Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family
Page 23
They agree they would do anything for Charlie, and condemn the Establishment for convicting him. "Right and wrong is what you yourself want to make it," Sandra said. "We killed six people for our brothers, that's where it's at. We did it for love," she said, smiling.
A smiling Snake said, "See, what you have done in that courtroom has been an act of propaganda. You have sentenced people to death for actually giving heart to life. You have taken what is true, and turned it into a lie. That is how you live - how you all live."
The girls squatting on the sidewalk looked at one another and nodded slowly. Each one agreed with the other. There was no mistaking that.
No sooner had society convicted the killers and settled in, sighing that the worst had been done, when the following year the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Termed a "permissive delay," the moratorium permanently removed those capital punishment convictions, commuting them to life sentences. All condemned killers would face eligibility for parole. The doors on all death row cells were opened, and the murderers entered the general prison population to await parole hearings.
"We beat the gas!" cheered Bobby on San Quentin's Death Row. "Lone Eagle's gonna fly again!"
Tex Watson's mental dysfunctions improved miraculously with the moratorium. Having hoped at best for some commutation from death to life-imprisonment due to his feigned diminished capacity, Tex would now plan for his potential freedom through manipulating the parole system.
"Sure, there'll be a time before we're eligible for parole, but the point is that we'll be eligible. It'll be up to us to show we deserve to be set free - show them that we're different people now."
"You have to beat the opposition," says Susan, "and they're going to put up a real show..."
Within a very short time, Susan began concocting the idea of converting to the "born again" Christian movement - "You know, finding God and all that, and being forgiven for what we did," she would say. And Tex, the most brutal and wanton of murderers, was quick to pick up the cue. He could immerse himself in religion as he'd once wallowed in the blood of his victims, and by his "praising the Lord" theyd see he was changed - "a new man." He'd get married - be granted conjugal visits, and he'd spawn children to "show love for the little ones" and speak of the preciousness of life.
Leslie would no longer fret over her pending dose of cyanide, but decided to work on her memoirs. She'd push herself into some alternate school program - outside, the prison, of course, and earn a respectable degree. She'd make herself over from coiffeur to pedicure - show how she too could be a respectable member of the society that had condemned her. She'd erase the thrill of murder from her thoughts, though knowing there'd be no changing of that inner impulsive one, the knife-wielding one that Charlie'd sniffed out so successfully. He knew she'd kill - knowing she wanted to kill, and all he had to do was the put the knife in her hand and deliver her to the nearest victim.
Even Charlie knew - perhaps better than any of them, that all that stuff could be cloaked beneath an adopted respectability. "Ass-kissing the Establishment," he'd say, "like a dog licking the hand of the one that's got the chain and the whip."
"After all," Leslie'd say, "isn't that what it all is anyway? You tuck in that part that's ugly and show them the best face you've got?"
And since Charlie, with a kind of "Jesus Christ-like" refusal to compromise, would soon become the fly in the ointment - "the nigger in the haystack," he'd say, as those Family members convicted of murder turned against him - laying the blame for their actions on Charlie. Hungry for publicity that might dim the horror of her past crimes, Susan would write to the newspapers - condemning Charlie. To the Los Angeles Times, she announced, "I can assure you ... from firsthand experience that his depravity and depth of cruelty make him a truly base human being ..
Meanwhile, unlike Susan, Tex, Leslie and the others, Bobby does not shift blame for the killings. In his cell, decorating his torso with neoNazi tattoos while espousing his "Aryan Brotherhood philosophy," Bobby recalls his life with the Family, and attempts to assert his own leadership in the events that made history. "The men and women in this family [Manson's], my brothers and sisters," Bobby says, "have followed me through the killings, to the jails, the courts, to prison and to Death Row for the love they have for me ... But things came down the way they did and I know, somehow, that it's right. I know why we are here ... We are a family and we, the men, are the white sons of man. Knowing only one, and seeing no one above myself, I say I am the one son of man. But I know my soul and I am many. There are many people in this family. And there are many in this family that don't know they are in this family. And that's why I am here. I am here to show you, and to show all people ... to testify to what I know as true, and call all those in kind who recognize themselves in me, to give themselves into my family ...
"We are the outcast of society - rejected by society as not fitting the cookie-cutter. We are the outlaws on the motorcycles, the convicts in prison, the people on the street: the alley people. We are the white faction of the people society has picked out. Society's bad men, that are really the best of men; the freer, the stronger ...
