by Mark Hewitt
Charlie then told me about a deadly situation in CMF that could easily have ended his life. He began: “Hey Boxcar. In Vacaville, there was a chair I used to sit in on the tier. It was red. This new kid came into the unit from the hole. The whites found out he wanted to be part of their crew, and wanted to really earn his bones. They sent him to kill me. I sensed that this kid had some fear in him, and really didn’t realize what he was getting into, or exactly who he was sent to kill.
“I seen he had a knife in his pocket,” Charlie bragged, “and I asked him to show me the knife. He showed it to me, and I told him to give it to me, and to explain to me why he had it. He told me he was sent to kill me in order to be a part of the Arian Brotherhood, an ally of the Mexican Familia. Well, this kid was as harmless as a butterfly. After handing me the knife, and telling me what I already knew, he was deemed ‘no good’ by those who had sent him. He couldn’t go back to be with them in the hole or be a part of their gang!”
A few days later, I saw an inmate spit on Charlie’s window when Charlie was only a few inches from it. I could feel the pain in Charlie as he dealt with it. I could tell that it hurt him, even though Charlie knew how to deal with it from his years of incarceration. The guilty party, not a friend of anyone in the tier, had shouted after he spat. “You’re a piece of shit, Charles Manson. You’re a baby killer. Rot in hell you son of a bitch.” The outburst may have been a reaction to the clan outfit that Charlie had worn on the tier. More likely, the man was crazy or he was bitter over Charlie’s notoriety. Perhaps both.
Charlie yelled back at the guy at the top of his lungs. “You can’t hurt me! You haven’t done anything to me that hasn’t already been done to me. I’m not P.C. They got me locked behind this door to protect YOU. They put me in P.C., not P.C. in me. I’m Charles Manson, a serial killer, death row, dead man walking three times. I’m already dead. You can’t kill me or hurt me. I am no one. I’m lower than a bug. I’ve been doing this since I was a juvenile.
“You mess with my water, my air, my food, my clothes, my blankets, my sheets, my socks, my boxers, my mail, my visits,” Charlie continued. “You tell my visitors not to visit me. You steal my mail, steal my music, tell me I can’t draw pictures.” By this time, it appeared that he was yelling at the whole prison system, perhaps venting a diffuse rage at all mankind.
“The Justice Department has told me that I can’t have money because its ‘illegal business practice,’” Charlie went on. “I got people lying on me: they send the Secret Service to talk to me and say I asked them to help me kill the United States President. I ain’t said none of that. They just want a get-out-of-jail-free card. Your spit don’t bother me. So what you gonna do now?”
The tier got quiet, as it often did after a Charles Manson outburst. If the inmate who spat took issue with anything Charlie said, he didn’t vocalize it.
Sometimes, Charlie would put on what I called his, “mad man mask.” He would scream at the top of his lungs. He would do this even for visitors who could only see him, and not hear what he was saying. To this sound, he would add the visuals of someone shooting a pistol in the most menacing fashion. He would yell, “Bang, bang, bang,” while pulling the imagined triggers, as though he were holding real six-shooters. I sometimes wondered how much fear he put into those prison visitors who came by just for a look.
Most inmates were good at tuning Charlie out during one of his rages. We would listen to the first few lines, and then busy ourselves with reading, writing, watching television, or whatever we were working on. I often put earplugs in my ears to filter out his voice. It was understood that we all have blow ups from time to time. After a while, Charlie would cool down and life would go on.
It didn’t bother Charlie to disturb others with loud noises, sometimes even in the middle of the night. Why others didn’t object to this act of disrespect, I never understood. I suspect it was because of his notoriety. Maybe, they feared there would be retribution if they objected to Charlie’s obnoxious behaviors. I just ignored him as I ignored other inmates who were disrespectful. I have found that objecting usually doesn’t help. I wait for other, more menacing inmates, to keep disruptive people in line. My days of being the enforcer of a tier are long gone. I don’t want the conflict or the attention I craved in my earlier days. I suppose Charlie is responsible for helping mellow out my behavior. Ironically, he more than anyone else benefited from my new passive attitude.
One night, I was wakened at about two o‘clock in the morning. I heard the drum beat of someone playing his sink like a set of bongos. At first, I couldn’t determine from where the sound was emanating. Eventually, I recognized the voice that was singing along, and was able to locate its source. It was Charlie. He was chanting while playing bongos on his steel sink. He showed some talent, too. I would love to have heard him pound out a beat on a real set, just not at two in the morning.
He played slowly, then fast. He was able to vary his beat across two distinct sounds: low, low, low; high, high, high. It would sound terrific as part of some group of musicians, I thought. Eventually, Charlie drifted off into the silence of sleep and allowed me to resume my slumber.
