Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars

by Edward George

  INMATE MANSON: That’s not true.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: It’s not true?

  INMATE MANSON: No. My father’s name was William Manson.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: William?

  INMATE MANSON: Yes.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: And did you live with him for a while?

  INMATE MANSON: No. You know, it’s one of those divorce trips where you see a guy walk by and he’s your father and you really don’t—you know, I remember his boots—

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Yes.

  INMATE MANSON:—and I remember him when he went to the war. I remember when he—his uniform, but I don’t remember what he really looked like.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Your mother was arrested shortly after the birth and sentenced to prison for assault and robbery?

  INMATE MANSON: Yes.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: And you lived with your maternal grandparents in West Virginia. You don’t have a southern accent, do you?

  INMATE MANSON: When I need it.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Yes, when you need it. You later resided in foster homes until you were made a ward of the court in ’47. The rest of your juvenile life was spent in various informatories, reformatories and boys schools in Pennsylvania and Indiana. You dropped out of school at the age of nine in the third grade. You married Rosealie Willis in 1954. The marriage ended in divorce in 1956. You have one son, Charles, Jr., which resulted from this marriage, but you have not seen your son since the divorce. Is that correct, Mr. Manson?

  INMATE MANSON: I don’t know.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Okay. It says here, no military service. You used L.S.D. extensively, mescaline, amphetamines, and barbiturates, but no alcohol. Is that correct?

  INMATE MANSON: No.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: No? Enlighten me.

  INMATE MANSON: I’ve taken a few tabs of acid, I smoked grass, I smoked a little hash. I don’t mess with drugs, per se. I don’t do anything self-destructive. I like the cactus buds. They’re a spiritual experience, and I—

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Peyote?

  INMATE MANSON: And mushrooms are okay.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Yes.

  INMATE MANSON: I drink scotch whiskey. I like scotch whiskey and I drink beer occasionally. I’m not much of a wine drinker, but now and then some wine with meals is all right.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: You get any of that in here?

  INMATE MANSON: No, no, no.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. We’re going to—remember I said there was three areas of the hearing. The second area is your postconviction factors. We may come back to this. I told you one area we have questions.

  INMATE MANSON: Do I get to say anything about that?

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Oh, yes. We’re going to do that in just a little bit. We’re going to go to your postconviction factors and your psychiatric factors and your psychiatric evaluation. Now, that’s everything that’s happened to you since your last hearing, and also the evaluation and Deputy Commissioner Brown will handle that on my far right.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Koenig.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: You’re welcome.

  INMATE MANSON: Do I get a minute here—in between there?

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Why do you want a minute?

  INMATE MANSON: To respond to just what that record that you laid out there?

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: We’ll go back to that. You—

  INMATE MANSON: There’s just no way my mind can handle that.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right—

  INMATE MANSON: In other words, I don’t have the papers you have and I can’t refer to what you’re referring to, you know.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Yes. You may respond to this right now, if you wish. Go ahead.

  INMATE MANSON: Okay, okay. What that whole first 11 years being locked up in was trying to get away. You’ve got a juvenile. You lock him up in juvenile hall, you don’t know anything. He’s got no parents. He’s got nobody telling him the truth. Everybody’s lying to him. So the only thing he can do is run away.

  So that’s all I did. I ran away. And every time I ran away, they just got me and put me in a harder place to get away. So every time I would run away, they would take me and put me in a more difficult place to run away until I got to the federal prison system.

  I ran through Indiana and I ran through Illinois and I ran through Ohio. And then when they put me in Washington, D.C., Dr. Hartman put me in Virginia, Natural Bridge Camp with a [inaudible] and that was in 1952—‘51. Then I went to Petersburg—Camp Petersburg, Virginia, where they got the military academy.

  And then I went to Pennsylvania, then I went to Ohio, and then in 1954 I got out and I [inaudible] knew what I was doing. I’m still nine years old in third grade in my mind. I couldn’t very well know what was going on, you know, I never had any help from anyone. No one ever done anything for me.

  So what I did was I married the first girl I came to and stole a car and came to California because that’s where she wanted to come and I just followed her around like a blind guy because I really don’t—California was a—you know, I didn’t know what California was. You know, I’m this dumb hillbilly. I thought the pigeons were seagulls and the seagulls were pigeons. I didn’t know the difference, you know.

  So when I got to California, it was all about fighting in the county jail. I wasn’t out there on the street but what, maybe two or three weeks before they had me in the jail back in Terminal Island.

  So I went through the lieutenant there and they brought the guys—the lieutenants and the men that were in the uniforms from the dentist office and all the Navy and the doctors from Dr. Hartman, they brought them from back East, they brought them to Terminal Island with a lot of the old-time gangsters that were being released. They’re going to Needles, California, and out in the desert, to do different things in the—in the Mafia world, in that old underworld, where they made all that moonshine stuff.

