Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  Nonetheless, San Francisco during the Summer of Love appealed to Manson. Drugs and sex partners were easy to come by, especially for an older guy who had been around the block a few times and had a certain amount of charisma. Manson was not a big man, but if his incarcerated life had taught him nothing else, it had schooled him in how to be a masterful manipulator of people. Manipulation, domination, and control are the hallmarks of a psychopathic personality, and Manson had all those in spades. He grew his hair long and dressed like a hippie. He could play guitar and was not without talent as a songwriter. Young people flocked to him, seeing him as a sort of guru.

  Soon enough, the people, mostly young women, who congregated around him became essentially slaves to his whims. They became known as “the Family.” As the 1960s wound down, Manson spun a web of words and dope and sex, free love and revolution and apocalypse, and he led the Family onto an old school bus and out of San Francisco. Manson wound up in Los Angeles, where he hooked up with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, and for a while the Family lived at Wilson’s estate.

  A man named Charles Watson, eventually nicknamed Tex, met Manson at Wilson’s. The Family caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage before Wilson kicked Manson and his friends out. They moved to new digs at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, which had been built primarily as a set for western movies, and Watson joined them there. Manson then set his sights on Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who sang with a surf band called the Rip Chords and produced records. Manson wanted Melcher to record his music; Melcher listened to it but passed. Manson fumed.

  Toward the end of 1968, Manson established a new headquarters near Death Valley, at the Myers and Barker ranches. Manson had more on his mind than making it in the music business. Some of the ideas he riffed on to his Family concerned a coming apocalypse and a race war between blacks and whites. When the Beatles released their album The Beatles, which would come to be known as the White Album, one of the tracks, “Helter Skelter,” spoke to Manson, seemingly confirming his most psychotic hopes and fears. He began using that song title as the name for his imagined race war. Blacks would win the war, he believed, but he and the Family would be safe underneath Death Valley. The Family would grow until its members outnumbered the victorious blacks, then they would emerge from hiding and take over.

  As 1969 wore on, the Family’s activities grew darker and more destructive. Instructed to raise money for the Family, Watson ripped off a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe. When Crowe threatened retaliation, Manson shot him in the stomach, believing that he had killed the dealer. Crowe lived, however, but he didn’t report the shooting.

  Still after money, three Family members dropped in on Manson acquaintance Gary Hinman. Hinman refused to turn over any cash, so they held him hostage for a couple of days. During this time Manson sliced Hinman’s ear with a sword. After Manson left, Bobby Beausoleil, a Family associate, stabbed Hinman to death, and one Family member wrote “Political piggy” on a wall in Hinman’s blood. Someone also drew a panther’s paw, the symbol of the Black Panthers; Manson, who wanted to fan the flames of his desired race war, hoped that the radical black group would be blamed for the crime. Hinman’s murder was the Family’s first definite murder—although there were others that might have involved members of the Family—but not its last.

  Beausoleil was arrested while driving the car he had stolen from Hinman, and he still had the murder weapon with him. Two days later, on August 8, 1969, Manson told the Family, “It’s time for Helter Skelter to begin.”

  Terry Melcher had lived for a while on Cielo Drive, a road that wound up through a canyon above Beverly Hills. He had moved out, and that house was now occupied by actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Manson had been by the house a couple of times since Melcher moved out, and he knew that the record producer no longer lived there. He instructed Watson to take three other Family members to the house and “totally destroy everyone” inside. Watson later said that Manson had not given specific orders to kill but that this was how he interpreted the directions. Watson, at the time, was seeking more power and influence in the Family, and killing for Manson was a step in that direction.

  The Family members did as they were told. Polanski was working in London, but Tate, nearly nine months pregnant, and her unborn child were slaughtered, along with four guests: Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent. The murders were brutal and bloody. One victim, Frykowski, was stabbed fifty-one times, clubbed in the head thirteen times, and shot twice. Tate was stabbed sixteen times. On the way out, the murderers wrote “Pig” on the front door in blood.

