by Jeff Guinn
During the summer of 1943, Kathleen determined to get her life in order. In less than a year she’d been released from jail, engaged but not married, arrested again but not convicted, and had been an erratic guardian of her child. Charlie was about to turn nine, and he was increasingly incorrigible. Kathleen couldn’t effectively correct the boy’s bad habits without first admitting and dealing with her own. Above all, she was increasingly dependent on alcohol. Kathleen began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. At one she met Lewis, a twenty-seven-year-old who said he was trying hard to get straightened out, too. Lewis had a lot to overcome. His mother died when he was five, and his father spent several years in the same Moundsville prison where Kathleen and her brother, Luther, later served time. Lewis was just out of the Army; the fact that he was released from service during wartime indicates that he was something less than a model soldier. Currently, he was working in the property department of a circus.
It was hardly a pedigree to recommend Lewis as a source of long-term security, but it was enough for Kathleen. At the least, male day-to-day influence might help get Charlie under control. She married Lewis in August 1943. The wedding took place in St. Clairsville, Ohio, about a dozen miles across the Ohio River from McMechen. That meant the Thomases and Nancy were probably invited; as part of her new life, Kathleen wanted reconciliation with the rest of her family. She no longer expected fantasy romance or perfect happiness. It would be enough to be married and live something like a normal life. But because of her new husband as well as her son, Kathleen didn’t get one.
Neither Kathleen nor Lewis became long-term members of Alcoholics Anonymous. She got her drinking under control and he didn’t. From the first days of their marriage, Lewis caused Kathleen as many problems as Charlie did. Besides drinking too much and too often, her husband couldn’t hang on to a job, which meant Kathleen had to keep working. Despite whatever he might have claimed before the wedding, afterward Lewis had no interest in helping raise her son. He had no patience with Charlie and thought that it was Kathleen’s job to make the boy behave. He constantly criticized them both.
Kathleen understood that, once again, she’d made a bad choice in men, but at least in one way Lewis was different. Unlike Colonel Scott, William Manson, James Robey, and her unidentified fiancé from New York, he wanted to stay with her. Being wanted long term by someone was a new experience for Kathleen; perhaps that was all women could expect from men. She decided to stick it out and make marriage with Lewis work.
But that left the problem of what to do with Charlie. His behavior kept getting worse. Now he was stealing things, small items from stores and anything of value he could get his hands on at home. Whenever she caught and confronted Charlie, he never apologized. Instead, he insisted that someone else was to blame, usually her, sometimes Lewis. She didn’t give him enough, so he had to take things. Lewis was always yelling at him even when Charlie hadn’t done anything, so he might as well do something wrong since he was going to be accused anyway. Charlie kept cutting school—every truant officer in Charleston probably knew his name—and neither threats nor bribes made any difference.
Kathleen’s concern about her son was so great that she approached her mother for help. The two women had not been on good terms since Kathleen went to prison in 1939, but now Nancy was willing to set aside their differences for Charlie’s benefit. Nancy talked to Charlie, undoubtedly invoking the Bible and its admonition to children to honor and obey their parents. Charlie wasn’t rude to her—even in his worst moods he was reasonably pleasant to his grandmother. But afterward he didn’t improve at all.
Kathleen surely felt guilty. She knew that her own aberrant behavior had been a terrible influence on Charlie. But even though she’d finally changed her ways, Charlie continued to lie, steal, and skip class. Every so often he’d lose control and scream, and then even though he was just a kid, barely five feet tall and maybe sixty or sixty-five pounds, he still scared Kathleen with his crazy eyes. Between Lewis and Charlie she felt sometimes like she was going insane. Probably nothing could change Lewis. He was grown and permanently set in his ways. But Charlie was young. Something might still be done—just not by her. Where her son was concerned, Kathleen had run out of energy and ideas.