  So I learned all the things they learned. So this—I’m picking up all these things from all these older men. So they’re laying out to me what’s right and what’s wrong, and I don’t really know what’s right and what’s wrong, because people that say what’s right and wrong, they’re not doing what they say. They’re doing something different than what they say, you know. So I had to find all this out for myself.

  So then when you keep calling me a criminal and keep calling me a bad guy, then I got to be all the things that you think in your mind that I am, which is—that’s not really what I am. You got me being a bastard, you got me being a dope fiend. You got me being everything’s bad. I’m only five foot tall. I was five seven, then I went to five six, now I’m down to five two. I figure about another 20 years, I’ll be about four feet tall, because everybody’s just constantly pushing it over on me, like they got permission to get away with doing anything they want to do to me, because I don’t have no parents, because I don’t have no money, because I don’t have no education.

  You’ve got to have some education or some parents or you’re not smart. You’ve got to be stupid if you don’t read and write, you know. You’ve got to be all the things that are bad if you ain’t got nobody to protect you, because you find out in that cell, the only person that loves you, Jesus Christ.

  And that rebirth movement in 1967 was mine. Now you can tell Carter and all them other people that have been stealing my life every day and living in my reality, you know, that they can read Corinthians 13, chapter verse, you know. And that’ll handle that part of it. That’s the end of what I got to say then.

  PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: All right. You did a good job there. We’re going to go to the second area of the hearing now. Mr. Brown will h
andle your postconvictions.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I want to start right in with your C.D.C. 115s. You have about 60 of them. And it doesn’t appear that you have been doing very much to change them. I won’t go all the way back past 1981. As a matter of fact, I’ll start in ’83. Your last time you appeared before the Board was 1981, and I’m sure that that panel reviewed all of those 115s with you prior to that time.

  There are 60 of them starting from that time. Disrespect toward staff, possession of hacksaw blade. Do you have a copy of those?

  INMATE MANSON: No.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: [Inaudible] violence, dangerous properties?

  INMATE MANSON: No. No, I know what all those are though.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I want you—I’m going to read a couple this year that you had. March 14, 1992, threatening staff. (Reading.) On 03/14/92 at approximately 1510 hours while conducting my duties as floor officer, I was sweeping up a tier [inaudible] when Inmate Manson, B-33920 verbally demanded I go out to the S.H.U. yard and clear the showers now—clean the showers now because in my—in his opinion they’re dirty. I informed Inmate Manson that I didn’t have time to clean them today. Inmate Manson began to call me a liar and treacherous bitch. Inmate Manson also stated, “I would like to break all the bones in your body starting with your elbow working down to your knees.” Then Inmate Manson stated, “Tell that man up there, the patrol group operator, to open this cell door and let me beat you into submission so that you’ll be under my power.” (End of reading.)

  Do you recall that?

  INMATE MANSON: Yes.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Threatening staff—

  INMATE MANSON: Do I get to explain it?

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: You want to explain that?

  INMATE MANSON: Yes.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: You got it. Go ahead.

  INMATE MANSON: Prison is a treacherous place to live in. You miss one move, and you get stabbed. You’ve got to be aware of everything that goes on. There’s nothing that you can overlook. You’ve got to be aware of your air and ventilator that you breath, because if you’ve got emphysema and a Ninja warrior gets in your air, he can stop your air.

  So I’m in the shower area. They got some rust that’s coming out of the pipes, and this rust is building up and it looks just exactly like instant coffee. If you take a spoonful of that rust and you mix it in with instant coffee and you give somebody a cup of coffee, you can burn their kidneys out, you can kill them.

  So there’s a deadly substance out in the yard that needs cleaned up, because if I’m aware of this substance, when someone else comes out they see this substance, they may pick some of it up and put it in my coffee. So I try to be aware of everything.

  So I asked the woman when she came to work—I said, would you take the hose that you’ve been watering me down with and squirting me with when no one’s looking and go out there and squirt down that yard and clean up that mess out there, to where—and she says, well, no, she wasn’t going to do that. I said, well, somebody needs to do that because it’s a danger, you know. So she said she didn’t want to do it and she called me a liar so I called her a liar back.

  Now, whether you want to accept this or not, the deer in the woods—there’s a doe and there’s a buck. And the buck comes up to the doe and scares the doe and the doe turns around and backs up to the buck. That’s a matriarch and a patriarch. I live in a patriarchy. You live in a matriarch. You back up to your women. I don’t back up to my women. I don’t take no lip from my women. I don’t give them none, but I don’t take none either. If they disrespect me, I’ll disrespect them back. If they hit me, I’ll hit them back.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I’m going to interrupt you. I’m going to read these other two, because they’re along the same line. You keep your thought, and I’ll let you continue to go in that vein for a short while longer, but I’m not going to allow you to ramble all day.

