The drive back to Regina from Los Angeles is a long one. Over the few days that brought me closer and closer to home, I thought about my adventure and everyone I’d met. I tried to makes sense of everything, but putting things into perspective was difficult. The trip hadn’t brought closure. Instead, the world felt wide open, and things had a momentum of their own. I was just along for the ride. I began to welcome the uncertainty.
When I got home, I dropped my luggage on the kitchen floor and said hello to my cats. Minutes later I was back in the car, out to see Hank Williams III. It was a sold-out performance and when I got there he was already on stage. The show was amazing, as usual. It felt great to be with my tribe, getting soaked with beer and sweat. It felt great to be home. I hung out in the back until Hank finished, signed autographs, and took pictures with his fans. I approached him and we talked about some of the people we knew. I told him the story Stanton shared with me about the night at Marilyn’s house, when they’d all listened to the Polanski interrogation tapes. Hank recalled the evening the same way Stanton had. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened.” Hank wished me luck with my book, and as I left he said, “Send Mr. Manson my sincerest regards from the Williams family.”
As I write this, Charlie continues to call. One day he told me over the phone that we were in the visiting room. I didn’t know what he meant, so I asked him to explain. Charlie said that, once he meets someone, he is with that person forever. In his mind, we are still there in that room, at the table by the old vending machines, just talking. And he is still on the ranch, sitting around a fire, singing with his family. He is roaming the streets of Hollywood without a care in the world.
Charles Manson is a free man.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES MANSON
Much conflicting information exists regarding Charles Manson. I asked Graywolf to put me in touch with someone who knew the truth. He hooked me up with a man called “Moorehead,” who grew up and lives 200 miles from Manson’s birthplace. Moorehead has been fascinated with Manson since grade school, when he first read Helter Skelter. Because he grew up on Manson’s stomping grounds, Moorehead heard a lot of stories from people who knew Charlie’s family and friends. An old school researcher and archivist, spending days in a library going through old census records is the way to uncover history, and he’s perfected the process. He began doing research through court records, cemeteries, and old newspapers. Moorehead is a friend of Charlie’s and he enjoys sending Charlie photos and accounts of his findings. He told me that Charlie has a lot of fond memories from his youth, memories of the way things used to be.
I met Denise Noe through Kenny Calihan. I was struggling to figure out the story behind the murders and told Kenny about my frustrations. He suggested I talk to Denise a friend of Charlie’s and who wrote an essay titled “The Manson Myth.” I’d never known Charlie to read anyone’s account of the crimes, and so I was extremely interested in talking to her. Kenny promised to have Denise call me, and sure enough, a few hours later I received a call from her.
Pleasant and somewhat soft spoken. Denise was curious about my book, and was direct with her questions. She wanted to make sure I had Charlie’s best interests at heart before she helped me. Denise told me she has a very severe psychiatric disability. She is fifty-three, but has been living with her disability, formally diagnosed in her twenties, since she was fourteen. Although she is a person of fairly high intelligence, she has never been able to support herself, due to the limitations imposed by her handicaps. “I live-very frugally! -on alimony, because my ex-husband is a decent man,” she told me. Denise first became interested in Charles Manson when she read the book Helter Skelter in high school. “I was utterly persuaded by its portrait of him as a kind of criminal mastermind and charismatic proto-Hitler who could convince others of his grandiose worldview and then persuade them to murder on his behalf.” But Denise questioned what she read and started reading and researching to piece together the real story. She remarked, “I started to have a few nagging doubts when I read memoirs by Charles “Tex” Watson and Susan Atkins, and those doubts crystallized when I researched other books.”
I asked Denise if it were true that Charlie read her essay, and she said she ran the article off, wrote “The Manson Myth” on the envelope, and sent it to Charlie with the hope that he would read it. He did, they began corresponding, and Charlie started to call. “The first time we talked, we talked about the weather. That shows that Charles Manson is human after all, since we humans tend to talk about the weather when we meet! During that first conversation, I had a coughing fit. He was quite gracious about it and urged me not to feel bad about having coughed in his ear.” I asked her about Charlie’s critique of her work. Charlie said, “It reminded me of an old Packard car I used to drive that had a couple of cylinders blown out and used to start and stop all the time.”
The following biography is composed of information collected from Moorehead and Denise Noe.
Birth
Charles Manson’s date of birth is up for debate. His birth certificate, on file in Cincinnati, Ohio, states that he was born on November 12, 1934, at Cincinnati General Hospital, now University Hospital. However, Manson has stated he believes his actual birthday is November 11th, which in 1934 was Armistice Day, and today is Veteran’s Day. It is believed his birth date was deliberately changed so it would not “interfere” with such an important holiday.
His mother was Kathleen Maddox, widely portrayed as a party girl who rebelled against a strict, religious mother. The Maddox family was from Kentucky, specifically Morehead, where Kathleen was born, and, later, Ashland. Charles Manson’s assessment of his mother varies with his ever changing mood. He has described her as an affectionate woman who did the best she could to care for her child. He has also endorsed books and other forms of media that have deemed her a neglectful, alcoholic prostitute.
