersensitive thing,” she said. He was the first lover who had performed oral sex on her.

  Manson told the bright 17-year-old, “The fact is that if a man loves, he makes a woman feel like the most beautiful creature in the whole world. And if a woman loves, she can accept and feel all of his love, making one love, in one motion, of all feeling at once.”

  Lyn testified on his behalf, “Charlie is our father in that he would—he would point out things to us. I would crawl off in a corner and be reading a book, and he would pass me and tell me what it said in the book…And also he knew our thoughts…He was always happy, always. He would go into the bathroom sometimes to comb his hair, and there would be a whole crowd of people in there watching him because he had so much fun.”

  Squeaky did not go out on the 1969 killings, but six years later she tried to make up for it. In September 1975, in Sacramento, armed with a loaded .45 semiautomatic handgun, Squeaky rushed at President Gerald Ford and got within two feet of him, before being subdued by the Secret Service. She was quickly put on trial, and in November, sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate the President.

  Squeaky’s life sentence is sort of like Manson’s seven years for the theft of $37.50. Few people believe that Squeaky wanted to actually shoot Ford. In fact, while there were four bullets in the handgun’s magazine, there was no round chambered in the breech—which means that Squeaky could have pulled the trigger as many times as she wanted, but the gun would not fire. She would have to jack back the slide and chamber a round before the weapon would work. Lyn was familiar with weapons, so it is unlikely that she was ignorant of the necessary procedure to properly load the .45. On the other hand, she could have been stressed or drugged out, and just forgot to chamber a round—it can happen. And if she meant no harm, why was the weapon loaded? Many feel, however, that Lynette Fromme should have been convicted of assault at worst. She is still in prison today, almost 60 years old at this writing.

  Susan Atkins—Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz

  Susan Atkins, who became known as Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz, was 21 at the time of the murders and perhaps the most vicious of all the Family members. After chasing one of the escaping victims across the lawn at Cielo Drive and cutting him down, she then returned to the house to stab to death the eight-and-a-half-months pregnant Sharon Tate.

  Susan Atkins was born in San Gabriel, California, on May 7, 1948. She was the middle child and only girl among the three siblings. The family, apparently, had problems with alcohol, and authorities once tried to take the children away. She was a religious girl, sang in the church choir, was a member of the Girl Scouts, and was a good student in primary school.

  Susan, however, felt that she was left out of the family, with her parents preferring her brothers: her mother the youngest, her father the eldest. Atkins herself said, “I didn’t like my mother. She tried to get along with me,
but I just refused to get along with her. I didn’t like my father either. Didn’t like either one of them. I didn’t like my mother because she was an alcoholic…my father also was an alcoholic, used to beat my mother up.”249

  In 1963, when Susan was 15, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Susan and the church choir sang beneath her dying mother’s bedroom window. About her mother’s death, however, relatives recall, “Susan had an almost indifferent air about it.”

  After her mother’s death, Susan began to run wild. A friend of Susan’s stated, “She just didn’t seem to care. Like when her mother died, she didn’t show any real sadness about it. I don’t think Susan cared about anything very much. There was something wrong with her.”

  Atkins left home when she was 18—“On the day,” she says. She held a few menial jobs, but mostly she turned to crime. Susan was arrested for car theft and put on probation. She committed a number of petty crimes and frequented the company of armed robbers. In San Francisco, she worked as a topless dancer and lived in a communal house. She also got into Satanism. According to her psychiatric report, read into the record at her sentencing hearing, Atkins, in 1966:

  …entered into what she now calls her Satanic period. She became involved with Anton LaVey, the Satanist.* She took a part in a commercial production of a witch’s sabbath,† and recalls the opening night when she took LSD. She was supposed to lie down in a coffin during the act, and lay down in it while hallucinating. She stated that she didn’t want to come out, and consequently the curtain was fifteen minutes late. She stated that she felt alive and everything else in the ugly world was dead. Subsequently, she stayed on her “Satanic trip” for approximately eight months.

  One day in the summer of 1967, when Atkins was 19, she met Charlie at a party. Atkins recalled that Manson was singing and playing his guitar and that she was mesmerized by his voice and lyrics:

  And when he finished his song, I asked him if I could play his guitar. He just handed it to me without saying anything.

  I looked at it and put my hand on it, and I plucked it. I knew only one chord. I thought to myself, “I can’t play this.”

  I just thought that to myself, didn’t say it out loud. But he turned around and looked at me, straight in the eye, and he said: “You can play that guitar if you want to.”

  I just looked at him, and I immediately knew who he was and what he was there for. In other words, what he was there for was to show me he was inside my head. There was no way I could get away from it.

  And, wow, nothing like this ever happened before—and it blew my mind. I was just with him from then on.250

  Several days later, Manson returned for Atkins:

  He told me he wanted to make love with me. Well, I acknowledged the fact that I wanted to make love with him and he told me to take off my clothes. So I uninhibitedly took off my clothes, and there happened to be a full-length mirror and I turned away and he says, “Go ahead and look at yourself, there is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You always have been perfect.” He says…“You were born perfect and everything that has happened to you from the time you were a child all the way up to this moment has happened perfectly. You have made no mistakes. The only mistakes you have made are the mistakes that you thought you made. They were not mistakes…”

  He asked me if I ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, “No.” And he said, “Have you ever thought about making love to your father?” I said, “Yes, I thought I would like to make love with my father.” And he told me, he said, “All right, when we are making love imagine in your imagination that I am your father and, in other words, picture in your mind that I am your father.” And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience.251

  Manson was giving little Suzy Atkins a pseudo-Scientologist total mind-and-body fuck.