She’d heard about foster care programs and schools that helped wayward boys. They might have a lot of rules and sternly enforce them, but maybe that was what Charlie needed, a firm hand from people who knew how to communicate with problem boys like him. Kathleen had no intention of giving up Charlie permanently. But if he lived somewhere else for a while and got the help he needed, she could concentrate on Lewis and try to make him more responsible. If he didn’t have Charlie around aggravating him, maybe he’d drink less. Placing Charlie for a while in a foster home or school might be best for all of them.
In 1947, without first informing twelve-year-old Charlie, who’d begun running away from home for short periods and didn’t need a new excuse to do it again, Kathleen looked around for the right place for him. No appropriate foster care had openings. Then she found an Indiana school that sounded just right. The Gibault School for Boys was in Terre Haute about seventy-five miles from where Kathleen, Lewis, and Charlie lived in Indianapolis. The school, founded to offer a positive learning environment for male delinquents, was run by Catholic priests. When the Brothers of the Holy Cross replaced secular administrators in 1934, the student body was comprised of thirty-five boys. By the time Kathleen sought a place there for Charlie thirteen years later, there were about 125 students.
To hear Charlie tell of it later in life, his mother shipped him off to a virtual Midwestern gulag, but in fact Gibault was a pleasant, open (no fences or walls) campus. Pupils were accepted from fifth through tenth grade, with shop as well as academic courses available. There were sports teams, and the boys helped out on a 150-acre farm that provided fresh vegetables for students and faculty.
Applicants did not need to be Catholic, but boys accepted at Gibault were required to attend daily religious services as well as regular classes. Besides charging tuition from parents who could afford it (Kathleen would say later that she paid an unspecified amount to Gibault while Charlie was there), the school was financially supported by various Knights of Columbus councils. The priests demanded good behavior from students and enforced rules by paddlings with a yard-long board. School rules restricted this corporal punishment to no more than three swats at a time. Charlie claimed he was regularly beaten by the priests “with paddles as big as ball bats.” Since his behavior didn’t improve notably after arriving at Gibault in 1947, he undoubtedly did receive innumerable three-smack paddlings.
All new students underwent academic and psychological testing. Gibault found Charlie’s “attitude toward schooling at best only fair,” and, though there were sometimes short periods when he was “a likable boy,” he mostly demonstrated “a tendency toward moodiness and a persecution complex.” Charlie was unhappy at Gibault; he soon fled to his mother in Indianapolis. It hurt Kathleen to send him back; then and later he described Gibault as a terrible place where the priests hated him so much that they encouraged him to run away, but she knew Charlie was undoubtedly lying. Even so, he came close to persuading her that he’d learned his lesson and would never cause trouble again. After a few hours Kathleen steeled herself and took him back to Gibault.
In late December 1947 Charlie left Gibault again, this time on an approved pass to spend Christmas in McMechen with the Thomases. It was Jo Ann’s idea. As much as she didn’t like her cousin, she still thought it would be wrong to leave him at school for the holiday. Kathleen and Lewis stayed away—their current relationship was too tempestuous to inflict on the rest of the family. But besides Uncle Bill and Aunt Glenna and Cousin Jo Ann, there were two other relatives there to greet Charlie. His grandmother Nancy had moved to McMechen, and, having finally been paroled from Moundsville penitentiary, Charlie’s Uncle Luther was there, too. Prison records indicate that sometime in 1944 Luther was stri
cken with tuberculosis and confined to the dispensary until January 1947. He was then released, too sick to work or even to live on his own. Instead Luther lived with his mother, and sometimes when he felt especially ill and needed additional care he would stay with the Thomases, where Glenna and Jo Ann could nurse him.
Luther was dying slowly and knew it. Though Nancy was saddened by her only son’s plight, she was grateful that his eternal soul was saved. After so many years of resisting his mother’s religious beliefs, Luther in his last years became a zealous convert to the Nazarene faith. His newfound devotion was such that, lying in his sickbed or propped up in a chair, he studied for the ministry. Only the precarious health that confined him indoors prevented Luther from seeking leadership of his own congregation. When he died in 1950, Luther’s obituary made no reference to his prison term in Moundsville. He’d succeeded in publicly rehabilitating himself, and he made his mother proud.
