Charles Manson Now

by Marlin Marynick

  I asked Matthew to take me back to the start, before it ever occurred to him that he could be the son of the world’s most favorite madman. He told me about the strip club where he spun and a porn star that performed there. She couldn’t remember his name, but she seemed to have always known his face, and so she would seal the tips she’d save for him in an envelope labeled “Manson” and leave it in the back. Matthew said, “I really believe that Life magazine cover [the December 1969 cover featuring Manson’s famous hypnotic stare] is just kind of ingrained in people’s subconscious.” He mentioned his appearance has evoked strange reactions his whole life, that strangers become instantly scared or intimidated at just the sight of him. This is a fact of life that Matthew has learned to live with but has never fully accepted. “People see me, they make the connection subconsciously, and then they get scared. I’ve always hated having that effect on people.”

  Matthew was born in Chicago in 1968 and adopted by a couple in nearby Rockford, Illinois as an infant. He spoke very highly of his adoptive parents, who raised him to go to church and play sports, as most typical midwestern parents do. But even in the midst of a calm, Christian upbringing, Matthew somehow felt drawn to Manson’s mayhem. His first book report was on Helter Skelter. When he graduated high school, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his love of rock ‘n’ roll and study at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he met Clem, an original Manson family member who had allegedly cut a person’s head off with a pocket knife. “When I talked to Clem, I asked him, ‘What were you doing hanging out with this guy who is crazy?’ He said he thought Manson was Jesus Christ because he watched him raise a bird from the dead.” Matthew explained that Clem had served only seventeen years in jail, a reduced sentence because the judge thought him “too stupid” to have acted on his own with no orders from Manson. Matthew described Clem as an all around good guy: “Clem was a good blues guitar player. Everyone liked him, you know.”

  Matthew encountered much more Manson out west. He dated a woman whose mother dated Roman Polanski. He worked with another woman who was friends with Curt Gentry, a coauthor of Helter Skelter. Eventually he met and became engaged to a woman named Gina. As the couple thought about starting a family, Gina suggested Matthew research his biological parents. He contacted an adoption-search agency and was given the name of his biological mother. But he was forewarned. Though the agent suggested his mother’s mental health might not be in great shape, Matthew dismissed his mother’s eccentricities, her decision to live without a phone or a car, her undivided interest in her vegetable garden, as simply the idiosyncrasies of an aging hippie. It took some time to realize that something was wrong.

  Initially, Matthew’s mother “Terry” alleged her son had been conceived as the consequence of a gang rape. Then she admitted she might have confused male aggression with male vigor, in which case the encounter might have resulted from miscommunication in a situation shrouded by drugs. “She was, I guess, like seventeen. I think it was just convenient for her to call it a rape, especially when she found out who was involved.” Terry went on to tell Matthew she couldn’t reveal his full birth name over the phone, but would have to do so in person for “security reasons.” She alluded to her involvement in an “infamous hippie group.” Matthew confirmed, “She basically admitted it was the Manson group.” She disclosed that Manson had participated in the orgy that left her pregnant. “I don’t know, but everything adds up. My mother looked like them, an attractive looking young girl. She lived in the same town as Mary Brunner.” After his initial conversation with Terry, Matthew didn’t need much more convincing to accept that he might have such an eerily recognizable face for a biologically based reason. Listening to Matthew, it became hard to believe I’d never thought of Charlie having children. “There’s no telling how many kids are out there,” Matthew said. “He was in jail. He got out. He was making up for lost time.”

  Matthew told me Terry promised to know exclusive details about Charlie’s life. She claimed to have ratted Charlie out to the FBI. She said she knew ofan investigation into Charlie’s activities, initiated well before the murders, which, at one point, focused on a strange character named Steve who was a Charles Manson look-a-like. Steve turned out to be nobody. She insisted the idea of a worldwide race war was never part of Charlie’s teachings. “That came out after he was in prison,” she said. Terry once overheard family members talking about the Folger family. She couldn’t understand why they were so upset with the Folgers; Terry really liked their coffee.

  Matthew told me that when he’d heard the gist of Terry’s story, “things really came to a head.” He watched Charles Manson Superstar. “In that documentary, he talked about his children coming back, one ofthem coming back at around the age of forty.” Manson was released from prison on March 21, 1967. Matthew was born March 22, 1968. Manson went back to prison in 1969 and has been there ever since. There was a small window of opportunity for a child to be conceived, and Matthew’s timeline matches Manson’s perfectly. It’s alleged that Manson fathered another child around the same time, whose mother was Mary Brunner, Manson’s first family member. She allegedly gave birth to their son, Valentine Michael, on April 15, 1968, just weeks after Matthew was born. That child’s current whereabouts are unknown. Matthew was becoming convinced. “Then I started looking in the mirror; I mean, I look like this guy: my nose, my hair, my eyes. People have called me Charles Manson.”

