Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Or maybe Charlie’s brain just melted with drugs and paranoia and Hollywood bullshit—calls not returned, promised deals vanished into smoke. Manson would say anything that came to him with his moods and drugs and forget the next day, but according to Tex Watson, another trusted male member of the Family, Manson specifically told him that afternoon to go to producer Terry Melcher’s former house at Cielo Drive, and murder anybody he found there as a warning to Melcher. Manson had had some kind of music deal going with Melcher that had gone bad. Manson knew that Melcher no longer lived there and that Sharon Tate occupied the house. He ordered Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel to accompany Tex and do what he told them.

  Patricia Krenwinkel—Big Patty

  Patricia Krenwinkel was 18 years old when she met Manson. She was a former Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and an avid Bible reader. She was extremely homely—a manly face, excess body hair, and as revealed when she later shaved her head, jug-handle ears. She became known as Big Patty, Katie, or Yellow.

  Krenwinkel grew up in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles. Her father, Joe, was an insurance agent and her mother a housewife who was active in church and community programs. She did well in high school and attended one semester of the Jesuit Springfield College in Mobile, Alabama. After her arrest her parents described her as a perfect, normal, happy, clever, studious, pious, well-behaved child who enjoyed her family life, school and church activities, and was never in trouble. “Pat was very enthusiastic about reading the Bible…Never saw her hostile or angry…never saw her fight…never saw her cruel to animals…never saw her physically violent…not a person with a quick temper…If she awakened first in the morning, when she was still in her crib, she was doing little drawings or playing with little things…she would play with them and not create a disturbance. She would not cry for anyone to get her up or to do anything for her…I never had any trouble with her…never disrespectful…was a model child…never in trouble with the police…never received a traffic ticket.”254

  Creepy!

  At Cielo Drive, the former Sunday school teacher chased Abigail Folger out onto the lawn in front of the house and stabbed her twenty-eight times, as Folger whimpered, “Stop, I am already dead.” The next night at the LaBianca house, she stabbed Rosemary so hard that she severed her spine. She then stuck a serving fork into Leno LaBianca’s stomach and “pinged” it to watch the fork wobble.

  She would describe to her prison psychiatrists a much less rosy picture of herself as a child than the one painted by her parents. She said she always felt unwanted and unloved and perceived herself as ugly and hairy (which one might argue she was). Feeling overweight, she crash-dieted when she was 14. She said that she was completely mind-controlled by her parents, internalizing her “bad” repulsive self while maintaining an artificially pious and obedient exterior. The need to suppress her real self made her angry, which she also needed to repress and conceal.

  Her parents divorced when Patricia was 13 but they claim, “It did not involve the children. It was a very quiet something—very personal, and it was nothing that the children would have any part in or be hurt by it.” More wishful fantasy.

  Krenwinkel met Manson and Mary Brunner through her half-sister, with whom she was sharing an apartment and who was a heroin addict. (Another product of a perfect childhood under their roof that the parents fantasized about. Her sister would later die of an overdose.)

  Patricia recalled that when she met Manson he told her that everything would be all right. He liberated her secret self. Manson was the first man to make love to her with the lights on—to her hairy, “bad” self. She said, “I cried that first night with my head in his lap. He was like my dad. It got pure, it was so good…I told him, I’ve got to go wherever you go.” And she did.

  Linda Kasabian—Yana the Witch

  A new recruit to the Family, Linda Kasabian, was sent to accompany Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel to the Tate murders. Linda had the only valid driver’s license among them. Linda was born on June 21, 1949, in Biddeford, Maine. Her parents divorced and remarried when Linda was still young. She grew up in Milford, New Hampshire.

  Kasabian recalled, “My mother and father fought a lot. My first recollection of childhood was sitting on a couch crying…My father finally left the house for good after we had moved to New Hampshire. My mother insisted that he buy me some shoes before he left and he refused. But as he went out he slipped some pennies into my hand.”

  She remembers her father driving around to the house to see her later. He always had another woman in the car and Linda instinctively hated her.

  “My mother and I grew close…She’d fix up my banana curls and dress me in a pinafore and take me around, showing me off to everybody. My father used to beat her on the behind as she stooped over the washing machine…But my stepfather was worse. His name was Byrd and he had children of his own and he was always telling my mother how much better his kids were. I screamed at my stepfather one day. I said, ‘You hate me, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I hate you all right.’ And I flipped. I just flipped.”

  In grade school, Linda was a cheerleader and a star athlete. Then her recollections take a slight twist, almost sounding like Aileen Wuornos’s childhood:

  We used to go down to the river and strip. There were boys and girls and we’d all roll in the sand and feed the ducks and have a ball. But there was this kid, Larry, with the big bug eyes. He liked me and I guessed I liked him, too. But we wouldn’t let him come down to the river with us and this made him mad and one day he went to our teacher and then there was trouble. Then one day a girl I knew called me a dirty little river girl. But the boys liked me. Maybe because they thought of me as a river girl.255

  When Linda turned 16 she dropped out from high school and got married but soon divorced. After meeting a hippie named Robert Kasabian she married a second time and the couple traveled the country staying at various communes. In March 1968, Linda gave birth to her first child, Tanya. The following year the couple were living in Topanga Canyon with Charles Melton, who was acquainted with some Manson Family members. When her marriage with Robert was disintegrating in 1969, Linda paid a visit to her friends at the Spahn’s Ranch, where the Family was based. After spending a day with Manson, Linda returned to Topanga Canyon, packed her belongings, and after stealing five thousand dollars from Melton, left Robert to join the Family.