"Since I was real young I had to scuffle for myself, and this gave me a different understanding of things than most people have. Society didn't like me because my level of understanding clashed with that of the Christian ideology. I have always been the `bad man' . . . in society's eyes I am the devil and a thief. I take society's daughters into the bushes and make love to them and fuck them. And I don't have any shame - no use for society's kind of morals. And because I am stronger than most men, the young people and the children follow me, and other men like me, and this brings society's house down. And society fears that, so they are afraid of me, and that's why they lock me up in a prison. I show the young people, just as I have learned, that what they are being taught in school, in church, and by their mom and dad is not true. That the truth ain't in the church or its teachings. And when they see this, they begin to reject society's values as I have rejected them. They discover that to hold on to those ancient and obsolete values is to live a lie born of madness.
"We are a deadly family - to our enemies that may try to divide, control or destroy us, or any part of our world ... Every man brings his judgement on himself."
Susan would say she was unable to understand why society does not "forgive" her, since, she says, "God had already forgiven us. Does the American society now place itself above God? Does the public have no mercy in its heart?"
Sean Gotler, a post-Spahn Family member and ex-inmate of Atascadero, found the going tough on the outside. "Because I was still a part of them," he says, "I asked Squeaky if she wanted to go to this place in Salt Lake City and she could have a baby, but she said no, no, she had to be near Charlie. She belonged to Charlie. She said she and the others - like Sandra and the others - they'd always belong to Charlie no matter what, and they had to be close to him. That's why they hung around Daye Shinn's, and the sidewalk and why she went up to Sacramento for that trip to get word from Charlie ..
Gotler says, "I'm in a position of being able to look back on it now, and I admit I wouldn't want to know someone like Squeaky and like Charlie anymore - it's just too much of living in a nightmare and being at war - being at a war without an end ..."
Raids, arrests, hold-ups, jail breaks - the Manson Family would thrive and buck and bulge against the law, but they would not change. Sandra and Squeaky set up house in an old two-story clapboard house at 1725 P Street in Sacramento, and waged a campaign against the Establishment. To fully capture the media, Squeaky oiled up a .45 automatic and set out for the Capitol grounds. President Gerald Ford was visiting the California Capitol and as he walked across the grounds, Squeaky lunged at him with the gun. The hammer was cocked back, but one Secret Service agent managed to wedge his thumb between the hammer and the firing pin.
Instantly wrestled into handcuffs, Squeaky was charged with attempted assassination. She was tried and imprisoned. She woul
d attempt escapes, managing to draw attention to herself and the "Manson mania' .. .
Sandra, calling herself "Hungry Knife," would be arrested the following year for threatening government officials and corporate leaders, threatening blood baths by the "International People's Court of Retribution/Manson." The Nazi swastika appeared everywhere.
Twenty-five years later, Sandra would announce to the press that the Sharon Tate and the LaBianca murders were justified - "a sort of necessary prelude to social change ...Those murders were very justified. In spirit, I'm still at war. That's just as powerful as if I went and put a knife in some person's stomach in Hollywood."
Manson's fame and wide-spreading "appreciation" is disturbing to Vincent Bugliosi who prosecuted Charlie and the girls, and who wrote a best-selling book on the case, which was made into a television movie. "More than any other crime, the gruesome murders and Manson's power over his followers have both repelled and captivated the public - world wide, now. Over the last twenty-five years, he has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason, there is a side of human nature that is fascinated with ultimate evil."
Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, who helped convict Charlie and the Family, also keeps his own "vigil." He steadfastly opposes the parole of any of the "Manson Family," by reminding members of the State Board of Prison Terms, in graphic detail, of the seven murders that shocked the nation. "Manson and the others are in prison for committing the most brutal murders this nation has ever seen," he says, "for trying to start a race war. These individuals are out to destroy our society, and they are very dangerous. I do not think they should be given another chance to destroy."
None of this impresses Charlie, now a gnarled, ugly little man. "I put Bugliosi on the map," he says, "and he's made more money off me than he'll ever see again ..."
A recent fellow inmate says, "Charlie would stare at the wall like he was gonna spook or trance the sink, and he'd giggle and laugh to himself, then turn around and look you right in the eyes and still be giggling ...
