In convicting him, Manson said, I was only sending him home. Only this time it won’t be the same. Observed San Quentin warden Louis Nelson, before Manson was transferred to Folsom: “It would be dangerous to put a guy like Manson into the main population, because in the eyes of other inmates he didn’t commit first-class crimes. He was convicted of killing a pregnant woman, and that sort of thing doesn’t allow him to rank very high in the prison social structure. It’s like being a child molester. Guys like that are going to do hard time wherever they are.”
Too, like Sirhan Sirhan, convicted slayer of Senator Robert Kennedy, his notoriety is his own worst enemy. For as long as he remains in prison, Manson will be looking over his shoulder, aware that any con hoping to make a reputation need only put a shiv in his back.
That Manson, Watson, Beausoleil, Davis, Grogan, Atkins, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel will be eligible for parole in 1978 does not mean that they will get it, only that this is the earliest date they will be eligible to apply. The average incarceration in California for first degree murder is ten and a half to eleven years. Because of the hideous nature of their crimes and the total absence of mitigating circumstances, my guess is that all will serve longer periods: the girls fifteen to twenty years, the men—with the exception of Manson himself—a like number.
As for the leader of the Family, my guess is that he will remain in prison for at least twenty-five years, and quite possibly the rest of his life.
In mid-October of 1973 some thirty prisoners in California’s toughest lockup, Folsom Prison’s 4–A adjustment center, staged what was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “peaceful protest” against prison conditions.
The man who used and championed fear did not participate. According to the Chronicle story: “Mass murderer Charles Manson is among the inmates in 4–A, although prison spokesmen say he is not involved in this demonstration. Manson has been threatened by other inmates in the past, and authorities say he seldom ventures out of his cell for fear of being attacked.”
AFTERWORD
Twenty-five years after, as I said in my summation to the jury, Charles Manson “sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots” to commit the savage and nightmarish Tate-LaBianca murders, the nation continues to be fascinated with the Manson murder case. And the question I am always asked, particularly by the news media, is why?
Why has this mass murder case—as opposed to every other, and there have been many—continued to intrigue and captivate millions of people the world over? To the point where five-year anniversaries of the murders, as with no other murder case in America except the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, are marked by articles, news reports, and television specials, not just in the United States, but internationally.[91] To the point where, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, Manson receives more mail than any other inmate in the history of the U.S. prison system, an alarming amount of it from young people who tell him they want to join his Family; where Manson T-shirts are selling well today around the country; where there have been several plays about him, even an opera, The Manson Family, that premiered at New York City’s Lincoln Center in July of 1990—as well as a CD soundtrack of the opera released in 1992; where the multi-platinum rock band Guns N’ Roses sing a Manson composition, “Look at Your Game, Girl,” in their latest album; where, believe it or not, avant-garde typographers in California produced a new typeface called Manson in which for $95 art directors, per Time magazine, “can set their serial-killer Zeitgeist essays in Manson Regular, Manson Alternate or Manson Bold” (all renamed Mason after criticism); where “Free Manson” graffiti soils the landscape of Britain’s largest cities, and according to the BBC’s William Scanlan Murphy, Manson interest in Britain is approaching mini-mania proportions;[92] where the television adaptation of this book about the case was, when it aired in 1976, the most watched television movie in the history of the medium and, like no other film of a murder case ever, has continued to be shown, year after year without fail, in the United States and many other countries of the world; where a March 1994 ABC television special on the case produced the highest-ever ratings for a network magazine show debut. Again, why is this so?
After the Tate-LaBianca murders, there was a killer in Los Angeles called “The Trashbag Killer,” so named because he picked up drifters and hitchhikers, murdered and dismembered them, then put them in trash bags. He pled guilty to twenty-one murders. Yet, I don’t remember this murderer’s name. And I would wager that if you were to ask one hundred people in Los Angeles you’d be hard-pressed to find one person who did. This is not that uncommon. At the time of a mass murder, and when the suspected killer is apprehended and tried, there’s always considerable publicity. As a general rule, however, within a short time thereafter the murders and the identity of the perpetrator tend to fade from the public’s consciousness. But not so with the Manson case. In fact, next to Jack the Ripper, whose identity still hasn’t been conclusively established, Manson is probably the most famous and notorious mass murderer ever. So what is it?
