Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Update: 1998

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Appendix III

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The conversations throughout the book, including my conversations with Charles Manson, have been reconstructed from my recollection and, in some instances, from notes made immediately after those conversations.

  —Ed George

  INTRODUCTION

  SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM Charles Manson’s statement to the California court that convicted him of seven counts of murder conspiracy in the first degree and sentenced him to death in 1970:

  * * *

  “These children that came at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out or they did not want to go to Juvenile Hall, so I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this: that in love there is no wrong.

  “… It is not my responsibility. It is your responsibility. It is the responsibility you have toward your own children who you are neglecting, and then you want to put the blame on me again and again and again.… 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.

  “… I have nothing against none of you. I can’t judge any of you. But I think it is high time that you all started looking at yourselves and judging the lie that you live in. I sit and I watch you from nowhere, and I have nothing in my mind, no malice against you and no ribbons for you.… You are just doing what you are doing for the money, for a little bit of attention from someone. I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you. You haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves because you are crazy. And you can’t project it back at me.…

  “You can say that it’s me that cannot communicate, and you can say that it’s me that don’t have any understanding, and you can say that when I am dead your world will be better, and you can lock me up in your penitentiary and you can forget about me. But I’m only what lives inside of you, each and every one of you. These children … you only give them your frustration. You only give them your anger. You only give them the bad part of you rather than give them the good part of you. You should all turn around and face your children and start following them and listening to them.

  “… If I could get angry at you I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it. These children, everything they have done, they done for love of their brother.…

  “I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am. I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend. You want a sadistic fiend because that is what you are.

  “… My father is the jail house. My father is your system.… I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes. I have given everything I have away. Everything! I have accepted things and given them away the next second. I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you and I look how incompetent you all are, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha, I’m already dead! Have been all my life!’ I’ve lived in your tomb that you built.

  “I did seven years for a thirty-seven-dollar check. I did twelve years because I didn’t have any parents, and how many other sons do you think you have in there? You have many sons in there, many, many sons in there, most of them are black and they are angry.…

  “Sometimes I think about giving it to you. Sometimes I’m thinking about just jumping on you and let you shoot me. Sometimes I think it would be easier than sitting here and facing you in the contempt that you have for yourself, the hate that you have for yourself. It’s only the anger you reflect at me, the anger that you have got for you.… If I could I would jerk this microphone out and beat your brains out with it because that is what you deserve! That is what you deserve.

  “… I live in my world, and I am my own king in my world, whether it be a garbage dump or in the desert or wherever it be. I am my own human being. You may restrain my body and you may tear my guts out, do anything you wish, but I am still me and you can’t take that. You can kill the ego. You can kill the pride. You can kill the want, the desire of a human being. You can lock him in a cell and you can knock his teeth out and smash his brain, but you cannot kill the soul.

  “… I don’t care what you believe. I know what I am. You care what I think of you? Do you care what my opinion is? No, I hardly think so. I don’t think that any of you care about anything other than yourselves.…

  “You made me a monster and I have to live with that the rest of my life because I cannot fight this case. If I could fight this case and I could present this case, I would take that monster back and I would take that fear back. Then you could find something else to put your fear on, because it’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on and you pick a little old scroungy nobody who eats out of a garbage can, that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged though every hellhole you can think of, and you drag him up and put him into a courtroom. You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago!”

  1.

  CHARLES MANSON ARRIVED at San Quentin in June 1971 shackled in heavy chains and basking in the glow of a frenzied media. As he trudged across the garden plaza on his way to the prison’s notorious death row, an officer whispered a remark that would be repeated often that morning.

  “Look at him! He’s such a little motherfucker!”

  The world’s most famous “little motherfucker” had just been convicted of multiple counts of homicide for orchestrating the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, a two-night slaying spree that left eight people dead and shocked the world in 1969.

  Manson remained on death row at San Quentin until capital punishment was overturned by the Supreme Court thirteen months later. The ruling automatically reduced his sentence to life (with parole)—and created a massive headache for the American corrections system. If society didn’t have the stomach to execute a man who appeared to be evil incarnate, then what the hell were we supposed to do with him? It’s a question that’s never been sufficiently answered.

