Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them
416
Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them
416eBook
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Overview
Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff’s edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it’s this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it’s that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick.
The premier storytelling podcast studio Parcast has been focusing on unearthing these mechanics—the cult leaders and followers, and the world and culture that gave birth to both. Parcast’s work in analyzing dozens of case studies has revealed patterns: distinct ways that cult leaders from different generations resemble one another. What links the ten notorious figures profiled in Cults are as disturbing as they are stunning—from Manson to Applewhite, Koresh to Raël, the stories woven here are both spellbinding and disturbing.
Cults is more than just a compilation of grisly biographies, however. In these pages, Parcast’s founder Max Cutler and national bestselling author Kevin Conley look closely at the lives of some of the most disreputable cult figures and tell the stories of their rise to power and fall from grace, sanity, and decency. Beyond that, it is a study of humanity, an unflinching look at what happens when the most vulnerable recesses of the mind are manipulated and how the things we hold most sacred can be twisted into the lowest form of malevolence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982133566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gallery Books |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2022 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 497,266 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Kevin Conley is the author of the national bestseller Stud: Adventures in Breeding and The Full Burn: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel, and Over the Edge with Hollywood Stuntmen. A former editor at The New Yorker, he has written for GQ, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. He lives with his family in Connecticut.
Read an Excerpt
SHAME: Charles Manson and the Family
More than any other cult leader, Charles Manson and the Manson Family is responsible for introducing the image of cults into the modern national consciousness. This isn’t an exaggeration, like saying Al Gore invented the internet. Charles Manson and the nightmarish Tate-LaBianca murders that he masterminded mark the moment that everything changed on the American landscape.
How did Charles Manson achieve such notoriety? The 1960s were the television decade. There were only three broadcast networks, and every night a good part of the nation tuned in for the 6:00 p.m. news. One can point to TV becoming a transformative force in history when, on September 26, 1960, John F. Kennedy won the first-ever televised presidential debate. Radio listeners gave the victory to Kennedy’s Republican rival, the sitting vice president, Richard Nixon. But those following on TV witnessed an entirely different event: Nixon, sweating due to nervousness and a low-grade fever, facing a dashing rival who grew more confident and commanding as the hour-long debate progressed.
The Kennedys’ romance with television and vice versa continued after they took office, when the glamorous Jackie Kennedy gave the nation a televised tour of the White House. Then, tragically and indelibly, the TV cameras again brought the First Lady into American homes when they captured her in a bloody dress during the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Three days later, the state funeral was broadcast live for seven hours straight. Ninety-three percent of the television sets in the entire country were tuned to the event.
For the rest of the turbulent decade, TV continued to shape the issues as protests and social unrest swept through the United States. The Vietnam War was dubbed the “living room war” as nightly news programs beamed in footage of American bombing raids, executions of civilians, and Vietnamese monks setting themselves on fire. President Lyndon Johnson, who sensed that the war would be his political undoing, even claimed that CBS and NBC were controlled by the Viet Cong.
In 1965, state and local police routed civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama, and ABC News broke into the network’s scheduled broadcast with shocking coverage of law enforcement trampling, clubbing, and tear-gassing six hundred civilians—a turning point that would lead to the Johnson administration passing the Voting Rights Act five months later. When large-scale riots gripped the crowded inner cities of Detroit and Newark in 1967 and Miami, Chicago, Watts, and Washington, DC, in 1968, the footage showed cities in flames.
On July 20, 1969, an estimated 530 million people watched live as Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission orbited the moon, successfully landed a lunar module, and exited down the ladder, stepping foot for the first time on Earth’s only natural satellite. The inspirational event was heralded as the greatest proof of what humanity could accomplish.
Then, only a few weeks after this achievement, on August 9 and 10, TV showed humanity’s dark side emerging as the evening news reported the murders of seven people in Los Angeles, brutally executed on consecutive nights.
It wasn’t until two months later, on the night of October 12, that the police finally arrested Charles Manson. He was a small man, barely five-foot-three and 130 pounds at the time, but he nevertheless had an electrifying effect on those who gathered around him. The murders that he ordered his followers to commit—first of movie star Sharon Tate and four others staying with her at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, and then of married couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night at 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz—sent the area into an immediate panic.
In Manson’s misguided imagination, he hoped the fear those killings inspired would plunge the country into a race war. The apocalyptic conflict he was counting on never materialized, but the random nature of the crime and the brutal details of the killings—closely followed as news of the investigations reached the public through sensational nightly TV coverage—shocked America to its core.
It gives Charles Manson too much credit to think that this effect was intentional. But he was hungry for attention. At the time of the murders, he had spent the better half of his life in either reform school or jail. His uncanny ability to draw the spotlight to himself and to use it to get what he wanted was the one trait that his prison counselors and psychologists noted in nearly all their reports. When he was released on good behavior in 1967 from San Francisco’s Terminal Island after serving six and a half years of a ten-year sentence for forgery at McNeil Island federal penitentiary in Washington State, he emerged into a country that was dividing sharply along generational lines over issues like women’s liberation, civil rights, and the Vietnam War. Just a few years earlier, students in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, had been warning their peers not to trust anyone over thirty. Although Manson was thirty-four in 1969, nearly all the members of his “Family” were in their teens and early twenties.
The Manson murders showed the nation how quickly all those youthful impulses could go wrong. The members of the Manson Family were all from the baby boom generation, the over 76 million children born between 1946 and 1964, and who came into their prime years of rebellion and experimentation en masse. They proved to be highly susceptible to Manson’s mix of LSD and psychological manipulation. Manson himself was never present when his victims were killed, but he didn’t have to be. Even without raising a finger, the slayings had his unmistakable signature on them.
Manson exerted a near-absolute control over the Family, and he used this power with the same intent as if he himself had wielded the murder weapons: the bayonet, the kitchen knife, and the .22-caliber Hi Standard Longhorn revolver, or “Buntline Special.” This was his modus operandi—murder by proxy. Over two nights he demonstrated how easy it was to turn orphans, runaways, and college dropouts into highly motivated killers. And his hold on his Family continued even after he was caught. A gauntlet of young women in peasant dresses knelt on the ground outside the courthouse, telling any reporter who asked that they were holding a vigil, “waiting for our father to be free.” Inside the courtroom, Charles Manson and his co-conspirators invented new disruptions every day, singing, laughing maniacally, or chanting during the proceedings, even rushing the presiding judge, Charles H. Older, as Manson did at one point, yelling, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!”
Thanks to the circus atmosphere of the murder trial, millions of gullible teenagers and young adults who wanted to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” started to look like threats. In the months that followed the murders, the term “cult” quickly took on a new and terrifying meaning, in part because the horrific nature of the crimes seemed to require a whole new vocabulary. Up until that point, “cult” usually referred to a religious sect whose belief system differed from those of traditional religions, even if its inception and practices could be traced in part to one or more of those same traditional religions. There had long been cults that splintered off from Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and most were not viewed as inherently dangerous or malevolent. For sects like those, experts prefer the term “new religious movement,” or NRM.
Before Manson, “cult” was often applied loosely to elements of popular culture, describing die-hard fans of a singer or a television show. But in the years that followed, the word came to refer to what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “destructive” cults—the groups that systematically harm and kill others or themselves. There had certainly been dangerous cult leaders before Charles Manson, but these figures didn’t start fascinating the American public until the Tate-LaBianca murders. According to Lifton, one can recognize destructive cults because they generally have three distinct features: a charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship; a shift in attitude that allows that cult leader to take advantage of group members for sex and/or financial gain; and near-total control that can be traced to the cult leader’s ability to exert something Lifton calls “thought reform”—or, as it’s colloquially known, mind control.
Charles Milles Manson’s grandmother, Nancy Maddox, a fundamentalist Christian and the widow of a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad conductor, had five children to raise on her own—Glenna, Aileene, Luther, Dorothy, and her youngest, Ada Kathleen—in the hardscrabble eastern Kentucky town of Ashland. Nancy was strict, but she hoped that her brand of Golden Rule discipline would help her kids beat the odds and grow up to be moral and pious. But Ada Kathleen wanted to have fun like other girls and at age fifteen began sneaking over the state line, across the Ironton Bridge, and into the dance clubs on the opposite side of the Ohio River. She started keeping company with a man eight years older—the handsome Colonel Walker Henderson Scott—and hid any evidence of the relationship from her mother. Scott had a secret too: he was a married man. But, married or not, as soon as he discovered that Ada Kathleen was pregnant, he skipped town.
Nancy sent Ada Kathleen to Cincinnati to have the baby, where the teen birth would not inspire so much local gossip. Left on her own, Ada Kathleen proved to be resourceful. She convinced another man, twenty-five-year-old William Manson, to marry her despite her pregnancy, and on November 12, 1934, at the age of sixteen, she gave birth to a boy, Charles.