Also up for debate is Manson’s father: was he Colonel Scott, or the man whose surname Charles would eventually take, William Manson. It is widely recognized that Colonel Scott was Manson’s biological father, while William Manson served as his stepfather. Kathleen Maddox was never married to Scott; the two may have had a one-night stand or a brief affair around March 1934, before Kathleen moved to the Cincinnati area.
In August 1934, Kathleen Maddox and William Manson were married in Cincinnati. But, believing Scott to be Charles’ father, Kathleen divorced Manson and returned to Ashland to attempt a marriage to Scott. She discovered Scott had already married, filed a bastardy suit against him, and obtained a settlement in 1937. Kathleen would claim that Charles Manson had known Scott and spent weekends with him and Scott’s other child. According to Kathleen, and in contrast to other accounts, family surrounded Charles Manson early on, and he spent a lot of time with his grandmother, aunts, and uncles.
In 1938, Kathleen and a young Charles moved to McMechen, West Virginia, leaving Scott behind. The two moved in with Kathleen’s older, married sister. A year later, Kathleen and her brother Luther Maddox were arrested and sent to prison for the armed robbery of a service station located just outside of Charleston. Charles spent the next few years living at the home of his aunt and uncle in McMechen.
School Years and Youth
Which school Charles Manson attended during his grade school years is unknown, but it is very likely he received his early education in McMechen. After his mother was paroled, the small family lived in various hotel rooms around the area; Charles may or may not have attended school at this time. In 1947, at the request of his mother, Charles was placed in the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. He escaped after ten months to find his mother who, as the story goes, rejected him.
On his own at the age of thirteen, Charles Manson survived any way he could. As a teenager, he burglarized various grocery and retail stores. He was caught in the act of one such burglary and sent to a juvenile center in Indianapolis, from which he escaped after one day. A subsequent recapture sent Manson to
Father Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska, where he stayed for four days before escaping once again.
Reverting back to theft for survival, Manson and another boy committed armed robberies at service stations and grocery stores. During one robbery, Manson was caught and sent to the Indiana School for Boys in Plainfield, the place where Manson endured much abuse at the hands of guards and other young inmates. After four years in Plainfield and many escape attempts, Manson and two other youths finally succeeded in fleeing the facility in 1951. The three were headed for California when they were stopped in Utah for transporting a stolen car across state lines. Convicted at seventeen of his first federal offense, Manson was sent to The National Training School for Boys in Washington, DC. His incarceration at this facility initiated the series of psychological evaluations and I.Q. tests by which he would be analyzed for the rest of his life.
From 1951 to 1952, Manson was moved to increasingly more secure correctional institutions due to behavioral and psychiatric problems. After improving his commitment to his education and work ethic, Manson was granted a stipulated parole, which required him to live with his aunt and uncle in McMechen. However, Manson also spent time living with his mother, who at this point also resided in McMechen. Charles and Kathleen had previously improved their relationship through an exchange of letters while Charles was in prison.
Marriages and More Trouble
Free from a long stint in various juvenile facilities, Manson attempted a normal life. InJanuary1955, while living in Wheeling, West Virginia, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a waitress who was four years his junior.
The couple’s first few months of marriage were pleasant and uneventful. For the most part, Manson worked honest jobs and made a decent living. But, once Rosalie became pregnant with Charles Milles Manson Jr., Manson reverted back to old habits. He stole a car and headed for Los Angeles. Once again he was caught, this time in Indianapolis, and charged under the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act. His probation was revoked and he was sentenced to three years at Terminal Island Penitentiary in San Pedro, California. After a few initial visits, Rosalie ceased to return. Eventually Kathleen had to tell her son that his young wife was living with another man and filing for a divorce, which was finalized in 1958.
In September of the same year, Manson was paroled in California. He became a pimp to a few underage girls and forged a US Treasury check, a crime for which he received a ten-year suspended sentence. In order to evade being charged with pimping, Manson persuaded one of his prostitutes, Leona, to marry him so she wouldn’t have to testify against him. Once again on the move and still on parole/probation, Manson took his girls from California. He was eventually arrested in Laredo, Texas and charged under the Mann Act for transporting women across state lines with the intent to prostitute them. He was sent back to California to serve his ten-year sentence for breaking probation. Although the Mann Act charge was dropped, he was convicted of forgery and sent to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State.
Manson’s second wife petitioned him for divorce in 1963, after alleging the couple had had a son, Charles Luther Manson. In 1966, Manson was sent back to Terminal Island in California to prepare for an early termination of his sentence. In March 1967, Manson was released from prison, against his own wishes. It’s alleged that Manson requested not to be set free, citing his belief in his inability to adapt to the outside world.
Freedom and Formation of The Family
On March 21, 1967, Manson walked out of Terminal Island Penitentiary a free man. But his newfound freedom would last just over two and a half years. According to Manson, he never wanted to be in the real world. On the outside, after spending seventeen of his thirty-two years inside a prison cell, Manson perceived the world as a whirlwind. He eventually found himself in San Francisco around the start of the Summer of Love, a time of unrestrained release and, thus, a stark contrast to the climate inside jails and reform schools.
