The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  The Christmas party at Don Lugo was fun. There was a talent show and an abundance of talent among the men. The abortion doctor was a classical pianist, and the warden managed to locate a piano for the party; someone else provided a marimba for a kid named Carlos who had a band on the outside made up of his cousins. Cousins figured prominently in Carlos’s life. An older cousin had talked him into robbing a gas station; during the robbery, the cousin and the attendant exchanged gunfire and the cousin was killed. Carlos was serving a ten-year sentence for murder. In California if someone dies in the course of committing a felony, you go to prison for murder even if the guy killed was one of the perps—even if you didn’t kill him. My brother’s contribution to the talent show: he and a buddy sang a long, bawdy ballad that was cleaned up enough for the G-rated audience.

  By the time Craig and I left the party to go home, the tule fog had rolled in and was so dense that we had trouble finding the VW in the parking lot. I had never seen it that bad. It made pea soup look like consommé. I avoided the freeway and crawled along surface streets to the Denny’s where I was to deliver Craig. The only way I could see well enough to drive was to turn my headlights off, but then no one could see us. (In low-hanging dense fog, headlights make visibility worse. The fog no longer appears vaporous; it looks like a solid wall.)

  It took what felt like an hour just to drive the few miles to the Denny’s. When I pulled up, Craig said, “I can’t let you drive home. It’s too dangerous.”

  Neither of us had credit cards for a motel. In those days, college kids usually didn’t. “Do you have some cash at home? I would pay you back.”

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  He walked over to the phone booth in the Denny’s parking lot. I assumed he was calling a friend. I looked at my watch; it was 11:30. He got back in the car.

  “My parents are inviting you to spend the night at their house.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You don’t have a choice. Besides, they were very nice about it. They agreed that it’s too risky for you to drive. They have a friend who was killed in one of those chain reaction accidents on I-5 . . . they’ve never quite gotten over it.”

  “You have got to be kidding, Craig. I cannot sleep in the house of people who hate me.”

  “They don’t hate you, they hate . . . oh, please, let’s not do this now. My mother is making up the bed in the guest room right now.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” I looked at my watch again. Maybe they would be asleep by the time I got there and I could get up early and be out of there before they woke up and I wouldn’t have to see them.

  “Really, honey,” he said, “you don’t have a choice here.”

  When we got to his house, his parents had gone to bed. Craig showed me to the guest room. Someone had made an effort. On the dresser burned a lavender candle, and there was a bowl of small lavender soaps. The double bed was turned down, a sprig of lavender on the pillow and a stack of snowy white bath towels at the end of the bed. The room was so welcoming, I couldn’t help feeling a little hopeful. This was not the bare minimum.

  “Do you have an alarm clock I can borrow?” I asked Craig. “I should get going early.”

  “I’m sorry. Mine is in Berkeley.”

  “Will you please come get me as soon as you wake up? I want to get an early start.” He said he would.

  When I woke up I could smell bacon frying and thought about camping. I remembered that before the shit hit the fan, Craig told me his family camped in Yosemite for two weeks every year. He talked about how some day he wanted me to join them. And then my little disappointed heart sank because I remembered that the people in the kitchen cooking breakfast were never going to take a Jewish girl, quarter breed or not, camping. For a minute I wondered if I could escape through the sliding glass window. I got dressed and joined the happy threesome in the kitchen.

  Both of his parents greeted me warmly. It was an exact repeat of the other time I had breakfast there before they knew about my tainted blood. His dad, who had the same brush cut, was wearing the same plaid flannel shirt and jeans. His mom, a slightly plump woman with smooth olive skin and a perm that was a little too permed, was wearing the same apron. The fabric was decorated with the same cupcakes and it had the same lace trim. As before, there was a platter of scrambled eggs with cheese, a platter of bacon and grilled tomatoes, a platter of silver dollar pancakes. Somehow we came up with enough topics to discuss, though I was the one doing the heavy lifting. (Your apron is so pretty. Did you make it?) And then I was out of there. But not before his mother gave me a raft of crisp bacon wrapped in foil. “Maybe you can make BLTs for your lunch.”

  The fog had lifted, revealing a stunning, clear day. The San Bernardino Mountains, snow-capped and towering beyond the freeway, reminded me of how much I love Southern California when it’s clear. On the drive back to my parents’ house, I composed the thank-you note I would write. “Without a doubt you saved my life last night, and then this morning to present me with such a beautiful breakfast was beyond generous. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  Driving my mother’s little red VW, a sure sign that hatred didn’t have to be forever, and looking at my foil pack of bacon I thought about Anne Frank’s quote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

  Buoyant. I was utterly buoyant.

  I was glad my parents weren’t home. I didn’t want the grilling. I rummaged through my mother’s desk and found some expensive, cream-colored stationery and I wrote the thank-you note. I took a bath and then went for a walk.

  When Craig called that night, I took the phone into my bedroom. “It was really sweet of your parents to have me there.”

  He said nothing.

