Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  According to Wallie, Linda joined the Family at Wilson's house on her way somewhere and somebody picked her up hitchhiking. She said she was married, leaving her husband, and she seemed straight but just flits off to the ranch. Absolutely blew my mind."

  She was told by Gypsy, another member of the Family, how all the girls had assumed new names and were known as witches, Linda went on, so she became "Yana the Witch." Linda says that since the girls said they were witches, she tried to become one. "It just sort of seemed like a little game," and Linda fell in as a member of the Family.

  She said Manson later devised a "walkie-talkie" warning system to alert Family members, in the back part of the ranch, as they worked on what she called stolen dune buggies, and "the girls worked sort of like a guard tower with the walkie talkies." Linda says the girls did "anything and everything. Oh, help the men with dune buggy parts, take care of the cooking, sewing ... or other services for the men." The men, she explains, mostly worked on the dune buggies, although she "very seldom" saw Manson do any physical work.

  Charles Manson, age 14. Headline from Indiana newspaper reads: "Boy leaves `sinful home' for new life in Boys Town"

  Manson today at Corcoran prison

  Manson Family members at Spahn Ranch (Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, front left)

  ABOVE: Manson Family members at creek near Spahn Ranch BELOW: Sandra Good in front of trailer at Spahn Ranch

  Squeaky, Sandra, Gypsy, and other Family girls on a garbage run

  Sharon Tate

  Sharon Tate on set of "Eye of the Devil" as the sorceress Odile

  Last photo of Sharon Tate alive, taken on the day of her murder. Snapshot taken by fellow victim Voitycl< FrykowsI
  Tombstone of Sharon and unborn baby victim

  ABOVE: Sharon Tate's body, left; Jay Sebring's, right; as left by the killers BELOW: Abigail Folger on house lawn

  Abigail Folger at morgue

  Steven Parent, death by gunshots

  Voitycl< Fryl
  Frykowski at the L.A. County Morgue

  Jay Sebring at morgue

  Movie director Roman Polanski, husband of Sharon Tate, being brought to identify body

  Sharon Tate's body in Cielo Drive house

  Sharon Tate's body at morgue

  Murdered Leno LaBianca with fork sticking in stomach. Rosemary LaBianca murdered in bedroom

  Head of Rosemary LaBianca

  ABOVE: Leno LaBianca at morgue.

  BELOW: Stomach of Leno LaBianca showing carved word "WAR"

  THE FLIGHT TO DEATH VALLEY

  Barker Ranch

  One of the dune buggies, on display at an automotive museum

  Door at Barker Ranch

  Manson after arrest for murders, L.A. County courthouse

  Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, charged with murders

  Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel with heads shaved in emulation of Manson

  Bobby Beausoleil, convicted in the Gary Hinman killing

  Mary Brunner, Clem, and Family member at the courthouse

  Clem charged with Family beheading murder of Spahn ranch hand Shorty Shea

  Charles "Tex" Watson: "I am the Devil, here to do the Devil's work"

  Manson in court

  Manson in L.A. County Jail

  Manson, convicted of multiple murder

  Author John Gilmore, 1969 during Manson interviews

  Satanist Anton LaVey (far left) and Bobby Beausoleil (far right) during filming of Kenneth Anger's "Lucifer Rising"

  Killer Bobby Beausoleil takes a bride in prison

  Sandra Good, high priestess of the Manson movement, following release from prison

  Sandra Good's death threats to politicians and corporate leaders prior to Squeaky Fromme's attempted assassination of then-President Gerald Ford

  Signed polaroid of Manson at Corcoran prison

  Manson's business card (ATWA stands for Air, Trees, Water & Animals)

  Often Charlie would leave on trips to Wilson's and the "music scene," in pursuit of what had become an obsession. Meanwhile the Family would carry on, attempting to replenish itself.

  "Scavenging became a way of survival for the family," Susan says. "The supermarkets all over Los Angeles throw away perfectly good food every day, fresh vegetables and sometimes cartons of eggs, packages of cheese that are stamped to a certain date. The stores are only allowed to keep them until that date, but the food is still good, and us girls used to go out and do garbage runs, is what we called it. Pick up the food and take it back to the ranch, and cut out the blue spots and check it over to see that it was good food. And we used to go out and panhandle. We went out on garbage runs and we went and panhandled, and one time one girl and I put on dark clothes and took it upon ourselves to do this - Charlie had no knowledge of it - we went out and creepy-crawled. It's moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us - wearing very dark clothes and move at night."

  Linda recalls that sometimes Charlie told the girls how to dress, that "at night we were told to wear dark clothes." As for food, Linda also joined in the scavenging as the group "went on garbage runs ... We used to go to the back of supermarkets, get the food they had thrown away, wash it up and fix it." The family ate "mostly vegetables, and never meat," Linda recalls. She said Charlie didn't give directions as to eating habits, "not really," although "he used to be big on zu-zus - candy and ice cream and things like that."