Nancy and the Thomases suffered a real fright in mid-December 1947 when Jo Ann was also diagnosed with tuberculosis; she caught the disease while caring for her uncle. The sixteen-year-old was hospitalized, but her case was mild enough for her to be allowed to come home for Christmas. When Charlie arrived from Gibault, Jo Ann was confined to her bedroom. Charlie stayed with the Thomases and Luther was with Nancy. On Christmas Eve, everyone prepared for church with the exception of Jo Ann, who was too weak to go. She stayed in her room on the second floor and listened to the bustle as everyone got ready to leave. Then, to her dismay, Charlie stayed behind—she had no idea why her parents allowed it. But as soon as the door slammed behind her departing family, Jo Ann heard her cousin turn on the shower in the downstairs bathroom. Charlie wasn’t interested in showering, she believed; Jo Ann remembered Charlie’s fascination with guns, and guessed that the running water was meant to mask any noise her cousin might make opening a cabinet and stealing his Uncle Bill’s handgun. Jo Ann didn’t call down to ask Charlie what he was up to, or to warn him away from the weapon that she felt certain he was filching. Instead she lay quietly because she was afraid he might rush upstairs and hurt her if she tried to interfere. The shower ran the whole time that her other relatives were at church. When they returned, Glenna and Nancy went up to Jo Ann’s room to see how she was feeling. They also wondered why the shower was running. Jo Ann told them to ask Charles, adding that she thought he’d stolen her father’s gun and didn’t try to prevent it because she was afraid of him. They confronted the boy; he had the gun. Well, that was Charles all over, Jo Ann thought. He’d been invited to McMechen for the holiday as a treat, and still he stole from his hosts. He felt that anything he wanted ought to be his no matter what.
Charlie returned to Gibault, but ran away about ten months later. He once again fled to Indianapolis, but this time he didn’t go to his mother. Instead, demonstrating precocious criminal skills, he broke into a few small stores at night and rifled cash registers for enough change and small bills to rent a room. Nobody knows where Charlie stayed, but it could hardly have been anywhere reputable; no honest landlord would have rented to a tiny thirteen-year-old who looked even younger. Charlie soon pushed his burglary luck too far and was caught attempting another store break-in. That made Charlie’s immediate future the responsibility of the courts rather than of his long-suffering mother. A sympathetic judge noted Charlie’s time at Gibault, erroneously assumed that the boy was Catholic, and sent him to Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, a program founded by Father Edward J. Flanagan. Boys Town was the most famous juvenile facility in America, thanks in great part to the hit film of that title starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. Charlie wasn’t there long enough to see whether Boys Town deserved its reputation as the best place in the country for troubled youngsters to adopt more positive attitudes and lifestyles. Four days after he arrived at Boys Town, he and another student named Blackie Nielson stole a car and drove to Peoria, Illinois, where Blackie had an uncle who made his living as a thief. On the way, the boys somehow got their hands on a gun and committed two armed robberies, one of a grocery store and the other at a casino—the latter must have had lax or nonexistent security. This was a marked escalation in Charlie’s criminal career. It was a big step up from trying to steal his Uncle Bill’s gun to using a weapon in a holdup. Charlie was still just thirteen.
