Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  Because of Willie’s connections, the corrections department decided to let him finish his sentence at CMF. To keep him out of harm’s way, he was sent to my lockdown unit. I placed him in a cell right next to Manson because it was easier to deal with the celebrities that way. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t one of my better ideas, but at the time, it seemed logical.

  Manson was impressed by his new neighbor’s heavy connections, but as always, downplayed it, preferring to elevate himself to Willie’s uncle’s level. Despite this foolishness, the two hit it off. They became friends, talking, dreaming, playing music, and sharing their life stories. I don’t know if Charlie really liked the guy, or had some greater scheme going—probably both—but for a while, they appeared to do each other some good. Willie even began talking about joining the Family. The fast friendship ended over petty jealousy. A floor officer gave Willie the tier tender job that Manson coveted. Manson threw a tantrum and took a swing at the burly African-American guard, earning himself a stint in isolation (with Juan Corona nearby). When he returned to his “home” cell, he was still in a snit. He demonstrated his unhappiness by smashing his latest guitar—a six-hundred-dollar beauty a fan had sent—into tiny pieces. (It was the fourth guitar Manson destroyed on my watch, including one at San Quentin.)

  Willie loved music and was pissed at Manson for destroying the finely crafted instrument. “What did you do that for?” Spann demanded. “There’s a hundred guys on this floor who’d love to have a guitar but can’t afford one, and you go and destroy yours during a tantrum. What a stupid asshole!”

  After that, things went from bad to worse. Willie never forgave Charlie for bashing the guitar and got on his case every time he threw a similar fit. President’s nephew or not, Charlie fumed over being constantly criticized by some “punk.” After one nasty exchange, Manson played his trump card. “It’s about time I sent some followers to Plains, Georgia, to see an old lady!”

  Miss Lillian was probably the only person in the world Willie cared about. She had helped raise him, and stood behind him through all his troubles. Manson’s threat caused him to go ballistic. “I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ bastard!” he raged. “Don’t you ever threaten my grandmother!”

  Manson repeated his threat, and Willie repeated his. They went at it until the guards had to quiet them down. When I arrived at the cells, I could see that Manson was just dicking him around, but Willie was red hot. I was certain he was going to kill Charlie the first chance he got. That would have been some headline. To check out Willie’s state of mind, I pulled him out for a long interview. Among the revelations was his boast that when he was a lad, he’d managed to catch a glimpse of First Lady Rosalyn Carter naked and that “she had a hell of a body!”

  “When I was five, my mother went off, married this guy I never met and she didn’t tell me. I was living with my grandmother, Miss Lillian. My mother was running around a lot and neglecting me, so she [Miss Lillian] took up the slack. Nobody was rich then, but the Carters were well-to-do. I’d be in rags, not many toys, alone. Billy Carter, my cousin, had nice clothes, a pony, and lots of toys. Anyway, when Gloria, ‘Go, Go,’ came one day to pick me up at Mrs. Lillian’s, she was with this guy I never saw before. They took me off to his place. I was never accepted by this man, my stepfather. They had an outhouse that I was scared to use. I was terrified by it. I had to sleep in a pitch-dark room. I’d see monsters tracking me, trying to eat me, tear me apart. I had no one to run to.

  “I had to work like a dog, a nigger, pickin’ cotton and diggin’ peanuts. My stepfather was a hardworking man, got rich, earned it hard. But they were more interested in each other than me. ‘Back Seat Willie’ I called myself. Never rode in the front seat of a car. Go to sleep on the floorboard. Keep quiet. When company came over, I was sent to my room and told to be quiet.”

  At this point, I couldn’t help thinking how similar Spann’s childhood was to Manson’s. They were both ignored and neglected and neither had a strong father figure.

  “Once, I got caught stealing at the local store,” Willie continued. “The whole family was extremely upset because they were in competition with some of the local ‘Joneses.’ They wanted to look better than each other, and I made the family look bad. School grades were important.…

  “… In my mind, I killed my mother and my stepfather many times. I wanted them to love me, especially my mother, but it never came. She couldn’t give it because she was more interested in impressing others and keeping her marriage together. They hit it off and I was left out.