Charlie was not always noisy. When he was depressed, he could get really quiet. I would become so concerned sometimes that I would check on him from time to time, just to make sure that he was okay. When he thought about being denied visits from children, or the freedom he once enjoyed to pass out gloves to the tower guards, he would become melancholy. Sometimes, he would make self-destructive threats:
“I should just hang myself,” Charlie said somberly to me one day, “so I don’t have to deal with all this mess about my visits, mail, or being able to roam in the prison. I used to walk around passing out the latex gloves to all the units on 4-A yard. I planted flowers and grass, and now they spray me with mace, take my tennis shoes, jeans, food and tell me I can’t write my music or paint or play my guitar!”
I knew that Charlie was too mentally strong to actually kill himself. After all that he had been through with his difficult upbringing and his run-ins with the law, I knew he would be brave and face his difficulties like a man, like the true inmate he was, one who knew how to handle his responsibilities. Still, I worried. I would call to Charlie from my cell on regular intervals to ensure his safety. I wanted to be able to notify the guards if he did in fact attempt harm to himself. Each time I went to yard or shower, I would glance at him through his window to ensure he was in good shape. Eventually, he would get over his melancholia. He always did. Usually, it ended with a request for a talk.
“Boxcar,” Charlie would say quietly. “Are you busy?” We would then launch into a long discussion that told me that Charlie was himself once again.
CHAPTER 15
Charlie’s Future
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
The Buddha
Some people love Charles Manson; many more hate him. Some are drawn to him because of a fascination with the horror of his crimes. Others detest him and are glad that he was tried and convicted for those exact same crimes. There are also those who want nothing more than to kill him. How many nobodies have achieved infamy by killing or attempting to kill some well-known celebrity? Everyone, including Charlie himself, knows that the name of the person who ends Charles Manson’s life will go down in history and be forever linked with his. Many who cannot achieve attention from him, and who have no life of which to be proud, would love to kill him and thus be immortalized. If it were not for the murders of certain famous people, we’d never have learned the names of Mark Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, or John Wilkes Booth. Charlie lives with the knowledge that his death could be the ticket to someone else’s fame.
I came to love Charlie because of who he is as a person. Personally, I do not like people who hurt women and children. I especially despise those who harm people who are the most unable to defend themselves, such as the elderly and the disabled. If Charli
e were guilty of such crimes toward the weak, I wouldn’t want to associate with him. There have been many child killers and those who preyed upon the elderly that I have refused to befriend. In my opinion, Charlie did not harm those in need, regardless of any jury verdict. He helped the weak.
I wasn’t attracted to Charlie because of his fame. High visibility draws its share of stalkers, whether the celebrity is an actor, sports figure, or politician, but I am nobody’s follower. It wasn’t the crimes that held any attraction to me either, the kind of attraction that draws others to a fascination with the lives of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy. My decision to associate with Charles Manson was made only to give the man the benefit of the doubt. As I held off on my judgments of him, I began to see an interesting and very complex individual, one who is talented yet horribly wronged by society, one who therefore is capable of much good and much bad.
Charlie repeatedly told me that he was innocent of the wrongs for which he was convicted. Now, I am no fool. I would have to be completely gullible to believe a prisoner at his word. I know that most inmates proclaim their innocence. I did. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, much of it found on my person at the time of my arrest, I claimed that I had been wrongly arrested and falsely convicted. I was found guilty of fourteen felonies in the aftermath of two separate crime sprees, including grand theft and attempted murder. There is now no need to uphold the charade of my innocence. I am not proud of what I have done, but I am prepared to take responsibility for my actions. With all my appeals expended, there is not much point in denying the obviousness of my guilt. Charlie’s case is another matter, however.
I gave Charlie a chance. It’s not that I accepted his plea of innocence. I didn’t, at least not at first. It has been said that if you released all the prisoners who proclaimed their innocence, there would be no one left to guard. This statement is probably true. Most inmates who have spoken with me about their crimes either minimize their crimes or deny any guilt. I suspected that the old man was doing that with me also. Still, I wanted to know him for who he was, and not for what had been written about him throughout the years. I had heard the stories and listened to news reports. Since I know that today’s media will report something (or hold something back) irrespective of its truth, and since I know that our justice system wrongly claims that someone is innocent until proven guilty, I decided to get to know the man and form my own opinions.
From what I gleaned from my conversations with the old man, I believe that Charlie was not in the Tate house when the murders were committed, and that he is innocent of those crimes, as well as the murders at the La Bianca residence. Even if he is guilty, who of us is without sin? How can we convict him, keep him in prison all his life, while we participate in the same violence through our television and through our military? Perhaps society is guiltier than Charles Manson. Maybe the system in which we all live is guilty of creating Charlie.
I considered Charlie for months, pondering who he is and what his presence beside me meant. After hours of reflection, I finally arrived at peace about Manson’s identity. He is hard to classify since there is no one like him. He is a celebrity, and his notoriety has become a feedback loop. Many people have emerged who think he’s great simply because of his unusual beliefs or his bizarre behavior. They are likely hoping to obtain something out their contact with Manson. Because there are so many people around him who are fascinated by him, others can’t help but notice. He is a celebrity because he is a celebrity; people are interested in him because so many people are interested in him. Even with his connection to the horrendous events at two murder scenes, even with his life spent mostly in one institution or another, many attribute to him godlike characteristics, and want no more than to receive some kind of attention from him.