  When the murders took place, she stood watch outside the house and later testified against the accused in exchange for immunity. After Linda was released, she reconciled with Kasabian and moved to New Hampshire where she had another child.

  In a 1971 interview, she claimed to be a Jesus freak, telling the report, “Freedom is a union with that man,” pointing to a picture of Jesus above a mattress that served as her bed.

  In 1996, police arrested Linda and one of her daughters during a raid in which a gun and drugs were seized. Linda’s daughter, aka “Lady Dangerous,” was charged with possession of cocaine and sentenced to a year in prison. Linda Kasabian was found in possession of methamphetamine but stayed out of jail after agreeing to attend drug-counseling.256

  Before sending them out to Cielo Drive, Manson told the girls to leave a sign at the house: “Something witchy.” With Tex and Atkins snorted-up on speed (without Manson’s knowledge—he despised amphetamines) and Kasabian and Krenwinkel stoned on who-knows-what, they drove in a 1959 Ford through the San Fernando Valley Friday night traffic up the back of the Hollywood Hills. The high hills at night are a magical place. Viewed from the dark and relatively rural heights, the lights of Los Angeles below stretch out forever on both sides to the horizons like a vast, twinkling, electric ocean. After crossing Mulholland Drive on the ridge of the hills, they rolled down the other side along North Beverly Glen Boulevard into Bel Air, turning east into a tangle of hillside streets just before Sunset Boulevard. They parked the car down the hill from the Cielo Drive gate and proceeded on foot, carrying with them a change of clothes, rope, knives, and a g
un. They were all wearing black clothes that Charlie had them purchase for “creepy crawling,” where they would practice trespassing across people’s property in the middle of the night without being detected.

  Kasabian understood little of what was going on inside the house while she stood guard outside in the bushes. She heard shouts and the sounds of a scuffle. At one point, she saw Voytek Frykowski burst out of the house, screaming, blood streaming from his body. He was chased down by Susan Atkins and Tex, who both stabbed at him with their knives. Frykowski tried to stay on his feet, clutching a garden lamppost, like a wounded animal surrounded by a killing pack. Finally, he crumpled to the lawn with thirteen separate blunt-trauma injuries to his head, two gunshot wounds, and fifty-one stab wounds.

  When Kasabian saw Abigail Folger run out of the house, her white see-through nightgown a sticking-wet red, and chased by Krenwinkel wielding a knife and butchering her on the lawn, she had had enough. She left the Cielo Drive property and walked outside to sit in the car. Ten minutes later, she saw Tex, Atkins, and Krenwinkel descending the hill, like zombies, their dark clothes soaking wet and their hands and faces stained with red.

  Leslie Van Houten—LuLu with No Nickname

  The next night, Charlie, Tex, and Krenwinkel drove out to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Accompanying them was yet another female member of the Family—19-year-old Leslie Van Houten. Another “perfect” child from a Presbyterian family, Leslie was a Bluebird, Campfire Girl, and a member of a girls’ religious group called Job Daughters. She was the youngest of two children. When she was seven, her parents adopted two Korean orphans.

  Again, the family is portrayed as religious, an ideal family, but Leslie’s father actually had problems with alcoholism. The marriage was on the rocks. When Leslie was 14, her parents divorced.

  Leslie did well in school and was popular. She had been elected Homecoming Queen at her high school. But she led a double life. She began smoking marijuana, still something rare for middle-class kids back then. She became pregnant and had an abortion.

  She graduated from business school, but never sought any work afterward. She ended up in San Francisco and hooked up with Bobby Beausoleil, the handsome star of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil was socializing with Manson and was slowly being drawn into the Family. When he finally submitted to Charlie, he brought Leslie Van Houten with him.

  Van Houten felt overlooked by Manson, who did not give her a nickname like the other girls. Moreover, he handed her off to be Watson’s woman, which upset her even more. When she heard the girls who had gone to Cielo drive describe the murders they had committed, she decided she wanted to go the next time to prove her devotion to Manson. She got her opportunity the next night.

  After Manson went into the house by himself and subdued Rosemary and Leno LeBianca at gunpoint, he departed, leaving them tied-up and at the mercy of Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. After murdering Leno, they tied an electrical cord around Rosemary’s throat. As Watson and Krenwinkel stabbed her, Van Houten held her down with a pillow over her head. She then assisted them in cleaning the house of evidence and writing “witchy” slogans on the walls and refrigerator. She finally earned a nickname—LuLu.