  “I always felt that something was always missing inside of me because of my mother’s failure to love me. Some part of me failed to grow and mature. It stopped when I was twelve or sooner. Once, when I came home from school with poor grades,… they told me to think about it, how ashamed I should feel, how embarrassed for the family to have such a terrible child.

  “There was a gun case in the hallway with a latch that made a bing sound when it was opened. Sitting there, sacred out of my wits, I heard that bing. I ran out of the house through a screen door naked, thinking I was going to be shot. They took me to my uncle Jimmy’s house, who realized that I was sick. Jimmy took me to the same psychiatrist who was the one in the movie The Three Faces of Eve. They said that I had a brain tumor that would grow and worsen with time. But nothing ever came of that. It was probably better than saying I was crazy.”

  It should be noted that this was just Willie’s story, and cons often fabricate horrible childhoods and monstrous parents as an excuse for their own shortcomings. While Gloria Carter did go through some tough times early in her life, there is no concrete evidence that she and her husband treated Willie as he claims.

  After escaping his self-professed childhood hell, Willie moved to Los Angeles and began a life of drugs and crime, a criminal existence that eventually dropped him inside a prison cell next to Charles Manson.

  Willie apparently shared his sad life story with Charlie because Squeaky was moved to write Gloria Carter a scathing letter condemning her for not accepting her responsibilities as a mother. Squeaky mercilessly ripped Gloria’s alleged preoccupation with money and status, while sacrificing her child. This, however, was before Willie and Charlie had their violent falling-out.

  Alas, the PRESIDENT’S NEPHEW KILLS MANSON headline wasn’t to be. Willie was paroled a year later and was picked up at the gate by a twenty-two-foot Cadillac limousine. No, it wasn’t from the government. It was a gift from the ever present National Enquirer. They were paying Spann for an exclusive interview and sent Willie and his new bride, an insurance broker he married at CMF months before, on a nice vacation. (The pen-pal marriage didn’t last more than a few months.)

  The kicker is that not long afterward, I was aimlessly walking past a television one afternoon when I glanced up and spotted someone who looked like Willie gabbing on The Phil Donahue Show. I turned up the volume. Sure enough, it was Willie. He was playing tape recordings of his conversations with Manson, which he’d made at CMF. That was interesting because tape recorders were illegal in prisons. It turned out that Willie, ever the opportunist, had taken apart a cassette player and transformed it into a recorder. Now he was using his connection to Manson to play celebrity on television. Touché Willie.

  11.

  I WAS OFTEN frustrated, or downright appalled, by the thoughts and statements made by Charlie and Squeaky. They were two peas in a pod, and it was one rotten pod. Collectively, however, if observed solely as star-crossed lovers, they could be viewed in a softer light. Their love had survived horrors, headlines, assassination attempts, and dual incarcerations—not to mention the forceful arguments of a certain correctional administrator. Beyond their ramblings of hate and destruction, they shared a dream of survival, escape, and reunion. With that goal always in mind, Lynette continued her drumbeat plea to write to Charlie. Admiring her sheer tenacity, I finally relented, only to have the mellow Dr. Clanon, curiously, disapprove.

  That forced me back i
nto my uncomfortable role as love-letter censor to the psycho stars. When the pair dispensed with their crazy social agendas and got personal, they could be surprisingly endearing. “My thoughts have moved along,” Manson wrote her once. “My body is fading away here, but we are forever in the soul.…”

  “A pair of hands, a feeling, the silent shadows of a lonely, quiet ocean rolls,” Squeaky responded. “The sun on my tears and a smile only you can see.”

  They both knew their most intimate thoughts were falling before hostile eyes, but they didn’t care. Actually, I had the strong impression that Charlie and Squeaky believed that if they made their forbidden correspondence painfully personal and beautifully poetic, I’d weaken and slide it through. They were right. As long as they kept to sweet nothings instead of “rivers of blood,” I’d usually bend the rules.

  Sometimes, Charlie’s odd sense of gallows humor would surface and make me feel less guilty about my lawful intrusion into his personal life. After getting hooked on an especially heartfelt series of missives, I opened a new one with admitted anticipation. “Hi, Mr. George,” Charlie scribbled. “I was just checking to see if you were still reading my mail.”