Regardless of his notoriety, his fans, and the players hoping to exploit him, I happened upon Charlie completely by chance. I never requested a living arrangement that left me open to his manipulations. It could be argued that I deserved it, that I had found my place in the world by my own anger and stupidity. Yet, I had to believe that there was some deeper meaning in my serendipitous path that crossed Charlie’s. I have come to understand Charlie as the complex mix of a cult leader and an organized crime boss. He embodies both identities. To see him as any less is to not appreciate the force of his character.
He is a man’s man, in many ways. He is the super “alpha” male in our society. If there is one thing that he desires, indeed demands, it is absolute power and control. Accordingly, he demanded an absolute allegiance of his followers back in the 1960s, far surpassing anything that David Koresh, Jim Jones, or any other well-known cult leader required of his or her minions. His demands were backed up by murderous threats and example killings that any organized crime boss would recognize. During the hippie movement, he was a religious leader and the center of a crime syndicate, all rolled into one organization and represented in one, lone human who became a cultural icon. He accomplished all he did with an almost total lack of education.
While he preached good and evil, Charlie also embodied it. Where there is good, there is evil also. This needs to be understood to have a correct perspective on Charlie. Charlie’s dark sides, his infatuation with fear and death, stemmed from the fact that he believes himself to be the antichrist in the flesh. People in positions of power have to believe in their own abilities or they will not be held in great esteem by their followers. Charlie came to believe that he could control all situations that faced him and his “family.” Yet deep down, Charlie always knew that he was nothing more than a disadvantaged, unwanted child who grew into a troubled adult. Charlie spent his life on a crusade to prove himself, somehow, somewhere.
Partly as a result of his troubled upbringing and his ability to manipulate, and partly due to the demands of his followers, Charlie began to display Messianic qualities. He believed himself to be Jesus Christ returned to the world. However, his low self-esteem led him to believe that his charm alone was insufficient to lead his flock. He told his family members in the 1960s that he was not only Jesus but also the Devil, in the same way that he told this to me, over and over. Now that I understand Charlie a little bit more, I can understand what he was doing.
He was controlling others in any way he could. If you hit a dog hard enough and often enough, he will become violent and bite. Unloved, abused, neglected, and abandoned, Manson came to be attracted to evil as a means to gain the upper hand over others. He identified with evil, but always claimed righteousness at the same time. He liked the German Swastika, the five pointed star, and any other sign or symbol that was embraced by Satan worshippers. Though he studied Satanism, as well as Scientology, hypnotism, and a host of other philosophies and practices, he never fully embraced any of them. He instead chose a philosophy of eclecticism that eagerly embraced evil and anything that was frightening and intimidating. Concurrently, he proclaimed the good, claiming innocence and purity for himself. It was a conflicted philosophy that accomplished exactly what Charlie desired: confusion among his followers and enemies alike. While muddling the thoughts of others, Charlie could remain firmly in control.
Charlie is the most manipulative, psychologically astute, resourceful and cunning person that I’ve ever met. He is able to read people and craft his message into words that will entice his audience. He has been accused of meting out mind control. This is true in as much as he is able to figure out what motivates others and use this knowledge to his own advantage. It is this cunning and manipulativeness that prompted Rolling Stone magazine to label Charlie as “the most dangerous man alive.” At times, I wondered whether I had been given narcotics by him, particularly LSD, because the effect he had on me had been so great.
As I came to understand who he was and what made him tick, I feel I grew personally, and I learned not to fear him. He was nothing to be afraid of, even though he could talk tough and yell loudly. He wasn’t dangerous, and may never have been. If he were eve
r released, he would be a curiosity, a celebrity, and an icon of the 1960s, but probably nothing more. He is all these things already. Despite his threats, breathed in bravado, I have no reason to believe that anyone would actually be killed, or any laws would be broken. Charlie would likely promote edgy products like motorcycles and mixed martial arts matches. He would live in Malibu, enjoying a large beachfront property. He would entertain guests and throw poolside parties. For a laugh, he would make threats and stir up some controversy or another. Through a careful public relations campaign, he would increase his fame and enjoy the fortune that his notoriety would bring. He would also continue to mellow as he advanced in age.
Charlie never expressed to me a desire to be set free. He told me on several occasions that he didn’t want parole.
“This is my life. I don’t know what it is like to be on the outside.” he once said. In the past, he attended parole hearings, even requested to be released. He knew he would be denied, however. He claimed that the same government that had set him up and convicted him would be there to ensure that he was never released. He had come to accept that; in his mind, it was the price he paid for being so good to so many people. In his opinion, the world was not ready for the truth that he taught, perhaps never would be. It was not ready to face up to its own criminality, its own destruction of the environment, and its own systemic injustices.