But motherhood didn’t settle Ada Kathleen. Her family, including her son, later told stories about her wild-child teenage years, which included one particularly outrageous incident in which the young mother carted her baby out to the bar with her and traded the boy for a pitcher of beer. In 1987, Al Schottelkotte, a news anchor at Cincinnati’s WCPO-TV, unearthed a version as part of a feature on Manson: Supposedly, a waitress in the bar where Ada Kathleen was drinking had confessed how much she wanted a baby herself, and Kathleen offered the trade. The waitress, thinking Ada Kathleen was joking, brought the beer anyway. Later she was surprised to discover that her customer had not only finished off the pitcher but had actually left the bar without her baby. It took Ada Kathleen’s brother, Luther, several days—a mysterious detail that suggests the waitress might have decided to make the best of her newfound maternity—to locate the bar and the waitress and recover the boy.
Ada Kathleen soon began leaving Charles with relatives so she could go out and party, disappearing for days with Luther. But her husband, William, who at first had been happy enough to help Ada Kathleen raise another man’s child, quickly grew sick of these disappearances and divorced her in 1937. Ada Kathleen couldn’t have cared less. She was busy taking Colonel Scott to court, trying to force him to pay child support. She won her lawsuit, but all she ever recovered from the boy’s biological father was $25.
Did Charles inherit his mother’s ill will and grow up to resent his biological father for abandoning him? There is little evidence one way or the other. But there is a thriving network of amateur detectives researching nearly every aspect of Charles’s life and connections, no matter how obscure. And many in this community connect Manson to an unsolved murder in his hometown of Ashland four months before the Tate-LaBianca killings: Darwin Scott—Colonel Scott’s brother and Charles Manson’s uncle—was discovered in his home, stabbed nineteen times, a butcher knife sticking out of his body. The similarity of the crimes in Beverly Hills and Los Feliz has led many to attribute to Manson the same murderous feelings of resentment and desire for revenge in all three cases. But Kentucky detectives came to the more reasonable conclusion that Darwin Scott had a long rap sheet, a history of lengthy prison stays, and an unfortunate habit of running up astronomical gambling debts to shady underworld figures.
What can be verified is that, long before Charles Manson became the deeply disturbed and vengeful leader of the Manson Family, he’d had a remarkably troubled childhood. A rough upbringing is a common feature among violent cult leaders, and most share a history of abuse, neglect, and criminality. (It’s not a rule, though, and several whom we will look at appear to have grown up with loving and supportive families and had privileged educations.) But even among cult leaders, Manson’s childhood stands out for its lovelessness: scarred by frequent run-ins with the law, subject to reluctant care from a rotating cast of relatives, visits that were sandwiched between his own frequent stays in reform schools and homes for wayward boys. And these troubles started early, in August 1939, when he was only four years old and his mother and uncle teamed up to rob a man named Frank Martin.
After a night of drinking, the siblings lured Martin to a gas station, then assaulted him and stole his money, sticking a ketchup bottle in their victim’s back to make him think they had a gun. They did a terrible job of disguising their identities, and the police found and arrested them the next day. Charles may even have been watching as his mother was led away. A few weeks later a judge sentenced Ada Kathleen to five years in prison for her role in what the local media called the Ketchup Bottle Robbery.
With his mother locked up, Charles’s closest relatives had to decide on the proper family member to take care of the boy. The best candidate seemed to be his mother’s sister Glenna, who had a husband, Bill Thomas, and an eight-year-old daughter, Jo Ann. They lived the closest to where Ada Kathleen was serving her sentence, and that’s where he was sent: the small middle-class town of McMechen, West Virginia, where almost everyone worked in the mines or for the railroad.
It wasn’t long before Charles began creating problems for his new family. He was smaller than the other boys at school but always wanted to be the center of attention. Whenever people ignored him, he would act out impulsively. The standard punishment of the era—a whipping for bad behavior—didn’t have any effect on him. And he didn’t seem worried about getting beaten up at school either. He talked back to the bullies no matter how large they were. Jeff Guinn, in his expansive biography, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, tells how Charles’s cousin Jo Ann was instructed to keep an eye on him—which was why, when Charles got in an argument with a larger boy on the playground, she rushed to the young Manson’s defense, biting the bigger boy’s finger to scare him away.
Jo Ann’s behavior surprised the teachers, who didn’t expect to see the mild-mannered girl getting into fights. She explained that her cousin had been harassed and she’d only tried to defend him. But when confirmation of the story was attempted with Charles, he simply said that he wasn’t involved. It didn’t matter. The teachers already considered Charles a habitual liar: they’d previously witnessed him recruiting classmates, especially girls, to attack other students he didn’t like. And whenever they’d questioned Charles about these early efforts in mind control, he claimed innocence, saying that the girls had only done what they themselves had wanted to do. So when it came to his word against Jo Ann’s, the teachers had no choice but to believe her.
Jo Ann now saw her cousin for what he really was: a gifted con artist with no sense of loyalty, ready to lay the blame for his mischief on anyone but himself. But Jo Ann also came face-to-face with her cousin’s deeper pathological level of violence.
When she was ten and Charles was seven, an especially terrifying incident took place. Jo Ann’s parents had left for the day, and she was charged with babysitting and doing the housework. Charles refused to help with the chores—not an unusual position for a young boy. But he didn’t stop at that. He went out to the yard, found a sickle, and came back inside to frustrate her own attempts at her duties. When he refused to stop, Jo Ann kicked Charles outside and locked the screen door.
Charles screamed and slashed the door with the sickle blade. The look in his eyes terrified her, and Jo Ann was convinced that he planned to use the tool on her when he got back inside. Luckily, her parents pulled up at just that moment and he dropped the sickle before anything worse could happen.
These traits that Charles Manson exhibited as a boy could be considered consistent with recognized elements of psychopathy, a common condition in cult leaders, typified by amoral and antisocial behavior, the inability to love, and a host of other traits. The clinical psychologist Robert D. Hare developed a checklist that helps therapists to identify potential psychopaths. What could one infer that he might check off for the young Manson? Pathological lying? The tendency to manipulate others for personal gain? Lack of empathy? Glibness and superficial charm? Even though there is a hesitation among psychiatrists to put such a freighted label on one so young, these are all signs of what Hare classifies as both “factor 1” on his psychopathy scale—the most unequivocal diagnosis, typified by “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others”—and “aggressive narcissism.”
Would this mean that, at such an early age, Charles Manson was already a psychopath suffering from a recognizable mental illness? Not necessarily. Although his behavior clearly aligned with the early warning signs, these same traits (including a natural facility for lying) also have positive correlations associated with highly intelligent, extroverted people. Dr. Hare warns that these so-called core traits of the psychopath can prove to be useful, earning the person who displays them attention, rewards, and popularity. It may seem like a dangerous contradiction, but one of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of the psychopath is that, on a good day, people tend to enjoy being in their company.
But how did Manson pick up these traits in the first place? For example, it’s believed that a child can become insensitive and unemotional through either nature or nurture. Some children are born empathetic, but if they grow up with abusive parents in an unstable home, that empathy can disappear in self-defense and as a reflection of their environment. Kids raised this way are the most treatable and likely to be able to lead normal, productive lives—if therapists are able to help them in time.
The more dangerous children are those from loving homes and safe neighborhoods but who still exhibit the same traits as the ones who grow up in a directly opposite environment. According to authorities on psychopathy—from Hervey M. Cleckley in his seminal 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues on the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, to Robert Hare, who developed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—there is widespread agreement that some children have a genetic predisposition to psychopathy. Even as toddlers, they crave stimulation, they lie constantly, and they’re heartless (or, as they’re categorized in the clinical literature, “callous and unemotional,” or “CU”). If they seem like they’re being sweet or empathetic, it’s only because they want something from a person—thus, Cleckley’s “mask of sanity.” This condition is not uncommon; Robert Hare suggests that it afflicts about 1 percent of children, or roughly as many as those exhibiting symptoms of autism or bipolar disorder.
If untreated, it is expected that the psychopathic child will be committing violence against others by the age of eight or nine and engaging in criminal acts by fourteen to sixteen. One way to help prevent the condition from getting worse is constant attention and timely positive intervention—a loving family does have a protective but still not foolproof effect. And that kind of familial environment was precisely what was missing in Charles Manson’s childhood.
Manson experienced many traumatic events at a young age. Growing up with a mother who left him behind to party could have made it difficult for Charles to form a proper attachment bond with her as an infant. Watching his mother get arrested and visiting her in prison was almost certainly traumatic. Those were the chronic conditions that could have altered his nature. But Manson also suffered some distinctly hellish experiences that could have warped the way he looked at himself and the world. When Charles was five years old and living with his aunt and uncle, he attended first grade with Mrs. Varner, who was infamous in McMechen for verbally abusing and terrorizing her students.
Mrs. Varner spent Charles’s first day at school relentlessly mocking him for having a mother in prison. He ran home crying, a sign of weakness in the eyes of his disgusted uncle Bill. The next day Bill forced Charles to wear one of Jo Ann’s dresses to school, allegedly so his nephew could profit from the experience, toughen up, and learn how to be a man. Decades later, Charles still vividly remembered the humiliation.
