Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (2 page)

Squeaky asked question after question, hanging on my every answer. I sensed that any speck of information about him was sacred to her. Before I could wring her from the phone, she made me promise that I’d visit Charlie the next day.

I was so nonchalant about it that I didn’t remember my promise until late the following afternoon. Behind the cells in the high-security Adjustment Center was a dank, narrow utility alley. There was a small barred opening in the back wall of each unit approximately eighteen inches square. This allowed staffers to converse with an inmate without the other prisoners’ seeing them. The opening, at eye level, was secured with a steel door and was kept locked when not in use. During my rounds, I normally remained in the well-lit areas in front of the cells, casually chatting with the men behind the bars. That afternoon, I maneuvered through the old pipes, ripped-out wiring, and rusted ventilation ducts that cluttered the grimy alley and made my way toward the rear of the cell that housed Squeaky’s idol.

Before reaching it, I heard a clank inside a metal drainpipe that ran the length of the alley. The sound gave me a chill. I knew that inmates transfer weapons to other prisoners by tying them to homemade fishing lines and flushing them down their toilets. Was that a knife or a zip gun I heard traveling the inmate highway? A knife or zip gun that would one day be aimed at me?

I approached Charles Manson’s cell, quietly unlocked the steel viewing door, and took my first glimpse at the most feared man in the world. I instantly recoiled. There he was, hunched on his bunk like an ugly troll from a child’s nightmare. His fingernails were long and stained yellow from nicotine. His stringy black hair was draped around a chalky, almost inhuman face. The faint outline of a swastika scarred his forehead. He was thin, small, not physically threatening in any way, but boy was he creepy.

Turning slowly, the demon looked up at me. Our eyes locked. I felt my blood run cold as Manson studied me like a predator, twisting the tip of his goatee between his thumb and his index finger. Suddenly, a demonic snarl formed on his face. I backed away, totally spooked by his appearance. I tried to catch myself and overcome my fear. Hell, I was no stranger to prisons or crazed prisoners. I’d spent half my life surrounded by the most vicious criminals one can imagine. Before that, I’d landed propeller-driven fighter planes on bouncing aircraft carriers at sea. Nothing could be scarier than that. Or so I thought. Why, I asked myself, was this goofy pip-squeak affecting me so?

Gathering my nerve, I eased toward the door, found my voice, and introduced myself. “Hi. I’m Ed George.”

Manson stared for a moment, then responded in an austere, almost grandiose manner. “Do you know who I am?” I nodded. We looked at each other for what seemed like forever. I studied his eyes. They were every bit as hypnotic and frightening as I’d been warned. Whatever depraved energy burned inside this man was very real.

“Lynette Fromme called,” I began, breaking the tension. “She said that you want to marry her. Do you?”

Charlie slowly turned away. His gaze traveled to a picture of a crucifix that hung from his cell wall. After studying it for a few seconds, he responded in an eerie whisper. “Imagine me coming down from the cross to get married in front of myself.” His eyes turned back toward me, his face bathed in a devilish glow. I felt myself weakening again.

“Charlie,” I coughed, forcing away the dread. “I don’t have time for any bullshit. Do you or don’t you want to marry her?”

In a flash, Charlie sprang from his bunk and was suddenly standing inches away from the door. He pressed his face against the bars of the tiny aperture and began to speak with a savage intensity that was foreign to me. I stood riveted in place, paralyzed by some unknown force, soaking in the moment. His language was strangely exotic, gushing forth with great emotional energy. Time stood still as he lectured me about everything from his “fraudulent” conviction, to racism, to world pollution. His words were like a whip lashing at my conscience, making me feel that I was personally responsible for everything that was wrong with the world.

He poured it on, painting a horrific portrait of environmental corruption and the criminal neglect of children, which he blamed on the entire human race. I felt my intellectual side feasting on the stimulating thoughts and hungering for more. His twisted logic and garbled half-truths somehow began making sense.

