Finally she returned to Los Angeles to live with her father and attend University High. She made a few friends and her grades were okay, but she described her life at that time as dreary. She started smoking marijuana. After high school, she moved back to Alabama, enrolling in a teacher’s course at Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile. After one semester she decided she didn’t want to be a teacher, so she dropped out and returned to L.A. There she moved in with her sister, who was living in Manhattan Beach, and landed a job as a claims clerk at an insurance company. It was less than ideal.
Her sister’s life was in disarray; she’d had a short turbulent marriage and she’d started using hard drugs. (Four years later, Charlene died of an overdose of heroin. One of Pat’s painful memories is the last letter her sister wrote to Pat’s father. “She essentially begged for his love.”)
While living with her sister, Pat’s social life centered around a group of Marines who were stationed at Camp Pendleton. She dated a couple of them and was drinking buddies with all of them. “Sometimes they’d even sneak me onto the base. I loved being with them. One by one they were shipped off to Vietnam and it stopped being fun and games—some of them were dying over there.”
I asked her if losing friends to the war made her political. It was, after all, 1967 and there were many opportunities to organize against the war. “No,” she said. “The only thing political about me was the music I listened to. I loved folk music—The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez.”
One night Billy Greene, a friend of her sister’s, came by with a prison buddy who played the guitar and sang songs like “The Shadow of Your Smile.” His name was Charles Manson. He had a tough-but-wounded James Dean look. Pat swooned. That night, she and Charlie made love and he told her she was beautiful. “He said, ‘You should never be ashamed of your body.’ I couldn’t believe it. I had always been ashamed of my body. No one had ever called me beautiful. I started to cry.”
Charlie seemed to know things about her no one else did—secret fears, secret dreams—and she was convinced that he had psychic powers. Much later, much, much later, she learned that his skills weren’t supernatural, just super vigilant. “He knew how to pay attention to people’s strengths and weaknesses and he knew how to use that information to manipulate people,” she said. He’d acquired a bag of tricks in prison—some were literally tricks using playing cards and sleight-of-hand maneuvers—which also caused people to believe he possessed extraordinary powers.
After a couple of days, Manson invited her to travel with him to Northern California. Because she felt adrift, because she wanted something to matter, she said yes. “You can’t imagine what a relief it is when you have no idea what to do with your life and then someone comes along and tells you exactly what to do with it.”
It’s a decision she’s replayed in her mind many times over the years. “I was desperate for direction and I wanted so much to have someone I could hold on to and call my own.”
Though she didn’t know it immediately, she couldn’t, in fact, call Charlie her own. By the time they got to Santa Barbara, she discovered that he already had two other women—Mary Brunner and Lynette Fromme.
When Manson was first released from prison, he started hanging out in Berkeley. One day when he was sitting on the grass on the U.C. campus strumming his guitar, he met Mary, a serious, twenty-year-old blonde from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. After graduation from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in history, she’d gotten a job as an assistant librarian at U.C. When he told her he had no place to live, she invited him to stay with her while he looked for housing on the condition that there was to be no sex. But her Midwestern values were useless against Manson’s allure. She not only had sex with him, she tolerated his having sex with other women in her apartment while she was at work.
Mary soon quit her job and the two took off in a VW bus that Manson had somehow acquired, driving up and down the coast, stopping for a while and then moving on. On one foray to Los Angeles, he met Lynette Fromme at Venice Beach. According to Pat, Lynette was a feisty nineteen-year-old with red hair and freckles. She was from a comfortable middle-class family and, as a little girl, was close to her father but that fractured when she reached adolescence. She had attempted suicide twice after arguments with him, cutting her wrists on one occasion, taking barbiturates on another. It was after another serious argument with him that she met Manson.
“I really liked Mary and Lynette,” Pat said. “In many ways my attachment to them, and later to the other women, was as important to me as my relationship with Charlie.”
