Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Maddox. His surname was merely a guess on Kathleen’s part as to which of her lovers was the father. She was in and out of prison, pawning Charlie off on a religious aunt and sadistic uncle who called him a sissy, dressed him in girl’s clothing for his first day of school, and challenged him to "act like a man." By the time he was ten, he was living on the streets, except for his terms in various group homes and reform schools. He lasted four days at Father Flanagan’s Boys Town.

  His young adult life was marked by a series of robberies, forgeries, pimpings, assaults, and incarcerations at increasingly tougher institutions. The FBI had investigated him under the Dyer Act for the interstate transport of stolen cars. He was paroled from his latest imprisonment in 1967, just in time for the "Summer of Love." He made his way to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the West Coast magnet for flower power and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Looking primarily for a free ride, Manson quickly became a charismatic guru to the turned-on dropout generation still in their teens and twenties. He played the guitar and spoke in elliptical verities to disillusioned kids. Soon he was living for free, with all the sex and illicit stimulants he wanted. A nomadic "Family" of followers of both sexes gathered around him, sometimes numbering as many as fifty. As one of his services to the community, Charlie would preach his vision of the coming apocalypse and race war, which would leave the Family triumphant and him in control. His text was "Helter Skelter" from the Beatles’ White Album.

  On the night of August 9, 1969, four Manson Family members, led by Charles "Tex" Watson, broke into the secluded home of director Roman Polanski and his movie star wife, Sharon Tate, at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills. Polanski was away on business, but Tate and four guests—Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent—were viciously slaughtered in a depraved orgy that included slogans scrawled on the walls and victims’ bodies with their own blood. Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant.

  Two days later, at Manson’s apparent instigation, six Family members killed and mutilated businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Manson himself didn’t participate, but came in the house afterward for the mayhem that followed. The subsequent arrest for prostitution of Susan Atkins, who had participated in both murders, and an arson involving a piece of highway equipment, ultimately led back to the Family and perhaps the most celebrated trials in California history, at least until the O. J. Simpson extravaganza. In two separate proceedings, Manson and several of his followers were sentenced to death for the Tate and LaBianca murders and a number of others traced to them, including the killing and mutilation of Donald "Shorty" Shea, a movie stuntman and Family hanger-on who was suspected of squealing to the police. When the state’s capital-punishment laws were overturned, the sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.

  Charlie Manson was not your routine serial killer. In fact, it was in dispute whether he’d actually murdered anyone with his own hands. Yet his bad background was beyond question, and so were the horrors his followers had committed at his instigation and in his name. I wanted to know how someone sets out to become this satanic messiah. We had to sit through hours of cheap philosophizing and ramblings, but as we pressed him for specifics and tried to cut through the bullshit, an image began to emerge.

  Charlie hadn’t set out to be the dark guru. His goal was fame and fortune. He wanted to be a drummer and play for a famous rock band like the Beach Boys. He had been forced to live by his wits his entire life and so had become extremely adept at sizing up the people he met and quickly determining what they could do for him. He would have been excellent in my unit assessing an individual’s psychological strengths and weaknesses and strategizing how to get to a killer we were hunting.

  When he arrived in San Francisco after his parole, he saw vast hordes of confused, naive, idealistic kids who looked up to him for his life experience and the seeming wisdom he spouted. Many of them, particularly the young girls, had had problems with their fathers and could relate to Charlie’s past, and he was astute enough to be able to pick them out. He became a paternal figure, one who could fill their empty lives with sex and the enlightenment of drugs. You can’t be in the same room with Charlie Manson and not be affected by his eyes—deep and penetrating, wild and hypnotic. He knew what his eyes could do and what effect they could have. He told us he had spent his early life getting the shit beaten out of him, and with his small stature, there was no way he could win a physical confrontation. So he compensated by invoking the force of his personality.

  What he preached made perfect sense: pollution is destroying the environment, racial prejudice is ugly and destructive, love is right and hate is wrong. But once he had these lost souls in his sway, he instituted a highly structured delusional system that left him in complete control of their minds and bodies. He used sleep deprivation, sex, food control, and drugs to gain complete dominance, like a prisoner-of-war situation. Everything was black-and-white and only Charlie knew the truth. He’d strum his guitar and repeat his simple mantra over and over again: only Charlie could redeem the sick and rotting society.

  The basic dynamics of leadership and group authority that Manson described for us we were to see repeated over the years in subsequent tragedies of similar dimension. The power over and understanding of inadequate people that Manson possessed would be revisited by the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass murder- suicide of his flock in Guyana, then again by David Koresh at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to name but two. And despite the glaring differences among these three men, what links them together is striking. Insight we got from talking to Manson and his followers contributed to our understanding of Koresh and his actions and other cults.

  At the heart of it, the issue with Manson wasn’t this messianic vision but simple control. The "helter-skelter" preaching was a way to maintain the mind control. But as Manson came to realize, unless you can exert this control over your flock twenty-four hours a day, you risk losing it. David Koresh realized this and holed up his devotees in a rural fortress where they couldn’t leave or be away from his influence.

  After listening to Manson, I believe that he did not plan or intend the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends; that, in fact, he lost control of the situation and his followers. The choice of the site and victims was apparently arbitrary. One of the Manson girls had been there and thought there was money around. Tex Watson, the good-looking, all-American honor student from Texas, sought to rise in the hierarchy and rival Charlie for influence and authority. Zoned out like the others on LSD and having bought into the leader’s new tomorrow, Watson was the primary killer and led the mission to the Tate-Polanski house and encouraged the others to the ultimate depravities.

  Then, when these inadequate nobodies came back and told Charlie what they had done, that helter-skelter had begun, he couldn’t very well back down and tell them they had taken him too seriously. That would have destroyed his power and authority. So he had to do them one better, as if he had intended the crime and its aftermath, leading them to the LaBianca home to do it again. But significantly, when I asked Manson why he hadn’t gone in and participated in the killings, he explained, as if we were dense, that he was on parole at the time and couldn’t risk his freedom by violating that.

  So I believe from the background information and the interviews we did with Manson that while he made his followers into what he needed, they, in turn, made him into what they needed and forced him to fulfill it.

  Every couple of years, Manson comes up for parole and has been turned down every time. His crimes were too publicized and too brutal for the parole board to take a chance on him. I don’t want him let out, either. But if he were released at some point, knowing what I do about him, I wouldn’t expect him to be a serious violent threat like a lot of these guys are. I think he’d go off into the dese
rt and live out there, or else try to cash in on his celebrity for money. But I wouldn’t expect him to kill. The biggest threat would be from the misguided losers who would gravitate to him and proclaim him their god and leader.

  By the time Ressler and I had done ten or twelve prison interviews, it was clear to any reasonably intelligent observer that we were onto something. For the first time, we were able to correlate what was going on in an offender’s mind with the evidence he left at a crime scene.

  In 1979, we’d received about fifty requests for profiles, which the instructors tried to handle between their teaching responsibilities. By the next year, the caseload had doubled and would double again the next. By then, I had pretty much been relieved of teaching and was the only one in the unit devoting full time to operational work. I would still give presentations to National Academy and agent classes as my schedule allowed, but unlike the others, for me teaching had now become a sideline. I did virtually all the homicide cases that came into the unit and whichever rape cases Roy Hazelwood was too busy to handle.

  What had been an informal service without official sanction was developing into a small institution. I took on the newly created title of "criminal-personality profiling program manager" and started working with the field offices to coordinate the submission of cases by local police departments.

  At one point, I was in the hospital for a week or so. My old football and boxing injuries had messed up my nose, which had made breathing progressively more difficult, and I was in getting my twisted septum straightened out. I remember lying there hardly able to see and having one of the other agents come in and drop twenty case files on my bed.

  We were learning more and more with each new prison encounter, but there had to be a way to organize the informal research into a systematized, usable framework. And that step forward came through Roy Hazelwood, with whom I was collaborating on an article about lust murder for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Roy had done some research with Dr. Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric mental-health nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Burgess was a prolific author and already widely known as one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape and its psychological consequences.

  Roy brought her to the Behavioral Science Unit, introduced her to Bob and me, and described what we were doing. She was impressed and told us she thought we had an opportunity to do research of a kind that had never been done before in this field. She thought we could contribute toward understanding criminal behavior in the same way DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—had toward the understanding and organization of types of mental illness.

  We agreed to work together, with Ann pursuing and eventually obtaining a $400,000 grant from the government-sponsored National Institute of Justice. The goal was to exhaustively interview thirty-six to forty incarcerated felons and see what kinds of conclusions we could draw. With our input, Ann developed a fifty-seven-page instrument to be filled out for each interview. Bob would administer the grant and be the liaison with NIJ, and he and I, with help from agents in the field, would go back into the prisons and face the subjects. We would describe the methodology of each crime and crime scene, and study and document the pre- and postoffense behavior, Ann would crunch the numbers, and we’d write up our results. We expected the project to take about three or four years.

  And in that time, criminal-investigative analysis came into the modern age.

  Chapter 7

  The Heart of Darkness

  The question logically arises, why would convicted felons cooperate with federal law enforcement agents? We wondered about that ourselves when we began the project. However, the overwhelming majority of those we’ve approached over the years do agree to talk to us, and they do so for a number of reasons.

  Some of them are genuinely bothered by their crimes and feel that cooperating on a psychological study is a way to make some partial amends and also come to a better understanding of themselves. I think Ed Kemper fits into this category. Others, as I’ve indicated, are police and law enforcement buffs and just enjoy being near cops and FBI agents. Some think there might be some benefit in cooperating with the "authorities," though we’ve never promised anything in return. Some feel ignored and forgotten and just want the attention and the relief from boredom that a visit from us represents. And some simply welcome the opportunity to relive their murderous fantasies in graphic detail.

  We wanted to hear whatever these men had to tell us, but we were primarily interested in several basic questions, which we outlined in an article explaining the goals of the study in the September 1980 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.

  1. What leads a person to become a sexual offender and what are the early warning signals?

  2. What serves to encourage or to inhibit the commission of his offense?

  3. What types of response or coping strategies by an intended victim are successful with what type of sexual offender in avoiding victimization?

  4. What are the implications for his dangerousness, prognosis, disposition, and mode of treatment?

  For this program to be valuable, we understood, we would have to be fully prepared and be instantly able to filter what each man told us. Because if you’re reasonably intelligent, as many of these guys are, you’re going to find a weakness in the system that you can use to your advantage. By their very nature, most serial offenders are good manipulators. If it’ll help your case to be mentally unstable, you can be mentally unstable. If it’ll help your case to be remorseful and contrite, you can be remorseful and contrite. But whatever seemed to them to be the best course of action to follow, I found that the people who agreed to talk to us were all similar. They had nothing else to think about, so they spent a lot of time thinking about themselves and what they’d done and could give it back to me in minute detail. Our task was to know enough about them and their crimes in advance to make sure they were telling us the truth, because they’d also had enough time to construct alternate scenarios that made them much more sympathetic or guiltless than the record would indicate.

  In many of the early interviews, after hearing our convict’s story, I’d want to turn to Bob Ressler or whoever was with me and say, "Could he have been railroaded? He had a sensible answer to everything. I wonder if they really got the right guy." So the first thing we’d do when we got back to Quantico was check the record and contact the local police jurisdiction for the case file to make sure there hadn’t been some horrible miscarriage of justice.

  Growing up as a boy in Chicago, Bob Ressler had been terrified and intrigued by the murder of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who had been snatched from her house and killed. Her body was discovered cut up in pieces in the sewers of Evanston. A young man named William Heirens was eventually caught and confessed to the killing and the murders of two other women in an apartment building as part of some burglaries that escalated out of control. In one of them, the murder of Frances Brown, he had scrawled on the wall with her lipstick:

  For heAVens

  SAke cAtch Me

  BeFore I Kill More

  I cannot control myselF

  Heirens attributed the murders to a George Murman (probably short for "murder man"), who he claimed lived inside him. Bob has said that the Heirens case was probably one of his early motivations for pursuing a career in law enforcement.

  Once the Criminal Personality Research Project was funded and under way, Bob and I went to interview Heirens at Statesville Prison in Joliet, Illinois. He had been incarcerated since his conviction in 1946 and had been a model prisoner for all that time, the first one in the state to complete his college degree. He then went on to graduate work.

  By the time we interviewed him, Heirens was denying any connection to the crimes, saying he was railroaded. No matter what we asked him, he had an answer, insisted he had an alibi and wasn’t even close to any of the murder scenes
. He was so convincing and I was so concerned there might have been a massive miscarriage of justice that when we got back to Quantico, I dug out all the case files. In addition to the confession and other compelling evidence, I found that his latent fingerprints had been lifted from the Degnan crime scene. Yet Heirens had spent so much time sitting in his cell and thinking and giving himself all the answers that if they polygraphed him at that point, he would probably have passed with no trouble.

  Richard Speck, who was serving consecutive life sentences for the murder of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house in 1966, made it clear he didn’t want to be lumped with the other killers we were studying. "I don’t want to be on that list with them," he told me. "They’re crazy, these people. I’m not a serial killer." He didn’t deny what he’d done, he just wanted us to know he wasn’t like them.

  On one key level, Speck was correct. He wasn’t a serial killer, who kills repeatedly with some emotional cycling or cooling-off period between his crimes. He was what I characterized as a mass murderer, who kills more than twice as part of the same act. In Speck’s case, he went to the house with burglary as his motive, trying to get money to get out of town. When twenty-three-year-old Corazon Amurao answered the door, he forced his way in with a pistol and knife, saying he was only going to tie her and her five roommates up and rob them. He herded them all into a bedroom. Over the next hour, three more women came home from dates or studying at the library. Once he had them all in his power, Speck apparently changed his mind, engaging in a frenzy of rape, strangling, stabbing, and slashing. Only Amurao survived, huddling terrified in the corner. Speck had lost count.

  After he left, she went out on the balcony and called down for help. She told police about the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on the attacker’s left forearm. When Richard Franklin Speck showed up in a local hospital a week later after a bungled suicide attempt, he was identified by the tattoo.