Charles Manson Now

by Marlin Marynick

  John owns the original Tate murder crime scene photos, each stamped by the corner on the back. I asked John how Nelson ended up with such rare and exclusive items. “Somehow Nelson ended up with all of it.” I told John about the crime scene photos I’d seen at The Museum of Death. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I sold them a set of prints.” I asked to see his photos and he pulled out a filing box filled with rare, many one-of-a-kind Manson pictures. I saw Polaroid photos of Charlie and the girls; some were photos from happier times, before all the madness. When John handed me the crime scene photos, he showed me the backs where they were verified. I was silent. There was really nothing I could say. I felt somehow connected to what had happened. I was shown the slides that came from Sharon Tate’s camera, the pictures taken just days before she was murdered. The group of friends looked so alive. It was obvious that they were having fun and that they were all very close to one another. Most of all, they seemed oblivious to what would happen next. I commented on how beautiful Sharon was and John took me out to his garage, where he showed me a poster-size print of a shot Polanski took of Sharon nude in the snow. It was breathtaking: the most amazing photo of Sharon I’d ever seen. John said that, in the early ‘70s, he would meet random people at parties in Haight-Ashbury who said they’d been at the wild parties Polanski gave.

  John has also talked with famed Hollywood journalist Paul Krassner about the home movies. Krassner allegedly told John that he has actually seen a film in which Charlie, Susan, Voytek, and Abigail are at the Tate house doing MDA and having sex. Apparently the Los Angeles Police Department seized pornographic films and videotapes found in Polanski’s loft during the murder investigation. Krassner claimed the films also included Cass Elliot in an orgy with famous celebrities. Krassner believes that the secret celebrity sex tapes lie at the heart of the investigation’s cover-ups. Krassner and others (notably private and police investigators) feel that the stars’ actions could have been motivated mostly by the damage such tapes could do to their careers if they surfaced. John told me about additional movies that featured Sharon Tate with Dean Martin and Steve McQueen. Krassner wrote Charlie about the movie and received this response: “Sebring done Susan’s hair and I think he sucked one or two of her dicks. That girl loves dick, you know what I mean, hon’? Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers….”

  John affirmed, “The main thing about the Tate murder situation was the slumming, the movie stars converging with hippies.” He talked about the “piles” of “insane” stories regarding the parties at the Tate house. He said Roman, Sharon, Jay, and movie stars from all over Hollywood would go down to the Sunset Strip to pick up hippies and take them back to their houses for drugs and sex. “Eventually,” John pointed out, “that’s going to blow up in your face.” In his opinion, the murders were a direct result of all this wild interaction between the “rich and famous and the infamous and unknown.”

  John told me Nelson tried to get these videos from the same two cops who were in possession of the crime scene photos. Apparently the cops told Nelson the videos merely showed Sharon and Roman having sex. Allegedly the LAPD told Roman they would return his films ifhe took a lie detector test, the results of which compose part ofJohn’s collection.

  I asked John about Polanski’s polygraph. “Well, of course Roman passed the polygraph,” he said. John doesn’t believe Polanski had anything to do with his wife’s brutal death, but he believes Polanski knew Voytek was trouble, and regretted the fact that he hadn’t kicked Voytek out of his home before the horror.

  I asked John what happened to Nelson. John said that Nelson had secretly held on to some of his collection. When he decided to sell what remained, John was on a European tour with his films and Nelson couldn’t get a hold of him. So he sold to another collector from North Carolina, who’d previous bought items from John. When he received Nelson’s compilation, the collector contacted John and sold him what he had acquired. It turned out that Nelson was having a nervous breakdown, undergoing various operations, and popping “piles” of drugs. John told me Nelson was “most likely nuts from the beginning” since he’d been a convicted pedophile long before John met him. John sees Nelson’s interest in the Manson murders as a “voyeuristic obsession,” a desire to live vicariously through the sexual exploits at the Polanski residence and Spahn Ranch. “He was insanely jealous of the sex orgies. While the family was partying at Spahn, Nelson said, he was preaching at a church in Canoga Park. The main thing is that Nelson was trying to be a normal Christian during the hippie era, and when he discovered the Manson family, he realized he’d really missed out.” Apparently, Nelson’s obsession knew no limits. He supposedly stalked family member Sandra Good for years.