“I live not by your laws, but by my laws, the laws of the Great One of whom I am and of whom all of us are a part,” he seethed. “I am the one, the one who can save the world. The one who gave his life so that you could live. I am holding him for you, but you try to destroy me, yet you are really destroying yourselves. You fool! Can’t you see that I am you and that I am your reflection? I am your child, your creation. If you kill me, you kill yourself.”

It wasn’t so much his words, but the power, the energy, the charged charisma that emanated from his grubby little being. I began to understand why his troubled followers literally worshiped the man, why they would do anything, good or horrendously evil, to please him.

“The world is rotting,” he continued with escalating intensity. “Can’t you see it? Open your eyes. Pollution is all around you. Money is raping the earth, destroying the trees, polluting the air and water. Your children are choking and dying under your money noses. Your children cry for help, but you don’t hear them. You ignore them and they come to me. The children you ignore, I will keep. Someday they will rise up and kill you to save the world.”

After a pause, Manson cried out with resounding fervor: “I have a mission that makes my life worth something! You have sold your planet and your children. I have come to buy them with your blood!” With that, he darted from the door and retreated to his bunk.

I staggered down the alley, my head spinning from everything I’d just heard. It wasn’t until I was halfway down the hall that my senses returned. Thank God this man was locked in a cell, I thought. Thank God I could walk away from his hypnotic influence. What must it have been like for those who followed him when he was free, the impressionable young women who barely had any thoughts of their own? They were the perfect empty vessels, and Charlie had filled them with the most beguiling poison.

How could those disfranchised little girls from broken, dysfunctional families have fought it? I was a prison-hardened ex-cop and ex–navy fighter pilot trainee who had studied for five years to be a secular Sulpician Catholic priest, with additional Jesuit studies at the University of San Francisco. My head was clear, my will strong, my cynicism sharp, and my faith unbending. And yet, because of my open mind, I had temporarily fallen under this criminal’s spell. No wonder his followers had chosen to spend the best years of their lives camped around the entrance of a dank, foreboding prison, waiting for a sound, a glimpse, a fleeting thought to drift down from their imprisoned guru. I knew then that they would never leave. Squeaky’s calls would never let up, and the letters that poured in from troubled souls around the world would continue to arrive as long as Manson was alive.

From that moment on, I was hooked on Charlie and his Family. Not as a follower, but as a professor studying a strange, mystifying phenomenon. For the next eight years, I would be Charles Manson’s jailer, protector, and counselor. I would oversee the security and treatment of this strange, elfin man on a daily basis. I would control his life. In a way, he would also control mine.

The next day, while making my rounds, I stopped in front of Charlie’s cell. This was a different approach, a more public and casual visit. Charlie, a master of the moment, sensed that this wasn’t the time for a serious discourse on the meaning of life. His demeanor completely changed. He was less agitated, his voice was quiet and restrained, and his speech was clear and to the point.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked again.

“Of course.”

“No. I mean, do you know about me? Who I really am?”

“No. I know why you’re here, but I don’t know much about you.”

Charlie skittered to his bunk, grabbed a book, and stuck it through the cell bars. It was
Helter Skelter,
former L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s best-seller about the sensational Manson trial.

“Take it. There’s lots of lies in it, but it tells about me,” Charlie insisted. I thumbed through the pages, then handed it back.

“Thanks, but I’ll get my own copy.”

I was surprised that Manson was promoting that particular book. It painted a horrendous picture of him, at least from a sane person’s perspective. Then again, maybe Charlie reveled in the demon-possessed, murderer-controller, modern-day Adolf Hitler image Bugliosi presented. It’s difficult to fathom what feeds a felon’s self-image. Whatever Charlie’s reasoning, he would have to be more careful about his literary boastings in his current surroundings. There’s a strange, harsh, and totally inexplicable morality that exists among prisoners. While many ruthless and sadistic behaviors are accepted, even celebrated, others, like child molestation and crimes against women, are generally condemned. Manson’s offenses didn’t fall squarely into the banned categories, but he was still considered to be weird and sick. Like the “chomos” (child molesters) and rapists, he needed protection. He’d never admitted it, but he was aware of it. Manson was one of the best I’d ever seen at manipulating the system to keep himself out of danger.

