The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  The Tate-LaBianca murders hadn’t taken place at Barker Ranch, but the evil was hatched here. This was where Manson socialized or, rather, de-socialized, his acolytes, stripping them not only of their consciences, but also of their ability to think rationally, and this is where he trained them to be murderers. This is where they, in turn, nurtured him and surrendered their very humanity to him.

  The main house was a wood and stone structure and looked to be sturdily built. It was clear that, in the decades since the murders, it had been home to campers passing through and to squatters who stayed awhile. It was generally tidy—the concrete floor swept clean, the tiny assortment of dishes and pots on the shelves appeared to have been washed—and there was a note on the kitchen table asking people to keep it that way. Someone had put a bedspread, pillow, and pillowcase on the single bed.

  As the four of us walked around, Joe started taking photos of Maggie in various poses to suggest she lived here—stoking a pretend fire in the stone fireplace; sitting at the kitchen table pretending to read an issue of Life magazine with Manson on the cover she’d found on the shelf: December 19, 1969, “The Love and Terror Cult.” At one point, she stood at the stove holding a wooden spoon and pretending to stir soup. Maggie in no way resembled Pat, but the little drama she was acting out brought to life domestic scenes Pat had described to me.

  We moved on to the bathroom, where a non-functioning toilet had apparently been used anyway, but someone had removed the sink and vanity. The vanity had been Manson’s hiding place when the ranch was raided by Inyo County officers two months after the murders. The raid was not connected to the murders but the result of auto thefts, primarily of dune buggies, and of arson fires, which seemed to be motivated by vandalism in and around Death Valley. At the time of the raid, most of the group of seven had been sitting at the kitchen table, but Manson was not among them. When a sheriff’s deputy went into the bathroom he noticed long brown hair peeking out of the bathroom vanity. He opened the cupboard door to behold Charles Manson, dressed in fringed buckskin, hiding in the very cramped space.

  Outside, there was a stone and concrete structure—either a very small pool or a very large bathtub—that looked to be spring fed when there was enough water to feed it, and nearby, a corroded porcelain bathtub. I wondered if this was the bathtub Leslie had described when she told me one of her jobs was to read the Bible to Manson as he bathed.

  After their photo session, Joe and Maggie went to their truck to eat lunch. My daughter and I retrieved our sandwiches from our car and sat down in a couple of wooden folding chairs on the veranda where we had a panoramic view of the little valley. Amidst the sagebrush, there was a scattering of tiny yellow flowers, desert gold, I think, and the leaves on the cottonwoods were a dusky ochre. I again thought about the juxtaposition of the beauty and the grotesque history of the place. But the longer we sat there, the more my focus shifted from the beauty to the isolation, the desolation. And then I knew why I’d come: for the first time I understood the extent of the group’s primitive, regressive existence. This was a world unto itself, suspended from temporal, familial, societal considerations. The little oasis was buffered by the rugged primeval and empty terrain of Death Valley, so empty and so rugged it looked like a moonscape and served as a virtual moat. The sky, washed out by the sun, felt higher and more infinitely infinite.

  I thought of the Be Here Now credo of the ’60s. Such a total emphasis on the present is a fine goal if you’re practicing mindfulness, but Manson used it to strip away all other influences but his. As both Pat and Leslie report, he banned clocks and he openly chastised (and worse) manifestations of the life led by the young people before they hitched their wagons to his star.

  This was exactly what Zimbardo meant when he described what can occur when people are trapped in what he calls “an expanded present moment.” “When we stop relying on our sense of past commitments and our sense of future liabilities,” he writes in The Lucifer Effect, “we open ourselves to situational temptations to engage in Lord of the Flies excesses.” He explains that under normal circumstances, when you experience an abusive person, you are able to resist by relying on a temporal perspective that stretches beyond what he calls “present-oriented hedonism.” When your behavior is guided by the past, it is informed by your personal values and standards. When your behavior takes the future into account, you automatically engage in what he calls a “cost-benefit analysis,” which evaluates your actions in terms of future consequences. Situations where both past and future considerations are obliterated can result in what he calls deindividuation. This, he writes, was responsible for the abuse in Abu Ghraib and in his own faux prison experiments at Stanford. And this, I believe, is what happened under Manson’s rule where the goal was to erase all traces of the people his subjects had been.

  As we sat eating our lunch, except for the periodic rustling of a squirrel or the plaintive whimper of a quail, there was total silence. The hushed emptiness seemed to blot up everything into itself, even the passage of time.

  chapter forty-five

  HEAVEN’S GATE

  March 1997

  That night, on our way to our room after having dinner at the Lodge, we looked up, in wonder, at the sky. Away from the wash of city lights, the stars were dazzling, and though we were exhausted, we didn’t want to pass up the chance to take in the bejeweled sky. We got chairs from the room and brought them down to the lawn. As we tried to identify the constellations we knew, the ones everyone knows, we noticed what looked like a UFO low in the northern sky. I thought it must be a satellite, though I’d seen satellites before and they moved faster; this seemed to be drifting slowly, if it was moving at all. Also, the shape—a bright glowing head trailed by the fanned-out tail—was very un-satellite-like. And then we both remembered: on the drive to Death Valley we’d heard on the radio that the comet Hale-Bopp was the closest it would ever be to the earth. And there it was. So many words are thrown around at a time like that and we used them all: magical, astonishing, miraculous, historic, surreal.