  To get rid of him, San Quentin officials quickly transferred Manson to the California Medical Facility (CMF), Vacaville, for a psychiatric evaluation. Fo
und to be mentally stable, he was sent to Folsom State Prison, a hellhole that even a prison-scarred sewer rat like Manson found to be repugnant. Instead of the relative tranquillity of a federal prison, Manson now had to survive among vicious gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia, and assorted other friendly groups. Some members of these organizations itched to create a name for themselves by “offing” the world’s most famous felon.

  For the next three years, Folsom and CMF played Ping-Pong with the demon-eyed cult leader, bouncing him back and forth between the facilities. Folsom’s medical staff claimed he was a stark raving lunatic who belonged in a straitjacket at CMF. CMF’s doctors insisted that he was not psychotic, never had been, and should reside unencumbered at Folsom. The one thing everyone agreed on was that nobody wanted the little bastard under their roof. Even locked in a cell under heavy guard, Charlie Manson was one scary dude.

  Manson, true to his master-manipulator, antiestablishment form, created most of the dilemma himself. He could play crazy or sane. Wherever he was at the moment, he’d play the opposite role.

  In June 1975, Folsom officials found a way to expand the circle. Complaining that the Manson clan was camped outside the prison, harassing the staff and making everyone miserable, they appealed to the mercy of Bob Rees, San Quentin’s warden. Rees, figuring that his savage inferno couldn’t be any worse with Manson around, decided to help his fellow jailers. Rees’s act of compassion brought Charles Manson to San Quentin six weeks prior to my own reluctant arrival. When I got there, I was promptly placed in charge of the lockdown unit—the ominous section that housed prisoners so crazed and violent they couldn’t even coexist in a society made up of their criminal peers. Manson, naturally, was housed in my unit. That made him my responsibility.

  Along with Charlie came his bizarre group of fanatical followers. Led by his chief lieutenant on the outside, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the persistent mob had assaulted Folsom and CMF officials with daily calls begging for scraps of news about their beloved leader. They also demanded mail and visitation privileges. As with everything else dealing with Manson, Warden Rees dumped Squeaky and gang into my lap. “I don’t want to be bothered by those freaks,” he growled. “You handle it. And for God’s sake, make the right decisions!” Wonderful. I was now the chief ringleader of the entire Manson circus.

  The irony was that I never wanted to be at San Quentin in the first place. I’d previously served as a program administrator for the Sierra Conservation Center, a minimum-security facility in Jamestown, California, that was designed to give nonviolent prisoners a chance to work in the forestry service. The gentlemen cons spent their days building hiking trails, battling floods and forest fires, searching for lost children, and for the most part, enjoying the great outdoors. Set in the rolling, oak-studded hills on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, it was an idyllic place to work and live.

  Naturally, I took the transfer to San Quentin hard. That was going from one extreme to the other, from paradise to hell. San Quentin was a rancid rathole festering with violent, high-security felons. At the time of my assignment, the facility was a virtual chamber of horrors. A deadly riot had broken out four years before, resulting in the savage murder of three guards and two prisoners, along with the sadistic torture and mutilation of three additional correctional officers. After numerous delays, the inmates responsible were finally going to be tried, an event that brought the violent nightmare back to life in everyone’s mind. The place appeared on the verge of blowing out of control.

  The thought of working there depressed me. I furiously fought the transfer, all to no avail. A new team of top administrators was being assembled to try and keep the lid on the place, and I’d been handpicked to join them. The higher-ups apparently figured that my unique background as a former seminary student turned navy fighter pilot would come in handy. They felt that it gave me both the compassion and the authority San Quentin needed.

  I’d barely settled in for my first full day on the job when the insanity began. A chipper voice greeted me on the phone. “Have you met Charlie?” Squeaky asked.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  She appeared shocked that I hadn’t rushed right over to his cell for an autograph. For the next twenty minutes, Squeaky proceeded to extol Manson’s mythical charms. “Can I visit him?” she finally asked, getting to the point. Her birdlike voice hungered for an immediate answer. I knew that Manson’s previous prison administrators had refused to let him meet with any known Family members. The officials were afraid that Manson would use the visits to pump up his followers and send them out on horrible new missions. Those were my sentiments, exactly.

  After years of legal fights, appeals, and bitter frustration, Squeaky came at me with a new tack. “Charlie wants to marry me. I demand to see him!”

  “Does Charlie really want to marry you?” I asked, aware that such a request must originate with the inmate.

  “Ask him,” she squeaked, quickly changing the subject. “What about Charlie’s cell? What does it look like? How is it furnished? Does he have enough underwear, socks, linens? Does he see the sun? Does he have some earth to grow things? Books to read? A guitar to play?”