A view that’s enjoyed some currency is that the murders represent a watershed moment in the evolving social structure of our society. This view holds that the Manson case was the “end of innocence” (the ’60s mantra of love, peace, and sharing) in our country, and sounded the death knell for hippies and all they symbolically represented. In Joan Didion’s memoir of the era, The White Album, she writes: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969…and in a sense this is true.” Even now, in 1994, ABC’s Diane Sawyer endorses this notion when she says the Manson murders “brought an end to the decade of love,” and “something changed in the heart of America” with the murders.
Others feel, less extravagantly, that the murders were emblematic of the counterculture flower gone to seed. As Time magazine said in 1989 on the twentieth anniversary of the murders, the three female killers were “any family’s daughters, caught up in the wave of drugs, sex and revolutionary blather that had swept up a generation of young people.”
Or, some thought for a time after the murders, perhaps Manson and his disciples represented a ten-or twenty-year extrapolation of the direction in which the counterculture movement was going. And so forth.
All of these hypotheses seem to be devoid of supporting empirical evidence. For instance, although the Manson murders may have hastened its descent, the Age of Aquarius, of which Woodstock (one week after the Manson carnage) was at once its finest hour and last gasp, was already in decline. As the decade of dissent and raw excess approached its denouement, the movement’s mecca, Haight-Ashbury, was in ruins, and America had begun its retreat from the war in Vietnam—the political raison d’être fueling the movement. Moreover, Manson and the madness he wrought did not reflect the soul of the late ’60s, when admittedly the anti-establishment movement had reached a feverish crescendo. That movement indeed wanted a new social order, but largely one brought about by peaceful means. Manson advocated violence, murder, to change the status quo. As pointed out in the body of this book, though Manson was a hero to some, according to surveys at the time a majority of young people whom the media labeled “hippies” disavowed Manson, stating that what he espoused, i.e., violence, was antithetical to their beliefs.[93]
91
This year, the British Broadcasting Company and ARD, German National Television, are airing twenty-fifth anniversary specials on the case.
92
In a March 4, 1994, letter to me, Murphy writes:
There are 32 British rock bands that I know about playing both Manson’s own songs and songs in support of him, and a further 40 or so in Europe, particularly Germany. Only last week, one of the worst I’ve heard, ‘Charlie’s 69 Was A Good Year’, came out, recorded by a band called Indigo Prime; I’m sorry to say that it appears to be selling well. For some reason, the neo-Manson cult seems to centre in Manchester, where there are five stores selling ‘Free Charles Manson’ T-shirts (which are fantastically popular on Rave dance floors) and bootlegged records of his music; however, it’s far from exclusive to Manchester—there was an all-Manson concert in London in January, attended by 2,000 people. There is a full-fledged Manson Appreciation Society, ‘Helter Skelter UK’, based in Warrington, Cheshire. Posters supporting Manson are a common sight in the major cities, especially in the run-up to concerts by the Mansonite bands. The majority of the supporters of these bands are under 25. The truly frightening part is the fact that many of them, when asked, turn out to be Manson ‘buffs’ who have read all they can find about Manson, and strongly approve of Helter Skelter. There are very strong links to ultra-far-right political parties, particularly the British National Party.
93
Although I view Manson as an aberration who could have occurred at any time, the late ’60s obviously provided a much more fertile soil for someone like Manson to emerge. It was a period when the sex and drug revolution, campus unrest and civil rights demonstrations, race riots, and all the seething discontent over Vietnam seemed to collide with each other in a stormy turbulence. And Manson, in his rhetoric, borrowed heavily from these fermentations.