They continued to shuttle up and down the coast, alighting in the Haight, in Berkeley, and in Santa Cruz. “It was an exciting adventure for me. We’d stop into coffee houses and Charlie would play the guitar and sing pretty Spanish love songs. Everyone loved him. We’d meet more people. He’d collect more girls.”
There was a pattern to Manson’s recruitment. “Charlie had his front street girls, pretty girls who he used to lure men into the family, and his backstreet girls who were useful for their work and their loyalty to him. I was a backstreet girl. I was the designated mother. I cooked, I did the laundry and ironing, and I took care of the children, though I didn’t have a child of my own.” (Several of the young women in the group did have young children, including Mary Brunner, who had a son with Manson.)
On September 25, 1967, Pat sent her father a letter from San Francisco. “ ‘For the very first time in my life, I’ve found contentment and inner peace. I love you very much. Take good care of yourself.’ ”
chapter twenty
“THEY WERE ON A TEAR”
July 2001, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
Pat’s father lived in an assisted living facility in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The town is named after an Indian tribe indigenous to the area. (Coeur d’Alene was the French name for the tribe, and it literally means “awl heart.” The speculation is that perhaps the tribesmen were sharp traders.) It’s a pretty little town with a lake in the center. In 2001, the year I visited, most people had heard more about neighboring Sand Point, home of the recently relocated Mark Fuhrman, one of the investigating police officers in the O.J. Simpson trial.
The facility where Mr. Krenwinkel lived had a fresh, well-scrubbed atmosphere: the hallway carpet was periwinkle and gave off a new, slightly chemical odor; the walls were papered in a cheerful, sky-blue floral pattern. I stopped at a reception desk and there was a woman, presumably a nurse, scribbling in what I assumed was a chart. I said, “Hello” and stood waiting to be acknowledged. She didn’t look up or ask if she could help me. Finally, I cleared my throat. Still no response.
“I’m looking for Mr. Joseph Krenwinkel,” I said, raising my voice.
At the mention of his name, she not only looked up, her face brightened into a broad, welcoming smile.
“Oh, he is such a sweet gentleman,” she said. “They don’t make them like him anymore. I wish I could escort you to his room but I can’t leave the nurses’ station unattended . . . wait, I’ll call someone to help you.”
“Thank you, but I’m sure I can find it.”
“Please wait,” she said firmly. “I’ll get someone.”
Finally a nurse’s aide arrived and asked me to follow her. As we walked down the hall, she said, “Mr. Krenwinkel is such a gentleman, so well-mannered.”
On each resident’s door there was an object meant to personalize the occupant—athletic team banners, teddy bears, Raggedy Ann dolls. On Mr. Krenwinkel’s door, there was a straw wreath studded with brightly colored papier-mâché flowers.
When I had asked Pat about visiting him, she was enthusiastic. She hadn’t seen him much since he had moved away from California several years before. She’d explained that he was too old to travel, but they corresponded and talked on the phone regularly. When I wrote to ask him for an interview, he responded quickly with a note inviting me to visit.
I knew from Pat that after she went to prison, he had no ot
her family. Neighbors had taken him under their wing and had served as his family since. When they moved to Idaho from Southern California, he moved also.
One of Pat’s cousins similarly looked after her mother, who I briefly met when she was living with that cousin in Pacifica. She kept in touch with Pat but was not eager to talk to me and had very little to say about Pat in the past or the present. I wasn’t sure if she’d been talked out years ago or simply didn’t like the intrusion.
When Mr. Krenwinkel opened his door, he extended his hand. I’d say he was in his early eighties. His handshake was steady, as was his smile. He had clearly prepared for my visit; though it was summer, he was dressed in a starched white shirt, a dark tie, and a blazer. As soon as I sat down and we started to talk, however, it was also clear that I was too late. Perhaps a year or so too late. I don’t think Pat knew that he had dementia. I imagine their phone conversations had long ago become routine and ritualized. I’m sure they talked about the easy things: the weather, the meals at their respective institutions, his surrogate family. He easily managed the niceties with me. It was only when I gingerly approached the topic of Pat’s arrest that it became clear he could only manage conversations he’d had many times before.
