Former members of the Family have often recounted Manson’s systematic “brainwashing” methods, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), beginning with the seduction of new recruits by “bombarding” them with love, sex, and drugs:
On the witness stand, Paul Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter,
Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”
If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”
Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me?, tells a similar story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents had programmed into us.”
Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars. Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”
Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions — often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks — during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.
Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled, Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.”
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Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine — words came out of her mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”
For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”
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What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case.
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How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies — among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess — into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?