  Manson, who says, "I have ate out of garbage cans to stay out of jail," was nonetheless in tune with the scene. "I live in my own world, and I am king in my world," he declares, "whether it be in a garbage dump or if it be in the desert or wherever it be, I am my own human being." And to Charlie, those who made up the Family on the ranch were the unwanted "people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked them out and that did not want to go to juvenile Hall, so I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love there is no wrong."

  Linda says she first met Manson on the Fourth of July, "Independence Day." She sought him out, she said, because she'd heard he was "the beautiful man we had all been waiting for." She had sex with him that second night there on the ranch, "in a cave." She says, "He felt my legs and seemed to think they were OK ... He made love to me, and we had a slight conversation ... I don't remember all of it, but he told me I had a father hang-up." She admits being impressed when Charlie told her she had a "father hangup, because nobody ever said that to me before. I have no father, and I hate my stepfather." For Linda, too, Manson was to become the new father.

  Susan was Sadie Mae Glutz. Manson says, "Sadie was the kind of girl that wanted to be something that she wasn't. And I told her, `Sadie, you got to be yourself.' But all these pretty girls were with me, and making love to me, and she felt that if she made love with me she would be pretty like they were. And she is only - I only made love to her three times. She was pregnant most of the time I knew her, and once a girl is pregnant there just isn't any use to make love with her, dig. And anyway, she had these breasts that hung down to her waist. And I'd look at the line of girls waiting for me and I couldn't do it with Sadie. I'd look at the girls I'd had it with before and I couldn't go back, when I saw the others that were still waiting for me."

  Susan said more girls came, following after the others, and moved into the ranch after visiting with Charlie. "He got to know them immediately."

  Manson says, "These kids would come up to the ranch, young girls, and they'd say, `teach us to make love.' And if I'd like them, we'd get some grass and go to the shack for a couple of days and they'd learn .. .

  If you want to get to people and unlock their minds, the basic way you get to them is through fear," he explains. It was a lesson he had learned. "A normal girl comes down to the ranch and she says she's looking for her sister - she's never been here. So I said to myself, this girl is not looking for her sister. She's l
ooking to get involved with the people at the ranch and she's looking for `nasy things. Sex, which is nasty in her mind, and she knows as much as we do that she'd like to make love to her father, and she can't admit it to herself, yet her father in turn says, `Don't go out screwing any other guy,' because he'd like to screw her himself ... He doesn't want her screwing any other guy because of the society, and she has all these thoughts in her mind," Manson says. "She comes down to the ranch, and I said, `Your sister's not here.' She says, `What's in that dirty old room over there?' And I said, `That's a dirty old room with a dirty old mattress, and you don't want to go in there because it's a dirty place, you know.' She says, `I want to go in there,' and as soon as I open the door and go in there with her, she comes up against me and says, `What are you going to do to me?' She's thinking in terms of wish fulfillment and she's already got it in her mind for me to rape her - she's already got it in her mind, all the nasty things, and she's got the excuses, already got it in her mind that this is a good excuse in case she gets caught by her father. So I put on my nasty face and I say, `Come over here, come over here,' and `put your feet up over here ... Take down your pants - I want to play with your pussy.' I start playing with her, and when she starts to get hot, I put out my cock and show it to her. Then she really starts to get worked up, and I say `Come here - touch it' She says, `Oh, no, I wouldn't do that!' Then when she really gets warmed up, I say, `Gee, I think I'll go out and get a cigarette,' and I walk away from her, to get the cigarette. And she starts growling and carrying on - `How about - what's - come on, Charlie,' and she walks over to me ... So I say to her then, `Look, you never have to deal out of fear, don't let people run you out of fear - and don't be afraid of me acting like your father, and don't be afraid of your father -' I tell her sex is a beautiful thing, you can enjoy it without fear. `So you go off and find some guy that's your equal, that's on your level, and have it with him,' and I send her off."

  Charlie was claiming to have contracted with a rock group to buy two of his songs, one with a record company commitment. He also said he planned to accompany the group to Texas for engagements there, but couldn't keep the date because of parole restrictions.

  One young man in the music field, Gregg Jakobson, tried to generate interest in Manson's songs and music. "Dennis Wilson - one of the Beach Boys - and I were interested in recording Charlie," Jakobson says, and arranged with a friend, Terry Melcher, the son of actress Doris Day, to accompany him out to Spahn ranch. "We wanted some financial backing to do a film to accompany the music. In other words, I was trying to involve Terry in recording and filming."

  At that time, Terry Melcher lived in a rambling estate in the Benedict Canyon area on Cielo Drive. The name cielo, Melcher says, "is Spanish for sky." He had been living there since April of 1966, and had known Wilson "a number of years, it must be the last six or seven now." At one of Wilson's parties, Melcher met Manson and Tex Watson. Melcher remembers, "Wilson drove me to Cielo Drive one day, and Manson was in the back seat of his car strumming his guitar, and they dropped me off in the driveway ... One of my occupations is that of recorder-producer, and later I was asked to drive and meet Manson and his group, to see whether or not I'd be interested in recording them."

