The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  What about blood lust? Blood lust is not a clinical term, though it crops up in a lot of both fictional and non-fictional accounts of murderers, usually referring to serial killers. When used in popular culture it seems generic, covering many pathologies, including sadism. I have the sense that when Browning referred to it in the context of the Nazis, he was using it synonymously with bloodthirsty. Either way, there’s no indication that it pertained to either Pat or Leslie. Susan Atkins is another story. There is a clinically recognized blood fetish, hematolagnia, which refers to people who are aroused by the sight, smell, and taste of blood. If I had been able to interview Susan Atkins before she died, how would she have explained her boast to her cell mates about tasting Sharon Tate’s blood?

  In October 2015, Father Desbois told 60 Minutes that among the many disturbing lessons the Ukrainian villagers taught him about human nature is the universality of our propensity to violence. “I learned everybody can be a killer, anybody can be a victim.” Given how hard he’s worked on the Ukrainian project and how committed to humanity he is, what he added was odd and more than a little disheartening—the fact that he expressed it in the second person made his conclusion feel more personal, more pointed and more chilling: “I learned that you like to see other people dying in front of you, killed by other people, when you are sure you will not be killed.”

  chapter sixteen

  “IS THERE ANYTHING WORSE THAN DYING IN TERROR?”

  1996

  The next time I saw Leslie, I mentioned that I had watched several videos of her parole hearings and I asked whether she got tired of having to repeat the details of the murders over and over again, decade after decade. After all, everyone on those panels had heard the description before.

  “It’s horrible to have to repeat those details,” she said, “but I completely understand why they have to keep asking. They have to be sure that I acknowledge what happened . . . all of it. And,” she added, “the parole board has to be sure that I not only take responsibility for the consequences, they have to be sure I understand the full extent of those consequences.” She talked about the holes that were left in the LaBianca family, pointing out that Frank, who was fifteen, had to grow up without a mother, and his older sister, Suzan, lost the benefit of her mother’s love when she was a young adult. “When I was her age, my mother was so important to me and my survival. I don’t know if I would have made it without her.

  “And it didn’t stop there,” she said. “Another generation was deprived of having Rosemary as a grandmother and Leno as a grandfather. And so it continues. It’s so unfair.”

  I told her that while I appreciated her honesty—she never backed away from acknowledging how much the LaBiancas have suffered—I had a hard time wrapping my head around the situation. If she claimed that she had amnesia or was so awash in adrenaline it affected her memory, it might be more understandable. But at the time of the murders, she recognized how horrible it was for Mrs. LaBianca to hear her husband being killed in the other room and yet she felt no empathy, no basic human feeling for either of them.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said, shaking her head. “I wish I understood. I don’t. When I was still able to have one-toone therapy, that’s what we were working on. And then the state stopped offering individual therapy so it had to end.”

  While she doesn’t understand her absence of feeling then, she says she feels a deep sadness for the LaBiancas now. “Is there anything worse than that . . . to die in terror?”

  At some point we shifted from the topic of the murders to the topic of long-term coping with difficult circumstances. We talked for a while about how important resilience is. Can one acquire it? We agreed that it’s probably, like so many things, a little bit of nature, a little bit of nurture.

  I said that in the short time I’d known her, her mood generally seemed good, in spite of having been in prison for decades. She said she was an optimist by nature, but acknowledged that she couldn’t help occasionally mourning the life she’d never have. It was not a thought she allowed herself to have for long. “When I think about what I did to that family, how can I allow myself the luxury of mourning anything about my life?”

  On the drive back to Santa Monica, I thought about the circle of grief that Leslie talked about. Of course, she couldn’t help mourning the life she’d never have, the life she apparently had been destined to have. But as soon as she allowed herself those feelings, she was slammed with guilt over being both a survivor and a murderer. Mourning can be cleansing and therapeutic but not if, every time you feel it, you punish yourself for feeling it. I don’t think she was asking for sympathy from me; she was simply stating the circular nature of grief in her situation. I also realized that many people, unless they know her, would feel nothing but scorn for this problem.

  chapter seventeen

  THE EMPATHIC BRAIN

  1991

  In recent years, empathy has become a hot topic among researchers. Once considered a bonus, a perk of civilization, empathy is now increasingly viewed as a fundamental requirement for human survival. Primatologist Dr. Frans de Waal maintains that primates, both human and non-human, are hardwired for empathy and that empathy has deep roots in the origin of our species. “It begins in the body, a deep unconscious synchrony between mother and child that sets the tone for so many mammalian interactions,” he writes in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

  If, as de Waal suggests, empathy is hardwired in the brain, the neurons that are possibly responsible are a relatively new discovery.

  On a hot and humid day in the summer of 1991 in Parma, Italy, a macaque monkey sat in a lab waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Wires had been implanted in his brain—the region of the brain that’s involved in planning and carrying out movements. Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, that region of his brain fired and registered a brrrrrip sound on the monitor. A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. When the student raised the cone to his mouth, the monkey’s monitor sounded in the same way it would sound had the monkey raised the cone to his own mouth. He simply watched the student eating the ice cream.