"I'll be out of here," Charlie says with a twisted grin, "one way or another. It's just time. Time. That's all it is, and I have all the time in the world. They can't kill me, you see. They've never been able to kill me. Oh, they try - Bugliosi tried - they try to gas me or stick a knife in me and they try to light me on fire, but I'm not gonna die because they want me to die. I don't care who shoots who or why they shoot - it's only madmen that adjust to what's going on in your world. I don't care how much money Bugliosi or George Bush makes or if he doesn't make or dies - like President Bill Clinton - personally, I'd like to see them not alive, all of them, and if I had my way I could pull this switch - they'd be dead with a lot of others. I'd kill them right out in the parking lot ... My message for the future is that my first stop is when I'm out of here in either my body or my head, man, I'm going to Sabzevar, that's right, Sabzevar in Iran, dig. I got people waiting for me to connect to some financial business - I'll get some money for a change instead of everyone making money off me. And then I'm heading to Sri Lanka. There's people there that'll take care of this spirit for a while - feed me special stuff, but no meat - no meat. This is because intuition can be dulled by eating meat. See, I got my own mahatma, dig. He sends me the score, and from Sri Lanka, I'm on my way to New Delhi, and there I am going to radiate. Like the sun. Man and sun," he laughs. "It won't matter if I'm seventy-six years old, or if you think I'm the walking dead - you think it will matter? I am not the walking dead but walking in the spirits and the minds. What I'm talking about is known and will be known when I'm there. New Delhi? Oh, you know who Kali is - Kali's standing right behind me, and so's the octopus - you know what the octopus is? You dig the arms the thing's got? Oh, kill me," Charlie says. "Oh, sure, oh, sure, but you can't kill what is known and what I'm saying, and that is what is going to be said. It is law you can't hide from, you can't escape from. What you're going to do is you're going to see what I'm saying ..
His eyes seem to roll into his head as he bares his teeth and smiles ...
Also by John Gilmore from Amok Books
SEVERED
The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitue Elizabeth Short, known even before her death as the "Black Dahlia," has over the decades transmogrified from L.A.'s crime of the century to an almost mythical symbol of Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. Severed, the first true-crime book published on the strangest of all "unsolved" murders in the annals of modern crime, offers the documented solution to the case as endorsed by law enforcement and forensic science experts.
"The most satisfying and disturbing conclusion to the Black Dahlia case. After reading Severed, I feel like I truly know Elizabeth Short and her killer." - David Lynch
"I love Severed. It is the most uncanny evocation of Los Angeles during and after the war. I've read it about seven times. His portrait of Elizabeth Short as this strange, unknowable somnambulist sleepwalking through that unique junction of time and space is permanently haunting."
- Gary Indiana
ISBN 1-878923-10-2, (trade paper)
$16.95 US /£12.95 UK
288 pp., illustrated
For individual orders, please contact:
Also by John Gilmore from Amok Books
LAID BARE
A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip
Acclaimed as a powerful chronicler of the American Nightmare through his gripping examinations of near-mythic Southern California murders (the Black Dahlia, Tate-LaBianca), author John Gilmore draws upon his own reservoir of personal experiences as he turns his sights on our morbid obsession with Celebrity and the ruinous price it exacts from those who would pursue it. With caustic clarity and 20/20 hindsight, Gilmore unstintingly recounts his relationships with the likes of James Dean, Janis Joplin, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg, Lenny Bruce and many other denizens of the twentieth century's dubious pantheon both on the way up and at the peaks of their notoriety.
`Beautifully written in a style somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski ... This is an astonishing book. - Sight and Sound, U.K.
ISBN 1-878923-08-0 (trade paper)
$16.95 US / £11.95 UK
250 pp., illustrated
For individual orders, please contact:
New from John Gilmore on Amok Audio
LAID BARE CD
Words and Readings by John Gilmore
Music by Skip Heller
The Laid Bare CD presents John Gilmore's words and story in his own voice, accompanied by a compelling crime jazz score. This first Amok CD brings together hard-boiled fiction, soundtrack music, the underside of Hollywood glamour and true-crime literature. The specter of the Black Dahlia, the archetypal doomed would-be starlet, hangs over the proceedings, guiding the young Gilmore through the labyrinthine netherworlds of his fabled birthplace, Hollywood. The tragic 20th-century mythical figures the Black Dahlia, James Dean, Charles Manson, Janis Joplin, Lenny Bruce and Ed Wood, Jr. appear and vanish in recursive spirals, imbuing this audio project with a seductive eeriness.
Composer Skip Heller and his musical collaborators have evoked the tension, dread and transcendent moments of the world Gilmore brings to life-the desperate attempt to embrace the dream. This accomplished CD weaves together passages from three of Gilmore's books, scoring each excerpt with original music.
$16.98
Available October 2000
For individuals orders, please contact:
ilter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share