The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  Paradoxically, the main draw to violence for most of these women (and it was true of both Pat and Leslie) is ideological—the desire to right wrongs—and an overwhelming hunger to be part of something larger than their little lives. The most chilling similarity, however, is a complete lack of compassion for victims or potential victims. I also noticed a parallel in the way the media focuses on a particular kind of woman who commits a particular kind of violence.

  When the shooting in San Bernardino occurred in 2015, there was universal bewilderment that the mother of a six-month-old baby, Tashfeen Malik, was involved (Times of London: “Hatred More Powerful Than a Mother’s Love”). I believe we have a special place in our chamber of fears for violent women—especially violent women who look like prom princesses, as did Leslie Van Houten, or who are mothers of babies, as was Tashfeen Malik. The male shooter was the father of the same baby, but that was rarely mentioned in the media’s coverage of him.

  Even during periods when I set aside the project, I maintained my relationship with the women—corresponding with them and visiting when I could. My wish to understand the discrepancy between who they are now and who they were then never abated, but had I wanted to forget, the culture wouldn’t let me. It’s no exaggeration to say that almost every day since I embarked on this path, in a multitude of contexts, from jokes to metaphors, to serious references to evil, both Manson and the Manson Family have been mentioned in the media.

  The question that kept me returning to the project: If the women weren’t psychopaths or whatever term is now used to signify the absence of a conscience—sociopaths, borderline, narcissistic personality disorder—what happened to their humanity on those two nights? In the following pages you will read Patricia’s and Leslie’s descriptions of the horrible suffering of their victims. The brutality was very up close and very personal. They not only heard the cries, they felt bones and organs crushing at their own hands. What prevented them from responding to such horrible suffering? Why was it that it took a full five years after the murders for them to have any feelings for their victims?

  In my attempt to understand, I scoured research on the violent behavior of ordinary people, behavior that was exhibited in experiments but also real-life situations of mass brutality: Rwanda, Guatemala, Bosnia, and on a smaller scale, the barbarity at Abu Ghraib. But in my life, the extermination of six million Jews in Nazi Germany was what, early on, planted the need to understand this kind of barbarity in my mind. However, it wasn’t until I started to write this book that I realized how much my hybrid Jewishness, the Nazis called it Mischling, has informed my life and how much it’s baked in to my interest in the Manson women.

  When I was a girl I had a favorite knitted scarf; the dominant colors were muted shades of charcoal, pale blue, and lilac. But threaded throughout the fabric was a slender gold lamé strand. When I imagine my Jewishness, I think about that gold thread that looped through the length of the scarf. Though slender, it was always visible, always providing a glint of illumination when the scarf caught the light from the sun.

  Once I became aware of how much my Jewish heritage informed my life, it started to seem like an apparition hovering over everyone and everything I encountered along the way. At first, its influence seemed out of proportion. I am, after all, only a quarter breed and Jews make up little more than 2 percent of the population.

  How could it be connected to my interest in the Manson women? Here’s how: growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, learning that Jews were killed just because they were Jews and realizing that even my diluted Jewish blood would have put me and my family in very real danger, planted the question “why?” at a pretty early age. Why would ordinary Germans, commanded by Hitler, methodically kill people with Jewish blood—babies, adults, grandpas, grandmas—people who had done nothing wrong?

  That question hounded me as a girl, affected my young adulthood in complicated ways, and then, more recently, led to the central question of this book: Why? Why did two ordinary women, at the behest of Charles Manson, brutally murder people they did not know? Consistent with one of the themes of this project (i.e., all roads lead to Jewishness) I had always believed that three of the adult victims—Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Voytek Frykowski—were Jews. I didn’t imagine this was the motive but I did believe in a way I can’t articulate that it was a factor. I’m not sure where I got this idea of their respective ethnicities, but I have been unable to verify it.

  We do know that one victim, Sharon Tate’s unborn baby, was half Jewish. The father, Roman Polanski, is not only Jewish, both his mother and his sister were imprisoned at Auschwitz—his sister survived, his mother did not. And on the subject of Jewishness, there’s another “why” that plagued me: Why would Catherine Share, an orphan of Hitler’s holocaust, throw her lot in with Manson, a man who carved a swastika on his forehead? For a while it seemed as though everywhere I looked in my history there was a Star of David or a swastika, both symbolically or literally. Sometimes these associations seemed excessive, even to me, and I’d think about the way Alvy Singer, the character Woody Allen plays in Annie Hall, would see or hear references to Jews no one else could see or hear. One example: He’s telling a friend about having lunch with some guys from NBC. Alvy asks, “Did you eat yet or what?” And one of the NBC guys answers: “No, didchoo?”

  “Not, ‘did you?’ ” Alvy explains, but, “ ‘didchoo eat? Jew?’ No, not ‘did you eat,’ but ‘Jew eat?’ Jew. You get it? Jew eat?”

  How can I explain that the swastika Manson carved on his forehead was, in a strange way, almost as shocking as the murders? How can it have triggered anything in me even close to the shock that they murdered so many innocent people?