“Yes, those kids went on a tear,” he said. “There wasn’t much her mother or I could do.”
He repeated that expression—on a tear—many more times before I left. It stayed with me for a long time. Not only because it was ludicrously understated, or because he repeated it so often, but also because it seemed to summarize a way a dad might explain his only child’s behavior to himself, to the outside world. Also, the expression was evocative of a bygone era. I hadn’t heard it since I was a little girl.
I’m not sure what I’d been hoping would be revealed by our interview, and there wasn’t much, if anything, in the way of content, but even in his slightly addled state, what came through was his love for his daughter. It was clear he would have done anything for the little girl she’d been, the girl she became, and the young woman who was in a place where there was very little he could do for her. He may not have understood her or why she went on a tear that resulted in many murders, but in his eyes you could see that it hadn’t changed the feelings he’d had for the baby who played quietly by herself in her crib or the little girl he took on walks in Westchester to see LAX being built. She was still that little girl.
A few months after that visit, I got a letter from his surrogate daughter who had found my note among his belongings. “I knew you would want to know that he passed away on September 3rd. Joe is at peace now. He was a dear man.”
chapter twenty-one
DREAMING OF HITLER
During the trip to Europe with my parents in 1956 I started having dreams about Hitler, dreams that appeared fairly regularly for about a year. They weren’t all nightmares, though some certainly qualified. The setting and circumstances varied. Sometimes Hitler was sitting at a podium the way a judge does, or in the really scary ones, he was actually about to plunge a knife into me. The constant was that I begged him not to kill me. “Please don’t kill me. I’m only a little girl.” (Sometimes I would say, “I know I’m tall but I’m actually a little girl.”)
I always woke up before he killed me. For a long time, even after I learned the particulars of the Holocaust, I believed that such an appeal would work with any killer, if I were the one who made it in my most sincere, tearful, and heartfelt way. It was as though I thought no one else ever thought of that strategy. When I was older I learned how often murder victims plead for their lives and how, in reality, it almost never makes a difference. Later, when I read in Helter Skelter that Sharon Tate pleaded with Susan Atkins not to kill her or her unborn child, it rekindled the terror I had in those Hitler dreams.
This ushered in an era in my life when I was confused about my Jewishness, a confusion that continued the following year when I entered high school. I didn’t have a Jewish name and, though I had dark hair and dark eyes, no one identified me as Jewish. (Probably for the same reason I didn’t think Catherine was Jewish. She, too, had dark hair and dark eyes, but her last name was Share, which didn’t sound Jewish to me.) Because no one detected my Jewish heritage, people didn’t bother to hold back anti-Semitic comments.
My mother once said, half-kidding, or maybe not: “You scratch the surface of any gentile, and you’ll find an anti-Semite.” Keep in mind, she was married to a gentile. My father, in fact, was more sensitive to anti-Semitism than she. Between the two of them, my antenna for bigotry was sturdily constructed. Perhaps some of what my parents labeled anti-Semitic was benign and born out of ignorance—to me there’s a difference between an artless joke involving a Jew with a long nose and a mean-spirited observation about Jews being greedy, dishonest and conniving. But when I was in high school I didn’t see the difference and sometimes, especially among the older girls in my club, I felt I was in hostile territory.
I don’t want to be melodramatic about it. I didn’t suffer the way young gays did (and do). Not even close. What weighed heavily on me in high school was not the anti-Semitic remarks; it was my lack of courage in challenging them. It wasn’t until college when I was open about my Jewish heritage that I experienced actual hatred against Jews in a very personal way.
chapter twenty-two
THE NEED FOR A SCAPEGOAT
One day when I was with Leslie in the visiting room, Susan Atkins stopped by our table to say hello. She was startlingly manicured—she had the look of someone who just walked out of a beauty parlor. Her coordinated clothing ensemble, her well-coiffed hair, and her jewelry all combined to give her the put-together persona of a real estate agent who shops at Nordstrom. This was a stark contrast to both Pat and Leslie. Pat had given up on adornment; Leslie was still allowed to dye her hair but had a natural, wholesome look.