According to Harold Koplewicz of the Child Mind Institute in New York City, in the right supportive situation, cross-dressing can be a positive and beneficial form of expression for children who want to explore their gender identity. But those who’ve been forced to cross-dress against their will by parental figures can be severely traumatized by the experience. In fact, while we can’t say for certain that this single event can be the turning point in an already deeply troubled childhood, it’s significant that several different serial killers, all of them with a gruesome trail of criminal behavior, went through the same kind of experience. Henry Lee Lucas, a pathological liar who confessed to killing first sixty, then a hundred, and later three thousand people, was made to dress as a girl by his prostitute mother, who also made him watch her having sex with clients. She was the first person he was proven to have murdered, in 1960. Ottis Toole, also forced to cross-dress by his mother (who called him Susan), was raped at the age of five by his father’s friend, had a reported IQ of 75, and killed seemingly at random—ranging from a six-year-old boy to an eighteen-year-old male hitchhiker to a sixty-year-old man to a twenty-year-old woman he abducted from a nightclub in Tallahassee, Florida. Doil Lane, dressed in girl’s clothing as a child, was as an adult convicted of killing two girls, ages eight and nine, and admitted that he liked girls’ panties. Charles Albright, the “Texas Eyeball Killer,” was dressed as a girl by his mother, who also gave him a doll and helped him learn taxidermy, although she would not allow him to buy the expensive glass eyes sold in taxidermy shops. He later killed three prostitutes, murders that were linked by one common trait: all three had had their eyeballs removed with surgical skill.
Apart from these links, recent research has further associated an acute sense of shame as a result of a specific incident of humiliation with future psychopathic behavior. For many people, the reaction is internal, and the shame can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, from saying demeaning things about oneself to self-harm, even suicide. For others—and it seems true of Charles Manson—the sense of shame can lead to aggression. Often this can set off a cycle of behavior with a dangerous dynamic: the source of shame remains hidden even while it repeatedly acts as the trigger for incidents of inexplicable rage. While the incident in the first grade is unconfirmed as the precipitating source of Manson’s shame, his elaborate schemes of revenge and his unstable nature—uncontrollable rage welling up from unacknowledged stigma—may sound familiar to those who study the patterns of cults.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Manson lived with the Thomases for two and a half years, and during that stay he developed three interests that remained with him for the rest of his life: a love of music (the family had a piano and, in their happiest moments, played and sang together), knives, and guns. Around the time of his eighth birthday in late 1942, his mother, Ada Kathleen, was paroled, and Charles went to live with her. At first he was thrilled to be back with his real mother instead of his strict relatives. Later in life, he told Nuel Emmons, for the book Manson in His Own Words, that the hug Ada Kathleen gave him when she first got out of prison was the only happy memory he had from childhood.
For eight weeks Ada Kathleen and her son stayed in McMechen while she worked as a barmaid, but then they moved south to Charleston, West Virginia, where Ada Kathleen found a job as a cashier in Van’s Never Closed Market. It didn’t take very long for her to notice her son’s disturbing behavior, such as constantly skipping school and spending most of his time trying to sweet-talk women into giving him money for candy. When he started stealing things and blaming others for the crimes, she turned to her mother, Nancy, for help in teaching Charles right from wrong. But the lectures on morality had no more impact on her grandson than they’d had on her own daughter.
In the end, Ada Kathleen had no idea how to get through to her child. It probably didn’t help that she’d gone back to carousing at the ends of her shifts, leaving Charles in the care of a series of not-entirely-trustworthy babysitters. Finally, as a last resort, she decided to see if an institution for troubled boys might be able to instill some discipline and moral fortitude. So, in 1947, when Charles was twelve years old, she sent him to the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, run by the Brothers of Holy Cross.
Suddenly, a tormented boyhood turned into an adolescence filled with petty and ineffective criminal behavior. At the first Christmas break, Charles was allowed to spend the holidays with his aunt and uncle and his forgiving cousin Jo Ann, who had encouraged the invitation. But Charles was quick to take advantage of the Thomases’ hospitality. With the adults away at church, he tried to steal his uncle’s gun, running the shower to mask the noise he made rummaging in the gun case. Jo Ann, who was afraid of Charles at this point, did nothing to stop him, but when her parents returned home and asked her why the water was running, she told them to go and ask her cousin. When they did, they caught him red-handed with the weapon.
A few months after returning to school, Charles ran away and began robbing local stores. But the now thirteen-year-old didn’t have the patience to be careful or the keen awareness necessary to make a clean getaway. Soon he was nabbed again. In 1948 a judge, who assumed that Charles was Catholic because he’d been sent to the Gibault School, sent him to Boys Town, Nebraska, to the home for wayward boys that had inspired the Spencer Tracy movie a decade earlier. A feature in the Indianapolis News at the time had a picture of Manson, who, the paper reported, had told the court, “I think I could be happy working around cows and horses. I like animals.”
Charles didn’t stay there long. Within four days of arriving, he and another youth named Blackie Nielson stole a car and drove to Illinois. Somehow the two managed to get a gun somewhere, which they promptly employed in a pair of armed robberies. Then they tried to continue their criminal apprenticeship, eking out a living working for Blackie’s uncle, himself a professional thief.
In early 1949 the police apprehended Charles once more. This time he was sent to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield, a much harsher institution. Now fourteen, he had to survive in the company of a frightening array of individuals who had committed everything from robbery and assault to manslaughter. The staffers and older occupants regularly abused smaller, younger boys like Manson. And according to Charles, not long after his arrival, he was brutally raped.
Manson’s later description of the event could serve as a textbook example of what psychologists call dissociation: “You know, getting raped, they can just wipe that off... I don’t feel that someone got violated and that’s a terrible thing. I just thought, ‘Clean it off, and that’s all that is.’” This kind of distancing mechanism in extreme cases can lead to multiple personality disorder, but it probably helped Charles cope with the memory of the trauma and his surroundings. It also provides early evidence of a troubling trait: his ability to numb himself to pain and disengage from objective reality. Manson later explained that this was the time that he first developed what he called the “insane game.” Since he was too small to intimidate other students, he tried to scare them into believing he was crazy by flapping his arms and shrieking and making terrifying faces, a skill that he later displayed for television reporters who came to interview the famous cult leader in prison.
There can be little doubt that Charles was suffering at the Indiana Boys School. He lived in constant fear of being physically and sexually abused, and attempted to run away four times in 1949 alone. In October of that year, he and six other boys initiated the largest mass escape in the school’s history, but police quickly caught Charles trying to break into a gas station. Two years later, Charles and two other boys fled again, this time getting as far as Beaver, Utah—1,600 miles from Indiana—in their stolen car, provisioning themselves along the way with supplies stolen from gas stations. But despite this successful breakout and the long joyride that followed, an arrest came after only a few days.
Charles was then sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, DC, where he was given a battery of tests that found him to be functionally illiterate. But they also showed that he had an IQ slightly above normal at 109. He certainly proved that he could manipulate the staff psychologists. Soon, Charles had one of them believing that the only thing he needed to turn his life around was a confidence boost. His potential would be optimized by a transfer to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum-security prison in Rockbridge County, Virginia. There the Thomases reentered his life, assuring administrators that, if Charles were released early, they would house him and help him find employment. His parole hearing was set for February 1952; all Charles had to do in the meantime was keep a low profile and follow the rules. Instead, one month before the hearing, he was caught sodomizing another inmate while holding a razor to his throat. He was then transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia, where he continued to be cited for “eight serious disciplinary offenses, three involving homosexual acts.”
By this point, after five years, Charles Manson had become the kind of prisoner considered a danger to the general population. He landed next at Chillicothe, a maximum-security reformatory, with no hope of parole until his twenty-first birthday: November 12, 1955.
Surprisingly, though Chillicothe authorities called him “grossly unsuited” for rehabilitation even there, this is when Charles finally made a concerted effort to change his behavior. He learned to read at a seventh-grade level, became a model prisoner, put in some dedicated work at the facility’s automotive shop, and, after earning a commendation for meritorious service, was finally released. By the age of nineteen, he’d effectively spent the past seven years in six different reform schools.
While he endured this long detention, various instructors, caseworkers, and prison psychiatrists regularly assessed him. Their insights provide the best sense of Charles Manson at the time, as they spotted the first glimmers of the master manipulator that he would soon become. At his first stop in the Gibault School for Boys, one instructor described him as a middling student, a likable boy, moody, with a bit of a persecution complex. By the time he got to the Indiana Boys School, which took in “incorrigibles,” the teachers were growing more skeptical, complaining that Charles “did good work only for those from whom he figured he could obtain something.” At the National Training School for Boys, he got more mixed results, convincing one caseworker that he was aggressively antisocial, a trait attributed to his “unfavorable family life, if it can be called family life at all.” Another caseworker viewed him with even less patience, saying, “This boy tries to give the impression that he is trying hard to adjust although he actually is not putting forth any effort.” Still, the same observer did detect his will to power, saying, “I feel in time he will try to be a big wheel in the cottage.” Manson’s skills at deceiving seemed to be proven by the last report from the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where one gullible psychiatrist wrote that “one is left with the feeling that behind all this lies an extremely sensitive boy who has not yet given up in terms of securing some kind of love and affection from the world.” It is hard to look through this file and not see the mind games and calculations that were Manson’s primary means of self-defense.