  The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the phenomenon with peanuts. When the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths, the same region of the monkey’s brain fired as though he was bringing the peanut to his own mouth. Likewise, with bananas, raisins, and all kinds of other delicacies.

  The cells that were firing in the monkey’s brain were mirror neurons—brain cells that fire both when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own. This was a very big deal. Ice cream cones all around.

  The discovery was an enormous breakthrough and, according to Dr. Christian Keysers, a professor at the brain and cognition program, University of Amsterdam, it was analogous to finding out that after years of watching television, your television was also watching you. In his book, The Empathic Brain (2011), he explains that mirror neurons allow us to feel the other person’s distress or pain as our own.

  V. S. Ramachandran, a pioneer in mirror neuron research, calls these neurons “empathy neurons” or “Dalai Lama neurons.” In a 2007 article titled “The Neurology of Self-Awareness” in Edge, an online publication, he wrote that mirror neurons “dissolve the barrier between self and others.”

  The theory is that mirror neurons kick in at birth. Studies show that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing. Even more than other primates, human children are hardwired for imitation; mirror neurons are involved in observing what others do and then practice doing the same thing.

  The research on mirror neurons in humans is still in its early phase and like so many issues in science, there’s no consensus. Despite the excitement about the discovery in monkeys, the claims about the role they pl
ay in the human brain is premature. For one thing, the kind of measuring that’s done on monkeys is too invasive to be performed on people. As of this writing, there’s been only one study on humans and that was when brain surgery was performed on people with intractable epilepsy. These patients had electrodes implanted into their brains to identify the loci of their seizures; the search for mirror neurons was incidental to the surgical procedure. According to Christian Jarrett, in a 2013 article in Science, that study did find evidence of mirror neurons in the human frontal cortex and temporal lobe but revealed that the term “mirror neurons” actually covers a complex mix of cell types. “This is not to detract from the fascination of mirror neurons. It does show they are not the beginning of a causal path . . . rather they are embedded in a complex network of brain activity” (“A Calm Look at the Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience—Mirror Neurons,” December 12, 2013).

  There are those who maintain that mirror neurons are fixed and innate; others, like Cecelia Heyes, a researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, argue that they are affected by cultural practices just as much as they influence them. Her research shows that learning experiences can reverse, nullify, or exaggerate mirror-like properties in motor cells. These findings would seem to support the idea that Manson’s influence on Pat and Leslie changed their neural systems, but we are years away from proof of that sort of conjecture.

  Much about the development of empathy is still unknown, but according to Frans de Waal, examples of empathy in animals (other than humans) suggest a long evolutionary history. In a UC Berkeley publication, the Greater Good, he argues that empathy is essential to survival. “Without a proper mechanism to understand and respond to the needs of offspring, a species will not survive.” He also points out that empathy plays a role in cooperation—another necessity for survival. “Effective cooperation requires being exquisitely in tune with the emotional states and goals of others.

  “A lioness needs to notice quickly when other lionesses go into hunting mode, so that she can join them and contribute to the pride’s success. A male chimpanzee needs to pay attention to his buddy’s rivalries and skirmishes with others so that he can help out whenever needed, thus ensuring the political success of their partnership” (September 1, 2005).

  One does not usually associate Rhesus monkeys with empathy. They have a well-deserved reputation for being aggressive and dangerous once they reach sexual maturity. I can attest to this having been tackled and bitten by a Rhesus monkey named Harriet. (A friend had somehow acquired her believing she would make a wonderful pet. Harriet did not make a wonderful pet, and she especially didn’t like women.)

  Because of the breed’s ferocious character and because of my own experience, I was surprised when I came across the results of a Milgram-inspired study conducted on Rhesus monkeys (Masser-man, J., S. Wechkin, and W. Terris, Am. J. Psychiatry 121:584–585). Several monkeys were trained to pull on one of two chains, in order to receive food. After they had learned this response, another monkey was placed in an adjacent cage and displayed through a one-way mirror; pulling the chain now caused the monkey in the second cage to receive a painful electric shock. Most of the monkeys would not shock another monkey even if it meant they wouldn’t be able to eat. Some of them went so far as to go without food for five days rather than shock the other monkey. One of the animals went without food for twelve days (italics mine). Further evidence that empathy was involved: monkeys who’d been shocked themselves in previous experiments were even less willing to pull the chain that subjected others to suffering. Clearly Harriet’s empathy did not extend to female Homo sapiens.

  chapter eighteen

  UNFORGETTING RETRIBUTION

  1996

  I looked across the café table at Steve Kay and realized that in spite of some gray hair and wrinkles, I could still see the lean, clean-cut, kind-of-square boy I knew in high school. I immediately felt comfortable with him. I didn’t actually know him anymore but I knew him. There’s something about the familiarity that’s established in adolescence that can persist years later, even without ongoing or even intermittent contact. In high school, he was a nice guy to girls, so nice that he had much better luck attracting friends who were girls than girlfriends, though he had been the boyfriend of one of my best friends until, that is, she threw him over for a sexy, not-as-nice guy.

