Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  “… We don’t want out until Charlie’s out. We just were not content out there without him and we tried to get in to visit all those times and they wouldn’t let us, so we wanted to be inside with him until he gets out.… We tried for five years and were given the run-around.… We were working on various projects, trying to get elk hunters to stay out of the forests, trying to get the Ford Motor Company to keep the [smog] devices in their cars, to clean up their cars.… I’m on my knees to my life on earth and I don’t want to lose it. We’re very close to destroying the whole thing. I want to give up sometimes, and I want to just not pay attention to it. Not care. But I can’t. Once I’ve seen it, I say, ‘Okay, it’s with me. Now all I have to do is work out a way to balance it.…’

  “… When Sandy and I were in court, we saw the fun of it. You say something and the judge rules in your favor and it’s like ‘Yea! I made a point!’ But the worst part is when they get up and make the impassioned plea to the jurors. And you know it’s just a game. They can walk out the door and say, ‘Well, it came off pretty good.’ It’s a game. They’re actors. And I look at the judge [U.S. district judge Thomas J. MacBride] whose bridge games mean more. Whose duck hunt means more. He wouldn’t give up duck hunting for me. Not even when I came to him decently. Ha, ha, ha.’ He thought. That was real funny. Well, he’s a witty, clever guy, but he doesn’t hold a candle, he couldn’t shine Charlie’s shoes, because he’s not in the will of God. I respected him. I could have been his own daughter. I said, ‘Look, Dad. This is important. If nothing else, it’s important to me. You don’t need to shoot ducks. You don’t need the ducks to live.’ But he says, ‘Well, that’s tough luck. That’s my duck hunt.’ He just shoots them because he feels like he’s powerful and like he’s a sporting fellow.…

  “I was fifteen and left my house and went to work. I was going to high school, going to work. Looking for a job and for an apartment was hard when you’re fifteen. And everyone’s telling me, “Well, you have to lie and say you’re older.’ I’d say, Wait a minute. I don’t want to lie.’ They’d say, ‘Aw, come on. Everybody lies. You have to lie.’ That was my introduction.… The restaurant fella taught me how to cheat the customer.… The pet shop guy was cheating on his income taxes. Every place I went I learned that somehow they were trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. I grew up believing people were serving us. The man with the star, and all that. But then you look and find that all of a sudden, all of your illusions are gone and there isn’t anybody. You’re alone.…

  “[My father and I] argued [that last night] about some kind of definition from the dictionary, that’s how dumb it was. His way or no way. I said, ‘Yes, but,’ and he said, Yes but nothing.’ You’d think the definition would be clear, but I don’t remember if either of us looked it up. It was late at night. I was eighteen. I was looking for a couple to stay with because I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

  Squeaky said that after the argument, she was sitting alone on a bench, peering out at the ocean, when Charlie approached.

  “He looked at me and he knew. And he cared enough to pay attention.”

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  When it came her turn, Sandra, then thirty-six, was equally compelling. She started off with a story about a new recruit they’d sent out on yet another proposed murder spree.

  “He was a nut that was fixing to go off and start killing people. He was right out of Vietnam, trained by the government to kill people, and he writes us and he wants to be our hit man. So we thought, ‘Oh great. This is a real winner, floating around and flipping around Pennsylvania.’ But he kept writing these letters, so we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll take the guy’s energies and we’ll direct them so he won’t be hurting some innocent person walking down the street.’ So we directed him to the president of Kaiser Industries. We said, ‘Lookit, sure, you can be our hit man. Go take care of this guy.’ Gave him a little scenario on how to do it. Then he got on some other binge, Patty Hearst or something, and ended up telling the FBI.”

  The “little scenario,” according to court testimony, was that the assassin was supposed to kill the Kaiser head and his wife, paint their bodies pink, then stick a can of Ban deodorant in the man’s mouth. Good explained to Wilson that the pink paint signified the color that Kaiser coats its machinery, hotels, and shopping centers.

  “We went to war in the ’60s for change,” Good continued. “Manson didn’t kill anybody. He didn’t mastermind it. We kids, society’s nice children, we looked at the war in Vietnam, we looked at the pollution and we listened to the music, singing revolution. Revolution for the hell of it. And we were looking at problems, especially that war, and we went to war for our country. The Manson Family. We went to war against the big money that was killing the people in Vietnam and was killing our own country. Now, if that isn’t the ultimate in morality, I don’t know what is. When people sacrifice their own lives, as well as other people’s lives. When they go that far, you know that there is something happening.… You know, those people [Tate-LaBianca] were no saints. People that were already dead in their money anyway. How long are we going to be made the scapegoats with everybody putting their fear and hate off on us while avoiding the real problems? Practically everything you read about wasn’t true. Oh Jesus, we drank blood for fun. We’re filthy and slimy and sexually depraved. Cut off heads. You know, all those insane stories. The baby was mutilated. Tate was killed. She happened to be pregnant.… How many thousands of women have abortions every day? What else? Orgies. Blood and sex orgies. Filthy? Can you imagine me being physically dirty? Letting myself go? That’s repugnant to me. I don’t mind being called a killer, but don’t call me a dirty one.