Maybe Susan’s attention to her appearance had something to do with being married. Every time I saw her in the visiting area, she was with her husband. Leslie introduced me, indicating that I was a writer. I explained that my focus was still undetermined but that I would very much like to interview her. She was pleasant and said she’d be happy to meet with me, adding, “Write me a letter and remind me of this conversation.” In my career as a journalist, this was a request I’d heard countless times but always from busy politicians or celebrities, never from an inmate in prison.
I wrote to her later that week and, as I had with Pat and Leslie, sent her copies of articles I’d written. She wrote back, sending me what looked very much like a public relations press packet. It contained generic letters to her supporters that were filled with born-again Christian rhetoric. She attached a personal note indicating that she was sorry but she would have to decline my request to meet because she had promised a filmmaker that she would not talk to anyone else, adding, “I take giving my word very seriously.”
It seemed odd that she hadn’t mentioned that at the time Leslie introduced us and she invited me to write to her. Since I knew the filmmaker to whom she referred, I called and asked if she had required Susan to make such a promise. She was surprised. She said she had only asked that she not be interviewed by another filmmaker until she’d completed the documentary she’d was working on. (That project had been stalled indefinitely because of the prison’s new restrictions.)
I suppose it’s possible that Susan misunderstood the filmmaker’s request, but I doubt it because of her initial enthusiasm. I believe she changed her mind and, for some reason, didn’t want to acknowledge it. I can’t say exactly why, but Susan’s duplicity didn’t surprise me; it only reinforced my negative feelings about her. Since the first time I’d read accounts of the murders, there was something about Susan that inspired in me more anger than any of the other women. She wasn’t any more guilty than Pat, who’d also participated both nights, but forty years later, it was still hard to get some of her declarations out of my head. Not only did she brag about tasting Sharon Tate’s blood to her cell mates, she told the grand j
ury that when Sharon begged for her life, for her baby’s life, Susan replied, “I have no mercy for you, woman!” Almost all of her quotes had an element of braggadocio about them. And she was a liar. She kept changing her story. Even what she bragged about kept changing. In his 1979 memoir, Tex Watson referred to Susan’s need for attention.
When she wrote that she was a person who took her promises seriously, it seemed to be in the context of her born-again Christianity—a prevalent conversion in prisons. It may be a perfectly fine route for redemption of a kind, but it’s not necessarily a path to self-examination. My experience is anecdotal, not scientific, but I have interviewed enough born-again child molesters, rapists, and murderers to conclude that this conversion does not automatically lead to insight.
There’s something else about my feelings regarding Susan that bears parsing. It’s a phenomenon that has surfaced repeatedly over the years and that I have observed in myself and others. I believe I was actually relieved when Susan ultimately declined the interview because, by continuing to be at a remove, she served as a scapegoat, a scapegoat that was useful in helping me integrate some of the horror of the crimes. I explore this further in a subsequent chapter, but suffice it to say, my problem with Susan wasn’t all Susan’s fault.
The day Leslie introduced me to Susan, she also introduced me to Susan’s husband, James Whitehouse. I’d seen him in the parking lot driving a turquoise car that seemed, if not exactly a low-rider’s vehicle, first cousin to one. His appearance—very long stringy dirty-blond hair and a goatee—was at odds with Susan’s put-together look. A goatee can give a man a slightly menacing look, but on Mr. Whitehouse, it made him look more anemic than sinister. I was curious about the origins of their relationship. My gender is notorious for being attracted to violent men in prison. (Over the years, while on death row, serial killer Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, has had dozens of women competing for his attention.) But men, generally, do not seek out paramours who are serving life sentences for murder.
The Manson Women and Me Page 10
