Charles Manson Now (26 page)

I asked Candy what she and Manson talk about. “I didn’t have the greatest life growing up, and people like that can usually pick each other out of a crowd. So, that was sort of the first place I went with him.” Candy described Charlie as a kind of comrade and confidante. They identified with each other’s upbringing because neither was “brought up in the greatest of worlds.” Manson told Candy he wished he’d never left Indiana, where he’d spent time at a school for boys. “He loved Indiana and said if he had stayed he would have ended up being a farmer there, for God’s sake!” Candy chuckled at the seemingly improbable idea. The Manson portrayed in the media seems an unlikely farmer. “But just talk to him,” Candy insisted, “and you’ll learn he knows a lot about farming: crops, cattle, horses.” As well as she’s gotten to know Manson, Candy is continuously surprised by the way he thinks, speaks, and reacts. For instance, Manson’s mother is commonly thought to have been a neglectful, abusive parent, but when
Candy once mentioned the woman (she can’t remember exactly what she said), Manson jumped down her throat. “Don’t you ever talk bad about my mother!” he’d screamed, though Candy says her intention was never to speak badly about a person she’d never even met. “My mom done an armed robbery to pay for my tonsillectomy,” Charlie continued to rant. “Never talk bad about my mom. She spent five years in prison, he’d gone on to say, for that offense alone.

I told Candy I’d talked with Kenny briefly about the death of Charlie’s son. And she began to tell me about a man who’d worked with her in the candy factory and who had looked just like Charles Manson: “He had long hair and piercing brown eyes and displayed a great deal of pleasure every time someone said, ‘Hey, you look like Charles Manson.’ He would smile and say something like, ‘Yah, far out; thank you.’ The guy had a bizarre personality. Eventually, he committed suicide.”

When Candy began communicating with Manson she started to research her new friend. When she stumbled across an article about an alleged son of Manson’s who committed suicide, whose description coincided with that of the man she knew at the factory, she started to put the pieces together. The man had been born in Kentucky, in an area where Charlie had once lived. Candy asked Charlie where he was during May 1951, about the time the man would have been conceived. “He said, ‘I was in jail; why do you ask?’“ All that Candy knew about Charles Manson Jr. was that he died somewhere in Colorado. The mystery remains unsolved, but Candy has a good idea that her suspicions are correct.

I thanked Candy for all the information she shared with me.
She wished me luck with my book and graciously asked that I call if I ever needed anything. As I got off the phone, I was aware of how differently people, even those closest to him, perceive Charlie. It seemed as though Charles Manson connects to various people on distinctly different levels, so much so that it’s easy to see why the world is filled with such conflicting information about him. Maybe, I thought, by surrounding himself with such an eclectic group of friends and admirers, he is better able to cultivate different sides of himself, able to wear various hats. Talking to Candy, I got the sense that in her life Manson plays the role of big brother.

I started researching the topic of Charlie’s children and discovered several conflicting reports, none of which has ever gone public. One account described the method by which Charlie delivered babies at the ranch. On one occasion, he allegedly chewed through the umbilical cord and, with blood covering his face, handed the baby to its mother. It was easy to picture Charlie in such a surreal scene. Later, when I got the chance, I told Manson what I’d read and asked if it were true. Charlie laughed and asked if I’d ever seen a dog deliver pups. “It’s no different than that,” he said. “You just help the baby come out and tie it off with an old guitar string or something.” I asked Charlie how many babies he’d delivered. “I don’t know, a couple,” he’d answered casually, and then moved on to something else, as though the topic weren’t worth mentioning, as if it were not that big a deal.

In March 2010, Details published an article about Matthew Roberts, an aspiring writer, musician, and DJ who spins at
LA strip clubs a few days a week. The article was compelling: Matthew linked his conception to a 1967 San Francisco LSD-laced hippy orgy in which, his biological mother claims, Charles Manson participated. I was intrigued by Roberts’ description of the “hellish” night terrors he routinely experienced as a child, by the comparison the writer made between Roberts’ biological mother, who continued to drop acid well into her pregnancy, and Mia Farrow’s character in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, who, post-conception, ingests a vile concoction intended to create the Antichrist. I discussed the article with Stanton LaVey, who said he knew Matthew Roberts, gave me his number, and urged me to talk to him. Stanton and Matthew became close friends when they once rented a “shitty ass motel room together on LA’s skid row.” The two were simultaneously experiencing hard times, “fucking really getting to know each other.” Stanton told me that Matthew is complicated and composed of many intense layers: a “really deep cat.” I asked Stanton about the possibility that Matthew might be Manson’s son. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “he is Charlie’s son: there’s no two ways about it. There are so many mannerisms, weird little ticks, things that Matthew does that he’s not even conscious of that are totally Charlie.”