  During our conversations, Squeaky often detailed the constant hurdles she had to overcome to remain openly devoted to Charlie in her unfriendly surroundings. “This group of big, angry black women confronted me about why I have so much love for Charlie,” she explained. “One of them started yelling, I don’t believe Charles Manson is Jesus Christ!’ I yelled back. ‘You don’t believe in anything but money.’ ‘That’s right!’ she said. And Charles Manson isn’t going to give me any.’ ‘He’d give you a clean earth and water and air,’ I pointed out. ‘Can’t you see you’re killing your mother?’ ‘Them’s fightin’ words,’ she threatened, clenching her fists and coming toward me. She didn’t understand that I meant mother earth. She thought I was insulting her mother. The guards and other girls broke it up before anyone got hurt, but things like this happen all the time. We try to open their eyes, but they refuse to see the truth. Sandra and I have to separate ourselves from those who can’t comprehend. It doesn’t matter. Nothing can turn us away from Charlie.

  “Look at the mother salmon,” Squeaky continued, launching into a favorite nature analogy. “I have a picture of her on my wall to look at when I get discouraged. She’s leaping a five-foot waterfall going upstream to lay her eggs and die. She could give up and lie in the sun, but she fights on against terrible odds. She could forget the whole thing, decide that babies are not for her, protest that the male salmon doesn’t have to carry the load. And because the population of salmon would no longer be controlled by natural circumstance, she could make some sort of deal to sell the content of her womb for caviar. But she’s not like that because she hasn’t decided that she’s above God. She’s just a part of him and she gives him her all. She sacrifices her own life to balance the whole.”

  Squeaky Fromme had not seen Charlie, or heard his voice, in more than eight years. I was mulling that in my head when I got a wild idea. I called Lynette’s counselor at the federal prison in Pleasanton, California, and ran it by him. He was reluctant at first, but decided, what the heck, go with it. It was Christmas week. Spirits were high. The man agreed to call me back in an hour. When the time came, I took Charlie from his cell and brought him to my office. The phone rang. After a brief conversation, I handed the receiver to Charlie. “Lynette wants to talk to you. Official business,” I said with a wink. “Keep it short and simple. You have three minutes.”

  Charlie frowned and peered at the phone as if he’d never seen one before. He was certain this was just a prank, and didn’t want to show his disappointment. Slowly, he raised the receiver to his ear.

  “Charlie? Is it really you?” The high-pitched voice was unmistakable. Charlie’s eyebrows nearly shot over his forehead. He looked at me with confusion and shock. Then a warm smile spread across his face. It betrayed an emotion that I had always believed was beyond his capabilities—tenderness.

  “How you doing?” he cooed. “They treatin’ you all right?”

  I couldn’t hear Squeaky’s end, but I could almost feel her euphoria pouring into the room. I didn’t want to intrude, so I walked away and only half listened, keeping my ears on the alert for any alarming buzzwords. Charlie spoke casually, saying nothing crazy or off-the-wall. Although I could read the affection in his body language, I was surprised that he displayed very little of it to her. You’d think that after all her years of blind devotion, she’d at least earned a bit of sweet talk. Then again, I guess the relationship was never like that to begin with. This wasn’t man to woman, it was woman to master.

  Suddenly, my ears perked up. The tone of the conversation changed abruptly. “Patty Hearst, the rich bitch,” Manson said. Then, “How’s the Patty Hearst thing going?”

  I reached over and grabbed the phone. “That’s it. Time’s up,” I announced. “Say good-bye.” I held the phone to Charlie’s mouth to let him get in the last word.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  The abrupt termination didn’t seem to bother him at all. He thanked me and walked quietly to his cell. His obvious sense of satisfaction went beyond having talked to a lost love. Something was afoot, and I was once again right in the middle of it. Had Manson delivered a hit order on the famous heiress, who at the time was imprisoned with Squeaky? Was Charlie planning to intimidate or extort from Hearst? Or had Hearst, no stranger to demented revolutionaries, thrown in with the Manson clan, and was she planning to use her unlimited financial resources to reunite Charlie and Squeaky? Manson, as usual, dodged the questions, passing it off as idle chatter.