  “I can see killing for a purpose.… If someone came at you or your child with a knife or was dumping poison into your water system, you’d defend yourself. This is where we were at. The murders were supposed to be because Charlie didn’t get a recording contract? I mean, here we are looking at very real things and here the murders were reduced to the level of an ego trip? A man’s ego trip of getting some music recorded?… Man, going to college and all that stuff, I learned different ways to work within a system. Write your congressman, join the Sierra Club, do this, do that. And I worked in a lot of those areas. I’ve always been socially conscious. But I’ve seen that there were no alternatives. Those were the only means that we had at hand at that point in time to deal with the problems that we were seeing.

  “Manson never had a trial. That was a circus. That was a farce. That was a vehicle for the DA to write his book and make his movie. The whole thing was conducted with his future book Helter Skelter in mind. The truth has never come out.”

  The most critical truth I got out of that interview was to remind myself in my next letter to Sandra that I could call her a killer, but not a dirty one. That ranked right up there with Charlie’s line to the Enquirer reporters, “I’m a monster maybe, but I’m not a monstrous monster.”

  In 1981, our old friend Willie Spann flamed out on the media tour and got busted again for drugs. He passed through CMF for a ninety-day evaluation. To make matters worse, his uncle had been bounced out of office by the voters the previous year, effectively eliminating Spann’s only claim to fame. He was much more subdued and humble this time around, realizing that his fifteen minutes in the footlights had come and gone. The new attitude enabled him to put aside his past differences with Charlie and kiss and make up. Spann spent his time entertaining Charlie and Pin Cushion with colorful tales about how he had played on his uncle’s big job to score cash, lovers, and media interviews during the brief period he was free. When it was time to ship Spann out to his permanent home; we were all sad to see him go.

  Charlie tempered his grief with the knowledge that he was surviving on the mainline. By closely monitoring the crazies at CMF, we were able to keep him in population for the next three years. We gradually eased his custody rating to the point where he could walk around unescorted, take his meals in the cafeteria
with the other inmates, exercise in the main yard, receive visitors in the regular visiting room, and stay out of his cell on weekends.

  He was especially proud of his office in the back of the chapel and took me for a tour. He had a small desk and a chair, and had decorated a wall with pictures of wolves (devouring a caribou), birds, and fish, as well as landscapes. An eight-by-ten glossy of Lynette graced another wall, right next to a similar photo of Sandra. A third showed his two chief followers together, this time decked out in their hooded habits.

  Charlie escorted me from the office and led me to a cloistered chapel garden to show off the flowers and plants he was growing. He bent down and tenderly pointed out the grit, dust, and rust spots on the wilting leaves. “It’s the dirty air and water,” he said sadly. “It’s killing everything. Can’t you see it, man?”

  Charlie’s plants weren’t the only things dying from the pollution in and around the chapel. The self-identity of his bodyguard, Tommy Burke, seemed to be withering away as well, replaced by Manson’s stronger personality. I noticed that Tommy was now completely under Charlie’s spell, talking the talk and coming on like Manson junior. I pulled him into my office for a fatherly chat.

  “Listen, I know Charlie can have a powerful influence on people. I’ve felt it myself. What he says about the environment sounds good, and it’s a noble cause, but that’s only a small part of what Charles Manson’s all about. There’s a big part of him that’s horribly evil, and that’s what you need to be careful about. It’s important that you retain your own personality and manhood, and make your own decisions. Don’t turn your will over to him or you’ll regret it. Believe me, everybody, except maybe Squeaky and Sandra, has lived to regret it. I know it’s hard. I know you gravitate toward him and can’t help yourself. I do too. I have for a long time. But I’ve never surrendered my soul like the others. I’ve never given him my mind. That’s the difference. You be careful, Tommy.”

  Reading his face, I sensed that I’d gotten through. A month later, the pair had a falling-out over something neither would reveal, and Tommy asked to be transferred to another prison. We granted his wish.

  The only person I worried about now, aside from the Cuckoo’s Nest set, was Pastor Nick. He was spending a great deal of time with Charlie, and that usually meant trouble for anyone. I visited Nick one afternoon and found him engaged in a spirited long-distance telephone conversation. Charlie entered, saw me waiting, and ambled over to Nick. He gently reached out and pressed down the knobs on the phone, disconnecting the call. Instead of getting angry, Nick gave him a weary look and didn’t mention it. That troubled me. In case I hadn’t gotten the point, Charlie grinned and picked up the chaplain’s two-pound, foot-long carved wooden name-plate from his desk and held it menacingly over Nick’s head, ready to strike. Nick didn’t move or show any concern. Manson posed like he was waiting for a picture to be taken, flashed his wicked eyes, then put the artful club back on the desk. He left the room without another word. Nick merely rolled his eyes and picked up his phone to continue the aborted call. I was concerned more about Nick’s mental state than any physical harm that might befall him. I knew Charlie would never hurt the man. Recruit him into his Family, sure. Turn him away from God and onto drugs and sex, certainly. But he’d never physically injure him. In the end, the soft-spoken, passive pastor proved to be more resilient than I imagined. He survived his ordeal with Charlie without a physical or mental scar—which is more than I could say for myself.