  As he inquired more about his origins, Matthew’s relationship with Terry deteriorated along with her emotional stability. “She got really upset and aggressive. In one letter she wrote that all I cared about was humiliating her, all I cared about was that her clitoris was violated. Those were her exact words.” Eventually, Matthew sent his mother a photograph of himself. She was taken aback and insisted he looked exactly like Manson. “That,” Matthew asserted, “is when she got crazy.”

  After cutting off contact with his mother, Matthew decided to write Manson to see if he remembered Terry. He did. In one of his letters to Matthew, Manson wrote about his relationship with Terry: “We took a super train to LA-what an experience to last a life time.” Terry, of course, had come back from the trip pregnant, though neither could have known this at the time. And because of the circumstances surrounding Matthew’s conception, Manson knew no more than Terry about the question of paternity. At one point, Matthew saw a picture of Manson’s grandmother and described his resemblance to her as “uncanny.” If, despite their physical similarities, Manson is not Matthew’s father, there still exists something special between the two. “I feel like there’s something that connects us and I think that he feels that too. I think it has to do with good and evil and our perceptions of the two.” Matthew told me he understands Manson at a level most people cannot approach because he has experienced a similar set of circumstances. Except Matthew doesn’t think he could handle incarceration “simply for being a subversive” as well as Charlie has. “One thing that’s always fascinated me about him is that the man’s spirit can never be broken. I’m not that strong. I’d have been crying like a pussy in solitary confinement, you know, and he has never wavered for a second in his conviction that he’s right.”

  Charlie could still remember a few details about Terry and her family. He recalled a story Terry had previously told Matthew, about how her father had chased Charlie off his lawn, calling him a “white trash bandit biker.” Matthew’s biological grandfather was a six-foot-four heavily decorated marine who’d fought against the Japanese at Midway. “He wouldn’t have been intimidated by Charlie or any of his cronies.” Matthew told me there was no way Manson could have known these details if he hadn’t actually stood on Terry’s lawn forty years before. “He wrote [of their relationship] that it was free love and he paid the price. He told me how not knowing your father has its goods and its bads. He didn’t know his father and explained how all men were his father, how it can be good to learn from more than just one.”

  As is his way, Matthew t
urned to science to explain the strangeness ofhis experience. He told me that ifhe is not Manson’s son, the two could still resemble and feel drawn to each other through a phenomenon Einstein called quantum entanglement. Matthew explained: “You know, every now and again, the world sees a four-year-old child that plays Mozart perfectly. This is because everybody has a genetic code and a frequency by which they vibrate. Let’s say you recorded all of those codes from the beginning of time and put them in a computer. You might find that kid has the same genetic code and frequency Mozart did and that’s why he is able to play at four years old. He doesn’t necessarily have to look like Mozart, because your environment dictates how your body reacts and how you grow up. Your genetic code is identical to that of a roach until almost the very last few digits, so let’s say there are a finite number of possible human genetic codes and, every now and again, they repeat and the world produces a clone of a person that lived before. In the past, larger spans of time would separate these clones. People never made the connection. But now that we have over six billion people on the planet, the phenomenon might happen more frequently.

  Matthew went on to describe his theory that, as our planet evolves, its electromagnetic grid is breaking down and introducing the possibility of another level of consciousness, in which synchronicity increases. He cited the coincidences and synchronicities surrounding the September eleventh attacks on the United States as an example of this. “I think the more you’re kind of off that grid of collective consciousness, the more you’re open to it and the more you’re able to recognize it. Then, if you don’t have fear of insanity or fear of being weird, you can incorporate it into your life in a reasonable, socially acceptable way. Because, in other words, it’s nutty stuff, and people are afraid to experience things that are different.”

  Matthew hasn’t communicated with Charlie in two years, since Manson stopped responding to Matthew’s letters. Matthew told me he assumes Charlie won’t write because Matthew’s story went public. He is still hoping to someday unlock the secret behind his connection to Charlie, although, without DNA evidence, the chances of this happening are slim. And though he’s dealt with a lot of criticism, he says he still cannot understand why. “Wouldn’t anybody in their right mind, if there was a chance they were the son of Charles Manson, wouldn’t they want to know if that were true or not?” Ultimately, Matthew says, he’s stopped caring whether people believe his story or not, but this doesn’t make him immune to the hatred people throw his way. “I honestly believe I’ve had assassination attempts. But I feel like I have some unique ability to survive, like Charlie does. He was sentenced to death and then they reversed it. He was lit on fire and his skin grew back. I once attempted suicide myself and it was a miracle I survived, you know?”

  I asked Matthew about the night terrors the writer mentioned in the Details article. He described what he called “hallucinations” in which his eyes would be open and each bizarre sight would seem real. Matthew described an experience in which he found himself covered in spiders. In one recurring night terror, he’d awake to the torture of alien life forms. This, he told me, is significant, according to the theory he’s developed to explain his experience.