  Squeaky asked question after question, hanging on my every answer. I sensed that any speck of information about him was sacred to her. Before I could wring her from the phone, she made me promise that I’d visit Charlie the next day.

  I was so nonchalant about it that I didn’t remember my promise until late the following afternoon. Behind the cells in the high-security Adjustment Center was a dank, narrow utility alley. There was a small barred opening in the back wall of each unit approximately eighteen inches square. This allowed staffers to converse with an inmate without the other prisoners’ seeing them. The opening, at eye level, was secured with a steel door and was kept locked when not in use. During my rounds, I normally remained in the well-lit areas in front of the cells, casually chatting with the men behind the bars. That afternoon, I maneuvered through the old pipes, ripped-out wiring, and rusted ventilation ducts that cluttered the grimy alley and made my way toward the rear of the cell that housed Squeaky’s idol.

  Before reaching it, I heard a clank inside a metal drainpipe that ran the length of the alley. The sound gave me a chill. I knew that inmates transfer weapons to other prisoners by tying them to homemade fishing lines and flushing them down their toilets. Was that a knife or a zip gun I heard traveling the inmate highway? A knife or zip gun that would one day be aimed at me?

  I approached Charles Manson’s cell, quietly unlocked the steel viewing door, and took my first glimpse at the most feared man in the world. I instantly recoiled. There he was, hunched on his bunk like an ugly troll from a child’s nightmare. His fingernails were long and stained yellow from nicotine. His stringy black hair was draped around a chalky, almost inhuman face. The faint outline of a swastika scarred his forehead. He was thin, small, not physically threatening in any way, but boy was he creepy.

  Turning slowly, the demon looked up at me. Our eyes locked. I felt my blood run cold as Manson studied me like a predator, twisting the tip of his goatee between his thumb and his index finger. Suddenly, a demonic snarl formed on his face. I backed away, totally spooked by his appearance. I tried to catch myself and overcome my fear. Hell, I was no stranger to prisons or crazed prisoners. I’d spent half my life surrounded by the most vicious criminals one can imagine. Before that, I’d landed propeller-driven fighter planes on bouncing aircraft carriers at sea. Nothing could be scarier than that. Or so I thought. Why, I asked myself, was this goofy pip-squeak affecting me so?

  Gathering my nerve, I eased toward the door, found my voice, and introduced myself. “Hi. I’m Ed George.”

  Manson stared for a moment, then responded in an austere, almost grandiose manner. “Do you know who I am?” I nodded. We looked at each other for what seemed like forever. I studied his eyes. They were every bit as hypnotic and frightening as I’d been wa
rned. Whatever depraved energy burned inside this man was very real.

  “Lynette Fromme called,” I began, breaking the tension. “She said that you want to marry her. Do you?”

  Charlie slowly turned away. His gaze traveled to a picture of a crucifix that hung from his cell wall. After studying it for a few seconds, he responded in an eerie whisper. “Imagine me coming down from the cross to get married in front of myself.” His eyes turned back toward me, his face bathed in a devilish glow. I felt myself weakening again.

  “Charlie,” I coughed, forcing away the dread. “I don’t have time for any bullshit. Do you or don’t you want to marry her?”

  In a flash, Charlie sprang from his bunk and was suddenly standing inches away from the door. He pressed his face against the bars of the tiny aperture and began to speak with a savage intensity that was foreign to me. I stood riveted in place, paralyzed by some unknown force, soaking in the moment. His language was strangely exotic, gushing forth with great emotional energy. Time stood still as he lectured me about everything from his “fraudulent” conviction, to racism, to world pollution. His words were like a whip lashing at my conscience, making me feel that I was personally responsible for everything that was wrong with the world.

  He poured it on, painting a horrific portrait of environmental corruption and the criminal neglect of children, which he blamed on the entire human race. I felt my intellectual side feasting on the stimulating thoughts and hungering for more. His twisted logic and garbled half-truths somehow began making sense.

  “I live not by your laws, but by my laws, the laws of the Great One of whom I am and of whom all of us are a part,” he seethed. “I am the one, the one who can save the world. The one who gave his life so that you could live. I am holding him for you, but you try to destroy me, yet you are really destroying yourselves. You fool! Can’t you see that I am you and that I am your reflection? I am your child, your creation. If you kill me, you kill yourself.”