  Despite Nick’s firm grip on the situation, things didn’t always go smoothly. Angry about losing a transfer to a unit with an even lower custody rating, Charlie threw another heated tantrum. This time, he piled up all his possessions—books, magazines, newspapers, letters, photographs, clothing, sheets, and blankets—and lit a healthy bonfire in his Willis Unit cell. The guards had to grab a hose and drench the place—with Charlie in it. They dumped his scorched property into the garbage and dragged the little wet rat kicking and screaming into isolation. Charlie decked the halls with horrible threats the entire way.

  Eight months later, in October 1982, an officer tried to get into the chapel and was impeded by something blocking the door. Pounding and shouting, Manson finally let him in. The officer discovered that the door had been bound from the inside by an electrical wire. Manson was immediately interrogated and gave evasive answers. A search was commenced. In the ceiling of the clerk’s office—Manson’s office—a trapdoor was discovered that led to the attic. (I hadn’t even been aware that it was there!) Although the door had been bolted down and locked, its hinges were removed. Officers climbed through the door and entered the dark attic. They discovered a well-stocked “escape kit” consisting of a tape recorder, a glass vial containing a volatile white liquid, two pieces of metal stock—one of which was sharpened and taped into a shank—sandpaper, a pair of tin snips (wire cutters), four bags of marijuana, one hundred feet of nylon cord, and a hot-air balloon catalog. A ladder was standing in the chaplain’s office tall enough to reach the ten-foot-high ceiling. A search of Manson’s cell turned up a hacksaw blade, marijuana, and LSD.

  Charlie had obviously been preparing to make a break for it. Although the attic was enclosed, it was connected to numerous air ducts and passageways that led to who knows where. If the plot hadn’t been discovered, Manson would have stood a good chance of making it.

  Despite the evidence against him, Charlie was able to escape punishment because too many inmates had access to the chaplain’s office and it was impossible to pin it on anyone. That said, it was unmistakably Charlie’s operation from the get-go. Who else but Manson would include four bags of marijuana in his stash? The only question in my mind was how many others he had intended to take with him. Despite our relationship, he was unusually nimble on the subject, steadfastly denying any part.

  “I don’t want to get out of here!” he claimed. “You know me. I’m like Frankenstein. I’d be recognized everywhere. The townsfolk would chase me down and string me up to the nearest tree. No sir, I’m staying right here where it’s safe!”

  There was some truth to that, but not enough to keep him from trying to bolt. I closely monitored his behavior and moods to see how he was taking the discovery. Inmates frequently go nuts or become suicidal when their long-planned escapes are foiled. It’s not so much the loss of potential freedom that gets them down, it’s the sudden loss of the hope that they had fed on during the months of preparation.

  Charlie didn’t appear any different than before. If the aborted attempt was eating at him, he hid it well. It turned out that he did like most prisoners and simply began work on his next attempt. On February 26, 1983, a routine search turned up a pair of khaki coveralls in his cell. They were the exact color and style of those worn by the officers assigned to the security squad, and could easily be used by an escaping con to “filter in.” This time Manson went berserk. Although he knew as well as anyone that the gig was up the moment the clothing was spotted, he refused to fork them over, hitting number 9 on the tantrum Richter scale. When the dust settled, he had destroyed yet another guitar and trashed virtually everything else in his cell, including his latest television set. That effectively ended his days in population.

  Charlie sulked for a long time after that, alone in his cell with no guitar to play, no radio to listen to, no television to watch. Once again, a few minutes of anger resulted in months of boredom and despair. Still, he remained incapable of understanding the concept of cause and effect. He became especially mean during this period, spewing threats and jumping on everyone, including me. He made some veiled references to Squeaky and “mail,” coming as close as he ever had to exposing his festering resentment over my campaign to free her from his influence.

  At the same time, Squeaky’s letters took on an ugly, menacing tone. She wrote of killing me just as she had tried to murder President Ford. For all my help, Squeaky still viewed me as a barrier, a disapproving Peeping Tom who intruded upon her most intimate moments with her beloved
master. I stubbornly persisted in trying to convince her to break away, even after I became thoroughly convinced that it wasn’t possible. We fought constantly through the mail, firing letter after letter arguing points that would never be resolved. I often wondered why we kept it up. For Squeaky, I was the closest she could get to Manson, so it made sense. In fact, many of her letters addressed to me were written directly to him, as if I were nothing more than an invisible conduit. Plus, she had a lot of time on her hands, so writing was no doubt cathartic.

  Why did I keep writing to Squeaky? It’s hard to say. I think it boils down to the simple fact that I was unable to throw in the towel. As long as I could scribble some logic on a notepad, I’d keep trying to pump some sense into her.

  Usually, it was me who broke. As mentioned before, her letters were often so touching I couldn’t bear to keep them from Charlie. I’d pull him from his cell, slip him a letter, and let him savor it in my office. At times like that, I hated having to stand between them, but realized it was necessary. Left to themselves, there was always the fear that their correspondence would quickly transform from love and kisses to talk of hate and violence.