  I asked John to explain how he first got interested in Manson. He told me he read about the Tate murders in the paper when they happened and that, sometime before that, he had read an article in Time about a roving band of hippies ripping off tourists in Death Valley. He told me he’s always seen the Manson trial as a witch-hunt. John believes Manson isn’t responsible for the Tate murders. He told me, “I have always believed that you are responsible for what you do. Period. If these kids killed people it was because that is what they wanted to do. Any other belief about what happened is ultimately a dead end. Nowadays it is government policy that no one is responsible for anything and everything is someone else’s fault and only the government can save you. So now you know why everything is a giant mess and Charlie is still in prison for your sins.”

  Now, John believes, the Manson story has turned into a “mass culture universal myth.” John said no one knows what actually happened; even Tex Watson, who actually committed the murders, claims to have no idea what was really going on. Because of this, it’s possible the public perception of Charles Manson will someday shift. John told me about a writer named Wayne McGuire, who wrote a few articles for Crawdaddy and Fusion in the late ‘60s and then disappeared. McGuire predicted a future massive, worldwide schizophrenic breakdown, during which Charles Manson would morph into a major American folk hero.

  I asked John to explain his take on the origins of the Manson murders. He would lay it out like this:

  “When Charlie was released from Terminal Island and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, the hippies were attracted to him and he went with it. Constantly there were all these kids coming to him and asking him what to do about everything. Haight-Ashbury was being taken over by speed freaks and all of that. So they left San Francisco and went to LA. Then there was the spiral staircase, where the family spent a lot of time. The spiral staircase was a house located in the back of the Malibu Feed Bin at the intersection of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. Supposedly the family and Satanists and movie stars really got down there.

  “Bobby Beausoleil lived in the Haight with his band The Orkestra. Ken Anger was there and dinged out on Bobby and told him he had to be Lucifer in his movie so Bobby said sure. So Ken and Bobby are living at a Victorian mansion called the Russian Embassy because that is what it used to be. While living with Kenneth Anger for four or five years, I taped every interview he did and he told the Bobby story at least twice. He said, “Bobby told me he needed to go to LA to buy band equipment, so he left in the van I bought him with the money I gave him. Upon his return, I found a large square object wrapped in black plastic in the foyer. Our dog Snowfox was ripping at it, so I opened it and it was a bale of marijuana. I was outraged, as this could have gotten us all arrested. I threw him and the weed out. I subsequently went out, and when I returned the place had been broken into and all the footage of Lucifer Rising was gone. Bobby had driven my van to LA and the van broke down next to the Spahn Ranch, where he met those Manson people.

  “Bobby knew Gary Hinman from when he’d previously lived in LA. Gary was selling weed that had been sprayed by the government with paraquat. The Manson people bought some of this and sold it to the Hells Angels who got horribly sick from it. This led to Bobby killing Gary, which led to the other murders.

&nb
sp; “A number of points in Ken’s version of the story are very unlikely. Bobby drove to Topanga Canyon. He may have met the family at the spiral staircase. He did stay with Gary; they apparently had a thing going on. The family was wandering around in a bus they parked at Gary’s. The family and Bobby moved onto the Spahn Ranch. The family stayed with Gary Hinman, whom they met through Bobby Beausoleil. Gary was involved in some sort of drug situation.

  “Jay Sebring and Voytek were trying to corner the MDA market. According to rumors, Rosemary LaBianca was somehow involved in the MDA deals (she did leave behind one million dollars), while Leno LaBianca was being hounded by the Mafia to pay up. (The FBI tapped his phone.) The connections between Leno LaBianca and the Mafia were well documented. In their initial investigation, LA police immediately looked into this angle. According to Leno’s first wife, Leno had complained to her a week before the killings that someone had been in the house moving things around. Later, some of the girls in the family would admit to doing this. That’s how arbitrary it all is; these drug deals involve like everyone in Hollywood.