  “I just wrote your mother a thank-you note.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. Silence. Then: “After you left, I walked in the kitchen where my mother was washing dishes. I put my arm around her and kissed her cheek. I thanked her for being so gracious. I told her I was happy that she had a chance to get to know you. The smile left her face and the hateful look returned.

  “ ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Just because I was nice to her doesn’t mean a thing. I’d be nice to a stray dog if it needed help. Nothing has changed, Craig, and it’s time you accepted it. Way past time.’ ”

  chapter sixty-four

  THE MOTHERS WHO POISONED THEIR BABIES AT JONESTOWN HAUNT HER

  July 2012

  I was driving home to California from Arizona on Highway 58 through the Mojave Desert. I make this trek every summer after six weeks in the high desert south of Tucson. It was hot—the outside reading on my car thermometer read 115 degrees—and desolate. When I saw the Highway 395 turn-off to Death Valley I started thinking about my trip to Barker Ranch (see chapter 45). At that very moment the NPR program To the Best of My Knowledge came on the radio. The topic: “Why do people join religious cults?” Like so much that’s happened since I started researching this topic, I thought, “Synchrony!” Or maybe it was the primeval ambience of the desert. Or maybe the heat was getting to me.

  In any event, the host Jim Fleming was interviewing Diane Benscoter, a former member of the Unification Church. When the focus turned to dangerous cults, Fleming asked why some cult members commit violence. Benscoter said that in 1974 when she was recruited by the Moonies she was an idealistic seventeen-year-old who wanted to make a difference in the world. She was invited to join a peace walk from Omaha to Des Moines.

  Two young people accompanied her, and the three attended lectures along the way. There was much talk of the Messiah and making the world a better place—“creating the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” Her companions told her that God was choosing her to be part of this grand project. They told her it was not necessary to wait for the Second Coming. It had already occurred in 1920 in Korea in the form of Sun Myung Moon, and they were on their way to meet him in Des Moines, Iowa.

  With every
mile she walked, her excitement built. When they arrived and she met said Messiah, she was a convert. She cut off her hair, started to fast, and committed the rest of her life to Sun Myung Moon. She spent the next five years selling candy and flowers on the street to raise money for him. Her family was not willing to lose her permanently to the Moonies, so her parents hired a deprogrammer. Eventually, it worked.

  Part of her deprogramming was to read a book by Robert Jay Lifton about idealistic totalistic communities. Point by point, she realized that the Unification Church qualified: the church manipulated people, both personally and spiritually; the church promoted black-and-white thinking; the church forbade criticism of the leader or the principles of the group; the world was divided into good (everyone in the group) and evil (everyone outside the group). The scales fell from her eyes. She was free from the church’s grip.

  Jim Fleming asked her if it was a relief to reach the end of the deprogramming. Did she feel free at that point?

  Benscoter replied that she felt free in some ways but that freedom came with a price. It left her feeling extremely empty. She said she didn’t know anything about herself. She didn’t know what she believed in, she didn’t even know what music she actually liked—it had all been fed to her. She didn’t know what to do with her life.

  (As I’ve mentioned, Pat and Leslie told me that they, too, had “no self ” when they were with Manson.)

  When Benscoter hears about people in cults committing violence, either toward themselves or to others, she understands. The mothers who poisoned their babies with Kool-Aid at Jonestown haunt her. Suicide bombers who kill themselves and innocent people haunt her. She knows that she would have been capable of doing such things when she was a Moonie. “I was so dedicated to my Messiah, it had taken over my thought processes, my rational thought, such that I would have done anything and so I empathize with those people greatly.”

  November 10, 2012

  After missing each other for weeks Diane Benscoter and I finally talked, and when I got off the phone I felt as though the lock I’d been trying to pick for so long gave way. In an attempt to understand the women’s psyches under Manson’s influence, I had tried every combination of numbers, turned the dial both ways, held up the lock to my ear, listening to the vibrations of the pins, each time clicking impotently. Finally the numbers, the tumblers, the whatevers, slipped into place and something unlocked. Our conversation didn’t supply me with all of the answers, but it gave me a context that made their behavior if not totally understandable, at least not as alien as it had been.

  Here is a summary of our conversation:

  I told her what I had told so many. I described what Pat and Leslie were like growing up and how they changed when they were with Manson. I told her that the women were not only removed from any civilized idea of right and wrong, they were detached from any sort of feeling for their victims. Not an ounce of empathy for their suffering, not a fraction of an ounce.

  She told me that because of her experience as a Moonie, she understands. She repeated what she’d said on the radio. She not only understands, she identifies. She identifies with suicide bombers and with the mothers who poisoned their babies with Kool-Aid at Jonestown. They were all part of totalistic communities as described by Lifton—the book that helped her get free from the church.

  “Because you think of the leader as God and God is above the law, you have permission to spurn the laws of society, too. You start believing that the laws that you grew up believing in are wrong because they are man-made. The leader spouts the same stuff over and over, and everyone in the group keeps reinforcing it. There’s no countervailing force. There are no checks and balances. The instructions come from above. You start to feel special. We’re in on the secret. No one else is.”