After he was paroled in April 1954, Charles went from Chillicothe, Ohio, back to West Virginia, where he moved from home to home, first at the Thomases’, then to Ada Kathleen’s in Wheeling, and finally to his favorite place of all, with his grandmother, Nancy Maddox, who doted on him. But there was one condition Nancy laid down if Charles hoped to remain with her: he had to attend regular Sunday services with her at the Church of the Nazarene across the street. So Charles dressed up and listened to the sermons, absorbing some of the biblical strictures he would one day impose on his own followers, such as the idea that women should obey men, and the admonition to abandon one’s own identity to serve a higher power.
It’s no surprise that Charles didn’t fit into this sanctified circle. He tried to make friends with the other Sunday school kids but soon alienated them with talk of the violence of his reform school days and the drugs he claimed to have done. He found it hard to showboat when the people he was trying to impress had no idea what “shooting up” meant. Then, on a visit to his cousin Jo Ann—who was now married to a local minister—she noticed him buttering up a teenage girl who had come to their home for counseling. Charles showered the girl with compliments, and Jo Ann quickly realized her cousin was trying to seduce the vulnerable guest. As a result, Jo Ann made the girl immediately leave his company and her house.
Still, by other measures, Charles seemed to be making a sincere effort to live a normal, middle-class life. He met a divorced dad, Charlie Willis, at Wheeling Downs, a local horse track, and Willis introduced him to his youngest daughter, a popular girl named Rosalie. The match seemed improbable when they were dating, and when they got married, on January 13, 1955, many speculated that the girl had to be pregnant. But if she was, she never had the child. Charles got a job, made some friends, turned to music—as he often did when he was trying to be on his best behavior—and began learning chords on the guitar. But his attempt to lead a stable life did not last long. When Rosalie did become pregnant a few months into their marriage, Charles started stealing cars for extra money. In the summer of 1955, he decided to take Rosalie and leave McMechen to visit his mother, who was now living in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the couple was apprehended there, having driven cross-country in a stolen car across state lines—a federal crime.
Before sentencing, the judge had psychiatrist Edwin McNeil examine Charles. Manson claimed that he didn’t know how to live a productive life due to growing up in reform schools. Dr. McNeil suggested leniency, since Charles was married with a child on the way. The judge took McNeil’s recommendation and sentenced Charles to five years’ probation. However, Charles, facing another court date in February 1956, decided to skip town with Rosalie.
He didn’t evade police for long. On April 23, 1956, not long after the birth of his son, Charles Manson Jr., the twenty-one-year-old father was sent to San Pedro’s Terminal Island penitentiary. Once in prison, Charles continued his real education. He learned from pimps how to single out vulnerable girls who lacked strong parental figures and take advantage of their psychological weak points. They taught him techniques employed by domestic violence abusers: isolate the woman, convince her you’re the only one who truly loves her, then beat her to keep her fearful and subservient.
Charles mixed these prison-yard lessons with an official prison course created by Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Courses of instruction, sometimes for college credit or as a constructive use of time, are standard in prison systems. But this was the first class in Charles’s life to gain his undivided interest. In his cell, he practiced lines that Carnegie recommended putting to use. Many of the ideas outlined in the book echoed Manson’s own manipulative tendencies. And there was one piece of advice that he committed to heart: “Let the other fellow feel the idea is his.”
Eventually, when Charles got out of prison on September 30, 1958, Rosalie and their son were living with another man, so Charles moved back in with his mother. He didn’t stay out of jail for long.
Manson applied the darker lessons he’d absorbed at Terminal Island, and by mid-1959 he was pimping out a young woman named Leona (who’d already successfully pleaded with a judge to let Charles off for forging a signature on a stolen Social Security check he’d tried to cash at a Ralph’s supermarket). To add to his revenue, he stole credit cards and cars, again driving them north across state lines, this time with Leona and one of her friends for the purposes of prostitution—a violation of the Mann Act, which, by June 1961, landed the twenty-six-year-old in prison once again, this time at Washington State’s McNeil Island Corrections Center.
During this stint, Charles started studying Scientology for additional pointers in manipulation. He thought that Scientology’s belief in past lives and immortal souls could help him target troubled women, allowing him to personally offer a way to let go of their traumatic backgrounds. He also improved his guitar playing, feeding a passion for music he’d first picked up in his time with the Thomases. He discovered the Beatles, who were so popular by then that they could easily be heard even in a federal penitentiary. Despite his petty rap sheet and personal history, Charles still harbored delusions of being adored and beloved by the entire world, just like the Fab Four. He began writing songs and planning a career as a famous musician, combining a sturdy baritone and a feel for rhythm and blues with a talent for songwriting. Even the prison staff grew hopeful that Charles could secure work as a musician after his release.
By the time Charles was up for parole in 1967, the thirty-two-year-old had spent half his life in prison. But, much to the surprise of the authorities, he requested permission to stay in. Did he already have an intuition of what he would become? It’s impossible to know but also easy to see why he wanted to remain. Prison is a world of rules, a world he knew how to survive and thrive in. As Manson had admitted years earlier to psychiatrist Edwin McNeil, he had no idea how to manage outside of prison. Asking to continue his life inside actually represented an uncustomary amount of self-awareness on Charles Manson’s part.
The United States prison system is not designed to accommodate requests of any kind, let alone one for continuing room and board at taxpayer expense. Charles Manson was paroled in 1967 with permission to relocate to San Francisco. It was the Summer of Love, and a hundred thousand young men and women were converging on the city. Between a life of incarceration and his isolated small-town childhood, Charles was doubly unprepared for the rapidly changing world he entered. War protesters and throngs of hippies were everywhere, and a prominent group known as the Black Panthers, which had its national headquarters across the bay in Oakland, had become a highly visible presence on the San Francisco streets. After years of negotiating the strict racial segregation of the prison yard, he was intimidated by these newly assertive and outspoken Black men and women ready to fight for their rights.
Still, in San Francisco’s anti-authoritarian atmosphere, Charles’s prison experience gave him street cred, and he relished the positive reception, which differed so sharply from the rejection he had experienced back home in McMechen. He spent a few days blending in with the protesters and hippies on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, studying the young people and learning to mimic them. He quickly realized that among the counterculture he could repurpose his long rap sheet as a badge of courage, a sign of his independence and irrepressible revolutionary nature. Charles sensed this profound shift in attitudes and realized, through no effort of his own, that he’d actually come up in the world.
Using all these newfound wiles, he charmed Mary Brunner, a young woman he met at Berkeley, pretending that he shared her idealism and social views, and quickly manipulated Mary into sleeping with him and giving him a place to live. Charles convinced her that he was the only person who could make her feel listened to, valued, special, and beautiful, and then he plied her with his interpretation of the newfound concept of “free love” that he’d picked up from the hippies in Haight-Ashbury. While Mary worked at the Berkeley library, Charles stood on the street corners, piecing together the best lines from the various gurus on the scene, playing a little guitar, charming the vulnerable sorts who’d come to San Francisco to be part of the scene.
One of them lent him a car and he drove down to LA, where he met Lynette Fromme, a runaway child of divorce who fell hard for Charles’s patter and came back with him to Haight-Ashbury. “They call me the Gardener,” Charles told her, “because I tend to all the flower children.” Charles put his views on free love immediately into practice, having sex with Lynette while Mary watched, then having sex with Mary while Lynette watched. A few weeks later he added a third convert when he was invited to dinner by a man who’d picked him up while he was hitchhiking: his teenage daughter, Ruth Ann Moorehouse, fell for him, and Charles even managed to come away with an old piano that he traded for a VW bus, which now meant he could travel with his growing flock.
His growth strategy worked like a standard Ponzi scheme. Manson’s come-on wasn’t all that different from the pitches of many others of the era: he told people to abandon their inhibitions along with their possessions and love everybody, tossing together bits of Scientology and Dale Carnegie with Beatles lyrics and Bible verses. But even though the content of his pitches was standard fare, his manner during these impromptu performances was charismatic and unpredictable: he sang and whispered and preached and seduced by turns, mesmerizing in a crowd and in an intimate one-on-one. The style won him followers whose devotion he tested by getting them to go out in turn and bring in more people to join their band. Manson soon had a large group of devoted female followers, even though one of his teachings was that women were subservient to men and had to do their bidding. Within months he could order anyone in his hippie harem to sleep with anybody, and began calling his followers the “Family.”
