The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  Emile Bruneau, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, has spent years studying intractable conflicts around the world including Israelis and Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, Mexican immigrants and Americans along the Arizona border, and Democrats and Republicans. As part of his research, he’s analyzed programs designed to improve relations between antagonistic groups. Increasing empathy is a central goal of every conflict resolution program he has examined, but he now believes that increasing empathy might be exactly the opposite of what’s needed to reduce conflict.

  According to Bruneau, there is a widespread assumption that the type of people who engage in political violence are sociopaths, but he contends that is not the reality. When I interviewed him in early 2015, he said that suicide bombers tend to be characterized by very high levels of empathy. “Increasing empathy might be great at improving pro-social behavior among individuals, but a program that succeeds in boosting an individual’s empathy for his or her own group might actually increase hostility toward the enemy.”

  His theory is that the mind generates an “empathy gap” when considering an enemy. It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes. He said we don’t know what mechanism controls this, but he believes that it has nothing to do with how empathic a person is by nature. “Even the most deeply empathetic people can mute their empathy signals under the right circumstances.”

  Bruneau points out that empathy is flexible and that flexibility is a feature of being human. “Milgram and Zimbardo have demonstrated that context can be far more powerful than our own values and personality traits in determining how we treat other people.”

  I told Bruneau that his theory helped me understand the gap in empathy displayed by Pat and Leslie but, it was still puzzling to me that it took them so long to reconnect with the values with which they were raised. He said it was also puzzling to him.

  When I think of the importance of context and the way a group influences the perception of its members, I think about Leslie’s unswerving loyalty to the Family after she was arrested. There is very little in this saga that’s amusing, but there is one thing that always makes me smile. At a time when the country was reeling from fright and the Manson Family had infiltrated the nation’s collective psyche, Leslie provided the pull quote of the year, if not the century when she told her interrogator, Sergeant Michael McGann, without a hint of irony, “You couldn’t find a nicer group of people.”

  chapter forty-one

  PAT’S ANGER

  Fall of 1998

  Once again, I was late, and once again Pat was chilly, but today there seemed to be an extra iciness. I didn’t want to ask her directly what was wrong—with Pat that didn’t usually work—so I steered the conversation to something I’d been wanting to ask her. I told her I’d noticed in a parole report that one of her jobs at the prison was training women to fight fires (as a lifer, she wasn’t allowed to travel to fight fires herself), and I know she’d received commendations for this work.

  “What happened to that job?” I asked.

  “I quit,” she said.

  “You didn’t like the work?”

  “I loved the work and I miss it, but the prison cut way back on the amount of training the women received and after that, I just couldn’t do it anymore. In good conscience, I couldn’t send those women out to front lines of dangerous wild fires without adequate training no matter how much I loved the job.”

  She said quitting the job was another manifestation of lessons learned from her relationship with Manson. “When I was with him, I did what I was told. I obeyed. I won’t do that anymore.”

  She said she was passionate about the plight of abused women; she placed the relationship she and the other women had with Manson in that category. She said one of the things she felt guilty about was the role she played with the women. As surrogate mother, she may have made it more comfortable for some of them to stay, women who might otherwise have moved on and gotten out of there before their lives were so messed up.

  She had opinions about everything and considered it a badge of honor that she challenged what she heard and what she read. (She was a fan of The X-Files, whose motto is “trust no one.”) She accepted nothing as true, she said, before investigating it on her own, reading about it, and turning it over in her own mind. She read whatever she could get her hands on in the prison—Newsweek cover to cover every week and, when she borrowed it from Leslie, the New Yorker. She also loved the Nation, which she saw from time to time. She spent her share of time in the prison law library and was particularly fond of Supreme Court opinions written by Justice William O. Douglas.

  An hour into our time together that day, I said that she seemed upset. Had something happened? At first she denied it and then she acknowledged that she’d had a bad week and yes, she was upset, really upset with the psychiatrist who did the evaluation for her last parole hearing. In their session together she’d mentioned an incident that had happened with another inmate, and he used that incident against her in his report.

  An inmate who was on washing dishes detail started horsing around and accidentally sprayed Pat with a hose. According to Pat, the woman was horror-stricken when she realized she’d gotten Pat wet, but Pat’s reaction was to laugh it off and walk away. She mentioned it to the shrink only because she wanted him to know that she was now able to shrug off incidents that once would have angered her. But in his report he wrote that it was evidence of Pat’s insensitivity. He believed the inmate was terrified because she had sprayed “the most notorious woman murderer in the country.” In his opinion, Pat’s laughter at the time was a continuation of the insensitivity to others she showed when she murdered Abigail Folger and the LaBiancas.

  Pat said his interpretation demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the prison culture: “The woman, who, by the way, is covered with tattoos and is a member of a gang, wasn’t afraid because I’m the most notorious woman murderer in the country, she was afraid because gang members seek violent retribution for something as minor as being sprayed with a hose. I can’t tell you how ridiculous it is for him to say that a woman here is more fearful of me than she is of the Crips and the Bloods.”