I called Matthew from my hotel room and left him a message explaining who I was. Matthew called back almost immediately. We talked for a bit and made fast plans to get together in the following few days. Meanwhile, I was able to research more of his story through various other interviews he had given. My initial impression of his motivation for doing such press was that he wanted to find out, either way, if he was indeed Charlie’s son.

Matthew and I eventually met at a Thai restaurant near his
apartment. Based on what Stanton told me about Mathew’s likeness to Manson, I to notice an expected to see an immediate resemblance. But, looking at Matthew, who is built tall and solid, with long, wild hair and deep, wide-set eyes, I was reminded more of a friend I knew in Regina than of the masses of photographs I’d seen of a young Manson. Matthew seemed reserved, and quiet, in contrast to Manson’s lively, often flamboyant style. We introduced ourselves and took a few minutes to get acquainted by talking about LA, music, traveling. He struck me as a person more interested than interesting, a quality I value in others. I felt as if I was immediately on the same level with Matthew. We share a love for music, psychology, nature. We both feel drawn to Manson; we wanted to help each other figure out the mystery. Our initial conversation was a feeling out process: while I tried to figure out if he was sincere, he tried to predict whether or not I would twist his story around to make him look like an attention-seeking idiot. It turned out we both had nothing to worry about. Matthew exuded honesty, and I immediately felt his commitment to speaking his truth.

Over dinner, I asked Matthew how all of this hysteria began. He assured me it had nothing to do with self promotion. “So I’m at a party in downtown LA and I’m drunk and I’m telling this guy my story. He just happened to be a freelance writer and he asked if he could shop my story around. I said go ahead. So he got it in Globe.” At the time, Matthew had no reason to take the man seriously, no clue to the kind of contacts he had. Matthew said that, once his story hit Globe, he felt like a part of the butterfly effect. “The butterfly flaps its wings in China and it becomes a tempest in the United States. The story went from being in Globe to being
the number one Googled story over Thanksgiving weekend. Over two hundred million people searched me and I never made a single phone call trying to pitch this story.” Matthew told me he immediately took heat for self promotion from everyone, including those who wanted to promote the story themselves. “People would call me to do a story and at the same time accuse me of trying to advance myself or promote my band or whatever. I’m like, dude-you called me.” Matthew assigns a lot of meaning to the fact that his story received intense international attention after a single, simple conversation at a party. “I had nothing to do with it, literally. So, to me, this is a story that wants to be told. It’s got a life of its own.”

Matthew isn’t exactly in an ideal position to uphold any allegation. He acknowledged, “Can you imagine how I’m going to look if I get the DNA back and it’s negative? I’m going to look like a complete idiot.” For a burgeoning artist, garnering attention for falsely claiming to be the son of Charles Manson is not a smooth move. Matthew admitted that after buying Details magazine it took him three days to stomach reading the article. “I kept thinking in my head, ‘What the hell am I doing? What am I getting myself into?’“ He could have told the man at the party he didn’t want his story told. The fact that he didn’t is something, Matthew says, he wrestles with every day.

He may not have said no because of his overwhelming desire to know the truth.

“That’s it. Ultimately, I want the DNA. I want the proof and I can’t do it on my own. The truth is like God to me; that’s the most important thing in my life because I’ve been lied to so much.” Matthew assured me he could never lie about who may or may
not be his father. Because he believes the truth is the truth, whether one likes it or not, even if the truth turns out to be the worst thing in the world. “It’s the truth,” he insisted. “You got to suck it up and live with it.”

“I’ve never, ever, ever claimed to be the son ofCharles Manson - not once.” Matthew believes all he can do is field questions honestly and encourage people to make up their own minds. He resents headlines like “Man Claims to Be Son of Charles Manson” because he’s become acutely aware of how the media tweaks a story to sell it. And Matthew has more than misrepresentation to worry about. Once, a reality show production company contacted him to buy the rights to his story and thus prevent him from speaking to any other media. “They wanted to own my publishing rights, they wanted to own my life story. For five years I wouldn’t be able to do a single article, I wouldn’t be able to mention the name Charles Manson. Basically, their intention was to shut me up and shut me down. It felt more like the FBI owned the company and they were trying to silence me.” Since declining that offer, Matthew’s felt as if he’s been under surveillance. “It’s like they’re trying to set me up on shit or whatever, trying to get me on some kind of fucked up crime I didn’t commit. I’m probably being a little bit paranoid, but who knows, man.”

I asked Matthew to take me back to the start, before it ever occurred to him that he could be the son of the world’s most favorite madman. He told me about the strip club where he spun and a porn star that performed there. She couldn’t remember his name, but she seemed to have always known his face, and so she would seal the tips she’d save for him in an envelope labeled “Manson” and leave it in the back. Matthew said, “I really believe
that Life magazine cover [the December 1969 cover featuring Manson’s famous hypnotic stare] is just kind of ingrained in people’s subconscious.” He mentioned his appearance has evoked strange reactions his whole life, that strangers become instantly scared or intimidated at just the sight of him. This is a fact of life that Matthew has learned to live with but has never fully accepted. “People see me, they make the connection subconsciously, and then they get scared. I’ve always hated having that effect on people.”

Matthew was born in Chicago in 1968 and adopted by a couple in nearby Rockford, Illinois as an infant. He spoke very highly of his adoptive parents, who raised him to go to church and play sports, as most typical midwestern parents do. But even in the midst of a calm, Christian upbringing, Matthew somehow felt drawn to Manson’s mayhem. His first book report was on Helter Skelter. When he graduated high school, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his love of rock ‘n’ roll and study at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he met Clem, an original Manson family member who had allegedly cut a person’s head off with a pocket knife. “When I talked to Clem, I asked him, ‘What were you doing hanging out with this guy who is crazy?’ He said he thought Manson was Jesus Christ because he watched him raise a bird from the dead.” Matthew explained that Clem had served only seventeen years in jail, a reduced sentence because the judge thought him “too stupid” to have acted on his own with no orders from Manson. Matthew described Clem as an all around good guy: “Clem was a good blues guitar player. Everyone liked him, you know.”

Matthew encountered much more Manson out west. He dated
a woman whose mother dated Roman Polanski. He worked with another woman who was friends with Curt Gentry, a coauthor of Helter Skelter. Eventually he met and became engaged to a woman named Gina. As the couple thought about starting a family, Gina suggested Matthew research his biological parents. He contacted an adoption-search agency and was given the name of his biological mother. But he was forewarned. Though the agent suggested his mother’s mental health might not be in great shape, Matthew dismissed his mother’s eccentricities, her decision to live without a phone or a car, her undivided interest in her vegetable garden, as simply the idiosyncrasies of an aging hippie. It took some time to realize that something was wrong.

Initially, Matthew’s mother “Terry” alleged her son had been conceived as the consequence of a gang rape. Then she admitted she might have confused male aggression with male vigor, in which case the encounter might have resulted from miscommunication in a situation shrouded by drugs. “She was, I guess, like seventeen. I think it was just convenient for her to call it a rape, especially when she found out who was involved.” Terry went on to tell Matthew she couldn’t reveal his full birth name over the phone, but would have to do so in person for “security reasons.” She alluded to her involvement in an “infamous hippie group.” Matthew confirmed, “She basically admitted it was the Manson group.” She disclosed that Manson had participated in the orgy that left her pregnant. “I don’t know, but everything adds up. My mother looked like them, an attractive looking young girl. She lived in the same town as Mary Brunner.” After his initial conversation with Terry, Matthew didn’t need much more convincing to accept that he might have such an eerily
recognizable face for a biologically based reason. Listening to Matthew, it became hard to believe I’d never thought of Charlie having children. “There’s no telling how many kids are out there,” Matthew said. “He was in jail. He got out. He was making up for lost time.”