Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  After a nerve-racking weekend, the other shoe dropped that Monday. I received a chilling letter from Squeaky that hit me like a sledgehammer. The newly imprisoned Manson disciple wrote that she had tried to kill the President to focus attention on my denying her access to Charlie. Fromme wrote: “Had I had a chance to see Charlie, most likely I would never have gone to confront the Pres.” I put the letter down and sat stunned at my desk. It was only a one-in-a-million lucky break that kept Squeaky from being successful. The ramifications from my perspective were immense. In my dark corner of the world, a forgotten place populated by society’s worst outcasts, I had made a decision that could have altered the course of world history.

  I finally began to realize why nobody in the penal system wanted anything to do with Charlie Manson. Nobody except an idealistic ex-seminary student with a curious mind who thought he could save the world. I’d danced on the edge of the fire known as the Manson Family for nearly three months, all the while foolishly thinking I was shielded from the heat. Now, with my career in the balance and my resolve weakening, I’d been jerked into the blazing central core.

  3.

  AS I WAITED for the warden to make his decision regarding my career, a vise seemed to tighten around my head. I had a wife and six children to support. Losing my steady income would be devastating. I stayed away from Charlie on the cellblock, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply he’d messed up my life. I was in trouble because I had tried to show both Charlie and his followers a measure of kindness, but that sentiment would be lost on him. He was about power and control—with a good measure of evil insanity thrown into the bubbling cauldron inside his brain. Instead of sympathy, he’d get the perverse pleasure of knowing that Squeaky’s assassination attempt might cost me my livelihood.

  The vise clamped around my head didn’t ease a notch when I punched the time clock and went off duty. Walking the emotional tightrope between work and home—especially when work is a hellish prison—is always a high-wire act for prison employees. The stress, tension, and gloominess can be unbearable, even for those of us on the outside of the bars. This week nearly pushed me over the edge. I was jumpy and irritable around the house, snapping at my wife and six children over every little thing. Eventually, I was forced to isolate myself physically and emotionally from them. It was obvious that something was eating me, but I refused to elaborate. It had long been my policy to leave the dark side of my profession at the office. I didn’t think the family would appreciate lively dinner-table conversations about who got stabbed that day, or what poor sap was forcibly sodomized in the shower.

  Sometimes, however, it’s difficult to shed emotions the same way a person peels off his socks at the end of the day. This was one of those times.

  The ironic part of my inner turmoil was that meeting Manson had initially revitalized me. I’d recoiled at the prospect of leaving the fresh forests of Northern California for the stale confides of San Quentin, but soon discovered that from a laboratory standpoint, the prisoners housed at San Quentin offered a far more insightful portrait of the damaged human psyche. That appealed to my Jesuit side, and fed my quest for knowledge about the criminal mind. My fascination with Manson in particular became so strong that it stayed with me even when I was off duty. He was the one prisoner that I couldn’t restrain myself from talking about at home, a fact that alarmed my wife. She never shared, or even understood, my interest in Manson and his followers, and worried about the effect the hypnotic killer was having on me. It was as if she believed whatever Manson had might be catching.

  “Honest, Beth, he’s a real weirdo, but he’s got this charismatic personality,” I tried to explain one evening. “It’s too bad you can’t meet him.”

  “Don’t worry, Ed. I have no desire to meet him.” She shuddered. “He gives me the creeps. I think you should be careful.”

  “Be careful? About what?” I boastfully responded. “I can handle this.”

  Famous last words. You can imagine how reticent I was to admit that my current foul mood—not to mention my future career prospects—was directly related to my association with the famous cult leader. If Beth had known what was really going on inside my head during those days she probably would have freaked. Manson had planted some dark thoughts in my consciousness that I laughed off at the time, but were now eating at me like a cancer. “A woman hangs around a man because he’s a meal ticket,” he sneered on numerous occasions, promoting an oddly chauvinistic view for a man who depended so deeply upon loyal female followers. “Women are consumed by vanity. Their need to be beautiful and loved is more powerful than their instinct to be a loyal wife and mother. Given a chance, they’ll choose their own selfish desires over the good of their family.” That didn’t sound like any woman I knew, especially Beth. It didn’t even sound like Charlie’s clan. Here he was, destitute and imprisoned, yet many of his girls were sticking by him as fervently as ever. Squeaky, for goodness’ sake, had just tried to kill the President for him! Yet there he sat in his cell, spewing the poison that my wife was only in it for the money. “Lose your job and see how long she stays around,” he chided.