  Pat’s explanation sounded credible to me, certainly more credible than the psychiatrist’s. (It’s hard for me to get past his use of the word “insensitive” in the context of murder.) But later when I was at McDonald’s writing up my notes, I realized that I had been momentarily bothered by her anger. Not because it signaled that she was dangerous. I didn’t believe that Pat was dangerous. But maybe I do believe that she’s forfeited her right to express anger at anyone . . . ever. It didn’t take long for me to talk myself down from this position. No one can live without expressing anger, especially someone who’s been in prison for as long as she has. Even if you believe that she deserves to be there, the prison/parole system is unimaginably irrational, frustrating, unfair.

  I tried to imagine myself in her situation. I spend an hour—given current budgetary constraints, probably less than an hour—with a psychiatrist who doesn’t know me, and based on one incident that I tell him about, he arms the district attorney with ammunition that damages my record of twenty-seven years of hard work and good behavior. How could anyone not be enraged?

  Wanting the record to be fair may have nothing to do with parole. I’m pretty sure Pat knows the chances are slim that she will ever get out of prison, but it’s understandable that she would want some recognition for working so hard. Or if not recognition, at least not misrepresentation. What’s called for is a measure of justice, honesty, fairness.

  At the same parole hearing, Stephen Kay, who claims to have made a “study” of her but who hasn’t actually talked to her since 1970, told the panel that Pat only sees people as objects: “She has as much regard for you and me as she would a piece of Kleenex she’d blow her nose into.”

  I’m sure there are convicted killers about whom what he said is tr
ue, but I know it isn’t true of Pat. Unlike Kay, I have spent time with her. But who is going to object to the injustice of saying something undeserved and negative about someone convicted of murder? Kay’s continued depiction of her as dangerous was not only dishonest, it was unwarranted and unnecessary. If the chance that Pat will be paroled is very slim, why not give her credit for what she has accomplished? The only purpose his remarks serve is to whip up the old rage.

  I know Pat’s psychological makeup is complicated and contains vast unexplained areas of emotion—I discuss those later—but she is not without compassion. When I tell her about a friend who is dying of cancer, I know her sympathy is real. When I tell her about the work my daughter is doing at a massive refugee camp on the Somali border with Kenya, I know both her interest and her compassion are genuine. When she points out women in the visiting room, women in wheelchairs or with oxygen canisters who have terminal diseases and whose appeals for compassionate release have been turned down, I do not doubt her concern.

  One day, she asked me if I’d ever been to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. I said I had. She asked me if it’s as beautiful as it reads in the photographs. I said it is. We talked about the initial controversy surrounding the design, and we both agreed that, contrary to the critics, it’s a perfect tribute. She told me she had friends in high school who were killed in Vietnam and her pain about them is still acute. Tears rimmed her eyes when she talked about them. “I know I’ll never get out of here but if I did, the very first thing I’d do would be to go to the Vietnam Memorial.”

  Stephen Kay would no doubt challenge my belief in her authentic compassion, but that’s because his thinking is binary. You are either not a murderer or you are a murderer, and if you are, you deserve to have verbal abuse heaped on you eternally. It is a black-and-white world, and perhaps this outlook is precisely what we need in prosecutors. But perhaps that’s not what we need at parole hearings.

  chapter forty-two

  SCAPEGOATS—THE NEED TO BLAME

  At some point I stopped talking about Pat and Leslie to my friends. I stopped because no matter who these friends were, no matter how progressive politically or committed to social justice, no matter whether they were men or women, no matter how generally sympathetic to people caught up in the criminal justice system, most were unable to locate that sympathy for Leslie or Pat. Their names, almost as much as Charles Manson’s, still conjure both the terror and the anger that gripped the country at the time.

  As I got to know the women better, the harsh opinions toward them made me feel increasingly protective. It wasn’t as though I’d forgotten the murders; it was that I knew the women to be more than the murders they’d committed. I knew and trusted their remorse and their concern for their victims. I knew and trusted their concern about society’s problems in general and their empathy for people, especially women and children, who have a hard time of it. I knew and trusted their renunciation of all that was Manson and the beliefs they held when they were under his sway.

  But avoiding the topic among my friends didn’t avoid the problem. Outside of my social circle, I continued to be surprised by the vehemence of the hostility toward them. A few years ago I was in a writing workshop where, as in most such groups, the woman who led the group routinely insisted that we create a tolerant, nurturing atmosphere for each other so that our creativity could flourish. One day I wrote a paragraph about Leslie, describing the nature of her interactions with fellow inmates and the families of her fellow inmates. I tried to capture her sunny disposition and how it seemed infectious; I described the way people brightened when she talked to them. While I was reading the piece to the group, Lorna frowned. When I stopped reading, she shook her head and said, “I don’t understand.”

  That bad? I thought. The prose seemed straightforward.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t understand. Could you be more specific about what you don’t understand?”

  “I don’t understand why,” she said, shrugging her shoulders to illustrate her confusion, “with all of the worthy causes in the world and all of the worthy people in the world you would select this woman to write about.”