  I fretted about it for weeks afterward, frantically checking the morning paper for news of such a plot. Time passed and nothing happened. Whatever the scheme was, it never came off.

  I walked away from that incident having learned another valuable lesson. You try to be nice to a pair of monsters, and you might just get eaten.

  * * *

  As the years passed, many of the old Family members started shredding away. Whether they were simply trying to impress their parole boards or were being sincere is difficult to say. From their prison activities, I’d guess that it was the latter. At the California Institution for Women, the weak-willed Susan Atkins cut the cords early and wrote a book. Leslie Van Houten disavowed her confession and fought for new trials. Patty Krenwinkel vacillated for a decade before finally letting go. When I delivered that last bit of news to Charlie, his response was notable.

  “Maybe Leslie, but not Patty,” he said. “Back at the ranch, and when I had the bus, there were always people wanting to take my girls. Self-professed gurus were constantly trying to steal them away. There was a party house in Topanga Canyon we used to go to. The place was wild, full of people into group sex, hard drugs, devil worship, and all kinds of philosophies. There would be pockets of leaders and their little bands of followers scattered about all over the place. I’d bring the girls in and let them sit with, listen to, and even make love to whoever they wanted, dig? And you know, not a single one ever strayed. We went there dozens of times, stayed for hours or even days, and when the bus pulled away, everybody I arrived with left with me. I used to take great pride in that. Now? I’m here. Locked up. What can I do? If I wasn’t in here, things would be different. It’d be just as it was before, only larger and stronger.”

  Fortunately, Charlie was “in here” under guard, a factor that enabled his old gang to keep abandoning the ship. Steve “Clem” Grogan, another original follower, was at CMF the same time as Manson. When Clem walked the corridors anywhere near Manson, he tried to avoid him. Away from Manson, Clem was a decent fellow with a peaceful soul. An accomplished musician and skilled artist, the theme of his colorful paintings was winged nymphs dancing across lily pads, singed by the pleasures of love, saddened by the loss of innocence, betrayed by one they formerly worshiped. Reflecting on the autobiographical nature of his art, Clem tried to explain to me
how difficult it had been to escape Manson’s spell. “I was at Spahn Ranch longer than practically anyone. I took so many drugs that I followed Manson blindly. I would do anything he asked. It’s like he has this irresistible attraction, like he planted something deep inside me that’s still there and he can call upon it at any time.”

  That unwavering loyalty included, unfortunately for Clem, the murder of Hollywood stuntman Shorty Shea. “I knew Shorty for a long time. I liked him,” Clem told me. “But when Manson gave the order, I had to do it. I couldn’t resist. There was just no going against Charlie back then.”

  Clem, who survived a stabbing during his incarceration, was eventually paroled. He married, has remained clean, and seems to have repaired his life. Prior to his release, I bought a striking ink sketch he did of a man holding a newborn. I wanted it to remind me of Clem’s unceasing devotion to redeeming his broken life.

  Manson’s other top male Tate-LaBianca era henchmen, Tex Watson, Bruce Davis (Shea), and Bobby Beausoleil (convicted of murdering musician-drug dealer Gary Hinman), also left the fold. From the beginning, Watson privately requested that he be housed on a separate tier away from Manson on death row. That told me he was serious about wanting to break from his leader’s mystical influence. Years later, Watson and Davis made it official and became born-again Christians, joining Susan Atkins in a decision to follow the real God. Watson has been especially energetic in his new calling, writing a series of books from his prison cell and establishing a bustling mail-order ministry.

  “It’s interesting that Sadie [Susan] and Tex were the ones to find God,” Charlie observed. “They were the most messed up. They were direct participants in the murders that destroyed our entire group, murders that were Sadie’s idea to begin with to save Bobby. Then, they were the ones who yelled to the world that I controlled their minds. Sadie was always running off, getting in trouble, then scurrying back with an angry trick or boyfriend on her heels. I got into a knife fight once with this Mexican guy she was balling. When she left him, she stole his drugs. I had to cut him up to convince him to back off. If they’ve truly turned their lives over to God, then good for them. If they’re following God the way they followed me, with their own interests always in mind, then God can’t be too proud.”