  INMATE MANSON: You got it.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: The second one, February the 1st, 1992, written by an officer by the name of Bass, and you told her, “Bass, you’re a fucking punk.” She attempted to counsel. You stated, “Open this—Bass, open this fucking door and I’ll take that stick away from you and beat your ass with it.”

  You got another one, February the 10th, 1992, officer by the name of Moony. You became verbally abusive saying, “Get your nose out of my ass, you bitch.” When I attempted to proceed with the C.D.C. 115, Manson exposed his penis, and said, “Suck my dick, you white bitch, you’re nothing but a witch.” Manson then proceeded to spit on me.

  You may go ahead with your—conclude your statement that you were making about why this kind of behavior keeps going on, as far as you’re concerned.

  INMATE MANSON: Prison is a place where they keep men. They chew tobacco, they spit, they cuss, they do bad things. They ride horses, they fall down. It’s not a place where women should be working.

  Women come in here and we’re sitting on the toilet. We have to bare down and take our clothes off and bend over and show our private parts and they stand there and gawk. And it’s not a place for a woman. I wouldn’t want my mother working in a prison, if I had one. I wouldn’t want my sisters, I wouldn’t want my old ladies working in a prison.

  Prison and the authoritative-type jobs kind of—they like certain kinds of jobs. Some women that don’t like men, they like these kind of jobs. They can get over on some men and they feel really good about that, because they didn’t like their father and they don’t like men anyway. Well, I don’t particularly like men either, whatever men is. Or whatever that is to them, it’s got nothing to do with what it is to me.

  So what it is to me is like—I say a lot of words they say are bad words. To me, they’re just words. I don’t see good words or bad words. Good and bad is up to the individual to decide whatever he feels like’s good words.

  So when you’re talking to a man, you say, “Hey, you old dirty [unintelligible].” You’re saying things that you’re rapping, what they call the dozens, you’re rapping back and forwards. Then you got a guy and you’re sitting there rapping and you let a stinker, and there’s two guys in the room and (sniff-sniff) one of them smells it and looks at the other one, says wasn’t me. I mean, there’s only two of you there. It could—you know, I mean, how are you going to lie to yourself, you know.

  So me and this man is standing there and we’re rapping and man-talking back and forwards and this woman come around the corner like I was talking to her. I wasn’t talking to her to start with. I was talking to the guy.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: You have enough sense to understand that when you accumulated this many disciplinaries, that somewhere along the line, somebody’s saying that you’re doing it wrong. And somewhere in your mind, you need to make some kind of decision that you’re going to make a choice to stop.

  INMATE MANSON: Uh-huh.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Now you can sit up and you can rationalize and you can come up with all of the rhetoric that you want to, but it isn’t going to get you out of the hole. You’re just going to continue to dig yourself in deeper.

  INMATE MANSON: Okay. Can I explain that?

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Go ahead.

  INMATE MANSON: The turnaround, it comes to push, push comes to shove, shove comes looking around to see where you’re up above or down below, where you’re at and how it turns. Something that says good, says bad, that’s good, say what it is, what it is, that’s cool.

  So when you catch cool you got some fool coming through the door, you don’t know what he’s doing about what. He just come and fell out of the water like a fish on the floor. And he don’t know what he’s doing, he got no idea where he’s at and he’s coming into other people’s lives talking about words he don’t even know nothing about it.

  He comes in to my world, my life, and tells me roo-roo-rah, some old punk-ass mothe
rfucker shit that’s going to get me killed if I don’t put up some force fields in his mind to get his ding-dong ass off of me. So I tell him, get off of me. If you don’t get off of me, I’ll teach you how to get off of me. And he leans that, and he turns that around and he tells the inmate, you get up against that wall and shake down.

  And then he learns his man from getting the man and when they feel real secure, then they have to get them 115s in before I get to parole, because they want to get them 115s in because they don’t want to ever let me go, because if they let me go they lose the best thing they’ve got because they feel secure as long as they got me locked up in a cell. And they feel like—yeah, they feel like they got the man right there in the box where they can go back and say what’s what to who and says where, and you represent and who in what part or whose courtroom, see.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: All right.

  INMATE MANSON: Here’s the thing—let me say this to you Chief Thomas [sic]. When we—

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Hold up, hold up just a minute. My name—

  INMATE MANSON: Brown—excuse me, Mr. Brown.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: My name is written right there and don’t you ever call me anything but that name right there. Do you understand?

  INMATE MANSON: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Now proceed.

  INMATE MANSON: Sure. So it comes to this, it’s like, I’m not going to try to kid you. I’m not going to try playing nothing with you.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: And I’m not going to play with you and let me tell you something else—

  INMATE MANSON: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: No, no, no. you wait.

  INMATE MANSON: Oh, you want to kick me out of here and [inaudible] go home.

  DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: No, I’m not going to kick you out of here. No way I’m going to kick you out—

  INMATE MANSON: Well, I just don’t—you know, like the words you like—