In Peoria, Charlie and Blackie worked for the latter’s uncle as apprentice thieves much like Dickens’s fictional Oliver Twist and Artful Dodger. But in real life Charlie had more in common with his mother, Kathleen, and Uncle Luther—he could never avoid capture long. After just two weeks of quasi-adult thievery he was back in custody; police nabbed him in an after-dark attempt to rob a Peoria business. The subsequent investigation linked Charlie to his two armed robberies, and this time there was no sympathetic judge to sentence him to Boys Town. Instead, Charlie was packed off to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield, the type of institution commonly known as a “reform school.” As with Gibault, student inmates there attended academic classes and took courses to learn employable trades. Unlike Gibault, boys at the facility in Plainfield weren’t modestly rebellious and considered in need of relatively gentle correction. Ranging in age from ten to twenty-one, some Boys School inmates were there on a general charge of “incorrigibility,” but many others among the four-hundred-plus juvenile population were in Plainfield for crimes like armed robbery and manslaughter. Accordingly, the Boys School was a sternly regimented place. Some staffers were devoted to disciplining rather than encouraging. Boys could receive whatever amount of physical correction adult staffers deemed appropriate. This ran a torturous gamut from simple whippings with paddles to duck walking (staggering painfully about with hands clasping ankles) and table bending (arching backward with shoulder blades barely touching the surface of a table; just holding that position for a few moments ensured that a boy could not walk normally for hours afterward). Even youngsters who behaved suffered physically on a regular basis. When they weren’t in class—and classes were often canceled because teachers quit—students were frequently farmed out as field hands to local farmers who paid 50 cents an hour for the help. (The boys were allowed to keep 30 cents.) When staffers weren’t paying close attention on school grounds during the day or in dormitories at night, bigger, older inmates had ample opportunity to physically and sexually brutalize smaller boys. For undersized boys like Charlie, the ultimate goal at Plain-field was not to reform, but to survive.
• • •
When Charlie Manson arrived at the Boys School in early 1949, he found himself in an environment where his usual tactics of lying, intimidating, whining, and otherwise manipulating others to get his way were ineffective. For all Charlie’s remarkable criminal record for one so young, he was a beginner compared to lots of others boys in Plainfield. He claimed later that he was almost immediately raped by other students, who sodomized Charlie with the encouragement of a particularly sadistic staff member. If that is an embellishment, it is undoubtedly true that tiny Charlie was forced into sexual acts by stronger boys. Such experiences led him to develop an almost detached view of rape, whether suffered by himself or others. He said sixty years later, “You know, getting raped, they can just wipe that off . . . I don’t feel that someone got violated and it’s a terrible thing. I just thought clean it off, that’s all that is.”
Charlie couldn’t cut classes as he had back in Charleston, but he still couldn’t read beyond a basic grasp of a few printed words. He may have suffered from some learning disability, but such things weren’t tested or even acknowledged at the Boys School. Reports from teachers indicate that Charlie “did good work only for those from whom he figured he could obtain something,” and that he “professed no trust in anyone.”
Since he was in constant danger of being beaten and suffering sexual assault, it was at Plainfield that Charlie developed a lifelong defense mechanism he later called the “insane game.” In dangerous situations where he could not protect himself in any other way, he would act out to convince potential ass
ailants that he was crazy. Using screeches, grimaces, flapping arms, and other extreme facial expressions and gestures, Charlie could often back off aggressors. It didn’t always work; in Plainfield and later in adult prisons, Charlie sometimes had to submit to stronger inmates who didn’t care whether their prey was crazy or not. In these cases, he did whatever he had to. At the Boys School and afterward, Charlie Manson always survived.
During Charlie’s time at the Boys School, his mother was not often in touch with him and may not have visited her son at all. Kathleen was still trying to salvage her marriage to Lewis. On several occasions, fed up with his drinking, she left him. Though the length of their separations varied greatly, from only a few days to a later, longer span of several years, Kathleen didn’t find herself able to completely break away. Lewis made it clear that he wanted to remain married; his repeated promises to reform resonated with a woman who desperately wanted some semblance of security in her life, even if that was only an alcoholic husband. Kathleen didn’t stop loving Charlie; instead she hoped that reform school and professionals expert in combating delinquency might yet transform him into a better boy. She no longer believed that she could do it. If and when Charlie was judged ready for release, he needed to rejoin a stable family. For Charlie’s sake as well as her own, Lewis remained Kathleen’s priority.
In October 1949, Charlie joined six other boys in an escape attempt from Plainfield. It wasn’t his first time; Boys School officials later stated he’d made four previous solo tries. This one made the papers because it was the largest mass escape in school history. While most of the other boys avoided immediate recapture, Charlie was nabbed after less than twelve hours of freedom. He was picked up in Indianapolis by a policeman who caught him trying to break into a gas station.