One day, while sitting near the entrance to the University of California, Berkeley, Manson met twenty-three-year-old Mary Brunner, a Wisconsin native who worked there as an assistant librarian. The two began an affair and moved in together. Shortly thereafter, Manson discovered San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury: the magic district where hippies from around the world congregated and enjoyed the pleasures of free food, sex, drugs, and shelter. An unprecedented social phenomenon was happening at Haight-Ashbury, and soon enough Manson sat smack dab in the middle of it.
Soon after meeting Mary Brunner, the two began to travel around California, picking up other young women. They recruited Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme from Venice Beach. They picked up Patricia Krenwinkel on Manhattan Beach, then Susan Atkins at a house party in San Francisco. Slowly but surely, Manson acquired a following of mostly female devotees who were entranced by the philosophy he preached: a way of thinking, described in most accounts as a version of the scientology he’d studied in prison.
The early Manson Family lived a peaceful existence in a house in San Francisco. Eventually, Manson grew tired of the Summer of Love scene and he and his following set out in an old school bus Manson had gutted and converted into a group home. All the while, Manson, an aspiring artist, had music on his mind. The school bus traveled up to Washington State and down to Mexico before finally settling in Los Angeles. On September 11, 1967, Manson recorded his infamous LIE album. The rest of 1967 would prove uneventful for the Manson Family, which would live out a daily grind of dumpster diving, drifting, and having fun.
On April 15, 1968, Mary Brunner gave birth to Manson’s son, Michael Manson. In the late spring of 1968, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys picked up two of Manson’s girls, Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey, while they hitchhiked around California. Wilson brought the young women back to his house on Sunset Boulevard where the three allegedly talked for a while. Sometime during the conversation, Wilson invited the girls to crash at his place, while he went out to record at his studio. Later that evening, Manson and the rest of his Family occupied the Wilson residence. When Wilson arrived home, early the next morning, he was more than surprised to find the large group in his home. Scared, the famous musician asked the gang members if they would hurt him. As the story goes, Manson addressed Wilson’s fears by replying, “‘Do I look like I’m going to hurt you, brother?” At the same time he knelt down to kiss Wilson’s feet.
Manson and Wilson became fast friends and the Manson Family stayed at the Wilson home for the rest of the summer. Through his relationship with Wilson, Manson met record producer Terry Melcher and manager Gregg Jakobson, the men who would arrange Manson’s first recording session. Because of his developing relationship with Melcher, Manson and the rest of his Family often visited the producer’s home at Bel Air’s 10050 Cielo Drive. When Wilson moved out of his home in August, the Family was forced to find a new place to live. They eventually stumbled upon Spahn Movie Ranch, 500 acres of open space previously used in the filming of classic Hollywood westerns.
Spahn Ranch and Murders
After meeting the elderly owner of Spahn Ranch, George Spahn, Manson convinced him to allow the Family to crash at the ranch for a few days. Those few days turned into the better part of a year. The Family worked around the ranch to earn its keep, tending to the horses and keeping up the grounds. The Manson family girls also slept with Spahn to sweeten the deal. Not long after the family moved to Spahn, a drifting, drugging Texan named Charles “Tex” Watson join the group.
In the fall of 1968, some of Manson’s family members, including Manson himself, ventured out on a field trip and discovered the Myers and Barker Ranches contained within California’s Death Valley. Each ranch was owned by an elderly woman, easily persuaded to assist Manson in producing his music by providing him and his group a place to stay. During the winter months of early 1969, the Family occupied a home rented on Gresham Street in Canoga Park, California. After spending only two months in the Gresham Street house, the Family moved back to Spahn Ranch.
On March 23, 196
9, Manson made a visit to 10050 Cielo Drive. He was looking for Terry Melcher who, allegedly unbeknownst to Manson, was no longer the tenant of the property’s owner, Rudi Altobelli. Manson was met at the door by one of Sharon Tate’s friends, who advised Manson that the home had become the Polanski-Tate residence and directed him away from the property. Manson examined the property and then left to spend the rest of spring and early summer back at Spahn Ranch.
On August 9, 1969, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian drove to 10050 Cielo Drive. When Tex and the girls arrived at the house, they found it occupied by Sharon Tate, who was eight and half months pregnant, and her friends, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Jay Sebring. The family members proceeded to stab every person in the house to death and shoot Steven Parent in his car, parked in the driveway.
The following day, August 10, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian, Manson, Steve Grogan, and Leslie Van Houten drove to the residence of Leno LaBianca, a supermarket executive, and his wife Rosemary, a dress shop owner. The house was located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles and situated next to a home at which the Manson family had attended a party the year before. Manson allegedly entered the house first in order to restrain the couple; he then left the property, taking Atkins, Kasabian, and Grogan with him. The three remaining family members entered the residence and stabbed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca to death.
Charles Manson Now Page 25