  Once you understand that there is something about you that is so hated, you could be killed for it, it colors everything. How can there be something about me, something that has nothing to do with the content of my character, that would shut off even a glimmer of empathy in others? How does it work, this mechanism that shuts off empathy in response to an ethnicity, a culture, the color of skin? What happens to the brains of people who can no longer feel the suffering of fellow human beings?

  The Jewish question may seem irrelevant to understanding the Manson women but not to me—never to me.

  The result of this journey is a mosaic of associations, some having to do directly with the Manson women, some loosely associated with them, and some tangential but all helping me to make a little more comprehensible the incomprehensible.

  Over the past twenty years, I have grappled with the brutality of events on those two nights in the summer of 1969 and the opacity of human nature they revealed. This account describes my efforts to penetrate this mystery by peering through several different prisms. In doing so, I’ve learned a great deal about human behavior, much of it disheartening but some of it proof of our capacity as humans to transform ourselves, even those of us who have committed unspeakable acts. Nonetheless, all these years later, I’m left with an enduring sadness over the suffering of the victims, the ones whose lives were taken in such a vicious way and the ones who were left behind to grieve their loss.

  chapter one

  THE FORMOSA CAFÉ

  1995

  I walked into the Formosa Café, adjusted my eyes to the relative dark, and scanned the bar, looking for George, the man I was scheduled to meet. It was 1995 and I was researching a story about settled gypsies, and George, who was one, wanted to meet in Hollywood, far from the authoritarian eyes of the patriarch of his clan in Northern California. I’d suggested the Formosa Café because it was close to where he was living or said he was living, and it was the only bar I still knew in Hollywood, having left the city, my youth, and the bad food at the Formosa more than thirty years before.

  I didn’t see him when I arrived, so I sat idly watching a tennis match on the TV above the bar. A fleshy man in his late forties, looking uncomfortable in a starched white shirt and pinstriped suit, took the stool next to me. He ordered an
Anchor Steam and asked the bartender if he minded switching the channel to the O.J. trial—a request I found puzzling. Even in L.A., most people were taking a break from the proceedings; criminalist Dennis Fung had been droning on for days and all but the most ardent trial watchers had tuned out.

  The bartender, a lean, upright man in a waiter’s uniform left over from the same era as most of the movie stars whose autographed black-and-white photos were displayed on the walls, handed him the remote. The man clicked through the channels, stopping when he heard “crime of the century.” But Dennis Fung wasn’t on the screen. Instead, a pretty woman who resembled Mary Tyler Moore was talking about remorse. In 1969, she and three others were involved in the murder of a couple—a thirty-nine-year-old woman, a wife and mother of two, and her forty-four-year-old husband.

  “Who is that?” my bar partner said.

  “Leslie Van Houten,” I said. “One of the Manson women.”

  I hadn’t seen her face for twenty-five years. Of all the actors in that horror show, she was the most puzzling to me. Maybe it was her wholesomeness, her doe eyes, her fresh face.

  She was saying that the older she got, the harder it was to reconcile herself to what happened. “Mrs. LaBianca was younger than I am now. I took away all that life.”

  We were watching a documentary about Charles Manson called A Journey to Evil. There were clips of prison interviews with two of Manson’s accomplices: Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. Both were expressing remorse.

  “It’s bullshit,” the guy on the next stool said. “It’s an act. They’re sick. The whole lot of them.”

  Manson’s diabolical face then appeared on the screen to proclaim his resolute lack of remorse. “Woman, that doesn’t wrinkle my forehead none,” he said when the interviewer asked how he felt about Sharon Tate’s murder.

  He continued with his trademark mumbo jumbo, and the guy at the bar decided he was more interested in the current trial of the century and switched to Dennis Fung. After a half hour I gave up on the gypsy and walked out into the afternoon sun.

  It was February and one of those rare L.A. days when the air is cool, the sky the color of cornflowers, and the tops of the palm trees more than an impressionistic blur. The Santa Monica Mountains that bound that end of the city were startlingly clear. I remembered being delighted years before when a man at a dinner party in San Francisco proclaimed that nowhere else on earth was there an uglier juxtaposition of mountain and ocean than in Los Angeles.

  I had fled the city because of the usual culprits: the car-choked freeways, the ubiquity of strip malls and asphalt, the lung-bruising air. But I was also fleeing the very thing that drew my grandparents there in the early years of the century: the atmosphere of boundless possibility. Since its inception, L.A. had been a place to experiment, to shed the past. But a place that lends itself so readily to transformation is, by its very nature, ephemeral, and when I was growing up, it all felt a little too impermanent.

  But now the city stirred some ineffable longing in me; it was no longer the bad air, but other particulates—the night-blooming jasmine, seedy cocktail lounges, red hibiscus, and bungalow courts—that made it hurt when I breathed. What once seemed so transient had become bedrock.