  “He has to be loving this,” I muttered to myself. If Charlie knew how many times his childish cliche spun through my mind, he’d surely rub his goatee and cackle with hideous glee. Beth, of course, was above that kind of fickle thinking, I assured myself. Or was she? No man can really be sure until it happens. Manson had created a flicker of doubt, the same kind of flicker he fed upon in his followers, fed upon and stoked until it became a roaring fire. That’s why I knew until my fate was decided, I had to steer clear of the little demon. I couldn’t let him mess with my mind.

  I shook my head and tried to cast off the increasing paranoia. In all probability, Manson didn’t even know that my job was on the line. He was up to his neck in his own alligators, sparring with angry guards and federal investigators, feverishly denying that he had ordered Squeaky to clip the President. Still, news travels fast in prison. I couldn’t take the chance.

  Instead, I tried to comfort myself with positive thoughts about my personal life. Beth was a beautiful raven-haired Irish coed when we met. She was attending San Jose State, and I was a naval cadet undergoing flight training. Our paths crossed at a Christmas party while I was home on leave. I was so smitten by her that I immediately abandoned my date. By our second dance, I was already predicting we’d marry. Our subsequent whirlwind romance survived my leaving the service, her leaving college, our marriage, and our first child, all of which occurred in quick succession over the next two years. As our family grew and I settled into a career in corrections, Beth often struggled with the duality of my life. Once before, when the pressures of the job caused me to grow irritable and despondent, she suggested that I see a psychiatrist. In typical male fashion, I responded with wild anger, accusing her of knowing nothing about the tension I was under or the intricacies of mental illness.

  “Lose your job, and see how long she stays around.” Manson’s words tore at my soul anew as I paced outside. “Could there be any truth to that?” I asked myself. “Would Beth be sympathetic to my current plight after having warned me about it for years? After having specifically warned me about this particular prisoner? Or would this be the last straw?”

  I needed her support at that moment. I wanted to share how desperate and alone I felt. But instead of leaning on my devoted wife of seventeen years for the love and comfort she would have surely provided, I chose to heed the words of a certified maniac, suffer in silence, and wait for the storm to blow over.

  At the office, I passed the hours boning up on the bloody 1971 prison riot that had everyone’s nerves ready to fray due to the upcoming trial. The first thing that struck me was the date—August 21, 1971. I dug into the Manson file and confirmed my suspicions. Manson’s previous stint at San Quentin began in June 1971. Although he was locked down on a different floor, and no one ever connected him to the horrors that occurred, I couldn’t overlook th
e fact that he was there. It was almost as if the evilness inside his soul had washed over the place—just like it had now.

  Poring over the files, I noticed other similarities. The riot began when notorious African American revolutionary George Jackson hid a handgun inside his huge afro and smuggled it into the cellblock. Like Manson, Jackson was a charismatic, verbose natural-leader type who had published a series of letters in a book entitled Soledad Brother. The gun was intended to be used at an appropriate time for a quick, quiet escape. Instead, a guard spotted something shiny in his hair, forcing Jackson’s hand. The guard was immediately taken hostage and forced at gunpoint to open cells. In a flash, some of San Quentin’s most violent prisoners were running loose through the corridors, slaughtering corrections officers with homemade knives, fingernail clippers, pencils, and anything else that could puncture or tear human flesh. The depravity and utter brutality instantly reminded me of another slaughter, the one so vividly described in the book Helter Skelter. Manson had unleashed his animals on a group of helpless celebrities and socialites in Hollywood to allegedly promote his bizarre agenda of a race war. Jackson had unleashed his animals on a group of helpless correctional officers—one with five children—to cover up his escape, an escape that would free him to ignite his own ideological race war.

