The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  I thought about those women. One of them had told me that everyone she knew at Frontera had committed her crime because of a man. Her cellmate was in prison for embezzling money from her employer to pay off gambling debts—her husband’s gambling debts. This kind of loyalty does not generally go both ways. I couldn’t help comparing that to my observation that husbands are much less likely than wives to stick around after their spouses are incarcerated. (Of course, in the case of wives who kill their husbands, there isn’t much of a choice.)

  As each of our names was called, we lined up. We rolled up our pant legs, rolled down our socks, and pulled our pockets inside out. I was told that the only items I could bring in with me were my car keys, two packs of unopened cigarettes, and no more than fifty dollars in cash for the vending machines. Most of us had brought along transparent ziplock bags for these items to minimize the delay. Because the inmates wore jeans, visitors could not wear denim of any kind. It was deemed important for guards to easily distinguish between inmates and outsiders.

  After we passed through a metal detector, we were buzzed into another holding area: a frigid, overly air-conditioned, glassed-in room that, for some reason, smelled like day-old urine-soaked diapers. After I slipped my request form through a slot, a guard retrieved it and went to find Leslie.

  A tall, slender woman waved to me from behind the bulletproof glass, and the guard buzzed me through the door. Leslie was dressed in jeans and a red knit turtleneck. Her long ponytail was pulled gracefully to one side. She looked older than I’d expected. Long gone was the flawless radiance of her twenties, a radiance that was apparent even in the grainy black-and-white newspaper photos. At forty-six she was still girlish with soft brown eyes, amber hair, and an almost perfectly shaped, slightly turned-up nose. There were still faint traces of the X she’d seared onto her forehead with a hot bobby pin during the trial. (Manson carved an X on his forehead to symbolize his removal from society, and then the three women followed suit. He subsequently redesigned his into a swastika.)

  It was her winsome, fresh face that made Leslie’s involvement in the horrific events of 1969 so discordant. Susan Atkins, who’d packed a pistol long before hooking up with Manson, looked as though she came out of the womb brash and hard-edged. Patricia Krenwinkel was singularly plain with an atmosphere about her that was both terrified and terrifying. It was easy to imagine that there had been something in each of their early years to explain, if not the murders, at least Manson’s initial claim on them. But Van Houten had the Southern California wholesomeness of a Disney Mousketeer, the quintessential 1950s daddy’s girl. We’d seen her face on TV: Sally Field as Gidget or Robert Young’s perky daughter on Father Knows Best, the one he called Princess.

  Leslie’s charm had been noted by every reporter who ever interviewed her, and while winning supporters, her affability had also been used against her. At her parole hearing earlier that year, Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay warned the board to read between the lines of staff reports highlighting her stellar accomplishments in prison. “Throughout her life she has been outwardly directed, adaptable, very smart, very charming, but she can adapt to evil as well as goodness.”

  She and I sat side by side on chrome and vinyl chairs at long, low Formica tables. The large square room had linoleum floors and the bland functionality of a high school cafeteria. I had expected her to be reticent, but there was an accessible warmth about her that made it easy to talk. She’d taken advantage of every educational and therapeutic opportunity available since she’d arrived at Frontera. In June 1982, she’d earned her BA from Antioch College in a program, since discontinued, in which half the students were inmates, the other half were from the community and attended classes in the prison. She majored in English literature and minored in psychology, studying with a professor who was a pro-tégé of Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who took up where Jean Piaget left off in the study of the moral development of children. For reasons both personal and academic, Leslie was captivated by the subject. According to reports, her class participation was excellent, her term papers original, and she eventually became the professor’s teaching assistant. At the time of my first visit, she worked as head clerk for a program administrator, a job for which she earned $53 a month. Over the years she’d been involved in a variety of philanthropic enterprises: she started a program called “sharing our stitches,” in which the inmates made quilts for homeless people; she tutored inmates who needed remedial work before they could enter a GED preparation program; she also read for a non-profit group that produced audio books for blind adolescent girls.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said at one point when she was describing her many activities.

  “That’s a lifelong pattern,” she said, smiling. “When I was in high school, one of my teachers said I was involved in so many extracurricular activities, my photo was on every page of the yearbook.”

  I struggled with how I could artfully ask her how much of her altruistic activities were motivated by guilt. She anticipated my question.

  “I have a lot to atone for but it’s always difficult to know exactly what motivates people. I do know that at least some of my motivation comes from wanting to live the most productive life I can possibly live even though I’m in prison.” She added that although she feels an unfathomable amount of remorse, she also knows its limitations.

  “There is nothing I can do, nothing, that can undo the harm that I caused. I don’t kid myself about that. There is nothing I can do to fill the holes that were left in people’s lives.”