  The sight of that comet that night in Death Valley struck me as synchronistic, another “sign” connected to the murders. For the life of me now, I can’t remember what I thought it was a sign of, other than that perhaps I was a little too immersed in my quest.

  Two days later, however, we learned that while our eyes were trained on the comet, a group in Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego had been focused on it for their own eccentric reasons. The members of Heaven’s Gate were preparing to be rescued by a spaceship they believed to be traveling behind the comet, a spaceship that would take them to a higher plane of existence. In order to board the spacecraft, they would need to leave their bodies, which they did by eating phenobarbital mixed with applesauce and washing it down with vodka. To ensure asphyxiation, they secured plastic bags over their heads. Each person carried exactly $5.75 in his or her pocket, passports, and all wore Nike “Windrunner” athletic shoes and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” “Our planet earth is about to be recycled,” Marshall Applewhite, their leader, explained in a video. “Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us.”

  In the days that followed, much was learned about Applewhite and his group. Like Manson, he required his followers to give up their families, their friends, and to renounce all worldly possessions. They were told they must battle spiritually with dark forces known as Luciferians, a label applied to anyone and everyone outside the group. The passports and cash were related to a short story written by Mark Twain in 1907 having to do with travel on the tail of a comet.

  What they did was not strictly analogous to what the Manson group did. They didn’t kill anyone but themselves. What was similar was the way in which the two men—Manson and Applewhite—were able to get smart, presumably sane people to abandon their values and reject what was familiar and rational. Instead of being delivered to safety in a spacecraft, Manson’s tribe would be transported in dune buggies and be saved from th
e apocalypse, a race war, by retreating to a bottomless pit in Death Valley. When arrested, the group had been actively looking for this pit and were stealing dune buggies because Manson claimed they were the ideal vehicles for entry into the city housed within the bottomless pit.

  It’s hard to say which of the exit/entry plans (exiting one reality, entering another) hatched by the two men displayed more lunacy. There is something about the brand specificity of Nike “Windrunner” athletic shoes that seems, if not comical, then jarring. The imagery involved in Manson’s exit/entry plan had a more artistic touch. He allegedly purchased a “golden” rope that would be attached to the dune buggies for the purpose of lowering the vehicles into the city in the bottomless pit.

  chapter forty-six

  A DIFFERENT PAT

  1997–2016

  In contrast to my visits with her, Pat’s letters were consistently filled with warmth and optimism. While she made references to politics, she didn’t dwell obsessively and the comments were usually positive. In 2008, she wrote that she was thrilled that Obama was elected and, though our country was in dire straits at the time, she hoped that his election would lift the nation’s spirits. She felt blessed to have witnessed his election. “JFK and now Obama.”

  I always looked forward to her notes during the holidays. No one in my life sends me greetings that are as sweet, non-generic, and sincere. She vividly conjured the aromas, the treats, and the good cheer of the season and good times with family and friends. She always asked about my family. In the years that my daughter worked in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, she never failed to ask me about her, expressing admiration for her work and what the organization accomplishes.

  Reading these letters is always bittersweet for me, though. I’m touched by her generosity of spirit, but I can’t help feeling sad for her. I remember what she said many years ago about Anne Tyler—that reading her novels always makes her feel the saddest about never having a family. (What she had with Manson was really the only family experience she had as an adult.)

  In 2002, she wrote that she had started obedience-training puppies, the ones who would eventually be trained to be service dogs for the disabled. This is an intense program; the inmates spend twenty-four hours a day with the dog during the training period. She wrote glowingly of the puppy she was working with at the time, a golden retriever named Joshua who she described as a sweetheart.

  This was a contrast to her attitude later when I got a puppy. At one of our visits I asked her for training tips—by that time she’d been at it for a few years. She offered some basic advice but gone was the enthusiasm she’d expressed in her letters. I don’t know what to make of this difference. None of her bitterness or anger came out in her letters. I’m glad that I had this experience to counter the discomfort I felt after our visits, but I’m as puzzled by the contrast today as I was when I first met her.

  chapter forty-seven

  THE TERROR OF BEING EXCLUDED

  In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo, citing decades of research, details all of the ways that ordinary, average individuals—whether they be soldiers in Guatemala, doctors in Nazi Germany, Hutus in Rwanda—can be stripped of their values, their morality, their souls. After elaborating on the variables that contribute to this process—isolation, drug use, denying people identities—he declares that the most important variable, far and away more important than the others, is the fear of being excluded from the in-group. Manipulating this fear, he asserts, is the most effective way people are transformed from ordinary human beings into human beings capable of evil. We tend to associate the desire for acceptance by the in-group with high school, but according to Zimbardo, this need does not stop at adolescence but continues through adulthood. He cites people’s willingness to suffer painful and or humiliating initiation rites in return for acceptance in fraternities, cults, social clubs, or the military.