  Unlike Manson, however, Jackson’s reign of terror lasted only thirty minutes before he was gunned down by a sharpshooter. That was still enough time to leave his blood-smeared mark: three corrections officers mercilessly hacked to death, three more mutilated to the point of death, and two informant prisoners similarly murdered.

  Manson, no stranger to such carnage, had a typically selfish and callous reaction. Shortly afterward, he was overheard having a heated discussion with his lawyer. “George Jackson’s attorney brought him a gun! Why can’t you bring me one?”1 (Immediately after saying that, Manson added that he was just joking.) I thought about that as the news of Squeaky’s assassination attempt saturated the radio and television. Despite Manson’s denials, my suspicion was that he might have known more than he let on.

  Whatever the truth, it had all become personal to me. Usually an event of that magnitude is watched with detached disgust. Not this time. My life had somehow become intertwined with a group of violent loonies. And no matter where I went or what I tried to do, I couldn’t escape it. Hardly a minute passed on television without photos of Squeaky, Manson, and the rest of the gang flashing on the screen. I retreated again, reading files at the office and working in the yard at home, isolating myself in my own emotional prison.

  On Tuesday, a sergeant interrupted my misery by telling me that despite the way everyone felt about Manson and what had happened with the President, they were on my side. Rinker had bullied his way past a number of duty officers when he barged into B section to snatch Manson, and that caused them to lose respect.

  “That little shit Manson hadn’t done a thing wrong,” the sergeant groused, “and they pounced on him like a pack of hound dogs.”

  Warden Rees finally summoned me to his office later that afternoon. We launched into a repeat of our previous argument. Rees, locked into the command structure, felt I should have followed Rinker’s orders and removed Manson from B section without delay, regardless of how I felt about the decision, or about Rinker himself. By not doing so, and by intending to appeal, I wasn’t taking the associate warden seriously. I countered that the order was ill-conceived, unfair, and illogical, and that Rinker’s subsequent actions were heavy-handed and brutal. Rees wasn’t buying it.

  “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I’ll tell you just once, you better start getting along,” he ordered. “There’s too much at stake for this kind of bullshit. You understand?” I was so locked into my fight-or-flight mode that I failed to realize that Rees’s scolding meant that I wasn’t going to be fired. Not this time, anyway. “If you can’t work things out, somebody’s got to go,” he threatened. “And that’s usually the guy lowest on the totem pole.”

  “Yes sir, I understand,” I said, getting the picture. I had the Polaroid, but I still couldn’t shut my mouth. “I know I’ve put you on a cross, Bob. I’m really sorry. That wasn’t my intention. You can fire my ass, but let me say just one more thing. Rinker has little understanding of what motivates people. He thinks just like Manson, that fear is the only thing that motivates. That’s how Rinker works. Fear does motivate some people, but it just pisses me off! Rinker busted into my unit and allowed the gooners to drag that little bastard the whole length of the upper yard with his hands cuffed behind his back. Many inmates saw that and by now the rest have heard about it. Further, he didn’t tell my staff why the hell he was there or what the hell he was doing. He’s on a power trip. They could have taken Manson out and lynched him for all my men knew. He let the gooners act like a bunch of vigilantes. This from a man who preaches treating inmates fairly, no more barbed wire and bullets? I’m sorry, boss, but that man’s an asshole!”

  My hands trembled with fear and frustration as I stormed out of the room. It was a great speech, filled with kindness and humanity for all, but I was talking about Charles Manson! Why was I taking such a fervent stand for that homicidal creep? The answer came to me as I reached my office. I remembered reading somewhere, or maybe hearing during an episode of Star Trek, that a society can be best judged by the way it treats its worst criminals. If we look the other way when someone—even a subhuman like Manson—is brutally dragged across a prison hallway, what does that say about ourselves? Will we still look the other way when it’s a protester being manhandled instead of a condemned felon? Or how about a member of a rival political party?