  After we ordered lunch, we talked about what had happened to the people we knew at Hollywood High and then filled each other in on our families and our careers. I knew from reporters who covered the courts that he had a reputation for being a tough but honest prosecutor; I knew that he’d been awarded deputy prosecutor of the year five years before in 1991. And I knew that he continued to follow all of the people who’d been involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders. I just didn’t know how closely. How single-mindedly. How obsessively.

  He was a young deputy district attorney, only three years out of law school, when he assisted Vincent Bugliosi at the original trial, and he subsequently represented the state in two retrials after the California Supreme Court overturned Leslie’s original conviction. In addition, he’d insisted on representing the district attorney’s office in every single parole hearing, not only of Manson, who had no hope of release anyway, but of any and all of the people connected to the case. One L.A. Times reporter characterized him as “the leading voice for unforgetting retribution” and likened him to the obsessed prosecutor in Les Misérables.

  We discussed the fact that since the Tate-LaBianca murders there had been an increasing emphasis on victims’ rights—in large part because of the work of Sharon Tate’s mother and sisters—that had culminated in the victims’ rights bill in 1982, which gave victims and their families a greater role in sentencing and parole hearings. We also argued affably about the Three Strikes sentencing law. Like most prosecutors, he believed it worked. Most other people I knew, judges and defense attorneys, thought it was a terrible law. But when we went back to talking about victims and the families of victims and how important it was that they be given ample opportunity to be heard, there was little he said with which I disagreed. “Moving on with one’s life after the trauma is difficult and painful,” he said. “Participating in the court process helps families move on.”

  Steve told me he had been close to Doris Tate, Sharon’s mother, before she died in 1992 of a brain tumor; and he continued his relationship with her two remaining daughters, Patti and Debra. He suggested that if I wanted to learn more about the family’s involvement with victims’ rights, I talk to Patti Tate and he said he would arrange it. He also invited me to attend a trial he would soon be prosecuting. I accepted the invitation.

  chapter nineteen

  DUES-PAYING MEMBER OF THE LITTLE WILDLIFE SOCIETY

  1947–1969

  On December 3, 1947, Patricia Krenwinkel was born into what is now called a blended family. Her mother, Dorothy, a young widow with a child from her first marriage, moved from Mobile, Alabama, to Los Angeles where she married Joe Krenwinkel in 1944. When Patricia was born, her half sister Charlene was seven.

  The family lived in Westchester, the section of Los Angeles where LAX is located. Pat’s mother was a housewife, her father an insurance agent; both parents were active in the community. They organized neighborhood Easter egg hunts, Halloween parades, and Christmas parties; they taught Bible School; her mother was a member of the World Church Women’s Council, helped out with the Campfire Girls, and went door to door for the March of Dimes.

  Pat remembered being especially close to her father, a man she described as gentle and kind. A cherished memory from her childhood was walking hand-in-hand with him down the street on weekends to survey, in wonder, the progress of the construction of LAX. Her memories of her relationship with her father were marred only by the fact that he was not as involved with her half sister Charlene—a persistent source of pain for Charlene and, hence, for Pat.

  Pat described her mother as warmhearted, a woman who was
always concerned about society’s underdogs. “I remember down-on-their-luck guys coming to our door and asking to work for food. She would always give them something to eat.”

  As a kid, Pat read the Bible, sang in the church choir, and had a vast collection of pets: dogs, hamsters, goldfish, parakeets, canaries. She was a dues-paying member of the Little Wildlife Society.

  During the penalty phase of the trial, her parents testified to what a perfect little girl she’d been. They were clearly still stunned by their daughter’s involvement in seven murders, and some of their testimony reads, point by point, like a rebuttal to the standard warning signs of a future serial killer: she was gentle with animals; she was never cruel to other children, in fact never even fought with other children; she belonged to normal childhood organizations; she liked going to the beach; she never lost her temper; she got good grades; she was so cooperative at school, her teacher loved having her in class; she was a good Presbyterian; she read the Bible with enthusiasm; as a teenager, she never got in trouble with police, never even got a traffic ticket.

  “Pat,” her mother testified, as recounted in Helter Skelter, “was one of those babies who would wake up in the morning and play in her crib for hours without crying.” And her mother remembered that when she was a little older, she’d spend many uncomplaining hours in an indoor swing.

  She may have seemed contented as a baby, but Pat remembers growing up in an atmosphere of “hushed desperation” and loneliness. She always felt loved by her parents, but that acceptance was not matched by her experience at school, where she had few friends. As she entered adolescence, the security at home vanished. There was no yelling, no acrimony, but the tension mounted. Her father started sleeping on the couch in the den. Pat got quieter and withdrew. Meanwhile, her sister Charlene acted out—she was sexually promiscuous and she abused drugs. Pat’s parents divorced when she was seventeen and her mother moved back to Alabama, taking Pat with her. Pat was miserable there. She always had trouble making friends, but it was worse in Alabama. The kids at the high school she attended were suspicious of Yankees.