  When the desire to be included is coupled with the terror of being excluded, Zimbardo writes that it can cripple initiative, negate personal autonomy, and lead people to do virtually anything to avoid rejection. “Authorities can command total obedience not through punishment or rewards but by means of the double-edged weapon: the lure of acceptance coupled with the threat of rejection.”

  I believe that Manson was a genius at wielding this double-edged weapon.

  chapter forty-eight

  HATRED MORE POWERFUL THAN A MOTHER’S LOVE

  December 2015

  When I first heard about Tashfeen Malik, the young wife and mother who, along with her husband, slaughtered fourteen of his co-workers at the San Bernardino Health Department in December 2015, I wondered about similarities between her story and what I know about Leslie and Pat.

  I’ve discussed in another chapter why I, like most people, are more unsettled when women kill; it is in part, I believe, because we associate that gender with nurturing. Malik was not only a woman, she was, according to early reports, the nursing mother of a six-month-old baby. If killing fourteen people in cold blood is inconsistent with how we view motherhood, abandoning your nursing child while doing so challenges an unfathomable quantity of what we hold dear.

  In recent years, with the rise of terrorism, social science researchers have paid increasing attention to young people who are drawn to this kind of violence. Though the research on jihadists is still in its infancy, there is much that sheds light on the dynamics of what was once called the Manson Family.

  I’ve seen only a few photos of Malik; they were all headshots and seemed to reflect only a hint of the woman’s true nature. Unlike the first image I saw where she was cloaked in black and her face expressionless, in this one, she’s wearing a white hijab and her eyes seem softer. I think I can detect the faintest of smiles, though her expression is mysterious enough it could be something besides a smile. What was I looking for in her face? I was trying to see past my assumption of her rage and heartlessness and the complete disdain for her victims; I was trying to detect some trace of her humanity. It was a painful exercise.

  Because what she did was so horrible, it’s difficult to imagine this woman as anything but monstrous. That’s why words of that nature seem to fit. In the original Tate-LaBianca trial, when Vincent Bugliosi argued in favor of the death penalty for the women and Manson, he had said, “These defendants are not human beings, ladies and gentlemen.... These defendants are human monsters, human mutations.”

  Bugliosi was using those words for effect with the jury, and when I first read Helter Skelter, I agreed with his characterization. Those labels are a response to our fear and provide a sense of comfort because they put distance between us and murderers. Those people aren’t us. But the labels lead to a dead end when it comes to understanding behavior, and I don’t believe we can afford the luxury of dead ends.

  What are the similarities between Tashfeen Malik in 2015 and Pat and Leslie in 1969? For one thing, the murders in both cases were not abstract. The suffering they inflicted was palpable. From their own descriptions, we know how physically close Pat and Leslie were to their victims; Malik had to have seen the terror in the eyes in some of those fourteen people who died and the twenty-one who were injured; she had to have seen the blood spatter, the agony. As she aimed her AR-15 assault rifle, witnesses said that unlike her husband who hesitated, she did not.

  Pat and Leslie did not know their victims; Malik apparently did not know her victims well but she knew about them. She knew they were welcoming and generous to her family. (There was one exception: one of her husband’s co-workers had expressed anti-Muslim feelings, but it’s not believed that he was the one who inspired the massacre.) Among the people she killed were people who had given the couple a baby shower and had purchased gifts they’d requested when they registered at Target. She knew her victims were parents and husbands and wives, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters. Given all of that, how was she able to so completely detach herself from their humanity?

  Was there something in her history to explai
n her cruel detachment? If so, it wasn’t economic deprivation. As was true of Pat and Leslie and so many of the young people enticed by ISIS, Malik did not come from hardship. She was born into a middle-class family in Pakistan. Her father was a landowner, an engineer, and at some point he moved his family to Saudi Arabia where she attended university, eventually completing a graduate course in a school of pharmacy.

  We know that Pat and Leslie, at least in part, were vulnerable to Manson because of their youth and their struggle with identity, but Malik was twenty-seven years old and in a settled life. Her husband made a good living and they owned a condominium. She was a mother. She had in-laws who provided babysitting.

  Given the barbaric acts ISIS displays on TV and the Internet, it’s reasonable to assume that some kind of pathology is what drives people from comfortable lives in the West into the arms of ISIS. Social science researchers, however, take issue with that assumption; the attraction, they say, is far more complicated. “These young people are not psychopaths,” Scott Atran, an anthropologist wrote in the September 4, 2016, issue of the Guardian, “but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.” He explained that recruits for ISIS from Western countries are in transitional stages in their lives—between jobs, schools, relationships, countries—and are looking for new families.

  Given their desire to be part of the caliphate, you’d think they’d be spurred on by traditional religious fervor, but not so. By and large, most of them are “born again.” They are self-seekers who have found their way to jihad in myriad ways, ways that include a need for what Atran calls “a sense of power, destiny . . . a giving over to the ineffable and unknown.”