Charles Manson then started expanding his reach beyond San Francisco, traveling around in their rainbow-painted bus, recruiting more women to join his cult, a lot of them teens who’d come to San Francisco as soon as school let out. In fall 1967 he moved his growing Family to Los Angeles. Manson soon found that it wasn’t easy to feed such a large group, and they had to resort to foraging in dumpsters to survive. A few months later, in 1968, he made an arrangement with an old blind man named George Spahn for the Family to stay, for free, on the five-hundred-acre Spahn Ranch—or Spahn Movie Ranch, as it was also called—in the Santa Susana Mountains, north of LA, in exchange for doing chores and helping with horse rides through the old movie sets.
Although the free-love communal vibe helped the group fit right into the spirit of the sixties, the fact that there wasn’t much beyond a belief in Manson and his words and impulses holding the rootless group together meant that they were passing an invisible line that separated a commune from a cult. For instance, one of the shadowy bonding and seemingly harmless but highly illegal activities he convinced them to do was dubbed “creepy crawling”: it involved breaking into people’s houses in the middle of the night and rearranging things, a profoundly random intrusion that grew even more troubling when the homeowners discovered that nothing at all had been taken. But delinquency, adventurism, and strange beliefs weren’t all that exceptional in those days, as baby boomers turned flower children all over the country were banding together in social experiments that often turned sour—though none quite so spectacularly as the Family’s did.
In Los Angeles, the unsuspecting cult started to grow exponentially larger. Manson had a knack for discovering troubled young people with malleable personalities and convincing them that he was the answer to all their problems in life. And it didn’t hurt that one of the constant rituals on the farm was group LSD trips, during which Charles wove their trippy perceptions into his growing body of personal revelations. One of his most well-known followers, Linda Kasabian, a key figure in his murder trial (who was granted immunity and not charged with a crime), would later comment that, when she first met Manson, she thought, “This is what I’ve been looking for.” And Manson was incredibly skillful, able to appear as whatever the potential Family member wanted him to be, with his cryptic sayings open to almost any interpretation. (He told Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, for instance, that “the way out of the room is not through the door; just don’t want out and you’re free.”) He was so successful at recruitment that he soon began teaching male followers, like Charles “Tex” Watson, how to bring others into the cult. At its peak, the Family could count more than a hundred people among its devotees.
Manson still hoped to gain worldwide fame through his music, and he thought he’d finally gotten his chance in the spring of 1968 when Dennis Wilson, drummer for the Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Family members. Charles used this opportunity to introduce himself to the musician, ply him with drugs, and compel the women in the Family to have sex with him. Soon he’d played on Wilson’s musical insecurities and gotten him to buy the rights to the Manson-penned song “Cease to Exist,” which Wilson later produced with the Beach Boys. It was through Wilson that Manson met Terry Melcher, the son of actress Doris Day, and a powerful record producer. The three met regularly at Melcher’s home: 10050 Cielo Drive, the future site of Manson’s most horrific murders.
Terry Melcher had a lot of hits under his belt, producing albums for the Byrds and the Beach Boys. Charles hoped that Melcher could perform the same magic for him, securing his fame and helping him with the musical career he’d set his heart on. But things didn’t work out that way. After seeing Manson get into a violent brawl with a stuntman at Spahn Movie Ranch, Melcher flatly refused to sign Charles to any recording deal.
Then the Beach Boys’ version of “Cease to Exist” came out on December 2, 1968, as the B side to “Bluebirds over the Mountain” and as a cut on their album 20/20. Wilson had made several alterations that enraged Manson, changing the title to “Never Learn Not to Love,” revising some of the lyrics—rewriting the darkly spiritual invitation “cease to exist” to the more standard Beach Boys seduction ploy “cease to resist.”
On top of that, Wilson hadn’t given Charles a writing credit. Wilson felt entitled to the sole credit, partly to recoup some of the expenses he’d racked up having Manson and the Family mooching off him and having his Ferrari totaled at Spahn Ranch. Wilson says he did pay Manson $100,000 and had given him a motorcycle for his part in the song. But what may have ticked Charles off more than anything was that the single failed to sell, and the release that he’d hoped would be his big break fizzled out as the B side of a song that stalled at no. 61 on the charts, an ignominy that ended Manson’s professional music career before it really started.
Wilson had no idea how dangerous it was to make Manson angry. When Manson found out that he didn’t have a writing credit on the song, he threatened to murder Wilson. Now it was Wilson’s turn to cut ties with Manson. After this fiasco, Manson no longer had any contacts in the music industry and his hopes for stardom were gone. All he had now was the undying loyalty of his cult, the Family.
He began prophesying a strange fantasy for them, an apocalyptic future that would follow the bloody race war he was sure was coming, pitting African American militants and their white liberal supporters against the racists who resisted civil rights. He predicted that the few white people to survive this war would promptly be slaughtered in turn by the militants. According to Manson, the Family would find safety during this uprising by fleeing to a “bottomless pit” in Death Valley that would lead them to a secret underground city where they could live in peace while the battle raged above them. Once the dust had settled, Manson’s Family would emerge from Death Valley, the only white people left in America. With the old, corrupt civilization purged in the uprising, Manson’s Family would rule over the African Americans, whom Manson considered unable to govern themselves. In a last leap of illogic, he somehow thought that the militant victors of the race war would actually welcome Manson’s rule.
After the Beatles’ “White Album” dropped on November 22, 1968, Manson became convinced that the iconic record somehow offered mystical signs of the coming race war. He began calling it “Helter Skelter” after the Beatles’ song of the same name. In Manson’s twisted mind, the Beatles also knew about the approaching end times; Manson persuaded his followers that he might be the only one who’d received their true message. This was, of course, nonsense: the Beatles had named the song after an amusement park ride beloved by British children.
Manson’s outrageous scenario is clearly so delusional that it has led some observers to claim it as evidence of paranoid schizophrenia. At least one member of a parole board that Manson faced endorsed this theory even though an FBI agent who interviewed him in prison found him to be sane—albeit clever, callous, unemotional, manipulative, and a pathological liar. This was an unstable mix of characteristics to start with. But now add to this his free-floating desire for revenge, the recent triggers for his rage, his near-absolute control over a large group of drug-addled followers who all thought that he was blessed with prophetic powers, and it wouldn’t take much for this combustible mixture to ignite.
This is the state of mind that Charles Manson was in on a hot and muggy August 9, 1969, at Spahn Ranch. But Manson had more than just the heat to deal with. One of his followers, Bobby Beausoleil, a devilishly handsome young actor from the Haight-Ashbury crowd, had been arrested for killing a music teacher and drug dealer named Gary Hinman. The longer Beausoleil sat in jail, the likelier it was that he would talk to the police, and that was what worried Manson.
Only two weeks earlier, on July 25, Manson had been at Hinman’s home with Beausoleil, demanding that he give them their money back after a drug deal gone bad. When Hinman didn’t comply, Manson cut off his ear with a sword. That clearly turned Hinman into a risk, and he could easily lead the police to the Family. Manson told Beausoleil: “You know what to do.”
Was Manson like a mob boss, or was he acting on one of Dale Carnegie’s principles? Either way, it was a rule he seemed to live by: Let the other person feel the idea is theirs. He never needed to directly order a follower to commit murder. And sure enough, two days later, on July 27, Beausoleil stabbed Hinman with the help of two of Manson’s most devoted cultists, Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner, who took turns holding a pillow over Hinman’s face. Beausoleil wrote the words “political piggy” and stamped a paw print—the symbol of the Black Panthers—on the wall using the dying man’s blood. The Family members intended to mislead the authorities, hoping they would assess the crime scene evidence and blame the Black Panthers instead.
But Beausoleil left fingerprints at the scene, and on August 6, police discovered him sleeping on the side of the road in the murdered man’s car. Once they had him in custody, they discovered that Beausoleil’s prints matched the ones found at Hinman’s residence. It wouldn’t be the last time that somebody in the Manson Family got sloppy and careless.
With Beausoleil in prison, Manson now decided he needed to create a series of random copycat murders to distract the police. Someone needed to die, someone rich and famous whose brutal murder would make headlines. It wasn’t just the prospect of returning to prison that troubled him. He also needed to maintain control over his followers, the people who believed he was a higher being, equal parts Jesus—after all, as he frequently told his followers, his name was “Manson,” or “Son of Man”—and the devil.
The psychologist Robert Lifton pointed out this particular maneuver in cult leaders, who often position themselves as powerful spiritual figures to their followers, elevated above the rest of mankind. He called the technique “mystical manipulation.” According to Lifton, this is one of the key steps in thought reform (or mind control). Another aspect of this brand of mystical manipulation involves a cult leader pretending to look into the future, setting himself up as a prophet to his followers. To pull this off, a cult leader tries to reframe everyday coincidences to appear as the fulfillment of prophecies. This is what Manson was attempting to do by turning a fairly commonplace event in the late sixties—the release of a new album by the Beatles—into a sign of the coming apocalyptic race war.