  Susan Atkins became Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz. She had a child by somebody from the Family, which Manson also delivered. The little boy was named Zo Zo Ze Ze Zadfrack (or according to other sources, as if it makes a difference, Zezo Zece Zadfrack).

  Before Susan Atkins joined in on the murders at Cielo Drive, she had already participated in the torture and murder of Gary Hinman on July 26, 1969. Thirty-two-year-old Hinman taught music in L.A. and was working on his Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA. He was a member of the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect and owned several cars and a Volkswagen camper. Hinman was fairly well known in Topanga Canyon, and hitchhikers and hippies often stayed at his house, as did Manson in 1968. Hinman may or may not have been manufacturing synthetic mescaline.

  According to witnesses, on Friday, July 25, Bobby Beausoleil, a new male member of the Family, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins went to Hinman’s house armed with a handgun and knives. They demanded money from him and ownership papers to his cars. Hinman refused, whereupon the trio began to beat him. When they had no success getting what they wanted, they telephoned Manson.

  Manson arrived brandishing a sword and demanding that Hinman turn over the cars and money to him. When Hinman refused, Manson struck him with the sword, cleaving his ear in two and cutting a deep wound into his jaw. Hinman quickly handed over the keys to his cars and Manson drove off in one of them, telling the girls to sew Hinman’s wound up, and to continue attempting to extract cash from him.

  Atkins and Brunner stitched Hinman’s wound with dental floss and then proceeded to torture him all day Saturday and into Sunday. They would take turns sleeping. On Sunday, Hinman had still failed to relinquish any money. At that point, Beausoleil telephoned Manson again, who allegedly said, “You know what to do,” or “You know what to do. Kill him—he’s no good to us,” or “He knows too much.”

  Manson steadfastly denies he gave any instructions to kill Hinman:

  It would come from the witness stand that when on the telephone the only thing that ever connected me with Hinman’s murder was Beausoleil called me and asked me what to do and I told him, “You know what to do.” I didn’t tell him like [raising voice], “You know what to do.” I told him, “Man, you’re a man, grow up, juvenile. Don’t ask me what to do. Stand on your own two feet. Be responsible for your own actions. Don’t ask me what to do.”252

  Shouting, “Society doesn’t need you—you’re a pig! It’s better this way. I’m your brother,” Beausoleil stabbed Hinman four times. As Hinman bled to death, one of the girls gave him his prayer beads and Hinman chanted, “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo—Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” the chant of his Buddhist sect.

  Hinman lost consciousness, but continued to breathe. Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner then took turns holding a pillow over his face until he suffocated. Using his blood, they wrote, “Death to Piggies,” on the wall and attempted to stage the scene to look like some kind of Black Panther hit. They even made a crude cat’s paw print on the wall.* They left with the remainder of Hinman’s vehicles.

  Charlie’s Apocalypse

  In the days between the Hinman murder and the Tate murders, Manson was north of Los Angeles, driving up the coast in a 1952 Hostess Twinkies bakery truck. A series of witnesses and a traffic citation pinpoint his travels.

  Manson was up in Big Sur at the Esalen Institute. Esalen was (and is today) a personal “growth center” and luxury resort for wealthy clients from San Francisco and Los Angeles, offering seminars in all sorts of alternative Eastern and Western philosophies presented by various guest speakers. The subject matter ranged from yoga to satanism. Abigail Folger often stayed at the Esalen Institute.

  Manson traveled in high Hollywood movie and music circles. He was a guest for the longest time in Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson’s home, had met producer Phil Kaufman when Kaufman was in prison for a marijuana possession charge, and Kaufman promised to produce Manson’s record, LIES (and did so in 1970 after Manson went on trial). Manson has a whole history of broken deals and screwed-up opportunities with heavy players in the film and music industries. The industry was liberating itself of the old studio mogul dinosaurs, getting closer to t
he youth in the street. A lot of doors were open for a guy like Manson. (The Beach Boys had actually recorded one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” which appears on their 20/20 album as “Never Learn Not to Love.”)

  Manson visited Esalen on numerous occasions, taking seminars himself, using their hot tubs and springs and looking for recruits. This last visit to Esalen, however, did not go well for Manson, according to witness Paul Watson, who testified that Manson had said he went “to Esalen and played his guitar for a bunch of people who were supposed to be the top people there, and they rejected his music. Some people pretended that they were asleep and other people were saying, ‘This is too heavy for me,’ and ‘I’m not ready for that,’ and others were saying, ‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ and some just got up and walked out.”253

  Manson rolled back into Los Angeles on Friday morning, August 8, 1969, feeling exposed and rejected after the experience in Esalen and in one dark and heavy mood. Sharon Tate and her friends had just a little over twelve hours left to live.

  In the preceding six months, Manson had gone apocalyptic with the Family, purchasing dune buggies and planning to hide out in Death Valley when the race war he predicted between blacks and whites broke out. He was feeding his followers pure hatred and fear. The prosecution would claim Manson called it Helter Skelter, inspired by the Beatles song on the White Album. Maybe.