  “But,” I asked, “what accounts for the brutality?”

  “In a situation like that there’s a chemical reaction,” she said. “Adrenaline is released . . . you’re euphoric in that moment because you believe that what you’re doing is exactly right. You have what feels like super-human energy.” She likens this state of mind to a mother who is able to gather enough strength to lift a car off her child. “You’re in a bubble of righteousness. Everything else disappears. You’re above the law of physics. There is nothing you can’t or won’t do.”

  She said the bubble is impenetrable, so impenetrable that it can override the most basic human instinct, a mother protecting her young. When the Jonestown mothers watched their babies foaming at the mouth from the poison Kool-Aid, it still wasn’t enough to shake them out of it. “You believe the world is evil and now you have the ticket to heaven. You are so special. You have special permission to do anything.”

  She talked about how someone’s mind can become so distorted that it makes sense to try to save the world by any means necessary, even if it’s brutal and ugly. In fact, she said, when your brain is working like that, you think it would be wrong if you didn’t participate. “Something happened to my brain when I was in the church. I know my brain changed.”

  “But, Diane,” I said, “five years. It took Pat and Leslie five years of being away from Manson and the other cult members to get out of that bubble.”

  This did not surprise her. She said it’s precisely because the behavior was so extreme, so brutal, they couldn’t let it in. The brain has a way of protecting itself when someone has done something so horrific. “What they did was so enormous. How could they comprehend that?”

  Diane never did anything as extreme as Pat and Leslie when she was in the Unification Church, not even close, but she acted in ways that, for her, were so out of character that she later had difficulty believing accounts of her behavior. “At one point I got a call from my brother telling me that my mother had breast cancer. He asked me to come home and I refused. I felt that what I was doing was more important than being with my mother. Before that it would have been inconceivable for me to turn my back on my mother when she was sick with cancer, so once I made the decision not to go home, I was even more dedicated to the church because I had to justify that decision.”

  “In for a dollar, in for a dime?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” she replied.

  “But,” I said, “it’s one thing to believe that you’re above the law because of divine intervention, but it’s quite another to cause terrible suffering and feel nothing for your victims.”

  “Once you’ve crossed the line,” she explained, “you shut down the part of you where empathy resides. Your survival depends on being able to shut it down. The cognitive dissonance between who you were and who you are is so great, you wouldn’t be able to tolerate it otherwise. And it isn’t just empathy that you shut down. It’s your values, it’s everything you believed in. It takes a long time before your original, primary version of what’s right and wrong returns.”

  chapter sixty-five

  STARLIGHT BALLROOM

  June 2012

  I was roaming the periphery of the Starlight Ballroom, trying, with all of my visual might, to make out the faces of former classmates hanging in clusters around the room. All attendees of the reunion at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel had their high school yearbook photos pinned in prominent places on their persons, and thank God for that. Father Time, with his habit of multiplying chins, subtracting hair from the top of heads while adding adipose to midsections, had been of no use in helping me recognize old friends. Most of us had not seen each other since 1960 when we’d marched across the stage of the Hollywood Bowl to Pomp and Circumstance to receive our diplomas.

  At the Starlight Ballroom on reunion night, the music was provided by a homegrown group, The Four Preps, one of our claims to fame. I didn’t know the guys; they were in my brother’s class and first got together to perform in the 1956 Hollywood High talent show. They sounded great, even without the deep voice of tall Eddie Cobb or the high tenor of Marv Ingram—both of whom had been replaced by younger men after they died in 1999.

  My eyes landed on
one face that looked almost exactly the same as his yearbook photo: Stephen Kay. No extra chins or adipose on Steve. He was the same tall, lean, erect guy—if anything, more erect—that he’d been in high school but, as I’d discovered in our more recent contact, he now wore an armor of righteousness that hadn’t been there when we were teenagers.

  When I first talked to him after embarking on my Leslie and Pat journey, I’d assumed he could help me flesh out the women, help me understand who they’d been and who they’d become. I didn’t yet know about his laser focus on only one part of that: who they’d been. He not only had no interest in who they’d become, he was hostile to the very idea that they had changed in any way.

  The more time I spent at the prison the less contact I had with Steve, and I knew that once I decided to write a letter to the parole board supporting Leslie’s release I was sure he’d believe that I had been naive, seduced by her dangerous charm. I also assumed he would see it as a betrayal of him. As a result, I’d been apprehensive about encountering him at the reunion.

  But there he was and there I was and there we were talking courteously. He introduced me to his wife, who was lovely and cordial. I knew he had officially retired and that he no longer attended parole hearings. He told me that he was now working on cold cases. I’d read that one of those cases was the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective turned private investigator, had asked Steve for help after his own investigation into the grisly unsolved crime convinced him that his own father, psychiatrist George Hodel, had murdered the victim, twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose tortured and mutilated body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. An account of this is detailed in Hodel’s book, The Black Dahlia Avenger, including his relationship with Stephen Kay.