The Manson Family already believed their leader was a kind of modern prophet. But as the summer was coming to an end, the Black population still had not risen up against the white oppressors. Manson couldn’t let his followers think that he was wrong—that he was somehow less than a divine being. So while simultaneously trying to distract the police from his connections to the murder of Gary Hinman, he was also putting a scheme in place that would instigate the race war: the Manson Family would commit a new series of murders meant to implicate the Black Panthers again.
This all depended on a chain of events that would have African Americans, facing racist reprisals in the aftermath of these murders, rising up as one to rebel—a situation of such violence and mayhem that the police would have to abandon their investigation of the death of Gary Hinman. In the chaos, the Manson Family would rescue Bobby Beausoleil, Manson would avoid another prison sentence, and all of them would retreat to the promised underground sanctuary in Death Valley some 250 miles away. Like so many of Manson’s plans, this was all a fantasy, based partly on the actual network of ghost towns and abandoned mines in and around the area and partly on his delusional interpretations of the Beatles’ White Album, which supposedly predicted race war (“Blackbird”) and revolution, and the book of Revelation, in which the Family members believed Manson appeared as the prophesied Christ.
Given the outlandish nature of this prophecy, it’s hard to attribute the hold that Manson exerted over his followers solely to his powers of mystical manipulation. Clearly the hundreds of LSD trips that the Family members had taken together played a part in their belief that a race war was inevitable and that soon this tiny band of hippies and dropouts who could scarcely feed themselves would begin to rule the world. But no matter how they arrived at this absurd conclusion, by the night of August 9, 1969, the faithful members of the Manson Family stood ready to answer his every command.
Manson chose Tex Watson to act as the leader on the fateful mission. Watson got his nickname because he was in fact from a small Texas town, where he’d once seemed destined for a promising future: a track athlete and football star voted Class Favorite, an honor roll student, and “yell leader”—a prestigious position designated to rile up the student body. Watson, despite all his LSD trips, still saw himself as a natural leader, maybe even a rival to Manson himself. And Manson played on this ambition to stir Watson’s addled mind into action.
Manson also reminded Watson of his personal responsibility: in June 1969, Manson had shot a drug dealer, Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, after Tex mishandled a swindle designed to get the Family $2,500 that they’d need to move to Death Valley. Lotsapoppa survived, but never went to the police. Still, Charles had proven that he was willing to kill to defend Watson. Could Watson really say the same?
To kick off the race war scheme, Manson didn’t think he needed to murder anyone in particular; he just had to find somebody rich and famous enough so that the shock alone would set things in motion. So he dipped into his deep well of resentment and pulled up the address of Terry Melcher, the record producer who’d refused to give him a deal. He knew that Melcher no longer lived at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills—but whoever was there now would surely be just as well-off. After Manson put this idea in Watson’s head, Watson proposed that he would, in fact, go to Terry Melcher’s former residence. Manson’s ability to manipulate Watson was so powerful that even when Watson was interviewed years later by the FBI, he still believed the brutal killings were his own idea.
Manson wanted three female followers to accompany Watson. In the Manson Family, women were supposed to do what men told them to do without question—an article of faith that he’d picked up back at the Church of the Nazarene and twisted to his own purpose. Manson didn’t tell them about the planned murders that night, knowing that they would do anything Watson commanded.
To assist in the murders, Manson selected one of his first cultists, Patricia Krenwinkel. At first glance, this sweet churchgoing middle-class girl might not seem to fit in with the Family, but her parents had separated when she was fifteen, and she’d switched high schools three times. As a result, Patricia grew up feeling isolated. Her older half sister introduced her to LSD, and both girls later tried, separately, to kill themselves. When she met Charles Manson, he immediately noticed the nineteen-year-old’s loneliness and lack of self-confidence. Krenwinkel was an ideal candidate for the Family—cracked but not broken—and even though Manson was thirteen years older, he proceeded to seduce Krenwinkel and make her believe that he was her soul mate. He could offer her all the love and attention she needed. He could give her a sense of purpose. By the time she realized that Manson wasn’t who he claimed to be, he’d already made sure that she was too terrified to leave. He would make Krenwinkel stand still so he could throw knives at her. He shamed her in front of the other women, placing her naked in the middle of the other followers and calling her ugly and stupid. He made her life hell and yet gave her just enough attention that she felt she could never flee.
Susan Atkins was another accomplice in the slayings and one of the first women Manson had met after he was paroled in 1967. Atkins’s mother died of cancer when she was only fifteen, and she’d spent the rest of her teen years cycling through abusive boyfriends, drinking, and taking drugs. She’d already attempted suicide, spent a few months in prison for robbery, and worked as a topless “vampire” dancer for a group of Satanists. Once she saw Charles Manson playing guitar, she was easy prey. When she and Manson had sex, he spotted her insecurity and ordered her to pretend that she was being intimate with her own father. His skillful mind control had a powerful effect: Atkins had already helped Bobby Beausoleil kill Gary Hinman, and Manson knew he could rely on her once again when the time came.
Manson also needed a getaway driver. Linda Kasabian, a recently divorced woman who’d left the American Psychedelic Circus commune, had slept with Tex Watson, and had come to Spahn Ranch to join the Family, bringing $5,000 that she’d stolen from one of her ex-husband’s friends. Unlike most of Manson’s followers, Kasabian had a valid California driver’s license, which was the reason Manson had wanted her, over the objections of other Family members, to join the group in the first place.
On August 8, 1969, Watson took the wheel of a yellow 1959 Ford, since he was the only one who knew where the four of them were heading. He brought with him a length of rope, a knife, and a .22-caliber Hi Standard “Buntline Special” revolver. As the vehicle wound its way through Benedict Canyon to 10050 Cielo Drive, the three women wondered aloud what they’d be doing that night. Would they would be stealing cars or heading off for another round of “creepy crawling”? They had no idea that they were about to go on one of the most notorious murder sprees in American history.
Watson stopped the car at the front gate of the residence. No one could see the main house from there, but the fence was decorated with the twinkling Christmas tree lights that Terry Melcher’s girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, had put up before the two of them moved out, not long before director Roman Polanski rented the place in mid-February 1969. Watson cut the phone lines at the house with bolt cutters, then backed the Ford down the hill and parked it out of sight.
The four scaled the fence as Watson explained they were now going to go into the house and murder everyone inside. But before they could do so, a car came down the driveway and pulled up to the gate. They hid in the bushes and saw behind the wheel eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, who’d just dropped in on his friend William Garretson, the young caretaker staying in the guesthouse on the Cielo Drive property.
As Parent rolled down the window to open the electronic gate, Watson walked out of the bushes and slashed him with his knife. Parent begged for his life, but Watson then shot him four times at close range. The canyons swallowed the sound, making the nearby shots appear to come from far away. No one in the main house noticed, and Garretson had already turned up his own music in the caretaker’s cottage and didn’t hear a thing.
The Family members now made their way to the main residence. Watson sent Kasabian to check for a way in through the windows, then noticed a hall window that was already halfway open. He cut through the screen, pulled up the window, and sent Kasabian back to the gate to act as lookout. Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel then entered the home.
The residence was sprawling and occupied that night by four people: Abigail Folger, a social worker and heir to the Folger’s Coffee fortune; Wojciech Frykowski, an actor from Poland and Folger’s boyfriend; the movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with husband Roman Polanski’s child; and Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring, an ex-boyfriend of Tate’s who’d remained a close friend. They’d all just come back from dinner and were settling in for the night. Tate had spoken earlier with Polanski, who’d called to say he’d just finished the screenplay for The Day of the Dolphin, the next movie he hoped to direct, and would be home in a couple of days. As long as her husband was away, Tate liked having people over to keep her company.
Tate was a fashion model turned actress, who’d gone from bit roles in TV series like Mister Ed and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to starring roles in such films as The Fearless Vampire Killers, where she’d met Polanski, and 1967’s The Valley of the Dolls, for which she’d received a Golden Globe nomination. Nobody in the Manson Family was aware of who was living in the home on Cielo Drive, but they had just landed by chance on exactly the kind of celebrity whose death would shock the entire country.
A little after midnight, the residents all started turning in for the evening. Folger settled down in the guest bedroom to read, Frykowski fell asleep on the living room couch, and Sebring and Tate were deep in conversation in the master bedroom.
The first person the Family members spotted was Frykowski. Watson told Atkins to check around for any others, and his voice woke Frykowski up. Watson kicked him in the head, saying, “I’m the devil, here to do the devil’s business,” and warned Frykowski that he’d be a dead man if he tried to warn the others or called for help.
Atkins passed the open door of Folger’s room and waved at her; Folger was used to people dropping in on Tate at all hours and waved back, then returned to her book. Down the hall, Atkins spotted Tate and Sebring talking, but they didn’t even notice her.
Meanwhile, Krenwinkel realized that she’d forgotten her knife in the car and ran back to the gate to borrow one from Kasabian, who wouldn’t need it on lookout duty.