  “Vincent Bugliosi (prosecutor in Manson case, coauthor of Helter Skelter) was ordered to come up with a motive that did not implicate the rich and the famous-hence, Helter Skelter, baby. This idea basically came from Paul Watkins, a “member” of the Manson family-it was his take on things he heard around the ranch. As for August 10, I am rather certain that the plan was always to go to the LaBianca’s. Apparently they did all this driving all over the place beforehand and maybe that was to confuse the passengers in the car: Linda, Clem, Susan, Leslie, Pat, and Tex, presuming that Charlie was driving. It is fact that the family had gone to parties at Harold True’s next door and that the family had creepy crawled (broke in and moved belongings around) at the LaBianca’s about a week before. Years later, Charlie stated that they were after Leno’s ‘little black book.’ In a 1991 episode of Hard Copy, Manson admitted to knowing about LaBianca’s Mafia connections when confirming that he in fact asked Leno for his ‘little black book.’ The family partied at Harold True’s house often, and the LaBianca’s daughter Suzan had a boyfriend in the Straight Satans, perhaps DiCarlo, who also hung out at Spahn Ranch. I have the original map hand-drawn by Harold True, showing the family how to get from Spahn Ranch to his house.

  “There’s the idea that the LaBiancas were somehow involved in the same drug situation as Jay and Voytek. There is not really anything to back this up, aside from things that Charlie insinuated to Geraldo Rivera about the Mafia being involved with Leno or Rosemary leaving an estate of one million while Leno owed his bookie money and the FBI or some such entity tapped his phone. Then there’s the idea that Leno was embezzling money from his grocery store business and cooking the books and possibly using it as money laundry.

  “Tex Watson came to Hollywood to be somebody. He became a hairdresser and met the hairdresser to the stars, Jay Sebring. Tex met Terry Melcher, who was living at what became the Tate house. Tex met Charlie Manson. They both met Dennis Wilson. Everyone was driving around, hitch hiking around, even a big deal rock star like Dennis hitched sometime.

  “Tex had been in the Tate house before he was in the family, because Terry Melcher lived there. There was a lot of involvement between the people in the Tate house and the people who were involved with the family before the murders happened. Tex partied there a number of times. Tex and Jay Sebring knew each other and they were both hairdressers. Tex was, at one point, renting a house that belonged to Leno LaBianca. There are massive connections between everybody. The free clinic in Haight-Ashbury had a benefit party. General Tate was there; Charlie, Susan Atkins, and Abigail Folger were there. An LA county fireman personally told me he saw Sharon Tate horseback riding at Spahn Ranch when the family was running the horse concession for George. There were no coincidences, no randomness; everyone knew each other. Tex created the Crowe situation by getting money for drugs from him and then running off with the money, leaving the girls there. Charlie had to rescue them. According to the girls’ account, Tex and Voytek were involved in a similar situation.

  “As far as the parties at the Tate house, now this depends on to whom you talk. Debra Tate stated that the family partied there. As I said, Voytek and Jay were trying to corner the MDA market, and they were working with these three drug dealers from Canada, who the LAPD interrogated. Mama Cass assumed these three guys did the murders because they were her drug dealers, and John Phillips called the LAPD and said the same guys most likely committed the crimes. In a very recent interview, Debra Tate just out of nowhere said, ‘Those Manson people were here all the time; they used the pool; they used the bathroom…’

  “As for “Helter Skelter,” these killings brought out a pile of dirt that had to be swept under the carpet. The big deal was that movie and rock stars were slumming by picking up hippies on Sunset Strip and bringing them home to party with. Sex and drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll and movie stars. The American Dream. One of the stranger stories I’ve heard is that Cary Grant was having sex with some boy in the bushes near the Tate house the night of the murders; when he heard all this screaming and stuff, he fled.