  Manson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, and Atkins were tried together and sentenced to death, but the sentences were commuted when the death penalty was temporarily suspended in 1970. One can surf the Internet and find complete transcripts of their parole hearings. Atkins claims to have found Jesus in a big way, while the other women found him in a small way. They are all sorry, boohoo. They are all up for their umpteenth parole hearing in 2006 and 2007. It’s unlikely they will be released.

  Manson rages on. For a while, he had his own website, ATWA.com, but it got pulled and a WHOIS search shows it as “locked” but available for sale. What isn’t these days? Now others run it for him under different URLs, linking into archival caches of the former site.

  The Method to Charlie’s Madness

  Charlie Manson demanded absolute obedience from the people around him. His word was never questioned. At first one might suspect that it was the drugs, especially the LSD that broke down the will of his disciples—but it wasn’t. It was the sex. Dr. David Smith, who worked at the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic and saw the Manson group, said, “A new girl in Charlie’s Family would bring with her a certain middle-class morality. The first thing Charlie did was to see that all this was worn down. That way he was able to eliminate the controls that normally govern our lives.”257 Manson’s girls had become his followers, not despite their middle-class background and education, but because of it.

  Manson controlled the men in the Family through the girls. The girls often lured the men to his circle, and afterward it was on Manson’s command whether the girls would have sex with the men or not. Manson also liked young men in his group, to lure other girls, because he knew that as an older man he often scared young girls away.

  Nor was Manson above using physical violence with any female that disobeyed him. He was particularly abusive of a 13-year-old girl by the name of Dianne Lake, nicknamed “Snake” for the way she moved when she made love. Her parents had already gone hippie, living on various communes, and had no objections to her joining the Family. Manson was seen beating her with a chair leg once, and with an electric cord another time. (After Manson was sent away to prison, Snake was adopted by a district attorney, returned to school, and today is a vice-president of a bank. I’m not sure how happy an ending that is.)

  Manson orchestrated group sex sessions. One witness said, “Everything was done at Charlie’s direction.” He would dance with his followers trailing behind him like a train, stripping off their clothes. Manson would liberally distribute LSD and peyote and the Family would huddle into a group grope, with Charlie giving directions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture, but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”

  Manson would use sex to break down people’s “hang-ups.” He sodomized the 13-year-old Lake in front of the group and performed fellatio on a young man to show he had no hang-ups himself.

  But there was more to it than that. Sometimes it’s the times. Today, a Charlie Manson running his kind of game might at best get a shrug and a laugh. But the sixties were a very special time—a type of loss of virginity for an entire generation of Leave It to Beaver kids, who found themselves not only dropping acid, smoking pot, and having sex, but also dying in Vietnam, in civil rights actions, and in campus protests, clubbed and killed by their Father Knows Best elders. Unlike the “lost generation” of young men who returned from the First World War and fueled the rebellion of the twenties, the sixties’ kids mostly stayed close to home—their traumas unfolded not on the battlefield, but in their hushed, closed suburban homes, and it encompassed young men and women alike. The hypocrisy of the times was crushing. A figure like Charlie Manson was truly a Christlike savior in their eyes. He was something new. It was no coincidence how many of the women who joined Manson grew up in religious households. The entire ethos of modern California is built on the search for a new spirituality, and Manson was one of its epicenters.

  Manson said at his sentencing:

  You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad and even killers that your children are. You make your children what they are. I am just a reflection of every one of you…These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.258

  That might be the one truth Charlie never turned into a lie.

  CONCLUSION

  RECOGNIZING THE PREDATORY WOMAN

  Profiling Female Serial Killers

  Is your mom, sister, daughter, grandmother, wife, girlfriend, babysitter, the nurse taking your kids’ temperature, or the home-care worker who looks after your granny a serial killer just waiting for
an opportunity to strike? Probably not, but she could be. What might be the warning signs, other than the burning sensation you might have in your throat after drinking a cup of coffee she sweetly offered you?

  There are some warning signs—common behavioral traits that we have seen in the women featured in the case studies:

  The telling of exaggerated stories intended to inflate the teller’s worth or importance in the listener’s perception

  Compulsive lying

  Petty thieving, bouncing of checks, bad credit behavior

  Sudden shifts in mood or a permanent shift to a hostile and demeaning attitude from an affectionate and respectful one

  Promiscuous sexual behavior

  Morbid interest in death and true-crime literature

  Drug or alcohol abuse

  Eating disorders or obesity

  A history of abuse as a child

  A history of broken marriages

  That’s right—many are characteristics that millions of average men and women all might exhibit. In other words, there are very few warning signs without context. A bounced check might be nothing but an error in balancing a checkbook—but in a Black Widow it may be a warning of trouble to come. The problem is having enough information to have a context.

  There are characteristic indicators of a psychopath:

  superficial charm

  self-centered and self-important

  need for stimulation, prone to boredom

  deceptive behavior and lying

  conning and manipulative

  little remorse or guilt

  shallow emotional response

  callous with a lack of empathy

  living off others or predatory attitude

  poor self-control

  impulsive lifestyle

  lack of realistic long-term goals

  promiscuous sexual behavior

  But not all psychopaths are killers—many, especially the intelligent ones, cause all sorts of perfectly legal havoc, some from congressional seats and corner offices.