  I walked down Formosa Avenue past the Warner-Hollywood Studios, the costume supply and post-production companies, and stucco garden apartments with bars on the windows. Even in the days when Hollywood could claim some glamour, this neighborhood was the underbelly. I thought about the Manson women and how the guy in the bar declared them “sick” with such certainty. His characterization was kinder than prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s who, in Helter Skelter, the best-selling account of the murders, described them to the jury as “human monsters, mutations without hearts, without souls.”

  I first read Helter Skelter in 1975 when I was at home luxuriating in what were supposed to be deliciously indolent days following the birth of my youngest child. A good friend had given it to me, as he wrote in the inscription, “to entertain you while you nurse your new baby.” My husband thought another book for my infant care collection might have been a more appropriate gift, but this friend and I had long shared an interest in the murders.

  We’d met working in a residential program for young, first break schizophrenics. At the time, I was the program director and a psychiatric social worker; he was an intern getting his PhD in psychology. We were both interested in looking at disturbed behavior in the context of family systems. The young people in Manson’s group had rejected their families of origin and had created a new one—one that redefined family and, in the process, stripped them of their basic humanity.

  Jacob, the book giver, knew I had more personal reasons to be interested in the case. I’d attended Hollywood High School where I’d been friends with two key figures in the Helter Skelter story—Stephen Kay, the young deputy district attorney who assisted Vincent Bugliosi at the trial; and Catherine Share, aka Gypsy, who had assisted Charles Manson in recruiting young girls into his tribe.

  Also, there were issues in my own family of origin that were somewhat parallel, though certainly not as extreme. My brother had served time for a home invasion robbery, and Jacob knew how that had affected me. Like the young people in Manson’s group, my brother was the offspring of middle-class parents who had high expectations of him. Like Leslie Van Houten, he was popular, smart, good looking, affable. He, too, dropped out of college, lived both aimlessly and recklessly, saturating his brain with psychedelics. This described thousands of kids in the 1960s, but few of them committed crimes like my brother—a frightening home invasion that involved an older couple. He had been incarcerated at the California Institution for Men in Chino, just a few miles from the prison where the three Manson women ended up.

  So, despite my personal reasons to be interested in the case, I had just as many reasons to avoid it, reasons about which Jacob was oblivious. He was not yet a father and had a limited understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities of nursing mothers. While Helter Skelter was indeed a page-turner, I was so frightened by the contents, the book itself became a totemic embodiment of evil that I couldn’t bear to have in the same room as my freshly minted daughter or my six-year-old son. The idea of random savagery is especially terrifying when your protective hormones are at their peak and safeguarding your baby’s every breath is your total preoccupation.

  But it wasn’t Charles Manson, an old-fashioned psychopath with a New Age angle, who was the source of my terror. Because he looked deranged, he was somehow easier for me to dismiss. It was the women. Their seeming normality coupled with the barbarity of the crimes, their insult-to-injury behavior during the trial, their mocking disdain for the grief of the victims’ families—ten families in all—was unfathomable. And because I had known Catherine Share, Manson’s chief recruiter, when she was a bright, pretty, and all-around appealing high school student, her devotion to him was even more startling. While she didn’t directly participate in the Tate-LaBianca murders, she committed other crimes at his direction.

  In my mind, the description of the murdered Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, curled in a fetal position, her silky blond hair and the pattern of her floral lingerie nearly obscured by a cloak of blood, were superimposed on the photos of Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins at the trial, holding hands, skipping down the courthouse halls singing Manson’s songs, looking as though they were on their way to some kind of hippie hoedown. The images of those girls and the brutal murders would float in and out of my consciousness for the next couple of decades.

  Since the Tate-LaBianca murders, Charles Manson had achieved almost mythic status in the country. To a subgroup of disaffected European and American youth he was a folk hero, an inspiration, an eternal rebel without a cause. To the rest of us, in his pint-size way, he had become as much a symbol of evil as Hitler. Though Manson didn’t personally kill any of those seven people, he was more widely known than any other serial killer.

 
One of the impenetrable mysteries of Hitler’s Holocaust continues to be the unspeakable brutality of ordinary Germans—middle-class people who contributed in direct and intimate ways to the slaughter of Jews. Similarly, the enduring potency of the Manson myth derives not only from his involvement in the murders but from his deft extermination of the humanity of seemingly normal young people who killed at his behest.

  After a glimpse of Leslie Van Houten’s and Patricia Krenwinkel’s apparent penitence, I wanted to find out about their journey, and that of Susan Atkins, the third woman who was convicted with them. I remembered Leslie’s attorney, Maxwell Keith, pleading with the jury: “Study her, don’t kill her.” The jury had decided to kill her anyway—a decision that was later reversed when the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty law, as it was then written, unconstitutional. (See chapter 7.)

  So had she been studied? Did the women have, as Vincent Bugliosi contended, something “deep in their souls” that would have propelled them to violence even without Manson? Or were they simply forlorn, impressionable youngsters whose minds were rendered useless because of a combination of social turmoil, drugs, and the exquisite manipulative skills of a psychopath? From their perch of middle age, what was their understanding of why on two successive nights in 1969 they participated in the murders of seven people they did not know?