  First I was surprised and then I was angry, but in between the surprise and the anger was amusement. “It’s my turn to be perplexed,” I said with what I intended as a sarcastic smile on my face. “Lorna, I’m wondering about that creating a safe, nurturing environment thing?”

  “I guess there’s a limit to my tolerance,” she said, ignoring my smile and looking at me with a most un-amused look on her face.

  Of course the right answer, or at least one of them, was: I wasn’t writing about Leslie to advocate, I was writing about her to understand—to understand her, to understand human nature. She only needed to be worthy of exploration, not advocacy. But that was all beside the point. Lorna was not interested in any portrayal of Leslie as a multi-dimensional person; she was only interested in judgment. Eventually, I did advocate for Leslie’s release, so Lorna had apparently seen the writing on the wall.

  The next day she called to apologize. “I’m sorry but I couldn’t help myself. I guess my feelings are still pretty intense about those murders. Those feelings override everything else.”

  The more I thought about it, though, the more her reaction gave me pause. She had echoed the sentiments expressed by many of my friends. I recoiled at her attempt at censorship, but it also increased my awareness of the prejudice I was up against in writing about the women. And I couldn’t help wondering about myself. If one of the other participants in the group brought in a sympathetic portrayal of someone like Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the social worker now serving a life term for being responsible for the murder and rape of hundreds of Tutsi women, could I stomach any attempt to depict her as anything but despicable? I doubted it. Unlike Leslie, she denied her participation, but what if she, too, was assuming responsibility and expressing genuine remorse? Would I feel the way Lorna did? I think so because every time I think of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, when I think of the way she engineered some of the most depraved actions on the face of the earth (forcing a boy to rape his own mother, for example), I feel such intense hatred it scares me.

  A few years ago, the film director John Waters, who’s been friends with Leslie for many decades, wrote Role Models (2010), a book about people who have inspired him. It is an eclectic collection—ten profiles that include, among others, Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, and Leslie Van Houten. In his chapter on Leslie, he praised her hard work, her tenacity, her patience, and her willingness to assume responsibility for her part in the murders. He also wrote that he respected that she resisted the temptation to adopt religious fanaticism, a route that would provide her instant forgiveness. “She has managed to live through bad times without despair and inspire others to do the same.”

  When Waters appeared on HBO’s Real Time to promote the book, Bill Maher asked him about Leslie. Waters, while acknowledging how horrendous the murders were, talked about how much he respects and is inspired by her, adding that she had paid her dues and that it was time for her to be released. And then Maher asked a version of what Lorna had asked me in the writing group. I can’t remember the exact words and I can’t find the clip on the Internet, but his point: this woman is not worthy of your attention.

  For a long time I dismissed these attitudes as parochial and small-minded, but the question I had asked myself about the Rwandan social worker continued to bother me. It became increasingly clear that I was not immune to these feelings, and it wasn’t limited to the Rwandan social worker. Karla Faye Tucker, a young woman who was convicted in 1984 for the brutal murder of two people, was another one. I knew very little about the circumstances of the murders until George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, refused to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment. When the state eventually killed her in 1998, she was the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1984, and the first in Texas since 1863.

  When I read about Bush’
s coldhearted refusal to consider mercy, I was angry, but then I’d been angry at Bush since he’d unseated Ann Richards, a woman I greatly admired, for the governorship of Texas. When I read a detailed account of the grisly murders, my rage transferred from George W. to Karla Faye herself. She’d found Jesus in prison and after that, people from all over the world rallied to the cause of saving her life. Supporters included the United Nations Commissioner on Summary and Arbitrary Executions; the World Council of Churches; Pope John Paul II; Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi; the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; conservative pundit Tucker Carlson; televangelist Pat Robertson; and even Ron Carlson, the brother of Karla Faye’s murder victim Deborah Thornton. When the pleas reached fever pitch, I read Crossed Over, an account of the friendship between Karla Faye and novelist Beverly Lowry. After reading Crossed Over, my anger then targeted Beverly Lowry as well. I didn’t understand. (When you could pick anyone to defend, why pick her? Sound familiar?)

  She pled for Karla Faye’s life on the basis that she was under the influence of drugs at the time of the murders, she would not have committed the murders otherwise, and that she was now a reformed person.

  But Lowry’s pleas left me cold. No matter how sympathetic her portrayal of Karla Faye, I simply could not get around the brutal, graphic details of what she had done. Yes, she’d had a difficult childhood and yes, she had a spiritual awakening and yes, she expressed profound remorse. No doubt, she had an appealing, fresh-faced girlishness about her, but look at the crime: There was a motorcycle that Karla Faye’s boyfriend Danny Garrett wanted and that the victim, Jerry Dean, owned. There were drugs, there was partying, and one thing led to another. Karla’s boyfriend bludgeoned Dean with a hammer. The blows caused his head to become unhinged from his neck and his breathing passages to fill with fluid. He began making a “gurgling” sound that Karla Faye didn’t like, so she grabbed a pickax and smashed it into him.