After getting the report from Atkins, Watson ordered Atkins and Krenwinkel to bring everyone into the living room, which they did, at knifepoint. Watson tied Sebring’s hands, then put a rope around his neck, looped it over a ceiling beam, and tied the other end around Tate’s neck. Tate started to cry while Sebring complained about their rough treatment of a pregnant woman. Watson replied by shooting him in the stomach. The hairstylist collapsed, bleeding onto the living room carpet.
Watson demanded money, but nobody had much, except for the $70 in Folger’s purse. Watson had hoped to walk out of there with a huge haul for the Family’s relocation fund and was incensed at how badly things had gone south—after all, here was an extravagant house with a movie star in it, and nobody had much more on them than he did.
The slaughter that followed the first stage of the attack was ugly, violent, and unpredictable. But even though the victims were defenseless and their killers relentless, brainwashed, and acting without conscience, the slayings still didn’t prove to be easy. Watson and Atkins had both taken acid and meth earlier in the day, which added a further level of incoherence to the ensuing bloodbath.
Watson began stabbing Jay Sebring repeatedly. As Sebring lay on the floor dying, Frykowski struggled to free himself from his restraints. Atkins tried to stab him, but once Frykowski got free and they wrestled on the floor, most of her blows landed on his thighs and shins. His screams drew Kasabian up from the gate. She arrived just in time to see Frykowski stagger out of the front door and collapse in the bushes. Kasabian tried to apologize to Frykowski but was interrupted when Watson followed him outside. Kasabian then watched Watson leave Frykowski for dead on the lawn; the coroner later reported that he’d been shot twice, stabbed fifty-one times, and bludgeoned over the head with the butt of the Buntline Special revolver.
Kasabian—the only one of the four to betray any moral compunction during the killing spree—was horrified and yelled into house that people were coming, a lie she hoped would frighten the other Family members and bring the grisly events to an end. She was ignored.
Folger tried to make a break for it out the front door, but Krenwinkel followed, slammed her to the ground, and stabbed her repeatedly, drenching Folger’s white nightgown in blood. Perhaps in shock at what she’d just done, she told Watson that she wasn’t sure if Folger was dead. He came over to help. While he finished her off, he instructed Krenwinkel to check if there was anyone else they could kill in the guesthouse.
Krenwinkel was torn. She was terrified of disobeying a direct order, but she also didn’t want to round up more people to add to the slayings. So she walked toward the guesthouse until Watson couldn’t see her, waited a minute, and then returned, telling him there was nobody else on the property—the only reason caretaker William Garretson survived the massacre.
By this point, Sharon Tate was the last one left alive. She begged and pleaded with the killers to save her child’s life. They could take her hostage, wait two weeks for her baby to be born, and then do whatever they wanted. But Atkins and Watson were high on drugs, drunk on bloodlust, and too indoctrinated in the Manson Family’s beliefs to care about the welfare of an unborn child. Atkins stabbed Sharon Tate sixteen times, telling her, as Atkins herself later testified in court, “Woman, I have no mercy for you!” while Tate cried for her mother.
In a little under half an hour, everyone who’d been staying at the main house at 10050 Cielo Drive lay dead.
Afterward, Atkins remembered that Charles Manson wanted them to do something “witchy” at the crime scene, so she took the towel that had been used to tie Frykowski’s hands and scrawled “PIG” on the front door in blood, mimicking what she’d seen Beausoleil write on the wall after killing Gary Hinman. Then Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel left the crime scene and walked down the driveway to Kasabian, who was now waiting for them by the yellow Ford. They retrieved the spare clothing they’d brought along, and everyone except Kasabian, who’d waited by the car and hadn’t gotten bloodied, changed into clean clothes.
On the drive back to Spahn Ranch, Kasabian bundled up the bloody clothes and threw them all down a steep hill on Watson’s command. A little farther down the same road, they got rid of the weapons as well. Taking a detour down a side street, they spotted a garden hose on a lawn, and turned it on to wash the blood off their hands and faces. The homeowner came out to stop them, but they jumped in the car and raced away—just not fast enough before he got their license plate number.
When they made it back to Spahn Ranch, Manson was deeply unhappy. They’d barely retrieved any money, and as far as he could tell from their ensuing descriptions, they hadn’t created a dramatic enough crime scene. He then drove back to 10050 Cielo Drive himself to wipe down their fingerprints and spread an American flag on the couch near Sharon Tate’s corpse, hoping that in this era when young people were burning the flag to protest the Vietnam War, the juxtaposition of the flag and a dead pregnant woman would get significant attention. But even though Sharon Tate’s death was all over the media by August 10, Charles Manson wasn’t satisfied. From what he could gather, the police hadn’t picked up any of the clues connecting this crime scene to the Black Panthers and Gary Hinman’s murder. It was clear that these killings simply weren’t going to be enough to start the race war he’d prophesied. He needed more people to die.
On the evening of August 10, Manson gathered Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian, and two additional devoted followers, Steve “Clem” Grogan and Leslie Van Houten. At nineteen years old, Van Houten was the youngest of the group, the product of a middle-class family in the LA suburb of Monrovia. But after her parents divorced five years earlier, she began using drugs and running away from home. She met Manson the year before through Bob Beausoleil. Van Houten ended up eager to please Manson any way she could, her key function in the Family being the transcriber of Manson’s improvised song lyrics in shorthand. But that night Charles had far bigger plans for her.
Manson explained that since all concerned had effectively bungled the murders in the early morning hours of August 9, he wanted at least two more copycat killings and was going to ride along to make sure things went well. He directed the car crammed with seven people to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz. Manson, who’d attended parties next door, believed that everybody on Waverly Drive was rich enough to have their murders cause a sensation. He had no idea that his intended victims only owned a grocery store, and Rosemary also had partial interest in a boutique.
The LaBiancas’ back door was unlocked. Manson and Watson found Leno sleeping on the couch and roused him at gunpoint. Manson, who always wanted to be liked, even by the people he intended to kill, assured Leno that this was just a robbery and asked who else was in the house. Leno directed them to his wife in the bedroom. Manson brought Rosemary out to the living room, took her wallet, and then brought Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house. Manson ordered them to put Rosemary back in the bedroom and make sure that “everybody did something” so they would all bear equal responsibility. Then he went back to the car with Kasabian, Atkins, and Grogan and drove away, on the lookout for another murder target.
Meanwhile, Watson put a pillowcase over Leno’s head, gagged him, and tied him up with lamp cords. Then he did the same thing to Rosemary, who was still in the bedroom. Krenwinkel grabbed a kitchen knife to take care of Rosemary. After killing Abigail Folger the night before, she didn’t want any more blood on her hands, but disobeying Manson was a more terrifying prospect. Krenwinkel and Van Houten waited in the bedroom while Watson stabbed Leno to death with a bayonet given to him by Manson. When Rosemary heard her husband’s cries and put up a struggle, Krenwinkel began stabbing her. Watson then came into the bedroom and finished Rosemary off, dealing the final blow.
This time the Family was careful to give Charles Manson the dramatic scene he’d demanded. Watson carved the word “WAR” into Leno’s abdomen. Krenwinkel, getting over her initial hesitation, stuck a fork into Leno’s stomach and a knife in his throat. Van Houten wrote “DEATH TO PIGS” and “RISE” on the walls in the LaBiancas’ blood. Van Houten hadn’t done much to participate in the actual murders at this point, so Watson made her pull up Rosemary’s dress and stab her even though she was already dead. Leslie spotted a bag of change and grabbed it. Then, with the couple dead, the trio realized they were hungry and looked in the refrigerator, partaking of the watermelon and chocolate milk they found there. After their post-murder snack, they neatly placed the watermelon rinds in the sink while Krenwinkel wrote the words “HELTER SKELTER” in blood on the refrigerator door.
It was those two fateful words, taken from the Beatles’ White Album, that would be the key to unlocking the secrets of the Family and securing Charles Manson’s eventual conviction for murder. Manson had thought the police would see the writing on the wall—literally—and blame the African American community for a series of copycat murders. Yet initially the police had no idea that the murders of Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate and her friends, and the LaBiancas were part of a pattern. In fact, on August 12, authorities told reporters that there was no connection between the Tate and the LaBianca murders; they truly thought they had unrelated cases on their hands.
Manson had failed to start “Helter Skelter.” And it also seemed as if he were going to get away with the slayings even though the police were busy investigating him for car theft. The Family had been stealing vehicles and transforming them into dune buggies for their underground city while waiting out the race war. And that was why the cops finally came to the Spahn Ranch on August 16: to make arrests for the lesser crimes. Manson and twenty-five of his followers were rounded up and taken into custody. That included Susan Atkins, who craved attention and approval, a key reason she belonged to the Manson Family in the first place. Once she was locked up, she started bragging to her cellmate Virginia Graham about her part in the previous week’s killings. When Graham asked how she felt about it, Atkins said that in murdering the pregnant Sharon Tate she had been killing a part of herself and that now she felt tired, elated, and at peace, because she knew this was the beginning of “Helter Skelter.”