  “I’ve run into several people who were in jail with Tex, and they all said the same thing. One of these stories made it into a Boston tabloid. Basically Tex would be in the chapel preaching against homosexuality; then he would go back to his cell and get a blowjob. I think he’s a flat out sociopath, who is a genius at lying. Tex was a drug dealer and Tex killed everyone, which is what he told Pat Robertson on his show. Pat Robertson actually makes a statement at the end of my movie. It’s one of the most amazing things anyone has ever said about this situation: ‘You didn’t kill a pregnant woman and smear her guts all over the walls, but this man did, and Jesus saved him; think what he can do for you.’“

  Hearing John’s analysis of the Manson murders, I felt in over my head. It occurred to me that the reason so many people are interested in the Manson murders might be the simple fact that there is really no way to figure it all out. I could spend the next five years trying to piece it all together, and I would likely end up at the same place I started. The more I talked to John and Vicki, the more I thought about Bill Nelson, how he’d relentlessly stalked and harassed Sandra Good and one of Charlie’s sons-his obsession was a story all on its own. The Manson murders seemed to have taken over his life. I thought about all the secrets Nelson took with him to the grave and how, ultimately, he’d become another casualty in the Manson story.

  When I think about the desert John calls home, I remember a lot of wind; it felt exactly like where I live, in the middle of the Canadian prairies. But somehow, out there, the wind had an emptiness to it. Everything I experienced on that trip had a momentum I really couldn’t understand, yet things were coming together in a way that seemed almost necessary. It felt as though I had to meet all of these different people and take from them whatever I could the better to prepare myself for what would happen next.

  After my failed attempt to visit Charlie, I’d written the warden, and my visitor application had been approved. The day after I left the desert, I would go back to Corcoran for a meeting with Charles Manson.

  I left the desert and began the trip back to Los Angeles. On the road, I couldn’t focus on anything. I had serious doubts about what I was doing, but I managed to ignore them enough to keep going; part of me shut down. I went over in my head how the meeting should go, even though I’d convinced myself that it probably wouldn’t happen anyway. There was a level of insanity involved in this visit, and I began to question how much sanity I had left. Because, though I had yet to understand fully why meeting Manson was so important to me, it was something I felt compelled to do. It took three hours to get to my hotel, but it felt like fifteen minutes. Once I arrived, I had no idea what to do with myself. I tried to catch up on emails but that was hardly a diversion. I couldn’t possibly explain any of this to someone on the outside.

  Sleep didn’t come easy; it didn’t really come at all. In
the morning, I gathered my things and walked, rather like a zombie, into the cool morning air. As I made my way to Corcoran, I felt oddly at ease, as if a huge pressure had been lifted and I no longer cared what happened. I pulled up to Corcoran’s first security point; that morning, the guard was chatty. He told me about some Manson movie he’d seen before warning me that I probably wouldn’t be meeting Charlie that day. He wished me luck and patted my car twice on the roof. Inside the prison walls, the guards seemed shocked that the pending part of my application status had been lifted. I was cleared to go through. I think I was more surprised than they were, but I strolled outside to wait for the bus that would take me out to PHU.

  It was ten A.M. when I cleared the final security desk. I was processed and walked through a metal detector before waiting outside with a guard for the gate to open. The early morning had developed into a beautiful day; a low-lying fog added to the quiet. “Is it always this quiet out here?” I asked the guard. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s kind ofthe opposite ofwhat goes on in there.” With that, the gate opened and we walked into an enclosure. As the first gate shut behind us, another gate opened in front and, once through it, we were on our way to the visiting room. As we walked, we talked about Corcoran and what it was like to work there. The guard told me he was thankful for his j ob, though he found it very challenging and stressful; he didn’t feel like there were any other options for him. He told me his job was his own way of doing time, until he was able to retire. “Just go through there and walk straight ahead,” he said. “Have a good visit.” He pointed to a door and let me walk the final twenty steps on my own. I opened the door, paused for a few seconds, gathered my thoughts, and walked into a large room.