Isegoria

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.”

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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?

The motive prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi presented for the Manson murders was, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), spellbindingly bizarre, combining racism, apocalyptic, biblical rhetoric, and the Beatles:

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.

When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate, O’Neill explains, the details were even more jarring:

Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.

It gets worse.

After they were found guilty, and the trial moved to its death-penalty phase, the three convicted women from the Manson Family — Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten — took the witness stand:

One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse.

[…]

To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love — it freed that person from the confines of their physical being.

Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”

Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know? “Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.”

“‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has happened. She is gone.”

About a week after the Manson Family’s arrests, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Manson appeared wild-eyed on the cover of Life magazine, looking like a modern-day Rasputin:

Inside the issue, the “Manson women,” many of them barely teenagers, posed with babies slung over their slender shoulders. They spoke of their love and undying support for “Charlie,” whom they deemed the second coming of Christ and Satan in one.

Life still hosts a gallery of images, including that cover:

The underground press supported Manson:

People thought he was innocent, that his status as a left-leaning communard had been overblown. Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”

An L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists?

The trial became a spectacle:

On the very first day of the trial, Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs. The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written. They laughed at the photographers who jostled to get their pictures. During the trial, if Manson took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity, his expressions, his outbursts.

[…]

Things were no more orderly outside the courtroom, where, at the corner of Temple and Grand, members of the Family gathered each morning to hold sidewalk vigils. Barefoot and belligerent, they sat in wide circles, singing songs in praise of their leader. The women suckled newborns. The men laughed and ran their fingers through their long, unwashed hair. All had followed Manson’s lead and cut Xs into their foreheads, distributing typewritten statements explaining that the self-mutilation symbolized their “X-ing” themselves “out of society.”

That Life gallery includes some later photos, too:

Manson was an unlikely candidate for a charismatic leader, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only five foot six.

Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours, they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years. He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny.

Eventually, she pursued a traveling salesman in Indianapolis, marrying him in 1943 and trying to cut back on her drinking. Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops. His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead, he was made a ward of the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana. He ran away. His mother took him back. The separation must have weighed on him, at least to go by his acolyte Watson, who later wrote that Manson had “a special hatred for women as mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my mother’s boy.’”

The “mechanical boy” made short work of the Gibault School. Ten months in, he ran away again, turning to burglary to keep himself afloat. His crimes soon landed him in a correctional facility in Omaha, Nebraska. He ran away from there, too, and started breaking into grocery stores. At age thirteen, Manson was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a tougher institution, where he claimed the other boys raped him. He learned to feign lunacy to keep them at bay. And he kept running away: eighteen times in three years.

In February 1951, when he was sixteen, Manson broke out again, this time with a pair of other boys. They drove a stolen car across state lines—a federal offense. When a roadblock in Utah brought their escapade to an end, Manson was sent to the National Training School for Boys, in Washington, D.C. Thus began a long stint in the federal reformatory system. From there, Manson went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma.

In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way. He took on various service jobs, but he couldn’t give up stealing cars, several of which he drove, again, across state lines. Those crimes, plus his failure to attend a hearing related to one of them, netted him a three-year sentence to Terminal Island, a federal prison in San Pedro, California. By the time he got out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.

Manson kept pimping, stealing cars, and scheming people out of their money. The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines. They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation, and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”

Stuck in prison for the long haul, Manson took up the guitar and dabbled in Scientology. The staff noted his gift for charismatic storytelling and his enduring “personality problems.” He made no secret of his musical aspirations. From behind bars, he observed, with great interest and envy, the meteoric rise of the Beatles.

When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”

Maybe we should let people stay in prison longer.