That was the break that investigators needed to connect the Tate and LaBianca killings to a single group, and it wouldn’t be the Black Panthers. Charles Manson, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel were all charged with murder. Linda Kasabian, hesitant to participate in the killing spree in the first place and horrified by the murders, had left Spahn Ranch in the Family station wagon and, when Manson thought she was off on an errand, fled instead to New Mexico and offered to turn state’s evidence. In return for her freely offering her testimony, the prosecution granted her immunity, although she never asked for it. She was on the witness stand for seventeen days, and prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi credited her unwavering testimony with securing guilty verdicts for all involved.
Charles Manson had just been caught in a web of his own making. As the number of his followers grew, he had to rely on more than just his abilities to spot hidden character weaknesses to exploit for personal gain. He fell into the trap—one that repeatedly befalls cult leaders—of building himself into a godlike figure, one capable of prophesying what was to come. He never suspected that he’d cornered himself, that his improvised promise of a race war, an underground sanctuary, and a future in which his band of misfits would rule the country, if not the world, was just a maneuver to buy time. He’d forgotten his own hapless history of crime: the failed escapes from reform school, the careless break-ins, the stolen check he’d tried cashing at Ralph’s supermarket, a pimping career that led him back to prison. His genius for exploiting insecurities didn’t help him when it came to orchestrating a horrific crime and the blunders that led to hard evidence: Susan Atkins inexplicably leaving her knife under a couch cushion on Cielo Drive; Tex Watson beating Wojciech Frykowski so hard with the butt of his Buntline revolver that the cheap gun’s grip broke and left traceable fragments around the corpse; Watson pressing the button of the electronic gate with a bloody finger. As a criminal enterprise, the Manson Family had all the skills one might expect from a random collection of unemployed acidheads from broken homes. For all his loyal following and his messianic ambitions, Manson’s grandest scheme had led him right back to the place he’d spent most of his life—prison—and, despite the notoriety he’d gained, to that same primal shame that had been his lot nearly from birth.
Charles Manson’s trial began on June 15, 1970, and it quickly turned into a circus that captivated America, with the proceedings featured every night on television. Manson treated each court appearance like a performance. He constantly misbehaved. He attacked the judge by rushing at him, armed with a pencil, while screaming, “Someone should cut your head off, old man!” He gave Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten specific instructions on how to join in the disruptions. One day the women sang in court, the next day he had them screaming nonsense or shaving their heads. He carved an X into his forehead and in a speech to the cameras, in which those present can make out a haunting mixture of truth, incoherence, self-pity, and manipulation, he said, “I am what you are making me. I was good and now I know none. For you as a group of people have shown me no mercy. The mark on my head simulates the deadhead black stamp of rejection, anti-church, falling cross, devil sign, death, terror, fear. I wanted to be a good guy, but you didn’t let me.”
Many of Manson’s female followers who weren’t on trial for murder spent their time camped out just outside the courthouse, dressed like flower children, giving interviews to the press. Some of them tried to threaten and even poison witnesses. Barbara Hoyt, a Family member who’d agreed to talk to the prosecution, was offered a trip to Hawaii instead by several of Manson’s followers in exchange for refusing to testify. Ruth Ann Moorehouse and Barbara Hoyt traveled together to Hawaii, and just before she left, Ruth Ann tricked Barbara into consuming a potentially lethal ten hits of LSD she’d hidden inside a hamburger. Barbara survived and became an even more eager witness for the prosecution.
As his ultimate gambit, Manson tried to get his codefendants to announce to the court that they’d committed the murders themselves without any involvement from him. But Van Houten’s defense lawyer, Ronald Hughes, recognized that Manson was manipulating his client. The attorney may have been too perceptive about Charles Manson for his own good: before closing arguments, Hughes disappeared while on a weekend camping trip. His body was found the same day that every single defendant received the death penalty.
Although the cause of Ronald Hughes’s death has never been definitively solved, an anonymous Manson Family member contacted lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi—who, in his closing argument, had described Charles Manson as “the dictatorial master of a tribe of boot-licking slaves”—and told him that the Family was responsible. Even with their leader behind bars, the Family was willing to kill for him.
Despite the prison sentence, none of the Manson Family members remained on death row for long. In February 1972, after California abolished the death penalty, Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, and Van Houten—along with every other convicted killer in the California system (including Sirhan Sirhan, who’d assassinated Robert F. Kennedy)—had their sentences commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
Once Manson’s followers were locked up and safe from his influence, they finally began to think for themselves. Many tried to take on new identities. Tex Watson converted to Christianity and became a popular jailhouse minister, although an FBI agent who interviewed him was skeptical about his sincerity and believed the principal killer was just angling to get out on parole. Despite all of Watson’s efforts to reform, the California parole board still considers him a risk to society, denying his freedom as recently as October 2021.
Susan Atkins became a born-again Christian also, trading one form of devotion for another. She died of cancer in 2009, setting a state record for the longest time incarcerated by a woman—one that Krenwinkel and Van Houten have now surpassed.
Bobby Beausoleil also exchanged one type of fanaticism for another, joining the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood. He, too, was denied parole, in 2022.
Patricia Krenwinkel began thinking on her own once she landed on death row: learning that Charles Manson had sold her to another prisoner in a card game certainly provided a jolt in that direction. She claims to have regained her sense of self and, with it, all the remorse she initially couldn’t allow herself to feel. She is now a model prisoner and a mentor for several prison groups. However, despite her claims of breaking away from Manson’s influence, in 2017 she was denied parole for the fourteenth time. She is eligible for reconsideration once again, in 2022.
Leslie Van Houten, the youngest of the convicted murderers, has also become a model prisoner and openly expressed remorse for the Manson Family killings. As a child of a bitter divorce that led to her dropping acid repeatedly at age fourteen, she credits her father for coming back into her life and helping her regain both her grip on reality and her own moral code. Her lawyer pointed out at her 2013 parole hearing that her value system has been completely transformed since falling under Manson’s sway back in 1969. She was twice recommended for parole, in 2016 and in 2017, but both times her release was blocked by Governor Jerry Brown, honoring the request of the victims’ family members, who still consider her to be an unrepentant killer. Her latest appeal for parole was denied by the California Supreme Court in February 2022.
For some, Charles Manson’s mind control proved too powerful to overcome. Mary Brunner, his first follower, who only missed participating in the murders because she was in prison for credit card fraud at the time, felt guilty about testifying against the Manson Family at the explosive murder trial. She and several other Family members were later sent to prison for stealing guns, which they’d hoped to use as part of a 1971 plane hijacking to free Manson. She was released in 1977 and then disappeared from the public eye.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme went to jail in 1975 after attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. But life in prison wasn’t enough to shake her devotion. She was locked up alongside fellow Family member Sandra Good, and the two referred to themselves as “sisters in the church of Charles Manson.” Fromme’s dedication to Manson was so unwavering that she broke out on December 23, 1987, to see him after hearing that he had been diagnosed with cancer. She was recaptured and finally released on parole in December 2009. In an interview with ABC for a television special called Manson Girls, Fromme confessed that she was still in love with Charles fifty years after the brutal murders. “I feel honored to have met him,” she said. “And I know how that sounds to people who think he’s the epitome of evil.”
Linda Kasabian, whose seventeen days of testimony against her fellow Manson Family members sent them all to death row, vanished into a life of obscurity. When last sighted, she was living in low-income housing under her second assumed name in Tacoma, Washington, not far from the home of the youngest of her four children. In the years since those convictions, she has struggled with her own guilt, and with drugs and alcoholism, and has said that she thinks about the senseless murders every day. Her arrest record attests to her problems with self-control in the intervening years: in 1976 she was fined $100 for disorderly conduct when she tried to prevent firefighters from putting out a bonfire in Nashua, New Hampshire; in 1982 she was charged with indecent exposure for flashing her breasts at a biker rally in Laconia, New Hampshire; in 1987 she was charged with a DUI in Cape Canaveral, Florida; and on her last arrest in 1996, during what she describes as a “period of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction,” she was arrested for possession of rock cocaine and methamphetamine. She told the Daily Mail in an interview soon after Manson died that, to this day, she can still hear the screams of the victims “if I let myself go there.”
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Shame: Charles Manson and the Family 7
Shame: Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo and the Narcosatanists 51
Exploitation: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 91
Exploitation: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple 127
Pathological Lying: Claude Vorilhon and Raëlism 175
Sadism: Roch Thériault and the Ant Hill Kids 203
Megalomania: David Koresh and the Branch Davidians 231
Sadism: Keith Raniere and NXIVM 271
Escape: Credonia Mwerinde and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God 315
Denial of Reality: Marshall Applewhite and Heaven's Gate 347
Acknowledgments 379
Notes 381
Bibliography 395
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