I bought
Helter Skelter
that weekend and read it again with renewed interest. The horror of what Manson and his followers had done terrified me. The savagery and lurid detail surrounding the murders was staggering. I couldn’t shake the eerie images of drugged, homicidal zombies invading Hollywood and cutting up eight socialites—including
Petticoat Junction
actress Sharon Tate’s unborn baby. In a particularly gruesome touch, Charlie’s depraved crew used their victims’ blood to write cryptic messages like “Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” on the walls.

Although Charlie himself had not participated in the first set of murders, he went out the second night and personally selected supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, to be his clan’s next victims, breaking into their home and tying them up. Once they were so secured, he left and ordered his followers to do the dirty work.

I again wondered why Charlie would want me to read such a disgusting depiction of his madness. Was he bragging, or was it merely an attempt to fill me with fear? I was sure it was both. The cunning little bastard believed that fear motivated everyone. What better way to instill fear than with that book?

My initial experiences with Charlie made me recall an article I’d recently read about Dr. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect. Speer described his first impression of Hitler, catching one of his speeches in a “dirty, ill-lit beer hall” in Munich. Until then, Speer had viewed Hitler as nothing more than a “vulgar, rabble-rousing fanatic in a comic-opera Brownshirt uniform.” That changed as Dr. Speer listened.

“Hitler started to speak earnestly, persuasively, almost shyly,” Dr. Speer recalled. “His manner was completely sincere, more like a dedicated professor delivering a lecture than a screaming demagogue. Within a few minutes, he had the entire audience in his grip, and by no means was everyone there his supporters. Soon, his low-pitch manner disappeared, his voice rose to a hypnotic pitch, and there was a palpable aura of tension and excitement in the hall, a crackling emotional voltage.… His dynamic presence filled the room. His voice swelled, his eyes transfixed the audience. It wasn’t so much what he said, I hardly remembered afterwards, but the mood he cast over the entire hall; it had an almost orgiastic quality.”

This was exactly the way I reacted to Manson. I was thankful that the cult leader had been caught and cut down when he was, because, like Hitler, he would have done a hell of a lot more damage had he remained free.

Part of me wanted to stay away from this man, to keep my distance and treat him like any other prisoner. Another part sucked me in, drew me to him like a heroin addict to a needle. I’d abstain for a few days; then I couldn’t stand it anymore and would have to go to his cell for my next “fix.”

One afternoon, this feeling was so overpowering that I was moved to pull Charlie from his cage and bring him to my office for a chat. Charlie sensed it was time for another royal performance and obliged. Like Dr. Speer, I sat in rapt attention as he put on his latest show, this time giving me a rousing rendition of his life story. He began by conjuring primitive images of serpents and other animals and weaving them into spectacular metaphors. He spoke for an hour about the horrors of his life, how he’d walked out of prison the previous time with good intentions, then encountered his female followers and started his “Family.” He described in detail how he used LSD to turn them on, and made love to each one. He expressed an amazement at the emergence of his own persuasive powers, discovering for the first time that people would follow him and that he could control them.

He continued by reciting a chapter from what I can only describe as Manson’s personal book of Anti-Proverbs, a stream-of-consciousness series of loosely connected nuggets of disturbed, life-guiding thought.

“What do you know about fear? To save people from what they do to themselves, it would take a greater fear than the earth has ever seen. A fear only I can unleash! Fear is nothing more than awareness. Awareness is love. Absolute fear is absolute awareness. Give in to your fear and it will cease to exist. All you are left with is the awareness. And that awareness is love.

“See, all is love? There is nothing that’s not love. Confusion is love in another form. But what really is love? Love is a word we used for God. But even that’s misguided. What we mean by love in that form is intelligence. The understanding of things that are beyond you. Beyond you, but not beyond me. Because I can see. I understand. That’s what you people can’t accept in your paycheck-whore worlds. It blows your mind to confront the truth that I’ve been enlightened, and the rest of you haven’t.