  Noble thoughts all. The bottom line was, I hadn’t drawn the line in the sand because of a protesting college student or a rowdy libertarian, I’d done it for Charles Manson. That had to count against me. How much I’ll never know. What I do know is that not only did I keep my job, but I wasn’t even written up. My guess is that my mentor, Rees, respected my stance and defended me to some extent when Rinker roared in demanding his pound of flesh.

  I tempered my elation and feeling of victory with the understanding that however intellectually founded my cause, I couldn’t escape the fact that I had fallen, to some extent, under Manson’s spell. Even if it was nothing more than a morbid fascination combined with a curious desire to know what made his twisted mind tick, I’d risked everything for a cause some might find hard to swallow. I’d have to be more careful the next time.

  Two weeks later, I spent a few nervous hours convinced that “next time” had arrived. Another strange woman, Sara Jane Moore, forty-five, fired a shot at Ford in front of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. For all his famous physical bumbling, Ford was certainly becoming nimble as a chipmunk when it came to sidestepping female assassins. Moore’s shot missed. Everybody at San Quentin, including me, was convinced this was another Manson production—even if Moore was a little out of fashion and threadbare for his tastes.

  “Don’t look at me, I don’t know the old bitch,” Charlie, a spry forty-one, cracked. “She ain’t one of mine. Don’t be sending those FBI/Secret Service goons up here again gettin’ on my ass.”

  Although Moore was indeed some kind of wacko revolutionary, Charlie was right—she wasn’t aligned with him. Not only wasn’t Sara a Family girl, she was a socialist and strongly anti-Manson. She and Squeaky ended up in the same prison and hissed like a pair of warring bobcats the entire time. Obviously, their shared failure wasn’t enough to unite their troubled spirits.

  It had, however, poured additional anxiety into mine. The way I saw it, I’d dodged a bullet again. To keep from catching the next slug squarely between my eyes, I thought it would behoove me to learn all I could about Manson. Not only him, but about his followers as well. I wanted to know who the next Squeaky might be, and get a head start on trying to figure out Manson’s next move. I started by boning up on Manson’s life in “the system,” both before and after the Tate-LaBianca murder
s. That was critical. The police detectives, prosecutors, journalists, and authors who had studied him in the past had centered their investigations almost exclusively on the small segments of time he spent on the outside. Yet, Manson himself had said many times that he wasn’t a product of the outside world. His strange persona was not a result of his broken home, Kentucky/Indiana/ Ohio/West Virginia environment, a promiscuous, uncaring, bisexual mother, the copious amounts of drugs he ingested, or even the rebellious 1960s. He viewed himself as a casualty of the American prison system.

  Manson had been in and out of boys’ homes and jails since committing his first armed robbery at age thirteen. His much publicized twisted value system was little more than typical con behavior. He didn’t fear social rejection, and seemed incapable of feeling guilt. The basic convict code was ingrained in him at a young age: One should be hedonistic, self-centered, and think only of survival; show defiance toward the system, and beat it any way you can; and never, ever snitch.

  Hedonism, defiance, and hatred toward snitches were the tenets that the third-grade dropout later taught his gullible young followers. The “peace and love” flower children were simply fed a cherry-flavored syrup that disguised a bitter spoonful of jailhouse poison.

  In order to do that, Manson had to first develop his extraordinary ability to collect, control, and manipulate people. Although manipulation skills are common among prisoners, Manson had apparently mastered the persuasive arts long before his first bust. His relatives described him as a pleasant child who always knew how to get his way.

  “If Charlie wanted anything, I’d give it to him,” his mother told the Los Angeles Times in a rare interview before her death. “My mother did, too.… He never had to do a thing to earn what he wanted.… Charles had a wonderful personality and always charmed people at a first meeting.… He was real musical and had a real nice voice, so I gave him singing lessons. Then he got so conceited about his music that I made him stop, but he still sang special solos in church, and people always talked about how good he sang. I think that made him over-confident.… Everything was just handed to him.”