  Melcher recalls that at Spahn ranch, "there were forty or fifty of them, it's hard to say exactly, they were everywhere, mostly young women, and they all seemed to be part of the same group, they all sang together with Charlie Manson. He played a guitar, and it seems to me some of the girls were playing tambourines. I was later told that they were all songs that Charlie Manson had composed. The type of music they were doing and the whole setting itself was rather peculiar to the pop music business, to say the least ... I went back there approximately within a week after I had first been there, because a friend of mine was going to spend a summer traveling around the country recording various Indian tribes doing native songs and that sort of thing. I mentioned I had seen a group in Chatsworth that seemed something like an Indian tribe. They sat around and all sang together, and all participated - that perhaps that might be the type of thing he was interested in, and that was the reason for my second visit.

  "Manson, he spoke to me," Melcher says, but there was no talk about arranging a time when they would get together with ideas of recording. "The reason I went back the second time ... I felt sorry for those people. There were a lot of girls that were obviously young and I assumed that most of them were runaways, and when I went back with my other friend who had the trailer and it was set up to record out of doors, or anywhere that you might find people making music, the purpose of that visit was to perhaps show it to someone who maybe wanted to do something like that, but that wasn't exactly what I was looking for in music ... After hearing them sing a dozen or so songs I may have singled out one and said, that is a nice song,' just to be polite," Melcher says. "When someone performs for you, you don't want to simply not respond to their whole presentation, and to be polite I probably said something. Usually that is what I say ... There were all those people wandering around and I gave them $50, which is all I had with me, so that they could buy some food."

  Jakobson, who had arranged for Melcher to visit the ranch, recalls, "I think Terry showed some interest in the music, but there was nothing positive. There was never any, `Yes, I will record you' talk going on. It was like that was the preliminaries and nothing ever came of it."

  In fact, those who had shown interest in Manson's talents no longer found the time to review them. Charlie's "hobnobbing" and enthusiasm for getting "something goin"' in the music business had, finally, amounted to nothing.

  When she first heard Manson discussing his philosophy of the "Infinite Soul," Wallie Sellers recalls thinking, "This could be great if you really believed it. But I think what happened is that it was just a con - he was just doing it. He did believe it to a certain extent, but not completely. He was still interested in how to pay the bills like all men are. Girls aren't that interested because it's not part of their character. But here he had this family now and he had to support them, and when any man is put under that kind of pressure he can get very hostile. When he first went to the ranch there and things started going wrong, he was hostile. And he came back and the girls were all pregnant and everything. He thought that was great when he was at Dennis Wilson's - being with the Beach Boys, but all of a sudden the responsibility was all his - the whole thing, having to feed them, having to clothe them, everything. And I guess when his records didn't work out, and here were these girls . . .

  "At that time he had gotten them so completely believing in everything, that I guess they turned around and completely convinced him. So here he was, he wanted to scream out and say, `Don't you know this is just a scam, and that all of a sudden it's blown up in my face,' and they'd just say, so calmly, `No, Charlie, it's not that . . . That's just the Establishment, they're just putting that into your head. We love you.' And Charlie sits there and he has nobody he can talk to - nobody he can say, `Well, I really blew it, what am I doing out here?' to - because they're all giving him the same business that he's been giving them for a year. Tell me you wouldn't get frustrated. What happened is they convinced him of his own philosophy and then he blew his mind. Everyone is everyone else. I am you, and you are me, and so there's no ego. But Charlie had to have an ego, or he never would have been able to clothe and feed his family ...

  "Before, Charlie'd had it very well under control, because he never got mad. I was always wondering when he would blow it," Wallie says, "because everybody's got to get mad once in a while. They still kept coming down to Dennis Wilson's house, and I think three of the girls were pregnant at that time, and he was trying to tell `em all to split and that they had graduated - they'd graduated and it was time for them to go on their own, and it was time for him to get a new following of girls. And they were really believing this, the three of them - all pregnant. He was really uptight, trying to give `em this business about dissolving the group then, the whole thing, and he was going
to start from scratch. He and Skip were going to start the new group. You know, that he and Skip would go and find a new Family, and I think that was Charlie's last dying effort to escape from having to follow through on his own philosophy. And when he went to that ranch he just had to believe it, because he just kept hearing it, like a record. Any one of the girls, you could ask them a question and they'd all give you the same answer. He had them perfectly trained, like Pavlov's dogs. I met Susan Atkins one time. I asked her about herself, and she gave me this routine, like a record, and I said, Are you one of Charlie's girls?' and she said, `Yes, how did you know?' I just knew by the sound of her voice that Charlie'd been at her. So I think that Charlie either started believing it or he got so involved with it he just couldn't drop it, and he tried to change it a little to make it more interesting ..

  Charlie began to talk more and more about a "bottomless pit," at first as though to himself, muttering about the bottomless pit. After his efforts to gain recognition in the outside world had all failed, his philosophy of oneness and love took a negative turn. He carried the Bible, cracked open and folded down to Chapter IX, Revelations, and he'd read knowingly: