Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family

by John Gilmore;Ron Kenner

  Leslie had arrived at the ranch with a couple of other girls, and with Bobby. The change in Leslie - the substitution of families - was almost instantaneous. One member of her new family - of Charlie's Family - says, "Leslie just drifted in one day along with some others, like they'd come up on a fluke, a joke. She went in the trailer with Charlie and after that she was part of us."

  "But the thing was," Carl Foster says, "she didn't want to ball Charlie. She wanted to be with Bobby - not Charlie, physically, that is. She was more jittery than the others - something really determined about her, and like she didn't have any sense of what it was, so of course Charlie'd steer her straight. He had that over her, and she was going to fit in like she was being locked down."

  DeCarlo had brought a child to the ranch, and says, "I took my little boy up there to the ranch because my wife had him but she wasn't taking care of him, so I went to Venice and brought my boy back up there." His boy was a year and a half old.

  After DeCarlo rebuilt the three-wheeler for Charlie, he says, "Manson was on a motorcycle thing whereas he wanted to do this thing with motorcycles but he decided on dune buggies ... So, me being an expert motorcycle mechanic and plus I belong to a club, a powerful club that he knew - he wanted my club to come up there, but they didn't want nothing to do with him. His idea, what he wanted to do with my club, was to scare the public away, you know, and they didn't want nothing to do with him."

  Joe Brockman had been split off from the Family for some time. He recalls, "While he'd been at Wilson's and then the ranch, I acquired a `66 VW and made some scores along the Strip ... Looking around for Charlie or Bobby. Up in the canyon I got hold of some of the others, Freida, Skip, I saw a couple others and Gypsy.

  Most had gone to Charlie's ranch. So, with my mild case of TB, I went out to the ranch and spent some time working on the VW, busting it down to a dune buggy for Charlie. There were a lot of old cars in Chatsworth and we tore them down on the ranch, converting them. We had a couple motorcycle guys helping. One was putting together a threewheeler Harley for Charlie who'd got the bike exchanging the rights to a song. It was a better song than a bike, but Charlie said he didn't care.

  "A lot of times Charlie and I would go off by ourselves. I spent almost three hours in the afternoons. He took me up to this water hole and told me about the people - there was plenty of girls, and then the guys that wanted to join up. I saw some of the bikers that came up, a lot of others. They wanted to get at the young girls. Two that I knew up there were just fourteen years old," he went on. "Charlie would never let them. He'd stand between them like a door, making a door of himself. One afternoon he said to some guys, `You got to go through me if you're after them, and I have no fear.' I'd seen big dudes get scared of Charlie when he'd come on that way. He told me, `I don't give a shit for anything and I'm taking these guys for a ride in the dune buggy.' He took them and spun around curves at eighty and ninety miles an hour. Charlie said, `You see they just walk away from me because they are afraid, because I don't give a shit whether I get killed or not.'

  "Others came down to the ranch to join up with us. Charlie'd say, `In order to join up with our bunch you have to have experienced fear, lived with it.' So we'd take them down to the water hole on a trail, and then stake them out on the trail which was a byway for snakes to get to the water. Me and a couple others, Carl Foster was one, we tied Charlie down on the trail and all the snakes crawled over him. He dug it. The snakes had no fear because he wasn't afraid. Others that we staked out were screaming their heads off. And one guy, of this bike group, a real bust-out beer head, he screamed and fainted and came to and was screaming. He pissed all over the ground and cried like a child. We had to get him off there or he'd have gone nuts."

  Manson, Joe, and some of the others would make long excursions north out into Death Valley to an area called Goler Wash, north of Shoshone, California. Joe explains: "Charlie'd been up there before and took the bus up. He wanted to find the place where nobody was and nobody wanted." There was an old house there, occupied at that time by a couple of miners. "It was called the Barker Ranch," Joe says, "and Charlie wanted to know who owned it and the land around there. Mrs. Barker owned it, we were told, but she wasn't around the place very often. She didn't live in Death Valley. A couple of miners were doing claim work in the wash. One, Buck Johnson, a sort of caretaker called `old Buck,' said he was a gold miner.

  "Just a little ways from the Barker place, maybe a quarter mile, was another house and it was owned by the grandmother of one of the girls Charlie had in the Family. We stayed there on and off and after a couple of weeks Charlie said, `The animals around here are a lot smarter than most people we know,' and he said they hadn't lost the ability to love or be real, but that people had lost that. They couldn't love. He said even the wild burros were more aware and able to love than man could."

  Manson says, "I studied the animals, I know how they get moisture from the sand. I've seen them do it. I'd watch the rodents burrow and exist in places where no one could live, how they'd go down deep, and get the water, even store it. I didn't eat meat. I didn't eat meat and I could communicate with the coyotes. The coyotes would come along and they would smell my crap and could tell there was no meat in what I ate, so they had no fear of me. They knew right away that I meant no harm to them."

  Earlier he had located Arlene Barker, owner of the property in Goler Wash on the edge of Death Valley National Monument. Mrs. Barker recalls, "He [Manson] asked me if he could camp at Goler. There was a girl with him, and he told me he was associated with a group in the music business. He said the Beach Boys. I was under the impression from what he said to me that he wrote music for the Beach Boys. He gave me a golden record. I told him if he wanted to stay over there a few days it was all right with me." At that time, Mrs. Barker had two men living at her ranch, "doing assessment work in the claims, and they told me that there was a couple from Arizona and a little boy, and a couple of what they described as hippies, staying at the ranch."

  The Family made several trips back and forth between Death Valley and the Spahn ranch, Joe remembers. Manson continued to rule over the Family that was growing in number. "At nights the new girls would wallow around Charlie," Joe says. "He was the ringleader of the circus that was happening. Some of the people were really turned on to love - strung out behind the physical thing. One night after a camp fire and singing, Charlie and I walked around the rear of the old bunkhouse. He said, `Making love is the most basic experience, to me the only real experience.' He said love means a lot of things to different people, `Like the guys in jail read stories about some goddamn love, to them all a love story means is a big cock on one page that gets bigger on the next page and bigger on each page after that. Love isn't like that,' Charlie said. `Love involves beautiful emotions.'

  "Then the next thing he's laughing and sort of crouching in the shadows. He talks about the thirty girls doing anything he wants," Joe says. "He said, `I screw anyone I want, get it all I want - I got a Rolls Royce over here, I got a sports car over there. I got dune buggies and anytime I want I got the mountains.' Meanwhile the girls are waiting on him hand and foot. They are all puppets he controls. Charlie wrecked up the Rolls and he wrapped the sports car and he just left them laying there at the side of the road. And I said to him, `You just going to leave the cars racked up here?? 'Yeah, sure,' he said, `Who needs it?' What did he care about the cars?

  "He said, `When I was your age I used to spend an hour every day with a girl making love to her. Now when the sun goes down,' he said, `I just think of screwing, I can start screwing any one of thirty girls, and I can screw all night long."'

  Linda admits that the girls were on the ranch to serve the men, and particularly, Charlie. She recalls one occasion about mid-July: "There was one particular girl, I don't remember her name. She was very young, maybe fifteen - sixteen. She was very shy and very withdrawn," Linda recalls. "She was in the middle of the group and Charlie took her clothes off and started making love
to her. She was pushing him away - at one point she bit him on the shoulder and he hit her in the face. And after that she just fell back ... Then he told Bobby Beausoleil to make love to her and he told everybody to touch her and make love to her." No one touched the girl until Charlie told them to, and afterward, "then Charlie told everybody to make love to everybody ... We all shed our clothes, and we were on the floor and it didn't matter who was beside you, a man or a woman, you made love and touched each other and it was like we were all one." Everyone was nude and had sex with each other, she remembers. In the Family philosophy, "everything was all right" and "there was no wrong," she says.

  Joe claims, "I had two girls that slept with me during my stay at the ranch. One had stayed with Beausoleil before he split. Tex and one of the girls stayed over at the Longhorn Saloon that they were making into a nightclub. Charlie stayed practically a different place every night with a different girl. He told me he didn't like the girls to take aggressive parts, he had to be strong, and he was aggressive. `I don't like a girl to be aggressive when they're screwing you,' he said, `because it tends to bring out the female in you. And I don't like to be submissive. It's a woman's part in life to be submissive and to take care of men. You see,' he said, `That's why it's so great with these young girls because they take care of me like a mother ..."'

  Charlie had other demands to make of the family. Linda recalls that one day at supper time, Charlie told Bobby and another in the group, Bruce Davis, "to go with credit cards and to buy all types of clothing for us and the children and certain parts for the dune buggies ... He wanted each of us girls to have two sets of clothing, sort of like a straight dress to wear on, like weekends at the ranch, or when riders would come by, and each of us to have a pair of moccasins and Levis and a blouse or whatever, and clothes for the babies, and he ordered sleeping bags. We got sleeping bags and there were a whole bunch of pocket knives for each person . . ."

  Freida King had been living at the ranch for some time, always barefoot, but never without a knife at her side. "People wore whatever shoes they could find," she says. Freida was painting the saloon. "Painting and fixing it," she says. Inside the saloon were two old Sparkletts water bottles, which had been painted along with the walls and some old chairs. Freida put the words "Helter Skelter" on one of the water bottles, she says, "because I listened to the Beatles, and they told me to paint the jug so I just put it on there ... I don't know if Charlie told me directly, it was just getting everything ready and the jug had to be painted."

  Manson says about "helter-skelter" that the words come from a Beatles song. "It is not my music," but he adds, "I hear what it relates ... It says rise - it says kill."

  In some of the songs Charlie wrote, the word helter-skelter was used, and, Susan says, "he'd talk about helter-skelter. We all talked about helter-skelter. You must understand that all the words had no meanings to us and that helter-skelter was explained to me by Charlie then - I don't even like to say `Charlie' - I'd like to say the words came from his mouth - that helter-skelter was to be the last war on the face of the earth - it would be all the wars that have ever been fought built one on top of the other, something that no man could conceive of in his imagination. You can't conceive of what it would be like to see every man judge himself and then take it out on every other man all over the face of the earth."

  It seemed no one but Charlie knew what was in Charlie's head, if Charlie himself knew. But Linda remembers "a certain passage in one song where he said he thought he heard, or did hear, the Beatles calling him, saying, `Charlie, Charlie, send us a telegram' - he thought the Beatles were calling him."

  Another family member recalls that Manson told the family how certain lyrics of the Beatles called for the black man to rise up. In one Beatles song, Manson believed he heard machine gun fire and the oinking of pigs, he said. The young man, who remembers being under the influence of LSD when he first met Charlie, says he later thought Manson was Jesus Christ and that he once tried to die - at Manson's command - by attempting to stop eating, thinking and exerting all physical effort. He said that out in the desert, Manson told him, "Give up your thoughts. Die. Because it's all unreal."

  Just as throughout history some have been willing to die for Christ, some of the Family were supposedly willing to die for Charlie. Or kill for him.

  "A guy worked at the ranch - worked for old blind man Spahn," says Foster, "named Shorty Shea, a kind of ranch hand guy who pictured himself being an actor like some sort of John Wayne. He'd married a black chick that Charlie didn't like - because she was a `nigger,' he said, and advised me to stay upwind. This Shorty'd been bummed out with Charlie running the ranch as he was, and he'd even talked to the old man about kicking Charlie and the hippies out of there, and Shorty was the guy to do it, or so he thought. This guy even had some of the license plates on the swiped cars. Charlie said, `It's too bad he's breathing. He oughta stop breathing and let live, right?'

  "Old George, the old man, he liked the girls, especially Squeaky who was at his side half the time when she wasn't making garbage runs, and she was like this blind man's - walking him here and walking him there, and the old man dug it - dug her. And Squeaky didn't trust or like his hired hand - this Shorty guy - this dumb fucking cowboy ... who was digging his own grave."

  Charlie had been talking about death, says Linda. "I heard him say, `If you are willing to be killed, you should be willing to kill."'

  A boy Manson drove into town with one day, recalls an episode after the two left an ice cream parlor. He asked Manson to drive him by a relative's house, and when they arrived, the boy says, Manson wondered if the family had a dog, then suggested, "Why don't we go in there and tie them up and cut them to pieces." The boy said he told him "No." In his wildest dreams, he couldn't have taken Charlie seriously.

  A few afternoons later, Joe says, "I was sitting at the Longhorn in the shade and Charlie came out. He'd been painting the inside of the saloon. I hadn't said a word, and he looked at me and said, `You're changing and going away.' I said, `Where?' and Charlie said, `You are going into yourself, dig. We have been through a lot of shit and a lot of it hasn't flown yet. And you have always been going out of yourself, haven't you?' And I said, `Yes.' He said, `Go in all the way, it's where you're heading.' He said why didn't I go back to the desert, and I said I wasn't sure about it out there, to which he sort of laughed. He said, `You've gone in by yourself and nobody's pushed you, and what you're doing is right, it's perfect, dig, because that is what you're doing.' He said whatever had to be done, had to be done, and the thing of being done would make it perfect."

  Joe stayed on at the ranch, "maybe another week or so, I don't have any idea about time. I didn't see Charlie every day - he stayed all over, with a different girl all the time." In Joe's mind, time was disconnecting itself from his thought process. In Death Valley, Joe says, "On a couple occasions in Shoshone I'd walked for miles with him on the desert floor. I'd seen him squatting in the noonday sun without a hat, figuring things for himself, when not even the animals would go in the sun. Maybe I'd been affected by the heat. But I had lost track of clock and calendar time. Anyway, I stayed at Spahn ranch. We all got up when Charlie did and ate whenever he did and what he ate, and he was a clock we all watched to check things out and see where we were."

  Yet Charlie himself told the family, "I have never lived in time." He said that in reform school, "A bell rings. I get up. The door opens and I go out. A bell rings, and I live my life with bells. I get up when a bell rings and I do what a bell says. I have never lived in time.

  "Things are relative," he told them. "I haven't got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to see any wrong. I have never found any wrong. I looked at wrong, and it is all relative. Truth is relative to the way you want to think. My reality is my reality and I stand with myself on my reality. Whatever you do is up to you ..."

  But Charlie's time and Charlie's law was becoming the absolute. One girl says she once saw him slap another g
irl across the face twice, angrily admonishing the two girls and Tex that they were not to go to sleep until he [Charlie] had gone to sleep. Another girl, seventeen, says Manson struck her with the leg of a chair, kicked, hit and even whipped her once with an electrical cord.

  "Charlie preached love," Joe says, "but he was saying something else. He used the love he showed in all kinds of ways to strip us down to the bone, and then we were ready to do whatever he wanted. I stole, we all stole. I hit so many supermarkets and drugstores I lost count. We made almost daily raids into the `pig pen' (shopping centers). And when I couldn't get the stuff in my clothes, stealing, I was out in all the garbage cans. We spent a lot of time in people's trash and we even had a song about The Garbage Man we'd sing at the ranch ... We were all part of the garbage man - all the great garbage man - and we were really people of what you could call the true garbage can ...

  "One day," he recalls, "I think Leslie was in a car with a couple of girls, and we went to do some prowling in the pig pen, and the car broke down. The fuel pump just sort of busted up. Also there'd been no oil for the car for a long time, not since I'd stolen a case from a Chevron station. The girls got some of the stuff Charlie'd wanted them to bring back, and they started hitching. Some dudes picked them up and said, `No, the guy can't ride,' and this made the girls sort of laugh because none of it mattered one way or another. So I just started walking and then I saw this sheriff's car - pulls up and I had pills in my pocket, so he said, `Let's go ...