  The next night, Manson wanted more. This time he accompanied the four killers, and two more Family members joined them. They went into the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, husband-and-wife entrepreneurs who lived next to a house where Manson had attended a party. Manson and Watson tied up the LaBiancas, and Manson left the premises.

  While he was out of the house, the others stabbed Leno twenty-six times, some of those with a carving fork, and Rosemary forty-one times. Watson carved “WAR” on Leno’s abdomen, and Patricia Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter Skelter”—misspelling what had become Manson’s raison d’etre, by this point—on the refrigerator in Leno’s blood.

  The double whammy of vicious home-invasion murders terrified Los Angeles, but it took police a long time to connect the dots. After three months, the detectives with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office who were working the LaBianca case decided that the two assaults were connected, and among their suspects was Charles Manson. Their investigation led to Spahn’s Movie Ranch and the Family, and ultimately to the Death Valley ranch, where Manson was found hiding under a bathroom sink.

  On his first day of testimony, Manson arrived in court with an X carved into his forehead (which he later turned into a swastika), which was a statement that he had “Xed” himself out of the establishment world. Most of the other family members, including the female defendants, copied the mark on themselves. The prosecution argued that the murders were meant to trigger Helter Skelter.

  On January 25, 1971, Manson and the other three defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and other crimes—twentyseven separate counts against each one. All four were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty in 1972. Manson, who had never actually killed anyone himself, was convicted on the basis of the joint-responsibility rule, which holds all of the participants in a conspiracy guilty for the crimes committed in pursuit of the conspiracy’s goal.

  On September 5, 1975, Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, where she had moved in order to be close to Manson’s new home at Folsom State Prison. Sentenced to life, she was released after serving thirty-four years in prison. Manson is currently ensconced at Corcoran State Prison, where he has applied for parole and been denied eleven times. He’ll be eligible to apply again in 2012.

  IN CONTRAST to Charles Manson, Kevin Foster rates only one mention on Criminal Minds, in the episode “3rd Life” (312), about a pack of teenage killers.

  After a night of vandalism that earned scant coverage in the newspapers, four teenagers in Fort Myers, Florida, led by high school dropout Kevin Foster, decided to present an organized face to the world. They would be the Lords of Chaos. In their manifesto, they wrote, “During the night of April 12, the Lords of Chaos began a campaign against the world. Be prepared for destruction of Biblical proportions. The games have just begun, and terror shall ensue.”

  The other core members of the group were three high school seniors: comic book nerd Pete Magnotti, computer geek Chris Black, and band member Derek Shields. Other kids moved about the group’s periphery and were involved in some of the escapades. Foster, eighteen and described as smart and strong, was their natural leader. His mother owned a pawnshop, and he seemed to have access to an almost limit
less supply of guns.

  The teenagers began their campaign of terror on April 20, 1996, by blowing up an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. Six nights later they carjacked and robbed the landlord of one of the group’s hangers-on.

  Their big night came on April 30. They had planned to steal clothing from a department store and then wear the stolen clothes to a senior night event at Walt Disney World, where Foster hoped to steal a character costume and use it as a disguise that would enable him to shoot minorities in the park. When the smoke bomb they wanted to use as a distraction at the department store failed, they gave up that effort and instead went to their high school. After setting the auditorium on fire, they were spotted by Mark Schwebes, the school’s thirty-two-year-old band director. He confiscated some items they had stolen from the school and warned them that he would alert the police. After Schwebes left, Black said, “He’s gotta die tonight.”

  Some of the teens went home, but the four original Lords of Chaos members went to Schwebes’s home and rang the doorbell. When Schwebes opened the door, Foster fired a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun into his face at close range, killing him instantly. Foster, believing Schwebes to be gay, fired a second blast at the band director’s buttocks. The killing made Foster feel as though he was on top of the world.

  That feeling didn’t last long. Foster bragged about the murder to other members of the group. One of those told his girlfriend, and soon enough word reached the police. While the boys were on their way to rob a Hardee’s restaurant, the police closed in and took them into custody.

  Some of the hangers-on weren’t charged, or they turned state’s evidence and walked. Shields, Magnotti, and Black pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. Black and Shields got a life sentence, and Magnotti was sentenced to thirty-two years. Foster had a three-day trial; it took the jury slightly more than two hours to reach a verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to death on June 17, 1998.

  At this time, Foster remains on death row at Florida State Prison. He and his mother—who testified that he was home with her at the time of the murder—were later convicted of conspiring to murder some of the Lords of Chaos who had testified against Foster.

  IN “THE POPULAR KIDS” (110), which features a pack of teenagers who appear to be engaged in satanic ritual activity, there is a reference to the satanic panic of the 1980s. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, there was a rash of claims, mostly in the mass media, about satanic rituals, sacrifices, and abuse. Most of these claims vanished into nothingness when exposed to the light of day, but talk-show hosts like Geraldo Rivera fed the scare for as long as they could, because satanism meant big ratings.

  Cult “experts” at the time claimed that fifty thousand to two million children in the United States were ritually sacrificed to Satan every year. In fact, the entire murder rate in the country at that time was around twenty-five thousand a year. Under leading questions by investigators, children told horrific stories of ritual abuse at day-care centers. No proof of this abuse ever turned up, but evidence that the kids were only telling the investigators what they wanted to hear was abundant. Teenagers sometimes turned to the occult and satanism, but out of boredom and alienation, rarely with real seriousness of intent. Without a smoking gun, the media moved on to other pursuits, and the whole panic fizzled.

  IN “THE POPULAR KIDS” (110), profiler Spencer Reid uses Jim Jones and his People’s Temple as an example of a murderous cult. Jonestown, Jim Jones’s Guyana hideaway, is referred to again in the episode “Minimal Loss” (403), about a cult’s disastrous standoff with government officials.

  James Warren Jones was born in Indiana and began his career as a preacher there in the 1950s. He developed a large, mixed-race congregation, which was very rare at that time and place. He moved his temple, which practiced what he called “apostolic socialism,” to California after the government started looking into his claims of cures for cancer, heart disease, and arthritis.

  Fearing an imminent nuclear war, Jones took his congregation to Ukiah, California, which had been described as a place that could withstand a nuclear attack. Later he opened branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles and set up headquarters in San Francisco. Jones was prominent in local and national Democratic political circles.

  Rumors of illegal activities surfaced, however, and in 1974 the People’s Temple, as Jones called his congregation, acquired land in Guyana. Jones wanted to establish a model communist community there, and by 1977 he and several hundred members of the congregation lived there full-time. In 1978, almost a thousand people lived in the community.

  Jones constantly warned his flock about its capitalist enemies. He isolated his congregation from the rest of the world, forcing its members to sign over their possessions to the church. He even made them sign confessions of having sexually molested their children, in order to give him ammunition to use against them if they ever turned on him.

  Nevertheless, people did leave the congregation, and the stories they told back home circulated quickly. In November 1978, California congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown on a fact-finding trip, accompanied by his staff, the media, and others. On November 18, as he was preparing to leave Guyana to return to the United States, a couple of families asked to be allowed to go with the congressman’s party. At the airstrip, a tractor-trailer carrying armed temple members drove up, and the members started shooting. Five people, including Congressman Ryan and one of the temple defectors, were killed, and nine others were injured.

  That night, fearing reprisals, the temple members met in their pavilion. Some of Jones’s aides had prepared a vat of Flavor-Aid spiked with Valium and cyanide, among other additives. Some in the congregation argued against suicide, but once word of Ryan’s death spread, they knew their options were limited. They’d had suicide rehearsals before, so the procedure was familiar. People used syringes to squirt poison into the mouths of infants and children because they weren’t cooperating. Once the adults had poisoned their own children, they weren’t likely to back out. The poisoned began to die within about five minutes.

  Jones, who did not drink his own poison, was found with a gunshot wound to the head, either self-inflicted or at close contact. Nine hundred followers joined him in death.

  LIKE JIM JONES, David Koresh kept his disciples in a contained environment. When you’re asking people to believe that you’re a prophet—a common thread in the lives of megalomaniacs for whom people are willing to kill and die—it’s essential that you control what they see and hear and think about. Some members of Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect believed him to be God Incarnate, so it was not difficult for him to persuade them to do whatever he wanted.

  According to reports from inside the sect’s ranch compound, about ten miles from Waco, Texas, Koresh wanted a lot. He fathered at least fifteen children by many different “wives,” some of whom were as young as twelve. When he wanted to marry someone who was already married, he simply used his authority to annul her existing marriage. Then he could marry the woman or girl, and her “former” husband was expected to live in celibacy. Koresh was, he said, entitled to 140 wives, according to his interpretation of the biblical Song of Songs. Koresh dictated all of the rules by which his flock would live. He required them to relinquish their material possessions, which he could keep or redistribute at will.

  The discipline he administered was often harsh. He was said to paddle infants, even those as young as eight months, for forty-five minutes. He made adults go into a sewage pit, then refused them permission to bathe afterward. He made children call their parents “dogs.” Only Koresh was to be their “father,” just as he was to be the “husband” of any girl he found attractive, however young she might be. Despite these stories, a child abuse investigation by the state failed to turn up any evidence against him.

  Vernon Wayne Howell was born in Houston, Texas, on April 17, 1959, to a fourteen-year-old girl. He never knew his father, and at the age of four he was left with his maternal grandmother, who raised him. Dyslexic and
barely literate, the boy grew up lonely and isolated and dropped out of high school in his junior year. He was not unintelligent, however. Before he left school, he had memorized the entire Bible, and throughout his life he was able to talk about it at great length, convincing others that he was spiritually wise. He could usually come up with a biblical passage that would excuse any behavior in which he wanted to indulge. He was also a reasonably good musician who, like Manson, considered a rock music career.

  At age twenty, Howell joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church, leaving only when a dispute with the pastor, over Howell’s interest in the pastor’s daughter, soured his relationships there. He moved to Waco in 1981 to join the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic sect that had splintered off from the Seventh Day Adventists in the 1930s. In 1955, the sect had established a ranch outside Waco, which they called the Mount Carmel Center.

  The group’s prophet was an elderly woman named Lois Roden. Her adult son, George, expected to be the next prophet, but Howell claimed the gift of prophecy and began a sexual affair with Lois. She declared that God meant for her to have a child with Howell and that this child (who never came along—no surprise, given Lois’s age) would be the Chosen One. George Roden objected, and the group was divided in its loyalties.

  Howell took some of his followers and set up a splinter of the splinter ninety miles away in Paradise, Texas. For the next several years he worked on building that group. There he began his controlling ways, forcing people to break bonds and attachments made on the outside and show loyalty only to him. He also developed his interest in polygamy—for himself, but not for anyone else—after Lois died.

  When George Roden saw his own support fading, he challenged Howell to a contest to see which one of them could raise the dead. Roden dug up a corpse to practice on, and Howell, sensing an advantage, alerted the authorities. Told that he had to supply proof that Roden was abusing a corpse, Howell and some of his followers went into Mount Carmel, armed, to take photographs. A shoot-out ensued in which Roden was wounded and Howell, among others, was arrested. A mistrial freed Howell, but Roden was soon arrested for the murder of another rival. With Roden in a mental institution and a large amount of unpaid back taxes, Mount Carmel was put up for sale by the state. Howell bought it, renamed it Ranch Apocalypse, and brought his followers to live there.