  Matthew has fervently researched his condition. He discovered that the frightening scenes disrupting his sleep could result from his pineal gland producing too much DMT, a naturally occurring hallucinogenic chemical, during his sleep. “Your brain produces DMT two times in your life: when you’re born and when you die. It takes you into the world and it takes you out of the world.”

  Matthew told me about a psychiatrist who did experiments with DMT. When his subjects were exposed to amounts larger than those typically found in the human body, they experienced hallucinations centered on the same subjects that tortured Matthew. “They reported a lot of reptile stuff, a lot of alien sexual stuff,” Matthew said. “These things were so traumatic to these people that the experiments had to be discontinued.” The effects of the exposure to DMT were so disturbing, a support group was created to help the subjects cope with their shared experiences. Though the study was cut short and never repeated, Matthew believes it furnished enough evidence to suggest a trip on DMT doesn’t provoke haphazard hallucinations like any other psychedelic drug. “These weren’t just random experiences,” Matthew insisted. These people were describing beings with common messages, shared themes.” He referenced the fact that ancient tribes who took DMT recorded the experience of future technology they could not have possibly predicted. He suggested the possibility that DMT could induce another dimension of reality, a realm that has, as he put it, “a certain amount of reality to it, or at least repeatability, a consistency that exists outside of random chemical reactions.” Matthew reinforced the trauma such alternate realities could cause fully matured adults, willfully participating in a scientific study. “Imagine now,” he said, “a child, who has no idea what is happening to him, experiencing things so hellish and horrific, with nothing to explain it other than religion or demons.”

  Matthew and I talked about his interest in psychiatry. He half joked, “I’m fascinated with human psychology and human behavior; all of this couldn’t have happened to a better person.” Matthew told me that he’d once started medical school. “I was an intern and took classes, but once I got into it, I knew it wasn’t for me.” Matthew confided that once he saw how psychiatry really worked, he lost his passion for it. He didn’t like the rigid labels placed on patients, nor did he agree with the field’s heavy focus on medication. Matthew told me that during an interview, a writer once asked ifhe’d ever worried about schizophrenia. “I said, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve thought about it. I’m not nuts but I’m a little nutty.’“ The writer proceeded to publish an account that stated Matthew admitted to suffering from schizophrenia. Matthew said that kind misrepresentation is “the same kind of shit” the media has pulled on Charlie. “Like I said, if there’s not a genetic connection, then I shudder to think what’s going on in this fucking world.”

  We talked about our beliefs and experiences with mental health, and I asked Matthew what he thought about schizophrenia. He told me he thinks schizophrenia is a condition through which a person’s mind advances enough to see the relativity of all things. Synchronicity will then seem to increase in that person’s life to such a degree that he is left with the dilemma of deciding whether to believe he is the creator of his life’s events or merely the observer.

  Matthew elaborated: “We basically have two filters by which we perceive all of reality. The fear filter or love filter. Hate is not the opposite of love; it is still love, just to a lesser degree. Fear is the opposite of love. So where you have fear, that is a good indicator that you lack love in that area. The degree to which you hate one person or thing proportionately limits your ability to love another. So you can’t love one thing while hating another. Likewise, the degree to which you hate or victimize another is in direct proportion to the degree to which you yourself can be victimized. Paranoid schizophrenia occurs when you perceive these events through fear. This condition can be cured, simply by perceiving these events through the love filter. Suddenly, then, you have the gift of intuition. Why would you ever fear someone harming you if you can’t be harmed?

  “Every event in our lives offers us an opportunity to learn something. The more adverse a situation is, the greater the opportunity to learn/advance. A perfect example of this is the story behind the movie A Beautiful Mind. I think I’m hyper intuitive and I think that ties in with the schizophrenic thing quite a bit because, ultimately, if you are synchronously experiencing things as a function of intuition, then you are simply living the life you are supposed to live, whether that’s being in the right place at the right time or actually predicting things. A schizophrenic believes that he’s predicting events, that he’s creating reality.”

  I told Matthew about Stanton’s experience with surveillance, his belief that helicopters follow him everywhere. “Really?” Matthew asked. “I moved into a friend�
�s house for a while and he told me that the helicopters flying overhead went crazy; he hadn’t experienced them that way until I moved in. All of a sudden they were flying right over us; it literally felt like they were going to land on the roof. I’ve moved near the airport and that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.” I asked Matthew to interpret this bizarre experience. He explained that, with thermal imaging technology, every person on the planet is visible from space. “Everyone lights up like a firefly,” he said. “This might be my ego, or delusions of grandeur, but I believe I glow very bright. I do think they track me; maybe they think I’m some sort of threat.”

  THIRTEEN

  UNCOVERING THE FINAL DETAILS

  It was Stanton LaVey who told me about John Aes-Nihil. Stanton has known John since he was a kid, when John was his mother’s and stepfather’s (Zeena and Nikolas) roommate. Stanton and John were close and John used to drive Stanton to school. Stanton told me that what makes John unique, aside from the deep connection he feels wth the Manson Family, is the fact that he has been interested in Manson from the beginning: 1969.