  As I walked out of the prison, I was flooded with contradictory emotions. Trying to reconcile the brutality of the murders with the human being I had just met was dizzying. I got in my car and sat watching relatives and friends climb into theirs—they all looked stunned and exhausted, too, no doubt a projection on my part. For them, it was probably just another visiting day.

  chapter six

  WALLET ON THE BEACH

  1996

  After I left the prison, I drove to a nearby McDonald’s to reconstruct the interview. I found a corner booth and as I started to scribble notes, I picked up enough snippets of conversation from surrounding tables to realize that the people around me eating burgers had also been visiting inmates at Frontera. There seemed to be an equal number who’d been visiting the nearby men’s prison. But these friends and relatives displayed none of the emotion I thought I saw in the faces and body language in the parking lot. “Betty seemed to be in a good mood today,” said one man who, I assumed from his age, was the father of an inmate. That was as intense as it got. But later, as I started to pack up my stuff to leave, I overheard a couple sitting at the next table talk about someone I presumed to be their son. The woman was weeping.

  “He’s lost so much weight,” she said.

  “Honey, he’s okay. He’ll be okay,” the man said. “You’ve got to stop worrying.”

  This was an echo of long-ago endless conversations between my parents in the early days of my brother’s incarceration in the very same prison: my mother’s chronic worry and her resulting insomnia; my father’s concern for her alternating with his irritation at her fretting; his own worry about my brother mixed with his fury at the crime he had committed.

  When I first visited my brother, he was in the maximum-security section. I went there alone because it was midweek and my parents were both working. I was eighteen, a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley. We sat face-to-face, a heavy glass partition between us, and talked through a telephone. My tall, handsome brother, confident in the eyes of the outside world, seemed diminished, shriveled by the surroundings. He professed to be fine, just fine. In his first letter to me from prison he’d quoted the seventeenth-century poet Richard Lovelace, “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage” (“To Althea, From Prison”). But no matter what he claimed, it was clear that the stone walls of this prison were very thick indeed. He’d lost a lot of weight and his fingernails were pitted
, eaten up by psoriasis. Before he went to prison, this disease had been mild. Now there was nothing mild about his disfigured fingernails.

  I hadn’t seen him since the summer before. It had been a rough summer. Actually, his relationship with my parents had been tumultuous since he had dropped out of college a few years before. He’d been living in an apartment in Hollywood with friends and working on and off at a string of low-paying jobs. In short, my parents’ dreams for him had not panned out. He had a girlfriend who they didn’t think was of his caliber, though at that point no one knew exactly what that caliber was, and whatever it was he seemed determined to click it down as far below their expectations as he could.

  My role in our family was to be my brother’s advocate, his defender. I loved him steadfastly but anxiously, and every time he got into a brawl with my parents and stormed out of the house I worried that I would never see him again. And then one night, the brawl was so loud and so intense that I was sure I would never see him again. He had come for dinner, and we’d almost made it to dessert when all hell broke loose. I can’t remember what the fight was about. I just remember I backed out of the dining room and into my bedroom and put Ray Charles on my record player, turning the volume up to drown out the shouting. Then, the shouting stopped and I heard a knock on my door.

  When I opened it, my brother’s eyes were fiery with rage, but he was also tearful. “Good-bye, sis,” he said, putting his arms around me. There was a finality in his voice that frightened me. I was right to be frightened. He stopped calling home. After a few weeks, my mother, who was ill from sleeplessness, finally called him. His phone had been disconnected. My father drove by his apartment in Hollywood. It was one of those stucco multiplexes with names like Palm Gardens or Bougainvillea Plaza. The manager said that he’d moved out owing rent and had left no forwarding address. My father was a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service and pretty good at finding people, but he couldn’t find my brother.

  That was June. Then, one Saturday in August, I came home to find a Santa Monica police officer in the living room talking to my parents. My brother’s wallet had been found on the beach in Santa Monica, miles away from his apartment in Hollywood; my parents’ address in Silver Lake was on his driver’s license. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my mother crying. My parents were in the kitchen. My father was cooking scrambled eggs.

  “Sweetheart,” my father said, “I know he’s fine. He probably just lost his wallet.” My mother worried out loud that he was dead. I worried, too, but for some reason I felt that expressing it would be disloyal to my brother. I feigned confidence that he was fine and, along with my father, adopted a you worry too much attitude with my overwrought mother. By the time I returned to school in Berkeley in the fall, there was still no word.

  On my eighteenth birthday at the end of September, girls on my floor at Davidson Hall gathered in my room to eat the German chocolate cake my mother had sent. Just as one of my friends lit the candles the phone rang.

  “It’s your brother,” my roommate said, “he wants to wish you a happy birthday.”

  chapter seven

  MRS. TATE’S FURY

  1996

  The day before my next visit to the prison, I spent some time at the Ontario Public Library to research the history of women’s prisons in California, generally, and Frontera, specifically. I came away with a new appreciation for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The organization is often maligned because of its part in the establishment of Prohibition, but it turns out the group was also involved in prison reform for women. (Their diligence was also a factor in getting the vote for women in 1919.)

  Until 1932, women prisoners lived at San Quentin where they were housed in makeshift quarters called “the bear pit.” There were no windows, no source of heat, and the smell was oppressive because the slop buckets were stored in something called a “hopper” inside the pit. The women were never allowed outside to exercise or breathe fresh air for fear they would try to talk with male inmates. Through the work of the WCTU, the women were finally transferred in the 1930s to marginally improved quarters at a prison in the Tehachapi Mountains where they remained until the current prison was built in 1955.

  The first name selected for the new prison was Corona after a small nearby town—a fact resolutely opposed by the Corona town fathers who succeeded, ten years later, in persuading the Department of Corrections to change it. The prison was rechristened Frontera, the Spanish word for frontier. According to a prison pamphlet, the word was selected to convey a new beginning, a fresh start—a reflection of the optimistic spirit that guided the staff in those days.

  It would soon become clear to me that the prison’s trajectory from that early optimism to abject negativity and the shift in focus from rehabilitation to punishment was connected to the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The seeds of destruction of prison reform were planted on those two horror-filled nights. The crusade to replace prison reform with the primacy of victims’ rights was, in large measure, fueled by the fury and the anguish of Doris Tate, Sharon Tate’s mother, and continued by Sharon’s sisters Patti and Debra. But in 1971, when Leslie, Susan, and Pat arrived at Frontera, the state was still committed to providing the necessary components of rehabilitation—education, vocational training, psychotherapy, and family unification—even to women facing the death penalty.

  According to the local newspaper, the Ontario Daily Report, as soon as the warden at Frontera, Mrs. Iverne Carter, learned that the Manson women were sentenced to death, she asked the state to build a new structure to house them. Frontera was ill-equipped to meet their needs. Executions of women were so rare—there had only been four in California since 1893—that only one death penalty cell had been built and it was occupied at the time by Jean Oliver Carver, who was convicted of beating a woman evangelist to death with a rock during a robbery.

  The warden’s request was denied and instead, a miniature death row was hastily created in an unused wing of the administration building. A crew of workers from the nearby men’s prison at Chino were brought in to build three tiny cells—each one seven and a half by nine feet and placed side by side—that were sealed off from the rest of the building by heavy steel doors. They also installed strong bars on the doors and windows and mesh between the bars to prevent the women from reaching through.

  On April 19, 1971, in an interview in the Ontario Daily Report, Mrs. Carter, described as an energetic, sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, confessed that she was troubled by the grimness of the quarters. But she said each cell would be equipped with a nine-inch black-and-white television set, and, if the women behaved themselves, they would be allowed to spend some time each day in the hundred-foot-long exercise yard that was built next to the cells. The yard was concrete except for a tiny patch of grass where, according to Mrs. Carter, the women could sit or meditate.

  The warden said she was determined to keep the three alive and well while they awaited the gas chamber. After all, she told the reporter, circumstances could change and it was possible that the women would some day be useful to society. (And, indeed, circumstances did change in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty as it was then written and carried out in most states constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.)

  chapter eight

  LIVING WITHOUT HOPE

  September 1996

  The first time I met Pat Krenwinkel we only had a few minutes to talk. For some reason, my application to visit was approved just ten minutes before the end of visiting hours. It was an awkward ten minutes. Unlike the welcoming tone of her letters, she was not initially friendly and there was no time for ice breaking to ease us into conversation. I blurted a clumsy “What’s it like to live here?”

  She didn’t pause to think about her reply. “I live every day knowing that I will leave nothing behind when I die that isn’t ugly.” Her answer took my breath away. “The worst thing about bein
g here is living every day of my life without hope. They might as well have executed me.”

  The next time I saw her, a month later, I was again struck by her cheerlessness but also by how unadorned she was. Unadorned in her appearance, her language, her outlook. I associate my early impressions of Pat with the color gray. Grayness seemed to envelop her. Some of it was actual—she often wore a stone-gray sweatshirt almost the same color as her short, neatly trimmed hair—but there was an atmosphere of unrelenting bleakness surrounding her.

  When I’d first written to her requesting an interview, I received a response a month later consenting to the interview and thanking me for sending her copies of my articles, articles she said she’d read carefully. She referred specifically to a series I’d done on Werner Erhard, founder of EST, in which many former followers accused him of operating a cult. Patricia wrote that there were similarities between the techniques used by Erhard, Charles Manson, and “many more power-seeking individuals.” (Both men had been influenced by the methods of Scientology.)

  I hadn’t given much thought to the articles I’d sent (my purpose was just to show her that I was a serious journalist concerned with serious issues), but after receiving her letter, I reread the Erhard series. In one of the articles, two of Erhard’s daughters described a family dinner when they were teenagers in which their father’s staff beat up their mother, Ellen Erhard, knocking her down, pulling her hair. They claimed that their father, after ordering the assault, sat and watched, his own hands unsullied. He had accused her of infidelity and wanted his staff to coerce her into confessing.